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Questioning Practice: Heidegger, Historicity, and the Hermeneutics of Facticity Eric Sean Nelson (Department of Philosophy, University of Massachusetts Lowell) |
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Published in Philosophy Today 44, 2001 (SPEP Supplement
2000): pp. 150-159 (ed. W. Brogan & M. Simons).
Page numbers are in [bold]
.
[150]
Questioning Practice: Heidegger, Historicity, and the Hermeneutics of
Facticity
We remain of necessity strangers to ourselves, we do not understand ourselves, we must mistake ourselves, for us the maxim reads to all eternity: "each is furthest from himself," - with respect to ourselves we are not "knowers"... - Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (Preface, 1).
1. Introduction
For Martin Heidegger, in the lecture courses and occasional pieces of the early 1920's, historical understanding occurs according to an orientation that arises out of the experience of the today in its facticity. (1) The articulation of historical understanding awakens the question of the possibility of a historically-situated action-guiding understanding. Understanding, which always occurs from out of a particular place and particular time, is the way and manner humans are in the world. As such, the question of understanding raises the issue of the facticity of understanding. If understanding is historical, in the sense of the double genitive, the question of historicity becomes especially pressing for that being whose today-- with its ecstatic sense of past, present and future-- is an issue for it.
Historical understanding refers not only to what is being understood (history), for which Heidegger criticized traditional hermeneutics and historiography, but to how it is understood as a way of our own being in a situation and world (historicity). My claim is that because understanding is historical in this double sense, understanding occurs according to an orientation that arises out of the experience of historicity in its facticity.(2)
The double sense of historicity meant that Heidegger was compelled to reconsider how history was conceived in previous philosophy, especially the phenomenology of Husserl. Phenomenology needs to become not only genetic and generative but genealogical and hermeneutical. Phenomenology becomes hermeneutical if the concern with genesis can be turned toward the contingency and facticity of origins and their disclosure rather than remaining a concern with the origin of ideal meanings and validity. Phenomenology thus does not become hermeneutical in the sense of revealing the omnipresence of the immanence of meaning but, on the contrary, the practice of phenomenology discloses the "hermeneutical situation" from out of which it occurs. It indicates the hermeneutical situation, in which I always find myself, as far as the potentially irreducible contingency and singularity of this situation is found to be a question for me and places me into question. The moment in which I live can resist and even decenter my understanding of it. (3)
It is precisely this character of facticity that opens up and reveals my possibilities. My possibilities for action are grounded in the facticity of my existence. Practice follows facticity in its double sense: (1) the facticity of the repetition and habits of everyday life and (2) the facticity that throws this habitual everydayness into question, which opens up possibilities, and allows for choosing and acting otherwise.
The young Heidegger had argued that Husserl's attempts to deal with the problems of a genetic and historical phenomenology were [151] inadequate. Heidegger articulated the fractured horizon of intentionality in response to this failure.(4) For Heidegger, the rigorous pursuit of phenomenology leads to the "hermeneutics of facticity" which takes the hermeneutical situation as its point of departure.
Understanding, considered as a structure of human comportment, is not only the enactment of intentionality in an environment. This enactment is fundamentally temporal and potentially exposes intentionality to its own limits and ruptures. Heidegger undertook the clarification of these limits in his account of "limit-experiences" such as anxiety, boredom, and the anticipation of death. Consciousness is not simply a "consciousness of" something in these experiences of "uncanniness" (Unheimlichkeit ) that interrupt the flow of ordinary experience. The "self" in its self-concern cannot find adequate security in the self-certainty of consciousness. Dasein finds itself concerned and even anxious in its world. Because of this, Dasein is always related to its situational praxis.
For Heidegger in the early 1920's, life is to be approached through its
facticity. The experience of life is that of
factical life. Since hermeneutics is the
self-explication of the facticity that formally
indicates what we ourselves are, it does not simply have
facticity as an object of investigation (GA 63, 15).
Factical beings are called to question their own
existence in its facticity. The question of a
hermeneutics or formal indication of facticity
addresses me in my existence. This question indicates the need to confront
life in both its everydayness and uncanniness,
since the being of life is both what is most familiar and strange (GA 61,
189). Yet what is most familiar in its everydayness remains unquestioned. The
uncanniness of everydayness is left unspoken. Each
is furthest from himself.
