A Companion to Heidegger’s “Introduction to Metaphysics" (original) (raw)

At the Limits of Thinking: Heidegger’s early critique of representationalism and metaphysics

THE PURPOSE OF THIS PAPER is to examine a thread in Heidegger's critique of traditional philosophy, which Heidegger considers essential to the way that metaphysics is and has been since Plato: the critique of representational thinking. Focused to the period of 1928-1932, the period, according to Thomas Sheehan, of Heidegger’s “turn”, I will examine a critical missing step in Heidegger scholarship. Specifically, I address how Heidegger transitions from his post Being and Time Kant period to his “later” destruction of metaphysics, accomplished through his critique of representational thinking. There are several motivations for this examination. First, during the period 1928-1932, Heidegger increasingly comes to see the history of metaphysics as deeply erroneous in terms of attempting to interrogate being. Although Heidegger’s reflections on the status of metaphysics remain mixed during this incredibly fecund period of his thought, he will eventually come to entirely “overturn”, after 1932, the whole history of the Western metaphysical tradition. In order to understand how Heidegger accomplishes this, and how it is that we may potentially recover from the error of traditional metaphysics, we will need to understand how our tendency toward representational thought comes to constitute and reinforce metaphysics. Second, Heidegger’s own account after 1932 claims that metaphysics produces representational thinking, yet it is clear from Heidegger’s own work of the period that he considers representational thinking the basis for metaphysics. My paper will seek to briefly show how Heidegger accomplishes this “turn” from the limitations of philosophy to an overcoming of metaphysics as a whole. By closely examining Heidegger’s “What is Metaphysics?” and “On the Essence of Ground”, I hope to demonstrate how Heidegger’s critique of representationalism is not only at the limits of phenomenology but can contribute to contemporary philosophical debates.