Theodore Kisiel
It was Fichte who first coined the abstract term “facticity” (Facticität; later Faktizität) for the philosophical tradition. He was thereby not referring to empirical facts or a collection of them, but to the central “fact” of the tradition of modern thought, which takes its starting-point from Descartes’ famous regress to the “fact of the I-think”, understood as the irreducible limit of reflection behind which one can question no further. It then becomes the ground on which all of modern philosophy takes its stand in order, like Atlas, to move the entire world. The locution of the “fact of the I-think” appears on occasion in Kant’s First Critique, which he supplements with another comprehensive fact early in the Second Critique, when he proclaims the moral law, in its correlation with freedom, to be “the sole fact of pure [practical] reason”. It might accordingly be called a transcendental fact, although Fichte tended to call it “facticity”, especially in his later lecture courses. The posthumous publication of these courses and later works by his theologian son, Immanuel Hermann Fichte, could be considered the most proximate source of the diffusion of the term into the nineteenth-century literature of both philosophy and theology. Nineteenth-century Protestant theology is replete with references to the “facticity” of the events of Christian salvation history, on which the Christian faith takes its original stand. The persistent albeit sporadic use of the term in nineteenth-century writers such as Kierkegaard, Feuerbach, Dilthey and the neo-Kantians is a matter of lexical record (Kisiel 1986–7, 2008).
Dilthey’s occasional use of the term is especially influential on Heidegger. In the context of distinguishing between mythical thought and religious experience, the early Dilthey makes the following observation about the world of early humanity:
[T]his context … grounded in religious experience … is likewise conditioned by the way in which reality is given to human beings in those days. Reality is life and remains life for them; it does not become an intellectual object by way of knowledge. Therefore, it is in all ways will, facticity, history, that is, living original reality. Because it is there for the whole living human being and has not yet been subjected to any kind of intellectual analysis and abstraction (hence dilution), it is therefore itself life. … Life is never exhausted by thought.
(Dilthey 1988: 161 = 1973: 141, emphasis added, trans. mod.)
And yet life is amenable to thinking, when performed without theoretical intrusion, that is, phenomenologically. In his quest for a critique of historical reason, Dilthey gradually renounces the elevated reason of the detached transcendental ego, “in whose veins flows no real blood” (1973: xviii), and calls instead for a return to the “this-side” of life, to the full facticity of unhintergehbares life itself, “behind which [theoretical] thought cannot go”, the vital original reality given to human beings to live before they come to think about it, an irreducible ultimate and irrevocable givenness that human beings cannot but live in and are bound to live out. It is the phenomenological return “to the things themselves”, in this case, back to the transcendental fact of life itself. Starting from the ineradicable givenness of factic life, the phenomenologist must now enter into this life in order to understand it from out of itself, in its own terms. In his philosophy of historical life, Dilthey’s ambition was to develop the “categories” – Heidegger will eventually call them existentials – or basic structures of historical life out of factic life itself, which prior to any thought spontaneously articulates and contextures itself in a manifold of vitally concrete and meaningful basic relations (beginning with I-myself-being-embodied-in-the-world-with-others-among-things) that constitute its immediate lifeworld. In Dilthey’s pregnant phrase, “das Leben selbst legt sich aus”: “life itself lays itself out, interprets itself”, generating its own meaning and senses of direction in the combined shape and thrust of a working context and operative continuity of structure (Wirkungszusammenhang) (Kisiel 1993: 134–5).
In fact, human life is this self-articulating and therefore fundamentally understandable operative continuity of context. Accordingly, phenomenology as the pre-theoretical proto-science of original experience is a “hermeneutics of facticity”, whose initial aim is to make explicit the implicit structures into which historical life has already spontaneously articulated itself, “laid itself out”, prior to any extraneous thought or alien theoretical intrusion. The young Heidegger thus sharply juxtaposes the historically situated I over against any sort of theoretical I or transcendental ego abstracted in Cartesian fashion from its vital context, thereby denuded of its world, dehistoricized and devitalized (ibid.: 45–6; TDP 61–6, 74–7, 174 = GA 56/57: 73–8, 88–91, 206, 208–9).
