Art, Truth and Freedom: Contemplating Heidegger's Categorial Vision

Categorial vision may seem a strange, if not erroneous way of naming the manner in which Heidegger discloses the ontological essence of art, truth and freedom. For with Heidegger, the term "categorial" pertains solely to the ontological characteristics of things present-at-hand (Heidegger, 1962a: 79); that is, things which remain categorially distinct from the temporal structures or "existentialia" of 'Dasein'. Furthermore, categorial vision is usually associated with Husserl's scientifically nuanced phenomenology concerning the intuited revelation of objective essences beyond the psychological relativism of subjectively constituted facts. Yet Heidegger's ontology of Being, despite its more poetic, hermeneutic mode of thinking, is nonetheless closely modeled on Husserl's anti-idealist attempt to overcome the intractable dualism of subject/object relations through the categorial vision of pre-reflective essences. Both are concerned with dismantling the transcendental conditions of categorical or conceptual identity. what Heidegger refers to as the metaphysics of presence dominant since Plato.