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PHENOMENOLOGICAL INTERPRETATIONS

has been transmitted and reported to it from the past, in what it has appropriated and learned in an average way. Even what has been worked out in an original manner as an authentic possession falls into averageness and publicness. It loses the specific sense of its provenance out of its original situation and in this free-floating manner enters into the common practices of the “everyone.” This falling touches all of the dealings of factical life, all of its circumspection, and not least of all its own actualization of its interpretation with respect to the forehaving and foreconception of this interpretation. In the ways it formulates questions and finds answers to them, philosophy too is situated in this movement of facticity, since it is only the explicit interpretation of factical life.

Accordingly, it is necessary for the philosophical hermeneutics of facticity to begin within its factical situation by inserting itself into the particular state of the having-been-interpreted of factical life given in advance for hermeneutics. This having-been-interpreted initially supports hermeneutics and can never be completely eradicated. According to what was said above about the tendency toward falling effecting all interpretation, it is precisely “what is self-evident” in this pregiven interpretation, i.e., what is not discussed in it, what is thought to require no further explanation, which will turn out to be what inauthentically, i.e., without being explicitly appropriated from out of its origins, sustains the reigning effective force of pregiven problems and directions of questioning.

The addressing and interpreting of factical life actualized by factical life itself allow the ways of seeing and speaking here to be given to them in advance from objects in the world. Whenever human life, Dasein, the human being becomes an object of inquiry and is defined in interpretation, this objectivity stands within forehaving as a worldly occurrence, as “nature” (the psychical is understood as nature, as are spirit and life in the analogous categorial articulation involved here). That today we still speak of the “nature” of man, the “nature” of the soul, and more generally the “nature of things,” and that we also discuss the categories of this kind of objectivity in the same way, i.e., employing categories developed from a particular kind of explication, namely, a particular way of looking at “nature”—this has its motives in intellectual history. Even when the objects in question are in principle no longer crudely spoken of as “substances” (a way of speaking Aristotle was, one should add, far more removed from than is generally taught) and interrogated in terms of their occult qualities, the interpretations of life move nonetheless within basic concepts, starting points for questions, and tendencies of explication that have sprung from experiences of objects we today have for a long time no longer had available to us.

In its contemporary situation, philosophy moves inauthentically within Greek conceptuality and, indeed, this conceptuality has been permeated by a chain of diverse interpretations of it. The basic concepts of Greek philosophy have lost their original expressive functions that were tailored to particular regions of objects that were experienced in a particular manner. But in spite of all of the analogizing and formalizing these basic concepts have undergone, a certain


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