In the course of writing a recent book about Hegel’s Science of Logic (2019) and so about Hegel’s metaphysics, I recalled that the only other commentator known to me to take as seriously as I did (in the way that I did) that at the heart of Hegel’s enterprise was the identification of logic (a theory of pure thinking) with metaphysics (an account of being) was Martin Heidegger.1 But Heidegger did not mean to off er a mere interpretation. He was also trying to say that all metaphysics up to and including Hegel had been working under the same assumption, starting with Plato’s claim that reality was Idea and on through scholastic and early modern metaphysics. Moreover, Heidegger claimed that this assumption about the primary availability of being to discursive thinking, in all the developing variations in later philosophy and especially in modernity, had set in place by its implications various notions of primacy, significance, orders of importance, social relations and relations with the natural world that had led to a disastrous self-estrangement in the modern West, and a forgetfulness and lostness that ensured a permanent and ultimately desperate homelessness.2 For Heidegger, Hegel had taken that mostly implicit assumption as far as it could be taken, and so was its “culmination” in the claim that the Absolute had been achieved, that all dualisms had been reconciled and that a complete account of the intelligibility of being and thereby an account of any possible being had been realized. But for Heidegger, this culmination allowed us to see, in
1. Schelling might count as another example, but it is important to Heidegger that Schelling’s rejection of the very idea of a science of logic as a science of being is much too hasty and so does not appreciate Hegel’s culmination of metaphysics.
2. And, in its ultimate late-modern consequences, the technological en-framing (Gestell ) of all possible meaningfulness.