The hermeneutics of Being and time is evidenced by Heidegger’s subjugation of statement or proposition (Aussage or Satz) to interpretation (Auslegung). While the statement is the traditional site of truth in philosophy, the spirit of phenomenology will take us from statement to things themselves. Heidegger reminds us of Aristotle’s insight that for truth to be what it is, it must give us access to know beings as beings: “episteme, he theorei to on he on“, where philosophy is defined as “episteme tis tes aletheias” (Heidegger, 1996, p. 213). Phenomenologically appropriated, Aristotle’s understanding of a philosopher’s activity as “apophainesthia peri tes aletheias” is described by Heidegger as “demonstrating something and letting it be seen with regard to the ‘truth’ and in scope of the ‘truth'” (Heidegger, 1996, p. 213). The significant connections formed by Heidegger among to on he on, apophainesthai and aletheia enable him to bring the traditional problem of truth into the hermeneutic-phenomenological scope of fundamental ontology (Heidegger, 1996, p. 213). Hence Dasein‘s essence as an interpreting and understanding being and its potentiality-of-being as such come into play. The aforementioned triad in the phenomenon of truth has no validity or objectivity outside Dasein. To continue this argument further, it can be said that an ontological investigation into truth cannot be complete without interpreting and understanding Dasein‘s lived experience (Erlebnis) in its “thrownness” (Geworfenheit) as Mitdasein in its universal mode of being-in-the-world.

Apophainesthai, which brings being into light, cannot be conceived without sight. Seeing or sight, on both actual (physical) and metaphorical levels, is intimately bound up with the hermeneutics of Being and time. Sight, according to Heidegger, is an integral part of the fore-structure (Vor-Struktur) that constitutes the hermeneutic circle; in its pre-ontological form, it is called fore-sight (Vor-sicht). Vor-sicht, as the hyphenated form of the ordinary term Vorsicht (cautiousness) in order to emphasise implied circumspection (Umsicht) in the latter (in the sense of taking care), is used by Heidegger as an interpretive tool to demonstrate that in its being-in-the-world, Dasein is first and foremost circumspect about the environing of its being, which is filled with other beings both animate and inanimate. This existential circumspection saves Dasein from the metaphysical problem of either solipsism or scepticism; it can be said that hermeneutics is neither, and this implies the dawning of the third path in Western philosophy through Heidegger’s hermeneutic appropriation (Ereignis) in his contemporaneous overcoming of Husserlian transcendentalism, which isolates “consciousness” from Dasein‘s thrownness in the world, in the phenomenological movement of Germany.

Fore-sight, in hermeneutic terms, means the following: seeing “something as something” before it is thematised in a statement about it (Heidegger, 1996, p. 149). In other words, seeing (the as-structure) comes before asserting or describing via speech or writing. Invoking apophainesthai again, what Heidegger calls Lichtung – the clearing of being in light – is primordial to the hermeneutic circle. To be “cleared” (gelichtet), explains Heidegger, does not refer to the ontic properties of light, but to the opening up of Dasein in the temporal mode of care (Sorge) (Heidegger, 1996, p. 351). Only in care can Dasein be properly understood as a transcendent being, i.e., as a being that is neither merely “objectively” present (Vorhandenheit) nor merely for use (Zuhandenheit), but as being there for its possibilities in the unity of the three temporal ecstases (Ekstasen) that defines the horizonality of its projective understanding. Dasein‘s transcendence is in the da, not beyond it: the essence of Lichtung in apophainesthai.

It is the da in care that makes Dasein‘s seeing possible, and that includes its pre-ontological fore-sight in the fore-structure of its understanding of being; and not the ontic brightness of light. This is why the blind can “see” through the other senses and interpret their being-in-the-world. It can therefore be said that the ontological difference in fundamental ontology forms the basis of the hermeneutic circle. Without this awareness of primordial differentiation, interpretation cannot arise from understanding: it degenerates into “idle talk” (Gerede), which basically cannot find a home in temporal ecstasis and gets blown about like dust in the wind. Conversation is hermeneutic if and only if hermeneutics is authentically and resolutely understood and carried out as interpretive fundamental ontology.

