Factical Life Experience and Christian Enactment

Paper Summary:

This paper examines Heidegger's description of factical life experience as attitudinal, in that it indifferently asserts relational meanings as significance. In comparison, it takes a look at his examination of how the Christian life experience stands indifferently towards such indifference. The paper points out that, in factical life, the surrounding world tends to dictate in its immediacy an attitude of the significance of objects that presupposes experience, whereas the Christian life experience of 'having become' inhabits a futurity that exists in both time and history in a manner that factical life cannot. The paper maintains that the primordial Christian lives both time and history in a manner which reduces the significances of factical life to incidental temporality. The paper concludes that this attitude engenders a sense of anguish in its oppositions, which reinforces itself as the 'how', or manner in which Dasein embraces being at the phenomenological point of experience.

From the Paper:

"Factical life experience is attitudinal in that its Dasein, or being-in-the-world, is determined by a relationship with experience that is presupposed by a web of significances, which refer solely to the surrounding material world. "'Attitude' is a relation to objects in which the conduct is absorbed in the material complex". There exists only an interest in the content, the matter that exists as the material component of experience, which draws the focus away from the experiential self. Attitude is as much a cognitive position toward the world as objects, as it is a dictation of the relationship to the material complex, not as self, but as an object dictated by the significances of the surrounding world. The 'how' of factical life is 'fallen' into because it 'worlds'; the attitude of significance it is not generated from Dasein, rather, it is a living in history. The attitude of significance subsumes the 'how' and hides the historicity of the material complex. History, as enacted by science, forms an objective material complex that factical life experience takes up as 'what actually happened'; a structure of attitudinal foreconceptions of objects which hold significance only with regard to the axiomatic foundations of science as enacted through history. Relational meaning and their enactment are directed by the surrounding world, instead of either being self-generated through Dasein or by the experience itself. Factical Dasein is inserted into factical life to secure itself either against, with, or for history, reducing both Dasein and history to the status of objects in service to factical life's attitudinal relationship to experience. "The concerned Dasein is only an object-segment from a great whole object (from the entire objective historical happening)". Living-in-the-world is constructed objectively in a historical context that is re-interpreted by the tendency of life to 'fall away' attitudinally into preconceptions of objects as significance."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Heidegger, Martin. The Phenomenology of Religious Life. Trans. Matthias Fritsch and Anna Gosetti-Ferencei. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004.
• Heidegger, Martin. Towards the Definition of Philosophy. Trans. Ted Sadler. London and New Brunswick, NJ: The Athlone Press, 2000.

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