Hermeneutics and Phenomenology: Figures and Themes 9781350078024, 9781350078055, 9781350078031

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Hermeneutics and Phenomenology

Also available from Bloomsbury Relational Hermeneutics, edited by Paul Fairfield and Saulius Geniusas Philosophical Hermeneutics Reinterpreted, Paul Fairfield Gadamer and Ricoeur, edited by Francis J. Mootz III and George H. Taylor The Ethics of Time, John Panteleimon Manoussakis Hermeneutics between History and Philosophy, Hans-Georg Gadamer

Hermeneutics and Phenomenology Figures and Themes

Saulius Geniusas and Paul Fairfield

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbur y Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2018 Paperback edition published 2020 Copyright © Saulius Geniusas, Paul Fairfield and contributors 2018 Saulius Geniusas and Paul Fairfield have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover image by Irene Martinez Costa Cover image © Tara Moore / Getty Images All rights reser ved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbur y Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Librar y. A catalog record for this book is available from the Librar y of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-7802-4 PB: 978-1-3501-5527-5 ePDF: 978-1-3500-7803-1 eBook: 978-1-3500-7804-8 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Ser vices, Chennai, India

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For Geraldine and Gwyneth

Contents Editors’ Introduction: Hermeneutics and Phenomenology

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Part 1 Pre-Husserlian Phenomenology and Hermeneutics: Hegel and Dilthey 1 2

Hegel on Cognition as Phenomenological, Hermeneutical, and Historical Tom Rockmore Dilthey’s Path: From the Legacy of Boeckh and Droysen to the Foundation of the Human Sciences and a Hermeneutical Logic of Life Jean-Claude Gens

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19

Part 2 Phenomenology in Dialogue with Hermeneutics 3 4 5 6 7 8

Phenomenology as Hermeneutics Kevin Hart What ‘Phenomenon’ for Hermeneutics? Remarks on the Hermeneutical Vocation of Phenomenology Claudio Majolino and Aurélien Djian Phenomenology and the Givenness of the Hermeneutic Circle James Mensch Husserl’s Hermeneutics: From Intuition of Lived Experiences to the Horizonal Lifeworld Dermot Moran The Stuff that Dreams are Made of: Max Scheler and Paul Ricoeur on Productive Imagination Saulius Geniusas Ricoeur’s Unrecognized Debt to Merleau-Ponty John Arthos

31 48 65 78 93 106

Part 3 Hermeneutics in Dialogue with Phenomenology 9 10 11 12 13 14

The Metaphysical Dimension of Hermeneutics Jean Grondin The Hermeneutical Turn of Phenomenology in the Young Heidegger’s Thought Sophie-Jan Arrien Gadamer and the Philosophy of Science Lawrence K. Schmidt Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, and Religion: Restoring the Fullness of Knowing Jens Zimmerman Traces of Endings: The Time of Last Things Felix Ó Murchadha Hermeneutics, Pragmatism, and Foucault C. G. Prado

Notes Index

125 138 149 163 175 188 199 233

Editors’ Introduction: Hermeneutics and Phenomenology Saulius Geniusas and Paul Fairfield

