Introduction: Ontology and Ecology

Summary

I remember one morning in 1979, in Milan, at the office of the journal Alfabeta. Gianni Sassi – not a voracious philosophical reader but a very intelligent man, who unfortunately left us too soon – was reprimanding an editor for cheekily inserting a review of his own book in the journal's next issue: ‘You cannot do that!’ shouted Sassi, ‘It's a question of ontology!’ – of course, he meant deontology. Those were the years when people started saying ‘epochal’ instead of ‘important’, and ‘ontology’ – a philosophical specialisation – was becoming an everyday term, in the wake of Heidegger's popularity.

Heidegger's idea was that the beings we encounter in the world hide a more fundamental Being that makes them possible, determining them through conceptual schemes (that is, concretely speaking, through the books we have read and the language we speak). He also thought that this encounter with Being – stratified in tales, traditions and libraries – constitutes a sort of duty, replacing those of religion and morality. In this sense, Sassi wasn't wrong, after all, in mistaking ontology for deontology. This duty, for Heidegger, concerns not only people, but also beings: if they really want to be what they are, they have to be confronted with the more fundamental Being.

This idea doesn't seem too far-fetched, either. The Aristotelian notion that experience comes before science, Leibniz's reference to the principle of a sufficient reason for everything, and – finally and mostly – Kant's transcendental argument that everything that can become science has to become science (just like every person must become moral), all point in the same direction. The fact that Being and Time was a piece of transcendental philosophy was fairly obvious to Löwith when he proofread the text for his professor.

For a long time I agreed with all of these views; then I developed some perplexities about them. On 28 September 1999 I was in Mexico City and had just begun work on this part of the book, which is a criticism of the abuse of conceptual schemes and transcendental arguments in ontology. Suddenly, the external world hit me: the room started shaking. At first I thought I was hallucinating – I had never experienced an earthquake before.