2. Phenomenology and the hermeneutics of factical life
The word facticity is in one sense an unfortunate choice to convey both the unrecognized and unthematized everydayness and the fallenness, thrownness and uncanniness (ruination) of life. Acknowledging the problematic character of this word, other senses can still be clarified. Clarification is insufficient since any elucidation of the sense of facticity in the economy of Heidegger's early thought requires the intensification and upsurge of this sense.
The word facticity is derived from the Latin factum. Factum refers to human activity and production. Factum is an artifact of human practice. Following this usage, Giambattisto Vico formulated the axiom verum factum; the true is the made. (5) In humanist thought from Vico to Marx, humans know history insofar as they make history. The identity of subject and object guarantees the possibility of knowledge and action based on knowledge. The model of productive activity that this presupposes is inherently instrumental. The real is defined as a set of objects created and transformed by a subject. The meaningfulness of these objects is thus determined by their purposefulness and usefulness for the productive agent.
The meaning of fact as something constructed was, however, increasingly lost in modernity. The notion of facticity functioned in the Kantian and positivist discourses of the Nineteenth-century as an appeal to truths that are not made by humans but given to them as incapable of being doubted. "Facticity" shared a similar fate with the word "positivity" in referring to the actual or real that cannot be circumvented.
The concept of facticity underwent a further more radical transformation in the thought of Heidegger in the early 1920's. Facticity emerged as a concept related to those of resistance and withdrawal, contingency and singularity, thrownness and uncanniness. These relations of the "non-related" appear as a positive and constitutive characteristic of existence and [152] Dasein. Instead of being indubitable for a subject, what I will call the "non-related" are events that throw the subject, its explanations and narratives, into question.
The question of understanding broached by Dilthey and Husserl compelled Heidegger to move toward a confrontation with and articulation of the facticity of understanding. Facticity can be seen in a variety of phenomena, since the transparency or givenness of the body,(6) language, and history can reveal their non-transparency and questionability.
When phenomenology is confronted by its own contingency and finitude, insofar as the phenomenological reduction to intentional consciousness is more than simply incomplete, the question of historicity becomes pressing. This question is insistent because the historical situation and generation to which one somehow always belongs are a primary way in which we are challenged by the facticity or thrownness of life.(7)
Heidegger's lectures of the early 1920's state that the practice of phenomenology, which itself is a practice of formal and situated understanding, leads inevitably to hermeneutics. Responding to this claim does not, however, lead to a return to the traditional hermeneutics of the text but rather to the explication of the inherently contextual, perspectival and thus prejudicial character of life to which I belong.
Historicity poses a question that requires phenomenology to be not only genetic but also hermeneutical. Insofar as it is to become a hermeneutics of factical life, rather than of the interpretation of texts, phenomenology is exposed to the generative and historical character of life. According to Heidegger in 1924, Dasein is not only thrown into its own being-towards-death, it is stretched between birth and death (GA 17, 283). Phenomenology becomes hermeneutical if the concern with genesis can be turned toward the contingency and facticity of origins and their disclosure instead of remaining bound to the idea of consciousness and the model of mathematical knowledge informed by an interest in ideal meaning and validity.
Phenomenology does not become hermeneutical in the sense of revealing the omnipresence of the text and meaning ("linguisticality"), since the disturbance of meaning and the presence of the non-meaningful is indicated in facticity. The practice of phenomenology discloses and is disclosed by what Heidegger called the "hermeneutical situation." The phenomenologist is forced to encounter the hermeneutical situation, the generativity of being in between birth and death (GA 17, 283), the historicity of being related to a particular generation and people, and the temporality of being in between the "already" and the "not yet" (GA 17, 319). I find myself confronted with the facticity of fore-structures that I have not made which open toward a future that is not to be understood as a continuation of the present. The potentially irreducible contingency and singularity of the today and the hermeneutical situation, structuring and structured by memory and expectation, is disclosed as a question for me that places me into question insofar as I respond to it. The moment in which I live resists and can decenter my understanding of it, an understanding which I am. Understanding is not only a cognitive activity concerned with validity. According to Heidegger, understanding is worldly. It is always a way of being in the world and of comporting oneself in one's world.
