1. Explicitness. Western thinkers from Socrates to Kant to Jürgen Habermas have assumed that we know and act by applying principles and have concluded that we should get clear about these presuppositions so that we can gain enlightened control of our lives. Heidegger questions both the possibility and the desirability of making our everyday understanding totally explicit. He introduces the idea that the shared everyday skills, discriminations, and practices into which we are socialized provide the conditions necessary for people to pick out objects, to understand themselves as subjects, and, generally, to make sense of the world and of their lives. He then argues that these practices can function only if they remain in the background. Critical reflection is necessary in some situations where our ordinary way of coping is insufficient, but such reflection cannot and should not play the central role it has played in the philosophical tradition. If all were clear about our “presuppositions,” our actions would lack seriousness. As Heidegger says in a later work, “Every decision . . . bases itself on something not mastered, something concealed, confusing; else it would never be a decision.”1 Thus what is most important and meaningful in our lives is not and should not be accessible to critical reflection. Critical reflection presupposes something that cannot be fully articulated.
Heidegger calls this nonexplicitable background that enables us to make sense of things “the understanding of being.” His hermeneutic method is an alternative to the tradition of critical reflection in that it seeks to point out and describe our understanding of being from within that understanding without attempting to make our grasp of entities theoretically clear. Heidegger points out how background practices function in every aspect of our lives: encountering objects and people, using language, doing science, etc. But he can only point out the background practices and how they work to people who already share them–who, as he would say, dwell in them. He cannot spell out these practices in so definite and context-free a way that they could be communicated to any rational being or represented in a computer. In Heidegger’s terms, this means that one must always do hermeneutics from within a hermeneutic circle.