Why, given the emphatic success of such brilliant phenomenological analyses as that of readiness to hand in undermining the understanding of Being as presence that has dominated Western philosophy since the Greeks, does Heidegger suddenly abandon phenomenology? The question perplexes. As we have seen, Heidegger leaves us oddly in the dark when it comes to the effective disappearance of any explicit appeal to phenomenology in his work from 1928 onward. Beyond the apparent announcement of the imminent self-overcoming of phenomenology that we have seen in the 1927 lecture course The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, plus a few, not entirely consistent statements scattered throughout his work from 1924 to 1930, we are left speculating (along the lines of the question of world discussed previously) as to why Heidegger appears to abandon the phenomenological method (at least in terms of any explicit claim to be doing phenomenology) after 1927, and as to whether a text such as the 1936 essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” is still providing a phenomenological or quasi-phenomenological account of the work of art, earth, and world. Is phenomenology left behind because it has succeeded in affording appropriate access to its object, the Being of beings, proceeding from the hermeneutic of Dasein, and has thereby necessarily overcome itself, made itself redundant as a method, so to speak? Is it abandoned because it fails to afford appropriate access to the temporally and historically configured Being of beings, the “phenomenon” of world, which turns out not to be a phenomenon at all, or at least to be inaccessible in its phenomenality to any phenomenological seeing? Is it merely relinquished as a title, perhaps on account of what Heidegger calls Husserl’s “temperamental” criticism, yet quietly retained, if not as a method, at least as a way of thinking? Is it merely the “scientific” aspiration and intent to do “research” that is abandoned, while
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