The young Heidegger therefore suggested that Husserl's attempts to deal with the problems of a genetic and historical phenomenology were inadequate. Heidegger articulated the fractured horizon of intentionality in response to this perceived failure. Intentionally is the directedness of a consciousness that is always consciousness of something. Dasein is exposed to the limits of intentionality in experiences of its attunement and mood (Stimmung ) such as joy, horror, mourning and Angst, such that Dasein cannot be understood as an equivalent to intentionality (GA 17, 287-288). The [153] ruptures indicated in these experiences of non-relatedness can be understood neither through intentionality nor by falling back into intuition. Instead there is a process of relating to the facticity of life that Rudolf Makkreel called "making life visible non-intuitively" (1990, 313).
Heidegger charged the concept of intentionality with blocking access to the disclosure of the world in attunement and comportment. It prevents recognizing both the phenomenon of everydayness and its potential disturbance and decentering in exposure to uncanniness (GA 17, 317-318). Consciousness, and the intentionality that characterizes it, cannot be freed of its own facticity, of that which resists and withdraws from it (GA 17, 71). Husserl therefore failed to ask the question of the being of consciousness.
This hermeneutics of facticity has a double intention: (1) philosophy has the task to maintain rather than negate the facticity of life and more radically to strengthen the factical character of life; and (2) phenomenology needs to remain in the tendency of factical life that it describes and articulate its disturbance of systematic philosophy (GA 59, 174). The movement toward what is originary and fundamental is the preservation and intensification of the facticity of life. Instead of revealing a secure and certain foundation, fundamental experiences open the questionability and uncertainty of Dasein in its world (GA 59, 174).
Heidegger proposed that the rigorous pursuit of phenomenology leads beyond the intentions of Husserl. Its pursuit means to place oneself in the question of the "hermeneutics of factical life." Factical life indicates the self-assured and unrecognized assumptions and prejudices of everydayness in which Dasein dwells as das Man, so much so that the limit concept of authenticity can only be interpreted as a modification of the everydayness of the they-self. The behaviors of everydayness occur according to the indifference of what happens usually and for the most part (SZ 43).
Facticity refers more radically, however, to
the strangeness and foreignness that the everyday self avoids. This otherness
or difference can throw the everyday self, and the practical and theoretical
orientations derived from it, into disquiet and uncertainty. Exposure to this
facticity, understood as
thrownness and uncanniness, is the
possibility of individuation through that which does not occur usually and for
the most part. The unusual discloses both the uncanniness
of my existence as well as the structures of everydayness. The breakdowns and
ruptures of the everyday allow what is usually presupposed and accepted to
become a question. Unreflective habits and customs become visible in that
which resists, reverses and withdraws from the meaningfulness maintained and
reproduced in everydayness. The repetition of identity is revealed to be a
repetition of difference. The sensus
communis of das
Man is confronted with the singular that it cannot determine. This
confrontation with the in-difference of everydayness is the possibility of the
differentiation and individuation of Dasein.
(8)
3. The questionability of facticity
As Hans-Georg Gadamer has noted, "hermeneutics of facticity" is a paradoxical expression (1994, 131). Hermeneutics indicates the interpretation of meaning. It is inquiry into the event and structure of communication and language. Facticity, however, indicates that which refuses, resists, reverses interpretation and meaning. Hermeneutics is necessary because of the "relatedness" ( Zusammenhang) of meaning and world. Facticity expresses both the relatedness that goes beyond conscious understanding in "everydayness" and the exposure to "non-relatedness" (the breakdown of meaning) in experiences that throw the subject into question. As such, the hermeneutics of facticity is about the tension between communication and the ineffable. This ineffability is already found in the immanence of life itself.
Facticity thus has a double structure. It designates both the already known insofar as it is [154] unknown, namely everydayness, and that which potentially resists, reverses, and places into question this understanding and its derivative forms, uncanniness. In experiencing uncanniness, the ruination and questionability of life are encountered. The agon or polemos of Auseinandersetzung or interpretive conflict emerge as a positive characteristic of life (GA 61, 2).
Facticity operates in Heidegger's lectures as both a promise of the realization of the tasks of philosophy and as a threat of that which would make philosophy impossible. It is a promise of the disclosure of what is ordinarily interpreted as empirical, real, and material prior to their doctrinal transformation. Facticity would point to a more original articulation of the world prior to doctrines, systems and theories. However, facticity does not only refer to the primordial and original in experience. The return to factical life is not a return to an immediate or immanent ground of experience on which doctrine and theory could then be constructed. Thrownness and uncanniness suggest a threat to the self-explication of experience and the possibility of knowledge.
