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The early twentieth century marks a significant change in ontological enquiry with Martin Heidegger being the dominant protagonist. Interestingly, Heidegger not only branched away from the canonical tradition of Western metaphysics that had been in place since Plato, yet his political “turn” in 1933, seems somewhat contradictory to his central doctrine of absolute-resoluteness. Within this investigation I will approach this shift in ontological enquiry with a conceptual historical approach. I will highlight the inseparability of the Ontic (human) and the Ontological (Dasein), as both of which are inherent and reliant upon one another. It is thus that I hold the premise that all enquiry is in relation to its utterance. The enquiry is influenced and determined by the enquirer, philosophy does not occur within a vacuum. The socio-political environment is a high determinant of metaphysics. To quote Karl Marx, ‘men make their own history, but they do not do so freely, not under conditions of their own choosing, but rather under circumstances which directly confront them, and which are historically given and transmitted.’ It is this notion that is distinctly in relation to metaphysics as I stand by men make their own ontological conceptions in much the same way as Marx determines history. The aim therefore for this paper is to demonstrate the socio-political influence upon Heideggerian philosophy and those influenced by his practice. I will demonstrate that early twentieth century Germany experienced a period of acceleration which fractured the temporal succession of Self-World conceptions.
Classical Greek ontology (metaphysics) maintains a rigid view of Being as the only reality there is. It further regards man basically as an object with a fixed nature that is susceptible to scientific investigation. Though these thoughts dominated the ancient Greeks' orientation just as it is doing to the contemporary European and American worlds, Heidegger strongly objects these misconceptions by purging them from his metaphysics. He argues that the confusion about Being is eminent due to the neglect of man as the necessary being. This paper therefore, is an assessment of Heidegger's attempt to free man from the freeze of traditional metaphysics. It espouses Heidegger's radicalization of the human being's intrinsic potentials and capabilities to further advance the self and knowledge as a conscious being that necessarily exists. Dasein or man is primarily, a self-making or meaning-making being and not a foreclosed entity.
In contrast to a widely held view, I argue that Cassirer actually anticipates Heidegger in his interest in the question of being in its unity and in its diversity. Cassirer’s conception of knowledge already involves an understanding of being in its unity and diversity. The connection between the unity and diversity of being and diverse senses in which things manifest themselves to us is crucial to the pluralism that both Cassirer and Heidegger inherit from Kant’s Copernican Revolution. Cassirer takes up an idealism of ideas as normative standards from the Marburg interpretation of Plato and Kant. He takes ideas to be the normative standards according to which we are able systematically to understand things and engage with the world. Ideas function as the basis for a shared normative significance that is available to us in discussion and dialogue. The process through which we understand the significance of things emerges as the basis for the unity and diversity in the meaning of being. Following his interpretation of the later Plato, Cassirer takes the normative significance and the meaning that being has for us to emerge from the process of external and internal dialogue through which we make sense of the world about us. In this process subject and object emerge out of an experience that is not already divided up into subjects and objects. Thus, for Cassirer, idealism emerges with the problem of the unity and diversity in the meanings of being. The affective world of mythic thought gives us a kind of access to a conceptualized version of the pre-theoretical experience in which we are always already embedded. Cassirer implicitly rejects the conception of a worldless subject as the basis for our understanding of the world and of being. From Kant’s Copernican revolution, Cassirer inherits the idea that we always understand things from the standpoint that we occupy in space, time, nature, culture and history; we always also understand things only by also transcending our standpoint through our participation in the norm-guided action of self-conscious thought. The embeddedness of our thought in the natural and symbolic context in which we find ourselves makes the very notion of a worldless subject unintelligible. Heidegger’s claims in Being and Time notwithstanding the unintelligibility of a worldless subject is a shared insight that Cassirer and Heidegger owe either directly or indirectly to Kant’s Critique. Heidegger’s attack on Kant’s and Cassirer’s conception of experience as based on a worldless subject of knowledge and thought is baseless. Both the Critique and the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms constitute extended refutations of the idea that we can make sense of anything, including “the pure being” of logic, but also the subjects and objects of thought, independently of our standpoint and independently of our social and natural context. We, our thought and everything that we do emerge out of the process through which space, time, nature, history and culture unveil themselves in our thought and experience. Cassirer regards the notion of being as dwelling in the world as a key notion in the natural concept of the world (in at least the context of Indo-European natural language), even if he rejects the idea that it is key to understanding being itself, pure being. The context in which we dwell is on his view the basis for the tendency going back at least to Pre-Socratic thought to identify being with a particular concrete and sensible being. Pure being is manifest for Cassirer, by contrast, in the normative significance of the copula as an expression of what Kant calls the original synthetic unity of apperception and of all thought and experience. Through the normative power of ideas and through the normativity of the original synthetic unity of our thought (of ourselves) we have always already also transcended our own standpoint. The transcendence of our own standpoint that is an inherent feature of the normativity of the action of thought creates the illusion of a being and of a subject that is completely independent of any context and of the very process of thought. Thus a particular being easily comes to be identified with the process of thought. For Cassirer, Plato’s philosophy begins the process through which our understanding and logic emancipate themselves from particular being and from the world in which we dwell. For Heidegger, following Kant, Plato’s philosophy and its conception of ideas also marks the point at which philosophy begins to fall prey to the illusion that being itself is the particular being of idea. Heidegger strives to preserve normative standards for thought while rejecting the metaphysical conception involved in Plato’s conception of ideas. Cassirer eventually also recognizes and rejects the metaphysical aspect of Plato’s ideas. Both Cassirer and Heidegger connect the pluralism of different meanings of being to different ways in which we relate to the world in temporal terms. Cassirer distinguishes different conception of time in myth, language and thought and in different human cultures. Different conceptions of time give rise to different ways of understanding being and process. In an important sense, Cassirer betrays an allegiance to Heidegger’s vulgar conception of time as temporal sequence. Cassirer takes sequence to be the key to true or authentic temporality and thus favors a conception of being and of the world grounded in sequence. Cassirer sees the ultimate logical and ontological foundation of our experience in sequential thought. But sequences do not exist for Cassirer independently of the process through which sequences come to be distinguishable and distinguished by us. Cassirer’s pure being of sequence is only present in the process relating things. There is for Heidegger an event through which everything comes into its own proper significance in our dwelling as being-in-the-world. This event is in some sense just the process by which Cassirer’s seemingly much more abstract pure being as functional-sequential unity institutes significance. Thus both Heidegger and Cassirer are able to follow Natorp in embracing Heraclitus’s notion of logos as ultimate ground of significance. And their notion of logos is one that is fundamentally process-based. Logos and logic are for the Marburg school fundamentally a process of interactive and historically situated thought, as is the very notion of being. Heidegger inherits this conception from Natorp and Cassirer and their reading of Greek thought.
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In this article I attempt to present Heidegger's conception of the ontotheology in his late thought. I based mainly on his famous book “Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning).” In ontotheology Heidegger needs the figure of “the last god” to show the very path to being itself. It is not the God of religion, but the proper god of metaphysics, the god of other beginning, which using a sign (Wink) points Dasein the right direction. It seems to be a key to the meaning of ontotheology itself. The problem of ontotheology is presented against the backdrop of several of the most important contexts of Heidegger's thought manifested in “Contributions...”: the problem of being itself and the path to it or the problem of the last god and his sign.
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Jednota, Aug. 16, 2017, p.7
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