Martina Roesner: Ursprung – Hervorgang – Innestehen. Trinitarische Grundstrukturen eines nachmetaphysischen Selbstseins im Ausgang von Meister Eckhart, Hegel und Heidegger

Heidegger’s philosophical approach to human selfness is commonly regarded as a downright rejection of virtually all traditional metaphysical concepts of humanity. Not only does Heidegger criticize the classical Aristotelian definition of man as animal rationale but he also attacks the Biblical notion of man as “created in the image and likeness of God” as well as its philosophical offspring, i.e. the Hegelian conception of human subjectivity as breakthrough point of absolute, divine self-consciousness. The way Heidegger conceives of “non-metaphysical” selfness in his Beiträge zur Philosophie can be read, however, as an implicit avowal of commitment to a certain form of speculative thought he had already claimed for in the final chapter of his Habilitationsschrift but apparently never developed afterwards. This paper aims at expounding how much the non-substantial, dynamic relationship between “origin” (Ursprung) and “being-one’s-self” (Selbstsein) in the Beiträge owes to Hegel’s and Meister Eckhart’s philosophical interpretation of the Trinity as archetype of “groundless”, non-ontical, purely relational selfness mediated by the logos. Thus, Heidegger’s non-Cartesian concept of the self proves not so much a post-metaphysical notion as the fruitful continuation of a certain model of selfness developed within the history of metaphysics itself.