Heidegger

For Heidegger, for instance, the question of Being "proved intractable in the investigations of Plato and Aristotle" and: "what was formerly wrenched out of phenomena in a supreme effort of thought, although in a fragment ary and groping (in ersten Anläufen) manner, has long since been rendered trivial" (Sein und Zeit).

Now, it is a priori excluded that Plato and Aristotle should have "discovered" their ontology by dint of "thinking"; they were, at most, the first in the Greek world to consider it useful to formulate an ontology in writing. Like all modern philosophers, Heidegger is far from being aware of the quite "indicative" and "provisional" role of "thinking" in metaphysics; and it is not surprising that this writer should, as a "thinker," misunderstand the normal function of all thought and conclude: "It is a matter of finding and following a way which allows one to arrive at the clarifi cation of the fundamental question of ontology.

As for knowing whether this way is the sole way, or a good way, this can only be decided subsequently" (ibid.). It is difficult to conceive a more anti-metaphysical attitude. There is always this same prejudice of subjecting the intellect, which is qualitative in essence, to the vicissitudes of quantity, or in other words of reducing every quality from an absolute to a relative level. It is the classical contradiction of philosophers: knowledge is decreed to be relative, but in the name of what is this decree issued?

 

By "phenomenology" we simply mean the study of a category of phenomena, and not a particular philosophy which claims to resolve everything by observing or exploring in its fashion the phenomena that present themselves to one's attention, without being able to account for the central and ungraspable phenomenon that is the mystery of subjectivity...

There are no metaphysical or cosmological reasons why, in exceptional cases, direct intellection should not occur in men who have no link at all with revealed wisdom, but an exception, if it proves the rule, assuredly cannot constitute it. For instance, an intuition as just as that which forms the basis of German ‘phenomenology’, inevitably remains, for lack of objective intellectual principles, fragmentary, problematical and inoperative. An accident does not take the place of a principle, nor does a philosophical adventure replace real wisdom. No one has, in fact, been able to extract anything from this ‘phenomenology’ from the point of view of effective and integral knowledge — the knowledge that works on the soul and transforms it. A true intuition, even if it were fundamental, could not assume a definitive function in a mode of thought as anarchical as modern philosophy; it must always be condemned to remain merely an ineffectual glimmer in the history of an entirely human system of thought which, precisely, does not know that real knowledge has no history.