Wheeler, Michael, "Martin Heidegger", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2015 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =
VOLUME 29, 2004
T
FROM CIRCULAR FACTICITY TO HERMENEUTIC
TIDINGS: ON HEIDEGGER’S CONTRIBUTION TO
HERMENEUTICS
PANAGIOTIS THANASSAS
ARISTOTLE UNIVERSITY OF THESALONIKI
ABSTRACT: Heidegger’s perspective on hermeneutics is not
uniform but is characterized by the overall move of his
thought from his earliest writings to Being and Time and from
there to the “turn.” In all these transformations, Heidegger’s
major contribution to hermeneutics remains his constant and
persistent contention, illustrated each time through different
means and concepts, that understanding and interpretation
constitute far broader phenomena than what was believed by
the various historical manifestations of hermeneutics.
Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics has been initiated by
this insight; but philosophical hermeneutics will bear and
constructively convey Heidegger’s legacy, only if it goes beyond
the repetition of the transcendental question of the conditions
of possibility of understanding, i.e., only if it
transforms itself into a hermeneutic philosophy.
he ambiguity and polysemy of the title may give rise to two questions.
The first question asks: which hermeneutics are we referring to here? Is it the
traditional “art of understanding,” whose main objects and points of reference
have been the Bible, the classical texts of antiquity, and legal texts? Are we
referring to Schleiermacher’s perception of hermeneutics as focusing on the
historical reconstruction and representation of the conditions underlying the
creation of an intellectual work of the past? Are we concerned with hermeneutics
in the sense it acquires in Dilthey, who tries to describe understanding as
the foundation of the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften), offering the latter
a method that would make them equal to the natural sciences? Or, finally,
are we referring to philosophical hermeneutics as established and developed by
48 PANAGIOTIS THANASSAS
Hans-Georg Gadamer, who expanded the scope of understanding to embrace
every human activity?
In approaching our subject, we will not take full account of the various
modes and genres of hermeneutics; we will conventionally identify it as the
approach of understanding and interpretation in general, without considering
the nuances resulting from the use of the term in its various historical
occurrences. It must be noted that Heidegger himself perceives hermeneutics
in this conceptual broadness. This is precisely his main contribution to hermeneutics:
his constant and persistent assertion (illustrated each time through
different means and concepts) that understanding and interpretation constitute
far broader phenomena than what was believed by the various historical
manifestations of hermeneutics.
The second question asks: which Heidegger are we referring to here? Is it
the Heidegger of Being and Time, i.e., the author of the work which, although
incomplete and despite its fragmentary character, remains the most prominent
philosophical “failure” of the twentieth century? Or, perhaps, the late
Heidegger, who abandons not only the attempt to construct a “fundamental
ontology,” but also the strictness of the philosophical conceptuality, searching
now for the historical interplay between the revelation and concealment
of truth in the fields of art, poetry, the tradition of metaphysics and modern
technology? Or are we referring to the early Heidegger, who, as a young lecturer
at the University of Freiburg, opened new philosophical horizons with
his 1919–1923 lectures that attracted the most philosophically talented youth
of that time?
Heidegger’s first period of intense philosophical investigation and creation,
the Freiburg period, ended in 1923, the year of his appointment as Extraordinary
Professor at the University of Marburg. This period was perhaps the most
productive and authentically original of his life, containing in vitro almost the
entirety of his philosophy that was to be developed in the writings to follow.
The last lecture course of the period, entitled Ontology: Hermeneutics of
Facticity, contains the most extensive and substantial development of
Heidegger’s hermeneutics. Our attempt to clarify the question “which Heidegger?”
will take this course as its point of departure (I). We shall then turn to
Being and Time (II) and will conclude our attempt to arrive at an answer to
this question through the examination of a later text, which bears the title, “A
Dialogue From Within Language” (III). In this text, Heidegger, using his
favourite method of nominalizing adjectives, will introduce “the Hermeneutic”
1—a phrase which implies that Heidegger’s references to hermeneutics
are not concerned with its particular historical manifestations but search for a
deeper meaning of understanding and interpretation. Finally, the concluding
part of this paper (IV) will attempt to detect the scope and the limits of
Heidegger’s contribution to what is nowadays called hermeneutics.
FROM CIRCULAR FACTICITY TO HERMENEUTIC TIDINGS 49
I. LIFE AS INTERPRETATION
“As far as I remember, I first used these words [“hermeneutics” and “hermeneutic”]
in a . . . course of the Summer Semester of 1923.”2 This recollection
by the late Heidegger is not correct. One comes across “hermeneutics” in
Heidegger’s very first course of 1919, where he describes an understanding
of life in the mode of Erlebnis, distinguishes it from any “theoretic-objectifying
or transcendent positing,” and calls it a “hermeneutical intuition”
(hermeneutische Intuition).3 In another course of 1919, Heidegger emphasizes
the importance of historical retrospection and of “understanding the intellectual
and historical factors,” not just for the purpose of “introducing” a
philosophical issue, but as a necessary and irreplaceable part of the “preparation
and activation of phenomenological criticism.” In his view, the “essence
of the entire phenomenological hermeneutics” lies in a deep unity between
historical and systematic philosophical research.4 During the Winter Semester
of 1919–1920, in an attempt to depict a relationship between science and
life that will not suppress the distinctive features and the historicity of the
latter, he refers to a “science of the origins” (Ursprungswissenschaft), which
in the final analysis assumes the form of a “hermeneutic” science.5
These occasional references, however, do not sufficiently account for the
“hermeneutic” disposition of Heidegger’s endeavour, about which the philosopher
himself seems particularly uncertain. It is only in the lecture course
of the Summer Semester of 1923 entitled Ontology: Hermeneutics of Facticity
that the concept of hermeneutics moves to the centre of his inquiry.6 This
course completes the first Freiburg period, constituting the culmination of his
philosophical and academic activities between 1919 and 1923, a period that
can be considered on the whole as an effort to develop sufficiently a “hermeneutics
of facticity.”7 But what is the meaning of the concept of “facticity,” to
which the early Heideggerean hermeneutics is attached?
Facticity (Faktizität)8 denotes the ultimate, non-reducible reality of individual
existence, which every authentic philosophy should acknowledge as
its foundation and point of departure. The founding factum and the fundamental
reality of life can never be ignored, it cannot be reduced to or deduced
from anything else. Since, however, this factum is full of meanings, human
beings incessantly perceive and understand these meanings produced by themselves
by articulating and arranging them into a “factical life unity.”9 In the
1923 course, which is our focus here, facticity is introduced as a “designation
for the character of the Being of ‘our’ ‘own’ Dasein” (GA 63, 7/5). If “we
take ‘life’ to be a mode of ‘Being,’ then ‘factical life’ means: our own Dasein
which is ‘there’ [da]” (ibid.). One might assume that the “hermeneutics of
facticity” is a distinct field of hermeneutics that deals with, analyzes, and
interprets a specific object called “facticity.” However, it is precisely this assumption
that Heidegger tries to oppose. Neither is hermeneutics perceived in
50 PANAGIOTIS THANASSAS
the ordinary sense of a doctrine of understanding nor is facticity perceived as
an “object” of hermeneutics.
In a brief and rather encyclopaedic reference to the history of hermeneutics,
Heidegger emphasizes the significant shift in the meaning of hermeneutics
after the seventeenth century. As he points out, “hermeneutics is now no
longer interpretation itself, but a doctrine about the conditions, the object, the
means, the communication and the practical application of interpretation” (13/
10). Later on, Schleiermacher and Dilthey would confirm this process, the
former by confining the task of hermeneutics to an “art (technique) of understanding”
of foreign speech, and the latter by establishing a “methodology
for the human sciences [Geisteswissenschaften]” (13–14/10–11). Finally, the
predominance of the technical and methodological dimension of hermeneutics
resulted in the complete loss of a previously existing unity between interpretation
and application and, along with that, the loss of the practical
orientation still preserved in the original notion of hermeneutics.10 Thus,
Heidegger feels the need to clarify that in his text “hermeneutics is not being
used in its modern meaning, and in no sense does it have the meaning of such
a broadly conceived doctrine about interpretation. In connection to its original
meaning, this term means, rather: a specific unity in the actualizing
[Vollzug] of hermeneuein (of communicating), i.e., of the . . . interpreting of
facticity” (14/11).
