The essence of ground

pp. 161-193

in: William Richardson, Heidegger, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1963

Abstract

The Essence of Ground (1929) is one of the hardest diamonds in all of Heidegger's ample treasury.¹ Appearing two years after SZ, it offers, together with WM, the first public explicitations of the major work. That Heidegger chose to publish a meditation on what constitutes the essence of ground should not surprise us. In KM, we saw how, faithful to the program of grounding metaphysics as delineated in SZ, the author analysed the transcendental imagination as the "ground upon which the inner possibility of… general metaphysics is instituted," simply because it is the center where transcendence comes-to-pass. It is certainly plausible, then, that he articulate further the relation between transcendence and ground in language and perspective more properly his own.