Heidegger's Topology by Jeff Malpas

Author:Jeff Malpas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press

4.5 Language and Metaphysics

In the essays and lectures from the period after the publication of Being and Time through to the writing of Contributions, from “What Is Metaphysics?” in 1928 through to Introduction to Metaphysics in 1936, Heidegger returns frequently to the question of the nature and origin, as well as the necessary forgetfulness, of metaphysical thinking. This is no mere accident, but is directly connected to Heidegger’s own diagnosis of the difficulties that surround Being and Time as having their source in the way the work retains an essentially metaphysical approach to the question of being. In the “Letter on ‘Humanism’” this criticism is directly connected with the idea that Being and Time operates within a framework centered on the idea of transcendence: “being is thought on the basis of beings, a consequence of the approach—at first unavoidable—within a metaphysics that is still dominant. Only from such a perspective does being show itself in and as transcending.”141 In this context, Heidegger repeats the crucial sentence from the Introduction to Being and Time in which he states that: “Being is the transcendens pure and simple,”142 commenting that this statement “articulates in one simple sentence the way the essence of being hitherto has been cleared for the human being,” and as such “remains indispensable for the prospective approach of thinking toward the question concerning the truth of being.”143 Yet he also adds, “[b]ut whether the definition of being as the transcendens pure and simple really does name the simple essence of the truth of being—this and this alone is the primary question for a thinking that attempts to think the truth of being.”144 In the introduction to “What Is Metaphysics?,” Heidegger comments that “every philosophy that revolves around an indirect or direct representation of ‘transcendence’ remains of necessity essentially an ontology, whether it achieves a new foundation of ontology or whether it assures us that it repudiates ontology as a conceptual freezing of experience.”145 Thus, although Heidegger constantly insists on the radical character of Being and Time and on the necessity of the path it follows, it is nevertheless the case that he also views the focus on transcendence, with all that implies, as itself bringing an ontological or metaphysical orientation with it.

This conclusion is, however, one to which Heidegger comes only gradually. In 1928, while already engaged in the rearticulation of aspects of the analysis of Being and Time, he still holds to a metaphysical perspective, writing that: “Several times we mentioned how all these metaphysical, ontological statements are exposed to continual misunderstanding, are understood ontically and existentially. One main reason for this misunderstanding lies in not preserving the proper metaphysical horizon of the problem.”146 The continued preoccupation with transcendence in the period up until 1929-1930 is indicative of Heidegger’s continued attempt to work from within metaphysics, even if it is a metaphysics that also requires a radical “dis-mantling.” By the time of “On the Essence of Truth,” given as a lecture and revised a number of times between 1930

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