Heidegger, fenomenologia, hermenêutica, existênciaTherefore in this connection it seems to me a mere misunderstanding to invoke the famous Kantian distinction between quaestio juris and quaestio facti. Kant certainly did not intend to prescribe what modern science must do in order to stand honorably before the judgment seat of reason. He asked a philosophical question: what are the conditions of our knowledge, by virtue of which modern science is possible, and how far does it extend? The following investigation also asks a philosophic question in the same sense. But it does not ask it only of the so-called human sciences (which would give precedence to certain traditional disciplines). Neither does it ask it only of science and its modes of experience, but of all human experience of the world and human living. It asks (to put it in Kantian terms): how is understanding possible? This is a question which precedes any action of understanding on the part of subjectivity, including the methodical activity of the “interpretive sciences” and their norms and rules. Heidegger’s temporal analytics of DASEIN has, I think, shown convincingly that understanding is not just one of the various possible behaviors of the subject but the mode of being of DASEIN itself. It is in this sense that the term “hermeneutics” has been used here. It denotes the basic being-in-motion of DASEIN that constitutes its finitude and historicity, and hence embraces the whole of its experience of the world. Not caprice, or even an elaboration of a single aspect, but the nature of the thing itself makes the movement of understanding comprehensive and universal. Truth and Method Foreword Sec. Ed.
This raises a final question, which concerns less the method than the contents of the hermeneutic universalism I have outlined. Does not the universality of understanding involve a one-sidedness in its contents, since it lacks a critical principle in relation to tradition and, as it were, espouses a universal optimism? However much it is the nature of tradition to exist only through being appropriated, it still is part of the nature of man to be able to break with tradition, to criticize and dissolve it, and is not what takes place in remaking the real into an instrument of human purpose something far more basic in our relationship to being? To this extent, does not the ontological universality of understanding result in a certain one-sidedness? Understanding certainly does not mean merely appropriating customary opinions or acknowledging what tradition has sanctified. Heidegger, who first described the concept of understanding as the universal determinateness of DASEIN, means by this the very projectiveness of understanding—i.e., the futurality of DASEIN. I shall not deny, however, that—among all the elements of understanding—I have emphasized the assimilation of what is past and of tradition. Like many of my critics, Heidegger too would probably feel a lack of ultimate radicality in the conclusions I draw. What does the end of metaphysics as a science mean? What does its ending in science mean? When science expands into a total technocracy and thus brings on the “cosmic night” of the “forgetfulness of being,” the nihilism that Nietzsche prophesied, then may one not gaze at the last fading light of the sun setting in the evening sky, instead of turning around to look for the first shimmer of its return? Truth and Method Foreword Sec. Ed.
If one still wanted to define the nature of aesthetic existence in a way that constructed it outside the hermeneutic continuity of human existence, then I think one would have missed the point of Kierkegaard ’s criticism. Admittedly, the natural, as a joint condition of our mental life, limits our self-understanding and does so by projecting itself into the mental in many forms—as myth, as dream, as the unconscious preformation of conscious life. And one must admit that aesthetic phenomena similarly manifest the limits of DASEIN’s historical self-understanding. But we are given no vantage point that would allow us to see these limits and conditions in themselves or to see ourselves “from the outside” as limited and conditioned in this way. Even what is closed to our understanding we ourselves experience as limiting, and consequently it still belongs to the continuity of self-understanding in which human existence moves. We recognize “the fragility of the beautiful and the adventurousness of the artist.” But that does not constitute being situated outside a “hermeneutic phenomenology” of DASEIN. Rather, it sets the task of preserving the hermeneutic continuity which constitutes our being, despite the discontinuity intrinsic to aesthetic being and aesthetic experience. Truth and Method I 1
