the subject of certainty and the certainty of the subject

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The Subject of Certainty and theCertainty of the SubjectChristophe Perrina

a FNRS/Université catholique de Louvain, BelgiumPublished online: 02 Oct 2014.

To cite this article: Christophe Perrin (2014) The Subject of Certainty and the Certaintyof the Subject, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 22:4, 515-533, DOI:10.1080/09672559.2014.948721

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The Subject of Certainty and theCertainty of the Subject

Christophe Perrin

Abstract

The history of philosophy would not have needed to wait for Heidegger if Hegelhad taught us that the transformation from hypokeimenon to subiectum introducedby Descartes is due to the transformation from truth to certainty, which heintroduces too. So, taking for subject this certainty, which makes the certainty ofsubject, we aim to understand that before the truth of man was distorted, the truthitself – the ontological and antepredicative truth, i.e. aletheia – was with him.

Keywords: Heidegger; Descartes; certainty; subject; subjectivity

In 1927, Heidegger was clear that it was with Kant that ‘the ego became, forthe first time – and in an explicit fashion’ that which it had not been up to thatpoint: ‘the authentic subjectum and the authentic Substance.’1 This was reaf-firmed in 1929: ‘the I – Subject – Substance. Kant first’,2 and also: ‘The I assubiectum remains a substance. Up until Kant: here there is a new step … thisI is an outstanding subjectum, the authentic Subject.’3 But in 1927, a qualifica-tion was added: ‘the phenomenon was already prefigured with Descartes’,4 andin 1933, Heidegger’s position seemed to change: the ‘Subject’ was first ‘pos-ited by Descartes’.5 Why this change?6 Because ‘the change from hypokeime-non to subiectum’7 flows from ‘the change from Truth to Certainty’.8 Fromnow on, this position is credited to Descartes, and to no-one else. It is thischange which we would like to clarify with respect to its circumstances, itsmeaning and its consequences. But let us begin by saying a few words aboutthis change itself.

It cannot be denied that Descartes himself never used the terms subject orsubjectum for man. Neither did he elect to use the term suppositum for defin-ing the person, a term used by Locke and Leibniz, and popular amongst Scho-lastics and theologians. Nevertheless, Descartes does eventually designate whathe terms res cogitans, as opposed to the animal rationale, as subject. Thismove is, according to Heidegger, constitutive of philosophical modernity and‘turns the Greek way of thinking inside out’.9 Where hypokeimenon designatedall entities, inert things as well as living things and humans – ‘Everything

International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 2014Vol. 22, No. 4, 515–533, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09672559.2014.948721

© 2014 Taylor & Francis

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which abides of itself and in advance is hypokeimenon. Subiectum is Star andVegetation, Animal, Man and God’,10 Heidegger explains in 1940, fromDescartes on, that the ego claims the title of subjectum for itself alone, whichnow stands ‘not only for the subject-predicate relation but also for the subject-object relation’.11 To sum up, for classical and medieval philosophy, if man issubjectum it is only as the substrate of its predicate in the same way as anyother entity. By contrast, when Descartes defines cogitationes as accidents ofthe res cogitans, it means that not only is man, like any other thing, the bearerof his proper attributes, but also that, from a logical point of view, in so far ashe thinks, he is the subject of his thoughts, which he possesses as his ownproperties. He can also distinguish himself from other entities which he nolonger conceives as subjecta but rather as objecta since, as regards theirrespective predicates, if they remain subjects, in so far as the subject providesthe foundation for the way in which it thinks of them, they are as suchconstituted as objects for the subject.

This ‘change in the concept of the subject’,12 this ‘change in signification’,13

and better, ‘this change in the significance of the words subiectum and obiec-tum’ which Heidegger revisits in the summer of 1934 and the winter of 1935/6– in order to stress that it is ‘not some generalized question of linguistic prac-tice’ but the sign of a ‘fundamental change in Dasein’,14 the sign of a ‘greatand sudden change from Antique Being through the middle ages and to thecontemporary Being of Man’15 – is one which he first attested to in 1927. Hethen affirms that ‘the objective, in other words, that which is set against asobject, is, in modern or Kantian terms, the subjective’, and vice versa, ‘thatwhich Kant calls subjective, is rather, for the Scholastics, in accordance withthe literal meaning of the expression “Subject”, that which lies before, the hyp-okeimenon, the Objective’.16 In sum, in the broad sense, the subject is whatsubsists in any particular thing I am faced with, and therefore which lasts, per-sists, such that it amounts to the basic constituent of the thing in question,whilst it can, at the same time, become the object of a predication. Also, wespeak of the subject of, for example, a book, meaning thereby the object of thebook in the sense of that which is presented in thought. Any subject can in thisway become an object of the mind, in so far as it is represented. Under theseconditions, the subject refers back to an objective element, whereas the objectappears as something subjective, in so far as it is an object for a thinking sub-ject. The explanation for this completely different conception of subject andobject lies in the ‘anthropological transformation of the notion of the subject’,which is owed to Descartes, whose ego cogito – which textually, is not, andwhich substantially, cannot be reduced to a subject – finds itself occupyingprecisely this position, to the extent of being, ‘in protean form the subject parexcellence, and finally, the only one’.17 In a stricter or narrower sense than thebroader definition discussed above, humanity, conceived in terms of its capac-ity for thought, becomes the subject. As such, its own capacity for thinkingunderpins the being of an entity; i.e., it lays out the conditions of what it

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means for an entity as such to exist or not. To summarize: if previously entitiescould only exist as subjects, now entities could only exist as objects. ThereforeDescartes ‘for the first time and expressly laid out this distinction’,18 in asmuch as and in so far as, ‘since Descartes, philosophy turn toward the subjec-tivity of Man’.19 Now, let us turn from the subject toward the question of cer-tainty, in order to move from the latter to complete our presentation of thatcertainty which belongs to subjectivity.

