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257 6 Later Heidegger: “The Great Turning Around” Any kind of metaphysics has and must come to an end, if philosophy is to attain its other beginning. (Heidegger, CP 121, §85) Truth is defined as this very unconcealment in its essence, in disclosure , in terms of the beings it sanctions; it shapes each configuration of its own essence on the basis of Being thus defined. In its own Being, therefore, truth is historical. (Heidegger, N 3:187) Hegel, Nietzsche, and the early Heidegger were all engaged in the project of working out the implications of Kant’s anti-realism while simultaneously trying to break free of certain of his ways of framing the issue. I have argued that they only succeeded in liberating themselves from parts of it, while retaining much of its basic structure. For the thinkers of the Kantian Paradigm , the A5 Active Knower’s faculties partially constitute A1 Dependent reality by either organizing it with space, time, and the categories (Kant), volatilizing historical movement (Hegel), congealing chaotic flux (Nietzsche ), or temporalizing into the forms of engaged instrumentality or disengaged inertness (early Heidegger). The latter three figures developed “metaphysical” systems (Objective Idealism, Step Six Physics, and Phenomenological Ontology, respectively) that dispensed with noumena, Kant’s remnant of realism’s R1 Mind-Independence. Without independent reality, the distinction between our subjective contribution and the world’s objective raw matter—ultimately, the distinction between appearance and reality that defines metaphysics for Heidegger—cannot be maintained. These thinkers establish the presence of human activity (A5) in experience in other ways than Kant’s strategy of positing a difference between the way the world appears to us and the way it really is (R1); namely, by noting (A3 Ontological Pluralist) differences among historical periods (Hegel), among the experiences of various kinds of people (Nietzsche), or between tools and objects depending on whether we use or stare at them (early Heidegger). These differences are linked to some form of human agency in order to show A5. At their most progressive, these thinkers complete A1 by considering the variously constituted phenomena to be reality itself, since there are no noumena beyond them. The Kantian Paradigm embraces what I am calling the Empirical Directive by changing the conception of the self from a substance like Descartes’ thinking thing to a functional experience-organizing energeia which can only be studied by the way it organizes experience. Kant retained R6 Realism of the Subject by insisting on a unique definition of the self as one specific set of forms of intuition and concepts, but as ED took hold and evidence of historical and cultural diversity became increasingly persuasive over the nineteenth century, the paradigm’s single definition of the subject loosened (A6). Seeking evidence of a transcendental subject within experience brought the subject into the gravitational pull of the empirical world, so to speak, which drew it in more and more completely over the next 150 years (see Schürmann 1987, 46). Whereas Kant maintains a single, static set of experience-organizing processes necessarily linked to experience and so not transcendent but transcendental, Hegel posits an evolving chain of conceptual schemes within history that transform according to an internal logic. Nietzsche liberates this multiplicity from the organizing rule of reason that limits its possible forms, allowing the schemes to proliferate according to needs, albeit needs founded on a somewhat determinate will to power. The unchanging content of the self for Nietzsche is slight—just a loose group of drives seeking increased power in indefinitely many ways—but it must engage in active appropriation in order to be healthy, that is, to be in accordance with its true nature. Although the trajectory of these thinkers is one of decreasing content to the self, each of them ends up giving the subject some kind of R6 functional identity which remains constant throughout external historical change (see Rorty 1989, 4). While the Kantian Paradigm thinkers were fairly successful in undermining R1 or realism for external reality (Nietzsche ’s stand on this is ambiguous, as I showed), they only weakened R6. Being and Time represents a step backward in this progressive erosion of R6 Realism of the Subject. On the one hand, it gives ED a strong ontological grounding by defining Dasein as Being-in-the-world, but on the other hand it regresses to Kant’s single definition of the faculties of the subject, that is, the existentialia. The existential...

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