Prejudice and Possibility. How to Philosophize after The Culmination

Overcoming metaphysics in Heidegger's sense requires that we experience ‘the ground out of which the history of being first reveals its nature ( Wesen )’ (Heidegger 2000: 67). What overcoming metaphysics means for Heidegger is not just doing without metaphysics, but getting at the source of our understanding of and relation to what is, to being. He does this by studying the history of Western philosophy and by asking ‘why is it that being lets itself be thought as metaphysics?’ Heidegger finds that the history of philosophy is not a history of a progressively better conceptual grasp of what is, but a history of a prejudice, a story about an oversight and a forgetting, and the philosophy of Hegel is its culmination. Heidegger thinks of his own philosophy as working in the aftermath of metaphysics, and his project has clear affinities with both Hegel's and Pippin's projects, in that a central philosophical task is to figure out what has happened to us.