When identifying a philosophical method in Being and time, §63, which is positioned quite late in the book on page 311, sums up the promising hermeneutics of the Dasein analytic pursued by way of fundamental ontology in the sections before it. Called The hermeneutical situation at which we have arrived for interpreting the meaning of being of care, and the methodical character of the existential analytic in general, Heidegger reminds his readers that Dasein, as a being who has the meaning of being as its issue, is first and foremost a hermeneutic being, in that self-interpretation belongs to its being (Heidegger, 1996, p. 312). Given that, on the practical level, understanding of being can be situated anywhere along the spectrum of ontic-ontological differentiation, hermeneutics teaches us that even on the most basic ontic level, Dasein already has a pre-ontological understanding of what existence is. In other words, that something is, Dasein already has some notion of what it means. It is for this reason that extinction and nothingness can be explained even to the Dasein of a child. Understanding of being indeed belongs to the existential wholeness of our being as Dasein. 

The ontic-ontological differentiation, or the ontological difference that holds up the project of fundamental ontology (Dasein analytic) in Being and time, determines the struggle for Dasein in its tendency, by virtue of the everydayness of its being-in-the-world, to become lost in worldly cares and concerns, both of which can be subsumed under the primordial phenomenon of care (Sorge) in Dasein. Heidegger’s primary existential insight in Being and time is that Dasein “falls prey” to the ontic obfuscations of the everyday and of “the they” (das Man). For most of its wakeful hours, Dasein tarries in a state of “fallenness”, where the lack of ontological disclosure (aletheia) holds sway. Hermeneutics, then, has almost the spiritual task of pulling Dasein up from its lostness in inauthentic temporality: it is ontological redemption. Hermeneutics, as a project of authenticity, may come as a shock to the ontologically slumbering Dasein. Heidegger asks, in §63, “Does not then the violence of this project amount to freeing the undisguised phenomenal content of Dasein?” He then goes on to ask whether this “violence” is arbitrary or belongs to hermeneutics itself (Heidegger, 1996, p. 313). 

It is upon Dasein‘s presupposed notion, or pre-philosophical understanding, of being (Sein) and existence (Existenz) in general that Heidegger founds his hermeneutic circle. In other words, the Vor-Struktur of understanding is what enables Heidegger to proceed with hermeneutics in a philosophical manner, freed from any general metaphysics of Western philosophers before him that he accuses of the guilt of the “forgetfulness of being” (Seinsvergessenheit). The arising of Vor-Struktur is unique in that it is not based in theory and metaphysics, but in the lived experience (Erlebnis) of existence – the existence of the self-interpreting and self-understanding Dasein. Herein lies the most important insight of Being and time that, like an uncanny lightning that suddenly appears from nowhere, illuminates the landscape of philosophy in a totally unfamiliar manner. The conscience (Gewissen) of Dasein becomes not the place of confusion, nihilism and false hope, but where being calls to Dasein in its fundamental atttunement (Stimmung) to being in its myriad ways comportment (Verhältnis) towards it. For it to be philosophical at all, hermeneutic circle has fundamental ontology (Fundamentalontologie) as its methodology. As fundamental, and hence primordial, Heidegger’s ontology is not an ontic science, but hermeneutics of ontological difference, which grants access to understanding of being as being (Sein), and not just one among beings (Seiende). In so far as transcendence (Transcendenz) can be spoken at all, it is in Dasein‘s understanding of being as being. Given that Dasein is a being which, in its being, is a being-towards-death (Sein zum Tode) in its anticipatory futurity (Zukünftigkeit), Heidegger can describe the ecstatic-temporal character of the existence of Dasein as its transcendent disclosure.

Since the advent of the phenomenological movement in the 1920s, realism, given its naïve standpoint on the definition of being as objective presence, has its once dominant position continuously challenged. Under Heidegger, phenomenology found its correct path in the veritable tradition of hermeneutics. And through working further on the unfinished problematic of lived experience in Dilthey’s attempt to revive hermeneutics as a historical science, Heidegger brings interpretation and understanding into the central concerns of fundamental ontology, i.e., an ontology that sets about its task by differentiating the ontic and the ontological, such that hermeneutic circle can never descend into the vicious circle of limiting being (Sein) to beings (Seiende). In lived experience, Dasein is not merely a thing, or only a presence among many in the world, but in its potentiality-of-being (Seinkönnen), is capable of telling, and sometimes even foretelling, how an experience is lived in reference to the entire horizon of its care (Sorge). And as an individuated being, a being that is capable of calling something “mine”, lived experience, qua Dasein, is never one and the same in the universal phenomenon of being-in-the-world. In hermeneutics, universality is never uniformity; yet the universality of being-in-the-world is greater than the sum of all individual lived experiences of Dasein, which allows Dasein to have understanding of being as a whole.

