But if [entities] as a whole are ever brought into question, then the questioning does come into a distinctive

relation
with them distinctive because it is unique and [entities] do come into a distinctive relation with this questioning.
For through this questioning, [entities] as a whole are first opened up as such and with regard to their possible
ground, and they are kept open in the questioning. (Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 5)
In everyday life, people encounter all kinds of things and interact with them. We talk about things and use
things. We ourselves are things of a certain kind. According to Heidegger, philosophy has historically focused on
describing and categorizing these various kinds of things without questioning how we have come to encounter
anything in the first place. How is it that we inhabit a world filled with intelligible, meaningful entities, things that
we can encounter and interact with? Why do things present themselves to us, and, even more strikingly, how should
we make sense of the fact that we ourselves are things in this way? At the beginning of his Introduction to
Metaphysics, Heidegger is interested in examining a process of questioning that could shed light on these issues. The
passage quoted above reflects several insights he gains in this process.
Heidegger describes the sort of questioning he is interested in as the questioning of entities as a whole.
This is a kind of questioning that seeks what is common to all entities insofar as they are entities, rather than the
particular facts that incidentally apply to certain entities. In that sense, this process gets at the unique feature that
makes something meaningfully present. But besides the fact that the question pertains uniquely to the entities, the
process of questioning also addresses entities in a distinctive way. Asking why anything is meaningfully present
asks for a ground or explanation of what makes meaning as a whole possible. By contrast, my ordinary encounters
with the appearance of things engage them only as they currently present themselves. Engaging in Heideggers
questioning involves inquiring into what makes it possible to be a thing at all, prior to the particular engagements
that make it possible to be a toothbrush, a hammer, a God, or anything else. Things are opened up by this prior
questioning in the sense that their intelligibility as things comes before any of the particular ways they are
meaningful parts of the world. Entities are kept open because the process of questioning cannot be resolved by
focusing on the features of a particular entity. In other words, the source of meaningful presence could not itself be a
present entity.