Heidegger’s Existential Ontology and Its Reconstruction in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia

Heidegger is one of the most original and important thinkers in the history of Western philosophy, but his philosophical project is difficult to grasp and appreciate. Formulating his quest as the revival of the question of Being that he believes has been ignored since the time of Aristotle, he brings to the fore the fundamental significance of ontology. Yet he remains critical of traditional ontological inquiry. In particular, he opposes Cartesian ontology, i.e., ontology of “thingness” that answers the question of Being in terms of beings, and in doing so conceals the truth of Being. Heidegger demonstrates that while ontological issues played a certain role in the history of philosophy, all previous philosophy was concerned with beings or things in their being. However, Being is not a thing, but that which “transcends” things, “the transcendens pure and simple.” This “transcendens” could be open only through the authentic experience of “Being-in -the world” that Heidegger frames as the analytic of Dasein understood as human existence in respect to its temporal and historical character. Heidegger’s unique contribution to philosophy begins with his identification of the human being’s existential-experiential situation with the ontological position itself. Saying that “Dasein is ontically distinctive in that it is ontological,” he points out that the condition of experiencing-existing is precisely that of rendering the Being (ὄν) of entities explicit or intelligible in thought and speech (λόγος), and is thus most basically the condition of a being concerned with Being. Thus, the question of onto-logy, literally the meaning of Being, is implicated in the very Being of the being who inquires after it. According to Heidegger, the prevailing Western consensus on ontology rests on the Cartesian cogito ergo sum. However central to philosophy as a whole, the question of what it means to “be” was never quite considered. Heidegger criticizes thinkers who regard humans as detached from the world around them, mere observers of objects from which they are independent. Instead, he