"Factical Life Experience as the Point of Departure"

Like I was talking about in my last post, here is a great, short passage from Heidegger's The Phenomenology of Religious Life (Winter Semester, 1920-21), that introduces you in a remarkably loose fashion to what Heidegger calls "the world," and, as the title of the section (quoted above) says, that basic phenomenon from which he sees his inquiries taking their departure:

The peculiarity of factical life experience consists in the fact that "how I stand with regard to things," the manner of experiencing, is not co-experienced [or experienced also]. What belongs to cognition according to its own meaning must be phenomenologically isolated prior to all decrees that philosophy is [in its essence] cognition. Factical life experience puts all its weight on its content; the how of factical life experience at most merges into its content. All alteration of life takes place in the content. During the course of a factically experienced day, I deal with quite different things; but in the factical course of life, I do not become aware of the different hows of my reactions to those different things. Instead, I encounter them at most in the content I experience itself: factical life experience manifests an indifference with regard to the manner of experiencing. It does not even occur to factical life experience that something might not become accessible to it. This factical experience engages, as it were, all concerns of life. The differences and changes of emphasis are found entirely in the content itself. The self-sufficiency of factical life experience is, therefore, grounded upon this indifference, an indifference which extends itself to everything; it decides even on the highest matters within this self-sufficiency. Thus, if we pay attention to the peculiar indifference of factical experience to all factical life, a specific, constant sense of the surrounding world, the communal world, and the self-world becomes clear to us: everything that is experienced in factical life experience, as well as all of its content, bears the character of significance. But with this, no epistemological decision has been made, either in the sense of some kind of realism or in the sense of some kind of idealism. All of my factical life situations are experienced in the manner of significance which determines the content of experience itself. This becomes clear if I ask myself how I experience myself in factical life experience:--no theories!

Generally, one analyzes only theoreticaly and thoroughly formed concepts concepts of the soul, but the self is not problematized. Concepts like "soul," "connection among acts," "transcendental consciousness," problems like that of the "connection between body and soul"--none of this plays a role for us. I experience myself in factical life neither as a complex of lived experiences nor as a conglomeration of acts and processes, not even as some ego-object in a demarcated sense, but rather in that which I perform, suffer, what I encounter, in my conditions of depression and elevation, and the like. I myself experience not even my ego in separateness, but I am as such always attached to the surrounding world. This experiencing-oneself is no theoretical "reflection," no "inner perception," or the like, but is self-worldly experience, because experience itself has a worldly character and emphasizes significance in such a way that one's own experienced self-world no longer stands out from the surrounding world... One [a "philosophical psychologist"] could object that I experience myself--how I feel--nonetheless factically, without special reflection; I know that right now, Iacted clumsily, and so forth. But this how, too, is no thoroughly formed manner of relating to something but a significance factically tethered to the surrounding world. The factical of which cognizance is taken does not not have an objective character but a character of significance which can develop into an objective context.
-from The Phenomenology of Religious Life, tr. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferenci (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 2004, pages 9-10.

I'd suggest reading the whole passage, which I do not duplicate here. I should note that Heidegger emphasizes just afterwards that factical life experience, as "attitudinal, falling, relationally indifferent, self-sufficient concern for significance," does not focus on significance as if significance were a general and theoretical phenomenon like "value:"

Significance seems, then, to be the same as value; but value is already the product of a theorization and, like all theorizations, has to disappear from philosophy... In the falling tendency of life experience, a connectedness of objects increasingly forms and increasingly stabilizes itself. In this way one arrives at a logic of the surrounding world insofar as significance plays a role in the connectedness of objects...
-ibid, 11-12.

...but in this arrival one has already missed the primary phenomenon that makes up factical life experience itself, significance. That is, in explicitly specifying any logic of the world, one moves into the sphere of abstract values and away from the significance of the world as such. As Heidegger puts it, one is just calling the "how" a "what." One moves back towards this significance, back towards the "how" itself (which indeed makes possible the relational significance of objects that one can "value" or not), only when one stops valuing and experiences it as factically significant, i.e. through a "how." As Heidegger says (to himself--indeed, these are lecture notes--and this only reinforces how hard it is to talk about factical life experience, to stick with the "how" as a "how" and not reduce it to a "what"): no theories!

Another note (on Hegel and the dead)

A better way of putting what I was getting at in my notes is featured in this (other) note:

-There is no thinking that would not already be thinking the death of the thing. One-sided thinking is a thinking that only respects the life of the object. It fails to see that the death of the thing is as important for and constitutive of its life as life itself. Overcoming life by the recuperation of death into life is the fundamental action of a thinking that raises the thing to the level of the Concept. As such, it must think the death of the thing, and think it as (as we already said), already present in the life of the thing. (For death and life, one can substitute being and nothingness: we're using Hegel's earlier Schellingian vocabulary that one finds in his essay on "Love," for example, because that gets at what he later calls "negativity" in a more concrete metaphorical manner.) The thinking of the death of the thing as already present in the life of the thing is, in a sense, killing it, killing the one-sided conception of life, pure life, that one attributes to it. Thought in the opposite way, one-sided thinking is attributing life to the object. A thinking that refuses the Concept and therefore produces phenomenality, appearance (as separated from essence), would be a thinking that attributed (only) life to the thing.

Quick notes on the Concept and death

Here are some more thoughts of the idea of the Concept as the killing of the thing. I'll develop them later:

-The withdrawing of the thing out of the present and into negativity/history brings forth the Concept--it is the appearance of the Concept, it is the phenomenon, in the Phenomenology of Spirit. On this cf. Heidegger's book on the Phenomenology.

-The above is evident in the chapter on sence certainty: when one says "the now" the now is already gone, Hegel says. What he means is that the now is dead, killed, the moment it is grasped as present. Bringing it into your grasp has lifted it already to the level of the Begriff, the Concept. Thus, every now is already dead.

-The demonstration of sense certainty or indeed any stage, then, is the demonstration of this stage's already being the Begriff, the Concept. It exists only as a stage because it already comprehends what it denies as a stage, as a phenomenon or a showing. Not only every now is dead, killed: everything is already dead for Hegel. Thinking is dead thinking: the thinking of death, the dead thinking (itself), refusing to remain alive as much as it refuses to remain dead.