The core of the ontological difference, as Heidegger elaborates it, is the historical claim that since Plato, being is something to be compared to an ultimate be-er, that all things are themselves modified expressions of ultimate things. The upper-bound of everything is therefore itself a type of being. Heidegger follows Kierkegaard first in breaking apart being and existence, and then suggesting that as we move into a new historical epoch of thinking, we can see that being and beings are two different things. Being, the concept, is here a series of practices that make beings or entities intelligible to the special type of being who has those practices. In other words, that the upper (and lower, a la Derrida) bounds of Being, the concept, are not themselves beings, like in Spinoza or Aquinas where God is the Most-Been, or where Atoms are the least-been who still be and Nothing is a concept of being beneath a certain threshold, but are instead the ways of encountering things which bring them to our eye in a certain light, instead of any of the other things or any of the other ways of thinking about them.

¶ 9:15 AM