The most important thing in life and in work is to become something that one was not in the beginning.
Michel Foucault
Who of us can say, when he turns around on a path for which there is no return, that he followed it as only he had to?
Fernando Pessoa
§ 41. Retrospective Reflections on the World-Conceptual Relevance of a Hermeneutics of Facticity
With the hermeneutical demonstration that our never other than lifeworldly situated self-understanding is always already historical at the origin of its self-worldly significance, the factual analysis of Heidegger’s early work comes to an end, in that for one thing, it makes explicit the point of departure of phenomenological hermeneutics of factical historical life in the wealth of its structures. For another, beyond the fact of placing the starting point in life, the central question of his early work illuminates at the same time how “factical life-experience belongs in a wholly originary sense to the problematic of philosophy,”1 in that the structure and task of a phenomenological ‘ur-science of life’ is determined more precisely as a hermeneutics of the situation. To sharpen the contour and profile in these ontological-functional relations was the aim of the present investigation.
If one considers the hermeneutics of the situation thus expressed according to its material side, one finds the claim inherent in it, as philosophy of our own time, also to work up its pressing social questions qua concrete critique of the time in a historical analysis oriented to the solution of problems; with Heidegger there is indeed only a comparably weak resonance, in particular, if one thinks of Kant, Herder, Humboldt, Fichte, and Hegel, of Kierkegaard and also Nietzsche in the sworn gesture of proposed diagnoses of a dawning age of European nihilism. And while from out of the circle of Heidegger’s contemporaries—whether it is a matter of Scheler and Simmel, esteemed by him, or his friend Jaspers—there are found extensive defenses of current social-political questions of the present, such testimonies are found rarely in the early Heidegger, with the exception of reflections on the place of the university. In other words, this means that at the level of explication Heidegger clearly undersells the structural insights, gained in hermeneutical reflection, into the contingency and relationality of human life-relations with regard to their potential in the direction of the material working out of a philosophy of the situation.
That he almost exclusively uses the innovative impetus of this insight—aimed at re-shaping phenomenology in the direction of a hermeneutics of historical factical life—with regard to lifeworldly existential explication and application in terms of the individual enactment of everyday life, and not in a historical critique of his times, which is another possible tendency gained from this transformation, does not mean that the factical-hermeneutical position articulated in formal indication cannot accommodate such concretion.2 In the generation of his students, that is, of Karl Löwith, Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, or Georg Picht, one very often encounters philosophical interventions of the type of diagnostic of the present aimed at and even inspired by Heidegger’s existential analyses. Like other philosophical guides or auspices of the time, such as Sartre, Camus, or Vattimo, Heidegger’s students bear witness as a whole to a not insignificant effective potential for and within the scope of duties of the critique of the age, in connection with numerous other philosophical and extraphilosophical influences and stimulants even in the Heideggerian approach.
Finally, to emphasize this, if only in a set of intimations, is to this extent relevant for a critical development of thought, as it is apparent from this point that the world-conceptual relevance of the Heideggerian approach need not, at least with regard to concrete explication, be laid bare by what he himself implements in his own investigations. If this deficit, seen as such, contains in itself a “need for catching up,” it can thus, with regard to his concrete work of analysis, turn out all the more productively if one bases oneself on the insights into the structure of experience of human being-in-the-world gained by the early Heidegger and communicated in corresponding conceptual explications.3 For Heidegger, as this investigation has shown, it is chiefly a matter of all individual experience in the face of the formal existential structures antecedently formatting, that is, opening up the horizon of experienceability in general, and as such constituting the image of the self and the world alike. In the dynamically shaped functional constancy of the self and world, the variance of the historically determined dispositive of the interpretation of life is inscribed, and accordingly the conditions—bound to their ontological structures—of the hermeneutical situation (as part 1 of the present treatise has shown) are always already historicized in themselves; consequently, the ontological character of facticity exhibited and revealed in formal indication is not to be uncoupled from concrete factical historical hermeneutics in which philosophy itself, as we have seen, is handed down in accordance with its conception of the world.
In other words, it is the phenomenological working out of formally indicating structures with and by Heidegger’s successors in historical hermeneutics that has excavated the fundamental structures of human self- and world understanding in a way that nonetheless in its formalization does not leap over the lifeworldly dimension of the factically concrete enactment of life in its historical experiences as its own originary level of thematization. On this view, the fact that the hermeneutics of facticity belongs to the aforementioned line of tradition proves itself not simply and solely as consistent with the grasped philosophy according to its ‘concept of the world.’ Further still, with the hermeneutically enacted turn to phenomenology in general, the world-concept of philosophy is determined anew; that is, it preserves a hermeneutic basis, which in itself opens the possibility of knowing the coherence of the self-relation and world-relation in the indicated self-understanding as an ontologically revealed context of wholeness.
