I

One of the Heidegger’s unfinished projects is potentially the most useful in the phronetic application of his hermeneutic ontology in an existential region of being such as nursing: metontology.

While abandoned as a distinct project in the late 1920s because of its concern with the ontic instead of the ontological, Heidegger ventured into the field of metontology late in his career, namely in the application of his phenomenological insights into questions of medicine in his dialogues with medical practitioners between 1959 and 1969 at the home of the Swiss psychiatrist Medard Boss, the transcripts of which were published as Zollikoner Seminare in 1978. Although steering close to the fundamental theme of ontological difference developed in Being and Time, Heidegger nevertheless felt challenged by the manifold instances of being (Sein) as beings (Seiende) that his audience of doctors and psychiatrists faced daily in their work. The unresolved methodological tension sometimes forced Heidegger to fall silent. For our purposes, it is precisely in this lack of resolution or disclosedness that a new pathway in phenomenological methodology may be found.

Where Heidegger encountered the boundary of language in ontology is where metontology begins and a genuine phenomenology of the ontic, which we experience through our senses, can be formulated. Respecting the richness of physis in the ontic, this is a project projecting itself in the futurity of time which is full of philosophical promise.

II

Phenomenologically speaking, meontology is an extension of the ontological while it deals exclusively with the ontic. The overall hermeneutic schemata of ontological difference is thus retained. This observation is based on Heidegger’s emphasis in Zollikon Seminars (Heidegger, 2001, 80-81): Dasein is embodied because it is spatial in its being in the first place. The body does not come before space. Space is the precondition of bodily being.

Thinking beyond Heidegger, the ontological priority of space over the ontic phenomenon of the body raises another question: ultimately, there may be little or no ontological difference between body and machine (such as cyborg) as far as being-embodied-in-space is concerned. This makes room for a phenomenological enquiry into artificial intelligence, or the simulation of the human mind or existential projection per se, if not even thrownness (Geworfenheit) into the world.

Reflecting further on the meaning of Dasein in this futuristic scenario, does not the traditional question of Geist – spirit or ghost – resurface as we seek to redefine the meaning of being human in Dasein?