This historically situated I will soon be ontologically identified with Da-sein as being-in-the-world (see Chapter 3). The language of life now slides into the language of be-ing. Yet, behind the scenes of Dasein as being-in-the-world, the spontaneous hermeneutics of factic life experience continues to operate as a pre-theoretical primal domain of being. Consider the theme of the understanding-of-being. Human being understands being. But this “understanding-of-being” is at first not conceptual in nature; it is rather the more matter-of-fact understanding of what it means to be that comes from simply living a life. To begin with, we do not know what “being” means conceptually, but we are in fact quite familiar with its sense preconceptually in and through the manifold habitual activity of living. If the term “knowledge” still applies to this understanding of life in its being, it is more the immediate “know-how” or “savoir faire” of existence, a knack or feel for what it means to be and how to “go about the business” (umgehen) of being that comes from life experience. We already know how to live, and this pre-understanding of the ways of being is repeatedly elaborated and cultivated in our various forays into the environing world of things and the communal world of being-with-others, both of which intercalate and come to a head in the most comprehensive of meaningful contexts, the self-world of our very own being-in-the-world.
This repeated cultivation and explication of our pre-understanding of being into habitually reinforced articulated contexts of relational meaning is what Heidegger has called a “hermeneutics of facticity”, where the “of” is regarded as a double genitive. That is to say, the facticity of life experience, on the basis of a prior understanding, already spontaneously explicates and interprets itself, repeatedly unfolding into the network of meaningful relations that constitutes the fabric of human concerns that we call our historical world. Historically situated existence in its facticity is thoroughly hermeneutical. Accordingly, any overtly phenomenological hermeneutics of facticity, in its expository interpretation of the multifaceted concerns of the human situation, is but an explicit recapitulation of an implicit pan-hermeneutic process already indigenous to historical life. Facticity is through and through hermeneutical (understandable, intelligible, meaningful).
But there is more. Also related to the hermeneutic situation of factic life is one of Heidegger’s most celebrated “theses”, namely, that Dasein is disclosiveness, the locus of truth as the unconcealment of being (see Chapter 8). This originary mode of truth is already manifest from the tacit dimension of pre-predicative understanding that must be repeatedly explicated out of its precedent latency and concealment, first of all in the persistent exercise of the habit of living, which can then be more overtly explicated by way of deliberative existential and phenomenological exposition. The hermeneutic situation of factic life itself, unfolding itself against the background context of the environing world of tool usage and procurement of products, the interpersonal world of social usage and communal custom in being-with-others, and the self-world of striving-to-be and discovering oneself in one’s unique being, is the proximate disclosive arena of originary truth as unconcealment. Truth is thereby displaced from its traditional locus in judgement and assertion – even seemingly comprehensive assertions such as Cogito ergo sum – to the existentially contextualized expository question, especially when it is poised at the doubled frontier of concealment of the human situation in its mystery and its errancy.
The comprehensive disclosive capability of human existence was in fact recognized quite early by the philosophical tradition. Aristotle, for example, observes that “the human soul is, in a way, all beings”, that is, it is capable of “coming together with” all being by way of cognitive intellection (SZ 14, citing De anima 3, 430a14). But for this tradition, which runs from Parmenides to Husserl, the basic mode of knowing is the total transparency of illuminative seeing, intuition, which in temporal terms means a making-present. In the context of a hermeneutics of facticity, by contrast, the basic mode of knowing is interpretive exposition out of a background of understanding that by and large remains tacit, latent, withdrawn and, at most, only appresent, a tangential presence that shades off into the shadows of being’s concealment. Discovering beings and disclosing the self and its world take place in a temporal “clearing” of unconcealing being that displays an overriding tendency to withdraw into concealment. But this very withdrawal is what draws the enquiring human being to unceasing thought in its questioning pursuit of the temporal sense and mystery of being.
The facticity of life was first thematized indicatively and schematically1 in the War Emergency Semester of 1919 under the heading of the pre-theoretical “primal something” (Ur-etwas) of “life in and for itself” (Kisiel 1993: 21–2, 38, 50–55; TDP 186–7, 98 = GA 56/57: 219–20, 116). The semesters that follow make factic life the sole and central matter of a phenomenology defined as the pre-theoretical primal science of original experience.
