For most of its history, Western philosophy tried to use pure reason to know reality. But, argues Robert Pippin, Heidegger showed that this entire philosophical tradition was doomed, due to its mistaken assumption that what it is to be a feature of reality is to be available to rational thought. This assumption, which culminated in Hegel, led philosophy to forget the meaningfulness of reality for humans, and so left us lost. Only by recognising that we encounter reality not primarily through reason, but through the ways in which it matters for us, can philosophy recover the world as something meaningful for humans.

1. What is forgotten in the Western philosophical tradition

Heidegger claimed that German Idealism and especially Hegel’s philosophy was the “culmination” (Vollendung) of the entire Western philosophical tradition. This meant that one could most clearly see in the work of Kant and Hegel the decisive, underlying assumption guiding that tradition from its inception in Plato and Aristotle to its final fate. Because of that assumption, philosophy had exhausted its possibilities; all that was left for it was to recount its own past moments either in some triumphalist mode (Hegel) or in some deflationary irony (Derrida). This failure, Heidegger hoped, might tell us something crucial for the possibility of a renewal of a philosophy that had something to do with human life as it is actually lived.

___

This most basic question in philosophy was taken to be the question of “the meaning of being qua being,” but in reality, Heidegger claimed, this question had never been properly addressed; indeed, it had been “forgotten.”

___

The heart of that prior tradition was metaphysics, the attempt by empirically unaided pure reason to know the “really real,” traditionally understood as “substance.” This most basic question in philosophy was taken to be the question of “the meaning of being qua being,” but in reality, Heidegger claimed, this question had never been properly addressed; indeed, it had been “forgotten.”