If any of Descartes’ contributions to the history of ideas were to be high-lighted by Heidegger, it would no doubt be the idea of certainty, in particular,‘the idea of absolute knowledge’.20 The reason for this is simple: ‘Descartes ishaunted by certainty.’21 He appreciated the ‘certainty’22 of mathematics and heseeks to achieve an ‘equivalent certainty’23 in the field of philosophy. It isbecause the things in which he believes are ‘highly doubtful and uncertain’24

that he seeks those things which are ‘entirely certain and indubitable’.25 Being‘happy enough’ to ‘find only one’, he ends by ‘knowing what this certaintyconsists of’ and, similarly, ‘what is required for a proposition to be true andcertain’.26 In this sense, Descartes could well boast of having made scepticismimpossible. ‘The first and most certain’27 truth which is offered to him, thecogito, not only resists a doubt more radical than that of the pyrrhonian scep-tic, but it even furnishes the criterion of certitude. But for Heidegger there ismore. And we can perhaps take our lead here from Patočka, who first visitedFreiburg in 1933 at which time Heidegger would have stated in the Lecture-seminar entitled Die Grundfrage der Philosophie28 that if Descartes’ statementmarks a turning point, it is not simply because it is absolutely certain, butrather because it serves as the point of departure for a thinking in which thestate of certainty constitutes the essence of the true’ – in sum, ‘truth and certi-tude are identical’.29 In the words of Patočka, If Heidegger continued to returnduring the second half of the ’30s to the ‘forthcoming of a new concept oftruth in Descartes’ and to ‘his determination of truth as certitude’, it is because,‘Western man hold for true that of which he is certain, that is, that which heknows by virtue of his capacity to know the world which surrounds him andto draw from nature valid laws.’30 We are however entitled to pose the ques-tion in regards to this reading: are we certain as Heidegger seems to be thatDescartes in fact supports the idea that truth and certitude are identical? DoesDescartes not distinguish in the Méditations between truth and certitude?31

Indeed, for Descartes, certitude derives its force from truth, which ultimatelymeans that truth and certitude are distinguishable and therefore not identical. Itis in this manner that one may understand how, for Descartes, certainty fur-nishes the appropriate assurance for truth and furthermore the assurance regard-ing the criteria used in the establishment of truth. To this question, JeanBeaufret responds, without hesitation, in the affirmative, arguing that if suchan ‘interpretation of the truth’ does not correspond to ‘any project explicitlythematized by Descartes’, it is because it corresponds to what is ‘un-said in hisphilosophical project’, and even to its un-thought, and not in the least because

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it is ‘one of the most decisive invisibilia in history’.32 In order to pursue thisquestion further, let us examine that which Descartes leaves us to consider.33

Concentrating solely on the argument concerning dreams from the Méditationpremière, Hobbes admitted to being surprised that ‘this excellent author of newspeculations’ had not ‘refrained from publishing such old things’,34 in so far asCicero had already mentioned it,35 and also arguably Plato; in the Theatetus hepresented the argument concerning madness, and almost even the argumentconcerning the deceptive God,36 as commonplaces of eristic argument. Nonovelty on this point then,37 and no mystery. Descartes acknowledged havingread ‘a long time ago several books written by sceptics and academicians con-cerning this matter’ and even that he had done so ‘not without a certainamount of distaste’.38 It must be said that these ideas can be found every-where: in the Pyrrhonian Exercises of Sextus Empiricus who presented them,in the Contra Academicos of Augustine who refuted them, as part of the staplediet in the classes on logic and rhetoric run by the Jesuit Colleges, and as ageneral part of the cultural ambience in the era of Montaigne, Sanchez, LaMothe Le Vayer or Gassendi.39 What was new was to turn this into the princi-pal theme of philosophy as a whole, because it had become a ‘sickness’ forwhich it was imperative to ‘teach the cure’.40

This is what changes with Descartes. Where Plato only addressed the themeindirectly through the dialogue form, and where Aristotle washed his hands ofit,41 Descartes could only ever take seriously such ‘general and extraordinarydoubts’,42 which were ruining an epoch whose leading motto, symptomatically,was the slogan ‘Certitude and Assurance’.43 Whilst Plato and Aristotle couldserenely discuss the being of beings, in the light of the beings accorded tothem in the clear light of their presence, without needing to be reassured abouttheir own ability to do so, Descartes frantically sought this sort of reassurancein order to establish the presence of other beings on this foundation. Thus whathe sought to reassure himself of was ‘knowledge concerning beings as awhole’44 albeit determined through the sciences. But what explains this situa-tion? Here we encounter the problem of the un-thought: ‘That truth has, in itsessence, become certitude is an event whose beginning remains inaccessible toall metaphysics.’45 Indeed it remains the case that, as Jean Beaufret, for whomthe case of Chrysippus was most revealing, stated, ‘at the time of Descartes,reassurance was sought concerning beings as such rather than on the way inwhich an understanding of such beings was to be disclosed in the first place’.46

A disciple of Zenon and Cleanther, the second Portic scholar no longer philos-ophizes in relation to things, but rather on the basis of existing teaching con-cerning these things, since he no longer desires to learn how to see the world,but rather to guarantee those principles capable of legitimizing conclusions anduseful to the development of knowledge.47 Thus, little more than a centuryafter Aristotle, philosophy was founded less on a faith in reason, but rather ona reason based on faith.


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By replacing argument based on authority with the authority of argument,did Descartes really provide a remedy? It would be wrong to think that he did,in part because he was not the first to attempt this, and because in any case hisefforts in this direction were not fruitful. On the one hand, Galileo did nothave to wait for Descartes to oppose the materiality of facts to the ideality ofbooks, and, at the same time, to oppose the Aristotelians of his day, who hadpretensions to the ‘honourable title of philosopher’ when they were merely‘doctors of memory’.48 On the other, Descartes sought to rely on his reasononly in order to vindicate the doctrines of faith which, at the time of theRenaissance were beginning to be questioned in that they rested only on theauthority of biblical revelation. When Christianity was no longer able to hidewhat it was (namely, a dogmatism defined by ‘the Summa, the collection ofdoctrinal works in which the unified whole of the contents of the doctrine astransmitted by tradition was reconciled and the different opinions examined,applied or rejected in so far as they were in agreement with the doctrine of theChurch’) at that point, ‘man took the initiative to assure himself, through hisown capabilities, of the certitude of his own position in relation to beings as awhole’.49

So from God, we arrive at Man. But these ‘two realities, God and Man’ areultimately, ‘as knowing beings, the metaphysical bearers of truth’.50 Funda-mentally, nothing changes: the same secure relation to beings is sought, butwhat has changed is that the certitude of salvation is not seen as satisfactoryand another form of certitude is anxiously sought instead. In this sense ‘certi-tude’ proves itself to be ‘Descartes’ fides’51 – that which must be held on to,believed and followed. Heidegger then goes on to conclude that whoeverinvokes ‘Descartes’ thereby ‘takes leave from the Church: its authority’.52

Everything concerning Descartes’ alternative Credo which expresses the sensethat ‘far from excluding faith from his philosophical project, Descartes in factradicalizes it’,53 is contained in the phrase: ‘truth which has achieved certaintyof itself’54 (vérité certitudinaire). The ‘Liberation of Man from the Traditionand Order of the Church and its Dogmas’55 recalled in 1934 could, in 1938,be presented in terms which showed the former to be determined by thelatter:

This liberation, continually liberates itself, unawares, from the attachmentto revealed truth in which the salvation of Man’s soul is made sure andcertain. Liberation from the revealed certitude of salvation should there-fore amount, in itself, to a liberation with a view to a certitude in whichman can assure himself of the true and of his own knowledge thereof.This was not possible except in so far as man liberated himself for thepurposes of providing a guarantee of the certitude of what was capableof being known. Now this in its turn could not have happened withoutman deciding, both by himself and for himself, concerning that which,from now on, would count as ‘what was capable of being known’.


