Kant understood his Critical, or transcendental, philosophy to be a “prolegomenon” to any future metaphysics, not itself an instance of metaphysics. Likewise, Husserl introduced transcendental phenomenology as a metaphysically neutral inquiry into the intentional constitution of meaning. Finally, in Being and Time (1927) Heidegger described “fundamental ontology” as metaphysically neutral, an inquiry into the conditions that make an understanding of being possible. However, each of these thinkers also sought to go beyond metaphysical neutrality toward metaphysics proper, and both Husserl and Heidegger did so by appeal to Leibniz’s concept of the monad. In this talk I will focus on Heidegger’s “metaphysical decade” (roughly, from 1927-1935), in which he tries to develop the metaphysical implications of fundamental ontology by drawing on a “monadological” interpretation of Dasein’s transcendental structures: thrownness, projection, and being-with. Like Heidegger himself (who abandoned the project and called for “overcoming” metaphysics instead), I judge this attempt a failure. But it is an illuminating failure, because the Leibnizian tropes Heidegger developed into his “metaphysics of Dasein” clearly reveal the political and ontological problems that can appear when one fails to respect the limits of phenomenology as a critique of meaning and employs it in the service of an inquiry into beings “as such and as a whole.”