Nevertheless, Heidegger is not yet in a position to clarify this primordial
meaning of the concept and its relationship to his own endeavour. He therefore
confines himself to pointing out that “the word was chosen in its original
meaning because, though basically inadequate, it nonetheless highlights in an
indicative manner a few factors which are at work in the investigation of
facticity” (14-15/11). This assertion makes it clear that Heidegger’s hermeneutics
is not at all concerned with the interpretation of texts or foreign speech.
His hermeneutics does not see in human existence just one issue among many
others, but rather its only issue. Hermeneutics does not retrospectively turn to
human existence as an already given reality nor does it view it as the object of
a distanced intellectual activity, but rather it emerges from within existence
itself, from life and “facticity.” A primordial and inherent feature of Dasein is
its ability, tendency, and need to interpret itself, searching for its position in
the surrounding world and placing itself within it.11 Interpretation is not a
secondary act, but an indispensable and inescapable condition of the human
Dasein, which therefore exists as long as it interprets. Interpretor ergo sum.
Since hermeneutics is inherently present in facticity and structures the latter
by interpreting it, it would be wrong to consider facticity as an “object” of
hermeneutics. In an insightful comment, Gadamer once described the genitive
in the phrase “hermeneutics of facticity” as genetivus subjectivus and not
objectivus.12 This means that facticity is not interpreted from the outside, as
the passive object of a theoretical act, but it actively interprets itself and its
FROM CIRCULAR FACTICITY TO HERMENEUTIC TIDINGS 51
position in the world. This relation cannot be considered in the light of phenomenological
“intentionality,” since it is not a relation-to but a mode of
Dasein’s Being, which should rather be described as “the wakefulness of Dasein
for itself” (15/12). Hermeneutics, but also philosophy as a whole, is thus characterized
by a relentless self-reference. In Heidegger’s words, “the hermeneutical
engagement . . . is not a ready-made possession but rather arises and
develops out of a fundamental experience, and here this means a philosophical
wakefulness, in which Dasein is encountering itself.13 The wakefulness is
philosophical—this means: it lives and is at work in a primordial self-interpretation
which philosophy has given of itself” (18/14).
Heidegger’s invocation of hermeneutics is guided by a deeper intention:
namely, the undermining and abolition of the traditional precedence of a theoretical
and scientific approach to the world and human existence. Hermeneutics
thus constitutes primarily a self-interpretation of facticity that structures existence
and makes its unity possible. Existence, the Dasein, should not be abandoned
and left to become the “object of indifferent theoretical beliefs” (3/2),
but has to be entrusted to a hermeneutics born and emerging within the context
of facticity. The “inception, execution, and appropriation” of this hermeneutics
is “ontologically and factico-temporally prior to all accomplishments in the
sciences” (15/12). Needless to say, the distrust towards science and theory does
not lead to a renunciation of philosophy in general. On the contrary, Heidegger
intends to free philosophy from the bonds of theory and to associate it with the
living, endless “questionableness” (Fraglichkeit, 17/13) of human existence.
Philosophy can be self-referential and oppose any kind of external imposition
or encroachment; it can define itself as an activity performed simply eautes
heneka, only because human life itself in its individuality constitutes an autonomous
self-defined entity. Furthermore, the self-relationality of existence
involved in interpretation cannot be perceived as reflection (Reflexion). Since
interpretation belongs “to the Being of factical life itself” (15/12), since it is
ontologically identical to life in general, it cannot be accomplished by keeping
distant from its “object,” nor does it allow any sort of reflective mediation: it
has to be accomplished in an immediate way.14
This concept of interpretation entails primarily a challenge to Hegelian
dialectic. Later on in the course, Heidegger will attack dialectic explicitly
(although unsuccessfully), accusing it of living “from the table of others”
(45/36). In a note entitled “hermeneutics and dialectic” (107–108/83), he will
point out that the latter “does not lead to and call for direct grasping and
having,” while hermeneutics, by contrast, offers a “more radical possibility, a
new conceptuality.” The immediacy claimed for hermeneutics, however, seems
to invalidate any mediating function of hermeneutical Logos, and this constitutes
the greatest gap in Heidegger’s approach. This gap probably leads to
Heidegger’s inability to determine properly the precise character and function
of hermeneutics and its relationship with what he calls “philosophy.” On
52 PANAGIOTIS THANASSAS
the one hand, the immediacy of hermeneutics enables it to remain at a pretheoretical
stage, constituting thus a direct manifestation of facticity: hermeneutics
is not a matter for specialists, but rather an indispensable component
of every individual existence, every Dasein. On the other hand, however,
“hermeneutic understanding” proceeds to indicate some general formal characteristics
of existence (das Formale, 18/14).15 Although trying to be formalistic
or “return back” to Dasein and avoid self-sufficiency (ibid.), Heidegger’s
analysis does remain different from our active understanding carried out in
the everyday activities of our individual existence: it is theory.16
Heidegger’s attraction to the older hermeneutics and its orientation towards
practical applications has already been mentioned. Not only does he try to restore
this applied dimension but he also promotes it to the only dimension possible.
It is probably his refusal to accept the mediating and therefore theoretical
character of hermeneutics and his persistence in relating the latter to common
understanding as its immediate disclosure that prevents Heidegger from determining
the status of hermeneutics in itself and in relation to philosophy in general.
One would expect that a hermeneutics rooted in existence and returning to
it cannot but constitute the only true philosophy. Therefore, the following awkward
statement might evoke a feeling of surprise: “I think that hermeneutics is
not philosophy at all, but in fact something preliminary which runs in advance
of it and has its own reason for being: what is at issue in it, what it all comes to,
is not to become finished with it as quickly as possible, but rather to hold out in
it as long as possible” (20/15–16). Our puzzlement increases with another statement:
“hermeneutics is itself not philosophy; it wishes only to place an object
which has hitherto fallen into forgetfulness before today’s philosophers for their
‘well-disposed consideration’” (ibid.).
It seems that the treatment of this “object” called facticity cannot be philosophical,
inasmuch as Heidegger perceives philosophy in the traditional sense
of a theoretical, conceptual investigation. The opening section of the lecture17
makes clear that hermeneutics is pursued in the service of philosophy qua ontology;
its task is confined to a critical, preparatory function, aiming to point
out the invalidity of two claims often raised in philosophy. The first demands
that “everyone should avoid dwelling too much on presuppositions and look
rather at the things themselves,” while the second insists that “presuppositions
must be put before the public in generally understandable terms, i.e., in the
least dangerous and most plausible fashion” (19/15). Both claims “surround
themselves with the pretence of a purely objective, absolute philosophy”—a
semblance to be cancelled by hermeneutics, together with the myth of a philosophy
approaching things free of any presuppositions or predispositions.18
Paving the way for Gadamer’s “rehabilitation of prejudice,”19 Heidegger exposes
the demand for an understanding and a philosophy free of any conditions,
presuppositions, and particular viewpoints as the greatest and most
dangerous prejudice. The claims of a “scientific” and “objective” philosophy
FROM CIRCULAR FACTICITY TO HERMENEUTIC TIDINGS 53
become only pretence for making the “lack of critique” the highest virtue and
for unfolding a deep hermeneutic “blindness” (82/63). Instead of pleading for
an (unfeasible) dissociation from our viewpoint, hermeneutics calls for its “explicit
appropriation” in its historical dimension. The shape of the “hermeneutic
circle” to be exposed in Being and Time is here at the stage of its genesis.
