Abstract

This work, The Rational-Architectonic of Modernity, understands itself to be part of a whole, which was begun with the same author’s Topologie der Metaphysik. The Topologie presented the history of metaphysics as a whole in the sense of something completed, which was taken there in the full significance of that which consists not only of beginning, middle, and end—contrary to the usual talk of the end of metaphysics as a failed undertaking—but also which had a concretely determined task to fulfill and did so—contrary to the notion of that history as a continuum of philosophically relevant questions, which may be arbitrarily taken up and furthered. This task was shown in the Topologie to be a threefold one, in each instance prescribed by a different configuration of an originary knowledge of the determination of man. Each configurations of wisdom, having already come into the world, called forth a reason that, loving this wisdom itself, was thus philosophic in the strict sense—a reason which corresponded to this wisdom and conceived it in a logic appropriate to it alone. This reason called forth by these configurations of wisdom formed a series of rationes, which in each instance constituted a figure, an entire epoch of metaphysics. Taken abstractly, the terms out of which the rationes were made up were ‘the determination of the topic’, ‘the topic of thinking’, and ‘thinking itself’—it is no accident that these terms stem from the province of the Heideggerian sense-explication.