Project of fundamental ontology: transformation or overcoming phenomenology?

Abstract

In his paper the author considers the issue of phenomenological destruction in the works by M. Heidegger, which was finalized in Heidegger’s fundamental book «Being and Time».

The dynamics of Heidegger’s methodological search is presented, beginning from his lecture courses in the 1920s. It is shown that practical (primary) experience is gained owing to description of experience of Christian life in the Letters of Paul the Apostle. Heidegger modifies his own methodology then in the Phenomenological interpretations of Aristotle. The main phenomenon in the above work changes its nature: it exists in the concealed way rather than is directly given and phenomenological destruction is therefore modified to some extent. In The Hermeneutics of Facticity Heidegger’s methodological position is further developed. For now facticity means the existential nature of “our own existence here”, whereas the term Dasein itself completely replaces a rather unclear concept of life.

In «Being and Time» Heidegger eventually re-interprets all the main concepts: phenomenology, ontology and hermeneutics to the extent that at different stages of his work he totally discards them. And a subsequent explication of the concept of phenomenon radically transforms the project of phenomenological research itself: the first phenomenon mainly conceals itself rather than reveals. According to the author of the paper, such research method can be named in different ways (destruction, hermeneutics etc.), but naming it a phenomenological method means assigning to the terms of phenomenology and phenomenological the meanings alien to them.