Once Husserl had put “phenomenological eyes in my head,” as he said in 1923 (GA 63: 5.22–23),
Heidegger fought against the naïve objectifying realism of the Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics he had
been steeped in, which held that “the real” is id quod habet esse or id cui existentia non repugnat, i.e., that
which exists independent of any subjective constitution by human beings. In that traditional view the
realness of a thing is its existentia or Vorhandensein, its “mere existence” (1) outside of nothing and (2) out
there in the real world. The phenomenological attitude breaks with that naïveté and draws us back
reflectively and thematically to where we always already stand without noticing it: within meaning-giving
fields of possible intelligibility. There we relate to things not merely as objects positioned spatio-temporally
in the universe, independent of us, but rather in terms of their significance, their meaningful presence to us
as personally, socially, and bodily engaged with them. From the start of his career Heidegger affirmed, “I
live in a first-hand world of meaning; everything around me makes sense, always and everywhere” (“In
einer Umwelt lebend, bedeutet es mir überall und immer: GA 56/57: 73.1–8). Heidegger’s philosophy, like
all phenomenology worthy of the name, is correlation research. For us “the real” is not simply what’s-out-there-now;
it is the meaningful—not necessarily the “true,” but always the meaningful. Huis clos: there is
no hors-texte, no exit from meaning. For us who are condemned to λόγος, outside of meaning there is only
death.