The relationship to facticity as the non-relatable suggests the fundamental questionability of life and its manifestations. For Heidegger, what matters is to remain in this questionability. To linger in this questionability is to be claimed by a question that addresses Dasein in its being, i.e., in each case concerning me in my being. It is to pursue, repeat and reiterate the question that questions me. Repetition (Wiederholung) is always singular, differentiated, through the "each case" or "each time" of Jemeinigkeit . Repetition is differentiation and the possibility of individuation.
In the examples Heidegger uses, facticity refers to the materiality that disturbs thought. It is the rejection and pain that confound the emotions, the resistance that humbles the will, the remains and historical ruins of the world that cannot be integrated into the present, as well as the breakdowns that throw into doubt utility and pragmatic usefulness. Purposive behavior is confronted by the seemingly non-purposeful and intractable. Meaning is conditioned by non-meaning, by experiences of the lack, disruption and failure of meaning. This occurs on a variety of fundamentally different levels from the faulty hammer to the closure of Dasein's own most possibilities in the common life of das Man (the community of the "they" or the "one" who is anyone and no one in particular), from Dasein's relation to being as the radical lack of ground, to the "nothing" which resists being ordered into systems of concepts and propositions. The confrontation with death in the anticipation of one's own death enables Dasein to differentiate and individuate itself. Resoluteness, however, means to remain within this determinate-indeterminate nearing of death. In this movement toward authenticity Dasein cannot step out of the pain that is the condition of its existence as Dasein.
Facticity thus intimates the problematic character of assumptions about intelligibility, meaningfulness and purposefulness. The being of factical life is an infinitude of richness, the depth and texture of the world that cannot be made thematic as concept or figure, which withdraws from understanding and by that exposes understanding to its own limits and finitude. It is not simply the "brute fact" or "given" (which in being given is not necessarily understood). It suggests the death that haunts life, the pain that shadows joy.
Facticity is, on the one hand, a theme of
articulation and appropriation. The hermeneutics of
facticity calls upon Dasein to articulate
itself from out of its worldly being.(9)
On the other hand, it also suggests that which resists and potentially
undermines articulation, appropriation and other modes of human comportment (Verhalten).
4. Understanding, formal indication, and uncanniness
Understanding, considered as a structure of human comportment, is the enactment of intentionality in an environment. This enactment potentially exposes intentionality to its [155] own limits and ruptures. Heidegger undertakes the clarification of these limits in his account of what Karl Jasper's had called "limit-situations" or "limit-experiences" such as anxiety, boredom, and the anticipation of death. (10) Consciousness is not "consciousness of" something in these experiences of uncanniness that interrupt the flow of ordinary experience. The "self" in its self-concern cannot find adequate security in the self-certainty of consciousness. Dasein finds itself concerned, troubled, and uncertain in its world.
The discussion of death in Being and Time receives a different context of interpretation given the unfolding of this theme in the early lecture courses. "Authenticity" in the face of my death is a modification of the inauthenticity of everydayness. It is the precisely the recognition of what cannot be solved and settled because it is my end (my being "finished") with which I can never be finished. As the farthest or outer most possibility of my existence, it is an impossibility of control and mastery that can continually throw my projects and purposes into question. Heidegger asks us to linger in a questionability that cannot be answered or mastered without inauthenticity, which is characterized through avoidance and flight. The possibility of death indicates the anticipation of a facticity and finitude that cannot be authentically avoided, mediated or overcome. It remains the own most, unrelatable and impassible possibility of Dasein (SZ 252).