Hermeneutics and phenomenology can be spoken of in many ways. In what follows, they will be conceptualized as philosophical traditions that, along with a few others, form the contours of contemporary continental philosophy. The present book will address neither ancient, medieval, or non-Western hermeneutics (such as Vedic or Buddhist hermeneutics), nor will it engage in hermeneutics as it is understood outside of philosophy (such as literary or biblical hermeneutics). The same restrictions will apply to phenomenology: this book does not address the diverse ways in which the concept of phenomenology was either employed in the history of philosophy, appropriated in recent analytical philosophy, or amended in other disciplines where it is often used as a synonym for introspectionist methodology. Continental philosophy constitutes the general framework within which the present book brings hermeneutics and phenomenology into dialogue with each other. Even when such conceptual restrictions are introduced, hermeneutics and phenomenology have too rich a history for the question of their relationship to be exhaustively addressed in a single book. It is inevitable that an anthology such as this one would focus on particular figures and themes while leaving others out of consideration. Our goal in what follows is to bring post-Husserlian hermeneutics, as represented especially by Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur, into dialogue with classical phenomenology, as represented by Edmund Husserl, Max Scheler, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. While much of the landscape of twentieth-century continental philosophy is shaped by phenomenology and hermeneutics, the relation between them remains puzzling. In the second half of the twentieth century it was common to claim that what distinguishes hermeneutics from phenomenology is the latter’s idealism, and that once phenomenology liberates itself from this commitment it becomes hermeneutical phenomenology. Today many have become more sceptical of the hermeneutical turn in phenomenology thus conceived, at least in the sense that we have become more sensitive to what alternative paths such an absorption of phenomenology into hermeneutics closes off and what further problems it itself introduced. The hermeneutical turn was neither the first nor the last turn in phenomenology. It was preceded by the so-called existential turn (Karl Jaspers, Hannah Arendt, Gabriel Marcel, Jean-Paul Sartre, etc.) and followed by the so-called theological turn (JeanLuc Marion, Michel Henry, Richard Kearney, etc.). Each of these turns proved to be

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deeply problematic. It must be stressed that no one to date has managed to eliminate the suspicion that these existential, hermeneutical, and theological phenomenologies are in fact not very phenomenological, despite the fact that they identify themselves as such. The central goal of this book is to address the numerous issues to which the relation between phenomenology and hermeneutics gives rise. Our goal is to demonstrate that this relation remains at once ambiguous and of central importance to the inner coherence and further development of continental philosophy. Questions regarding the relation between hermeneutics and phenomenology are of central significance for contemporary philosophy in general and continental philosophy in particular. For better or worse, the hermeneutical turn in phenomenology has heavily influenced subsequent continental thought; indeed, in the absence of this turn the landscape of contemporary philosophy would have been profoundly different. How one conceives the relation will depend on what one understands to be the meaning of the relational terms as well as on where one is situated in either or both of these traditions. A multi-perspectival volume on hermeneutics and phenomenology – one that illuminates how the relation is viewed from both hermeneutical and phenomenological standpoints – is thus much needed. Only on the basis of such a re-evaluation can one further reassess the significance of both traditions for contemporary philosophy. While phenomenology is largely associated in philosophy with the tradition stemming from Edmund Husserl’s investigations, Husserl was not the first to employ the concept. We come across ‘phenomenology’ already in the eighteenth century: Johann Heinrich Lambert’s philosophical discourse was explicitly defined with reference to the concept of a phenomenon. Among others, Hegel employed this concept as well, and his employment of it is by no means anachronistic. Indeed, the birth of classical phenomenology, associated with Husserl’s name, did not mark the death of Hegelian phenomenology. When Ernst Cassirer in the 1920s described his philosophy as a phenomenology of symbolic forms, he employed the concept of phenomenology in line with Hegel rather than Husserl. Similarly, when Japanese philosopher Miki Kiyoshi identified his work of the 1930s as phenomenological, he followed in Cassirer’s footsteps and had in mind the continuation of Hegelian thought. Husserl was neither the first nor the last thinker to employ the concept of phenomenology. As Paul Ricoeur has remarked, the history of phenomenology is a history of Husserlian heresies.1 Thus, phenomenology is understood differently depending on whether it is conceived in line with Husserl’s, Heidegger’s, Scheler’s, Merleau-Ponty’s, Ricoeur’s, Marion’s, Henry’s, or some other projects. Hermeneutics as well is not spoken of in one way. For the most part, when hermeneutics comes into contact with phenomenology, it is the hermeneutics of the late nineteenth and (especially) twentieth centuries. In this context the hermeneutics of Dilthey, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur are of foremost importance. Although most of the contributors to this book focus on Heideggerian and post-Heideggerian hermeneutics, pre-Husserlian hermeneutics – particularly Dilthey’s contribution – is also taken into consideration. It is a common view that the issue of the relation between classical phenomenology and post-Husserlian hermeneutics was settled some fifty years ago. On this often

