Destruktion
<h3>Destruktion</h3>
<p>Here is Martin Heidegger on philosophy as the task of destroying <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology" title="Ontology">ontological concepts</a>, in other words also including, ordinary everyday meanings of words like time, history, being, theory, death, mind, body, matter, logic etc.:</p>
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<dd>When tradition thus becomes master, it does so in such a way that what it 'transmits' is made so inaccessible, proximally and for the most part, that it rather becomes concealed. Tradition takes what has come down to us and delivers it over to self-evidence; it blocks our access to those primordial 'sources' from which the categories and concepts handed down to us have been in part quite genuinely drawn. Indeed it makes us forget that they have had such an origin, and makes us suppose that the necessity of going back to these sources is something which we need not even understand. (<i>Being and Time</i>, p. 43)</dd>
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<p>Heidegger considers that tradition can become calcified here and there:</p>
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<dd>If the question of Being is to have its own history made transparent, then this hardened tradition must be loosened up, and the concealments which it has brought about dissolved. We understand this task as one in which by taking the question of Being as our clue we are to destroy the traditional content of ancient ontology until we arrive at those primordial experiences in which we achieved our first ways of determining the nature of Being—the ways which have guided us ever since. (<i>Being and Time</i>, p. 44)</dd>
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<p>Heidegger then remarks on the positivity of his project of <i>Destruktion</i>:</p>
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<dd>it has nothing to do with a vicious relativizing of ontological standpoints. But this destruction is just as far from having the negative sense of shaking off the ontological tradition. We must, on the contrary, stake out the positive possibilities of that tradition, and this means keeping it within its limits; and these in turn are given factically in the way the question is formulated at the time, and in the way the possible field for investigation is thus bounded off. On its negative side, this destruction does not relate itself toward the past; its criticism is aimed at 'today' and at the prevalent way of treating the history of ontology. .. But to bury the past in nullity (Nichtigkeit) is not the purpose of this destruction; its aim is positive; its negative function remains unexpressed and indirect. (<i>Being and Time</i>, p. 44)</dd>
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