Kant and the Closure of the Epoch of the Metaphysics of Presence

In taking up the question of Kant and the metaphysics of presence, I am, of course, situating Kant in a topology first uncovered, opened out, and made accessible to questioning by Heidegger, Gadamer, and Derrida. Metaphysics, in this extraordinary sense, has the unity and continuity of a tradition, of what is passed down and passed on as always already decided before any decision which we might make, because, living always out of it, it is the horizon from which every decision receives its orientation. It is not itself a standpoint or a stance or a theory which one freely decides whether or not to adopt (the alternative to it is lacking), for it is the fundamental orientation toward and understanding of what-is which first opens me to myself and to other beings and so makes available to me the alternatives of free choice and of decision. The metaphysical tradition, in this sense, has the horizonal character of language as a structure or a virtual system, a character exhibited and in a degree scientifically falsified in structural linguistics.1 And the metaphysics of presence, the constant horizon of all subsequent thought, indeed has its "origin" in the critique which is accomplished in and against the Greek language in Parmendes' thought.