ontologies—they form the disciplines in which the content of the objects in these regions is drawn out as subject matter and displayed in its categorial character. What is thus made available then serves as a guide for problems of constitution, the structural and genetic contexts of consciousness of objects of this or that kind.
Conversely, it is only through phenomenology that the ontology corresponding to it is established on a secure basis and held on an orderly course in its treatment of problems. When we look at consciousness of ..., the of-which, i.e., the character of a being as such insofar as it is an object, also becomes visible, and it is only in this manner that it becomes visible. The characteristics of objects in the respective regions of being are what is at issue in the ontologies. This is what they come to. Precisely not being as such, i.e., be-ing which is free of objects.[5] Phenomenology in the narrow sense as a phenomenology of constitution. Phenomenology in the wide sense as something which includes ontology.
In such ontology the question—from which field of being should the decisive meaning of being which is to guide the treatment of all problems in ontology be drawn?—is not at all posed. This question is unknown to it, and because of that its own provenance, the genesis of its meaning, remains closed off to it.
The fundamental inadequacy of ontology in the tradition and today is twofold:
1. From the very start, its theme is being-an-object, i.e., the objectivity of definite objects, and the object as it is given for an indifferent theoretical mean-ing,[6] or a material being-an-object for the particular sciences of nature and culture concerned with it, and by means of the regions of objects—should the need arise—the world, but not as it is from out of its being-there for Dasein[7] and the possibilities of this being-there, or also affixing other nontheoretical characteristics to it. (Note: double sense of "nature" as world and as region of objects—"nature" as world can be formalized only from out of Dasein, historicity, thus not the "basis" of its temporality—same goes for "body.")
2. What results from this: it blocks access to that being [Seienden] which is decisive within philosophical problems: namely, Dasein, from out of which and for the sake of which, philosophy "is."
Insofar as the title "Ontology" is taken in an empty nonbinding sense, so that it means any questioning and investigating which is directed to being as such, it will indeed come into use in the following. Thus the term "ontological" refers to the posing of questions, explications, concepts, and categories which have arisen from looking at beings as be-ing [Seiendes als Sein] or, alternately, have failed to do this.
(Ancient metaphysics is taken up again as "ontology"—superstition