ABSTRACT
Martin Heidegger purports to open the way to thinking the essence of human existence in a manner which, since the pre-Socratics, had been consigned to oblivion. Heidegger traces the emergence of metaphysics from the growing divergence between poetic and conceptual modes of thinking; a divergence first apparent, he argues, in the historical shift from pre-Socratic philosophy to that of Plato and Aristotle. Heidegger's ontological claims concerning Dasein's authenticity, its caring for Being, as well as its potentiality for becoming-whole are nothing but pieces of apologetic subterfuge for beings about to meet their mortal fate. The ontological dignity with which Heidegger endows the term 'Being', the sacred aura that emanates from words like 'existence', 'authenticity', 'death', arises through an appeal to their self-sufficient semantic isolation. The dignity, the authenticity, with which Heidegger clothes this meaning, whose only content is a pre-reflective ontological difference between thought and being, conceals a denial of freedom in an autonomous aesthetics of death.