The main function of appropriating the horizon within which we approach
life, “facticity” and the conditions of our philosophical positions consists in a
destruction (Abbau, Destruktion) of the philosophical tradition. In contrast to
his initial demand for an “immediate” perception of things, in the course of
the lecture Heidegger acknowledges that “what shows itself from itself in a
straightforward manner need not as yet be the subject matter itself” for which
we are searching: “taking up the subject matter in a straightforward manner
guarantees nothing at all” (75/59), since this supposedly immediate perception
is immanently guided by tradition and the historically shaped modes of
understanding. Tradition accumulates successive strata of “concealment,”
which have to be excavated and removed in destruction, through a process of
reverse historical course that would lead to the very essence of philosophical
concepts and to their origins. In contrast to the “a-historicity of phenomenology,”
which “naively believes that the subject matter will, no matter what the
position of looking at it, be obtained in plain and simple evidence” (ibid.),
hermeneutics is expected to consider the deeply historical character of our
existence and facticity and, as a fundamental historical critique, to respect the
historical ballast accumulated in concepts. In this sense, as a hand-written
note by Heidegger confirms, “hermeneutics is destruction!” (105/81).20
To summarize, this early text defines understanding as an inherent, permanent,
and substantial element pervasive in any aspect of human existence. Heidegger
aims at a reversal of the process which, he believed, had taken place in the
past three centuries, beginning with the seventeenth century Protestant manuals
of hermeneutic rules. Viewing even Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics as a system
of specific rules of understanding and Dilthey’s hermeneutics as a method for
the human sciences, he attempts to overcome such conceptions and make hermeneutics
identical with the very act of understanding itself. Heidegger’s hermeneutics
of facticity is thus not an “art” or doctrine of understanding, but the
significant self-interpretation of existence itself: a philosophical hermeneutics
that keeps Dasein in wakefulness and reminds us of the historicity and the finitely
determined and prismatic character of every philosophical notion. Nonetheless,
this philosophical hermeneutics remains an ancilla philosophiae, it
cannot be transformed into a hermeneutic philosophy.
It seems, however, that Gadamer’s understanding of the genitive in the
phrase “hermeneutics of facticity” as a genetivus subjectivus should undergo
a significant modification: the genitive is both subjectivus and objectivus. As
subjectivus, it makes facticity the acting agent of hermeneutics and praxis the
origin of facticity’s development. As objectivus, it approaches facticity as the
54 PANAGIOTIS THANASSAS
object of an analysis that, even if Heidegger wishes to avoid this, cannot but
be called theoretical—although its legitimacy remains uncertain. This is an
anticipation of the circle attempted in Being and Time, which will prove fatal
to the success of the endeavour. The analysis of existence (Daseinsanalytik),
which is called upon in order to reveal the “meaning of Being” and to found it
in Dasein, will remain suspended and unable to confirm its origin in the practical,
pre-theoretical activity of Dasein. Both the hermeneutics of facticity
and Being and Time will constitute a theory that falsely and unsuccessfully
feigns a pre- and non-theoretical stance.
II. CIRCULAR UNDERSTANDING
As Heidegger admitted, his familiarity with the concept of hermeneutics
was due to his studies in theology, as well as to his study of Dilthey’s theory
of the historical Geisteswissenschaften.21 In the 1923 lecture course, Heidegger
has obvious difficulties with an accurate definition of the “hermeneutic”
dimension of his thought. Nonetheless, he calls upon it in order to distance
himself from Husserl’s phenomenology as “an unconditional” and “strict”
science. However, when four years later he addresses a broader audience in
Being and Time, he seems reluctant to abandon the term “phenomenology,”
and hence clearly distance himself from Husserl. On the contrary, he continues
to describe his ontological endeavour as phenomenological: “Ontology
and phenomenology ...characterize philosophy itself with regard to its object
and its way of treating that object [respectively].”22
Identifications of this kind express either a conceptual laxity or (more positively)
the awareness that names, disciplines, and schools hamper rather than
enhance philosophical understanding and thus have to be undermined in their
one-sidedness. At any rate, in Being and Time Heidegger not only associates
and strikes a balance between phenomenology and ontology, but also seems
to renounce the opposition between hermeneutics and phenomenology. “The
phenomenology of Dasein is hermeneutics in the primordial sense of this word,
which concerns the task of interpreting” (37). In an attempt to clarify more
precisely this “primordial sense” of hermeneutics, Heidegger distinguishes in
the famous “methodological” section 7 of the work between three components
of the “hermeneutic” nature of this phenomenology.
The first component refers to “the methodological meaning of phenomenological
description,” which lies in “interpretation” (Auslegung). The logos
of phenomenology assumes the character of hermeneuein in the sense of “transmitting,
announcing” (kundgeben). The meaning of Being and the structures
of Dasein to be “announced” are not rooted in the reflective acts of an intentional
consciousness, but rather in the Dasein itself and the act of understanding
as “thrown projection” (geworfener Entwurf). Heidegger obviously resorts
to this hermeneutic dimension, to which he assigns an existential meaning, in
FROM CIRCULAR FACTICITY TO HERMENEUTIC TIDINGS 55
order to distinguish what he calls hermeneutic phenomenology from Husserl’s
phenomenology.23 The second dimension of hermeneutics in Being and Time
lies in its relevance for “working out the conditions of the possibility of any
ontological investigation”—i.e., for an investigation aiming also at the Being
of beings other than the Dasein (37). Since the Being of beings and its meaning
emerges only through the understanding acts of Dasein, which acquires
thus an “ontic-ontological priority” over other beings (13–14), the possibility
of particular peripheral ontologies lies in a foremost hermeneutic disclosure
of Dasein’s structure and of the meaning that it understands. Finally, the third
dimension of hermeneutics results from “Dasein’s ontological priority,” relates
to an “interpretation of Dasein’s Being,” and aims at an “analytic of the
existentiality of existence” (38). This dimension is described by Heidegger as
the primary one, since the attempt to develop a fundamental ontology will
begin and pass through this existential analytic of the Dasein.
These clarifications confirm Heidegger’s perception of hermeneutics as it
was outlined in the 1923 course, without marking any significant progress in
the clarity of his concepts. The specific hermeneutic character of the “analytic
of the existentiality of existence” does not visibly emerge and the reader
can hardly discern its relation to what is called traditional hermeneutics; despite
Heidegger’s initial emphatic statements, in the course of Being and Time
the concept of hermeneutics becomes “strangely pale.”24 However, this is not
enough to invalidate the importance of the work for hermeneutics. Paragraphs
31 and 32, which focus on “Dasein as Understanding” and “Understanding
and Interpretation” respectively, contain Heidegger’s most significant contribution
to the subject of hermeneutics and understanding.
Understanding in Being and Time does not constitute a means of knowledge
and science, but a “fundamental Existential,” a “basic mode of Dasein’s
Being” (143). This primordial understanding affects the entire relation of
Dasein to the world which it discloses. The world is the first, indispensable
and non-reducible reality of existence, an insurmountable proteron constituted
as a totality of relations and meanings grounded on the “readiness-tohand”
(Zuhandenheit) of beings and on the position they take in the practical
framework of each individual existence. Since the fundamental ontological
category of existence is not actuality but possibility, understanding takes place
in a primordial way only as a “projection” of Dasein onto its own possibilities.
It is only this projection that makes possible an approach to and disclosure
of the world. Even philosophy itself, as the mode of understanding par
excellence, emerges as a specific form of possibility. Dasein on the whole
exists as continuously projected onto its possibilities, which it either accepts
or rejects. I project myself therefore I am.
Understanding is articulated and formulated as interpretation (Auslegung),
in which “understanding appropriates understandingly that which is understood
by it” (148). Heideggerean interpretation is not a simple and superficial
56 PANAGIOTIS THANASSAS
acquiring of information, but rather the working-out of possibilities projected
in the understanding, explicitly revealed and expressed in it. Interpretation is
not primarily concerned with texts or foreign speech but with practical everyday
life and the network of relationships that sustain each Dasein and constitute
its “world.” The primordial interpretation departs from the primary
determination of being as “equipment” (Zeug) and explicitly expresses the
understanding of the position of each being in this network on the basis of its
readiness-to-hand and its “in-order-to” (Um-Zu), its purpose. This position
becomes manifest through the understanding of “something as something.”
Primordial understanding does not understand beings as secluded and selfcontained;
instead, it situates them in the context of relationships and determinations
known under the name of “world.” An interpretation of something
as something (a phenomenon that Heidegger calls the “As-structure” of interpretation)
does not attribute this or that feature to a being a posteriori, but is
incipiently present, inherent even in elementary sense perception, as well as
in the modes of a presumably simple, pure and “neutral” vision. An understanding
based on the manifestation of a being’s position in the world produces
“meaning” (Sinn). The meaning of this “meaning” is holistic par
excellence, since it emerges from the integration of a piece of equipment into
a world, of the part into the whole: “As the disclosedness of the ‘There’ [‘Da’],
understanding always pertains to the whole of Being-in-the-world” (152).