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Descartes’ metaphysical task then becomes the following: to create themetaphysical foundation for the liberation of man to a liberty of assuredself-determination.56

How can such a certitude however be attained when truth is no longer givenby a revelation? One possibility: to pose ‘the question of “method”’, and topose it at its ‘highest level’, thereby giving the answer its ‘metaphysical signif-icance as a way of determining the essence of truth’.57 The stakes involved inthis move are high since it modifies or at least complicates the metaphysicalproblematic as it was inherited from antiquity. This is precisely what Heideg-ger tries to show in a seminar held in the winter semester of 1937/8 and enti-tled, Die metaphysischen Grundstellungen des abendländlischen Denkens(Metaphysik). Beyond presenting the ‘foundational axiom of all cognition’ ofphilosophical thinking and all thinking shaped by such thinking, namely: ‘esse= certum esse’,58 he also re-examines the Meditationes de prima philosophia,in order to determine the exact relationship Descartes maintained concerningthe question: ‘what is an entity?’ The question he asks is the following: does‘the Meditationes unfold the guiding question – or the opposite?’59 If Heideg-ger affirms that the ‘essentials’ of what he discusses are contained ‘in Sein undZeit’,60 the efforts which he expends in reassessing what he terms for the firsttime ‘Descartes’ fundamental metaphysical position’61 suggests something of achange of direction. After having investigated the early signs of the crucial ele-ments in the development of veritas into certitudo, and without hesitating toindicate the importance of Aquinas in this,62 he starts examining the positionitself and its consequences:

Quid est ens? is the question that is nowhere asked in the Meditations deprima philosophia! In fact, you will not find this question here. Better: itis not posed in this form. However, the whole inquiry moves along thelines set by this guiding question. In fact, the guiding question is takenfor granted in such a way that it seems like something completely differ-ent is beginning.

[…] The Meditationes seeks the fundamentum absolutum inconcussum[…] The certum, that is to say the true, that is to say ens qua ens. Thequestion of being as a guiding question […] has not disappeared, on thecontrary: it is more powerful than ever because a response is supplied toit without it ever being posed as a question – in this lies a fateful flaw(Verhängnis).63

This passage is important because it marks a significant change from his firstreading of Descartes as outlined in Sein und Zeit. Certainly, Descartes doesnot suddenly become the author of a fundamental ontology but there is adecisive move away from seeing Descartes’ work as an ‘ontological void’.


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The metaphysician of a metaphysics, as metaphysical as that of the othergreat metaphysicians in so far as the question of beingness is also posed byhim, Descartes also occupies a novel position in this respect because heprecedes the examination of this issue by posing the question of truth.64

However, the prior posing of this question is not the suppression of onequestion by another but the hierarchical ordering of two lines of questioning:the one duplicating the other – (1) what entity is true? And (2) what is theentity in truth? In this sense, the project is ‘never simply just a “theory ofknowledge”, except in the Meditations de prima philosophia’.65 It is rather,and indeed was always meant to signify, a ‘metaphysics of knowledge’.66 Itis important to stress the significance of this passage in that it resolves acertain tension inherent in Heidegger’s first interpretation of Descartes. Fromone point of view, Descartes’ work had been presented as foreign to anyepistemology and, on the other, it was presented as preoccupied with nothingelse. Now this ambiguity is resolved; the theory of knowledge – ‘when andwhere does it start? With Descartes! Why? Because the essence of knowl-edge is grasped, the ground of the preservation of the true and of thetruth’.67 Descartes did not ask any other question with the same urgency. Heposes a ‘metaphysical question’, a question which, ‘since the beginningWestern man’ has asked himself ‘in the following manner: ti estin episteme’;this is not the question which has become ‘much later, during the course ofthe nineteenth century … an object of scientific considerations, that is, ofinvestigations in the fields of psychology and biology’.68 There could benothing easier than ‘by means of a comparison carried out in retrospect andunder the impulsion of the historiological-philological exploration of the past’to advance the idea that the ‘thinkers of antiquity and in an analogous sensethose of the modern period’ had ‘practised a type of “theory of knowledge”in the manner of the philosophical specialists of the nineteenth century’:noting that to put things in this way was but a ‘childish conception’nevertheless.69

Descartes is therefore the metaphysician who was the first to undertake tofound the truth by drawing on his own resources, resources which are drawnentirely from his own human capabilities. According to Heidegger, Descartes’innovation lies here: in the invention of the ego conceptualized as the sub-ject.70 Thus, ‘what appeared in metaphysics was this: the certitude of all beingsand of all truth was founded in the self-consciousness of the individuated “I”:ego cogito ergo sum, the self finding itself in its proper character’.71 In sum-mary, ‘ens certum – inconcussum – is the ego – as the sum’.72 Medieval ontol-ogy’s thesis that, apart from the summum ens ‘omne ens est ens creatum’,73 isnow abandoned. As Heidegger writes in the Beiträge – ‘The most eminentbeing’ is from now on the ‘creatum of the creator’, the being in relation towhom one only invokes the lumen naturale in order to ‘justify a certitude’,74

‘in opposition to the verbum divinum, to revelation’.75 Now this Cartesian prin-ciple, which seeks to ensure that ‘Truth’ chimes with the ‘self-certainty of


