Martin Heidegger›Introduction to Metaphysics›The Forgetting of Being

The Forgetting of Being

Introduction to Metaphysics · Martin Heidegger

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The history of Western metaphysics is, for Heidegger, a history of forgetting: the original Greek experience of being as emergence, presence, and unconcealment was progressively covered over by a tradition that took being for granted as the most obvious concept, transforming it into a property, a substance, or an idea. This forgetting is not a failure of individual thinkers but the destiny of Western thought — and its culmination is the age of technology.

Being Becomes a Concept

For Plato, the being of things — what makes a horse truly a horse — is the Idea, the eternal, non-sensory form grasped by the intellect. For Aristotle, being is substance: the underlying subject that persists through change. For Descartes, the primary being is the thinking subject; for Kant, being is what the categories of the understanding impose on experience; for Nietzsche, being is will to power. Each step is a further forgetting of the question: what is being itself, prior to any determination by a particular metaphysical framework? The question has been replaced by a succession of answers that do not acknowledge themselves as answers.

Nihilism as Destination

The forgetting of being does not leave being-thinking behind; it transforms it into something else. The Nietzschean proclamation that God is dead — that the highest values have devalued themselves — is not the end of metaphysics but its completion: the moment when the metaphysical tradition recognises that it has no ground to stand on. The will to power that Nietzsche proposed as the new ground is itself the ultimate expression of Western metaphysics in its epoch of subjectivity. Heidegger sees in Nietzsche not the overcoming of nihilism but its most honest statement.

Technology as Metaphysical Destiny

The culmination of the forgetting of being is not a philosophical doctrine but a practical reality: the modern technological world-order. When being is understood as presence-at-hand, as standing-reserve available for human ordering and exploitation, the original experience of physis as self-arising emergence has been completely replaced by the will to master. Technology is not the application of a scientific worldview; the scientific worldview is itself an expression of the metaphysical tradition that culminates in technology. The danger is not nuclear weapons or environmental catastrophe but the concealment of every other way of encountering beings.

The concept of the history of being (Seinsgeschichte) and the forgetting of being runs through all of Heidegger's later work. Its most concentrated statement in Introduction to Metaphysics is the analysis of the Greek beginning and its aftermath. The four-volume Nietzsche (1936–1946) develops the thesis that Nietzsche is the last metaphysician rather than the first post-metaphysical thinker.

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