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6. Facticity and Ontology
- Fordham University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
The focus of this chapter is the lecture course Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity (G 63), which Heidegger delivered during the summer semester of 1923. It looks first at howHeidegger understands the importance of hermeneutics. A hermeneutic ontology puts factical life into question. In this way, Dasein can achieve a better understanding of itself because hermeneutics involves a kind of vigilant self-awareness of one's own life. Ontology also comes into focus here. This chapter explains what it means to live in a pre-having of Being. I show here how the hermeneutics of facticity involves an understanding of Dasein in its particularity and in its Today, as a factical, living being, and thus not as an objectified thing, such as a person or as a rational animal. Lastly, this chapter looks at the notion of average everdayness (especially the notion of curiosity). It demonstrates how Heidegger does not view average, everyday life as purely negative. On the contrary, his factical interpretations indicate the ways in which average everydayness opens Dasein to the meaningfulness of objects and of people in our lives.