Heidegger’s History of Being and the Phenomenology of ‘Other’ Cultural Traditions

Abstract

Heidegger’s movement away from his project of Dasein analytic of Being and Timeto Being-centeredness in the middle period of his writings allows Being to give itself in appearing or clearing in its manifoldness. In the later years, Heidegger goes on to say that Being lies in the openness, luminosity or clearing (Lichtung) and determines the truth of beings. For Heidegger, it is in Being’s revealing-withdrawing inter-play that historical people come and ground their own cultural history. In this paper, I shall argue that Heidegger’s thinking of the history of Being is useful for establishing the phenomenological ground for a philosophical defense of ‘other’ cultural traditions in the background of their increasing questionableness in the planetary phase of the western understanding of Being. I show Heidegger’s attempt to overcome ontotheology and what according to Heidegger happens to the history of ontology in western metaphysics with the specific meaning of Being it has inherited since Plato. Destruktion of the history of Being is an unrelenting, ever-ongoing process in Heidegger’s writings. It has developed much earlier than Being and Time in the 1920s as a fiercely critical approach to the western philosophical tradition. The second section discusses Heidegger’s turn (die Kehre) towards the history of Being. It is through the history of Being, Heidegger attempts to overcome the history of western ontology. Heidegger contends that the history of Being unveils the truth of Being in a particular manner to the historical people in each metaphysical epoch. Hence, there is no single revelation of Being once and for all. This is an important notion that I shall emphasize in support of my conception of ‘other’ cultural traditions. The third section is on the history of Being of the Greeks and the late moderns. While Heidegger emphasizes six such metaphysical epochs, I have chosen two important ones for our analysis; the original Greek understanding of Being or Phusis and the late modern technological understanding of Being or Gestell (enframing) as Heidegger sees it from the point of view of the history of Being. In the concluding section, I argue that Heidegger’s attack on a reified and unified history of philosophy and his emphasis on a divergent history of Being clear the way for my attempt to draw up a phenomenology of other cultural traditions.