the concept of phenomenology. At first, phenomenology can be understood as an approach that opposes the dogmatic constructions of theories that are detached from the primordial meaning of phenomena. The very idea of phenomenology is that of a return to the “things themselves”—to the phenomena—via a dismantling of artificial conceptual constructs that obstruct the original givenness of phenomena. In section 7 of Sein und Zeit, Heidegger explains: “The term ‘phenomenology’ expresses a maxim which can be formulated as ‘To the things themselves!’ It is opposed to all free-floating constructions [freischwebenden Konstruktionen],” that is, to all “accidental findings,” to conceptions which only seem to have been demonstrated . . . [and] to those pseudo-questions [Scheinfragen] which parade themselves as ‘problems,’ often for generations at a time” (SZ, 27–28). The full concept of phenomenology implies a twofold movement: on the one hand, a distancing from derivative conceptual constructions, and on the other, a positive inquiry into the being of the phenomenon. To this twofold aspect, Heidegger will add a third in the 1927 lecture course The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, where he distinguishes three fundamental features of phenomenology: reduction, construction, and destruction (Destruktion). We will see how these three features, as Heidegger defines them, open the way for an understanding of phenomenology as a phenomenology of the event.
In that 1927 course, Heidegger begins by defining phenomenology as the very method of ontology, allowing him to grasp the phenomena (in contrast with Husserl), not in relation to a constituting consciousness, but to the event of being as such. Indeed, Heidegger stresses that phenomenology is concerned about the being of phenomena, their modes of givenness, their happening. Unlike his former mentor, Heidegger defines phenomenology in relation to ontology, as giving us access to the being of beings. The opposition that Husserl established between phenomenology and ontology, or rather the “bracketing” of ontological themes in the transcendental phenomenological reduction, is a foreclosure of ontology that can be said to be rooted in the determination of phenomenology as a transcendental idealism, that is, in the subjection of phenomenology to a traditional (Cartesian) idea of philosophy. For Heidegger, on the contrary, as he already stated in Being and Time, ontology and phenomenology are not two distinct disciplines, for indeed phenomenology is the “way of access to the theme of ontology” (SZ, 35). Heidegger is very clear on this point: “With regard to its subject-matter, phenomenology is the science of the Being of entities—ontology” (SZ, 37). In turn, and most importantly, ontology itself “is only possible as phenomenology” (SZ, 35, modified). In The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger defines phenomenology as an “a priori knowledge” of being.10 Phenomenology is that mode of knowledge that seeks to bring out the a priori structures of being and to that extent is distinct from all ontical sciences. If being appears as the a priori of beings, in the sense that it determines beings as beings, phenomenology “as a science of Being is fundamentally distinct in method from any other science” (GA 24, 28/20). These sciences are positive sciences, sciences of beings; phenomenology, for its part, is a “pure apprehension of Being” (GA 24, 28/19). It is an ontology.
Now, this ontological understanding of phenomenology will prove crucial for our thinking of the event, for the emphasis shifts from phenomena (things) to the being of these phenomena (their happening or eventfulness), from phenomena to phenomenality. As alluded to earlier, phenomenology consists in showing, not the appearance itself, but the event of its appearing. Jean-Luc Marion clarifies, “If in the realm of metaphysics it is a question of proving, in the phenomenological realm it is not a question of simply showing (since in this case apparition could still be the object of a gaze, therefore a mere appearance), but rather of letting apparition show itself in its appearance according to its appearing.”11 This is what Marion calls phenomenality or manifestation, which, I should note from the outset, is a self-manifestation, that is, not initiated by some agent or subject but happening from itself. “The privilege of appearing in its appearance is also named manifestation—manifestation of the thing starting from itself and as itself, privilege of rendering itself manifest, of making itself visible, of showing itself” (BG, 8). Phenomenology is turned toward the self-showing of the phenomenon as such, not to the appearance per se. It is turned toward the event of its manifestation. Nonetheless, this distinction between the ontical and the ontological cannot be taken as a simple separation, for as will be seen, ontical phenomena, and indeed things, manifest ontological potency. In turn, being cannot happen without beings, even though being is not a being. I shall return to this issue as it pertains to a thinking of the event.
Phenomenology is rigorously approached as ontology, that is, as Heidegger understands it, in its “possibility.” Indeed, for Heidegger, phenomenology is not exclusively connected to the phenomenological movement founded by Husserl. This is how he presents the issue in this passage from Being and Time, beginning with an ambiguous homage to Husserl that is immediately followed by a distancing with his former mentor: “The following investigation would not have been possible if the ground had not been prepared by Edmund Husserl, with whose Logische Untersuchungen phenomenology first emerged. Our comments on the preliminary conception of phenomenology have shown that what is essential in it does not lie in its actuality as a philosophical ‘movement.’ Higher than actuality stands possibility. We can understand phenomenology only by seizing upon it as a possibility” (SZ, 38). He would also insist years later, in the seminar on the lecture “Time and Being,” that phenomenology does not represent “a particular school of philosophy” but must be understood as “something which permeates [waltet] every philosophy.”12 In “My Way to Phenomenology” (1963), Heidegger reiterates the same point: “And today? The age of phenomenological philosophy seems to be over. It is already taken as something past which is only recorded historically along with other schools of philosophy. But in what is most its own phenomenology is not a school. It is the possibility of thinking, at times changing and only thus persisting, of corresponding to the claim of what is to be thought” (GA 14, 101/TB, 82). Last, in a 1969 supplement to that 1963 text, Heidegger referred to the aforementioned passage of Being and Time: “In the sense of the last sentence, on can already read in Being and Time (1927) pp. 62–63: ‘its (phenomenology’s) essential character does not consist in being actual as a philosophical school. Higher than actuality stands possibility. The comprehension of phenomenology consists solely in grasping it as possibility’” (GA 14, 102/TB, 82).
Now, one might venture to suggest that to follow this injunction to take phenomenology to its most extreme possibility might lead to approaching it as a phenomenology of the event. This appears in the 1927 course where, as mentioned prior, Heidegger distinguishes three main elements in the conception of the phenomenological method: (a) the phenomenological reduction (Reduktion); (b) the phenomenological construction (Konstruktion); and (c) the phenomenological destruction (Destruktion). A brief reconstruction of each of these features will reveal their relevance to a thinking of the event.
(a) The expression “phenomenological reduction,” although borrowed from Husserl, is nonetheless understood very differently by Heidegger. As he clarifies from the outset: “We are thus adopting a central term of Husserl’s phenomenology in its literal wording, though not in its substantive intent” (GA 24, 29/21, emphasis mine). In fact, as early as the 1925 course Prolegomena to the History of the Concept of Time,13 Heidegger had already distanced himself from the Husserlian conception of reduction. In that course, he equates transcendental reduction with an abstraction (Absehen-von, Absehung), not only from the reality of consciousness, but also from the individuation of its lived experiences and ultimately from being itself: whether in the transcendental reduction, in which the question of the being of intentionality is not raised, or in the so-called eidetic reduction, in which the individuation (Vereinzelung) of experiences is bracketed, it is the question of the being of being that is not posed. Husserlian reduction is characterized by Heidegger as a forgetting of the question of being because Husserl’s project is marked by a prior orientation toward an absolute science of consciousness. “Husserl’s primary question is simply not concerned with the character of the being of consciousness. Rather, he is guided by the following concern: How can consciousness become the possible