The early Heidegger, however, thought of his transcendental argument as distinct in

two ways. First, he thought that the thinkers prior to himself had skipped a critical
step. They had gone directly from a transcendental discussion of intentionality to
attempt to ground a metaphysicswithout pausing to consider what it meant to be
an intender, without discussing the conditions under which an entity can be one
who intends or (in Heideggers own terminology) without asking the question of the
meaning of the being of Dasein. Heidegger thought that because of this, all his
predecessors had fallen into the trap of thinking of the intentional agent as
substance that happened to have an odd range of properties: mental properties that
involved thinking of things and itself, or of being conscious and self-conscious. In
contrast, Heideggers own analysis of the meaning of the being of Dasein led him to
assert that the meaning is temporality, that to be an intentional agent of the sort we
are is to be temporal. (Okrent, 1988, pp. 6-7)
The early Heidegger further thought that the subjectivism he found prevalent in
modern metaphysics all the way back to Ren Descartesthe emphasis on the
character of the intentional subject and its intentionality as the ground for all
determinations in regard to what it is for any entity to bewas itself a function of
this Cartesian error in regard to the ontology of the intender. In the completion of
Being and Time, the early Heidegger hoped to show how the appropriate answer to
the question of the meaning of Daseins being (that is, the pragmatic, antimentalistic, agency-centered answer to the question what are the necessary
conditions for being an intentional agent?) lead to the appropriate, antisubjectivistic answer to the question of the meaning of being (that is, to a nonsubject-centered account of the conditions under which any entity can
appropriately be said to be).
But the early Heidegger was wrong about all this. Whats more, he discovered that
he was wrong relatively quickly. Being and Time was never completed, although we
do have what Heidegger called a new working-out of Division I, Part 3. This volume,
The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, represents Heideggers best attempt to
construct the antisubjectivistic metaphysics that he then thought must follow from
his pragmatic analysis of intentionalityand it is a failure. In Chapter 6 I
reconstruct the argument of Basic Problems and show that it leads to an aporia. As a
first approximation, the problem consists in the fact that Heidegger had
misidentified the source of metaphysical subjectivism. It doesnt always arise out of
Cartesianism; in some cases it arises out of the transcendental mode of argument.
All transcendental arguments, including the early Heideggers own, are
verificationist; and verificationism, even of a pragmatic sort, leads to subjectivism in
metaphysics, a commitment that cannot be supported by the argument of Being and
Time.
The rest of Part II develops the late Heideggers response to the collapse of the
metaphysical project of Being and Time. This response has two sides. First,
Heidegger came to believe that metaphysics had reached its end or completion in
the present age, a completion understood as taking place in the scientific attitude of
socially active humanity. That is, the question of what it means for some entity to be

or for any entity to be, and which ontological sorts of entities there are, are all
questions that we now see can be answered only pragmatically, either directly
through seeing what kinds of activities are successful or indirectly through the
ontological commitments of a pragmatically understood science. The late Heidegger
isnt always happy that metaphysics has been completed in this way, that philosophy
has found its telos in science and technology, but he is consistent in his assertion
that it has. (Okrent, 1988, pp. 6-8)
But there is a second side to Heideggers response to the collapse of the antisubjectivistic program of Being and Time. Late Heidegger thought that over and
beyond metaphysics, over and beyond the question concerning what it means for
something to be or which sorts of things there arequestions that he came to see as
both definitive of philosophy and capable of being answered only pragmatically
there was another question that has a unique status and cannot be answered either
scientifically or pragmatically. This is the question of the truth of beingthe
aletheia, opening, or lighting of being. In Chapters 7 and 8 I argue that with
appropriate modifications this question should be identified with Heideggers initial
question concerning the necessary conditions for the possibility of intentionality. I
further argue that the late Heidegger thought this question was neither
metaphysical nor scientific, because the answer was neither contingent and
grounded in a scientific investigation of any entity or capacity of any entity, nor
analytic and grounded in a priori analysis of what it means for any entity to be.
Positively, this amounts to the claim that the answer to the question of the truth of
being (the question of the conditions under which being can be understood or
intended) is derived from a transcendental argument that (1) has no metaphysical
implications whatsoever and (2) does not involve any a priori analysis of the being
of any entity, including any transcendental subject, subject of consciousness, or
Dasein. (Okrent, 1988, pp. 8-9)
El olvido del ser en ser y tiempo se entiende desde una perspectiva terica cuyas
consecuencias no escapan al terreno de la metafsica entendida como la
investigacin terica sobre el ser. Si bien es el motivo fundamental del proyecto
inconcluso de ser y tiempo, el olvido del ser no tiene ms que un tratamiento
introductorio en esta y las obras de este periodo. Se mantiene, sin embargo, en el
pensamiento heideggeriano posterior a la Kehre, al abandono del proyecto de Ser y
tiempo, por la razn de ser una fundamentacin trascendental de la metafsica, del
adeduado planteamiento de la pregunta por el ser.
Para una exposicin satisfactoria del olvido del ser que inaugura el proyecto de sery
tiempo hay que ir ms all de esta obra y reconstruir las referencias fragmentarias
que se encuentran en los conceptos fundamentales de la metafsica, Kant y el
problema de la metafsica, los problemas fundamentales de la fenomenologa, de la
esencia de la verdad, carta sobre el humanismo; con ayuda de los comentarios que
sobre el tema hacen Okrent, Dreyfus, Habermas, NI 22, 194, 654, 155, , NII 28, 402,
LXV (Grundfragen der Philosophie 45) 111, PT (Phenomenologie und Teologie en
Weg Marken) 53/10, 293, 115, 119, 138, 442, WMP (Nachwort zu Was ist
Metaphysik? En Weg Marken) 304/385.