Heidegger’s destruction of metaphysics: mediaeval and modern philosophy. Part 2

Abstract

The article is focused on the analysis of Leibniz’s logic and metaphysics undertaken by Heidegger in the year 1928 (Gesamtausgabe vol. 26) and the lecture on Fichte’s Science of Knowledge, Schelling’s early philosophy of nature and Hegel’s philosophy undertaken by Heidegger in the year 1929 (Gesamtausgabe vol. 28). Heidegger examines the results of Leibniz’s theory of truth as inclusion and considers mutual relations between the principle of sufficient reason and the principles of identity and contradiction. For Leibniz and Heidegger the problem of metaphysical foundations of logic is one of particular interest. Heidegger compares Leibniz’s monadology with his own theory of Being-in-the-world. From his point of view the main problem in German idealism consists in the identity (equivalent of scholastic unum) of subject and object of thought. Heidegger examines the concept of productive transcendental imagination in Kant’s, Fichte’s and Hegel’s system and confronts it with his own idea of imagination as original temporality. Hegel’s question for the beginning of philosophical thinking inspires him to explain the meaning of the Geschichtlichkeit. If in the twenties Heidegger perceived Hegel’s system as the fulfillment of the European metaphysics, so since the thirties such a fulfillment became for him Nietzsche’s philosophy of the will to power.