Summary: Being and Time (page 11)

But what method are we to follow in order to think being? In which discipline should this reflection find its place? It is to this question that Heidegger devotes the final stage of the introduction.

First of all, we should note that this is an eminently philosophical task, since with the guiding question of the meaning of being, the investigation takes up the fundamental question of philosophy in general.

This is anything but obvious. In the Introduction to Phenomenological Research, Heidegger warned that one should not expect to find philosophy here. My conviction is that we have done with philosophy. We are confronted with wholly new tasks which have nothing to do with traditional philosophy. ¹

We see here a reversal in Heidegger's position on this point—a reconciliation with the very notion of philosophy.

But which particular domain of philosophy in general is concerned? Ontology—the discipline which has traditionally taken as its object the explanation of being itself. Heidegger, however, adds some important clarifications.

First, the point is not to take over some historically transmitted ontology—that of Plato or Hegel, for example—and insert his own work within that framework.

Heidegger does not even retain the formal idea of ontology once it has been stripped of any reference to this or that author: that traditional notion of a special philosophical discipline standing alongside other disciplines.

For this is an idea we find, once again, in the Introduction to Phenomenological Research: we must not first sketch out a discipline a priori and then go in search of something that might serve as its object. We must begin from the object under examination and, starting from it, work out the discipline that will enable us to clarify its meaning:

There is no question here of fulfilling the task of some pre-given discipline; quite the contrary, it is only from the inner demands of particular questions, and from the mode of treatment required by the things themselves, that a discipline can ever be worked out.

The question of being is of such a nature that it calls for a phenomenological treatment. The ontology Heidegger is calling for must therefore be resolutely phenomenological.

Once again, however, this is not phenomenology in the sense of a particular school of thought—one standpoint among others, which would relativise it. We are not embarking on a Husserlian research project. Heidegger does not use the term 'phenomenology' in the sense given to it by Husserl.

On this point, the break with his former master had already been in place for several years. As early as the Introduction to Phenomenological Research, Heidegger criticised the primacy of consciousness—of Cartesian inspiration—that we find in Husserl, and gave phenomenology a quite different orientation.

So what meaning does Heidegger give to the term 'phenomenology'?

He retains only a minimal sense of the word, using it as a methodological concept that might be summed up in the slogan: To the things themselves!

What does such a slogan designate? What programme does it point to?

To return to the things themselves is to flee airy constructions, illegitimate concepts, pseudo-questions of the sort that characterise so many philosophical systems. But if it meant no more than this, it would be a rather empty rallying cry—one that could apply equally well to any science.

Heidegger seeks to recover the originary Greek sense of the notion of phenomenology by going back to its etymology. What is the phainomenon (φαινόμενον)? And what is the logos (λόγος)?

This gives Heidegger an opportunity to recall the main lessons of the Introduction to Phenomenological Research, to which we refer you. Let us nonetheless summarise the key points:

- The Greek root of 'phenomenon' is φῶς, phôs, 'light'. Phainō: to bring to light, to make appear. The originary meaning of 'phenomenon' is therefore that-which-shows-itself-in-itself, the manifest.

- This has nothing to do with mere appearance, which designates, on the contrary, a situation in which a being shows itself as what it is not.

- Nor is it to be confused with 'appearance' in the Kantian sense of the word, which expresses the improper meaning Kant gives to 'phenomenon'.

- Logos means making manifest that which is at issue in discourse. Thus logos lets something be seen—or, conversely, it conceals it—and in this sense it can be true or false.

- But logos is not the primary locus of truth: truth is given in an originary way in the phenomenon, and logos merely transcribes it. Truth does not therefore belong properly to judgement, as the moderns think.

- We must therefore return to the Greek concept of truth, which expresses precisely this idea: truth lies in the pure and simple, sensible reception of something.

- From all this we can derive the originary Greek sense of the term 'phenomenology' that Heidegger wishes to retain: to let that which shows itself be seen from itself, just as it shows itself from itself—and this is what fully unfolds the content of the slogan To the things themselves!.

- In other words, the principal results of ontology, as Heidegger conceives it, must appear to us in just such a grasp of its objects that everything to be elucidated concerning them is necessarily dealt with in a direct bringing-into-the-light and direct legitimating.

The point, then, is not to restrict ourselves to the data of lived experience of pure consciousness, as in Husserl, but to welcome that which shows itself of itself in so far as it is there: the phenomenon, understood as this privileged mode in which a being is present.

From this perspective, being emerges as the privileged object of this discipline—this ontology placed under the sign of phenomenology. Why?

What must phenomenology make visible, if not that which, initially and for the most part, precisely does not show itself, that which is in withdrawal and yet at the same time essentially belongs, as that which gives it meaning and ground, to what does, initially and for the most part, show itself (namely, beings)?

But this is being. As we have already seen, it can be so thoroughly covered over as to be forgotten, to the point where the question that asks after it and its meaning falls silent.

We can then understand why ontology is possible only as phenomenology: The phenomenological concept of phenomenon designates, as that which shows itself, the being of beings.

Or again: considered in its content, phenomenology is the science of the being of beings – that is, ontology. Ultimately, these two titles characterise philosophy itself, both in respect of its object and its mode of procedure. Philosophy is a universal phenomenological ontology.

The introduction concludes with a tribute to Husserl, whose Logical Investigations first broke open the way for phenomenology.

We can now plunge into the first division of the first part of the work—the only one actually written, let us recall: the preliminary fundamental analysis of Dasein.

¹ Our translation. The references for the quotations are available in the book Heidegger: A Close Reading