Heidegger’s most exhaustive phenomenological treatment of factic life itself occurs in Winter Semester 1921–2, replete with an elaborate system of categories in the spirit of Dilthey that trace the complex motions of life in its relations with the world. The transitive movements of life include to live in, live out of, live for, live against, live with, and so on, something. This “something” that sustains these manifold relations of living is called the “world”. The category “world” accordingly names what is lived, what life holds to, the content aimed at by life. Consequently, if life is regarded in its relational sense, the world then characterizes its sense of holdings, its sense of containment. The relational sense of living can be further formally specified as caring. To live is to care. Broadly understood, to live is to care for our privations or needs, for example, “our daily bread”. What we care for and about, what caring adheres to, can be defined as meaningfulness. Meaningfulness is a categorial determination of the contextured world. The world and its objects are present in life in the basic relational sense of caring. “An act of caring encounters them, meets them as it goes its way” (PIA 68 = GA 61: 90). Caring is an experience of objects in their respective mode of encounter, ranging from things and persons to oneself, which respectively occupy the environing world, the shared world and one’s own world, the three specific worlds of care. To be an object here is to be met on the path of care and experienced as meaningful. Meaningfulness is to be taken broadly and not restricted to a particular domain of objects, say, objects of “value”. Meaningfulness is not experienced as such, but can become explicit in the expository interpretation of one’s own life as factic (PIA 70 = GA 61: 93).
The deeper structure of factic life that underlies the intentional correlation between us and the world thus proves to be the correlativity of care and meaningfulness. This deep structure might now be properly identified as its facticity, which as an articulated context of meaning is in no way a brute fact closed in on itself but instead a meaningful context open to further development. One such development – Heidegger here calls it the actualization of a tendency inherent in factic life – is for factic life in its caring to enter into the world to the point of becoming taken by it and never managing to return to itself.
Heidegger’s first detailed phenomenological account of the ways of decadence – in this semester called “ruinance” (Ruinanz) – is presented in an idiosyncratic language and at a level of complexity that will by and large be abandoned in future accounts, as it is in Being and Time, where it is described as a “falling” into “inauthenticity” (see Chapter 4). A sampling of just one of the ways of ruinance developed here may suffice. Life’s tendency to become totally absorbed in the world can reach the point of abolishing the sense of distance from the world as such. Instead, its sense of distance gets shunted into dispersion, being transported from one meaningful arena to another, now seeking distantiation within the meaningful world. The life of care in the shared world is accordingly directed towards rank, success, position, advancement, advantage, superiority (PIA 77, 90 = GA 61: 103, 121). This care for distantiation and distinction finds ever new gratification in the dispersion, which multiplies itself endlessly. “Life, in its inclination to disperse its relational sense into distantiation, is hyperbolic” (PIA 78 = GA 61: 104). Multiplicity itself becomes a mode of meaningfulness. In its endless quest for variety and novelty, life at times even lapses into the temptation of curiosity, the fascinating “lust of the eyes”. In incessantly looking at the world, life looks away from itself. In being drawn into the world, life is in fact in flight from itself. The very multiplicity of possibilities increases the possibilities of mis-taking one’s self in ever new worldly ways. One is embarked on a life of interminable mis-takes, a veritable life of errancy. Succumbing to the illusion of infinite possibilities, life sequesters itself off from itself. In so doing, factic life constantly eludes its self and pursues the path of the elliptical (PIA 81 = GA 61: 108), cultivating multiple ways of self-evasion, dissembling and self-deception.
Here, accordingly, a counter-ruinant hermeneutics of facticity assumes the role of unmasking dissemblance and disguise, in order to bring factic life back from its lostness in the multiplicity of the world and restore it to itself in its most original self-standing and uniquely unified stance in the facticity of life. The counter-movement to lostness in decadence is the movement of transcendence towards simply finding one’s self in the sheer and utter facticity of one’s own unique factic situation of simply being-t/here in its full insecurity and radical questionability. It is of the essence of philosophy to be counter-ruinant in its persevering movement towards facticity pure and simple. Countering the flight of factic life from itself, it seeks out its own facticity in its fullest temporal and historical concretion, which turns out to be its very own factic self in its unique historical situation, as the unique basis for interpreting its hermeneutic situation. How this is to be achieved calls for a review of the senses of direction that underlie the above account of the intentional movements of factic life.