The relation between part and whole constitutes one of the typical questions
of hermeneutics,25 an answer to which was provided by the scheme of a
hermeneutic circle, which the interpreter traversed from the part to the whole
and vice versa. The comprehension of a given text’s meaning is illuminated
by considering its position in the author’s entire work, which in turn can be
understood differently in light of the comprehension of a particular text. The
same process takes place at a lower level between a text in its entirety and a
particular expression in it, which mutually enable an understanding of each
other. In Being and Time, Heidegger adopts the concept of the hermeneutic
circle but decisively modifies it, assigning to it a more radical function and
turning it against the traditional methodological self-consciousness of the historical,
philological, or other disciplines. “Interpretation,” he states, “is never
a presuppositionless apprehending of something already fore-given to us. If a
particular concrete interpretation, in the sense of exact textual interpretation,
is willing to appeal to what ‘stands there,’ what first of all ‘stands there’ is
nothing but the self-evident undiscussed assumption of the interpreter, necessarily
lying in every interpretative approach as something that has been ‘taken
for granted’ with the interpretation as such, i.e., as something fore-given in
fore-having, fore-sight and fore-conception” (150).
This triadic structure of fore-understanding26 brings out different aspects
of the dependence of each specific hermeneutic act on the pre-existing whole
of relationships, conceptions, meanings and dependencies that make up the
FROM CIRCULAR FACTICITY TO HERMENEUTIC TIDINGS 57
interpreter’s world. Each “understanding of the world” implies an “understanding
of existence” and vice versa. At the same time, “every interpretation
which is to contribute to understanding must already have understood what is
to be interpreted” (152). The whole from which, in Heidegger’s view, the
understanding of the part begins is thus not the whole of a foreign text or a
biography, but rather the whole of our own Dasein, as a sum of relationships
to the world that leads every hermeneutic act: “This circle of understanding is
not an orbit in which any random kind of knowledge may move; it is the
expression of the existential fore-structure of Dasein itself” (153).
In contrast to the Geisteswissenschaften that, influenced by the scientific
methodological ideal of “precision” and “unconditioned knowledge,” would
rather wish to avoid the cyclical nature of understanding, Heidegger refuses
to see the hermeneutic circle as an unfortunate defect. It is neither a circulus
vitiosus like those despised and condemned in logic, nor an inevitable imperfection
that we have to tolerate (ibid.). On the contrary, it constitutes an inherent
and indispensable element of every understanding and every relation
to the world. In fact, even the so-called unconditioned and unprejudiced positive
sciences are conditioned by the hermeneutic circle. Understanding is thus
liberated from the false ideal of an absolute knowledge and truth and reconciles
itself with its existential dimension, its finitude, and its disposition to be
complete and yet not definite, holistic and at the same time prismatic. Understanding
will never escape the horizon within which it takes place. The structure
of fore-having, fore-sight and fore-conception is a set of shadows that do
not follow but lead it. The “situation,” the kairos, is not a necessary evil but a
condition of the possibility of every understanding.
In Heidegger’s scheme, the beings to be understood (pieces of equipment,
texts, utterances, situations, facts, intentions, existence, the Others) become
evident only in the light of the conditions that have been laid down by the threefold
fore-understanding. An attempt on the part of the interpreter to annul any
preheld views and approaches would not only be fruitless, but would also constitute
an indication of serious hermeneutic blindness, leading away from the
specifically hermeneutic desideratum: the constant awareness of the necessary
presuppositions of understanding and interpretation. Nevertheless, the hermeneutic
circle is authentic only when it transforms itself and the fore-understanding
while being traversed. Heidegger, however, seems reluctant to draw and explicitly
state the normative implications incipiently contained in the scheme of the
hermeneutic circle.27 He simply points out that “what is decisive is not to get
out of the circle but to come into it in the right way” (ibid.).
However, which is the “right way”? One would expect that it lies in the
constant awareness of the cyclical nature of understanding and interpretation,
in the knowledge that these are guided by specific presuppositions, and in the
constant effort to lay them down as far as possible. In short, one would think
that the correct traversing of the circle would be a traversing with critical
58 PANAGIOTIS THANASSAS
awareness, self-control and self-exposure. But Heidegger himself attaches a
different meaning to the “right way”: he invites the interpreters not to obey
passively the fore-understanding imposed on them by various “fancies and
popular conceptions,” but to shape it “out of the things themselves” (aus den
Sachen selbst) (153). This laconic appeal to “things themselves” gives rise to
a number of questions. Does this appeal not lead to obscuring the real nature
of understanding, to neglecting the significance of the interpreter’s role and,
finally, to the illusion of an objective interpretation based on a fore-understanding
arising out of “the things themselves”?
Promoting “things” to a regulative principle that exclusively leads interpretation
seems to disrupt and revoke the very existence of a hermeneutic
circle.28 The irresolvable tension between the hermeneutic aspects of a text
and a tacit foundationalist appeal appears here in the form of a tension between
the fore-structure that is said to condition all understanding at the existential
level and the things themselves as norms of interpretation. The
“As-structure” of the interpretation and the fore-structure of understanding
are Heidegger’s crucial and original contribution to the hermeneutic endeavour,
revealing understanding and interpretation as existential characteristics
with a range and significance much wider than what traditional hermeneutics
would allow for. The conceptual lacunae already pointed out, the lack of sufficient
clarification and the inability to indicate the specifically hermeneutic
nature of the attempt are, at least in part, a result of the conditions under
which Being and Time was written.29 We will complete our discussion of this
work with a consideration of the problem that arises when the scope of understanding
and interpretation becomes so extended that it transcends and infringes
upon the very limits of language.
From the very beginning, Heidegger had referred to a “mere pre-predicative
seeing” of beings as a means of primordial understanding that interprets beings
“as a table, a door, a carriage, or a bridge,” without having to be explicitly
stated “in a determining assertion” (149). In the section devoted to
“assertion as a derivative mode of interpretation” (section 33), Heidegger will
contrast an assertion like “The hammer is heavy” with some “primordial carrying
out of interpretation” of the type “too heavy” or “hand me over another
hammer!” While an assertion expresses an attitude of existential neutrality
and distanced theoretical (if not “logical”) perception, primordial understanding
is carried out on the basis of a vital practical appropriation of beings. It is
established in the everydayness of existence and understands them as readyto-
hand, integrating them “as” these or those in the whole of relations and
practical references that make up my world. This “hermeneutic As,” the primary
structure of familiarity with things and of their understanding, has to be
distinguished from the “assertive As,” which constitutes a derivative form of
“suppressing” the former (158).
FROM CIRCULAR FACTICITY TO HERMENEUTIC TIDINGS 59
Through the distinction between a hermeneutic and an assertive “as,” Heidegger
attempts for the first (and possibly the last) time in the history of hermeneutics
to dissociate it from language and assign a pre- or non-linguistic dimension
to it. This distinction, however, seems impossible. The “pre-predicative simple
seeing” that Heidegger invokes as a means of carrying out the primordial understanding
of a non-linguistic “hermeneutic As” seems to assume the role of
a quasi-intuitive knowledge, acquired in the context of everyday action. How
is it possible, however, to make the simplicity and pre-predicative immediacy
of this seeing compatible with the complexity of understanding, as an understanding
of something as something? And what kind of “simple seeing” is
this, when even the primary perception through the senses has been exposed
as a composite hermeneutic act?
In a lecture course of the Winter Semester of 1925–1926, Heidegger characterized
this “kind of Being of language” as “concealed up to our days” and
as “ontologically totally enigmatic.”30 In the few months between this and the
writing of Being and Time, he does not appear to have made any decisive
steps towards resolving this obscurity. It is not incidental that language and
discourse (Rede) as its “existential-ontological foundation” upset the threefold,
“ecstatic time”-oriented structures worked out by Heidegger. Discourse
initially appears as “equiprimordial with disposition (Befindlichkeit) and understanding
(Verstehen)” (161). But in the alignment of these existential characteristics
along the three time dimensions (section 68), whereas understanding
is founded upon the future and disposition upon the past, discourse remains
ignored and is substituted in its relation to the present by “falling” (Verfallen).
