facticity

(1) The “thing itself” of Heidegger’s thinking was Ereignis. (2) But Ereignis is a reinscription of what Being and Time had called thrownness or facticity. (3) But facticity/Ereignis is ex-sistence’s ever-operative appropriation to its proper structure as the ontological “space” or “clearing” that makes possible practical and theoretical discursivity. (4) Such facticity is the ultimate and inevitable presupposition of all activities of ex-sistence and thus of any understanding of being. (5) Therefore, for ex-sistence – and a fortiori for Heidegger as a thinker of Ereignis – there can be no going beyond facticity.

At the Le Thor Seminar in 1969, Heidegger characterises his thinking as taking the form of what he calls a ‘topology of being’ (Topologie des Seins) and as thereby giving a key role to place (topos, Ort/Ortschaft). Much of my work over the last 25 years has been devoted to exploring how such a topology is indeed present in Heidegger’s thinking, both early and late, and so to showing how place figures in that thinking – to showing, in effect, how the questioning of being is also the thinking of place. The aim here is to provide a summary introduction to the topology that this exploration has aimed at uncovering, but to do so in a way that is focussed on the early work, especially Being and Time. To this end, the discussion proceeds through an explication of the topological elements that are present in the form of key terms and ideas such as facticity, questionability, being-in, existential spatiality, and there-being or Dasein. There is also a brief exploration of the way the term Dasein figures in German philosophical discourse prior to Heidegger in ways that are not only reflected in Heidegger’s early work, but also draw directly upon that term’s topological connotations.