Before that meeting in Paris, Beaufret told Kearney and me that Heidegger did not like people to take his thought as a pretext for kicking metaphysics down the stairs, because, “after all, metaphysics is true.” Overcoming metaphysics would then mean a step back to the forgotten soil in which the tree of metaphysics grows, namely, to a thinking of Being as event and phenomenon. This would not diminish the great edifice of onto-theo-logy — that is, the effort to analyze the beings of beings rationally, and to ground their being in a supreme being, sometimes called God — so well built up over the centuries from Aristotle to Hegel. But it would contest the sole authority of metaphysical reason in approaching being. That is how Kearney’s mentor, the late William J. Richardson, S. J., read Heidegger, in the only book to which Heidegger himself wrote a substantial preface.

¶ 6:27 AM