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thinking’76 has at least two consequences, the one fateful, the other moremodest. First, the fateful consequence:

the idea changes from Plato’s eidos to the perceptio of the ego cogito ofthe res cogitans which is the way in which Descartes thinks of the sub-stantia finita of man. The earth is detached from the sun. Everything thatis, subsists as the objectum of a subjectum, which takes on itself the self-consciousness of man in that it acts as the measure of all objectivityaccording to the certitude of the subject. God becomes the object of allobjects; that is, He becomes the absolute subjectity of unconditionedself-certitude.77

Whilst, with Plato, the ideas were still found amongst things, with Descartesthey move toward mens and to the mens humana. Hobbes remarked on thenew way in which the word idea was used in the Troisièmes Objections78 tothe extent that the Thomistic Scholasticism had generally reserved the term todesignate the archetype of a thing in the divine intellect. An heir of the Pre-socratic emphasis on the fact of appearance, the Platonic idea refers to how anentity presents itself to be seen, its phainomenon.79 By placing the accent onthe fact of looking at something, the Cartesian idea, an heir of Roman thought,only refers to what appears, its phantasia. In brief, ‘for Descartes idea signifiesexactly the same thing as representation and this in the double sense of what isrepresented as such and of representation in the sense of the action of repre-senting’.80 The thing perceived being identical to the act by which I perceive itand the idea of a thing being no different from the perception that I have of it,the thing can only be for me that object which exists only for me. God doesnot escape from this, whose ‘being’ consigns Him, as ‘pure thinking’, to ‘alsoallow himself to be grasped in thinking’.81 An object amongst objects, He isnothing more than the shadow of himself, in other words, the image which wemake of Him, as we do of everything else. There is no need to seek any otherorigin for nihilism than Cartesianism. In the Meditationes de prima philoso-phia, ‘God is already a dead God that is to say a God who has been killed’.82

The crime is villainous and His murderer is still on the run: since then the egowho stole from Him his place remains the only master on board, determiningwhat is by assuring himself of it, that is, cognizing it.

As to the more modest consequence, it is this:

What was posited at the beginning of modern thought by Descartes forthe first time as the certitude of the I, a certitude in which man assureshimself of the certitude of the entity as the object of representation, isthe germ of what today, in terms of the ‘lived experience’ and ‘life expe-riences’, has become the basic form of man. It belongs to the irony ofhistory that one discovers today – much later of course – the need torefute Descartes, and that this is accomplished by appealing, against it


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and its ‘intellectualism’ to ‘lived experience’ whilst such ‘livedexperience’ is nothing but the simple descendent of the Cartesian egocogito.83

Nietzsche of course comes to mind in this passage. Indeed Heidegger is cer-tainly thinking of the Nietzsche who maintained a position contrary to theMéditation seconde, namely the position that the body was easier to know thanthe soul, or again that the body was a ‘richer phenomenon, clear, more grasp-able: to place at the head, from the point of view of method’.84 But its form asmuch as its substance sufficed to put this proposition out of joint. In fact,

when Nietzsche says in apparent opposition to Descartes: that it is notthe spirit and the soul – the conscience – which are given first and fore-most in man, but rather the body and states of the body, in the most fun-damental sense, he is still thinking in terms of the modern conception ofman,85

the conception which seeks to establish that which is certain. In this way,Descartes’ tends to turn the weapons of his critics against them. To make useof them to criticize is to subject oneself to criticism in turn.

Liberated from the dogma of the Church, the ego cogito which, on the basisof certitude, established a truth which it founded for itself, began to enjoy anew sort of liberty, not in the sense that it had begun to enjoy a form of free-dom it had previously been denied, but rather in the sense that ‘through thisliberation, the essence of liberty, in the sense of an obligation to that which isobligatory, was constituted in a new way’.86 For Heidegger, liberty is certainlynot licence. ‘Being free means that, instead of certitude of salvation establish-ing the measure for truth, man establishes an equivalent certitude within whichand by virtue of which, he becomes certain of himself as that entity which isself-constituting.’87 In breaking with revelation, modern man regulates truth forhimself and at the same time imposes on himself the obligation to respect thistruth. His in-dependence leads him into autonomy. This is why, with Descartes,we are not merely presented with a discussion of liberty in the field of philoso-phy – a discussion inaugurated in the Discours de la méthode with the distinc-tion between thinking and extended substance, the one subject to determinism,the other characterized by a freedom. In addition, Descartes presents us with a‘claim to liberty’, an ‘affirmation of liberty as a claim to determine oneselfaccording to a law one sets for oneself’.88

Let us highlight the point again, through Heidegger, even if this timethrough the language of the philosophers of Königsberg or Sils-Maria:

Descartes’ metaphysics is no annex, but rather the very type of a form offoundation for modern man and, that is, of a certain relation to the worldaccording to which, from now on, man can no longer be considered to


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be an exception with regard to the order of world and life in Christiantradition, but rather he conceives himself according to Nietzsche’s phraseas the ‘measure and centre’, the one who sets the rules and lays downthe law […] Modern man is not only free, but his freedom consists inhis being claimed by his freedom to know this claim as the sentence ofhis own being.89

Heidegger’s emphasis on Descartes’ Méditation quatrième convincingly illus-trates that ‘in modern times, liberty is essential to every viewpoint’.90 Thequestion there is to know how I can be deceived, whilst God is truth andwhilst I have received from him the capacity to distinguish truth from false-hood and whilst ‘it is certain that I have this capacity such that, when used asit should, it is incapable of failing me’.91 If Descartes starts from imputingerror to human finitude – ‘in so far as I am not myself the sovereign being, Ifind myself subject to infinite possibilities of failure’92 – he eventually incrimi-nates his liberty – ‘in so far as the will is much more ample and more expan-sive than the understanding, I do not subject it to the same limits, but […] Iextend it also to things which I do not understand’.93 As if the necessaryimperfection of a creature that I am were not sufficient, I add to this the con-tingent imperfection which is the poor use of my own free will. In the end,error is not a matter of ignorance but a sin. But more than the discovery of themeans of avoiding it and even to arrive at the knowledge of truth (that is, ‘tomaintain a firm resolution to hold as true only that which is clearly known tome’94) to identify the cause of error allows one to grasp to what extent I am,as Spinoza put it, de facto an ‘imperium in imperio’.95

As a result, error being the consequence of my liberty, truth is even moreso. Is it therefore the case that Descartes can say with Heidegger and Heideg-ger with Descartes, that ‘the essence of truth is freedom’?96 It certainly is not.Cartesian truth is ‘the truth of “certitude” fashioned and grounded in truth asrectitude (Richtigkeit) of representation – adequatio’97 to use the medievalterm. However, truth for Descartes cannot be reduced to this acceptation,98 andas such it exercises its determining influence on modernity:

That Descartes interprets truth as certitude; that Kant, not independentlyof this turn, distinguishes empirical truth from transcendental truth; thatHegel determines in a new manner the important difference betweenabstract truth and concrete truth, that is to say between a scientific truthand speculative truth; that Nietzsche says ‘truth’ is an error – all theseare essential consequences of a thoughtful questioning. And yet, none ofthese touches the essence of truth.99

The reason is simple: ‘the foregoing essence of truth, rectitude of representa-tion, stands and falls with truth as the unconcealment of entities’,100 this origi-nary truth is understood as aletheia which is Heideggarian truth. Descartes’


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idea of truth is thus one which is also ‘true’ in the sense understood by theAmerican Pragmatists: it is an idea which produces some yield, which isadvantageous and effective. It forms part of ‘leading conditions for the con-struction of first systems of philosophy’,101 it makes ‘possible the developmentand dominance of the subject-object relation’102 and the ‘domination’ of‘machination’.103

But Descartes’ idea of truth is nevertheless still false or rather an ‘untrue’104

idea, an idea which hides the truth of the true whilst, at the same time, it par-ticipates in this primary truth, to the extent that, this ‘Untruth’105 is, as Heideg-ger explains, the first veiling which arises out of truth as unconcealment. Asrectitude since Aristotle, truth invites man to conform to something which sup-plies the normative basis for judgment. As certitude since Descartes, truth alsoinvites man to confirm the existence and nature of entities in accordance withthe norms appropriate to the ontic field in question. Now, in a certain sense,man is free with regard to entities in that he can let them be encountered assuch or not. However, this Heideggarian understanding of freedom is not Des-cartes’ arbitrary liberty; it is not one of man’s properties, but rather what dis-poses of him in projecting him into the midst of entities opened up for him assuch. In this sense, Heideggerian truth is freedom as a state of ‘letting-be’(Eingelassenheit)106 toward beings, a welcoming of them in their ownmostbeing. The exact opposite, in short, of Cartesian truth, which is liberty in thesense of a decision concerning the being of beings, an assignment of theirbeing ‘to their grounding basis in the Subjectum, as that which underpins theiropenness to cognitive survey’.107

In this way, if truth conceived as the adequacy of created things to thedivine understanding was, during the Middle Ages, already far from being thatwhich was designated by this word in Antiquity, the gap widened even furtherwhen, deprived of that faith which, formerly, offered the assurance of absentthings,108 modern man was given the task of establishing the certitude ofthings present. Without doubt, this was the task faced by Descartes and thosefollowing him. After all, what is ‘man himself’ or at least the man of the mod-ern epoch, if not ‘the one for whom everything is posited. Measure, centre andend. The most outstanding subjectum. Fundamentum inconcussum absolutuum’and this because ‘the entity is that which is guaranteed for man as Subject[…], that is to say that which he secures, that which he has managed to secure,and that which provides him with security’?109 In this lies Descartes’ novelty:on the one hand, ‘myself and my states are the first and true being’ and on theother hand ‘everything else is calculated on the basis of this being understoodin this way’.110 To put the point another way:

Everything which is self-certifying must, at the same time, confirm thecertainty of that entity on the basis of which such a self-certifyingknowledge is itself secured. The fundamentum, the ground of this liberty,that which lies as ground, the Subjectum must be certain and something


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which must satisfy the foregoing essential requirements. An outstandingSubjectum capable of satisfying these requirements therefore becomesnecessary. What is this subsisting and knowledge-giving ground? Theego cogito (ergo) sum. That which is certifying certainty, reveals itself ina basic thesis which, at the same time (simultaneously and throughoutthe same time), testifies that it is indubitably co-given, as present, withhuman thinking.111

Descartes is writing at a time when the uncertainty which haunted the thinkingof his contemporaries was great. He wrote, as we know, a century after Agri-ppa,112, at a time thus when Montaigne affirmed that ‘there is no longer anyscience’113 and when Sanchez maintained that ‘there is a science of nothing’,since the sciences are only ‘vanities, rhapsodies, fragments of rare and misun-derstood observations’.114 The sense of unease goes deep. How are we capableof achieving any kind of truth, when truth can only emerge from the questionsabout reality which we pose for ourselves? Why not admit that ‘we have nocommunication with being’.115 To see the way in which ‘astrology, medicine,jurisprudence, physics stagger each day and shake in their foundations’, PierreBorel remarks that ‘we know nothing which might not be demolished’.116 Andwith good reason, Montaigne had explained the vanity of wanting to buildwithout ‘a firm basis secured against the assaults of fortune’.117 Descartes tookthis teaching on board only to attempt to supply what was lacking even to theextent of taking over the architectural metaphor. It is in the quest for a princi-ple (Grundsatz) that his philosophy marks its foundational thesis (Grund-satz):‘ego cogito, ergo sum’, which can itself be summed up as the ‘I-thesis’118

(Ichsatz) and, in so far as this formula attests to the ‘self-relating – self-know-ing human being’, a knowing-known of and by the subject ‘in its absolute cer-titude’ and which therefore places itself ‘as the foundation (sub-jectum) ofwhich can be an object of cognition and therefore of each entity; man is fromnow on conceived as ‘Subject’ and is determined as the reasoning self-con-scious sub-jectum’.119

Let us now, with Heidegger, go back over what, after Descartes, becomes socentral to the modern epoch. That is the cogito: ‘cogito ergo sum’, namely, ‘Ithink, I am’.120 We are dealing here with a ‘relation’, an ‘indubitable’ intuitiverelation – to which conjunction and co-ordination are irrelevant – such that‘man, in this truth or certainty, is what lies at the basis, the subjectum’ but asubjectum in the Scholastic sense, a subjectum as substrate, the basis of deter-minate attributes – and in this sense ‘the cognizable basis of all cognition’.121

But where does this change take place? The answer: in the fact that if ‘the egois the subjectum in the proper sense’, then ‘the subjectum is to be called fromnow on ego’ and thus that ‘everything that belongs to the I is subjective’ andfurthermore that this ‘determination is valid for each I as such an I’.122 Orrather ‘thought rigorously, man is not the subjectum’ in Descartes, to the extent