This confusion is only exacerbated by the statement that, even though discourse
“does not temporalize itself primarily in any definite ecstasis,” the
present takes over to perform within it “a privileged constitutive function”
(349). In the end, language will be related as “idle talk” (Gerede) to the nonauthentic
“falling,” and only silence will appear as its authentic form. What
one can conclude with certainty is Heidegger’s embarrassment in the face of
language, which is to take its revenge upon him by breaking down the confining
models in which he is trying to subsume it.
III. HERMENEUTIC TIDINGS
After the failure to complete Being and Time, Heidegger’s philosophical
investigation turns to new directions. The 1929 lecture entitled What is Metaphysics?
will illustrate the impasse of his thought in the late 1920s that was to
lead him to the famous and spectacular “turn.” Despite Heidegger’s own belief,
this turn did signal a shift of position, which in simple terms can be described
as a resignation from the attempt to ground the meaning of Being in Dasein
through an analytic of existence that leads to “fundamental ontology” and directs
it. Since Dasein, individual existence, has proven unable to sustain
60 PANAGIOTIS THANASSAS
Heidegger’s foundationalism, it is now emphatically transformed into a Da-
Sein: into the Here (Da) of a Being (Sein), which no longer constitutes a projection
(Entwurf) of existence, but a dynamic historical process of revelation and
concealment of truth that transcends and over-determines human will and power.
The scope of the Heideggerean turn first becomes clear in philosophical
circles in 1947, after the publication of the famous Letter on Humanism. Notably
called “the house of Being,”31 language emerges in this letter not as an
existential of doubtful function, but as the main field of unfolding truth as
strife between concealment and revelation. Language does not constitute a
man’s act, characteristic or creation, but rather a response to the “call” and
the “voice of Being.” Heidegger’s next approach to language will take place
in the text “A Dialogue From Within Language,” written in 1953–1954 “on
the occasion of a visit by Professor Tezuka of the Imperial University of Tokyo.”
32 This text represents a stylistically unsound attempt to engage in a philosophical
dialogue with the Japanese professor, an attempt which confirms
that the philosophical dialogue not only was born but also probably died with
Plato. This Heideggerean dialogue often comes close to bad taste and kitsch—
as when, for example, the interlocutors discover the essence of language in
Koto ba, where ba denotes leafage or flowers and Koto “the pure delight of
the beckoning stillness” (142/45). The relevance and importance of the text
become evident only after it is divested of this pseudo-dialogic character.
In this text, Heidegger is indeed “on the way to language,” trying to escape
the difficulties of his previous attempts to conceptualize and philosophically
assess it. He is no longer satisfied with the characterization of language as the
house of Being. This he considers a “clumsy” expression (90/5) that overlooks
the multiplicity of languages and language families and fails to provide “a concept
of the essence of language” (112/22). In searching for this essence in what
he calls “the Hermeneutic” (das Hermeneutische), Heidegger rehabilitates the
concept of hermeneutics abandoned long ago, and modifies it in a way compatible
with his later thought. He is no longer interested in hermeneutics as an “art
of understanding” (like the earlier philosophers), or as “interpretation as such”
(as he initially was). He explores hermeneutics only in the context of an attempt
to “determine the essence of interpretation through the Hermeneutic” (98/11)—
which, however, “means not just the interpretation but, even before it, the bearing
of message [Botschaft] and tidings [Kunde]” (122/29).
In a characteristic return to his philosophical origins, Heidegger alludes
implicitly, but clearly, to the lecture of 1923.33 At the same time, he exposes
his earlier hermeneutic investigations to radical evaluation and modification.
The hermeneutic task of human beings is no longer determined by the facticity
of individual existence. It does not primarily consist of a self-referential understanding
of human life and the world, but of “hearing” and then “bringing
tidings,” “preserving a message” (126/32). Understanding and interpretation
thus contain two dimensions: the receiving and hearing of the message on the
FROM CIRCULAR FACTICITY TO HERMENEUTIC TIDINGS 61
one hand, and its preserving and transmission as tidings on the other. If we
compare these dimensions to understanding’s description in Being and Time
as a “thrown project,” we observe that the first dimension takes the place of
throwing, while the second supersedes Dasein’s projecting upon its future
possibilities.34 Understanding and interpretation continue to provide a dynamic
association of something given and of a human contribution. The difference
lies in the degree to which each participates in the overall combination: while
in Being and Time Man receives his “thrownness” (Geworfenheit) and directs
it under the conditions of a free projection toward infinite future possibilities,
in Heidegger’s later philosophy the content of the human tidings is strongly
determined by the message previously received.
This quasi-dialectical relationship between hearing and transmitting also
leads to a revision of the concept of the hermeneutic circle, now defined by
Heidegger as a circle of the “relationship between the message [Botschaft]
and the bearing of it [Botengang]”: “The message-bearer [Botengänger] must
come from the message. But before this he must also have gone toward it”
(150/51). The interpreter, in Heidegger’s sense of the term, is now expected
to transmit and announce only what has been entrusted to him or her in the
form of a message; in order to hear it, however, it is first necessary for him to
turn to and approach it. Heidegger confirms the inescapable nature of this
movement, but at the same time he expresses his reservations about the benefit
of characterizing this movement as a circle: “This necessary acceptance
of the hermeneutic circle does not mean that in the notion of circling we experience
primordially the hermeneutic relation” (ibid.). He even certifies that
he no longer supports his earlier view, since “that talk of a circle always remains
superficial” (151/51).
Being and Time’s “fore-understanding” is thus replaced by participation
in the “hermeneutic relationship” (hermeneutischer Bezug); Man is “called”
by Being itself to become part of this relationship, which in turn means “the
presence of present beings [Anwesen des Anwesenden]—i.e., the twofold
[Zwiefalt] of the two out of their oneness [Einfalt]” (122/30). The allusion to
this “twofold” between presence and present beings signifies that, apart from
the particular beings becoming present and accessible, there exists the fact of
Being-present, the very presence itself, the revealedness of beings in general—
truth as a strife between unveiling and concealment and as the condition
of the possibility of every particular appearance and disappearance of a
being. It is this very twofold that calls Man, who in turn is expected to “correspond
to the call [Zuspruch] of the twofold and thus bear witness to its message”
(ibid.).
The hermeneutic relationship—i.e., the relationship of Man to the twofold,
is not determined by an inherent need of individual existence, but by
language itself. In the field of language we could perhaps discern another
twofold, homologous to that between“presence and present beings”—namely,
62 PANAGIOTIS THANASSAS
the twofold between language and particular utterances. The essence of language
could be located precisely in this twofold: since language does not
confine itself to particular statements, it is not even identified with the sum of
possible phrases or articulations, but rather transcends them as an infinite
source of new possibilities, as an incessant overflowing of meaning. Just as
the twofold between presence and present beings emerged out of their oneness,
the twofold between language and utterances equally emerges out of an
analogous unity that guarantees the transmission of meaning, inasmuch as the
utterances participate in the totality of language—the “relation of all relations”
(215/107).
The hermeneutic relationship does not arise as a human product, nor does
it take shape on the basis of human wishes and desires. In this relationship,
Man is called to receive the message and transmit it further—after hearing it.
The point of departure for this relationship rests outside, beyond and above
Man, who is unable even to determine the exact sources of the messages.
Such a determination is not feasible, because the origin of a message cannot
be located in a particular being and cannot ever be fully revealed. It rather
stems from that field of strife between truth and forgetfulness, revelation and
concealment, that Heidegger now calls Being. The common denominator of
Heidegger’s appeals to Being lies in the suggestion that truth is not confined
to a subjective intellectual, logical, or linguistic human activity, but rather
denotes a dynamic process originating outside the human being and leading
beyond it. It is Man’s duty to be constantly prepared for receiving and protecting
the signs of this strife and the revelations it permits. The hermeneutic
relationship is a relationship of readiness for an “obedient” perception of the
messages of this truth process.
