"To think Being itself explicitly requires disregarding Being to the extent that it is only grounded and interpreted in terms of beings and for beings as their ground, as in all metaphysics"
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Heidegger is picking a fight with the entire Western philosophical tradition, and he does it with a kind of stern perversity: to think Being, you have to stop treating it like the most obvious thing in the room. His complaint is that “metaphysics” can’t help but translate Being into a service role - a foundation that props up particular things (“beings”) and their explanations. In that move, Being becomes a backstage utility: the grammar that lets philosophy talk about entities, causes, categories, God, nature, mind. Useful, yes. Explicitly thought, no.
The intent is surgical. Heidegger isn’t arguing that metaphysics is wrong about beings; he’s saying it’s structurally incapable of asking the question he thinks matters most: what it means for anything to be at all. Metaphysics, even when it reaches for the highest principle, still treats Being as a concept among concepts, a super-entity, a “ground” that behaves like another thing. That’s the “disregarding” he’s naming: reduction by explanation.
The subtext is also a rebuke to intellectual comfort. If Being is always smuggled in as self-evident, philosophy gets to act like its deepest presupposition never needs defending. Heidegger’s line tries to short-circuit that habit. Context matters: this sits in the wake of Being and Time and the later “history of Being” project, where he reads Plato-to-Nietzsche as a long drift into forgetting. It’s not mere abstraction; it’s a diagnosis of why modern thought is so good at controlling things and so bad at noticing what makes “thinghood” possible.
The intent is surgical. Heidegger isn’t arguing that metaphysics is wrong about beings; he’s saying it’s structurally incapable of asking the question he thinks matters most: what it means for anything to be at all. Metaphysics, even when it reaches for the highest principle, still treats Being as a concept among concepts, a super-entity, a “ground” that behaves like another thing. That’s the “disregarding” he’s naming: reduction by explanation.
The subtext is also a rebuke to intellectual comfort. If Being is always smuggled in as self-evident, philosophy gets to act like its deepest presupposition never needs defending. Heidegger’s line tries to short-circuit that habit. Context matters: this sits in the wake of Being and Time and the later “history of Being” project, where he reads Plato-to-Nietzsche as a long drift into forgetting. It’s not mere abstraction; it’s a diagnosis of why modern thought is so good at controlling things and so bad at noticing what makes “thinghood” possible.
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