The Collapse of Deconstruction and the Return of Substance: Metaphysical Jurisprudence and the Recovery of Ontological Personhood

 

The Collapse of Deconstruction and the Return of Substance: Metaphysical Jurisprudence and the Recovery of Ontological Personhood

In the philosophical trajectory of the twentieth century, few thinkers have had as significant an impact on metaphysics as Martin Heidegger. His project, set forth in Being and Time and later in The Letter on Humanism, undertook what he called a “destruction” of the Western metaphysical tradition, and in particular of Aristotelian substance ontology. He declared that metaphysics, having reduced Being to the level of beings, failed to pose the question of what it means to be. As part of this critique, Heidegger dismissed substance, essence, and teleology as conceptual relics of a tradition consumed with logic and representation. Under his influence many abandoned the idea that metaphysics could meaningfully support universal concepts like the person, nature, or law.

Yet, Heidegger’s analysis is quite weak and limited.  I am developing a new philosophical synthesis, what I term Metaphysical Jurisprudence (MJ), that shows that Aristotelian substance metaphysics in conjunction with insights from evolutionary biology, ethology, and conceptual neuroscience provide a common front of classical ontology and empirical realism that together affirm personhood, normativity, and juridical structure, all categories that Heidegger’s framework marginalizes or erases. The resulting synthesis offers a decisive rebuttal to Heidegger’s et. al.  purported metaphysical “deconstruction” and establishes the proper framework for understanding law, justice, and the rational creature who bears them consistent with what really exists. 

Heidegger’s Deconstruction of Substance and Norm

Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics is radical. For Heidegger, the Western tradition, from Plato to Nietzsche, mistakenly treats Being as a kind of highest being, thus obscuring the difference between Being and beings. Aristotle, is accused of forgetfulness when he identifies being with substance, form, and actuality. In rejecting substance metaphysics, Heidegger rejects also the essentialist concept of human nature, the rational animal, and replaces it with Dasein, a being whose essence lies only in its existence, its openness to Being, and its “thrown” or historical condition.

From this perspective, the traditional idea of the person as a stable bearer of reason, moral agency, and legal responsibility is dissolved. Law, under this view, is not grounded in any natural or metaphysical structure of personhood but is a contingent, historical formation, one expression among many of Being’s “unfolding” in time. The juridical form becomes ontologically suspect, a mere artifact of a forgetful metaphysics.

What results is a system that is structurally incapable of supporting normativity. If personhood is not a real kind, but a linguistic convention or site of historical openness, there can be no metaphysical grounding for obligation, justice, or responsibility. These lose their universality and collapse into local manifestations of epochal Being.

 

The Common Front: Classical Form and Scientific Realism

By contrast, against this “unfolding” metaphysic of being, stands the powerful convergence between Aristotelian substance metaphysics and modern scientific disciplines that investigate the human organism in its full embodied and purposive form. These sciences, far from undermining the classical view, confirm and reinforce its essential claims.  This of course is not a new observation. 

Take, for example, the work of Peter Hacker and Maxwell Bennett. In their critique of contemporary neuroscience, they dismantle the reductionist idea that the mind is identical to the brain or that person-level capacities (like intention, belief, or reason) can be localized to neural correlates. Instead, they insist that such capacities are attributes of the whole human being, a rational organism embedded in a natural and social world. The metaphysical unit of analysis is not the brain, but the person, and this person is not a fiction, but a natural kind with discernible powers and capacities.

Likewise, the ethological tradition stemming from Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen reveals that animal behavior is not chaotic or accidental, but is structured by teleological patterns. Animals exhibit purpose-driven behaviors that arise from instinctual and adaptive functions. In humans, these behaviors are transfigured into rational aims, symbolic practices, and moral deliberation. Evolutionary psychology, when properly disciplined to avoid sociobiological determinism, adds further support: it shows that human beings have evolved specific faculties for cooperation, fairness, norm-enforcement, and abstract reasoning, faculties that make law and justice not only possible but natural.

Together, these disciplines affirm what Aristotle claimed more than two millennia ago: the human being is a rational, political animal, one whose nature disposes it toward logos, deliberation, and the ordering of life through shared norms. In short, the person is a substance, not in the sense of inert matter, but as a living form, a unity of body and soul, function and reason, nature and culture.

Why Heidegger’s Deconstruction Fails

In light of these converging insights, the limitations of Heidegger’s deconstruction become clear. First, his rejection of substance metaphysics rests on a false opposition between Being and intelligibility. By collapsing all metaphysical inquiry into the poetic disclosure of Being, Heidegger obscures the fact that Being reveals itself through form, that is, through the structure of actual entities. This is especially true in the case of the person, whose rational and moral capacities are not historically contingent but ontologically grounded. 

Second, Heidegger’s critique of teleology cannot withstand the weight of biological and behavioral science. The presence of natural ends, functions, and goal-directed capacities in organisms is not a metaphysical superstition but an observable fact. Purpose is not imposed by the observer but emerges from the structure of living systems. The law, when rightly understood, is the actualization of the rational creature’s natural orientation toward justice. 

Third, and most decisively, Heidegger offers no stable ground for normativity. His historicism erodes the universality of moral and legal obligations. But as the sciences of human nature show, and as substance metaphysics explains, normativity arises from the kind of being we are. We are not merely thrown into a world of possibilities; we are fitted for law, capable of reason, responsibility, and justice because of our nature.

The Juridical Form as Metaphysical Actualization

Metaphysical Jurisprudence thus affirms that legal personhood, obligation, and justice are not human constructions but metaphysical realities. They are rooted in the essential form of the human person as a rational substance, a being whose being/existence  includes the power to deliberate, to choose, to act, and to be held accountable. This juridical structure is not imposed from without; it is the realization of our natural potential.

The law, properly conceived, does not merely regulate behavior. It responds to the nature of the person. It gives form to the relationships, duties, and rights that arise from our condition as beings who are, by nature, capable of mutual recognition, responsibility, and common life. This is why MJ insists that jurisprudence must be metaphysical. To speak of justice, we must speak of the person. And to speak of the person, we must return to the metaphysics of form, substance, and teleology.

Conclusion: The Recovery of Metaphysics, the Grounding of Law

The alliance between Aristotelian metaphysics and empirical science dismantles the foundations of Heideggerian deconstruction. By simply reasserting the intelligibility of substance, the reality of teleology, and the truth of personhood, we are able to reestablish the metaphysical grounds for law and justice. Heidegger’s insights into technological bracketing and historical forgetfulness remain interesting, but his attempt to erase the metaphysical structure of Being must be decisively rejected.

The juridical form is not a historical accident or a poetic invention. It is the unfolding of what we are. In this sense, Being is juridical, because the rational substance that is the person is the locus of justice. Metaphysical Jurisprudence recovers this truth and builds upon it the architecture of a truly rational legal order.