Episode 323 - Monday, May 7, 1979

Being Jim Davis

This question has today been forgotten--although out time considers itself progressive in again affirming "metaphysics." All the same we believe that we are spared the exertion of rekindling a gigantomachia peri tes ousias [Plato, Sophist 245e6-246e1]. But the question touched upon here is hardly an arbitrary one. It sustained the avid research of Plato and Aristotle but from then on ceased to be heard as a thematic question of actual investigation. What these two thinkers achieved has been preserved in various distorted and "camouflaged" forms down to Hegel's Logic. And what then was wrested from phenomena by the highest exertion of thought, albeit in fragments and first beginnings, has long since been trivialized.

Martin Heidegger, "The Necessity, Structure, and Priority of the Question of Being," from Being and Time, 1927. Trans. Joan Stambaugh.

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