If one keeps in view this basic state of affairs constitutive of sense for the hermeneutics of facticity, this means that, to stress it once more, the critically remarked deficiency in the Heideggerian ‘world-conceptual process’ does not concern the basic conception of lifeworldly hermeneutics. What is deficient, if you will, exclusively in view of the present texts is their material arrangement or the concrete explication and application of the approach of the hermeneutics of facticity. But in exactly this respect, a wide field of future tasks opens itself for an existential-phenomenological hermeneutics also applied pragmatically therein.
A situational thinking of this sort easily, habitually achieves a proximity to an understanding of philosophy that conceives theory as practice. As has been shown over the course of this investigation, Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity forms itself in the experience of life, in that it governs the insertion of phenomenological explication in the concrete, factical interpretedness of life, through which it possesses a predominant orientation to the “present of the proximal [Gegenwart des Zunächst].”4 As a life-experience itself in this sense, in which it opens possibilities for the “self-encounter of Dasein,”5 this hermeneutics at the same time formulates the claim represented from the ancients onward, to conceive philosophy as a mode of life, as a “mode of knowing in which factical Dasein poses itself … unrelentingly for itself.”6
Philosophy as a form of life is a familiar theme that was broached in multifaceted ways in ever-new chapters in the history of thinking in the twentieth century, just as much in the late Wittgenstein as under other particular philosophical auspices in the existentialism of Sartre, the skeptical humanism of Camus, or in Levinas’s ‘humanism of the other’ and again otherwise in Foucault’s late creative period in the project of a philosophy of the art of life conceived as an aesthetics of existence. The question of philosophy as a form of life expresses itself phenomenologically-hermeneutically, in that the attentiveness or conceptual carefulness first and foremost directs itself to the mode of sight(ing) distinguished in and as coming to self-understanding, in which the natural and philosophical attitude itself draws closer to phenomena.
The fact that since the time of Thales a tripwire has existed imperiling the steadfastness of the philosopher in the nearest environment of sound human understanding leads familiarly to the fact that from the optics of the maid and the philosopher, contact with things and access to the commonly divided world seem so different. Insofar as this tension between the natural and the philosophical attitude, as we have seen, cannot be overcome, but instead virtually constitutes phenomenological-hermeneutical consciousness at the basis of the point of departure of pretheoretical experience, this itself becomes the motive for the developing of philosophy as a form of life. This basic phenomenon of the self- and world-relation of philosophical thinking proceeds before our eyes both vividly and impressively and at the same time thereby concludes this investigation in terms of a forerunning preliminary, as it were, when one recalls, in the place of a succinct closing remark as an open end, a note in which Paul Valéry—both phenomenologically in description and sharply edged in hermeneutical explication—clarifies the tension between philosophical and nonphilosophical self-understanding in relation to the lifeworld:
Does the greatest philosopher know no more than the first hack to happen along?
Perhaps it is to his advantage to know less. To know that he knows less.
Or—what comes to the same—to know that that which goes on in this hack when he is disturbed, astonished, confused—that this can be brought into play in every context, at every moment, systematically.
Philosophy is that which, at each moment, can bring things to a halt.
In this way, a certain dream unsettles the hack, the coachman, in waking to astonishment. But the philosopher transfers to the events and thoughts of the condition of wakefulness, the clearest waking—the same questions and surprises that related them only to the unambiguously alien in the dream.
Each lives in a clear, albeit diffuse world, the thinker in a darkness with a few bright spots.7
1. Heidegger, Phänomenologie der Anschauung und des Ausdrucks, ed. Claudius Strube [Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1993], GA 59, 38.
2. If one searches in Heidegger’s work after reasons for the missing world-conceptual implementation, its absence may be connected with the fact that in the course of the generally acknowledged formation of the approach of his lifeworldly hermeneutics, precisely this historical hermeneutics of facticity as it was proposed programmatically in the summer of 1923 in the form of a lecture, appeared to be comprehended at the threshold of the shift to a hermeneutical phenomenology as the ontology of Dasein—which, as Heidegger repeatedly emphasizes in Sein und Zeit, since the mid-1920s follows other aims in the question of being posed therein than that of a factical-hermeneutically-initiated anthropology or social ontology. And yet where an interest for its localization within the conception of fundamental ontology does appear, its systematic place is thereby understood rather than ascribed, as we have seen (§ 29), in metontology.
3. See, e.g. Hans-Helmuth Gander, “Interpretation—Situation—Vernetzung. Hermeneutische Überlegungen zum Selbst- und Weltbezug im multimedialen Zeitalter,” in Hermeneutik und Ästhetik. Die Theologie des Wortes im mulitmedialen Zeitalter, ed. Ulrich H. J. Körtner (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2001), 19–33.
4. Heidegger, GA 63, 30; cf. ibid., 85ff.
5. Ibid., 18.
6. Ibid.
7. Paul Valéry, Cahiers [Hefte] vol. 2, ed. Hartmut Köhler and Jürgen Schmidt-Radefeldt [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988], 62.