World and earth in their strife will raise love and death into their utmost (liebe und Tod in ihr Hochstes heben) and bring them together into fidelity to the god (die Treue zum Gott). (CTP:VI.280/GA 65:399) Despite Heidegger's insistence that fundamental ontology founds nothing,1 it nonetheless provides a foundation for ontology in the form of a certain metaphysical subiectum or residue of Christian theology upon which the understanding of the meaning of is to be built. This foundation is the entity which questions, Dasein. More precisely it is its fmitude, defined by the way in which it stretches between birth and death. Death, which always implies a birth, is the source of the two defining characteristics of Dasein, its existential existence, and its in each case mine (Jemeinigkeit) (BT:68-69/SZ:42). This is to say that it is the uncertainty of death and the unchoosable nature of birth that define one's as an open whole, one which cannot be synoptically encompassed but which must be lived out, and it is this death that defines one's life as singular, as the only one which one has to lead and thus as inescapably mine. These two features together mean that this entity requires a unique method of access, since the external and disinterested observation of entities is appropriate only for those closed wholes which are able exhaustively to manifest their properties to such a viewpoint, which entities Heidegger names present-at-hand (vorhanden). Broadly speaking, for the metaphysical tradition it is this manner of which has remained the model for its understanding of being. Being is understood as presence in the sense of the whole of what is present insofar as it is present. It is assumed in other words to be something in the nature of a closed totality presided over by a god who would participate in the totality as an exemplary being. Being and Time in particular might be described as the attempt to understand on the basis not of an understanding that falls back on entitles within the world but of Dasein as that entity which is rather an open whole, an entity unsure of its foundation and limits and thus an entity which questions. In other words, Heidegger attempts to understand on the basis of a finite rather than an infinite one. In effect, has been understood on the basis of an infinitely being, disinterested in its creation and capable of encompassing the whole of creation in one glance. It is precisely intuition (Anschauen) that corresponds to as presence-at-hand. Indeed the latter may be so denominated precisely because an entity present-at-hand presents all of its properties to the general gaze of intuition. Heidegger's revolution is to understand on the basis of an entity which cannot be encompassed by such a divine gaze external to the individual and indeed external to itself, exempt the exigencies of perspective and its inherent finitude. For Heidegger one must understand Dasein the only perspective which we are in fact able to adopt, and that is our own, and it is on the basis of this perspective that we must understand being, that is, on the basis of an entity which is utterly finite and which as a result of this finitude is singular and uniquely mine and thus cannot fully be understood from the outside. It is this singularity which is crucial to an understanding of why Dasein must be our access to being, since Heidegger's attempt is to find a way of understanding that is neither general nor empty. What can be, even in early Heidegger, except the singularity of the being? It is only because Dasein is finite in the way of having an uncertain wholeness which cannot be delimited the outside (until my Dasein be dead in which case it will no longer be Dasein) that there is such a thing as being in Heidegger's sense. This is understood as temporality and it is this meaning of that has tacitly governed the tradition's understanding which involves the temporal determination presence. …