If speculative idealism sought to overcome the aesthetic subjectivism and agnosticism based on Kant by elevating itself to the standpoint of infinite knowledge, then, as we have seen, this gnostic self-redemption of finitude involved art’s being superseded by philosophy. We, instead, will have to hold firmly to the standpoint of finiteness. It seems to me that the productive thing about Heidegger’s criticism of modern subjectivism is that his temporal interpretation of being has opened up new possibilities. Interpreting being from the horizon of time does not mean, as it is constantly misunderstood to mean, that DASEIN is radically temporal, so that it can no longer be considered as everlasting or eternal but is understandable only in relation to its own time and future. If this were its meaning, it would not be a critique and an overcoming of subjectivism but an “existentialist” radicalization of it, which one could easily foresee would have a collectivist future. The philosophical question involved here, however, is directed precisely at this subjectivism itself. The latter is driven to its furthest point only in order to question it. The philosophical question asks, what is the being of self-understanding? With this question it fundamentally transcends the horizon of this self-understanding. In disclosing time as the ground hidden from self-understanding, it does not preach blind commitment out of nihilistic despair, but opens itself to a hitherto concealed experience that transcends thinking from the position of subjectivity, an experience that Heidegger calls being. Truth and Method I 1
More exactly, one can say that the mimetic representation (Darstellung), the performance, brings into existence (zum DASEIN) what the play itself requires. The double distinction between a play and its subject matter and a play and its performance corresponds to a double non-distinction as the unity of the truth which one recognizes in the play of art. To investigate the origin of the plot on which it is based is to move out of the real experience of a piece of literature, and likewise it is to move out of the real experience of the play if the spectator reflects about the conception behind a performance or about the proficiency of the actors. Already implicit in this kind of reflection is the aesthetic differentiation of the work itself from its representation. But for the content of the experience as such, as we have seen, it is not even important whether the tragic or comic scene playing before one is taking place on the stage or in life—when one is only a spectator. What we have called a structure is one insofar as it presents itself as a meaningful whole. It does not exist in itself, nor is it encountered in a mediation (Vermittlung) accidental to it; rather, it acquires its proper being in being mediated. Truth and Method I 2
This reintroduces all the aporias of aesthetic consciousness that we pointed out above. For it is precisely continuity that every understanding of time has to achieve, even when it is a question of the temporality of a work of art. Here the misunderstanding of Heidegger’s ontological exposition of the time horizon takes its revenge. Instead of holding on to the methodological significance of the existential analytic of DASEIN, people treat DASEIN’s existential, historical temporality, determined by care and the movement towards death—i.e., radical finitude—as one among many possible ways of understanding existence, and they forget that it is the mode of being of understanding itself which is here revealed as temporality. To define the proper temporality of the work of art as “sacred time” and distinguish it from transient, historical time remains, in fact, a mere mirroring of the human and finite experience of art. Only a biblical theology of time, starting not from the standpoint of human self-understanding but of divine revelation, would be able to speak of a “sacred time” and theologically legitimate the analogy between the timelessness of the work of art and this “sacred time.” Without this kind of theological justification, to speak of “sacred time” obscures the real problem, which does not lie in the artwork’s being removed from time but in its temporality. Truth and Method I 2
The tendency which Dilthey and Yorck formulated as common to them, of “understanding in terms of life,” and which was expressed in Husserl ’s going back behind the objectivity of science to the life-world, was characteristic of Heidegger’s own first approach. But he was no longer dependent on the epistemological requirement that the return to life (Dilthey ) and the transcendental reduction (Husserl ’s way of absolutely radical self-reflection) be based methodologically on the self-givenness of experience. On the contrary, all this became the object of Heidegger’s critique. Under the rubric of a “hermeneutics of facticity,” Heidegger confronted Husserl ’s eidetic phenomenology, as well as the distinction between fact and essence on which it depended, with a paradoxical demand. Phenomenology should be ontologically based on the facticity of DASEIN, existence, which cannot be based on or derived from anything else, and not on the pure cogito as the essential constitution of typical universality—a bold idea, but difficult to carry through. Truth and Method PART II 3
