Questioning Practice: Heidegger, Historicity, and the Hermeneutics of Facticity

Abstract

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) It is more salutary for thinking to wander into the strange than to establish itself in the understandable. -Attributed to Heraclitus, Fragment 50 For Martin Heidegger, in his 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 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" that 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 "limitexperiences" such as anxiety, boredom, and the anticipation of death. …