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PHENOMENOLOGICAL INTERPRETATIONS

observed. This mode of the being-there of the world is temporalized and unfolded only when, in the movement of its going about those dealings characterized by concern, factical life takes a break and sojourns. This being-there of the world—which as actuality and reality, or indeed conceived of in terms of the objectivity of nature that has been stripped of all significance, usually is thought to provide the necessary point of departure for epistemological and ontological problems—is what it is only as having developed from a certain taking a break and sojourning. This sojourning is as such a sojourning in and for the basic movement of those dealings characterized by concern.

And as for this concern, there is more to it than that it is related to its world generally and in an original intentionality. The movement of concern is not an indifferent actualizing, one that is of such a kind that by means of it things simply happen in life and as if life itself were a process. What lives within the movement of caring is its inclination toward the world, and it takes the form of a propensity toward becoming absorbed in the world and letting itself be taken along by the world. This propensity of the anxious concern of life is the expression of a basic factical tendency in life toward falling away from itself and, as included in this, falling into the world and itself falling into ruin. Terminologically, we can describe this basic characteristic of the movement of caring as “the inclination of factical life toward falling” (or in abbreviated form, simply as “falling into . . .” ), and we have thereby at the same time provided an indication of the directional sense and the intentional toward-which of the tendency of caring. Falling should not be understood as an objective happening or as simply “occurring” in life but rather as an intentional how. This propensity [Hang] is the most profound fate [Verhängnis] that life factically has to endure within itself. The how of having to endure itself in this manner, i.e., the way this fate “is,” must be approached along with this fate itself as a constitutive factor of facticity.

This characteristic of movement is not an evil feature of life appearing from time to time and able to be eradicated in more progressive, happier times of human culture. This is so little the case that such approaches to human Dasein in terms of an attainable perfection and a paradisiacal naturality are themselves only extensions of this very inclination toward falling into the world. Here one closes one’s eyes to the ownmost character of movement belonging to life and views life in a worldly manner as an object of dealings able to be produced in some ideal form. That is, one views it as the toward-which of simple concern.

That factical life in its inclination toward falling arrives at this worldly interpretation of itself gives expression to a basic characteristic of such movement: namely, it tempts life insofar as it spreads out before it and puts in its way possibilities (drawn from the world) of making things easy for itself in an idealistic manner and thereby missing itself. As tempting, the inclination toward falling is at the same time tranquilizing, i.e., it holds factical life fast in the circumstances of its fallenness, so that life speaks of these circumstances and concernfully refines them as though they were situations of unworried security and


Martin Heidegger - Supplements: From the Earliest Essays to Being and Time and Beyond