It is necessary to point out that the German term for “history” (Geschichte) is also the term for “story,” as is the French “L’histoire.” To understand the ontological meaning of Dasein is to understand that the telling of a story is the fundamental way in which the meaning of existence is illuminated. Long ago Aristotle had recognized that the structure of a story consists of a beginning, a middle, and an end. The similarity between the seemingly mere aesthetic analysis in the Poetics and the three-fold analysis of time into past, present, and future is profoundly revealing. Unless we were able to tell stories, whether fact or fiction, the meaning of our existence would not be available to us. And here it is the formal character of the story and not its accuracy or factual correspondence that matters. When Heidegger speaks of “the stretch between birth and death,” he means the story of an existence; and a story is just how the meaning of existence is made manifest (i.e., made “true”).
This too must be emphasized: it is not the events that make a story; it is a story that makes the events possible and meaningful. Contemporary epistemologists remarkably spend almost none of their time and energy on the examination of how stories function to illuminate our understanding. Yet, from a children’s fairy tales to epics and histories, the very structure of a story, which is a priori, is used constantly to illuminate how we exist in the world. Heidegger’s term “Geschichte” therefore should always be interpreted not merely as history in the narrow sense of what is written in textbooks but as a story.
Such events in the current of human history can surely be significantly described in terms of fate and destiny — in fact, in some sense the event so described is meaningless without such concepts. But terms like “fate” (202) and “destiny” are almost embarrassing to sophisticated philosophers, and at best they are often described in terms of general social consciousness or psychological attitudes that have nothing to do with truth or validity.
And yet Heidegger argues that fate, heritage, and destiny are what make historicality possible. “Historicality” means, to Heidegger, that existential awareness through which one understands Being in history, and as such it is the ultimate ground and cause of historical awareness and historical research. For Heidegger, the existential view of having a fate or a destiny, along with the power of a story to reveal meaning, is what makes human history possible.
The question as to how history is possible, and the ensuing general interest in such historico-philosophical questions as the nature, methodology, and presupposition of historical knowledge, became the focus of special inquiry in the nineteenth century, above all with Hegel and the idealists, but also very much so in the works of people like Karl Marx and Wilhelm Dilthey. Few if any of these thinkers, however, would have set the discipline of history upon such uncertain foundations as fate and destiny. Yet even as Heidegger makes this unorthodox claim, one senses a kind of intuitional sympathy with the idea; for if nothing else, such an interpretation of history brings the philosophy of history to a remarkably immediate level. The tremendous advantage of such a view of history is the availability of the focal entity, Dasein. In other words, the methodological problem of trying to build a science on a series of events or entities that no longer exist, and hence in an important sense are not, ceases to be such a major stumbling block. For the foundation of history is not, according to this interpretation, people, artifacts, situations, and events that no longer exist; rather, the foundation of history is the existing human Dasein — a Dasein that has a fate and a destiny. (1989, p. 201-202)