Hermeneutics thrives on a reading of indicators (Anzeigen). It is a form of reading that requires experience in interpreting and understanding lived experiences, those that belong to oneself as well as others in the horizon of Mitdasein, hence in the structure of care in “being-with”, both of which are primordial to our understanding of being. Lived experience is interpreted and understood in the horizon of the temporality (Zeitlichkeit) of the being of Dasein. As Heidegger writes in §63,

Primordially constituted by care, Dasein is always ahead of itself. Existing, it has always already projected itself upon definite possibilities of its existence; and in these existentiell projects it has also projected pre-ontologically something like existence and being (Heidegger, 1996, p. 315).

In being ahead of itself, Dasein, in its temporal projection of being, leaves behind the past and orients itself towards the future, such that the present is never the same: the existence of Dasein, hence its lived experience, is subject to the Heraclitean law of constant flux. In individual existence, death is the final horizon beyond which lived experience cannot pass. In order to go beyond the ontic, a nurse researcher doing qualitative research must not settle only on the details of a patient’s lived experience, but strive to aim for an understanding of the wholeness of its hermeneutic circularity. Dasein, in the horizonal unity of the three ecstases of past, present and future, is not a being to which time “does” something, but is actively ecstatic-temporal in the existential projection enabled by its potentiality-of-being. While there is never any delusion that Dasein can one day become the whole of being itself, such as the Christian notion of God as summum ens, Dasein is nevertheless in its incompleteness at any point in time, has its own structural whole in the fore-sight (Vor-sicht) of its care about the meaning of being. Because of the ever-present possibility of deadliness of the disease itself, a cancer patient still in her youth and a cancer patient receiving end-of-life care can both pose the existential question, “What does it all mean?” It is to this “all” that the nurse researcher doing qualitative research must direct her attention primarily and resolutely. The value of a research into lived experience is determined by whether Dasein, e.g., the Dasein of a young adult patient struggling with the narrowing of the horizon of her existential possibilities through cancer, is understood in its wholeness, i.e., on the ontological level. A mere chronicle of narration by the patient captures only the ontic details of her Dasein and awaits a thorough hermeneutic appropriation. Referring back to the methodological question posed by Heidegger that is quote above, what he means by “violence” is precisely the philosophical liberation of Dasein from pre-ontological naïveté. Dasein‘s projection upon the possibilities of its being is not a mere falling, but a full leap of hermeneutic awareness.

“To understand qualitative methodology requires consideration of its foundations” (Pascal, 2006, p. 67).

“This study posits that cancer survivorhood is not a return to a normative self, but an interpretive space for understanding the temporal authenticity of care” (Pascal, 2006, p. 307).

Pascal, following Hoy (1999), makes an erroneous reading of Heidegger’s famous “turn” (Kehre) by describing it as a “hermeneutic turn”. This is because right from the beginning of Heidegger’s philosophical career, hermeneutics was his philosophical method, nothing else; in fact hermeneutics was the reason for his break with Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology.

Heidegger’s Kehre instead concerned itself with the shift of emphasis from Dasein to Sein itself. Rather than just hinting at the primordiality of being that makes Dasein‘s understanding of being possible, Heidegger, in his mid-career writings such as Contributions to Philosophy, conducted a holistic investigation of being in terms of its historicity, sanctity and possible future directions, all in reference to the troubled destiny of humanity in the modern world.

References

Pascal, J. (2006). The lived experience of cancer survival: Heideggerian perspectives. Unpublished thesis. La Trobe University.

