Existence (and The Hermeneutics of Facticity)

Facticity and existentiality: the alternation between these terms is a constant feature of every analysis in Being and Time, and tracking their appearance and disappearance, their use and their constant reinterpretation is a great way to ensure that one reads that treatise attentively. But existentiality, despite Heidegger's efforts, can be said to remain underdeveloped there--no doubt because it is intrinsically hard to think and the later parts of the treatise that would give it a fuller and more explicit definition are missing. This of course does not mean that it is not thought in Being and Time, or that it is not developed and investigated as a structure, just that it is often less foregrounded in propositional statements and definitions than facticity. Supplementing this lack are the refinements made to it immediately afterward in Was ist Metaphysik?,  and especially with respect to Sartre's interpretation of existence in the Brief über den "Humanismus," that place heavy emphasis on interpreting existence as ek-sistence, standing-outside-of-itself. But perhaps this refinement is a bit too rigid with respect to what Heidegger is getting at in Being and Time, and therefore less helpful. What is needed is, of course, a good reading of Being and Time--in which ek-sistence as existence is indeed fully developed--but also perhaps a look at the earlier, clumsier lecture notes. In these Heidegger is less interested compared to his published texts for rigor with respect to how he speaks of being (not caring as much, that is, whether he says the obviously wrong phrase "being is"), and thus he is more likely to define it explicitly in a sort of rough and ready fashion. This brings it more into relief as a phenomenon  equiprimordial (gleichursprunglich) with facticity: because Heidegger does not have to talk about it with respect to Sartre's interpretation of it (which more and more should not be dismissed as a misinterpretation but a necessary interpretation and modification), it is seen more clearly as interconnected with facticity. All this is to say that a reading of the following sentences from the 1923 Freiburg course The Hermeneutics of Facticity could seriously help the reading proposed above:

The being of factical life is distinctive in that it is in the how of the being of its being-possible. The ownmost possibility of be-ing itself which Dasein (facticity) is, and indeed without this possibility being "there" for it, may be designated as existence.

-Ontology--The Hermeneutics of Facticity, 12.

Existence leaps out of the facticity which it is or exists as (one begins to see how tough it is to talk about this stuff explicitly). This makes phenomena like historizing in Being and Time open out into its existentiality and not remain just a sort of mode of authenticity that emphasizes facticity, which is precisely the most necessary and most fruitful way to think about it. Furthermore, we see how the hermeneutical task is itself really a making-the-

phenomenon-exist for us:

It is with respect to this authentic be-ing itself that facticity is placed into our forehaving when initially engaging it and bringing it into play in our

 hermeneutical questioning. It is from out of it, on the basis of it, and with a view to it that facticity will be interpretively explicated. The conceptual explacata which grow out of this interpretation are to be designated as existentials.

-Ontology--The Hermeneutics of Facticity, 12.

In short, it is helpful to drive the term "existence" back into the

 phenomenon, its co-belonging with facticity, in order to get a handle on it--and in fact this itself is the task of hermeneutics for Heidegger. Like with Kant, just collecting terms together, or even dividing them up in order to explicate them ("ek-sistence") does not release what is gotten at by the terms into any significant understanding. If Heidegger does this after Being and Time, it is perhaps because he considers this hermeneutical task preparatory to the thinking to be carried out in that treatise. But what bears upon this is the relation between the hermeneutical task and the phenomenology he carries out there--which he specifies in the introduction.