In the early 1919 lectures such hermeneutical phenomenology is described as a form of "understanding looking" that is fundamentally different from "theoretical knowing, whose known is only things, what is reified, or what is ob-jectified", including consciousness itself as an object of reflection. What makes Heidegger's phenomenology hermeneutic is the fact that "Understanding looking accompanies the sense of enactment of living-experience and is thereby capable of interpreting the pre-theoretical essence that is own to lived-experience". It is attuned to the things with which we concern ourselves as they present themselves to us against the backdrop of lived experience that is the most basic or original "event" or "Ereignis" from which hermeneutic phenomenology proceeds.

¶ 11:28 PM