Early Heidegger on Method: 1919–1925
Heidegger reworks phenomenology rather than leaving it behind. I trace that change from 1919 to 1925, showing how his study of lived experience becomes a question about time and Being.
Here’s the path I follow:
1919: Start with everyday meaning - how a lectern appears as something we use, not just a shape or color.
1920–1923: Examine facticity, or life as concretely lived, through history, religious experience, and interpretation.
1924–1925: Follow the turn toward Dasein, being-in-the-world, and time as preparation for Being and Time.
My reading rule is simple: <u>read each course on its own terms</u>. Track dates, translations, and changing terms. That keeps later ideas from slipping into earlier lectures - and helps you see how description, interpretation, and historical retrieval work together.
Early Heidegger’s Method: 1919–1925
Martin Heidegger, Lecture 1: Phenomenology & the Question of Being
This lecture is part of our curated philosophy for students collection, designed for those exploring the foundations of phenomenology.
1919: Phenomenology and Lived Experience
Heidegger turns phenomenological rigor toward pre-theoretical experience: life as we encounter it, already meaningful, before theoretical analysis. He develops this approach in the 1919 emergency-semester course The Idea of Philosophy and the Problem of Worldview. This marks his first step from method as description toward method as interpretation.
Primordial Science and Everyday Meaning
Heidegger calls philosophy a pre-theoretical, primordial science (vor-theoretische Urwissenschaft). Here, “primordial” refers to the origin of meaning, not an earlier historical age. Philosophy should clarify the meaning already at work in life - not impose a worldview or reduce experience to objectifying science.
In Heidegger’s 1919 classroom example, the lectern appears immediately as a lectern - not first as a brown shape that later receives a use. Lecturer, students, room, and teaching belong to the situation in which it makes sense. Describing its physical properties is legitimate, but it abstracts from that meaningful encounter.
The example shows where phenomenology starts: with meaningful relations, rather than detached perception.
Hermeneutical Intuition and Bracketing
Hermeneutical intuition makes experience explicit without separating it from the life in which it occurs. Lived experience (Erlebnis) means an occurrence within a situation, not a private feeling. Reflection still matters; the challenge is to reflect on lived experience without turning it into a fixed object.
For bracketing, this means keeping the meaningful situation intact while examining it. Heidegger rejects detached objectification, not phenomenological rigor. This move points toward being-in-the-world, but it does not yet reach Being and Time’s ontology of Dasein. From here, he turns to factical life and historical interpretation.
1920–1923: Facticity, History, and Interpretation
Heidegger moves from immediate lived meaning to the historical conditions that shape it. Facticity means the concrete, historical way existence is lived - not a collection of objective facts about someone. Between 1920 and 1923, he develops his method through religious experience, Aristotle, and the hermeneutics of facticity.
Pauline Letters and Lived History
Heidegger turns to Paul to show how people live through time from within expectation. In Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion (1920–1921), he reads Galatians and First and Second Thessalonians as expressions of lived religious existence. Enactment means meaning as lived activity rather than abstract content. Expecting the parousia, Christ’s return, shapes believers’ present conduct without giving them a calendar date. The anticipated future already matters in the present. Heidegger’s question is how faith organizes life, not whether its doctrine is correct.
Religious life thus becomes a model for understanding history. Wilhelm Dilthey explains why history calls for interpretation rather than explanation based solely on natural science. Heidegger takes the question a step further: What sort of being does the interpreting?
Formal Indication and Life’s Self-Interpretation
Formal indication points to a phenomenon without treating it as a fixed object. To follow that indication, identify the situation that makes the phenomenon intelligible, then trace how interpretation brings its meaning into view. In Ontology - The Hermeneutics of Facticity (1923), hermeneutics is how factical life becomes intelligible. The method fits because life already interprets itself before theory enters the picture. People understand themselves through practices, relationships, inherited customs, and their “Today,” even when that understanding remains implicit or distorted.
Reduction, Destruction, and Interpretation
In Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle (1921–1922), Heidegger traces inherited concepts back to the experiences that first gave them meaning. Destruction names this hermeneutic retrieval, not a rejection of the past. When reading, ask what experience a concept first expressed - and what later interpretations may have hidden.
Dimension | Husserlian reduction | Heideggerian destruction | Hermeneutical interpretation |
|---|---|---|---|
Starting point | Experience in the natural attitude | Inherited concepts | Situated, self-interpreting life |
Principal operation | Suspend acceptance of existence claims | Trace concepts to experiential sources | Make implicit meanings explicit |
Aim | Open transcendental inquiry | Retrieve questions buried in inherited thought | Understand factical existence |
These tools carry into Heidegger’s lectures on time and the question of Being.
1924–1925: Time and the Question of Being
Heidegger moves from the hermeneutics of facticity to time as the horizon of Being. Dasein names the being that already understands Being, even before reflecting on it. It is neither a detached subject nor another term for “human being.” Historical retrieval and existential interpretation now address the same question: what way of being makes this understanding possible?
