Summary: Being and Time (page 5)

But what is the point of asking such a question—the question of being? What could we possibly gain from resolving it? It is perfectly legitimate to ask what this question is meant to be for. ¹

The various existing sciences—mathematics, biology, history, and so on—do not concern themselves with being, but with beings.

Here we encounter a new term: 'ontic', which means 'concerning beings'. Just as 'ontological' means 'concerning being', 'ontic' designates what has to do with beings.

Mathematics, physics, anthropology, and so on are therefore 'ontic' sciences.

Now, if we look at the totality of what is—the whole of beings—we can distinguish within it different 'regions': for example, history, nature, space, life, Dasein, language, and so forth.

These different domains of things—or real domains (from the Latin res, 'thing')—are each the object of a particular ontic science: biology investigates living beings, physics the laws of motion, theology God, and so on.

But for Heidegger, this partitioning of the whole of beings carried out by the sciences is naïve and crude.

Indeed, this division, on which the classification of the sciences rests, ought to be grounded in a prior investigation: an inquiry into the way in which these different beings stand in relation to being—that is, into their mode of being. Only by grasping that certain kinds of being have a certain relation to being could we then identify them as belonging to a given science, grouping them together as the object of a single discipline.

This ontological inquiry—which concerns being—is therefore prior to the ontic examination—which concerns beings—carried out by each science: Such an investigation must necessarily precede the positive sciences, and it can do so. It provides each science with its foundation, in the sense that it delimits its object. This delimitation—this division—is then no longer done at random, no longer rests on empirical groping or on some arbitrary metaphysical picture, but is grounded in being itself.

So long as the question of being remains unresolved, so long as ontological research has not reached its goal, the different sciences cannot but be in crisis—for they lack the foundation that would secure the consistency and legitimacy of their object: perhaps the division of beings has not been properly carried out, and in that case it is their own legitimacy—and even their identity—that wavers.

And indeed, several sciences at the beginning of the twentieth century were undergoing significant crises. Heidegger gives a number of examples:
- in mathematics, the crisis of the foundations, opposing—over the primary mode of access to what is to be the object of this science—formalism and intuitionism;
- in physics, the collapse of old paradigms in the wake of the success of the theory of relativity;
- in biology, the rejection of the traditional opposition between vitalism and mechanism;
- in theology, the influence of Lutheran criticism, which reproached dogmatic systematics for resting on a foundation that does not spring from a primarily believing form of questioning; and so on.

For Heidegger, these various crises are the sign—the proof—of the ontological primacy of the question of being: as long as this question remains unresolved, the different disciplines will lack a secure foundation, because the division of beings underpinning their choice of object remains arbitrary, and they will thus remain in crisis.

Hence this question is not just idle speculation about the most general of generalities; it is probably the most fundamental and the most concrete question of all: what is at stake is nothing less than an a priori condition of possibility for those sciences that investigate beings of this or that kind—and indeed the very legitimacy of the way in which the field of knowledge is laid out.

How can we illustrate, in concrete terms, this primacy of ontology over the ontic sciences?

Heidegger takes the example of history. What comes first is not a theory of how historical concepts are formed, nor a theory of historical knowledge, nor even a theory of history as the object of historical science, but an interpretation of what is properly historical in its historicity. History can only find its object of study on the basis of a properly conducted ontological reflection on the relation to being of what is properly historical—the human being (or better: Dasein, since this term itself points to ontology, to the human being apprehended in its relation to being).

The particular ontologies on which each science rests themselves depend on this fundamental, most originary ontological inquiry—the one that asks about the meaning of being, and to which Heidegger devotes himself in Being and Time.

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