THE HERMENEUTICS OF FACTICITY
Foreword1
Putting forth questions—questions are not happenstance thoughts, nor are questions the common "problems" of today which "one"[8] picks up from hearsay and book learning and decks out with a gesture of profundity. Questions grow out of a confrontation with "subject matter." And subject matter is there only where eyes are.
It is in this manner that a number of questions will have to be "posed" in this course, and all the more so considering that questioning has today fallen out of fashion in the great industry of "problems." Here one is in fact secretly at work abolishing questioning altogether and is intent on cultivating the modesty of blind faith. One declares the sacrum [sacred] to be an essential law and is thereby taken seriously by one's age, which in its frailty and impotence has need for such a thing. One stands up for nothing more than the trouble-free running of the "industry"! Having become ripe for the organization of mendacity. Philosophy interprets its corruption as the "resurrection of metaphysics."
Companions in my searching were the young Luther and the paragon Aristotle, whom Luther hated. Impulses were given by Kierkegaard, and Husserl opened my eyes. This for those who "understand" something only when they reckon it up in terms of historical influences, the pseudo-understanding of an industrious curiosity, i.e., diversion from what is solely at issue in this course and what it all comes to. One should make their "tendency of understanding" as easy as possible for them so that they will perish of themselves. Nothing is to be expected of them. They care only about the pseudo.
1. Heidegger's title. The "Foreword" was not delivered in the course.