In his early attempts to lay a new foundation for Metaphysics, Martin
HEIDEGGER, the German philosopher, announced that Plato with his emphasis on
beingness of entities had distorted the Western Philosophy of Being. This
distortion had made later philosophers pay attention not to the Being itself but
to the entities seen in the natural world, and take Being as the sum of all entities
regardless of their different forms, as something created by God or nature.
Thus, they talked about things as present-at-hand objects of study, and man
became the Priviledged Creature, the Subject, the Mind, or the Will studying the
natural world of entities. Thus the Metaphysics of Presence was born.
HEIDEGGER, however, tried to break the binary opposition between the Mind and
the Matter by studying man as not something standing out of nature but as
something born in, nourished by, and taught by the natural world. He studied
man as Dasein or Being-in-the-world. The result was his complex philosophy
of interpretation which rejected the possibility of understanding Being in its
eternal form on the basis that Dasein himself is temporal and that all his
understandings are based on interpretations themselves built on previous
interpretations about Being.