It is evident that such a hermeneutic relationship, in which Man is no
longer the one who asks, but the one who is being asked, has nothing in
common with a hermeneutics up to then (including Being and Time) focusing
on human questioning. This is obviously the reason why Heidegger in
his “turn” abandons altogether the use of the concept of hermeneutics. The
text “A Dialogue From Within Language” is the only exception, although its
careful references to “the Hermeneutic” do not signify an attempt to restore
or reintroduce the concept of hermeneutics as such. The acknowledgement
of the existence of messages that are not products of a self-conceited human
subjectivity but rather originate beyond and outside us, the insight that language
is not a human tool or construction but rather (in a twofold to every
utterance) an endless source and unexplored condition of the possibility of
every statement which, as such, “is always ahead of us” (179/75), always
above and beyond us—this is the legacy bequeathed by the later Heidegger.
FROM CIRCULAR FACTICITY TO HERMENEUTIC TIDINGS 63
IV. HEIDEGGER AND GADAMER: TOWARDS A
HERMENEUTIC PHILOSOPHY
“The ‘hermeneutic philosophy’ is Gadamer’s own business.” Does this statement
by Heidegger35 justify the suspicion that his own use of the word “hermeneutic”
has always been arbitrary,36 so that every attempt to explore his
relationship to hermeneutics heads in the wrong direction from the very beginning?
I think that this suspicion is not valid, and that Heidegger’s contribution
to hermeneutics remains unquestionable. He was the first to emancipate
understanding from the (sometimes primary and sometimes parasitic) role
attached to it by disciplines such as law, theology, and philology, as well as
from the duty to assume the methodological equipment of the human sciences.
He was the first to reveal its predominant position in the entirety of
human existence, for he perceives understanding not as one among many other
possibilities of existence but as a fundamental process, not only relating to
text interpretation, but also actively present in the nucleus of every human
experience and activity.
The universality of the hermeneutic phenomenon and the omnipresence of
understanding, which Gadamer will later fervently support, are already clearly
emerging in Heidegger’s work, who was the first to raise them to subjects of
a philosophical rather than simply methodological treatment. Indeed, understanding
and interpretation are not techniques, but rather prerequisites of every
technique. They constitute elements of a “Truth” which is not contrary to
“Method”37 but a condition of the possibility of every method. Heidegger’s
hermeneutics is no longer a methodology; it may be a method in the sense of
Plato’s and Hegel’s dialectic, in that it is not applied to its object from the
outside, but emerges from within the object itself and its “very nature” (inasmuch
as understanding is an inherent element of the very subject-matter
[Sache] of the sciences, as well as of existence in general).
This hermeneutic method does not aim at an unrestricted knowledge or a
Hegelian absolute self-elucidation of the Spirit. Despite the spectacular shifts
of position already mentioned, a permanent characteristic of Heidegger’s approach
to the hermeneutic phenomenon is the awareness that light and darkness
coexist and are present at every moment. The equi-primordial character and the
permanent co-existence of authenticity and inauthenticity in Being and Time,
as well as the subsequent interweaving of revelation and concealment, of “world”
and “earth” within the truth process, are perfect examples of Heidegger’s persistence
in reminding us of the limits of Logos and of human finitude.38 As
Gadamer was to point out later, “hermeneutics concentrates on something incomprehensible.
This has always been the case for hermeneutics.”39
What, however, is the relationship between Heidegger’s approach to the
hermeneutic phenomenon and what Gadamer later established and presented as
philosophical hermeneutics? This question touches upon an issue which we
64 PANAGIOTIS THANASSAS
can only deal with in passing in this paper. Certainly, it is evident that Gadamer’s
philosophical hermeneutics would never have existed without Heidegger’s work
(a claim which, however, does not invalidate or undermine Gadamer’s originality).
It is equally clear, though, that Gadamer is called upon to fill gaps and
answer questions that have remained unexplored (or have not even been raised
at all) in Heidegger’s work. The most important of them is the relation between
interpretation(s) and hermeneutics. The latter could secure its autonomous and
specific character only to the extent that it is distinguished from the sum of the
pre- and non-theoretical interpretations involved in all our relations to the world
and all practical acts. Heidegger was clearly unwilling to accept such a distinction
or even focus on the way in which hermeneutics originates and emerges
from factual interpretations. It is only Gadamer’s transcendental approach to
the hermeneutic question and its transformation into a question concerning the
conditions of the possibility of understanding in general that will bring to light
and guarantee hermeneutics’ autonomy.
As compared to Heidegger’s work, philosophical hermeneutics presents three
major expansions, transitions, and transformations. The first concerns the fact
that Gadamer, being not only Heidegger’s son but also Hegel’s offspring, places
the finitude of human understanding in a wider historical context: in the domain
of tradition, which constitutes a powerful field of movement and determining
condition of the interpreter’s fore-understanding. The particular facticity
is thus disclosed in its inherently and primarily historical dimension, determined
by a plurality of factors, which can only partially be distinguished and
clarified. In addition to this affirmation of historicity, Gadamer is guided by a
positive evaluation of history itself. History is not the process of expansion of
the “forgetfulness of Being,” of the accumulation of shades and continuous
alienation from the primordial sense of philosophical concepts, but an endless
source of new meaning. This new meaning is produced not only through new
intellectual achievements, but also through the enrichment of the meaning of
the old ones in every act of their understanding. If we were allowed to make a
psychological observation, we would locate the main difference between
Gadamer and Heidegger in the presence and absence of good faith respectively.
When Heidegger suspects veiling, obscuring, and distortions, Gadamer expects
an unceasing discovery and production of new meaning.
Apart from this diachronic expansion of the hermeneutic circle towards
tradition and the past, Gadamer also undertakes an equally important
synchronic expansion, aiming at the inter-subjective, communicative dimension
of understanding.40 Interpretation as an “actualizing” (Vollzug) is no longer
confined to the self-referential field of facticity, Dasein or the interpreter who
awaits the call of Being, but rather takes place as a dialogic act. The relation
to the Other does not tend to “falling” (Verfallen) and the development of
“idle talk” (Gerede), but awakens dialogue, which, due to its character as an
actualization,” is raised to an independent value per se.
FROM CIRCULAR FACTICITY TO HERMENEUTIC TIDINGS 65
The association of finitude with historicity as well as the perception of
hermeneutics as interpersonal understanding are based on a third expansion
of hermeneutics, which grounds the first two and pertains to the significance
of language. As a historically growing totality, language constitutes the thread
that connects us to the past manifestations of the Spirit, establishing the historicity
of fore-understanding and every understanding whatsoever. As a communicative
horizon, language constitutes the thread that links us to the Other’s
presence, establishing dialogue as the field of every understanding and interpreting.
The universality of understanding is ultimately nothing but a sign of
the only universality possible, the universality of language.41 For Gadamer,
language no longer constitutes the house of Being, but rather “Being that can
be understood is language.”42 As a result, it is vain to search for a Being above
and beyond language. Gadamer does seem to accept a distinction between
language and utterances similar to the one described earlier.43 Philosophical
hermeneutics presents language as a “thing in itself” which, unlike the Kantian
thing in itself, is not identified negatively as something beyond our experience,
which resists our knowledge, but positively as a focal point of participation
and constant source of new meaning.
The eminently philosophical character of philosophical hermeneutics lies
in the explicit statement and treatment of the transcendental question of the
conditions of the possibility of understanding in general. On the basis of what
we have said so far, Heidegger’s contribution to the preparation and revelation
of this dimension must have become evident. What seems imperative for
philosophical hermeneutics today, after forty years of contribution to philosophy,
is to reflect on its present state and prospects. Here Heidegger again
proves useful, mainly through his reflections on the status of hermeneutics
put forth in the 1923 lecture course. We have seen that the doubts concerning
the philosophical character of hermeneutics in this text resulted from
Heidegger’s inability to locate and conceptually determine the particularly
hermeneutic dimension of his thought. Those views, however, when put forward
in the present situation, become extremely timely.
