Heidegger, fenomenologia, hermenêutica, existência(1) His interpretation initially “engages” facticity and “brings it into play” by looking to “the awhileness of the temporal particularity” of its be-ing, i.e., to its “be-ing (factically there as “our own” for a while at the particular time),” and thematizes this be-ing as a futural and open-ended “being-possible” or “existence” (see endnote 21) which cannot be “calculated and worked out in advance” as to how it will be “encountered” (see endnote 53), and this is a “position of looking” which, so Heidegger tells us in the Foreword, is historically influenced by Kierkegaard , Luther , and Aristotle .
(2) On the basis of this existence as its starting point, the interpretation accordingly will conceptually explicate the various “characteristics” (Seinscharaktere ), “ways,” or “hows” of be-ing (Wie des Seins) in the “awhileness of temporal particularity” as “categories” or “existentials,” i.e., as ways of “being-possible” or “existing” (for a while at the particular time) and as ways of “addressing” or “interpreting” its be-ing (for a while at the particular time) and that of the world. And it will do this by beginning concretely within its own “today” (itself a “defining feature of the awhileness of temporal particularity” and an “existential”), i.e., within the manner in which facticity “today” is “whiling” or “tarrying for a while’ in its “present” and in certain “givens which are closest to us” (see endnotes 22 and 35), doing so inauthentically and in a certain condition of “fallenness.” It is from out the “today” that other existentials are to be brought to light and explicated. Thus, beginning with an explication of the existential structure of the today, §6 proceeds to give a preliminary list of other existentials found in this setting: “temporality,” “being-there,” “the there,” “being in the world,” “being lived from out of the world,” “being-interpreted,” “publicness,” “talk,” “averageness,” “the every-one,” “masking,” etc. §§7-13 then focus more concretely on Heidegger’s own “today” of 1923 in the form of “historical consciousness today” and “philosophical consciousness today,” so that the above existentials and other ones (“having-itself-there,” “curiosity,” “movement,” “falling away,” etc.) can be drawn out of it. After a discussion of the method of this phenomenological hermeneutics of facticity (§§14-17), the remainder of the course takes up an even more concrete dimension of Heidegger’s own “today” of 1923, i.e., “tarrying for a while at home” in his own household, “being-in-a-room,” and encountering “a table” there. In this context, he explicates still other existentials (“whiling,” “being in a world,” “encountering” the world, “caring,” “concern,” “going about dealings,” “anxious concern,” “carefreeness,” etc.) as well as “categories” of the “being-there (for a while at the particular time)” of the world (the “world’s being-encountered,” “temporality,” “kairological moments,” “disclosedness,” “availability in advance” of what is “ready-to-hand ,” “significance,” the “appearance of the with-world,” the “self-world” of the “one-self,” “familiarity,” the “unpredictable” and “strange,” “spatiality,” etc.). In an inserted page of fragmentary notes from the following semester, Heidegger returns to the theme of the existential of the “authenticity’ of facticity with which he had begun in the introduction to Part One and in §3 and which he had defined as the “worry” and “wakefulness of [facticity] for itself” (for its being-possible and existence). In the insert (see section VI of the Appendix), authenticity is again concretely defined in connection with the “awhileness of the temporal particularity” of facticity as “a genuine ‘sojourn’ in which we hold out for a while at the particular time,” as ‘the sojourn before the possibility of leaping into the work of worried decision.” “Sojourning and holding out in life itself. . . . Holding back from a ruinous movement, i.e., being in earnest about the difficulty involved, actualizing the wakeful intensification of the difficulty which goes with this. …”
(3) As Heidegger also explains in §3, this explication of the existentials of facticity is not being done simply for the sake of “taking cognizance of” and have “knowledge about” facticity, but rather is an “existential knowing” whose interpretation of facticity is being pursued “with a view [back] to developing in it a radical wakefulness for itself,” i.e., for its authentic existence in the sense of an open-ended “being-on-the-way of itself to itself in interpretation. “ [Hermeneutics] speaks from out of interpretation and for the sake of it.” Thus, existence is that with respect to, on the basis of, and with a view to which the be-ing of facticity in “the awhileness of its temporal particularity” is interpreted in Heidegger’s hermeneutics. See endnotes 62 and 75 regarding his use of auf when describing “the world” as that “with respect to, on the basis of, and with a view to which” factical life lives and interprets itself inauthentically in “everydayness.”
