The ontological reduction consists of explicating the mode or ways of being that belong to or are proper to something. The ontic meaning of something is the mode of being in the world of that something or someone. Heidegger did not quite accept Husserl’s notion of the reduction as the grasping of the essence (eidos) of a phenomenon as constituted in consciousness. In contrast, Heidegger explains that the reduction should be understood as going back to the world as lived—which can never be brought to full unconcealment. Heidegger shifts to focus from ontic meaning (whatness of being) to ontological meaning (mode of being). To understand a phenomenon is aiming to understand the ontological mode of being of the being (meaning) of that phenomenon. But for Heidegger this understanding was not a Husserlian epistemological problem but an ontological concern: every way of being in the world is a way of understanding the world as an event of being. So, for example, the experience of “keeping a secret” is already a certain mode of being in the world (the mode and mood of secrecy) and understanding the things of the world as manifestations of their secret being. For example, Derrida speaks of the “absolute secret” as the ontology of secrecy: the secret of its secrecy. Heidegger’s hermeneutic-ontological phenomenology is a profound and truly inexhaustible source for what it means to think, reflect, inquire, and do phenomenological research.