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uncritically accepted view, the future of phenomenology depends on its capacity to be integrated within hermeneutics. Presumably, classical phenomenology in general, or Husserlian phenomenology in particular, is a form of outdated and unsustainable idealism, and only insofar as it is liberated from this can it continue as a living philosophical tradition, with a voice that still resonates in the context of contemporary philosophical debates. Supposedly, the hermeneutical turn in phenomenology, especially as defended by Ricoeur (see his ‘Hermeneutics and Phenomenology’, which many chapters of this book will address), provided classical phenomenology with a second life. Yet is it really the case that phenomenology required a hermeneutical turn to be sustained? Kevin Hart, for one, contends in his contribution that before dismissing classical phenomenology for its alleged foundationalism, intuitionism, subjectivism, or transcendentalism, we need to inquire anew into the exact meaning of such concepts as absolute grounding, intuition, the reduction, and transcendental subjectivity. We consider it a strength of this book that it offers detailed analyses of these and other central concepts in phenomenology. The contributions that fall into Part II are meant to bring into question the hermeneutical critique of phenomenology. These chapters demonstrate that this critique is in some ways misplaced and that both classical phenomenology in general and Husserlian phenomenology in particular have a compelling answer to this critique. Where would it leave us if such a re-evaluation of the hermeneutical critique of phenomenology were convincing? Might we still maintain that between these traditions of thought there exists what Ricoeur has termed ‘mutual belonging’ (une appartenance mutuelle), or should we conclude that classical phenomenology and post-Heideggerian hermeneutics offer us two different and perhaps irreconcilable trajectories of thought? Might the family resemblance between these traditions become even more explicit once the illegitimate portrayal and critique of phenomenology is dismissed? Once this preparatory work is done, we may be in a position to redraw the boundaries between these traditions, which in turn may serve as an invitation to rewrite some of the main chapters in the recent history of philosophy. We may be in a position to reformulate the hermeneutical critique of phenomenology in a more compelling way and indeed to subject hermeneutics to a phenomenological critique. Both traditions of thought may well be in need of mutual critique; arguably, the future of both largely depends on a critical openness to each other. Moreover, once this is accomplished, we can inquire, as many chapters of this book do, into the hermeneutical spirit of phenomenology and the phenomenological spirit of hermeneutics. Several contributors in what follows argue that classical phenomenology in many ways anticipates developments in postHusserlian philosophical hermeneutics, while hermeneutics in its own turn relies, either implicitly or explicitly, on phenomenological insights. Some chapters maintain that classical phenomenology foreshadows hermeneutical phenomenology while others argue that it constitutes a hidden set of possibilities which remain to be explored in alternative phenomenologies. Should we read Husserl as already gesturing towards Heidegger, or as offering an alternative form not only of phenomenology but indeed of hermeneutics? Should we understand phenomenological hermeneutics as a further development of classical phenomenology or as an alternative to it? This book includes both complementary and contrasting answers to these