As the "how" (way or mode) of a being that comports itself within a world, intentionality conceals and also discloses phenomena. The phenomenological reduction can make phenomena invisible as well as visible. Heidegger worried in his early lectures about what is covered over and hidden in a phenomenology committed to particular ideas about consciousness, the subject and knowledge. He therefore points out the need to radicalize the notion of intentionality found in previous phenomenology. Intentionality must become more formal than when it is employed as a definition of consciousness or of the mind. That is, intentionality needs to be abstracted and detached from intellectual and mental assumptions about it. Instead of intentionality, Heidegger speaks of formal indication or "how" something shows itself or enacts itself. Understanding is not intentionality. It is a "how of Dasein itself" (GA 63, 15). At the same time that Heidegger formalizes the concept of intentionality into the how, way or mode of the givenness of a phenomenon, he also demands that it should be more concrete in confronting the factical worldly comportment and orientation of those who are addressed as intentional beings. (11)
These claims about intentionality and facticity are unfolded in his early critique of Karl Jaspers' Psychology of Worldviews. Heidegger proposed in this review that the "genuinely fundamental level of phenomenological interpretation" is "that level of interpretation that is related to the factical experience of life as such" (PM, 30). Phenomenology moves from being a reduction to ideal validity to being a disclosure of factical life through the recognition of the temporal and perspectival character of a being set within a particular history and generation, in an environment and world. Yet this phenomenology of facticity is not identical with the facticity that is its concern. This is because understanding indicates a relation to facticity, an opening up of the questionability of facticity (GA 61, 2). This relatedness is not immanent, transparent or identical with facticity insofar as facticity can only be approached indirectly and non-intuitively.
The connections between meaning and facticity are to be opened and explicated, yet facticity presents the impossibility of explanation and understanding. Heidegger consequently does not call for the deformalization of intentionality alone. He refuses to collapse phenomenology into a popular life-philosophy that calls for the direct, immanent and immediate immersion in concreteness. Such a deformalization would be inadequate. Instead of being a formal and provisional indication, which is a questioning, it would be lost in the facticity of a particular and inadequate way of understanding that leaves itself unquestioned.
[156] In response to transcendental phenomenology, Heidegger insisted first on the radical formalization of intentionality. Intentionality does not enter the realm of "hermeneutical concepts" exclusively by the recognition of the facticity of its enactment by the phenomenologist. This is the mistake of intuitionist critics of Husserl, such as Jaspers and Scheler, who move directly from the transcendental to the so-called "concrete." This realm of formal indication or the related notion of hermeneutical anticipation requires the further formalization of intentionality into a question that asks "how" a being is or "what" is its mode or way of being.
This formalization is intended to disclose the irreducible "relatedness" of phenomena without returning to empiricism, intuitionism or realism. The phenomenologist begins to recognize and become open to concrete diversity through what Heidegger calls formal indication or hermeneutical anticipation. The recognition of this diversity in the facticity and singularity of its "members" can be achieved by neither contemplation nor imagination alone.
The phenomenology of intentionality, properly understood, is then for Heidegger the way of formal indication of facticity. The hermeneutics of factical life is the self-explication of facticity that is not identical to itself insofar as it is not facticity but its indication. This anticipation is the possibility of seeing something as it shows itself, of being receptive and open to the disclosure of the facticity that orients and informs human comportment. The phenomenological reduction is in a sense too concrete to disclose the world. It is too captured in the world as it is given to disclose its facticity.
The reduction is more than incomplete in that it is also tied to an
unquestioned specific attitude and mood, one that itself has its historical
structure and context. Intentionality is to be formalized to the "how" of the
comportment of a factical being-in-the-world (PM,
19) so that it can be deformalized in the working
out of its enactment in "individual and concrete ways of understanding" (PM,
21). Without this double movement, phenomenology remains caught in the
inadequate positions of idealism and realism. Phenomenology is precisely
"hermeneutical" then in being the formal indication of the "how" of
factical life, Dasein
and existence (GA 63, 16).
5. Destruction of history as exposure to historicity
Heidegger unfolded in his early lecture courses a project of a hermeneutics of facticity that opens phenomenology to historicity through ruination and destruction. The destruction of history is an unfolding of possibilities for confronting one's own historicity. If phenomenology is necessarily concerned with the generative and historical sources that it encounters in formalization, and if it is susceptible to the event of what is other than itself and its own project in experiences of uncanniness, then it is already hermeneutical. The relation between intentional consciousness and the givenness of objects to it loses its primacy in this turn to history understood as facticity and as possibility. Phenomenology takes an historical turn in the sense of its being genealogical (SZ 11), generative (SZ 20), and deconstructive (SZ 22).
Phenomenology is hermeneutical in the sense of being bound to a non-transparent situation. It is bound to a situation structured in and by the interplay of disclosure and concealment, presence and absence. It is informed and oriented by a determining but only partially known past and by a plurality of expectations about the future. This present is the hermeneutical situation. I encounter in the today both its contingency and its determination by an otherness that the situation does not make known or disclose to me.