We have already highlighted the containment sense of the world as meaningful context and the relational sense of caring, and stressed the broad formality of these senses interlocked in the most basic of the intentional relationships of facticity. The caring relationship with the world has been mobilized into a multiplicity of forms and manifestations, and thereby brought to concrete actualization. This is its sense of actualization, at this “ruinant” stage by and large improper or “inauthentic”. A more proper (eigentlich: “authentic”) concretion is to be attained by the temporal and historical extension of the actualization sense, its temporalizing sense, which indicates “how the actualization becomes actualization in and for its [holistically proper] situation, how it temporally develops, matures, comes to fruition. This temporal ripening is to be interpreted on the basis of the sense of temporalization” (PIA 40 = GA 61: 53, emphasis added). The factic experiential context now acquires a unique historical thrust in its sense of actualization. This holistic context is to be understood and interpreted not in objective-historical but in actualization-historical terms, as history-in-enactment, as self-actualization in one’s unique and whole historical context. It is an invitation for the self to-be-historical in and for its own proper situation. And it is by way of the temporalizing sense – which in Being and Time becomes the “authenticating” unitary movement of originary temporality – that one now “owns up” to one’s very own historical situation in its wholeness, thereby itself becoming a proper, historically situated self. Pervading the comprehensive temporalizing sense is a sense of the kairos, a sense of the timeliness of one’s own historical situation coming to its fullness of time, soliciting the self to respond with a correspondingly appropriate timeliness in order to be its time. Comprehending that situation at once properly and holistically, the temporalizing sense thereby transforms the intentional categories of life into proper hermeneutic categories operating in their properly comprehensive historical context, categories that are accordingly formally indicative in character, indicative of one’s very own concrete situation in its proper actualization while remaining formal on the level of the holistic life-nexus (PIA 87 = GA 61: 116). Unified by the properly comprehensive sense of temporalization, the triple-sensed prestruction (the senses of containment, relation and actualization schematized above) of the intentional relation between life and the world now becomes a fully fledged formally indicative concept; and in the end Heidegger considers formally indicative concepts to be the only properly philosophical concepts. The triple-sensed prestruction is itself now translated into the triadic presuppositional structure (of prepossession, preview and preconception) of the proper hermeneutic situation, which becomes the concrete site of interpretation out of which life and philosophy will now ripen into full maturity and come to themselves.
Since philosophy, radically understood, always starts from the pre-theoretical realm of the facticity of original experience, it does not in fact “pose” or “posit” its presup-positions. For it has already been positioned within its most basic “presupposition”, the very facticity of factic life. In Heidegger’s early language, its basic Voraus-setzung is in fact Voraus-dasein (PIA 120–22 = GA 61: 159–61), “pre-existence” in its being-t/here. Rather than a positing, it is more a matter of a radical return to the original facticity of the concrete life-situation in which we already find ourselves positioned, interpretively appropriating it and developing it into our own unique hermeneutic situation in which and out of which philosophy is to do its work of expository interrogation. Presuppositions of this sort are to be lived, seized as such in order to plunge wholeheartedly into the factically historical dimension of existence (IHS 478 n.4). What is to be brought into view as the basic prepossession of one’s own temporally and historically particular hermeneutic situation is the full concretion of factic life itself, which is the sole and comprehensive “object” of philosophical research. And since it is itself a mode of factic life, “philosophical research is itself the explicit actualization of a basic movement of factic life and constantly maintains itself within that life” (IHS 158, emphasis added). Philosophy actualizes itself only by way of the radical and concrete questioning that arises from the anxiety over its very own historically particular situation. What is being placed in question is the very facticity of one’s own time and generation. Being thus questioned by a historical situation that is uniquely its own, “philosophy is what it can be only as the philosophy of ‘its time’” (OHF 14 = GA 63: 18).
It is accordingly incumbent on each time and each generation of philosophers to subject its current hermeneutic situation, which to begin with has been transmitted to it in an already given interpretedness, to a deconstructive regress in order to explicate the hidden motive forces that are operative within that factic i nterpretation. In the end, philosophy’s entire history must be subjected to a destructive contestation of its venerable concepts in order to retrieve the original experiences from which they have developed. All this in order to direct the present situation towards a more radical possibility of appropriation of its historical situation. What Heidegger achieves at this stage from the vantage of facticity is a critique of the Greek-Christian tradition of the interpretation of life, especially human life (IHS 169–70), somewhat short of the metaphysics of constant presence on the level of being that will quite soon take centre stage and eventually be identified with the Occidental “history of be-ing” (see Chapter 11).2
Unique to Being and Time is its treatment of facticity in close proximity with the sense of the “thrownness” (Geworfenheit) of human existence. The interjection of thrownness into Being and Time also marks the completion in the radical switch of paradigms from the Husserlian Cogito to the Heideggerian Da-Sein, from an intentionally oriented consciousness to a historically situated ex-sistence, which was perceptibly imperfectly carried out in the somewhat mixed earlier accounts of the facticity of life.
