Vattimo (Realidade) – encenação (Vollzugssinn)

In the new and definitive edition of Wegmarken (published for the first time in 1967), which he prepared shortly before his death (in 1976) and which was destined for the Gesamtausgabe,¹ Heidegger wanted to include, beyond the lecture on “Phenomenology and Theology,” even the long, unedited review of Psychologie der Weltanschauungen by Karl Jaspers (from 1919) that he wrote between 1919 and 1921. Without even exaggerating the “testamentary” significance of such a decision, the importance of this writing for understanding the formation of Heideggerian thought cannot be lost on anyone. For what interests us here—the analysis of existence and consciousness as the circle of fore-understanding and interpretation—the discussion of Jaspers’s text is revealing. Jaspers, Heidegger recalls, wanted to study the Psychologie der Weltanschauungen in order to understand “what the human being is,”² namely, in order to construct a general psychology able to trace out the horizon of the psyche in its totality. In the preface, Jaspers also wrote that by doing this he wanted to provide “clarifications and possibilities which can serve as means to our self-reflection (in our worldviews).”³ This latter intention, Heidegger says, is the “properly philosophical” one. Naturally, it does not assume that Jaspers judges the worldviews that he studies on the basis of an assumed systematic conception such as the “truth”; nevertheless, what he himself says about his own intention allows us to ask if he would “return radically to the original genetic motivations in this history” by verifying “whether these ideals satisfy the fundamental sense of philosophizing” or whether they have “never been appropriated in an original manner.”⁴ In the pages that follow, Heidegger introduced the expression faktische Lebenserfahrung (factical life experience), which one finds at the center of his 1920–21 lecture course Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religious Life.⁵ The “properly philosophical” intent of Jaspers, that of putting into play the Weltanschauung itself, is not, according to Heidegger, realized in the work. Jaspers ends by forgetting it, dedicating himself instead to a panoramic, objectifying, and definitively “aesthetic” presentation,⁶ of the various types of Weltanschauung. This attitude is called aesthetic not because it places itself in a perspective that is concerned with beauty and form; in fact, it is also able to have a moral inspiration. Rather, it is aesthetic because it is concerned with its own object—from the point of view that Gadamer later characterized as “aesthetic consciousness”—as an object of pure contemplation. One cannot possess the meaning of existence, Heidegger says, in a “theoretical manner [author’s note: contemplative, objectifying], but rather by enacting (Vollzug) the ‘am,’ which is a way of being that belongs to the being of the ‘I.’”⁷ All of that shows “that this experience does not experience the ‘I’ as something located in a region, as an individuation of a ‘universal.’” And still here, “The ‘I’ should be understood here as the full, concrete, and historically factical self that is accessible to itself in its historically concrete experience of itself.” Concrete historicity does not at all signify here “the correlate of theoretical and objective historical observation; rather, it is both the content and the ‘how’ of the anxious concern of the self about itself.” That has nothing to do with a further broadening of the dominant “historical consciousness,” understood as a collection of knowledge about the past, the practical use of this information, and a critique of its surviving relics. It is not a matter, in a word, of Historisches, of historiography, but of history in progress that is actively in relation to its own past. Jaspers, and before him the phenomenology of Husserl, had given to philosophy the task of getting “to the things themselves.” Therefore, without any presupposition. Already in the first pages of the review, Heidegger had written that “thinking without presuppositions is here intended to be taken in a philosophical sense and not in a specifically scientific sense. . . . It might just be the case that even in the directions of inquiry in which we could find access to the things themselves of philosophy lie covered over for us, and that what is thus necessary is a radical kind of deconstruction and reconstruction, i.e., a genuine confrontation with the history that we ourselves ‘are.’” The destruction—or deconstruction—of something that one understands in the context of the writing, where it is no longer a matter of a “metaphysics” to be overcome, in the sense of the “second” Heidegger, but one speaks instead of the fact that the objective, panoramic, aesthetic presuppositions that ultimately assert themselves in Jaspers’s book are the result of a tradition accepted without criticism, and not even consciously assumed. Because of this subjection to tradition, “we are unable to see phenomena of existence today in an authentic manner, we no longer experience the meaning of conscience and responsibility that lies in the historical itself (the historical is not merely something we have knowledge about and about which we write books; rather, we ourselves are it, and have it as a task).”

A term that recurs often in this text, and that is rarely cited due to the difficulty of translating it adequately, is Vollzugssinn—the sense of enactment. For example: “When, in accord with the relational sense of one’s experience (Bezugssinn), one is directed historically to one’s self, the context of this experience also has a historical nature in accord with its sense of enactment (Vollzugssinn).” Here Heidegger is trying to give a name to the historicity lived as the active assumption of an inheritance and, just a bit later, it will also be revealed to, and against, the phenomenology of Husserl himself (as seems apparent to me in pages 27–29).

I have dwelled a bit on these notes to Jaspers because, apart from the fact that they already contain many themes from Being and Time in their early form, they express an attitude that, without being “realist” or objectivistic in the current meaning of the term, is not at all inclined to the rule of everything goes, not even in the sense of promoting philosophy as the more or less literary redescription of the world. In these pages there is an effort at cogency, the search for a rationality that is exercised precisely by placing presuppositions into discussion, those very ones from which phenomenology wanted to free itself (and also Jaspers, in the wake of the Wertfreiheit of Weber) at the expense of falling back into an attitude that Heidegger later calls metaphysical—already seeing clearly its unsuitedness for philosophy.

The text of the review of Jaspers’s book also responds, more or less completely, to the problem of the “good reasons” for preferring hermeneutics over “realism.” Freedom can be realized only by beginning from the presuppositions that are gathered explicitly within their own lived historicity, that is, assumed in their Vollzugssinn. Here there is already the core of Heidegger’s step away from Husserl, which risks not realizing that “experiencing in its fullest sense is to be found in its authentically factical context of enactment in the historically existing I.”⁸ The phenomenological epoché consists already here, for Heidegger, in the removal of every model of theoretical neutrality from consideration in favor of an explicit engagement of the Vollzugssinn. It is precisely by remaining faithful to Husserl’s requirement of going to the things themselves that Heidegger, in the end, becomes unfaithful to him. But it would be imprecise to say that the emphasis placed on the faktische Lebenserfahrung and on Vollzugssinn responds to a demand with a more rigorous theoretical foundation. In these same pages we are now discussing, Heidegger leaves out that the various experiences of existence (aesthetic, moral, religious) can be described phenomenologically from the point of view of a theoretical model.