Let us remember that Husserl himself faced the problem of the paradoxes that followed from carrying through his transcendental solipsism. Hence it is not at all easy to fix the point from which Heidegger could confront the phenomenological idealism of Husserl . We must even admit that Heidegger’s project in Being and Time does not completely escape the problematic of transcendental reflection. The idea of fundamental ontology, its foundation in DASEIN, which is concerned “with being,” and the analysis of DASEIN seemed first simply to mark a new dimension within transcendental phenomenology. The view that the whole meaning of being and objectivity can be made intelligible and demonstrated solely in terms of the temporality and historicity of DASEIN—a possible way of describing the main tendency of Being and Time —Husserl would have claimed in his own way—i.e., on the ground of the absolute historicity of the Ur-I. And if Heidegger’s methodological program was directed toward criticizing the concept of transcendental subjectivity, to which Husserl related all ultimate foundation, Husserl would have said that this was a failure to recognize the radicality of the transcendental reduction. He would undoubtedly have said that transcendental subjectivity itself had already overcome and done away with all the implications of a substance ontology and hence with the objectivism of tradition. Husserl , too, regarded himself as opposed to the whole of metaphysics. Truth and Method PART II 3
Thus it was clear that Heidegger’s project of a fundamental ontology had to place the problem of history in the foreground. But it soon emerged that what constituted the significance of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology was not that is was the solution to the problem of historicism, and certainly not a more original grounding of science, nor even, as with Husserl , philosophy’s ultimate radical grounding of itself; rather, the whole idea of grounding itself underwent a total reversal. It was no longer with the same intention as Husserl that Heidegger undertook to interpret being, truth, and history in terms of absolute temporality. For this temporality was not that of “consciousness” nor of the transcendental Ur-I. True, as the ideas of Being and Time unfolded, it seemed at first simply an intensification of transcendental reflection, the reaching of a higher stage of reflection, where the horizon of being was shown to be time. It was, after all, the ontological groundlessness of transcendental subjectivity, of which Heidegger accused Husserl ’s phenomenology, that seemed to be overcome by reviving the question of being. What being is was to be determined from within the horizon of time. Thus the structure of temporality appeared as ontologically definitive of subjectivity. But it was more than that. Heidegger’s thesis was that being itself is time. This burst asunder the whole subjectivism of modern philosophy—and, in fact, as was soon to appear, the whole horizon of questions asked by metaphysics, which tended to define being as what is present. The fact that being is an issue for DASEIN, that it is distinguished from all other beings by its understanding of being, does not constitute the ultimate basis from which a transcendental approach has to start, as seems to be the case in Being and Time . Rather, there is a quite different reason why the understanding of being is possible at all, namely that there is a “there,” a clearing in being—i.e., a distinction between being and beings. Inquiry into the fundamental fact that this “exists” is, in fact, inquiry into being, but in a direction that necessarily remained unconsidered in all previous inquiry into the being of beings—that was indeed concealed by metaphysical inquiry into being. Heidegger revealed the essential forgetfulness of being that had dominated Western thought since Greek metaphysics because of the embarrassing problem of nothingness. By showing that the question of being included the question of nothingness, he joined the beginning to the end of metaphysics. That the question of being could represent itself as the question of nothingness postulated a thinking of nothingness impossible for metaphysics. Truth and Method PART II 3
Heidegger’s hermeneutical phenomenology and his analysis of DASEIN’s historicity had as their aim renewing the question of being in general and not producing a theory of the human sciences or overcoming the aporias of historicism. These were merely particular contemporary problems in which he was able to demonstrate the consequences of his radical renewal of the question of being. But precisely because of the radicality of his approach he was able to move beyond the complications on which Dilthey ’s and Husserl ’s investigations into the fundamental concepts of the human sciences had foundered. Truth and Method PART II 3
Heidegger gave this matter a new and radical turn in light of the question of being which he revived. In legitimating the special methodological nature of the historical sciences, he follows Husserl in that historical being is not to be distinguished from natural being, as Dilthey does. On the contrary, the natural sciences’ mode of knowledge appears, rather, as a subspecies of understanding “that has strayed into the legitimate task of grasping the present-at-hand in its essential unintelligibility.” Understanding is not a resigned ideal of human experience adopted in the old age of the spirit, as with Dilthey ; nor is it, as with Husserl , a last methodological ideal of philosophy in contrast to the naivete of unreflecting life; it is, on the contrary, the original form of the realization of DASEIN, which is being-in-the-world. Before any differentiation of understanding into the various directions of pragmatic or theoretical interest, understanding is DASEIN’s mode of being, insofar as it is potentiality-for-being and “possibility.” Truth and Method PART II 3