The present reveals the uncanniness of a being "thrown" in a world. It indicates the fragility and pain of a self that cannot identify itself with or reduce itself to its context and at the same time is incapable of fully differentiating [157] and individuating itself from that context. Charles Scott discusses the lack of attention to "non-belongingness" and "non-relatedness" in Being and Time (1996, ch.1). However, the thought of "relatedness" (Zusammenhang) in Heidegger is bound to experiences of de-severing, difference, and negativity, where for example the anticipation of death remains a relation that is non-related and unrelatable.
Since this situation is oriented by expectations and structured by a past loaded down with tradition and forgetting (continuity and discontinuity beyond the individual and collective subject's ability to mediate, recollect or recover self-related meaning), hermeneutics can be receptive to disclosure only if it engages in a dismantling of history and tradition. This history covers and forgets that a being within tradition can be spoken to and claimed by what is non-identical with itself and by what is unsaid.
Being is not whatever can be said in language, being is both spoken in language and is what withdraws from being spoken (what Heidegger later will describe as a silent voice). Language, however, is not secondary in Heidegger's early philosophy as Ricoeur and others have argued. Heidegger already addressed the fundamental importance of language in his analysis of Aristotle's logic during the Winter semester of 1923-24: language is the being and becoming of humans (GA 17, 16), we see through language (GA 17, 30). The self-articulation of our own facticity is determined in language. A hermeneutics of facticity inherently invokes the question of how a particular being lives in and through its language.
The dismantling of history emerges as both the possibility of confronting what is past (and differentiating thought through Auseinandersetzung ) and of being responsive to what has been left unsaid. Heidegger continues in his later thought to call our attention to how forms of explanation and understanding do not help the recognition of the inexhaustible strangeness of the unfamiliar (BC, 82-83). Instead of assuming the identity of history and its course, thought needs to expose itself to the unfamiliar in order to have the possibility of a genuine encounter with the historical. The destructuring (Abbau) of history and tradition is required in order for Dasein to be exposed to its own historicity (compare GA 59, 29-30).
This phenomenological hermeneutics would be a reopening of lost and hidden possibilities in being a confrontation with forgetting. It would face these extreme possibilities for individuation and differentiation in two ways: (1) by being a confrontation with their cloaking in conventional life (everydayness of das Man) and (2) in requiring the recognition of the facticity and discontinuity of meaning and experience. Heidegger articulated how in encountering uncanniness, the lack of being at home in the world, uncanniness characterizes Dasein in its very being. The hermeneutics of facticity indicates that Dasein is already thrown into uncanniness, into a world of interrupted meanings whether they are thought of as "use" (pragmatically) or as "concepts" (theoretically). Thus, the phenomenolgist cannot rest with description but is required to go through the destruction and dismantling of the history of metaphysics.
This destruction is not only a theoretical activity. There is also the
destruction of everydayness. The dismantling of the tradition of metaphysics
and everydayness emerges out of the questions which grasp me in a particular
place and at a particular time (GA 63, 75). Destruction begins from the
contemporary situation which claims me in such a way that I am called to
respond. As such, it is concerned with practice in indicating other
possibilities of practice, those that are inapparent
in the habitual repetition of what is held to be true usually and for the most
part. Facticity remains bound to human practices.
Although facticity no longer means the activity
and products of human agency as the word factum
did, facticity remains bound to human practices as
that which indicates the structure of their everydayness -- repetitive custom
and habit-- and the intimation of the questionability that discloses other
possibilities in destructuring repetition.
[158] WORKS CITED
Blattner, William (1994) "Heidegger's Debt to Jaspers's Concept of Limit-Situation", 153-165, in Heidegger and Jaspers, ed. A. M. Olsen. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Carr, David (1974) Phenomenology and the Problem of History . Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Feher, Istvan (1996) "Heidegger's Postwar Turn." Philosophy Today 40, no. 1/4: 9-35.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg (1994) Heidegger's Ways. Albany: SUNY Press. Tr. John Stanley.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg (1994b) "Martin Heidegger's One Path," tr. P. Christopher Smith. In Kisiel and van Buren, Reading Heidegger From The Start. Albany: SUNY Press.
Heidegger, Martin (1976-98) Gesammtausgabe. Frankfurt: Klostermann.
