Hermeneutics of Facticity: Theodore Kisiel

A philosophical and holistic approach on one's existence.

Comprehending factical life in its holistic concreteness: through Dilthey to Heidegger

           ·         It was Ficte who first coined the abstract term “Facticity” for the philosophical tradition.
      ·         “The sole fact of pure practical reason”
      ·         Reality is life and remains life for them; it does not become an intellectual object by way of knowledge
      ·         Dilthey’s ambition was to develop the “categories” which Heidegger will eventually call existentials
      ·         “Life itself lays itself out, interprets itself”
      ·          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
      ·         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.
      ·         Facticity is through and through hermeneutical (understandable, intelligible, meaningful)

Countering ruinance and formally indicating the Facticity of life

·         The transitive movements of life include to live in, live out of, live for, live against, live with, and so on, something

·         To live is to care

·         An act of caring encounters them, meets them as it goes its way

·         Meaningfulness is not experienced as such, but can become explicit in the expository interpretation of one’s own life as factic

·         Heidegger’s first detailed phenomenological account of the ways of decadence is called “ruinance” which it is described as a “falling” into “inauthenticity”

·         Life, in its inclination to disperse its relational sense into distantiation, is hyperbolic

·         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.  

·         Philosophy is what it can be only as the philosophy of “its time”

Being thrown and the thrownness of be-ing

           ·         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

           ·         The being of Dasein breaks forth as the naked [and pure fact] “that it is and has to be”

           ·         Dasein always finds itself only as a thrown Fact

           ·         Belonging to the thrownness is the fact that Dasein “has been relegated to a world and exist factically with others”

           ·         A disavowal of that which in the today is working itself out as the “past and gone”

           ·         “I am my time”

           ·         Temporality: it is not just a fact, but itself of the essence of the fact: Facticity

Concluding unscientific postscript on “formal indication”

           ·         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.

           ·         These conceptual questions serve the task of philosophy: not to describe or explain man and his world, “but to evoke the Dasein in man”

           ·         “Only individual action itself can dislodge us from this brink of possibility into actuality, and this the moment of decision and of holistic insight [into the concrete situation of action and be-ing]”

Dasein as being-in-the-world: Timothy Stapleton

           ·         Heidegger uses the word “Dasein” to refer to what customarily might be called the self or “I”; or, as he more cautiously puts it to “this entity which each of us is himself”

Dasein and the understanding of being

           ·         Being is always the being of some entity or being

           ·         Ontic is the expression Heidegger uses for beings and our way of talking about them, “ontological” for the being of such beings and its language

           ·         For Heidegger, there is an understanding of being as substance and accident that accompanies simple experiences; that guides and structures them in advance and makes it possible for what I experience to be what it is.

           ·         Being as understood in terms of these traditional categories is what Heidegger calls  “categorical”

           ·         One of the first ways Heidegger talks about being is as what determines entities as entities.

           ·         First, Heidegger wants to claim that the traditional understanding of being , guided by the notion of substance, is inseparable in the from the idea of presence

           ·         Secondly, there is an intimate connection between this understanding of being and the theoretical attitude itself

An interpretation of being-in-the-world      

           ·         Being-in-the-world – nonetheless signifies a unitary phenomenon

           ·         Heidegger notes that being-in-the-world is triadic

           ·         Heidegger uses the word “Existenz” to refer to the unique kind of being that Dasein “is”

The world and its worldhood

          ·         The world, for Heidegger, belongs to Dasien’s being

          ·         Worldhood itself may have as its modes whatever strucutural wholes any special worlds may have at the time; but it embraces in itself the a priori character of worldhood in general

          ·         Worldhood itself is an existential

          ·         Uncovering the worldhood of the world entails disclosing those structures that belong to and make possible my engagement with the everyday surrounding world

          ·         The key idea, however, is that these structures of the worldhood of the world are a priori in the sense of being necessary and universal

          ·         The theoretical world of things that are just present for an observer is a particular modification of , and remains grounded in, the everyday worldhood of the world

          ·         The tacit understanding of readiness-to-hand, the “feel” for these structures that lingers in and holds them open, is what Heidegger calls circumspection

Being-in

·          Circumspection is a particular understanding of being (in contrast to being as understood) and as such a mode of being-in

·         The act of circumspective concern does not create the structures of worldhood, the assignment context, but rather illuminates or holds them open

·         Being-in, like the world, is an existentiale

·            Understanding, as has already been suggested, is one way in which this being-in is realized

·         Heidegger describes these two constitutive structures of being-in as “equiprimordial,” in the sense that they are equally important and elemental in their capacities to disclose the world

·         The expression “thrownness” is meant to suggest the Facticity of its being delivered over

·         Dasein is Being-possible which has been delivered over it to itself- thrown possibility through and through

·         Dasein does not just understand the being of the entities it concerns itself with in the world, but it understands itself as well as being-in-the-world

The “who” of being-in-the-world

          ·         That being which is an issue for this entity in its very Being, is in each case mine... Because Dasein has in each case mineness, one must always use a personal pronoun when one addresses it: “I am,” “you are”

          ·         Authenticity and inauthenticity are possible modes of being for Dasein because of the “mineness” of my being-in-the-world

          ·         The Self of everyday Dasein is the they-self

          ·         Authentic Being-one’s-Self does not rest upon an exceptional condition of the subject, a condition that has been detached from the “they”; it is rather an existentiell modification of the “they” – of the they as an essential existential

          ·         For Heidegger, Dasein has no such pre-given, inherently rational nature.

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