In the last years of is life, Gadamer remarkably continued to produce important
texts, often alternating between insightful observations concerning
his previous work, on the one hand, and a slightly narcissistic affectation, on
the other. His descendants, all those who more or less pose themselves within
the hermeneutic tradition, should now more than ever reflect on the young
Heidegger’s words cited earlier: “Hermeneutics is not philosophy at all, but
in fact something preliminary” (GA 63, 20/15). His paradoxical appeal to
remain within this “provisional” stage “as long as possible” has clearly been
fulfilled in the last few decades, in which hermeneutics indeed succeeded in
“placing an object which has hitherto fallen into forgetfulness before today’s
philosophers for their ‘well-disposed consideration.’” Posing the transcendental
question about the conditions of the possibility of understanding has
66 PANAGIOTIS THANASSAS
attributed a philosophical character to hermeneutics, but is not sufficient to
guarantee this character (not to mention the fact that the very notion of beingphilosophical
is deeply historical and thus prone to transformation). Philosophical
hermeneutics at present is forced to make a choice. It will
either—against the view espoused by Gadamer—become another philosophical
“school,” entrenching itself behind the constant reproduction and restatement
of that initial question, deviating from predominantly philosophical issues
and drifting towards some self-referential investigation; or it will acknowledge
that the new motivations in philosophy will not arise out of the mere
enterprise to understand understanding, but, as has always been the case, out
of the attempt to understand Man and world. In doing this, philosophical
hermeneutics would transform itself into a hermeneutic philosophy.44
Although Heidegger was the first to recognize the full scope of the hermeneutic
phenomenon, his contribution leaves open the crucial question of how
to accomplish that transformation. This task is still pending. Certainly, such a
process of transformation would not aim at creating yet another philosophical
school. Transcending the limits of schools of thought, a hermeneutic philosophy
will be aware of the historical dimension inherent to philosophical hermeneutics
and of the relevance of this dimension to our own, present
self-understanding—but it will not set historical questioning in opposition to
transcendentality, nor will it submit to the current “post-metaphysical” pleadings.
45 Following philosophical hermeneutics, it will reflect on “positionality,”
on the prismatic and finite nature of each philosophical point of departure
and each individual position. It will be aware of the historicity and situatedness
of philosophy, the conditions and sources of the omnipresent historical and
dialogic fore-understanding. It will acknowledge the multifaceted nature of
understanding, the finitude of the spirit, the transformation of the Absolute
into an absolute process, which is endless and at the same time complete within
itself. It will realize that the partiality of every philosophical view does not
undermine the truth claim present in it as in every articulation, nor does it
lead to relativism or scepticism. It will be aware of the limits of Logos, but, in
contrast to the parasitical negative hermeneutics of Deconstruction, will not
obstinately adhere to these limits, but will rather proceed within the entire
space signalled by them: the endless field of understanding. It will be continuously
cautious against the absolute distinction between historical and
systematic investigation, and will continue to search for the diachronic, historically
developing truth contained in the texts of the past. Finally, it will
continue to move in the realm of the interplay between identity and otherness,
an interplay that emerges between what is to be understood and the multiplicity
of understanding, actively mediating this relation. As heir of philosophical
hermeneutics, this hermeneutic philosophy will be able to further utilize
in the best way possible—that is constructively—Heidegger’s legacy.46
FROM CIRCULAR FACTICITY TO HERMENEUTIC TIDINGS 67
ENDNOTES
1. “Das Hermeneutische,” Unterwegs zur Sprache, 6th ed. (henceforth UzS), (Pfullingen,
1979), 98/11. Our translations are based on the English translation by P. D. Hertz, On the
Way to Language, (New York, 1971), 1–54; alterations are not pointed out. Page numbers
refer both to the German original and the English translation. Hertz translates the title of
the text, “Aus einem Gespräch von der Sprache,” as “A dialogue on Language.” Towards
the end of the text, however, Heidegger makes clear that it is not a dialogue “on” (über)
language, but rather a dialogue “from within” language and its essence (von ihrem Wesen
her; 149–150/51).
2. UzS, 95/9.
3. See Gesamtausgabe (henceforth GA) (Frankfurt, 1975), 56/57, 117.
4. Ibid., 131–132.
5. GA 58, 55. In the same lecture course (262–263), “diahermeneutics” is evoked as a
substitute for “dialectic as a synthetic juxtaposition of notions.”
6. Ontologie (Hermeneutik der Faktizität), GA 63. Our translations are based on the
English translation by J. van Buren, Ontology—The Hermeneutics of Facticity,(Indiana,
1999); alterations are not pointed out. Page numbers refer both to the German original
and the English translation.
7. This is what Heidegger himself seemed to believe. In a footnote in Being and Time
(72), he pointed out that “Dasein’s ‘Hermeneutics of Facticity’ has been presented repeatedly
in the lectures since the Winter Semester of 1919/20.”
8. The noun Faktizität comes from the adjective faktisch, which denotes the real as a
given, created, constructed “fact” (Faktum, lat. factum, facio). The term appears in the
second half of the nineteenth century. It is used by Dilthey and established by the Neo-
Kantians, who draw a distinction between Faktizität and Logizität. See T. Kisiel, “Das
Entstehen des Begriffsfeldes ‘Faktizität’ im Frühwerk Heideggers,” in Dilthey-Jahrbuch
4 (1986–87): 91–120.
9. During the period 1919–1923, Heidegger uses the terms “life” (Leben), “existence”
(Existenz), “facticity” (Faktizität), and “Dasein” as near synonyms. Towards the end of
this period, due to the re-appearance and gradual predominance of the ontological inquiry,
“existence” and “Dasein” conceptually substitute for the terms “life” and “facticity.”
However, it is only in Being and Time that Heidegger abandons the concept of “life” once
and for all, calling it “ontologically undetermined” and thus distancing himself from Dilthey
and his “philosophy of life” (see Being and Time, 49–50, 209, 246–247, 403, etc.).
10. For instance, in Patristic theology. These views are also shared by Gadamer, who,
throughout Truth and Method, will extensively elaborate and firmly establish Heidegger’s
critique of Schleiermacher and Dilthey; see Wahrheit und Methode (Tübingen, 1960);
also in Gesammelte Werke 1, trans. J. Weinsheimer and D. G. Marshall: Truth and Method,
2nd ed. (London, 1989).
11. See GA 63, 80/62: “Dasein (factical life) is Being in a world.”
12. See “Der eine Weg Martin Heideggers,” in Gesammelte Werke (henceforth GW) 3:
422; English translation: “Martin Heidegger’s One Path,” in Reading Heidegger from the
68 PANAGIOTIS THANASSAS
Start, ed. T. Kisiel and J. van Buren (New York, 1994), 19–34. The translation of genetivus
subjectivus as “possessive” (24) is rather misleading.
13. Heidegger is here still under the influence of Dilthey and his famous dictum which
defined understanding as “life capturing life itself”; see Gesammelte Schriften 7: 136.
14. See G. Figal, “Wie philosophisch zu verstehen ist. Zur Konzeption des Hermeneutischen
bei Heidegger,” in Siebzig Jahre “Sein und Zeit,” ed. H. Vetter, Wiener Tagungen zur
Phänomenologie (Frankfurt a.M., 1999), 138.
15. See also section 16, where “formal indication” is discussed; a more sustained treatment
of “formal indication” can be found in the lecture of the Winter Semester of 1920/21
Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion; see GA 60, 55–65. “Formal indication”
functions as an equivalent to the “hermeneutical intuition” mentioned above; it indicates
an attempt to develop concepts out of a pre-theoretical, historical understanding and “formalize”
them in a way that retains their demonstrative sense as indications that point back
to the facticity of their historical provenance and forward to their possible critical concretization
in new historical contexts. We could describe this notion of the “formal” as a
mode of conceptual/theoretical mediation that preserves the immediacy of factical existence.
Nevertheless, Heidegger will never give a full and satisfactory account of this notion.
In Being and Time he still promises to clarify the possibility of concept-formation in
the third Division of the first Part, which has never been published (see a note on 349,
deleted in the later editions, but retained in the English translation of Macquarrie, 401).
16. See Figal, ibid., 139; and J. Grondin, “Die Hermeneutik der Faktizität als ontologische
Destruktion und Ideologiekritik. Zur Aktualität der Hermeneutik in Zur philosophischen
Aktualität Heideggers 2, ed. D. Papenfuss and O. Pöggeler (Frankfurt a.M 1990), 171.
17. See section 1: “The title ‘Ontology.’” The preparatory and auxiliary role assigned to
hermeneutics with respect to philosophy/ontology accounts to some extent for the title of
the lecture.
18. Heidegger’s evident reservation towards an unconditional viewing and grasping of
“things themselves” indicates the distance he had taken since 1923 from Husserl’s phenomenology.
