ontology is at its very core infected by a subtle 'intuitionism?,2 I do not think so. To be sure, intuition in the broad sense intended by both Husser! and Heidegger means the 'simple apprehension of the bodily given as it shows itself' and accordingly 'carries no prejudice as to whether sense perception is the sole and most original form of intuiting or whether there are further possibilities of intuition regarding other fields and constituents' (GA Bd. 20, 64; 47). Categorial intuition first means that there is a categorial givenness that exceeds that of any sense givenness. It is therefore not inconsistent to say that the excess of the sense of being that enables the elements of a perceptual judgment to appear is, in its non-appearance, 'absolutely imperceptible and yet "intuited" , (RE 156-82). But is the very term intuition itself too infected by the connotations of seeing and perceiving that have accrued to it through a long tradition of Western Lichtmetaphysik, thereby rendering it ultimately unsatisfactory in naming the intimate awareness of being that comes with the habit of living, that pre-reflective 'understanding of being' that Heidegger throughout a long career of thought sought to indicate in its temporal dynamics and to define in its structure? Moreover, this mighty attempt to spell out the nature of this direct cognition of the structures of givenness, which can accordingly then be phenomenologically read off (abgelesen) in the given, in terms other than that of a metaphysics of constant presence with which intuition is typically linked, is ineluctably tied to the temporal nature of the being thus cognized in Heidegger early and late. Parmenides already noted, and Heidegger likes to reiterate, that 'being and thinking are the same.' For the 'understanding of being' is double genitive, as much of being as it is of understanding in the 'equiprimordiality' of intentionality. 'Understanding ... is not just a kind of knowing, but primarily a basic moment of existing as such.' In its initial implicitness, understanding is the very 'self-evidence' of being in its 'oblivion,' the dominion of 'that which precisely as the best "known" and most familiar dominates all of Dasein.' In its overtly explicative modality, understanding is 'the explicit fulfillment and actualization [Vollzug] of the projecting [of Dasein's temporality] in the very act of ontological conceptualizing' (KM § 42), in short, the veritable moment of the birth of language.
The displacement of categorial intuition by the understanding-of-being is in effect the transformation of Husserl's transcendental-eidetic phenomenology into Heidegger's hermeneutic phenomenology. But in the initial breakthrough to such a hermeneutic phenomenology, in Kriegsnotsemester 1919, Heidegger is still willing to speak of both poles in the same breath by identifying the doubling return of experience upon itself, the historicity immanent in human life itself, with the hybrid term, 'understanding intuition.' The experience of experience that takes possession of itself by taking along its experience is the understanding intuition, the hermeneutic intuition, the originary phenomenological formation of [those special