Abstract

To say that the coherence of what time shows us is infallible is not yet to say that time is logic itself. But that's what we're going to say here, or at least that it's in the form of time that logic first shows itself to us, before it regulates the reasoning of our imagination. The book sets out and explains the four statements on which phenomenological metaphysics is based : The first statement was made by Heidegger in his inaugural lecture " What is metaphysics ? " in 1929. It says: " It is nothingness itself that annihilates ". The second statement, as yet unpublished, says that the means that nothingness uses to annihilate is logic, and that the first form of logic is time, the second form, the one we know as our logic formal logic or the logic of predicates , is imagination. Imagination extends and complements the logical work of time by mimicking it. The third statement, the one least acceptable to common truth, says that the first three fundamental statements of phenomenology are not comprehensible by common truth, by common sense, by logos. In particular, the first statement was considered nonsense first by Rudolf Carnap, then by W. V. O. Quine. To understand the first three statements, a singular event must occur in a man's life : the event that brings nothingness and its contradiction into being in the same instant. This contradiction is Being itself, the madness of being. The third statement says that the truth of being is not transmissible. Each of us accesses it in our own time. The fourth and final statement is the only one that science can accept, even though it has never posited it. This statement is the generalized principle of contradiction. It states that in all circumstances, what time shows us is absolutely consistent : time is never wrong. If Aristotle's principle of contradiction is the foundation of our logic, the generalized principle of contradiction is the foundation of experimental science. All that time, immemorial time, which precedes man's access to the truth of being, is referred to here as childhood. The world, physis, common sense, common truth, logos, remain in childhood. Only man emerges into Being. The world is then offered to him as a gift, the gift that time - logic - gives to Being.