The sense of thrownness, colloquially put, is the potentially stunning realization that I find myself thrown into a world I did not make and into a life I did not ask for. In this stark and simple revelation of human finitude, one is confronted by the ineluctable radical fact of simply being here, willy-nilly; or, as Heidegger puts it, “the being of Dasein breaks forth as the naked [and pure fact] ‘that it is and has to be’” (SZ 134). The term “thrownness” aims to convey this existentially radical self-finding of Dasein’s purely and simply being-here. “Dasein always ‘finds itself’ only as a thrown Fact” (SZ 328). “The expression ‘thrownness’ is meant to suggest the facticity of [Dasein’s] being delivered over [to itself and its having-to-be]” (SZ 135). To be sure, Dasein is not a fact in the way that extant things are facts; rather, it is an ex-sisting fact, which continues to be what it always already has been, namely, thrown, carrying this thrownness forward as it throws itself forward, that is, pro-jects itself into its possibilities of being. Taken together as a single trajectory, thrown-projection is a unitary movement that constitutes the finite temporality of Dasein. Like other such Facts, thrownness is unhintergehbar: “As existing, Dasein never comes back behind its thrownness” (SZ 284). It constitutes one of life’s limit situations, that of finding oneself already situated in existence willy-nilly, which, when coupled with the other extreme limit situation, that of death taken as my outermost possibility, the possibility of the impossibility of being-in-the-world, allows us to take over our full finite self in its radical individuality and its wholeness.
But there is more to thrownness than this stark and sheer Fact of simply being here, my being delivered over to the Fact “that I am and have to be”. Also belonging to thrownness is the fact that Dasein “has been relegated to a ‘world’ and exists factically with others” (SZ 383). That is to say, we have been thrown not only into sheer being but also into an already contextualized being that we share with others. Thrownness in this context is associated with being born – as life’s opposite end from death – into the world (SZ 374) and, more specifically, born into a certain heritage that is taken to be a largely historical heritage (SZ 383) that might well include elements of family inheritance, such as upbringing, but certainly not biological heredity. This more concrete but still radical thrownness thus refers to the fact that we have been “born”, or “thrown”, into our particular historical world. “Born” here is somewhat metaphorical in usage, approaching the literal only when it refers to our being born into the historical community of a particular people and into a particular historical generation of that community (SZ 384–5). This triad of “sociopolitical” concepts that provides social concretion to the historicality of the human situation also comes from Dilthey (SZ 385 n.; Kisiel 2001), who likewise did not understand them biologically but cultivated them in the context of a “history of spirit”. As historical beings, we already stand in a tradition handed down to us by and through a progression of generational exchanges of a linguistic community. Factically, we have been preceded and precedented and thereby always already interpreted, and this historical lifeworld of precedence and tradition is the ineluctable point of departure of our own historical existence.
Taking over one’s very own historical thrownness accordingly involves taking over one’s own heritage (SZ 382–4) in the protoaction of proper historicality. In particular, it involves taking over the possibilities of one’s heritage that are adjudged to be relevant for one’s own current historical situation, as inherited and yet chosen possibilities. The basic historicalizing action of proper historicality takes place in the retracing of the unitary movement of the thrown-projection that is originary temporality; resolutely open for the whole of its unique historical situation, Dasein in the futural forerunning of its own death allows itself to be thrown back into the having-been of its factic “there”, where it takes over its own thrownness by transmitting the most pertinent of the inherited possibilities to itself, in order to be there in the timely moment of decision for “its time” (SZ 385). Crucial here is the recovery of precedent possibilities that are appropriate for “its time” and its generation. That is why the repetition of a tradition cannot be a rote repetition. The retrieval of precedent possibilities at once involves a re-view and a re-vision of them or, in Heidegger’s terms, a countering and a countermanding to the point of a “disavowal of that which in the ‘today’ is working itself out as the ‘past and gone’” (SZ 386). The remarkable feature of this process of reinterpretation of precedent possibilities for its time is that our own past now comes to meet us out of the projected future (SZ 20), as our proper historical tasks.
