Abstract

At first sight, “theory” does not seem to be a major issue in Heidegger's thought. Yet, as his early Freiburg lectures from 1919 demonstrate, Heidegger's development of a phenomenological method of his own required a systematic debate with the neo-Kantians and the philosophical privilege they accorded to theoretization. While laying the foundation for a phenomenological method whose prime object is the lived experience of the surrounding world, Heidegger sketches out a double concept of theorization, one which, through a process of successive stages of unliving, culminates in the objectified conception of an empty “something,” and another concept of theoretization for which the “something” is “the experienceable in general,” and which guides the a-theoretical encounter of phenomenology as an “archontic form of life” with the world, the other, and the “not yet.”