Currently, I have been developing a proposal for a new understanding of metaphysics under the title What is Metaphysics?: Reconstructing Metaphysics through an Integrated Phenomenology of the Will. This work aims to shed new light on the nature and structure of metaphysics, working primarily from the horizons of Heidegger and Yogācāra Buddhism. It brings out a possibility for answering the question concerning metaphysics and its overcoming as the way out of the forgetfulness of Being in the history of Western philosophy. This is the driving force, the backbone, and also the question left open in Heidegger's entire corpus.
This work starts with the critiques of Kant's transcendental shift in thinking metaphysics, followed by a critical presentation of Heidegger's diagnosis of the expansion of the Will, understood as the accumulation of metaphysics in modern times, while also reconstructing the entire problem through an integration with Yogācāra Buddhism's phenomenology of consciousness. The origin and mechanism of metaphysics, as well as the possibility of a non-metaphysical relation to Being, can be described in detail by a fusion of phenomenological analysis of eight-layered consciousness in Yogācāra Buddhism. This is the continuation of the path that is realized by Heidegger in the notion of Gelassenheit (Releasement/ Non-willing), but not fully carried out in his works.
On this basis, it proposes that metaphysics is primarily not a set of theories or knowledge about the principles of reality as it has been understood since the beginning of Western philosophy, but an existential mode of being -in- the- world. Metaphysics as theory is thus a secondary articulation of a more fundamental existential mode, known as the metaphysical mode of being-in-the-world. Metaphysics, by its nature, operates through representation (Vorstellung), which can be phenomenologically understood as both the result of and the activity within the structure of the human will. Therefore, the overcoming of metaphysics cannot be carried out by building another metaphysical theory or inventing a new language, as Derrida most prominently proposes. This overcoming, instead, involves a transformation of the will and the new relation to language itself.
This project goes beyond merely addressing the question that so far has not been fully examined in Heidegger scholarship. Rather, it develops a new philosophical framework for understanding the nature of metaphysics and why metaphysical thinking repeatedly reemerges in the history of Western philosophy. It intensifies a shift in thinking about metaphysics, from the theoretical approach to the existential approach. The integration with Buddhism and the transformation within the existential structure of the non-willing Dasein will inevitably result in the creation of the new lexicons deviating from Heidegger's original terms.