Since repetition involves interpretation and reinterpretation in accord with the holistic context of the historical situation into which one is thrown, we have come full circle back to a hermeneutics of facticity, now focusing on the overt disclosive exposition of one’s very own situation, the proper site of this more focused, that is, formally indicative (indexical), hermeneutics of facticity. Owning up to the holistic situation as my very own, thereby taking responsibility for it, being responsive to the solicitations and demands exacted by that temporally particular situation, making a precedent possibility latent in my heritage my own by way of repetition and explicitly handing it down to myself: all of these hermeneutic acts of enownment come together in the protoaction (Urhandlung) of proper historicality, which resolutely recapitulates the movement of the thrown-projection that is my originary temporality in its ownness and finite wholeness, from future to having-been to the timely moment of decision, where it can be said that “I am my time”. Or, to put it in its full finitude and naked thrownness: I am my one-and-only unique and proper lifetime. Historically, this could be called my fate, just as “we are our time” could be the expression of the communal destiny of a particular generation, say, of philosophers.
Resorting to the indexical personal pronouns brings us back to the formally indicative concept, which, as already noted, finds its ultimate actualization only in one’s very own temporal situation. The most central of the formal indications calls for this actualization to take place at the level of be-ing itself : “The be-ing about which this entity [called Dasein] is concerned is in each instantiation mine [yours, ours]” (SZ 42). Be-ing at its ownmost thus finds its proper expression in the existential declarations of the “personal pronouns, I am, you are, [we are]” (SZ 42). Following through on this formal indication by owning up to our most proper be-ing leads us to transform ourselves into the ownmost (eigenstes) Da-sein within ourselves, which in turn draws us more or less directly into the event of enownment, propriation, properizing, das Er-eignis. For it is in the ownhood and proper-dom of properizing enownment that the I, you and we come together and in each instantiation become them selves, in a “selfhood [that] is more originary than any I and you and we” (CP 225 = GA 65: 320), in short, the unique and proper selfhood of be-ing that transcends and comprehends all of the “personal” pronouns. (Put in grammatical terms, the enownment of be-ing transforms the indexicals of I, you and we into their more intensive “reflexives”, I myself, you yourself, we ourselves.)
Das Er-eignis, “originary history itself” (CP 23 = GA 65: 32), is the later Heidegger’s most frequently invoked, and deepest, characterization of the Da-sein-Sein relationship (see Chapter 11), which one can surmise to be already taking shape above in the increasingly receptive relationship, to the point of a reversal of initiative, developing between the human being and its thrown situation of be-ing. Dare one say that originarily owned temporality on the level of Dasein, and even more so the event of enownment/propriation on the level of be-ing (see Chapter 5), is now the ultimate facticity, behind which one can go no further? To be sure, not the fundamentum inconcussum that Descartes sought but, as temporal, clearly a fundamentum concussum, a shakeable foundation, a ground that gives way on to an abyss (Ab-grund)?
In a note circa 1929 that belongs among the attempts to complete the fragment that is Being and Time, Heidegger remarks:
temporality: it is not just a fact, but itself of the essence of the fact: facticity. The fact of facticity (here the root of the “turn-around” of “ontology” [into a metontology]). Can one ask, “How does time originate?” … Only with time is there a possibility of origination. … But then, what is the meaning of the impossibility of the problem of the origination of time?
(UV 9, emphasis added)
The formally indicative dimension of the hermeneutics of facticity has emerged in the above account, first, by way of the senses of direction coming together in the triple-sensed intentionality of factic life, which attains its most proper wholeness in a culminating unifying sense of temporalization; and, secondly, in the context of a situated ex-sistence finding itself thrown into a historical world and called on to make that historical situation its own by way of an overt disclosive exposition and retrieval of its latent precedent possibilities that are still relevant for its own time and generation, and their projection as our proper historical tasks. The formally indicative dimension, its indexical character, thus finds its proper site in the protoaction of my owning up to my holistic situation in order to come to my proper and whole historically situated self, a protoaction that resolutely recapitulates the thrown-projection that is my originary temporality in its ownness and finite wholeness. Indeed, the entire Division Two of Being and Time (BT) is devoted to bringing the “ontic-ontological projection of Dasein toward its very own and proper potential-to-be-whole” (SZ 313) to fruition in the proper and holistic movement of originary temporality. The lecture courses that follow the publication of Being and Time constitute various attempts to sketch out the direction of its never published Division Three (Kisiel 2005). These courses gradually make clear that the formally indicative dimension constitutes a radical revision of the very essence of philosophy. Philosophy is no longer a science, not even the original science of originary experience, but something more originary in its relentless transcending towards the temporal ground of Dasein in order to exist purely out of this disclosive ground. As such, philosophy opens up this possibility of transcendence to factically existing human beings and so points the way and grants them leeway to transcend towards their own temporally particular Dasein, which in each instantiation is mine, yours, ours. In prompting existing individuals to transcend towards this ground, in providing the occasion for this fundamental decision “to let transcendence happen”, philosophy is exercising its exhortative function, which Aristotle already designated as the protreptic of philosophy. Philosophy is not a science, but a directive exhortative protreptic.
