Heidegger: Being and the Hermeneutics of Pro-jection

Abstract

Chapter 7 takes a holistic view of Heidegger’s writings. While Husserl’s phenomenology was said to make a major methodological contribution to hermeneutics, Heidegger’s works are characterized as a hermeneutics from beginning to end, a claim argued by addressing the milestones of Heidegger’s enterprise from the “truth of Being” as the Seinsfrage and Dasein as a hermeneutical pro-jection to his writings on thinking and language as thinging a world. Heidegger is argued to cease to be primarily a phenomenologist when he replaces the question of what appears by what is concealed in appearances. In transcending acts of imaginative projecting by demanding self-projection (Sichloswerfen), Heidegger’s method is shown to have a close relationship with Kant’s reflective-teleological reasoning, especially in the “opened openness” of interpretation and of Dasein as a fundamental form of interpretation. Heidegger’s human propensity towards falling, care and temporality, Being-towards-death, the re-definition of truth as disclosed meaning, the subsumption of all signification under interpretation and the totality of involvements, are all shown to contribute to Heidegger’s all-encompassing conception of hermeneutics. The chapter closes on a brief critique of the moral vacuum in Heidegger’s philosophy, which is argued to weaken the very hermeneutic project he was aiming for.