I experience really exists: the acquaintance really greets me; the music is really playing; it really occurs to me; the [104] Swiss stogies that I tuck into my real briefcase really exist; the gentleman behind the store-counter really is excited; the boy on the street really is making this dog angry; he really behaves badly; the fearful and desperate beginner in phenomenology whom I encourage really is fearful and dissatisfied with himself. b) Meaningfulness as the reality-character of tactical life


b) Meaningfulness as the reality-character of factical life

What I experience there is factically real—exists. What is the meaning of this "existence"? If we want an answer to this question, everything having to do with the concept of existence and all epistemological proofs and clarifications must be left out. Rather, it is a matter of looking out from the phenomenal meaning of "real," in which I am living and about which in factical life I do not explicitly, theoretically know. Insofar as I live factically in all of that which has been said; insofar as I am in one way or another occupied with it, in each case according to its content; insofar as I participate in it in such and such a way, everything that is experienced—in terms of content it may be as heterogeneous as ever—has the same meaning of existence. One must thereby think away all theorizing, one must not consult what an epistemologist says about it, but rather see the sense in which factical experiencing has renewed its experiences and always in the character of meaningfulness. Even the most trivial is meaningful, even the plainly trivial. Even that which is the most worthless is meaningful.

Drinking tea, I take my cup in my hand. In conversation I have my cup standing before me. It is not the case that I grasp something colorful or even that in myself I grasp data of perception as a thing, and this thing as a cup, which is determined in time and space, something that gives itself in perceptual succession, something that could also eventually not exist. "My cup, out of which I drink"—its reality fulfills itself in meaningfulness, the cup is meaningfulness itself. I live factically always caught in meaningfulness, and every meaningfulness has its encirclement of new [105] meaningfulnesses: horizons of occupation, sharing, application, and fate. I live in the factical as in a wholly particular context of meaningfulnesses, which are continually permeating one another, i.e. every meaningfulness is meaningfulness for and in a context of tendency and a context of expectation, which constructs itself ever anew in factical life [proper form: situation—opened]. In this improminent character of meaningfulness, what is experienced factically stands in factical life-contexts.


PHENOMENOLOGICAL PREPARATION 83


Basic Problems of Phenomenology - Winter Semester 1919-1920 (GA 58) by Martin Heidegger