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that the basically medieval understanding which he had of this term was asfollows: ‘substantia, “subjectum”, each enity for itself, the thing, the livingbeing, man, God.’123 Rather, thought more rigorously in Cartesian terms, thebeing which we are is ‘the fundamental certitude’, that of the ‘being-together,that is to say, the necessarily-represented-being-together of the me cogitare andthe me esse’.124 But because it is this certitude itself which is the subjectumand because man exists as the ego, man is, in the final analysis the subjectum.Descartes’ contribution to the history of philosophy is therefore not confined tothe question of certitude but also crucially to the positing of the I as the self-certifying basis of certitude, a position which Heidegger thus judged to be,from 1929, the ‘limit-position’ or the ‘foundational-position’ of certitude.125

Let us conclude. Ever since ‘ousia’ was thought of ‘as substantia up to Des-cartes’126 and from when ‘substantia became subjectum understood as the sub-ject’,127 it transpired that ‘according to Descartes’, and following him, ‘the realsubstance, [became] the subject, the “I think”’.128 The first consequence is that,‘in Descartes’ wake’, ‘for all his successors and opponents’, ‘man is alwaysand still thought as subject’129 and the second is that nothing can be thoughtwithout the ego, a fortiori God who, in accordance with his being is ‘purethinking, cogitare’ and ‘also lets himself be grasped in thinking’.130 But forDescartes, no matter how hard it thinks, the ego of the Meditatio secunda willnever become the creator of truth. The only way to overcome the subjectivecertainty of the cogito to achieve an objective certainty is to arrive at God. Itis the demonstration of His Existence and His Truth which finally provides thesolution to all doubt and a solid basis for knowledge. In this way, a ‘way’ isdiscovered which might lead from ‘the contemplation of the true God, inWhom all the treasures of science and wisdom are contained, to the knowledgeof the other things of the universe’.131 Despite its incarnation in a finite being,the ego as the creator of all representations, still remains the basis of all cogni-tion. In this way, ‘the Meditationes de prima philosophia lay out the plan ofan ontology of the subjectum’,132 which contributes to ‘the completion ofmetaphysics’133 in the phenomenon of technology134 in which man ‘can, inaccordance with the understanding of his own being, determine and completethe essence of subjectivity’:135 the ‘metaphysics of subjectivity’.136 Now, thereis only one ‘founder of the doctrine concerning the subjectivity of humanbeing’,137 and it is not Kant but rather Descartes.

FNRS/Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium.

Notes

1 Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe vol. 24, pp. 178–9 (hereafter referred to as GA,followed by volume and page number).

2 GA 28, 46.3 Ibid., 120.


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4 GA 24, 178.5 Heidegger, Die Grundfrage der Philosophie, in GA 36/37, 50.6 For more details on this change, which occurs in a very significant period of

Heidegger’s thought – between 1927 and 1933 – see our contextualization inEntendre la métaphysique. Les significations de la pensée de Descartes dansl’œuvre de Heidegger (Louvain/Paris: Peeters, 2013), 215ff.

7 Heidegger, Die Metaphysik als Geschichte des Seins, in GA 6.2, 391.8 Ibid., 383.9 GA 42, 193.

10 Heidegger, Die seinsgeschichtliche Bestimmung des Nihilismus in GA 6.2, 393.But already: ‘In conformity with the Antiquity’s conception of Being, beings arefundamentally understood as present-at-hand. An authentic entity, ousia, is thatwhich is inherently orderable (Verfügbare), that which can be set in place(Her-gestellte), self-standing Estate (Anwesen), that which lies before, subjectum,Substanz. Things, both corporeal and spiritual, are considered substances (ousiai)’(GA 24, 210). Or again: ‘The hypokeimenon in Latin Tradition: the sub-jectum:every entity as entity is subjectum (sub-stans). This statement is valid for all ofmetaphysics from Plato to Nietzsche’ (GA 49, 163).

11 Heidegger, Die Metaphysik als Geschichte des Seins, in GA 6.2, 393.12 Heidegger, Die Grundfrage der Philosophie, in GA 36/37, 43. In reality, Heidegger

introduces this theme in the summer lecture course of 1933: ‘In its original signifi-cance and, during the Middle Ages, the “subject” had nothing to do with the Con-cept of the “I” and Man’s sense of self. Rather, Subjectum is the translation of theGreek hypokeimenon and that means that which is already there in advance, thatupon which we rely […] originally subjectum designated precisely what we wouldnow call an object and objectum meant, in the Middle Ages, what we would nowconceive of as being opposed and represented in thought, that which we think ofas subjective in the current sense of that word’ (ibid., 43–4).

13 GA 38, 142.14 GA 41, 106.15 GA 38, 142.16 GA 24, 50.17 Jean Grondin, ‘Pourquoi Heidegger met-il en question l’ontologie du sujet afin de

lui substituer une ontologie du Dasein?’, in Patricio Brickle (ed.) La Filosofiacomo pasión. Homenaje a Jorge Eduardo Rivera Cruchega en su 75 cumpleaños(Madrid: Trotta, 2003), 194.

18 GA 24, 176.19 GA 28, 271.20 GA 28, 201(n).21 Driss Bellahcène, Michel Foucault, ou l’ouverture de l’histoire à la vérité (Paris:

L’Harmattan, 2008), 169.22 Descartes, Discours de la méthode, première partie, Œuvres de Descartes, vol. VI,

p. 7. (hereafter referred to as AT, followed by volume and page number).23 Descartes, Règle seconde, Alq. 1, 84 (AT X, 366).24 Méditation première, AT IX–1, 13–14.25 Méditation seconde, AT IX–1, 19.26 Discours de la méthode, AT VI, 33.27 Principes de la Philosophie, 1, 7, AT IX – 2, 27.28 Indeed it is in Die Grundfrage der Philosophie where Heidegger, explicates why

‘Descartes’ doubt is methodological in a completely different and deeper senseentirely’ than it is for those for whom it forms part of their ‘journey to certitude’,Heidegger states furthermore that with Descartes, ‘the essence of truth is


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determined by means of certitude’ – in GA 36/37, 40 and 45. We know thatPatočka also followed the seminar entitled Der Begriff der Wissenschaft, in whichthe idea must have also been presented by Heidegger. However, we cannot be sureas we do not have the text of this last seminar as of yet.

29 Jan Patočka, ‘Cartésianisme et phénomenologie’ [1976] in Le Monde naturel et lemouvement de l’existence humaine, trans. E. Adams (Dodrecht: Kluwer, 1988), 8.

