McNeill (2018) – destruição

As we have seen, Heidegger developed his conception of destruction well before Being and Time  . Although the first appearance of the term Destruktion   is a mention in the course on Basic Problems of Phenomenology from winter semester 1919–1920 (GA58  , 139), the theme is already anticipated the previous semester, in his course on Phenomenological and Transcendental   Philosophy of Value in summer semester 1919, where Heidegger insists on the critical import of phenomenology. The idea   of phenomenological critique, which would soon become understood as destruction, was, however, not   to be taken in a negative sense, Heidegger insisted. Although Heidegger here presents the concept of phenomenological critique in Husserlian terms—its criterion is “the evidentiary understanding of lived experiences, of living in and for itself in the eidos   ”—it is concerned neither with logical proof and refutation, nor with theoretically imposed criteria, but rather with historical questions of provenance (Herkunft  ) and motivation (GA56-57  , 125–26). By the summer semester of 1920, in his course on Phenomenology of Intuition and Expression, the idea of phenomenological critique had become what Heidegger explicitly called that of “phenomenological-critical destruction” (GA59  , 29). A couple of years later, in his treatise Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle   (Indication of the Hermeneutic Situation  ) (1922), Heidegger further clarified his notion of historical critique intrinsic to phenomenology in terms of the need for a “critique of the present”: “Critique of history is always only critique of the present. . . . History gets negated not because it is ‘false,’ but because it still remains effective in the present without, however, being able to be an authentically appropriated present” (GA62  , 350–51). The phenomenological hermeneutics of facticity, Heidegger insists in the same text  , can occur “only on the path of destruction”; and the latter is conceived as essentially regressive, as a “deconstructive regress ” (abbauenden Rückgang) that will penetrate into the “original motivational sources” underlying the traditional concepts and categories used to interpret factical life (GA62, 368). Destruction is “‘ historical ’ knowing [‘historisches’ Erkennen  ] in the radical sense of the term”; it is philosophy’s “destructive confrontation [destructive Auseinandersetzung  ] with its own history [Geschichte  ].” As such, it is not a return to the past, but “the authentic path upon which the present needs to encounter itself in its own fundamental movements [Grundbewegtheiten],” that is, in what moves and is at work in the very happening of the present at its most fundamental level (GA62, 368).

[William McNeill  . "The Fate of Phenomenology : Heidegger’s Legacy", in FRIED, G.; POLT  , R. (EDS.). After Heidegger? London ; New York: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018]