Against the background of this existential analysis of DASEIN, with all its far-reaching consequences for metaphysics, the problems of a hermeneutics of the human sciences suddenly look very different. The present work is devoted to this new aspect of the hermeneutical problem. In reviving the question of being and thus moving beyond all previous metaphysics—and not just its climax in the Cartesianism of modern science and transcendental philosophy—Heidegger attained a fundamentally new position with regard to the aporias of historicism. The concept of understanding is no longer a methodological concept, as with Droysen. Nor, as in Dilthey ’s attempt to provide a hermeneutical ground for the human sciences, is the process of understanding an inverse operation that simply traces backward fife’s tendency toward ideality. Understanding is the original characteristic of the being of human life itself. Starting from Dilthey , Misch had recognized “free distance toward oneself” as the basic structure of human life on which all understanding depended; Heidegger’s radical ontological reflection was concerned to clarify this structure of DASEIN through a “transcendental analytic of DASEIN.” He revealed the projective character of all understanding and conceived the act of understanding itself as the movement of transcendence, of moving beyond the existent. Truth and Method PART II 3
This asks quite a lot of traditional hermeneutics. It is true that the German language uses the word for “understanding” (Verstehen) also in the sense of a practical ability (e.g., er versteht nicht zu lesen, “he can’t read”). But this seems essentially different from the understanding that takes place in science and that is concerned with knowledge. If we examine the two senses more closely, we can see that they have something in common: both senses contain the element of recognition, of being well versed in something. Similarly, a person who “understands” a text (or even a law) has not only projected himself understandingly toward a meaning—in the effort of understanding—but the accomplished understanding constitutes a state of new intellectual freedom. It implies the general possibility of interpreting, of seeing connections, of drawing conclusions, which constitutes being well versed in textual interpretation. Someone who knows his way around a machine, who understands how to use it, or who knows a trade—granted that there are different norms for purpose-oriented rationality and for understanding the expressions of life or of texts—it still remains true that all such understanding is ultimately self-understanding (Sichverstehen: knowing one’s way around). Even understanding an expression means, ultimately, not only immediately grasping what lies in the expression, but disclosing what is enclosed in it, so that one now knows this hidden part also. But this means that one knows one’s way around in it (sich auskennt). Thus it is true in every case that a person who understands, understands himself (sich versteht), projecting himself upon his possibilities. Traditional hermeneutics has inappropriately narrowed the horizon to which understanding belongs. That is why Heidegger’s advance over Dilthey is valuable for the problem of hermeneutics also. True, Dilthey had already rejected applying the methods of the natural sciences to the human sciences, and Husserl had called applying the natural sciences’ concept of objectivity to the human sciences “nonsense” and established the essential relativity of all historical worlds and all historical knowledge. But now, as a result of the existential futurality of human DASEIN, the structure of historical understanding appears with its full ontological background. Truth and Method PART II 3
Even though historical knowledge receives its justification from the fore-structure of DASEIN, this is no reason for anyone to interfere with the immanent criteria of what is called knowledge. For Heidegger too historical knowledge is not a projection in the sense of a plan, the extrapolation of aims of the will, an ordering of things according to the wishes, prejudices, or promptings of the powerful; rather, it remains something adapted to the object, a mensuratio ad rem. Yet this thing is not a factum brutum, not something that is merely at hand, something that can simply be established and measured, but it itself ultimately has the same mode of being as DASEIN. Truth and Method PART II 3
The important thing, however, is to understand this oft-repeated statement correctly. It does not mean simply that there is a “homogeneity” between the knower and the known, on which it would be possible to base psychic transposition as the special “method” of the human sciences. This would make historical hermeneutics a branch of psychology (which was what Dilthey had in mind). In fact, however, the coordination of all knowing activity with what is known is not based on the fact that they have the same mode of being but draws its significance from the particular nature of the mode of being that is common to them. It consists in the fact that neither the knower nor the known is “present-at-hand” in an “ontic” way, but in a “historical” one—i.e., they both have the mode of being of historicity. Hence, as Yorck says, everything depends on “the generic difference between the ontic and the historical.” The fact that Yorck contrasts “homogeneity” with “belonging” reveals the problem that Heidegger was the first to unfold in its full radicality: that we study history