1924: Aristotle, Dasein, and Time
In his summer 1924 course Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy, Heidegger reads Aristotle’s basic concepts as arising from lived human activity: speech, interpretation, rhetoric, and praxis. Rhetoric, on this reading, discloses practical life; it does more than persuade. Read the course for the experience each concept expresses, rather than as a summary of doctrine.
This retrieval leads directly to the problem of time. The July 25, 1924 lecture The Concept of Time is separate from both the Aristotle course and the related 1924 treatise with the same title. The lecture turns from everyday or objective time to Dasein’s temporal existence: projecting possibilities, inheriting a past, and acting in the present. To be situated means living from a past toward future possibilities. As you read, ask how inherited possibilities and expected outcomes shape present action.
1925: History of the Concept of Time
The next step is not another reading of sources. It is a more pointed question about the being that understands. The summer 1925 course keeps three Husserlian resources: intentionality, categorial intuition, and the phenomenological a priori. Heidegger’s objection is that phenomenology has not clarified the being of intentionality or of the one who experiences. Being-in-the-world shifts the inquiry toward an existence already involved in the world, rather than an isolated consciousness facing objects. This is a criticism from within phenomenology - not a departure from it.
From the Lectures to Being and Time
These courses prepare Being and Time without settling its argument in advance. Temporal existence increasingly guides the inquiry. Husserlian description serves ontology, while formal indication remains a way of interpreting rather than classifying. Read for what the description discloses and how your own understanding enters into it. Do not read the later reduction–construction–destruction scheme back into the 1925 course.
Conclusion: How Heidegger’s Method Develops
From 1919 to 1925, Heidegger draws reduction, interpretation, and history closer together. His focus moves from lived experience in 1919, through facticity and history in 1920–1923, to time and Being in 1924–1925. The 1925 lectures bring the shift from phenomenological access to the question of Being into sharper focus.
Reduction seeks access to phenomena without unexamined assumptions. Hermeneutics interprets life’s implicit self-understanding. Historical retrieval brings to light the inherited concepts that shape this access. Heidegger does not trade one method for another. He reworks how they relate.
6 Tasks for Reading the Early Lectures
Read backward from the later lectures with six tasks in mind: enter factical life as lived, follow how phenomena appear, interpret implicit meanings, examine inherited assumptions, trace concepts to their historical sources, and open the question of Being.
Timeline: 1919–1925
These five stages show continuities with Being and Time without suggesting that Heidegger followed a fixed plan.
Date | Lecture context | Methodological concern | Connection to Being and Time |
|---|---|---|---|
1919 | The Idea of Philosophy and the Problem of Worldview | Pre-theoretical experience and hermeneutical intuition | Worldly meaning comes before theoretical analysis |
1920–1921 | Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion | Enactment and historical experience | Expectation shapes present existence |
1921–1923 | Aristotle interpretations and hermeneutics of facticity | Formal indication, retrieval, and self-interpretation | Interpretation gives access to existence |
1924 | Aristotle course and The Concept of Time | Dasein and temporal existence | Dasein is interpreted through its temporal possibilities |
1925 | History of the Concept of Time | Phenomenological access to the question of Being | Being-in-the-world prepares fundamental ontology |
Reading Across Translations and Courses
For close reading, keep a log of course dates, German terms, translations, page numbers, immediate contexts, and changes in meaning. Track Faktizität (facticity), Vollzug (enactment), and Destruktion (destruction or deconstruction, depending on the edition).
Do not assume a term means the same thing throughout 1919–1925. Bilingual texts let you compare wording, while annotations explain technical choices. As you read across courses, follow how the relationship among phenomenology, history, and interpretation changes.
FAQs
How can I apply formal indication to everyday experience?
In Heidegger’s early work, formal indication offers a temporary guide to lived experience without pinning it down with fixed definitions. In everyday life, this means treating your experiences not as static facts, but as encounters with the world that keep unfolding. The meaning of your existence takes shape through active engagement, rather than abstract theory.
How does Heidegger avoid imposing interpretations on lived experience?
In his early lectures from 1919 to 1925, Heidegger seeks to understand lived experience without forcing it into established theoretical frameworks. He uses phenomenological reduction to set aside preconceived categories and let experience show itself on its own terms. His starting point is experience as it is lived, rather than its place in an abstract system. Through this approach, he aims to reveal the original meaning of existence.
Which early lectures should I read before Being and Time?
Focus on Heidegger’s Freiburg lectures from 1919 to 1925, which trace how he developed his ideas on phenomenology, hermeneutics, and reduction. Give special attention to his 1921 lectures on Saint Augustine’s account of time and the self. These lectures introduce key ideas that Heidegger later revisited and developed further in Being and Time.
