faktische Leben, vida fática, factic life, faktisches Leben, factical life

“factical life exists in the actualization of caring” (GA61:126); “factical life lives the world as the ‘in which’ and ‘toward which’ and ‘for which’ of life” (GA61:130)

To interpret is a double activity of explication or exegesis and understanding, which is intrinsically situated within, or bound to, a hermeneutic situation. The characteristics of this situation denote from the outset Heidegger’s insistence on a central motif of inquiry, a motif dear to Husserl, namely, sight. The hermeneutic situation is determined by a point of view, an orientation of vision, a visual horizon. Even if an interpretation assumes argumentation, debate, or a dialogue with others, it is ultimately a matter of vision. More precisely, it culminates and is accomplished in a Durchsichtigkeit, a transparence of the “living present” (the term is borrowed from Husserl), which marks the situation of the interpreter, and which he or she must take on resolutely. Under these conditions, the interpretation of the past of philosophy could only be a reappropriation of the present where the power of elucidation is measured by the radicality of the interpreter’s philosophical interrogation. Instead of devoting oneself to historiographical research, the interpreter must engage in philosophical research. This research, Heidegger insists in 1922, thematizes human Dasein, insofar as it is questioned with respect to its Being-character (Seinscharakter). In other words, the object of this research is factical life in its fundamental movement, that is, “In the concrete temporalizing (Zeitigung) of its Being it is concerned about its Being” (PIA, 359). Furthermore, far from being a distant observer of factical life, this research accompanies its proper movement and itself belongs to it, because this research deliberately confronts factical life in all of its gravity. I will recall briefly the “constitutive” characteristics of this factical life, considered in its motion. Factical life is through and through animated by a concern for either the environing world (Umwelt), the with-world (Mitwelt), or the world of the self (Selbstwelt), and it is therefore defined in relation to a world, a relation that, according to Heidegger, is the cradle of all meaning and the true “original intentionality.” It is as a modality of this intentionality of care that Heidegger introduces the second characteristic that is constitutive of factical life: fallenness. As a concernful relation to the world, original intentionality is accompanied by a tendency that is itself intentional, namely, to identify with the world and in this way to detach itself from itself. This fallenness substitutes tasks that are easy to master for the fundamental anxiety of factical life and obliterates the radical selfhood of this life under the leveling reign of publicness and of “the They.” Proper original intentionality is in this way the constant prey of an improper modality of intentionality. This persistent tension between the proper and the improper is particularly detectable in the third constitutive characteristic of factical life, that is, in the relation that this life has with its own end, death. The imminence and the ineluctable nature of death are constitutive of “the character of Being” of facticity and determine it intrinsically. On this point as well, the motif of vision is paramount. In its ineluctable imminence, death is the “phenomenon” that makes life visible (sichtbar) to itself (PIA, 365), that is, it brings “the specific temporality of human Dasein” (PIA, 366) into view (Sicht). But access to this view, since fallenness accompanies original intentionality as its shadow, assumes the detour of a (15) countermovement that resists Verfallen and opposes the original primacy of a negativity to the positivity with which it is identified. (Taminiaux, in Raffoul & Pettigrew, 2002, p. 14-15)

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