Metaphysics of Dasein as foundation of metaphysics. Heidegger in Severino's thought

Abstract

In his early book, Heidegger e la metafisica (Heidegger and Metaphysics), Emanuele Severi‐no had considered the “metaphysics of Dasein” as Heidegger’s major contribution to meta‐physics because it, by affirming the “finiteness” of Dasein, was seen as what makes possible the “fundamental question” of classical metaphysics, the one that asks about the absolute Foundation of the factual posing of being. Within this interpretative project of Heideggerian philosophy, Severino critically introduced a problematic issue in relation to the way Heidegger refers to “Being”. He emphasized that “Being”, for Heidegger, is the transcendens. This means that Being, while always remaining the Being‐of‐being, in Heidegger tends to constitute itself as “separate” from the totality of being. In the young Severino, there was a non‐univocal interpretation of this transcendens and it was also understood as the “transcendental capacity of manifesting”, that is, the equivalent of the psychological dimension (or, from Aristotle’s perspective, that of the “soul”). Later on, instead, Heideggerian transcendens was identified with Being of the “ontological difference”, through which Heidegger, according to Severino, had to conceive the relationship be‐tween “Being” and “being”, if he intended not to deny on a speculative level the existence of (nihilistic) “becoming” of beings that, even for him, is phenomenologically evident. In the perspective of a valorization of Heideggerian thought in relation to a contemporary resumption of metaphysics, according to me the transcendens to look at is the constitutive “transcendence” of Dasein, which was qualified by Severino as the same “possibility” of the metaphysical question and, then, of the affirmation of the metaphysical‐theological differ‐ence. Instead, in the perspective that rather detects the inscription also of Heidegger’s thought in the nihilism of Western philosophy, it must be emphasized that the Heideggerian transcendens is Being of the “ontological difference”: Being, that is, as the condition of possibility of the (nihilistic) becoming of beings, according to which, for Severino, it is originally impossible to affirm immutable Being.