only insofar as we are ourselves “historical” means that the historicity of human DASEIN in its expectancy and its forgetting is the condition of our being able to re-present the past. What first seemed simply a barrier, according to the traditional concept of science and method, or a subjective condition of access to historical knowledge, now becomes the center of a fundamental inquiry. “Belonging” is a condition of the original meaning of historical interest not because the choice of theme and inquiry is subject to extrascientific, subjective motivations (then belonging would be no more than a special case of emotional dependence, of the same type as sympathy), but because belonging to traditions belongs just as originally and essentially to the historical finitude of DASEIN as does its projectedness toward future possibilities of itself. Heidegger was right to insist that what he called “thrownness” belongs together with projection. Thus there is no understanding or interpretation in which the totality of this existential structure does not function, even if the intention of the knower is simply to read “what is there” and to discover from his sources “how it really was.” Truth and Method PART II 3
We will try to determine whether Heidegger’s ontological radicalization can contribute to the construction of a historical hermeneutics. Heidegger’s intention was undoubtedly a different one, and we must beware of drawing overhasty conclusions from his existential analysis of the historicity of DASEIN. For Heidegger, the existential analytic of DASEIN implies no particular historical ideal of existence. Hence with regard to any theological statement about man and his existence in faith it claims an a priori, neutral validity. This may be a problematical claim for the self-understanding of faith, as the controversy surrounding Bultmann shows. On the other hand, this by no means excludes the fact that both Christian theology and the historical sciences are subject to content-specific (existential) presuppositions. But precisely for this reason we are forced to acknowledge that the existential analytic itself does not, with respect to its own intention, contain any existential ideal and therefore cannot be criticized as one (however many attempts may have been made to do so). Truth and Method PART II 3
It is nonetheless true that the being of children or indeed of animals—in contrast to that ideal of “innocence”—remains an ontological problem. Their mode of being is not, at any rate, “existence” and historicity such as Heidegger claims for human DASEIN. We may also ask what it means for human existence to be based on something outside history—i.e., on nature. If we really want to break out of the spell of idealistic speculation, then we must obviously not conceive the mode of being of “life” in terms of self-consciousness. When Heidegger set about revising the transcendental self-conception of Being and Time , it followed that he would have to come to grips afresh with the problem of life. Thus in his letter on humanism he spoke of the great gulf between man and animal. It is quite clear that Heidegger’s own transcendental grounding of fundamental ontology in the analytic of DASEIN did not yet permit a positive account of the mode of being of life. There are still open questions; but none of this alters the fact that it would be completely to mistake the significance of what Heidegger calls existential were it thought possible to counter the existential of “care” with another specific ideal of existence, whatever it might be. To do so is to miss the dimension of inquiry that Being and Time opened up. In defending himself against such superficially argued polemics, Heidegger could quite legitimately refer to the transcendental intention of his own work, in the same sense that Kant ’s inquiry was transcendental. From the start his inquiry transcended all empirical differences and hence all ideals based on content. [Whether it fulfilled its intention to rekindle the question of “being” is another matter.] Truth and Method PART II 3
Hence we too are beginning with the transcendental significance of Heidegger’s problematic. The problem of hermeneutics becomes universal in scope, even attaining a new dimension, through his transcendental interpretation of understanding. The interpreter’s belonging to his object, which the historical school was unable to offer any convincing account of, now acquires a concretely demonstrable significance, and it is the task of hermeneutics to demonstrate it. That the structure of DASEIN is thrown projection, that in realizing its own being DASEIN is understanding, must also be true of the act of understanding in the human sciences. The general structure of understanding is concretized in historical understanding, in that the concrete bonds of custom and tradition and the corresponding possibilities of one’s own future become effective in understanding itself. DASEIN that projects itself on its own potentiality-for-being has always already “been.” This is the meaning of the existential of “thrownness.” The main point of the hermeneutics of facticity and its contrast with the transcendental constitution research of Husserl ’s phenomenology was that no freely chosen relation toward one’s own being can get behind the facticity of this being. Everything that makes possible and limits DASEIN’s projection ineluctably precedes it. This existential structure of DASEIN must be expressed in the understanding of historical tradition as well, and so we will start by following Heidegger. Truth and Method PART II 3
