Ontology and History in Mircea Eliade and Martin Heidegger

Abstract

This paper aims to attempt a comparison between Mircea Eliade’s archaic ontology and Martin Heidegger’s ontology of Dasein. More specifically, the first part of the article structures a comparison between Eliade and Heidegger’s early reflection in terms of methodological similarities and differences. In the second part, after reconstructing the sense and meaning of archaic ontology as expressed in Eliade’s main works, a contrastive comparison is proposed on the function that the concept of ‘repetition’ assumes in the Romanian historian and in the German philosopher. The third part, in conclusion, having established the irreducibility of the two ontological proposals, recovers Eliade’s perspective in order to show the internal criticality of any philosophy that seeks to resolve human existence in historical and temporal immanence.