Paley (1997) is one of the most cited articles in nursing theory on the role of phenomenology in nursing research. The main contention by Paley concerns the suitability of Husserl to nursing theory. While Paley is not a Heidegger specialist, his thesis on the serious difficulties posed by Husserl’s phenomenological method – bracketing out of ordinary consciousness in order to access the region of the essence of beings – is legitimate when it comes to an ontic discipline such as nursing, which integrates insights and knowledge from both natural and human sciences. Nursing science, as Pflegewissenschaft, is in the ideal position of being able to bridge the traditional divide between Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften. Yet, instead of bringing in a woolly notion of “harmony” between these two great domains of human knowledge, a critical reading of Paley enables us to appreciate just how important the ontic-ontological distinction is in the kinds of phenomena that many nursing theorists, inspired by the holistic paradigm mentioned in Kim (2006) and Kim (2010), endeavour to investigate. Paley’s analysis highlights the severe hermeneutic lack in Husserl’s phenomenology which, by virtue of its position in the history of Western philosophy, is still formed (gestaltet) by Cartesian consciousness – an antithesis to the innerworldly essence of Dasein as temporalised being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-sein). Erlebnis (lived experience) cannot be adequately grasped in reductive phenomenology but belongs to hermeneutics, which concerns itself with the Vor-Struktur of understanding: precisely the “natural attitude” that Husserl rejects, but which Heidegger uses as a pre-philosophical grounding of the phenomenon of understanding, which only Dasein is. Dasein, given its being-in-the-world, is primarily understood through its comportment towards beings. The lack in Husserl to understand and to interpret Erlebnis was precisely the reason why Heidegger turned away from and against his authoritative mentor – not crude anti-Semitism. As argued convincingly in Scharff (1997), a 10-year grappling with Dilthey’s hermeneutic legacy by the young Heidegger in his Freiburg years resulted in a crisis in consciousness that drove him to replace phenomenological reduction with hermeneutic circle. Philosophical hermeneutics was born.

References

Kim, Hesook Suzie & Ingrid Kollak (Ed.) (2006). Nursing theories: conceptual & philosophical foundations (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Springer Pub. Co.

Kim, Hesook Suzie. (2010). The nature of theoretical thinking in nursing (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Springer Pub. Co.

Paley, J. (1997). Husserl, phenomenology and nursing. Journal of advanced nursing, 26, 187-193.

Scharff, Robert C. (1997). Heidegger’s “appropriation” of Dilthey before Being and time. Journal of the history of philosophy, 35(1), 105-128.

We are back to where we started from, but with a new level of understanding. This return is not to be feared, because it is not the vicious circle of illogic. It is the hermeneutic movement of Dasein projecting itself into the meaning of being, in the primordial act of the understanding of being.

It is through Dilthey that the young Heidegger in his early academic career at Freiburg grasped the connection between hermeneutics and lived experience. In 1923, four years before the publication of Being and time, Heidegger, through the leitmotif of “ontology of facticity”, describes Dasein as human understanding in the mode of “being in” – thus signifying an important turning away from both natural science and traditional metaphysics in the way philosophy can and will be done. Instead of being able to be reduced to either, philosophy, as an intellectual enquiry into “being in”, stands its own ground as the primordial questioning of the what, the who, the how and the when of the “innerwordliness” (Innerweltlichkeit) of being: the individuated “content” of Dasein as being-in-the-world, which is temporalised as being-towards-death and bears the common name of “lived experience”. Experience is ontology – and that provides the ground for the separation of Verstehen and Erklären that Dilthey importantly made to engender the historical possibility of a philosophical hermeneutics.

In § 7(c) of Being and time, Heidegger takes great care to explain the importance of understanding the essence of phenomenon as making manifest, such that visibility belongs to the very meaning of phenomenon itself. Phenomenology, as the logos of phenomenon, is an investigation into the fundamental visibility of being – a special moment of uncovering which is captured in the ancient Greek term aletheia.

Viewed in this light, it is clear why Heidegger approaches and uses phenomenology as an ontology: for phenomenon to become “phenomenologically relevant” (Heidegger, 1996, p. 33), it has to be accessed in the context of the meaning of being (Sinn von Sein) in beings (Seiende). In being-in-the-world as the primary mode of being on earth, there is only one kind of being that can question the meaning of being – and that is Dasein. This ontological priority of Dasein provides the reason for Heidegger’s introduction of fundamental ontology in Being and time. Phenomenology, in Heidegger’s hands, becomes fundamental ontology. This is the first important standpoint Heidegger takes vis-à-vis the history of Western philosophy. The second important standpoint taken by Heidegger is that, by virtue of the ontological priority of Dasein, phenomenology as fundamental ontology is essentially hermeneutic in method and character. This is because the essence of Dasein‘s comportment to being (Seinsverhältnis) is understanding of being (Seinsverständnis), which Dasein accesses through interpretation – the mediation of “subjectivity” and its “fore-structure” (Vor-Struktur), so to speak. In other words, phenomenology, as fundamental ontology, is hermeneutics.

