Introduction to Metaphysics: From Parmenides to Levinas by Jean Grondin (review)

This is the very first thoroughgoing historical introduction to metaphysics in all of its major permutations over the centuries from the eminent scholar Jean Grondin. At the heart of the metaphysical endeavor are the varying human responses to the mystery of being, of ours and all of reality, which range from the attempts to rationally explain why there is something rather than nothing (notably the rationalist tradition of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Kant) to the meditative deliberative response prompted by astonishment over the fact of our being and over the immense fact of all that is (from Greek thaumazein to Kierkegaardian angst). In its historical sweep, the Western metaphysical tradition courses from the first philosophers of being among the ancient Greeks (Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus) and the medieval onto-theologians (Anselm, Avicenna, Averroes, Aquinas, Scotus, Suárez) to the aforementioned modern rationalists followed by the speculative-conceptual idealists (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel). Martin Heidegger proves to be the pivotal figure in this history of metaphysics, whose thinking then exercises its influence on the most recent variants of metaphysics, the metaphysics of existence of Étienne Gilson and Jean-Paul Sartre, the metaphysics of language of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jacques Derrida, the metaphysics of transcendence of Emmanuel Levinas.

Grondin succinctly delineates Heidegger’s overall project as “the resurrection of the question of Being in the name of overcoming metaphysics” (201). The place where the question of Being can occur with sufficient emotive force is clearly the human being or, in Heidegger’s preferred term, Da-sein (etymologically, “Being-here”). In plain and yet well-punctuated idiomatic English, the experience of Being-here is the experience of “Here I am!!!???” For Heidegger, “Dasein is the being for which, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it” (Sein und Zeit, 12 et passim). Thus, Heidegger virtually identifies Dasein with the question of Being. Its questionability for Dasein is further concretized by bounding it in its two most extreme limit situations, that of death and, on the other end, the limit situation of simply being situated in existence willy-nilly or, in Heidegger’s preferred term, “thrown” into a world I did not make and a life I did not ask for. These two limit situations serve to bound the unique time of my one and only lifetime, the time allotted to me in which to be or not to be. Dasein, haunted by the care it has for its own being, is now poised to ask some of the most pressing questions concerning its own being and thus to confront the mystery of Being in its own way.

Metaphysics for Heidegger retains positive connotations for a time by becoming virtually synonymous with “ontology,” such that Heidegger speaks of a “metaphysics of Dasein.” But with that coinage, Grondin appears to have found a breaking point in the Heideggerian opus, whereby everything about metaphysics now begins to turn negative and Heidegger “began to see clearly that [metaphysics] was a way of thinking aimed at objectifying and dominating beings and their principles, thereby evading the mystery of Being” (211–12). Metaphysics now becomes a total forgetting of Being and a total emphasis on beings. The forgetting of Being is at once a forgetting of its temporality and a repression of its finitude. Accordingly, metaphysics must be overcome and replaced by another way of thinking more contemplative and more attentive to the mystery of Being in its finitude and temporality.

Heidegger’s interpretation of the history of metaphysics as a metaphysics of permanent presence has become a staple for future thinkers: Parmenides’s permanent being, Plato’s eidos, Aristotle’s substance, the medieval God as nunc stans (a standing now), modernity’s human subject, Vorhandenheit as presence-at-hand, all describe stable, enduring, atemporal being, the kind of being subject to calculative thinking, itself driven by the will to dominate and control beings, turning them into a disposable standing reserve (Bestand). The resulting present age of global...