Blattner (1999:43-46) – facticidade [Faktizität] e factualidade [Tätsachlichkeit]

The tree is determinate in that, inter alia, it stands forty feet high. This determinacy fills out a more basic fact: the tree is actual.¹ The tree’s height is not just a matter of possibility, because the tree is real, actual. The principle in the background here is that the actual is determinate.² Because the tree is actual, it cannot just be the case that it is possible that it be thirty-nine feet high, forty feet high, forty-one feet high, etc. It must also be the case that the tree has some specific, determinate height. Heidegger wants to avoid using the word “actual” in describing Dasein’s determinacy, since “actuality” is not a term that will clearly apply to Dasein. In typical Heideggerian linguistic fashion, he writes instead of an entity’s “that it is.” In the case of the tree, he writes of the “factual occurrence” of the tree (SZ:56 ff).

How does Heidegger describe the “that it is” of Dasein? He uses two words to get at what he has in mind, “facticity” and “thrownness”:

And indeed the “factuality” of the Fact of one’s own Dasein is ontologically fundamentally different from the factual occurrence of a sort of stone. We call the factuality of the Fact of Dasein, as which every Dasein always is, its facticity. The developed structure of this determinacy of being is itself only (44) conceivable as a problem in light of the fundamental, existential makeup of Dasein, which we shall already have worked out. (SZ:56)

This characteristic of the being of Dasein, its “that it is,” … we call the thrownness of this endty into its There, in such a way indeed, that it is the There as being-in-the-world. The expression thrownness should indicate the facticity of being delivered over. The “that it is and has to be” that is disclosed in Dasein’s affectivity is not the “that (it is)” that expresses the factuality that belongs to occurrentness. . . . Facticity is not the factuality of the factum brutum of something occurrent, but rather a characteristic of the being of Dasein, which is taken up into existence, even if it is primanly pushed away.³ (SZ:135)

These passages, especially the second one, are dense and difficult texts, but let me mine them to a certain depth, in order to sift out the basic line of Heidegger’s thinking on Dasein’s determinacy.

Heidegger must develop a conception of Dasein’s determinacy that derives from or grows out of his conception of Dasein’s possibility, or existentiality: “Facticity is not the factuality of the factum brutum of something occurrent, but rather a characteristic of the being of Dasein, which is taken up into existence, even if it is primarily pushed away” (p. 135, emphasis altered). In the passage that introduces “thrownness” (on p. 135), Heidegger uses a particular linguistic device to signal the same general connection I have been trying to make. He characterizes Dasein’s determinacy not just as its “that it is,” but also as its “has to be.” Thrownness is Dasein’s “that it is and has to be.” Heidegger is not suggesting that Dasein is somehow necessary. This is connoted by the English, but not by the original German. Heidegger writes that thrownness is Dasein’s “Daß es ist und zu sein hat.” Dasein has its being to be. Dasein has its being and must make something of it, must live it out in a definite way. That is, its being is an issue for it. Dasein’s determinacy, in other words, is internally connected with its existentiality.

Let me thus return to the basic concept of existence and see what notion of determinacy Heidegger wants to connect with it. Dasein exists (in the technical sense) in that its being is at issue for it. We saw above much that is involved in and follows from this claim. One element we did not reflect on is this: to say that Dasein’s being is an issue, that it is a question, is not just to say that it is up for grabs or unsettled. To be an issue, to be in question for Dasein itself, Dasein’s being must matter to it. The sense in which this is true is rather weak, however. One can be indifferent to a question. So, for example, say that Jones is indifferent to (45) the question whether to watch hockey or tennis on the television. There is a question here for Jones, but one that “makes no electric connection with her being,” in William James’s words. One may contrast Jones’s indifference with the attitude of her coffee table, which likewise sits in front of the television, but is not indifferent to the question. The question is not an issue for the coffee table at all, in any respect. In a careful passage in §9, Heidegger writes, the occurrent “is ‘indifferent’ to its being, or precisely stated, it is such that it is neither indifferent nor not indifferent to its being” (SZ:42). So, when I say that its being must matter to Dasein, I mean this in a manner so weak that indifference is compatible with it. What is not compatible with it is only that it should be “neither indifferent nor not indifferent to its being.”⁴

This is how Heidegger thinks of Dasein’s fundamental determinacy; we can see this in a feature of the text in which he introduces “facticity.” The quote that defines “facticity” (from p. 56) is preceded by a discussion of the way in which

“The table stands ‘next to’ the door,” “the chair ‘touches’ the wall.” One may not, strictly speaking, talk (here) of “touching.” This is not because in the end, according to a precise measurement, a gap can be found between the chair and the wall. Rather, it is because the chair cannot, at bottom (grundsätzlich), touch the wall, even if the gap were null. The presupposition for that would have to be that the chair can encounter the wall. (SZ:55)

The chair cannot encounter the wall; that is, the wall cannot mean anything to the chair, cannot even present itself to the chair in the monotonous, indifferent quality of all those questions Jones confronts, but feels indifferent toward.

We have seen that for Dasein to have its being as an issue for it, that being must matter to it, even if only indifferently. This is the minimal content that Heidegger puts into “facticity” and “thrownness.” Its minimalness derives from the minimalness of that with which it is connected: Dasein’s being being at issue. Dasein’s existentiality or possibility, however, is typically more specific than that. Dasein is not just able-to-be, but also, say, able to be a simultaneous interpreter. The bulk of Heidegger’s treatment of facticity and its cousins focuses on the mattering demands of being more specifically able. He develops his account of these phenomena under the headings of “affectivity” (Befindlichkeit) and “attunement” (Stimmung). (46) I shall explore this account in some detail and then return to the original question of how this is supposed to clarify Dasein’s determinacy.