To quote from § 7(c) what is methodologically speaking the most important passage in Being and time:

The abundance of new and recent publications on qualitative research is evidence of a resurgent academic interest in the fundamental phenomenon of Dasein as our being-in-the-world that is integral to any thoughtful questioning of the significance of our lived experience in manifold times and situations. For qualitative research that uses the so-called “hermeneutic phenomenology” as its method, the question needs to be asked whether the fundamental ontic-ontological distinction that makes Heidegger’s ontological-phenomenological project possible in the first place is methodologically present and active in a researcher’s self-proclaimed “hermeneutic” approach to investigate the subject matter at hand. Qualitative research aims to make sense of lived experience; lived experience is part of the everyday business of Dasein. This means that all and sundry have at least a pre-philosophical understanding of what “lived experience” is. For the academically trained mind, moreover, the credibility of the lived experience described in a qualitative study is a discernible feature that determines the value and competence of the research in question.

To quote from a new publication on qualitative research held in a nursing library:

Heidegger’s notion of being-in-the-world is the antithesis to the “tranquilising” – a term used by the German philosopher himself in Being and time – effect of the environing of entertainment and “idle talk” – another Heideggerian term from Being and time – that is personified in the anonymous person of the everyday: das Man, rendered as “the they” in the two published English translations of the aforementioned magnum opus – of not only Heidegger himself but of modern hermeneutics. Existentially speaking, das Man is someone but also no one at the same time: society as a faceless stream of collective tranquilisation that Dasein falls into often through curiosity, temptation and simple laziness. What wrests Dasein away from this covering over of the potential for authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) in understanding of being (Seinsverständnis) is one unique mood (Stimmung) known to all: Angst, which is not ordinary fear or anxiety, but an unnameable dread in face of the disclosure of the uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit) of being-in itself, when being-in-the-world, always taken for granted in the fore-conception (Vorgriff) of Dasein, simply stops Dasein from feeling at home. In the moment of Angst, existence itself becomes problematic. Why is there being rather than nothing? What does it really mean to be? Why live and not die instead? Is not Dasein in reality the standing place for nothingness? Instead of who, is it not nothing that is there in the “da” of this most familiar yet primordially the strangest Dasein?

Heidegger wrote Being and time to address the ancient metaphysical prejudice that being (Sein) is “the most universal and the emptiest concept” (Heidegger, 1996, p. 1). His life-long dedication to address the question of being indicates how difficult it is to overcome this Greek misconception that allowed the forgetfulness of the distinction between being (Sein) and beings (Seiende) to hold sway in the history of Western thought. Where this ontological difference is not retrieved from the history of being, the dualistic metaphysics of subject-object divide takes over the structural whole of thinking.

The uniqueness of Heidegger’s contribution to philosophy, or to thinking as such, is his expansion, through the concept of the hermeneutic circle as explicated in Being and time (1927) but already prior to that in Ontology: the hermeneutics of facticity (1923) – of the Western hermeneutic tradition to include the interpretation of Dasein and its existential temporality as the leading path to the question of being. Being, as encountered by Dasein which is itself a self-interpreting being that has understanding of being (Seinsverständnis) as its essence, is significance: the potentiality for meaning, which differs from the given, in each and every such encounter. Using also phenomenology as passed down to him from Husserl, Heidegger was able to make explicit in his hermeneutic method that understanding of being is the condition for all meaningful interpretations. Understanding of being means that, first and foremost, being (Sein) is capable of being understood by Dasein. Meaning is the existential proximity of being (Sein) to Dasein; hermeneutics is the interplay of nearness and distance in the shifting horizons of interpretation in temporality. Whether in time or in the twinkling of an eye (Augenblick), the opacity of being to consciousness is something that can be overcome; it can be said that meaningfulness becomes the fundamental feature of hope, and the driving force of Dasein‘s comportment to the basic phenomenon of aletheia.

The theme of this hermeneutic investigation is the Dasein which is in each case our own and indeed as hermeneutically interrogated with respect to and on the basis of the character of its being and with the view to developing in it a radical wakefulness for itself (Heidegger, 2008, p. 12).