30 GA 46, and in particular, 302, 303 and 299.31 ‘more truth and certitude’ – Méditation première, AT IX–1, 26 – ‘a true and certain

science’, ‘… things considered true and certain’, the truth and certitude of allsciences’ – Méditation cinquième, AT IX–1, 55–6.

32 Jean Beaufret, as quoted by Frédéric de Towarnicki, À la rencontre de Heidegger(Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 295, and ‘Sur la philosophie chrétienne’, in ÉtienneGilson et nous: la philosophie et son histoire (Paris: Vrin, 1980), 98.

33 Remember that ‘the unthought is the highest gift, which a way of thinking has togive’ therefore that it ‘is not any deficiency belonging to the thinking itself’, butthe treasure which it stores away, ‘the more originary the thinking, the greater isits un-thought’ (GA 8, 82).

34 Troisièmes Objections, AT IX–1, 133.35 Cicero, Academia Prioria, II, 27, 88.36 Plato, Theatetus 158 b.37 Descartes does not conceal the point: these ‘reasons for doubting … I made use of

them, but not in order to parade them as novelties’ (Troisièmes Réponses, ATIX–1, 133).

38 Secondes Réponses, AT IX–1, 103.39 It would need to be pointed out that texts of Sextus Empiricus had only become

available again – through Latin translation – in the mid sixteenth century and thatAugustine’s Contra Academicos was directed more at the Middle Academy than atthe Pyrrhonians. This is significant in the sense that the ideas of scepticism are notsimply ideas taken over from Antiquity, but ideas which were responding to a par-ticular crisis in early Modernity, to which Descartes gave one response and beforehim Montaigne gave another and, after Descartes, Pascal would give a furtherresponse, to name only three of the more prominent figures.

40 Troisièmes Réponses, AT IX–1, 133.41 Without doubt, Aristotle was awake to the issue – see Metaphysics, Γ, 6, 1011 a 6 –

the argument concerning dreams is not worth debating – see Topics, I, 11, 105 a 3.42 Troisièmes Réponses, AT IX–1, 133.43 Nietzsches metaphysische Grundtellung (Sein and Schein), in GA 87, 11.44 Ibid.45 Heidegger, Die Metaphysik als Geschichte des Seins in GA 6.2, 385.46 Jean Beaufret, as quoted by Frédéric de Towarnicki, À la rencontre de Heidegger,

292.47 Cf. Diogenes Laertes, Lives, Doctrines and Sayings of the Philosophers, VII, 7.48 Galileo Galliei, Dialogo sopra I due massimi sistemi del mondo, Ptolemaico e

Copernico (1630), in Le Opere di Galileo Gallilei (edition by Antonio Favro,Florence: Barbèra, vol. 7, 1890), 139.

49 Heidegger, Die Europäische Nihilismus in GA 6.2, 116/ GA 48, 163–4.50 Heidegger, Die Metaphysik als Geschichte des Seins, in GA 6, 2, 385.51 Heidegger, Skizzen zu Grundbegriffe des Denkens, in GA 87, 216.52 Ibid., 217.53 Jean Beaufret, Dialogue avec Heidegger – Approche de Heidegger (Paris: Minuit,

1974), 27.54 Jean Beaufret, Leçons de philosophie (Paris: Seuil, 1998), vol. 1, 154.


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55 GA 38, 145.56 Heidegger, ‘Die Zeit des Weltbildes’ in GA 5, 107.57 Heidegger, Der europäische Nihilismus, in GA 6.2, 117/GA 48, 165.58 Heidegger, Die metaphysischen Grundstellungen des abendländlischen Denkens

(Metaphysik), in GA 88, 13. Heidegger had already underlined, ten years earlier,the sense in which with Descartes there is a ‘unity of Certitude and Beings (ens)’(GA 28, 218–9).

59 Die metaphysischen Grundstellungen des abendländlischen Denkens (Metaphysik),in GA 88, 77.

60 Ibid., 86.61 Ibid., 11, 68, 69, 74–6, 83, 86, 88.62 Heidegger discusses the Commentum in IV libros Sententiarum magistri Petri

Lombardi rather than De Veritate as he did in 1923/1924.63 Heidegger, Die metaphysischen Grundstellungen des abendländlischen Denkens

(Metaphysik), in GA 88, 91. Heidegger already spoke of the ‘fateful flaw’ ofDescartes’ philosophy in 1928/1929 (GA 27, 118).

64 Cf. Der europäische Nihilismus, in GA 6.2, 117/GA 48, 165: ‘The question of phi-losophy can no longer be asked like this: what is the entity? In connection withthe liberation of Man from the binding force of revelation and Church doctrine,the question for first philosophy becomes: how does man arrive by himself and forhimself at a completely shatterproof truth, and what is that truth? Descartes wasthe first to pose this question in a clear and decisive manner.’

65 Heidegger, Die metaphysischen Grundstellungen des abendländlischen Denkens(Metaphysik), in GA 88, 91.

66 Ibid., 213. If Heidegger recalls in a brief formulation from June 1938, the‘Pre-established framework for the possibility of an epistemology or a Metaphysicsof knowledge’ – ‘Die Zeit des Weltbildes’, in GA 5, 99 – and seems thereby toelide the difference between the two, he confirms the distinction in the winter ofthat year, distinguishing between ‘knowledge- theory’ and ‘metaphysical-theory’(GA 46, 164). The word in question is highlighted by Heidegger himself.

67 Heidegger, Zu Ernst Jünger ‘Der Arbeiter’, GA 90, 61.68 Der Wille zur Macht als Erkenntnis, in GA 6.1, 445–6/GA 47, 32.69 Ibid.70 We must insist on the fact that Heidegger accepts that ‘up to Descartes and even

more with Descartes himself, subject is the general name for all entities as such,sub-jectum (hypo – keimenon), that which lies there already of itself and which atthe same time is the foundation of its permanent qualities and of its changeablestates’. But in explaining ‘the pre-eminence of an unprecedented sub-jectum’ bythe ‘necessity, for man, of a fundamentum absolutum inconcussum veritatis’ whichturns up in French philosophy due to the ‘liberation by which man liberates him-self from any normative obligation to the truth of Christian revelation and toChurch dogma’ (‘Die Zeit des Weltbildes’, in GA 5, 106–07) – his analysis leadshim to speak, in an abbreviated formula, of ‘subject in Descartes’ sense’ (GA 69,157; GA 89/ZS, 23).

