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, which is later intensified by Heidegger's diagnosis of the expansion of the Will 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 phenomenologically described in detail by a phenomenology of consciousness in 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 claims 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, 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, metaphysics cannot be overcome by building another metaphysical theory or inventing a new language. The overcoming of metaphysics, rather, 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.