Heidegger entered into the problems of historical hermeneutics and critique only in order to explicate the fore-structure of understanding for the purposes of ontology. Our question, by contrast, is how hermeneutics, once freed from the ontological obstructions of the scientific concept of objectivity, can do justice to the historicity of understanding. Hermeneutics has traditionally understood itself as an art or technique. This is true even of Dilthey ’s expansion of hermeneutics into an organon of the human sciences. One might wonder whether there is such an art or technique of understanding—we shall come back to the point. But at any rate we can inquire into the consequences for the hermeneutics of the human sciences of the fact that Heidegger derives the circular structure of understanding from the temporality of DASEIN. These consequences do not need to be such that a theory is applied to practice so that the latter is performed differently—i.e., in a way that is technically correct. They could also consist in correcting (and refining) the way in which constantly exercised understanding understands itself—a process that would benefit the art of understanding at most only indirectly. Truth and Method PART II 4
Such a conception of understanding breaks right through the circle drawn by romantic hermeneutics. Since we are now concerned not with individuality and what it thinks but with the truth of what is said, a text is not understood as a mere expression of life but is taken seriously in its claim to truth. That this is what is meant by “understanding” was once self-evident (we need only recall Chladenius). But this dimension of the hermeneutical problem was discredited by historical consciousness and the psychological turn that Schleiermacher gave to hermeneutics, and could only be regained when the aporias of historicism came to light and led finally to the fundamentally new development to which Heidegger, in my view, gave the decisive impetus. For the hermeneutic productivity of temporal distance could be understood only when Heidegger gave understanding an ontological orientation by interpreting it as an “existential” and when he interpreted DASEIN’s mode of being in terms of time. Truth and Method PART II 4
Thus the sun has not ceased to set for us, even though the Copernican explanation of the universe has become part of our knowledge. Obviously we can keep seeing things in a certain way while at the same time knowing that doing so is absurd in the world of understanding. And is it not language that operates in a creative way, reconciling these stratified living relationships? When we speak of the sun setting, this is not an arbitrary phrase; it expresses what really appears to be the case. It is the appearance presented to a man who is not himself in motion. It is the sun that comes and goes as its rays reach or leave us. Thus, to our vision, the setting of the sun is a reality (it is “relative to DASEIN”). Now, by constructing another model, we can mentally liberate ourselves from the evidence of our senses, and because we can do this we can see things from the rational viewpoint of the Copernican theory. But we cannot try to supersede or refute natural appearances by viewing things through the “eyes” of scientific understanding. This is pointless not only because what we see with our eyes has genuine reality for us, but also because the truth that science states is itself relative to a particular world orientation and cannot at all claim to be the whole. But what really opens up the whole of our world orientation is language, and in this whole of language, appearances retain their legitimacy just as much as does science. Truth and Method III 5
But is it really the case that this world is a world of being-in-itself where all relativity to DASEIN has been surpassed and where knowledge can be called an absolute science? Is not the very concept of an “absolute object” a contradiction in terms? Neither the biological nor the physical universe can, in fact, deny its concrete existential relativity. In this, physics and biology have the same ontological horizon, which it is impossible for them, as science, to transcend. They know what is, and this means, as Kant has shown, as it is given in space and time and is an object of experience. This even defines the progressive knowledge that science aims for. The world of physics cannot seek to be the whole of what exists. For even a world equation that contained everything, so that the observer of the system would also be included in the equations, would still assume the existence of a physicist who, as the calculator, would not be an object calculated. A physics that calculated itself and was its own calculation would be self-contradictory. The same thing is true of biology, which investigates the environments of all living things, including, therefore, the human environment. What is known in it certainly also embraces the being of the scientist, for he too is a living creature and a man. But from this it in no way follows that biological science is a mere product of life and only has meaning as such. Rather, biology studies what exists in exactly the same way as does physics; it is not itself what it studies. The being-in-itself toward which research, whether in physics or biology, is directed is relative to the way being is posited in its manner of inquiry. There is not the slightest reason, beyond this, to admit science’s metaphysical claim to know being-in-itself. Each science, as a science, has in advance projected a field of objects such that to know them is to govern them. Truth and Method III 5
