O breve esboço que o próprio Heidegger faz do seu desenvolvimento em direção à Ser e Tempo, pouco depois do seu aparecimento, coloca o dedo no primeiro impulso que a ela conduziu, nomeadamente, a plena identificação do fáctico e dos meios para chegar a ele (“indicação formal”), e localiza o início deste impulso no seu trabalho sobre Duns Scotus. De fato, um exame atento da obra de habilitação mostrará que ela é totalmente regida pela tendência para a facticidade, ou o que o próprio Duns Scotus chamava haecceitas (thisness). A própria escolha de Duns Scotus como tema de dissertação foi ditada pelo fato de “ele ter encontrado uma maior e mais fina proximidade (haecceitas) com a vida real, a sua multiplicidade e potencialidade, do que os escolásticos antes dele” (GA1:145). Mas a isto, Heidegger acrescenta também uma apreciação da perspicácia lógica de Scotus. Pois é o acoplamento dos dois sentidos, a sensação de formalidade e concretude ao mesmo tempo, que entra em ação na descoberta do próprio Heidegger no Kriegsnotsemester de 1919. O que aconteceu aqui foi, de fato, uma dupla descoberta, não só da facticidade, mas também da abordagem “formalmente indicativa” dessa facticidade. A própria ideia de “indicação formal” encontra, de fato, os seus primeiros estímulos na versão escocesa da doutrina aristotélico-escolástica da analogia do ser. Considerar a dissertação de Scotus como um precursor traz à tona os elementos de uma “hermenêutica da facticidade” já operando em filigrana no que Scotus poderia ter chamado de sua “gramática formal especulativa da thisness”. É simplesmente uma questão de olhar para a densa selva da velha e cansada habilitação durante tempo suficiente, e nos sítios certos, até que ocorra uma mudança de gestalt que traga a sua hermenêutica de facticidade crescida para o exterior. E, como uma “indicação formal” vinda do além, recebemos diretamente de Heidegger, na sua carta a Löwith em 1927, a garantia de que o esforço será bem sucedido.
(…) It all began in Kriegsnotsemester 1919. This main thesis acquires historical sustenance from its auxiliary or precursor thesis: it all began in the habilitation work of 1915. There are certain developments in the breakthrough of 1919 which necessarily take us back to the habilitation of 1915 and its concluding chapter of 1916 (Frühe Schriften 341-353). With the publication of Kriegsnotsemester 1919, this earlier work on “The Doctrine of Categories and Meaning in Duns Scotus,” after a dormancy of seven decades, now assumes new significance in more ways than we have so far mentioned. That the prehistory to a “hermeneutics of facticity” must include the habilitation work finds corroboration in the already-cited letter from Heidegger to Löwith in August 1927, shortly after the appearance of BT. Löwith had found the “ontological formalizing” of Dasein in BT not particularly helpful in his own habilitation work on an “ontic” anthropology, and expressed a preference for the more concrete “hermeneutics of facticity” which he had learned from Heidegger’s courses and seminars in the earlier years from 1919. In the context of underscoring the ontic founding of ontology as one of his most important discoveries, Heidegger finally remarks:
The problems of facticity exist for me no less than in my Freiburg beginnings, only much more radically, and now in the perspectives which even in Freiburg were guiding me. That I was constantly concerned with Duns Scotus and the Middle Ages and then back to Aristotle, is by no means a matter of chance. And the work (BT) cannot be judged by what was simply said in the lecture hall and the seminar exercise. I first had to go all out after (extrem losgehen auf) the factic in order to make facticity into a problem at all. Formal indication, critique of the customary doctrine of the apriori, formalization and the like, all of that is still for me there (in BT) even though I do not talk about them now. To tell the truth, I am not really interested in my development. But when the matter comes up, it cannot simply be put together from the sequence of lecture courses and what is communicated only in them. This short-winded consideration forgets the central perspectives and impulses at work both backward and forward.
Heidegger’s own brief sketch of his development toward BT, shortly after its appearance, puts the finger on the very first impulse which led to it, namely, the full identification of the factic and the means to get at it (“formal indication”), and locates the beginnings of this impulse in his work on Duns Scotus. Indeed, a close examination of the habilitation work will show that it is totally governed by the tendency toward facticity, or what Duns Scotus himself called haecceitas (thisness). The very choice of Duns Scotus as a dissertation theme was dictated by the fact that “he found a greater and finer proximity (haecceitas) to real life, its multiplicity and potential, than the scholastics before him” (FS 145). But to this, Heidegger also adds an appreciation of Scotus’s logical acumen. For it is the coupling of the two senses, the feel for formality and concreteness at once, which comes into play in Heidegger’s own breakthrough in Kriegsnotsemester 1919. What happened here was in fact a double breakthrough, not only to facticity but also to the “formally indicative” approach to that facticity. The very idea of “formal indication” in fact finds its first stirrings in the Scotian version of the Aristotelian-scholastic doctrine of the analogy of being. Regarding the Scotus dissertation as a precursor brings out the elements of a “hermeneutics of facticity” already operating in filigree in what Scotus might have called his “speculative formal grammar of thisness.” It is simply a matter of staring at the dense jungle of the tired old habilitation long enough, and in the right places, until a gestalt switch occurs which brings its overgrown hermeneutics of facticity out into the open. And, like a “formal indication” from beyond, we have it straight from Heidegger, in his letter to Löwith in 1927, that the effort is guaranteed to succeed.