factual

Category: Heidegger - Being and Time etc
Submitter: Murilo Cardoso de Castro

factual

Factual (tatsächlich), 56, 135, 229, 276, 315, 394, et passim; versus factical, 56, 135, 229 (BT)

As an existentiale, ‘Being alongside’ the world never means anything like the Being-present-at-hand-together of Things that occur. There is no such thing as the ‘side-by-side-ness’ of an entity called ‘Dasein’ with another entity called ‘world’. Of course when two things are present-at-hand together alongside one another, we are accustomed to express this occasionally by something like ‘The table stands “by” [‘bei’] the door’ or ‘The chair “touches” [‘berührt’] the wall’. Taken strictly, ‘touching’ is never what we are talking about in such cases, not because accurate reexamination will always eventually establish that there is a space between the chair and the wall, but because in principle the chair can never touch the wall, even if the space between them should be equal to zero. If the chair could touch the wall, this would presuppose that the wall is the sort of thing ‘for’ which a chair would be encounterable. An entity present-at-hand within the world can be touched by another entity only if by its very nature the latter entity has Being-in as its own kind of Being – only if, with its Being-there [Da-sein], something like the world is already revealed to it, so that from out of that world another entity can manifest itself in touching, and thus become accessible in its Being-present-at-hand. When two entities are present-at-hand within the world, and furthermore are worldless in themselves, they can never ‘touch’ each other, nor can either of them ‘be’ ‘alongside’ the other. The clause ‘furthermore are worldless’ must not be left out; for even entities which are not worldless – Dasein itself, for example – are present-at-hand ‘in’ the world, or, more exactly, can with some right and within certain limits be taken as merely present-at-hand. To do this, one must completely disregard or just not see the existential state of Being-in. But the fact that ‘Dasein’ can be taken as something which is present-at-hand and just present-at-hand, is not to be confused with a certain way of ‘presence-at-hand’ which is Dasein’s own. This latter kind of presence-at-hand becomes accessible not by disregarding Dasein’s specific structures but only by understanding them in advance. Dasein understands its ownmost Being in the sense of a certain ‘FACTUAL Being-present-at-hand’. And yet the ‘factuality’ of the fact [Tatsache] of one’s own Dasein is at bottom quite different ontologically from the FACTUAL occurrence of some kind of mineral, for example. Whenever Dasein is, it is as a Fact; and the factuality of such a Fact is what we shall call Dasein’s “facticity”. This is a definite way of Being [Seinsbestimmtheit], and it has a complicated structure which cannot even be grasped as a problem until Dasein’s basic existential states have been worked out. The concept of “facticity” implies that an entity ‘within-the-world’ has Being-in-the-world in such a way that it can understand itself as bound up in its ‘destiny’ with the Being of those entities which it encounters within its own world. [SZ:56] BTMR §12

Thus with the question of the Being of truth and the necessity of presupposing it, just as with the question of the essence of knowledge, an ‘ideal subject’ has generally been posited. The motive for this, whether explicit or tacit, lies in the requirement that philosophy should have the ‘a priori’ as its theme, rather than ‘empirical facts’ as such. There is some justification for this requirement, though it still needs to be grounded ontologically. Yet is this requirement satisfied by positing an ‘ideal subject’? Is not such a subject a fanciful idealization? With such a conception have we not missed precisely the a priori character of that merely ‘FACTUAL’ subject, Dasein? Is it not an attribute of the a priori character of the factical subject (that is, an attribute of Dasein’s facticity) that it is in the truth and in untruth equiprimordially? BTMR §44

The ownmost, non-relational possibility, which is not to be outstripped, is certain. The way to be certain of it is determined by the kind of truth which corresponds to it (disclosedness). The certain possibility of death, however, discloses Dasein as a possibility, but does so only in such a way that, in anticipating this possibility, Dasein makes this possibility possible for itself as its ownmost potentiality-for-Being. The possibility is disclosed because it is made possible in anticipation. To maintain oneself in this truth – that is, to be certain of what has been disclosed – demands all the more that one should anticipate. We cannot compute the certainty of death by ascertaining how many cases of death we encounter. This certainty is by no means of the kind which maintains itself in the truth of the present-at-hand. When something present-at-hand has been uncovered, it is encountered most purely if we just look at the entity and let it be encountered in itself. Dasein must first have lost itself in the FACTUAL circumstances [Sachverhalte] (this can be one of care’s own tasks and possibilities) if it is to obtain the pure objectivity – that is to say, the indifference – of apodictic evidence. If Being-certain in relation to death does not have this character, this does not mean that it is of a lower grade, but that it does not belong at all to the graded order of the kinds of evidence we can have about the present-at-hand. [SZ:265] BTMR §53