The course of Winter Semester 1929–30 emphasizes this point from the perspective of Heidegger’s very last treatment of formal indication. In contrast to scientific concepts, all philosophical concepts are formally indicative.
The meaning-content of these concepts does not directly intend or express what they refer to, but only gives an indication, a pointer to the fact that anyone seeking to understand is called upon by this conceptual context to actualize a transformation of themselves into the Dasein [within themselves].
(FCM 297 = GA 29/30: 430, emphasis added, with addendum from FCM 296 = GA 29/30: 428)
Because such concepts can only convey the call for such a transformation to us without being able to bring about this transformation themselves, they are but indicative concepts. They in each instance point to Dasein itself, which in each instantiation is my (your, our) Da-sein, as the locus and potential agent of this transformation. “Because in this indication they in each instance point to a concretion of the individual Dasein in man, yet never bring the content of this concretion with them, such concepts are formally indicative” (FCM 296 = GA 29/30: 429). But when concepts are generic and abstract rather than proper to the concrete occasion in terms of which they are to be interpreted, “the interpretation is deprived of all its autochthonous power, since whoever seeks to understand would not then be heeding the directive that resides in every philosophical concept” (FCM 298 = GA 29/30: 431). Yet the kind of interpreting that seeks out its very own facticity in each instance is not “some additional, so-called ethical application of what is conceptualized, but . a prior opening up of the dimension of what is to be comprehended” (FCM 296 = GA 29/30: 428–9), namely, the “concretion of [each] individual Dasein”, its proper selfhood. The concepts and questions of philosophizing are in a class of their own, in contrast to science. These conceptual questions serve the task of philosophy: not to describe or explain man and his world, “but to evoke the Dasein in man” (FCM 174 = GA 29/30: 258). Accordingly, philosophy is not a science, but a directive exhortative protreptic, whose concepts are not generic and common, applicable to ALL indiscriminately and uniformly, but rather hermeneutically distributive and proper, applicable to EACH individually in accord with the unique temporal context in which each individual is situated. The same point is made in Being and Time in the distinction between “categories” and “existentials” (SZ 44–5), between the What-question and the Who-question, between the uniform anyone-self and the proper self of a unique one-time-only lifetime. “ALL men are mortal” is generic and common, stating a neutral scientific fact, while “EACH of us must die our own death” is distributively selective and individuating, singling out each to come to terms with their very own facticity of being-t/here.
These formally indicative, properly philosophical concepts thus only evoke the Da-sein in human being, but do not actually bring it about. There is something penultimate about philosophizing. Its questioning brings us to the very brink of the possibility of Dasein, just short of “restoring to Dasein its actuality, that is, its existence” (FCM 173 = GA 29/30: 257). There is a very fine line between philosophizing and actualizing over which the human being cannot merely slip across, but rather must overleap in order to dislodge its Dasein. “Only individual action itself can dislodge us from this brink of possibility into actuality, and this is the moment of decision and of holistic insight [into the concrete situation of action and be-ing]” (FCM 173 = GA 29/30: 257). It is the protoaction (Urhandlung) of resolute openness to one’s own concretely unique situation of be-ing, of letting it be, in each instantiation concretely re-enacted in accord with one’s own unique situation and particular “while” of history that authenticates our existence and properizes our philosophizing. It is in such originary action, repeatedly re-enacted from one generation to the next, that ontology finds its ontic founding. Just as Aristotle (and so the metaphysical tradition) founded his prote philosophia in theologia, so Heidegger now founds his fundamental ontology on “something ontic – the Dasein” (BPP 19 = GA 24: 26).
1. The schematic can be found only in the 1999 edition of GA 56/57.
2. It might parenthetically be noted that the concrete factic situation that motivates this destructive effort is the current facticity of philosophy itself, coming to fruition as it does in the operative context of the university, which has itself become the intellectual and spiritual locus of generational change (PIA 49–58, 122 = GA 61: 65–78, 161). And the present generation distinguishes itself from all previous generations by its acute historical consciousness of the past (PIA 55 = GA 61: 74). The factic historical institution of the university thus already finds itself in a factic life that is through and through historical (PIA 57 = GA 61: 76). It therefore falls on present generations of philosophers to actualize a thoroughly radical sense of the historical within the staid and venerable tradition of the university.
