Ontology as a question addressed to Being as such

(Heidegger in 1960. )

The Heideggerian approach aims to free ontology from any metaphysical shackles, in a phenomenological approach by upholding the question of the meaning of being drawn over the course of human existence, at the source of time.

Return to the original meaning of the question

The conviction that the “sense of being” has been forgotten originates in Heidegger, in the idea that this sense of “coming into presence” and not only of things present, which would be the true meaning, was initially intensely experienced by early Greek poets and thinkers including Heraclitus and Anaximander and explicitly by Plato, in almost unbearable brilliance, his coming into presence in all the profusion this word.

The metaphysics of Dasein

In Being and Time, and until the very first years of the 1930s, Heidegger is in search of a more radical and more universal conception of the essence of transcendence which necessarily goes hand in hand with a more originary elaboration of the idea of ​​ontology and, thereby, of metaphysics. In this brief period, it is a question of seizing being from the metaphysical essence of Dasein understood as transcendence. Metaphysics is no longer approached as a branch of philosophy, but as an event in human existence, as something proper and essential to the nature of man. Heidegger seems to rediscover there the Kantian theme of a “metaphysica naturalis” which he will take for true metaphysics.

Completion and overcoming of metaphysics

The theme of completion will occupy, in accordance with Being and Time, a cardinal place in Heidegger’s thought of history. It serves as a pivot for interpreting the passage from the era dominated by metaphysics to the era when it fades away as a doctrine but in full concrete realization of its principles, namely the era of Technique, following the example of the Nietzschean project of “overthrowing Platonism”. Thus in the notes collected under the title “surpassing metaphysics” of the essays and lectures, Heidegger explicitly says that metaphysics is complete because it has made the rounds of its possibilities. On this subject, notes Michel Haar, if the era of technology is its ultimate form, we still do not know what the completion of metaphysics has in store for us and we can hardly imagine what unconditioned domination will invent or total mobilization  which are just beginning.

Beyond metaphysics, another beginning

As for the idea of ​​”another beginning”, it should not be understood in a chronological sense where a “beginning” would follow “another beginning”, in a causal sequence, because it does not point to any philosophy of history, nor on the idea of ​​a progress of humanity or that of a decline, all this belongs properly to metaphysics and its need for “calculability”. The Other Beginning claims, above metaphysics, to go straight back to the origin, listening to the hidden dynamics of the story of “being.” It is a question of turning around to find through “Repetition”, the inaugural point of another possible path of thought, of “another beginning”. not a “cause”, which at some point in history would have the other beginning of thought for its “effect”, it is an origin, in German an Ursprung, which asks to become more “originary”, writes Martina Roesner.

(Includes texts from Wikipedia translated and adapted by Nicolae Sfetcu)