"For there is something else at work in Heidegger, not found in Gadamer. For want of anything better, I will call this other motif of Heidegger, 'Angst-driven existential intensity.' It originates in a sense of total displacement, the not-being-at-home that Heidegger will later call Unheimlichkeit, or uneasiness. Though we do not hear much about Heidegger's Plotinus studies, he must have identified strongly with the latter's sense of always being a 'stranger in something strange,' of being 'far away,' as native Mainers refer to us Massachusetts people who have fled north. For Heidegger, however, the problem lies not in the alienation itself, but in one's self-deception and failure to recognize it, in one's evading it, in fact, by plunging into an ersatz world in cultivated obliviousness to how fake this world really is. This need not, of course, be as trivial as Mickey Mouse and roller-coasters. As Heidegger himself repeatedly points out, the academic world will do just as well. For Heidegger, genuine philosophy, as opposed to philosophical garrulity, is the necessary corrective to this fallen circumstance. Philosophy, he tells us with singular vehemence, 'is the kind of recognition found in factual life itself, the kind of recognition in which factual existence there in the world [faktisches Dasein], brings itself back to itself, rips itself free at all costs and remorselessly takes a stand on its own' (Heidegger, 1988, p. 18).

Heidegger does not start with self-recognition. Indeed, 'at first and for the most part' one finds oneself already lost to oneself, having always already submersed oneself in the anonymous ways of the mock world. Hence Wachsein, being awake to oneself, presupposes the Destruktion of anything that diminishes, obscures, or blocks genuine self-knowledge.

To the extent the phenomenological hermeneutics of facticity seeks by its exposition [Auslegung] to help find a radical possibility for appropriating today's situation, it sees itself constrained to shake up the traditional and predominant way things have been exposited, with its buried aims, its implicit tendencies, and the hidden routes that the interpretation takes,… and to break through to the original sources and aims of the explication. Hermeneutics accomplishes its task only on the path of Destruktion….Destruktion is, indeed, the proper path on which the present, in its proper and basic ways of being in motion, must be encountered (Heidegger,1989, p. 249)

" (P. Christopher Smith in Mootz and Taylor 2011:20).

Mootz, Francis J. III and George H. Taylor
2011 Gadamer and Ricoeur: Critical Horizons for Contemporary Hermeneutics. New York: Continuum.

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