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12 Metaphysics, Metontology, and the End of Being and Time 1. Introduction The term “end” in the title of this chapter should be understood in three senses: 1. Heidegger’s unfinished book concludes in section 83 with a series of questions that are to prepare the way for the sequel, an interpretation of the meaning of being in terms of time. This preparation consists, strangely enough, in questioning the appropriateness of the method used in the previous four hundred or so pages. The analysis of Dasein’s ontological structure is, Heidegger now reminds us, “only one way which we may take.”1 Indeed, “whether this is the only way or even the right one at all can be decided only after one has gone along it.” At the end of Being and Time, then, can we say whether the path has been the right one? Only if we know what was to be accomplished by its means—hence, a second sense of “end.” 2. The end, or aim, of Being and Time is perhaps best understood through a comparison that Heidegger himself increasingly employed in the later 1920s, namely, with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which Kant described as “a treatise on the method, not a system of the science itself.”2 “Method” in this transcendental sense means demonstrating the conditions of possibility for synthetic a priori knowledge, preliminary to working out a system of such knowledge. Construing Kant’s synthetic a priori knowledge as “ontological knowledge,” Heidegger views transcendental critique as a reflection on the “ontological ground” of ontology. Similarly, the aim of Being and Time is to lay the groundwork for ontological knowledge (of the “meaning of being”), but in place of Kant’s 222 223 M E T A P H Y S I C S , M E T O N T O L O G Y focus upon the cognitive comportment of judging, Heidegger turns first to the interrogative comportment of raising the question of being. Where Kant locates the ground of ontological knowledge in “a priori synthesis,” Heidegger locates it in the understanding of being (Seinsverständnis) presupposed in all questioning. For this reason the focus of reflection falls on “Dasein,” a terminus technicus indicating that being who, in a prephilosophical way, necessarily raises questions about its own being and thereby provides the inescapable starting point for philosophical inquiry, “the point where it arises and to which it returns” (GA 2:576, 51/487, 62). But if, given the aim of showing how ontological knowledge is possible, Dasein has a peculiar claim on our attention, by the end of Being and Time Heidegger detects a “fundamental problem that still remains ‘veiled’ ” (GA 2:576/487). For if the possibility of ontological knowledge lies in Dasein’s prephilosophical understanding of being, must not any such knowledge be limited to the particular, finite perspective occupied by the questioner? Heidegger has all along acknowledged— indeed emphasized—that philosophical inquiry is nothing but a “radicalization ” of that everyday yet “essential” tendency that Dasein has to question the meaning of its being and that thus his own inquiry is ultimately “ontically rooted [verwurzelt]” (GA 2:20, 18/35, 34). But when Heidegger asks whether “ontology allows of being ontologically grounded [begründen], or rather requires in addition an ontic ground [Fundamentes],” he cannot be referring to the previously described priority of Dasein, for he immediately appends the further question, “and which entity must take on this function of grounding?” This question would make no sense if “ontic ground” merely referred to Dasein, the inquirer, as the inescapable starting point for philosophy (GA 2:576/487). It appears rather that when Heidegger asks for an “entity” in which to ground ontological knowledge , he stands poised to make a move that has since become familiar in philosophy, namely, to relativize such knowledge to some aspect of the context in which it arises. To ascribe a grounding function to the entity, “nature,” for example, might yield something like that naturalism that seeks to explain ontological knowledge in terms of causal relations between environment and brain states. Similarly, to embrace the entity, “history,” as such a ground might yield a kind of historicism in which the content of one’s thought, one’s ontological knowledge, is explained with reference to the conceptual resources of one’s historical milieu.3 Other candidates for the grounding entity could be proposed—society, language, even God—but the fact that in entertaining the possibility...

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