Modes-of-being and Heidegger’s Ontological Pluralism

Abstract

In this article, I offer an account of the concept mode-of-being that aims to define the central role that this notion plays in Heidegger’s ontology and clarify the underlying reasons of what I call the Heideggerian meta-philosophical thesis of ontological pluralism. To do so, I examine two contrasting interpretations of the notion of mode-of-being: the first one considers modes-of-being as categories of Dasein’s understanding-of-being that enable the interpretation of the ontic world of entities that is independent of the Dasein ways of understanding it. In this view a single entity can be discovered in more than one mode-of-being. By contrast, the second position considers modes-of-being as categories that metaphysically distinguish different kind of entities, so that a single entity cannot have more than one mode-of-being. Finally, I briefly sketch my proposal, which conceives modes-of-being in terms of the intrinsic ontological possibility of the entity, which manifests itself in Dasein’s understanding-of-being. I frame this discussion within the debate between a monistic ontological conception—which Heidegger criticizes and attributes to the tradition—and an ontological pluralism of modes-of-being, which I attribute to Heidegger.