Toward a Metaphysical Freedom: Heidegger's Project of a Metaphysics of Dasein

The 'Metaphysics of Dasein' is the name which Heidegger gave to a new philosophical project developed immediately after the partial publication of his masterwork Being and Time (1927). As Heidegger was later to recall, an 'overturning' took place at that moment, more precisely right in the middle of the 1929 treatise On the Essence of Ground. Between the fundamental-ontological formulation of the question of being and its metaphysical rephrasing, Heidegger discovered that a 'metaphysical freedom' stood at the root of Dasein's relation to his world and, thus, at the basis of his whole ontological questioning. This article will show how the very structure of the 1929 essay clearly illustrates the path Heidegger followed between Being and Time and the new philosophical beginning of the mid 1930s. It will conclude with a few critical remarks concerning Heidegger's attempt to free his thinking from traditional philosophy and to overcome metaphysics.