Heidegger's critique of Husserl's formulation of phenomenology takes its bearings from both the last phase of the first stage of its development and from the entirety of its second stage. Heidegger presents his critique as stemming from phenomenology's most basic principle, the “return to the things themselves”, and thus as a “phenomenological” critique. As such, his critique purports to be an immanent critique, in the precise sense that it claims to show that when taken on its own terms as a phenomenology guided by the principle of philosophical radicalism, Husserl's formulation of phenomenology falls short of its stated intention. Heidegger's critique has interrelated ontological and methodological foci. The former challenges Husserl's claim that intentionality is the most basic phenomenon of phenomenology; the latter challenges the capacity of not just Husserl's but of any reflective and eidetic method to encounter the source of the meaning of Being that is presupposed by the mode of access to phenomena made possible by this method.

Heidegger's ontological critique has in turn two interrelated moments. The first claims that the “being characters” (Seinscharactere) of the entity that exhibits intentionality as an essential structure are not originally secured by Husserl. The second claims that the “meaning of Being” that guides Husserl's formulation of intentionality in terms of the “immanent” being of the intentio and the “transcendent” being of the intentum is attained by going back not to the matters themselves proper to the entity that has the structure of intentionality but to a traditional idea of philosophy.