Ecstatic Self-Determination. A Reflection on the Possibility of an Ontological Correspondence between Heidegger’s Dasein and Plotinus’ Nous

With reference to previous research on the relation between Heidegger’s thought and Neoplatonism, this investigation seeks to show concisely how—despite the profound distance between the finitude of Dasein and Plotinus’ doctrine of the divine Nous—there exists a fundamental correspondence regarding their ontological structure. This correspondence may be described as a phenomenological principle of the necessary precedence of the pre- determinate and pre-present horizon over the ecstatic openness. That is to say, there must already be a primordial horizon through which openness to beings as presence becomes possible at all. By examining this structure in both the early and later Heidegger, and through a phenomenological approach to Plotinus’s doctrine of the Nous’ self- determination in its turning toward the One, the paper argues that a common fundamental paradigm of rationality can be discerned, i.e. a mode of thinking that is no longer metaphysical in the onto-theological sense, yet capable of unifying within itself the two essential moments of ecstatic openness and self-determination.