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§22. Being and Beings [459-461]

basic act, is delivered up to uncertainty and stands continually in danger of being reversed, because this objectification of being must necessarily move in a projective direction that runs counter to everyday comportment toward beings. For this reason the projection of being itself necessarily becomes an ontical projection, or else it takes the direction toward thought, comprehension, soul, mind, spirit, subject, without understanding the necessity of an originally preparatory ontological disposition of precisely these areas, in other words, the necessity of being serious about its work. For it is said that subject and consciousness must not be reified, must not be treated as a purely extant thing; this has been heard for a long time at every philosophical street-corner; but now even this is no longer heard.

Our account of the ontological interpretation of the handy in its handiness showed that we project being upon praesens, hence upon Temporality. Because Temporal projection makes possible an objectification of being and assures conceptualizability, and thereby constitutes ontology in general as a science, we call this science in distinction from the positive sciences the Temporal science. All of its interpretations are developed by following the guidance of an adequately presented temporality in the sense of Temporality. All the propositions of ontology are Temporal propositions. Their truths unveil structures and possibilities of being in the light of Temporality. All ontological propositions have the character of Temporal truth, veritas temporalis.

By our analysis of being-in-the-world, we showed that transcendence belongs to the Dasein' s ontological constitution. The Dasein is itself the transcendent. It oversteps itself—it surpasses itself in transcendence. Transcendence first of all makes possible existence in the sense of comporting oneself to oneself as a being, to others as beings, and to beings in the sense of either the handy or the extant. Thus transcendence a􀁎 such, in the sense of our interpretation, is the first condition of possibility of the understanding of being, the first and nearest upon which an ontology has to project being. The objectification of being can first be accomplished in regard to transcendence. The science of being thus constituted we call the science that inquires and interprets in the light of transcendence properly understood: transcendental science. To be sure, this concept of transcendental science does not coincide directly with the Kantian; but we are certainly in a position to explicate by means of the more original concept of transcendence the Kantian idea of the transcendental and of philosophy as transcendental philosophy in their basic tendencies.

We showed, however, that transcendence, on its part, is rooted in temporality and thus in Temporality. Hence time is the primary horizon of transcendental science, of ontology, or, in short, it is the transcendental horizon. It is for this reason that the title of the first part of the investigation of Being


Basic Problems of Phenomenology (GA 24) by Martin Heidegger