Meinong and the horizon of the question of being

The task of this article is rather simple: to consider the ontological contours of the Austrian philosopher A. Meinong’s theory of objects, which will allow us to see the horizon of the question of Being in M. Heidegger, or how the latter comes to the theme of Being as openness, through which he treats God (and theology) as a certain object that fits into the framework of ontotheology. This article therefore by no means pretends to expose the philosophy of Meinong or Heidegger in detail; the author is only interested in the breadth of the questioning of Being. Specifically, the author delves into the theory of objects within the framework of Brentano and Heidegger’s ontological projects, thereby discussing Meinong’s fundamental ontological vocabulary. Indeed, if essence/substance represents the basic meaning of Being, as Brentano, following Aristotle, believed, then ontology should be limited to the totality of essences, or the multitude of things. However, this approach did not suit Meinong at all, who builds his theory of objects on essentially different grounds. In particular, whereas Brentano opposed the real (Realen) to the existent (Existierenden), because the real was connected with the world of things, and the existent encompassed everything conceivable, or imaginable, for Meinong these concepts act as synonyms, since the real is the existent, whereas the realm of what goes beyond the real (Wirklichen) is fixed by the concept of presence (Bestand) or possibility (Möglichkeit), i.e. it is not the real and the existent that are opposed, but the real and the possible. The author believes that the clarification of these positions helps not only to clarify the ontological foundations of Meinong’s theory of objects, but also to better understand the horizon of Heidegger’s questioning of Being.