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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

Heidegger & historicity « Previous | |Next »
June 23, 2004

Trevor,
I'm very rushed. It's hectic in Canberra. I was going to write on Heidegger and historicity but I do not have time to think. Anyway I'm too tired to think. Maybe I can write about historicity when I get back to Adelaide on the weekend.

So I'll just link to this article by Eric Nelson. Eric says the following about historical understanding:


"Historical understanding refers not only to what is being understood (history), for which Heidegger criticized traditional hermeneutics and historiography, but to how it is understood as a way of our own being in a situation and world (historicity). My claim is that because understanding is historical in this double sense, understanding occurs according to an orientation that arises out of the experience of historicity in its facticity."

I'll pick up on what is meant by "the experience of historicity in its facticity" latter. At the moment I'm just too wired on the stress and tension of political life in Canberra to think about philosophy.

June 26
So what is meant by facticity? Eric Nelson addresses this by acknowledging that the word facticity is in one sense an unfortunate choice to convey both the unrecognized and unthematized everydayness and the fallenness, thrownness and uncanniness (ruination) of life. He says that:


"Acknowledging the problematic character of this word, other senses can still be clarified.....The word facticity is derived from the Latin factum. Factum refers to human activity and production. Factum is an artifact of human practice. Following this usage, Giambattisto Vico formulated the axiom verum factum; the true is the made....In humanist thought from Vico to Marx, humans know history insofar as they make history. The identity of subject and object guarantees the possibility of knowledge and action based on knowledge. The model of productive activity that this presupposes is inherently instrumental. The real is defined as a set of objects created and transformed by a subject. The meaningfulness of these objects is thus determined by their purposefulness and usefulness for the productive agent.

The meaning of fact as something constructed was, however, increasingly lost in modernity. The notion of facticity functioned in the Kantian and positivist discourses of the Nineteenth-century as an appeal to truths that are not made by humans but given to them as incapable of being doubted. "Facticity" shared a similar fate with the word "positivity" in referring to the actual or real that cannot be circumvented."


Nelson says that the concept of facticity underwent a further more radical transformation in the thought of Heidegger in the early 1920's. In his lectures of the 1920's Heidegger:

"....state that the practice of phenomenology, which itself is a practice of formal and situated understanding, leads inevitably to hermeneutics. Responding to this claim does not, however, lead to a return to the traditional hermeneutics of the text but rather to the explication of the inherently contextual, perspectival and thus prejudicial character of life to which I belong.

Historicity poses a question that requires phenomenology to be not only genetic but also hermeneutical. Insofar as it is to become a hermeneutics of factical life, rather than of the interpretation of texts, phenomenology is exposed to the generative and historical character of life."


Nelson says that facticity in Heidegger's early texts has a double structure since it:

"....designates both the already known insofar as it is [154] unknown, namely everydayness, and that which potentially resists, reverses, and places into question this understanding and its derivative forms, uncanniness. In experiencing uncanniness, the ruination and questionability of life are encountered."

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:31 PM | | Comments (0)
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