Abstract

This article analyzes Heidegger’s approaches to the problem of identity from the early university lecturers of the Twenties until Identity and difference, 1957. First of all, he was faced with the crisis of identity of Western thought arising from historicism and relativism: his solution was the rejection of timeless universality in favour of life and its categories. Gradually, this evolved in a reflection on the identity of the human existence in its difference from every fixed essence. In a third form, taking place after Being and Time, identity, now seen as absolute, becomes the main character of metaphysics, originated from an anthropological drift of the thought. In Identity and difference H. distinguishes between a metaphysical and an initial meaning of identity: nevertheless he ascribes to the initial identity the same characters previously attributed to the existence: is that still anthropology, and still metaphysics?