ABSTRACT
After Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger is the person most responsible for promoting phenomenology as a philosophical method in the 20th century. Heidegger relates how reader first gain access to consciousness as a field of experiences, as its own region, by refraining from positing any transcendent world. After designating the first such element, that of directing attention away from entities to their being, "the phenomenological reduction," Heidegger distinguishes it from Husserl's version. But the reduction, Heidegger advises, is not even the central, basic element of the phenomenological method, since it does not, by itself, lead to being itself. As for phenomenological construction (the third basic component of the phenomenological method), Heidegger leaves few clues for unraveling what he understands by it. Yet, while he is critical of “free-floating,” “abstract conceptual,” and “pure” (“logically empty”) constructions, he deems the existential interpretation an “ontological ‘construction’” and seeks a basis for it that moves beyond “a merely arbitrary construction.”.
