Kleinere Schriften. Band 1

Our time stands at the gates of a new metaphysics - one very different from the old, a sober, unspeculative, and much more modest one, yet still a genuine metaphysics in terms of its problem content. This metaphysics also requires an ontology as its foundation. It cannot exist without a first philosophy. However, it must be a correspondingly new ontology. It will never be possible to design it as a whole 'from above' or to conceive it as a system. It must be approached 'from below,' derived from detailed research and the analysis of identifiable problem contents. The traditional ontology of the Middle Ages cannot be authoritative here. It consistently placed the real under the forms of essence and understood the latter in terms of substantial forms. This has proven to be questionable as a speculative assumption. The real is much more differentiated than the realm of essence; the individuality of the existent falls far outside the boundaries of essence and essential law, as does the being character of the real as well as the processuality and the always unified completeness of the being connections in every specific real.