GA 17 (1994) Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung .
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GA 61 (1994) Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles . Second Edition.
GA 63 (1988) Ontologie: (Hermeneutik der Faktizität).
(1989) "Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles (Anzeige der hermeneutischen Situation)," H.U. Lessing (ed.), Dilthey-Jahrbuch. 6: 237-69.
SZ (1985) Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Niemeyer Verlag. Sixteenth Edition.
(1992-93) "Wilhelm Diltheys Forschungsarbeit und der gegenwärtige Kampf um eine historische Weltanschauung. 10 Vorträge," F. Rodi (ed.), Dilthey-Jahrbuch 8: 143-180.
PM (1978) Wegmarken. Frankfurt: Klostermann. Second Edition. Translation: (1998) Pathmarks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tr. William McNeill.
BC (1993) Basic Concepts. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Tr. Gary Aylesworth.
Heraclitus, (1960) Fragments in The Presocratic Philosophers , ed. G. S. Kirk and I. E. Raven. London: Cambridge University Press.
Makkreel, Rudolf (1990) "The genesis of Heidegger's phenomenological hermeneutics and the rediscovered 'Aristotle Introduction' of 1922." Man and World 23: 305-320.
Nelson, Eric Sean (2000) "Ansprechen und Auseinandersetzung." Existentia , Vol. X: 113-122.
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1998) On the Genealogy of Morality. Indianapolis: Hackett.
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Vico, Giambattisto (1988) On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians . Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.
Endnotes
1. References to Heidegger are to the pagination of the Gesamtausgabe (GA). The following translations are also used: BC (1993) Basic Concepts. Bloomington: Indiana University Press; PM (1998) Pathmarks . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2. I will use facticity to translate Faktizität , factuality to translate Tatsächlichkeit. Heidegger, like Dilthey before him, does not always keep these concepts terminologically distinct. Dilthey used Tatsächlichkeit in the sense of facticity and factuality. Heidegger began in the late 1920's to identify facticity with factuality and the word loses its previous philosophical role. In Being and Time, however, he still distinguished Faktizität and Tatsächlichkeit (SZ 56).
3. Compare Gadamer's claim that facticity already indicates a turning away from the self: A plunge in the world in which the hermeneutics of facticity repeats and intensifies the plunge (1994b, 26).
4. For an insightful account and evaluation of Husserl's success at providing a genetic and historical phenomenology see David Carr (1974).
5. Vico asserted the identity of the true and the made in his On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians. See pages 45-47.
[159]
6. Heidegger's suspicion of the biological explanation of the body, a concern expressed from his early critique of popular "life-philosophy" to his later confrontations with biological and racial interpretations of Nietzsche's thought, helps explains his rejection of a phenomenology of the body. But it is an insufficient explanation insofar as this critique of discourses of the body emerged from considerations of how Dasein is in its world, how it is as a linguistic and historical being. Dasein is a bodily being and, especially in his early thought, is considered in relation to the category of life. Yet the body is insufficient for interpreting this very bodily being in the world. Both Merleau-Ponty and Levinas criticized Heidegger for starting his analysis too late in Being and Time. Perception and nourishment are "prior to" our pragmatic relationship to things. However, perception and nourishment cannot be thought of as a characteristic of Dasein's being in the sense of a past prior to history and language. They already involve a concern with things and behavior aimed at use. They are not only already interpretive but interpretive according to the very structures of meaningfulness and the disruption of meaning that Heidegger analyzed in Being and Time .
7. Thrownness (Geworfenheit) is at first employed by Heidegger as an articulation of facticity, but it increasingly replaces facticity as the preferred term.
8. I explore the question of individuation and difference in Heidegger's thought in the article "Ansprechen und Auseinandersetzung." See Existentia , 2000, Vol. X: 113-122.
9. In this, Heidegger elaborated a motive from Wilhelm Dilthey: the self-articulation of life (Makkreel, 1990, 306). This self-articulation is grounded in the character of Dasein as care (Sorge) rather than being only a pursuit for intellectual self-knowledge (compare Feher, 1996, 14).
10. Compare William Blattner's investigation of Heidegger's appropriation of the concept of limit-situation from Karl Jaspers (1994, 153-165).
11. Compare Gadamer's discussion of the relation between the "emptiness" of formal indication and "fulfillment" in concreteness (1994b, 33).