But this could not be further from meaning that we are supposed to be as modem as possible, Le., respond to the purported needs and imagined wants of the day being publicly voiced. Everything modern is recognizable in the fact that it artfully steals away from its own time and is capable of creating an "effect" only in this fashion. (Industry, propaganda, proselytizing, cliquish monopolies, intellectual racketeering.)
By contrast, as what Dasein happens to encounter itself, Le., the character of its being, when its wakefulness has been led forth in such a manner cannot be calculated and worked out in advance and is not a matter for universal humanity or for a public. but rather is in each case the definite and decisive possibility of concrete facticity. The more we succeed in bringing facticity hermeneutically into our grasp and into concepts, the more transparent this possibility becomes. At "the same time," however, it is of itself something which uses itself up. As Dasein's historical possibility which is in each case definite and for a while at the particular time,[25] existence has as such already been ruined when one works with the idea that it can be made present in advance for philosophical curiosity to get a picture of it. Existence is never an "object," but rather being—it is there only insofar as in each case a living "is" it.
Insofar as the initial engagement and bringing into play is there for us only in such a manner, it is not an object for universal rationalization and public discussion. These are simply the prized means with which one in good time steers away from the possibility of hitting upon factical Dasein and striking out into it. Demands often and loudly proclaimed today: (1) everyone should avoid dwelling too much on presuppositions and look rather at the things themselves (a philosophy of things), (2) presuppositions must be put before the public in generally understandable terms, i.e., in the least dangerous and most plausible fashion—both demands surround themselves with the pretense of a purely objective, absolute philosophy. But they are only the masked cries of anxiety in the face of philosophy.
To ask where it is, then, that this hermeneutics belongs within the framework of the tasks of philosophy "itself" is a very peripheral and at bottom inconsequential question, if not one which has been posed III a fundamentally mistaken manner. The incidental strangeness of the course title should not tempt one to abandon oneself to such empty reflections.
Hermeneutics will itself remain unimportant so long as the wakefulness for facticity which it is supposed to temporalize and unfold[26] is not "there"—all talking about it is a fundamental misunderstanding of it. As far as I am concerned, if this personal comment is permitted, I think that hermeneutics is not philosophy at all, but in fact something preliminary which runs in advance of it and has its own reason for being: what is at