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Hermeneutics as Phenomenology

1 As soon as hermeneutics became philosophical it also became phenomenology. When Heidegger, in his famous 1923 lecture course on Hermeneutics of Facticity, conceives hermeneutics as the basic selfunderstanding of human life, he has two different aspects in mind. First hermeneutics is supposed be the explication of ‘facticity’, i.e., the articulation of being-there in its being. Understood in this way, hermeneutics is no longer a general doctrine of understanding, as it had been for Schleiermacher, and no longer a conceptual foundation of the humanities, as it had been for Dilthey. Instead, hermeneutics is the evidence of human life in its being, which can be articulated in philosophical concepts. But this is only possible if, second, hermeneutics is also the understanding and the explication of the philosophical tradition. What Heidegger calls ‘destruction’ and what, with Derrida is more clearly to be called ‘deconstruction’, is a true hermeneutical project. Traditional concepts must not be taken simply at face value. They have a history and an origin in the beginning of their history. It determines this meaning to greater or lesser degrees, but always does so essentially. Only if the original meaning of a concept is clearly understood, is one able to decide whether the concept may be appropriate in the context of its actual philosophical use, and this means for Heidegger, in its use in the context of the hermeneutics of facticity. According to Heidegger’s conviction, the most crucial problem of the hermeneutics of facticity is not to conceal or to falsify the evidence of human life in its being. Therefore, both the explication of factual life and deconstruction belong essentially together. Deconstruction is the hermeneutic purification of conceptual thinking so that the articulation of the self-evidence of human life is possible. The interplay of deconstruction and the hermeneutics of facticity constitutes phenomenology in Heidegger’s sense. According to his reflections on phenomenology in the 1923 lecture course, phenomenology is “an eminent mode of research [ein ausgezeichnetes Wie der Forschung]”,1 the task of which is to “gain the phenomenon [es zum Phänomen zu bringen]” (GA 63, 76), (i.e. not to conceal it beneath the concepts which are used). The term ‘phenomenon’ has been understood here already in the sense developed later on in Being and Time. Phenomenon means ‘what shows itself’, it is the ‘selfshowing’, ‘the manifest’.2 For Heidegger however the self-showing is not there in ‘naive evidence’ (GA 63, 75); it is not simply given. Normally it is conceptually concealed and has therefore to be unconcealed by an adequate philosophical description.