These phenomenal findings are not to be explained away. After all, they have been taken as a starting-point for explaining the voice of conscience as an alien power by which Dasein is dominated. If the interpretation continues in this direction, one supplies a possessor for the power thus posited, or one takes the power itself as a person who makes himself known – namely God. On the other hand one may try to reject this explanation in which the caller is taken as an alien manifestation of such a power, and to explain away the conscience ‘biologically’ at the same time. Both these explanations pass over the phenomenal findings too hastily. Such procedures are facilitated by the unexpressed but ontologically dogmatic guiding thesis that what is (in other words, anything so FACTUAL as the call) must be present-at-hand, and that what does not let itself be Objectively demonstrated as present-at-hand, just is not at all. BTMR §57

Yet the ‘charge of circularity’ itself comes from a kind of Being which belongs to Dasein. Something like a projection, even an ontological one, still remains for the common sense of our concernful absorption in the “they”; but it necessarily seems strange to us, because common sense barricades itself against it ‘on principle’. Common sense concerns itself, whether ‘theoretically’ or ‘practically’, only with entities which can be surveyed at a glance circumspectively. What is distinctive in common sense is that it has in view only the experiencing of ‘FACTUAL’ entities, in order that it may be able to rid itself of an understanding of Being. It fails to recognize that entities can be experienced ‘factually’ only when Being is already understood, even if it has not been conceptualized. Common sense misunderstands understanding. And therefore common sense must necessarily pass off as ‘violent’ anything that lies beyond the reach of its understanding, or any attempt to go out so far. BTMR §63

The classical example for the historical development of a science and even for its ontological genesis, is the rise of mathematical physics. What is decisive for its development does not lie in its rather high esteem for the observation of ‘facts’, nor in its ‘application’ of mathematics in determining the character of natural processes; it lies rather in the way in which Nature herself is mathematically projected. In this projection something constantly present-at-hand (matter) is uncovered beforehand, and the horizon is opened so that one may be guided by looking at those constitutive items in it which are quantitatively determinable (motion, force, location, and time). Only ‘in the light’ of a Nature which has been projected in this fashion can anything like a ‘fact’ be found and set up for an experiment regulated and delimited in terms of this projection. The ‘grounding’ of ‘FACTUAL science’ was possible only because the researchers understood that in principle there are no ‘bare facts’. In the mathematical projection of Nature, moreover, what is decisive is not primarily the mathematical as such; what is decisive is that this projection discloses something that is a priori. Thus the paradigmatic character of mathematical natural science does not lie in its exactitude or in the fact that it is binding for ‘Everyman’; it consists rather in the fact that the entities which it takes as its theme are discovered in it in the only way in which entities can be discovered – by the prior projection of their state of Being. When the basic concepts of that understanding of Being by which we are guided have been worked out, the clues of its methods, the structure of its way of conceiving things, the possibility of truth and certainty which belongs to it, the ways in which things get grounded or proved, the mode in which it is binding for us, and the way it is communicated – all these will be Determined. The totality of these items constitutes the full existential conception of science. [SZ:363] BTMR §69

But what does it signify to say that Dasein is ‘FACTUAL’? If Dasein is ‘really’ actual only in existence, then its ‘factuality’ is constituted precisely by its resolute projection of itself upon a chosen potentiality-for-Being. But if so, that which authentically has-been-there ‘factually’ is the existentiell possibility in which fate, destiny, and world-history have been factically determined. Because in each case existence is only as factically thrown, historiology will disclose the quiet force of the possible with greater penetration the more simply and the more concretely having-been-in-the-world is understood in terms of its possibility, and ‘only’ presented as such. BTMR §76

Submitted on:  Tue, 01-Mar-2022, 18:42