Heidegger: I Know You Are But What Am I?

 

Heidegger's entire argument can be effectively summarized: I know you are, but what am I?

Heidegger spent his career thinking about Being, attempting to ask - or even formulate - the question of Being.  Most people would call this work metaphysics, and would call a person who spends most of their lives thinking about such things a metaphysician. 

But Heidegger rejects the label, and flips it back on his (supposed) accusers.   

"You're the metaphysicians!" he shouts.  "You're doing metaphysics - not me!  I'm the only one around here who's trying to think non-metaphysically!" 

Heidegger attempts to evade the "metaphysician" label by redefining metaphysics such that metaphysicians are those people who, for instance, (1) only conceive of beings and never question Being itself, (2) think Being in terms of a highest being (onto-theology), (3) fail to maintain the ontological difference between beings and Being, and so on.  

Do not fall for this swindle.  Do not accept Heidegger's convenient redefinition of metaphysics to include everyone else but him (at least in the modern world).  Those all may be things that certain metaphysicians, on some occasions, do, but it does not define metaphysics.  Indeed, here Heidegger demonstrates his own incoherence, for by attempting to define metaphysics in terms of these tendencies of metaphysicians, he is attempting to impose a kind of essence of metaphysics, which, by his own account, fails to maintain ontological difference.

In fact, there's a delicious irony here.  Though Heidegger liked to present himself as untimely, as a being who is more at home with ancient, "primordial" ways of thinking than with the modern world - a romanticized "peasant," as it were - in fact, Heidegger, in his bias against metaphysics, is very much showing the influence of the modern trends of his day.  After all, what's bad about metaphysics?  Heidegger only used the term "metaphysics" as a pejorative because he had internalized a contemporary prejudice against metaphysics.

Let all of this silly name-calling go by.  If someone were to accuse me of doing metaphysics, I would reply, Yes, I am!  And you are, too.  There is no escape from metaphysics.  There are those who accept metaphysical assumptions unquestioningly, and there are those who attempt, however successfully or un-, to bring their metaphysical assumptions out into the light, so that we might try to better understand them.  If anything, I fear I am not enough of a metaphysician.

Anti-metaphysicians are metaphysicians.