Abstract

My thesis is that the early Heidegger develops the Being-question through a concentrated interest in life and language and that in doing so he makes the experience of Being pertinent to the life that human beings live and to the language that they speak. ;In his early lecture courses, Heidegger explains that life and language are philosophically relevant only insofar as they are experienced in the temporal human world. To designate the kind of philosophizing which attends to the temporal vitality of living and speaking, he uses the term, "facticity." By analyzing the facticity of life and language---mainly through the early courses---I show how profoundly living and speaking are operative in the development of Heidegger's understanding of Dasein, world, and Being. In tracing these developments I take account of the relationships facticity has to science, religious life, phenomenology, ontology, hermeneutics, and, most importantly, rhetoric. ;Aristotle, especially his Rhetoric, figures prominently in my dissertation. Heidegger believed that the disciplines of philosophy and theology could be traced back to Aristotle. Thus, the factical situation from out of which Aristotle conceptualized needed to be clarified. Since the Greeks lived profoundly in the spoken language, Heidegger says at this time that the original meaning of logos is speaking. Speaking, therefore, and rhetoric are critical to the factical situation of Aristotle. Accordingly, my dissertation focuses on speaking and life and thus on the way that logos as speaking permeates Dasein's way of Being-in-the-world. Importantly, by connecting speaking with the factical life of Dasein, I show that for the early Heidegger speaking discloses the world and that this disclosure constitutes Dasein's Being-in-the-world