His references to phenomenology are positive only when he focuses on the
concept of phenomenon as a being that manifests itself by itself” (section 14 et passim),
or when he contrasts phenomenology to dialectic (section 9). The following surprising
comment is noteworthy: “Göttingen 1913: for a whole semester Husserl’s students argued
about how a mailbox looks. Using this kind of treatment, one then moves on to talk about
religious experience as well. If that is philosophy, then I, too, am all for dialectic” (GA 63,
110/86). The correct word in the last phrase is most likely “phenomenology” rather than
“philosophy.” This is probably one of many printing mistakes encountered in the
Gesamtausgabe.
19. See Wahrheit und Methode, GW 1: 281–305.
20. The most significant illustration of the scope and function of Heidegger’s concept of
destruction is found in an extremely important text of 1922 entitled Phänomenologische
Interpretationen zu Aristoteles. Anzeige der hermeneutischen Situation. This text was first
published in 1989 by H. U. Lessing in Dilthey-Jahrbuch 6: 237–269. (English translation
by M. Baur: “Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle. Indication of
the Hermeneutical Situation,” in Man and World 25 (1992): 355–393).
FROM CIRCULAR FACTICITY TO HERMENEUTIC TIDINGS 69
21. See UzS, 96/10.
22. Sein und Zeit, 16th ed. (Tübingen 1986), 38. Our translations are based on the English
translation by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson: Being and Time, (New York, 1962); references
are made to the pagination of the German original, indicated also in the margins of
the English edition.
23. See also F. W. v. Herrmann, Weg und Methode. Zur hermeneutischen Phänomenologie
des seinsgeschichtlichen Denkens (Frankfurt a.M., 1990), 15–16.
24. Figal, ibid., 137. A section of the second Division on “The hermeneutical situation at
which we have arrived.” (section 63) does not add much to the elucidation of the concept
of hermeneutics in Being and Time.
25. See Gadamer, GW 1: 296–300.
26. Here we are using a term not used by Heidegger himself, in order to draw attention to
the unity of the three dimensions of what he calls “fore-structure of understanding” (Vor-
Struktur des Verstehens). Fore-understanding (Vorverständnis) as indicating this structure
was mainly used by Bultmann, before it was established as a philosophical term through
Gadamer’s Truth and Method.
27. Contrary to what G. Scholtz seems to believe (“Was ist und seit wann gibt es
‘Hermeneutische Philosophie’?” in Dilthey-Jahrbuch 8 (1992/93): 104), the transcendental
inquiry of a philosophical hermeneutics does not exclude, but rather involves and
implies deontic issues and normative consequences.
28. Only Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, under the decisive influence of Hegel,
will later develop and transform the hermeneutic circle so that it can be productively
traversed. In this, the pole of the interpreter (i.e., of fore-understanding) is historically
determined in terms of tradition and produced as a “history of effect”
(Wirkungsgeschichte). The interpreter does not monotonously search for the chimera of
“things themselves,” but rather produces and traverses a circle between history and the
present, between the historically effected “whole” of the spirit and the “part” of a special
individual creation.
29. The work was compiled in March 1926, under the pressure of the prospect of Heidegger’s
appointment as Professor at the University of Marburg. Heidegger resorted to earlier notes,
papers and lectures, often incorporating them unedited into his work, which at times seems
quite unsystematic. Gadamer rightly characterizes the process of writing Being and Time as
“the story of a true improvisation on the basis of excessive preparation.” “Erinnerungen an
Heideggers Anfänge,” in Dilthey-Jahrbuch 4 (1986/87): 17.
30. GA 21: 151.
31. GA 9: 333.
32. “Aus einem Gespräch von der Sprache”; see also n. 1.
33. An important indication of this allusion is the renewed reference to Plato’s Ion, 534e.
In the 1923 text, Heidegger translated the Platonic noun hermeneus as “speaker” (Sprecher)
and the act of hermeneuein as “communicating, announcing” (mitteilen, kundgeben); the
same is the case in the later text (see GA 63: 9/6, and UzS, 121–122/29).
34. See also Hermann, ibid., 25–26.
70 PANAGIOTIS THANASSAS
35. From a letter to Otto Pöggeler, cited in O. Pöggeler, Heidegger und die hermeneutische
Philosophie (Munich, 1983), 395.
36. See UzS, 98/11.
37. The title of Gadamer’s work Truth and Method erroneously became the reason for
taking his hermeneutic endeavor as an attempt to juxtapose truth to scientific method and
reject the latter’s claim to truth. Forty years after the publication of the work, this misinterpretation
should have been resolved.
38. For the “interplay” between “world” and “earth,” see “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes.”
Holzwege, GA 5: 1–74; English translation: “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Basic
Writings (London, 1993), 139–212. See also my, “Art as Ontology. Heidegger on the
Origin of the Work of Art,” Greek Philosophy and The Fine Arts, ed. K. Boudouris, Athens
2000 II: 181–190. This Heideggerian redefinition of truth in the Origin . . . has been
particularly important for Gadamer’s hermeneutical defense of the human sciences as
offering a different conception of truth, which is specific to them.
39. GW 10: 63.
40. It would be useful to further explore how Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action.
(Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, trans. T. McCarthy, (Frankfurt, 1981)), 1984–
87 is indebted to this description of understanding as the dialogic act par excellence.
41. See GW 1: 478–494.
42. Ibid., 478.
43. At least this is what is indicated through his references to verbum interius. See the
references to Augustine, ibid., 422–431. On the basis of personal discussions with Gadamer,
Jean Grondin considers Augustine’s verbum interius the essence of the universality of
Gadamer’s hermeneutics: see J. Grondin, Einführung in die Philosophische Hermeneutik
(Darmstadt, 1991), ix–xi.
44. This seems to be the opinion of G. Figal, when he states that “in hermeneutic philosophy
the world is expressed conceptually.” Hermeneutik–hermeneutische Philosophie. Ein
Problemaufriss,” in Hermeneutische Wege. Hans-Georg Gadamer zum Hundertsten, ed.
G. Figal, J. Grondin, and D. J. Schmidt, 342. The distinction between philosophical hermeneutics
and hermeneutic philosophy seems to be blurred, however, when Figal attaches to
the latter the task of “giving direct expression to the scope of understanding”: it “does not
deal with understanding in the context of the world, but rather with the world of understanding”
(ibid.). But the attempt to “comprehend how understanding takes place”
(“begreifen, von woher das Verstehen geschieht,” ibid.) is just what philosophical hermeneutics
has always been doing. Why should it be assigned to hermeneutic philosophy?
45. As G. Scholtz seems to do. “Was ist und seit wann gibt es ‘hermeneutische
Philosophie’?” 93–119. Scholtz rightly emphasizes the importance of historical consciousness
and the awareness of historicity for a hermeneutic philosophy. Nevertheless, in his
attempt to set clear and narrowly defined limits for a hermeneutic philosophy, he juxtaposes
the latter to “metaphysics, transcendentalism, and every philosophy of history.” He
thus describes it as a substitute for the disappearing metaphysics, overseeing in this way
metaphysical projects such as Hegel’s which also put emphasis on historicity. In addition,
when Scholtz insists that “every knowledge is not based on transcendental but rather on
historical and contingent presuppositions, which cannot be rationally reconstructed,” he
FROM CIRCULAR FACTICITY TO HERMENEUTIC TIDINGS 71
seems to raise doubts about the very aim and task of philosophy: the rational and conceptual
reconstruction of reality. The view of Scholtz takes account of an older attempt by O.
F. Bollnow to distinguish between philosophical hermeneutics and hermeneutic philosophy:
“The former consists in raising the method developed within the philological and
historical sciences to a higher philosophical consciousness. The latter signals the attempt
of philosophy to engage in hermeneutic activity in general, that is an activity interpreting
the reality of life-world.” “Festrede zu Wilhelm Diltheys 150. Geburtstag,” Dilthey-Jahrbuch
2 (1984), 49–50. Such a broad “definition” of hermeneutic philosophy is probably sufficient,
and certainly more adequate than that of Scholtz.
46. I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for this Journal, and my colleague and
friend Dionusis Goutsos, for their valuable comments on this paper.
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