phenomenology as the pre-theoretical proto-science of original experience is a “hermeneutics of facticity”, whose initial aim is to make explicit the implicit structures into which historical life has already spontaneously articulated itself, “laid itself out”, prior to any extraneous thought or alien theoretical intrusion. The young Heidegger thus sharply juxtaposes the historically situated I over against any sort of theoretical I or transcendental ego abstracted in Cartesian fashion from its vital context, thereby denuded of its world, dehistoricized and devitalized (ibid.: 45–6; TDP 61–6, 74–7, 174 = GA 56/57: 73–8, 88–91, 206, 208–9).
This historically situated I will soon be ontologically identified with Da-sein as being-in-the-world (see Chapter 3). The language of life now slides into the language of be-ing. Yet, behind the scenes of Dasein as being-in-the-world, the spontaneous hermeneutics of factic life experience continues to operate as a pre-theoretical primal domain of being. Consider the theme of the understanding-of-being. Human being understands being. But this “understanding-of-being” is at first not conceptual in nature; it is rather the more matter-of-fact understanding of what it means to be that comes from simply living a life. To begin with, we do not know what “being” means conceptually, but we are in fact quite familiar with its sense preconceptually in and through the manifold habitual activity of living. If the term “knowledge” still applies to this understanding of life in its being, it is more the immediate “know-how” or “savoir faire” of existence, a knack or feel for what it means to be and how to “go about the business” (umgehen) of being that comes from life experience. We already know how to live, and this pre-understanding of the ways of being is repeatedly elaborated and cultivated in our various forays into the environing world of things and the communal world of being-with-others, both of which intercalate and come to a head in the most comprehensive of meaningful contexts, the self-world of our very own being-in-the-world.
This repeated cultivation and explication of our pre-understanding of being into habitually reinforced articulated contexts of relational meaning is what Heidegger has called a “hermeneutics of facticity”, where the “of” is regarded as a double genitive. That is to say, the facticity of life experience, on the basis of a prior understanding, already spontaneously explicates and interprets itself, repeatedly unfolding into the network of meaningful relations that constitutes the fabric of human concerns that we call our historical world. Historically situated existence in its facticity is thoroughly hermeneutical. Accordingly, any overtly phenomenological hermeneutics of facticity, in its expository interpretation of the multifaceted concerns of the human situation, is
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