Heidegger, fenomenologia, hermenêutica, existência1. “Ontology” was the second of two initial titles Heidegger gave his course. The very first title “Logic” is related to his treatment in §2 of Plato ’s and Aristotle ’s characterization of λόγος (“discourse” about being) as ἑρμηνεία (“interpretation ”) and to his analysis in the same section of the title of Aristotle’s Περὶ ἑρμηνείας (On Interpretation), where “logic” (study of “discourse” about being) is being characterized as a study of “interpretation,” i.e., as hermeneutics. We find this concept of logic as hermeneutics spelled out in Heidegger’s important 1922 essay on Aristotle and the “history of ontology and logic.” hi fact, the treatment of Aristotle, ontology, hermeneutics, facticity, and Jeweiligkeit (“the awhileness of temporal particularity,” see endnote 9 below) in his course generally draws quite heavily on this essay, and it is cited in n. 4 in §9 (see also endnote 41). See “Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles (Anzeige der hermeneutischen Situation ),” Dilthey Jahrbuch 6 (1989): 246-47: “. . . philosophy is . . . simply the explicit and genuine actualizing of the tendency to interpretation which belongs to the basic movements of life in which what is at issue is this life itself and its being… The how of its research is the interpretation of the meaning of this being with respect to its basic categorial structures, i.e., the modes in which factical life temporalizes itself and speaks (κατηγορεῖν) about itself in such temporalizing…. The basic problem of philosophy concerns the being of factical life. In this respect, philosophy is fundamental ontology and it is this in such a manner that the ontology of facticity provides the particular specialized regional ontologies which are oriented to the world with a foundation for their problems. . . . The basic problem of philosophy has to do with the being of factical life in the how [jeweiligen Wie] of its being-addressed and being-interpreted at particular times. In other words, as the ontology of facticity, philosophy is at the same time the interpretation [Interpretation] of the categories of this addressing and interpreting [Auslegen], i.e., it is logic. Ontology and logic need to be brought back to their original unity in the problem of facticity and understood as offshoots of a fundamental kind of research which can be described as the phenomenological hermeneutics of facticity.”
Thus when Heidegger for external reasons had to replace “Logic” with “Ontology” as the title of his course, he was still thinking of “ontology” (study of the being of facticity in the “awhileness of its temporal particularity”) in its unity with “logic” (study of the “categories” or, as Heidegger later in the course also calls them, the “existentials” in terms of which factical life lives and “addresses” its being and that of the world “at particular times”) and with a “phenomenological hermeneutics of facticity” (the phenomenological “interpretation” or explication of these categories of “addressing” as categories of “interpreting”). Regarding the theme of Heidegger’s course, see also endnotes 3 and 9 and Translator’s Epilogue. With this “hermeneutics of facticity” in mind as the most concrete title for the kind of research he was engaged in, Heidegger in the introductory section of his course explained the dangers of describing such research with the traditional and loaded term “Ontology” and considered ways of redefining it but finally at the close of this section replaced “Ontology” with “The Hermeneutics of Facticity” as the course title. Furthermore, in §3 Heidegger went on to explain, as he already had in the above passage from his 1922 essay, that the genitive case in the course title was to be understood both as an objective genitive (i.e., “hermeneutics of facticity” in the sense that hermeneutics has as its thematic object facticity in the “awhileness of its temporal particularity”) and as a subjective or possessive genitive (“hermeneutics of facticity” in the sense that such hermeneutics is being carried out by facticity itself as its own “self-interpretation” “at a particular time” and in a historical “situation”). See also Editor’s Epilogue for an explanation of the different course titles.