71 GA 43, 97.72 GA 90, 182.73 Heidegger, Der europäische Nihilismus, in GA 6.2, 115.74 GA 65, 337.75 Ibid., 163. And Heidegger refers to the Regula III.76 GA 46, 364.77 Heidegger, Die Überwindung der Metaphysik, in GA 6.2, 115.78 Cf. Troisièmes Objections, AT IX–1, 138.


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79 Cf. Seminar in Le Thor 1969 in GA 15, 334: ‘In the idea, we are always temptedto hear idein, whilst what is first of all given before hand is the outlook which thething offers to us, rather than the image we have of the thing’.

80 GA 42, 158.81 Ibid.82 Heidegger, Die Überwindung der Metaphysik, in GA 67, 187.83 GA 45, 149.84 Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachlaß 1886–87, 5 [56], KSA 12, 206. Cf. Nachlaß 1885, 4

[15], KSA 11, 635: ‘To take the body as the point of departure and as a guide, thisis the essential. The body is a much richer phenomenon and which authorizesmuch clearer observations.’

85 GA 46, 25.86 Heidegger, ‘Die Zeit des Weltbildes’, in GA 5, 107.87 Heidegger, Der europäische Nihilismus in GA 6.2, 125–6/GA 48, 182.88 GA 90, 66. Cf. GA 46, 310: ‘The following important consequence plays itself

out: Man determines himself by himself, without taking into account the magiste-rium of the Church. The essence of man resides since Descartes in the capacity forself-determination.’

89 GA 90, 153. Heidegger cites Menschliches Allzumenschliches. Ein Buch für freieGeister, II, 230, KSA 2, 484. Cf. again GA 6.2, 30, 51, 52/GA 48, 9, 52, 53; GA87, 89; GA 90, 95.

90 GA 90, 155. Cf. GA 6.2, 126/GA 48, 182: ‘the essence of modernity’s beginning’is that ‘in very distinctive ways, liberty becomes essential.’

91 Méditation quatrième, AT IX–1, 43.92 Ibid.93 Ibid., AT IX–1, 46.94 Ibid., AT IX–1, 49.95 Baruch Spinoza, Ethica, III, praefatio, in 1923–6, Spinoza Opera, ed. Carl

Gebhardt, Heidelberg, Carl Winter, vol. 2, p. 137; Tractatus Politicus, II, 6, ibid.,vol. 3, p. 277.

96 Heidegger, Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, in GA 9, 186 and 187.97 GA 46, 164.98 That truth becomes certitude does not prevent ‘truth retaining its meaning as ade-

quatio, of rectitude. As such, it becomes important to find something on the basisof which to orientate and regulate oneself, something which is indubitable to allmen and all times. It is only such a truth known with certitude, capable of beingattested to at every moment, which is not properly truth, truth as certitude’ (GA46, 325).

99 Heidegger, Der Wille zur Macht als Kunst, in GA 6.1, 151/GA 43, 182.100 Heidegger, ‘Der Ursprung der Kunstwerk’, in GA 5, 38.101 Heidegger, GA 42, 52.102 And not the reverse: ‘it is not the subject-object relation which is first, forming the

framework in which the essence of truth alone became capable of determinationand foundation’ (GA 46, 164–5).

103 GA 65, 132.104 Heidegger, Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, in GA 9, 191.105 Ibid., 182, 186, 187, 191, 193.106 Ibid., 189 and 192.107 GA 46, 325.108 Before Aquinas, Hugh of Saint-Victor, defined faith as the ‘certitudo animi de

rebus absentibus’ ( De sacramentis christianae fidei, I, 10, 2 PL 176/330 C).109 GA 90, 65.


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110 GA 43, 97–8.111 ‘Die Zeit des Weltbildes’, in GA 5, 107.112 Cf. Cornelius Agrippa, De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum et atrium, atque

excellentia Verbi Dei declamatio. On this subject, see Richard H. Popkin, The His-tory of Scepticism. From Savonarola to Bayle (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2003).

113 Michel de Montaigne, Essais II, 12 (Paris: PUF, 1999), 592.114 Fransisco Sanches, Il n’est science de rien (Quod nihil scitur) [1581], French trans.

Andrée Comparot (Paris: Klincksieck, 1984), 59.115 Michel de Montaigne, Essais, II, 12, p. 601. Cf. Essais, I, 3, p. 17.116 Pierre Borel, Discours nouveau prouvant la pluralité des mondes, que les astres

sont des terres habitués, et la terre une étoile, qu’elle est hors du centre du mondedans le troisième ciel, et se tourne devant le soleil, qui est fixe, et autres chosestrès curieuses (Geneva, 1657), 3.

117 Michel de Montaigne, Essais II, 16, p. 623.118 GA 41, 106–10, 117, 119, 132, 170, 248.119 GA 46, 126. And also: ‘according to Descartes’ thesis, the ego is subject placed as

the foundation of all entities (in Greek to hypokeimenon)’ (310).120 Cf. GA 46, 369.121 Ibid.122 Ibid.123 GA 90, 65.124 Ibid.125 GA 28, 184 and 338.126 GA 43, 287; Nietzsches metaphysische Grudstellung (Sein und Schein), in GA 87,

177.127 Heidegger, Die metaphysischen Grundsellungen des abendlischen Denkens

(Metaphysik), in GA 88, 91.128 GA 42, 81.129 GA 65, 489.130 GA 42, 81.131 Méditation quatrième, AT IX–1, 42.132 ‘Die Zeit des Weltbildes’, in GA 5, 110.133 Überwindung der Metaphysik, in GA 7, 97.134 In the Beiträge, Heidegger clarifies the succession of events which leads to this:

the disappearance of truth as aletheia has as a consequence ‘the promotion of theessential dominance of beings’ which has, as a further consequence, the promotionof truth as certitude followed by ‘other consequences: mathematics and system,and from the latter, “technology”’ (GA 65, 132).

135 Heidegger, ‘Die Zeit des Weltbildes’, in GA 5, 110.136 GA 6.2, 170, 171, 177, 206, 211, 218, 343, 347, 350; GA 9, 318, 404; GA 42,

147; GA 48, 253, 259, 266, 269–71, 273, 307, 313, 320; GA 55, 158; GA 74, 22,26; GA 90, 28, 31, 304.

137 Heidegger, Gründsatze des Denkens, in GA 79, 102.

References

Beaufret, Jean. (1974) Dialogue avec Heidegger – Approche de Heidegger, Paris:Minuit.

———. (1998) Leçons de philosophie, Paris: Seuil.


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