40 | HEIDEGGER’S ONTOLOGY OF EVENTS
clarified by looking at what, in Sein und Zeit, he calls the ‘productive logic’ belonging to his methodology. It describes the way his ontology renders progressively more grounded or appropriate (eigentliche) accounts of being that advance along a diagenic axis. Importantly, a set of modulations of the concept of ground play a central role in defining his productive logic. This logic shows that though deconstruction is an important part of Heidegger’s methodology, it does not simply remain within those bounds, but from early on employs a rigorous, creative conceptual experimentalism or genetic methodology.
Heidegger’s discussion of productive logic is situated in his argument for the priority of the question and science of being with respect to other sciences (the main examples he comments on are mathematics, physics, biology, and theology). The ideas he uses here, though, are not confined to making this distinction. They apply to any problematic insofar as it includes an account articulating its subject matter and this account experiences a Grundlagenkrisis (crisis in its grounds or foundations), forcing it to revise them by developing a more appropriate understanding of its subject matter and, in turn, to fundamentally reconfigure the broader account by which the problematic field is articulated. These ideas apply to Heidegger’s own ontology, which consistently tracks the abyssal logic entailed in and perpetually disrupting the fundamental terms of the problematic of being and reconfigures its account of being on the basis of more originary articulations that this enables.
In Heidegger’s analysis, all sciences have a Sachgebiet (subject matter).48 This can either be a Bezirk (domain) of beings, as in the cases of ‘history, Nature, space, life, Dasein, language’, or the being of beings in general, as in the case of fundamental ontology.49 To a domain, which I have also called a problematic field or simply a problematic, belongs a set of Grundstrukturen (basic/ground structures) understood to characterise its subject matter and determine proper terms for scientific (wissenschaftliche) research about it.50 Here, ‘the basic structures [Grundstrukturen] of any such area’ are not the product of pure theoretical investigation; they bear a factical character, having ‘already been worked out after a fashion in our pre-scientific ways of experiencing and interpreting that domain of being [Seinsbezirkes] in which the area of subject-matter is itself confined’.51 To illustrate this, our pre-scientific experience of regularity in nature might lead to theoretical research producing an account of laws of nature. Here, we develop Grundbegriffe (basic/ground concepts) to articulate the Grundverfassung (basic/ground constitution) of the subject matter at hand: for example, Newton’s three laws of motion as used to articulate the basic constitution of the problematic field of nature.52 The Grundstrukturen we understand to characterise a problematic field are revisable on the basis
50 Ibid.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid., translation modified.