Self-understanding refers to a historical decision and not to something one possesses and controls. Bultmann has constantly emphasized this. Hence it is quite wrong to understand Bultmann ’s concept of fore-understanding—being caught up in prejudices—as a kind of pre-knowledge. This is a purely hermeneutical concept, developed by Bultmann on the basis of Heidegger’s analysis of the hermeneutical circle and the general fore-structure of human DASEIN. It refers to the openness of the horizon of inquiry within which alone understanding is possible, but it does not mean that one’s own fore-understanding should not be corrected by the encounter with the word of God (or, indeed, with any other word). On the contrary, the purpose of this concept is to display the movement of understanding as precisely this process of correction. It must be noted that this “corrective” process is, in the case of the call of faith, a specific one that is of hermeneutic universality only in its formal structure. Truth and Method Appendices Supplement I
The contemporary hermeneutical discussion that starts from Bultmann seems in one particular direction to be moving beyond him. If, according to Bultmann , the appeal of the Christian proclamation to man is that he should give up his right to dispose of himself as he chooses, this appeal is like a privative experience of human self-determination. In this way Bultmann has interpreted Heidegger’s concept of the inauthenticity of DASEIN in a theological way. In Heidegger, of course, authenticity is connected with inauthenticity not only in the sense that fallenness is as much part of human life as “resoluteness,” sin (unbelief) just as much as belief. The fact that for Heidegger authenticity and inauthenticity have the same origin points quite beyond the starting point in self-understanding. This is the first form in which, in Heidegger’s thought, being itself has come into language as the antithesis of “disclosure” and “concealment.” Just as Bultmann relied on the existential analysis of DASEIN in Heidegger in order to explain the eschatological existence of man between belief and unbelief, so it is possible to use as a theological starting point this dimension of the question of being that has been worked out more exactly by the later Heidegger, namely by going into the central significance that language has, in this event of being, for the “language of faith.” Already in Ott’s very skillful speculative hermeneutical discussion, there is, following Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism,” a critique of Bultmann . It corresponds to his own positive thesis on page 107: “The language in which reality ‘comes into language,‘ in and with which all reflection on existence takes place, accompanies existence in all epochs of its realization.” The hermeneutical ideas of the theologians Fuchs and Ebeling seem, similarly, to start from the late Heidegger by putting more emphasis on the concept of language. Truth and Method Appendices Supplement I
Here the work of the phenomenological school has proved fruitful. Today, now that the various stages in the development of Husserl ’s phenomenology can be seen, it seems clear to me that Husserl was the first to take the radical step in this direction, by showing the mode of being of subjectivity as absolute historicity—i.e., as temporality. Heidegger’s epoch-making work Being and Time , to which one generally refers on this point, had a quite different and far more radical intention, namely of revealing the inadequate ontological preconception that dominates modern understanding of subjecti-vity or of “consciousness” even in its extreme form of the phenomenology of temporality and historicity. This critique served the positive task of asking in a new way the question of “being,” to which the Greeks gave, as a first answer, metaphysics. Being and Time , however, was not understood in this, its real intention, but in what Heidegger had in common with Husserl . It was seen as a radical defense of the absolute historicity of DASEIN, which is, in fact, a consequence of Husserl ’s analysis of the primal phenomenality of temporality (“flowing”). The argument runs, more or less, thus: the mode of being of DASEIN is defined in an ontologically positive way. It is not presence-at-hand but futurity. There are no eternal truths. Truth is the disclosure of being that is given with the historicity of DASEIN. Here, then, were the foundations from which the critique of historical objectivism occurring in the sciences themselves could receive its ontological justification. It is, as it were, a second-degree historicism which not only opposes the historical relativity of all knowledge to the absolute claim of truth but works out its ground—namely the historicity of the knowing subject—and hence can no longer see historical relativity as a limitation of the truth. Truth and Method Appendices Supplement I
