Dasein - Monoskop

HEIDEGGER'S ONTOLOGY AND LANGUAGE AS THE UNIVERSAL MEDIUM 167
3.3. From Phenomenology as an Absolute Science
to Phenomenological Ontology as Hermeneutics
In the preceding section, I focussed on Heidegger's notion of Beingin-the-world
as Being-in-a-universal-medium-of-meaning. Little has
been said as yet, however, of why Heidegger takes his own project to
be an ontological one. In this section I turn to this question. I shall
try to show how Heidegger's critique of the transcendental reduction
is rooted in his ontological concerns and how his rejection of the
reduction leads him to a conception of phenomenology as hermeneutics.
As we shall see, this move from transcendental phenomenology
to hermeneutics is crucially motivated by the idea that the meaning
of Being can only be clarified in a circular fashion. Being is the most
fundamental category; Being is the meaning that is involved in alt of
Dasein's relating to itself, to others, and to the world. Thus Being
cannot be investigated without making use of an antecedent understanding
of Being. Therefore, the idea of absolute science cannot
be maintained, and philosophy has to manage without any absolute
truths.
It is not difficult to explain how Heidegger's criticism of Husserl's
use of the 'subject vs. object' distinction is connected to the question
concerning the meaning of Being. It suffices to recall the basic
principle of phenomenology according to which
(t) to be is to be for a consciousness
or, more precisely,
(tt) to be is to be an object for a (constituting) subject.
In the preceding section, we have seen that according to Heidegger
Husserl takes being-an-object as being present-at-hand, i.e., as being
explicitly identified or identifiable. Thus instead of (ii) we must
write:
(iit) To be is to be present-at-hand.
In questioning the subject-object distinction, Heidegger is thus naturally
led to ask whether Being has been adequately understood,
whether the meaning of Being is indeed exhausted by Being-presentat-hand.