Being and Truth

Contents

BEING AND TRUTH Contents Translators’ Foreword xv THE FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION OF PHILOSOPHY Summer Semester 1933 Introduction The Fundamental Question of Philosophy and the Fundamental Happening of Our History 3§1. The spiritual-political mission as a decision for the fundamental question 3§2. The Greek questioning in poetry and thought and the inception of philosophy. Philosophy as the incessant, historical, questioning struggle over the essence and Being of beings 5§3. What philosophy is not. Rejection of inadequate attempts to define it 7§4. The fundamental question of philosophy and the confrontation with the history of the Western spirit in its highest position: Hegel 10 Main Part The Fundamental Question and Metaphysics: Preparation for a Confrontation with Hegel Chapter One The Development, Transformation, and Christianization of Traditional Metaphysics 15§5. Considerations for the confrontation with Hegel 15§6. The concept of metaphysics and its transformation up to the time of classical modern metaphysics 17 a) The origin of the concept of metaphysics as a bibliographical title for particular Aristotelian writings (μετὰ τὰ φυσικά) 17 b) From the bibliographical title to the substantive concept. The Christian transformation of the concept of metaphysics: knowledge of the supersensible (trans physicam) 18§7. Kant’s critical question regarding the possibility of metaphysical cognition and the classical division of metaphysics 20 a) On the influence of the Christianization of the concept of metaphysics 20 b) The three rational disciplines of modern metaphysics and Kant’s question regarding the inner possibility and limits of metaphysical cognition as cognition on the basis of pure reason 21 v vi Contents Chapter Two The System of Modern Metaphysics and the First of Its Primary Determining Grounds: The Mathematical 23§8. Preliminary remarks on the concept and meaning of the mathematical in metaphysics 23 a) The task: a historical return to the turning points in the concept of metaphysics 23 b) The Greek concept of the teachable and learnable (τὰ μαθήματα) and the inner connection between the “mathematical” and the “methodological” 25§9. The precedence of the mathematical and its advance decision regarding the content of modern philosophy: the possible idea of knowability and truth 29§10. Modern metaphysics in its illusory new inception with Descartes and its errors 30 a) The usual picture of Descartes: the rigorous new grounding of philosophy on the basis of radical doubt 30 b) The illusion of radicalism and the new grounding in Descartes under the predominance of the mathematical conception of method 31 α) Methodical doubt as the way to what is ultimately indubitable. The simplest and most perspicuous as fundamentum 32 β) The process of doubt as an illusion. The substantive advance ruling in favor of something indubitable that has the character of the present-at-hand 33 γ) The fundamentum as the I 33 δ) The I as self. Self-reflection as a delusion 33 ε) The essence of the I (self) as consciousness 34 ζ) The self as I and the I as “subject.” The transformation of the concept of the subject 34 c) The substantive consequence of the predominance of the mathematical conception of method: the failure to reach the authentic self of man and the failure of the fundamental question of philosophy. The advance decision of mathematical certainty regarding truth and Being 35§11. The predominance of the mathematical conception of method in the formation of metaphysical systems in the eighteenth century 37§12. Introductory concepts from Wolff’s Ontology. The point of departure: the philosophical principles of all human cognition 38 Chapter Three Determination by Christianity and the Concept of Mathematical-Methodological Grounding in the Metaphysical Systems of Modernity 41§13. The two main tasks that frame modern metaphysics: the grounding of the essence of Being in general and the proof of the essence and existence of God 41 Contents vii§14. The mathematical character of the system at the basis of Baumgarten’s metaphysics 42 a) The concept of veritas metaphysica: the agreement of what is with the most universal principles 42 b) Preliminary considerations on the principial character of the principle by which the ens in communi is supposed to be determined 43§15. Baumgarten’s starting point as the possibile (what can be) and the logical principle of contradiction as the absolutely first principle of metaphysics 44§16. Remarks on the grounding of the principium primum. The principle of contradiction and human Dasein: the preservation of the selfsameness of the selfsame 45§17. The mathematical-logical determination of the starting point, goal, and...