Dilthey, W 1988. Introduction to the Human Sciences: An Attempt to Lay a Foundation for the Study of Society and History, R. J. Betanzos (trans.). Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Originally published as Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften: Versuch einer Grundlegungfür das Studium der Gesellschaft und der Geschichte. Gesammelte Schriften, I, 7th edn (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1973).
Kisiel, T. 1986–7. “Das Entstehen des Begriffsfeldes ‘Faktizität’ im Frühwerk Heideggers”, Dilthey-Jahrbuch 4: 91–120.
Kisiel, T. 1993. The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Kisiel, T. 2001. “Der sozio-logische Komplex der Geschichtlichkeit des Daseins: Volk, Gemeinschaft, Generation”. In Die Jemeinigkeit des Mitseins: Die Daseinsanalytik Martin Heideggers und die Kritik der soziologischen Vernunft, J. Weiss (ed.), 85–103. Konstanz: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft.
Kisiel, T. 2005. “The Demise of Being and Time: 1927–30”. In Heidegger’s Being and Time: Critical Essays, R. Polt (ed.), 189–214. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Kisiel, T. 2008. “On the Genesis of Heidegger’s Formally Indicative Hermeneutics of Facticity”. In Rethinking Facticity, F. Raffoul & E. S. Nelson (eds), 41–67. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
The two extant English translations of Heidegger’s Being and Time by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson in 1962 (BT) and Joan Stambaugh in 1996(BTS) both contain the pagination of the 1927 German original Sein und Zeit (SZ) in the margins. The protoaction of Dasein is formally indicated, especially in Division Two, where the pivotal and summary sections are §§45, 46, 54, 61–6, 69, 74, 83.
The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude is the English translation by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker of GA 29/30, Freiburg course of Winter Semester (WS) 1929–30. See especially §70a, “Formal Indication as a Fundamental Character of Philosophical Concepts”, 291–8.
Towards the Definition of Philosophy is the English translation by Ted Sadler of GA 56/57, which edits the three early Freiburg lecture courses of 1919. See especially the course of War Emergency Semester 1919, “The Idea of Philosophy and the Problem of World Views”, part 2, 53–99, and Appendix II, 183–8.
Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle: Initiation into Phenomenological Research is the English translation by Richard Rojcewicz of GA 61, the early Freiburg course of Winter Semester (WS) 1921–2. On formal indication, see especially part 2, chapter 2, “Appropriation of the Situation of Understanding”, 32–58. On “Factic Life”, see especially part 3, 61–115.
See also “Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle: Indication of the Hermeneutical Situation”, in Becoming Heidegger: On the Trail of His Early Occasional Writings, 1910–1927, T. Kisiel & T. Sheehan (eds), 155–84, 477–80 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007). This “Natorp-essay” was written in October 1922.
Ontology – The Hermeneutics of Facticity is the English translation by John van Buren of GA 63, the early Freibug lecture course of Summer Semester (SS) 1923.
Basic Problems of Phenomenology is the English translation by Albert Hofstadter of GA 24, the Marburg lecture course of Summer Semester (SS) 1927.
And see “Unbenutzte Vorarbeiten zur Vorlesung vom Wintersemester 1929/1930: Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt, Endlichkeit, Einsamkeit”, Heidegger Studies 7 (1991): 5–12.
See Kisiel (1993: esp. chs 1 and 3) and “The Demise of Being and Time: 1927–1930”, in Polt (2005), 189–214; Kisiel & van Buren (1994), esp. ch. 10, “Heidegger (1920–21) on Becoming a Christian: A Conceptual Picture Show”, 175–93, which includes examples of formally indicative conceptual schematisms; Raffoul & Nelson (2008), esp. ch. 2, “On the Genesis of Heidegger’s Formally Indicative Hermeneutics of Facticity”, by T. Kisiel, 41–67; ch. 3, “Factical Life and the Need for Philosophy”, by F. Raffoul, 69–85; ch. 4, “The Passion of Facticity”, by G. Agamben, 89–112; ch. 7, “Intransitive Facticity? A Question for Heidegger”, by R. Visker, 149–91.