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questions. It is our hope that their answers will lead to further analyses of the intricate relationship between hermeneutics and phenomenology. Questions about the nature of intersubjectivity as well as the relation between intuition and interpretation are also addressed in this anthology. In response to the old allegation that classical phenomenology is solipsistic, some contributors suggest that phenomenology is in some ways more open to the Other than hermeneutics itself, in the sense that it neither limits Others to human others nor conceives of them only as conversation partners. In response to the hermeneutical objection that phenomenology denies the centrality of interpretation, some chapters demonstrate that the hermeneutical distinction between interpretation and misinterpretation implicitly relies upon the distinction, so important in classical phenomenology, between intuition and interpretation. Other contributions focus on the hermeneutical allegation that classical phenomenology is a form of idealism. In response to this, some contributors argue that Husserlian idealism should not be confused with the subjective idealism of Berkeley or Fichte, while others contend that Husserl’s phenomenology is not a form of idealism at all. Still others attempt to broaden the debate between phenomenology and hermeneutics by refocusing our attention from static to genetic and generative phenomenologies, which would enable us to think of other ways to the reduction besides the Cartesian and to conceive of the reduction as an endless form of meditative practice. The relation between hermeneutics and phenomenology can be studied, for lack of better terms, at both macro and micro levels. At the former, one may inquire into the relation between two traditions of philosophy, where what comes into question is our understanding of the two regarded in their entirety and the relation between them. At the macro level one may address this relation from the perspective of either phenomenology or hermeneutics. One can speak, then, either of phenomenology in dialogue with hermeneutics – as happens in the second part of this book – or – as happens in the third – of hermeneutics in dialogue with phenomenology. If one addresses the relation at the micro level, one instead offers case studies of particular figures and texts. Many contributions to this book are instances of such micro-analyses. Others strive to correct what they take to be misunderstandings of some features and tendencies in both traditions, and to develop further some of their central insights. Even when regarded as philosophical traditions that belong to the core of continental philosophy, hermeneutics and phenomenology cannot be determined univocally. Given the rich history of both traditions, no exhaustive account of their relation is to be expected. Our aim is not to settle the debate but to contribute to it – and continue we must, since our understanding of this relationship remains an often undeveloped preconception which from time to time needs to be subjected to critique and revaluation. The chapters that follow fall under three divisions. The first focuses on preHusserlian phenomenology and hermeneutics and pays close attention to Hegel’s and Dilthey’s thought. The chapters included in the second part address the relation between phenomenology and hermeneutics from the standpoint of classical phenomenology, while the third part comprises chapters that focus on the same relation from a hermeneutical perspective.

Part One

Pre-Husserlian Phenomenology and Hermeneutics: Hegel and Dilthey

1

Hegel on Cognition as Phenomenological, Hermeneutical, and Historical Tom Rockmore

This chapter will address aspects of Hegel’s contribution to cognition (Erkennen) or theory of knowledge from the perspective of hermeneutical phenomenology. I will depict German idealism as a linked series of efforts by different hands to formulate an acceptable constructivist approach to cognition, an effort that in Hegel’s case is phenomenological, hermeneutical, and historical. I will further suggest that Hegelian constructivism is the best approach to cognition we presently possess.

Kantian epistemic constructivism Hegel belongs to the German idealist tradition. There is no agreement about either ‘German idealism’ or ‘idealism’. The philosophical term ‘idealist’ seems to have been invented by G. W. Leibniz. In responding to Pierre Bayle, he objects to ‘those who, like Epicurus and Hobbes, believe that the soul is material’ in adding that in his own position ‘whatever of good there is in the hypotheses of Epicurus and Plato, of the great materialists and the great idealists, is combined here’.1 Leibniz thinks idealism and materialism (or realism) are compatible. Later commentators mainly think they are incompatible. There is also no agreement about ‘German idealism’, including the main members of this tendency, its origin, and so on. Observers disagree about whether Kant is an idealist, whether German idealism begins before Kant, say in Leibniz, after Kant, for instance, in Reinhold, and so on. Hegel follows Kant in discussing the so-called problem of knowledge under the heading of cognition (Erkennen). ‘Constructivism’ is used in different ways, for instance, to refer to a major early-twentieth-century Russian avant-garde artistic and architectural movement. As used here, this term refers to the view that a necessary condition of knowledge is that the subject must ‘construct’ the cognitive object, or what it knows. Elsewhere I have argued that German idealism arises as a shared effort by different hands to formulate an acceptable version of a constructivist approach to cognition or theory of knowledge. I do not want to repeat that argument here.2

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Since Greek antiquity metaphysical realism has long been the most popular approach to the theory of knowledge. Epistemic constructivism is a second-best approach to cognition. With epistemic scepticism and metaphysical realism, epistemic constructivism is one of the three main responses to the problem of knowledge. Parmenides, the first recognizably ‘modern’ thinker, influentially poses the general cognitive problem at the dawn of the Western tradition. Parmenides’ view that thinking and being are the same suggests that, short of epistemic scepticism, there are only two ways to solve the epistemological problem. One is through metaphysical realism, or the adoption of the cognitive grasp of the mind-independent external world as it is beyond mere appearance as the acceptable standard of knowledge. The other is epistemic constructivism, or the view that we do not and cannot cognize a mind-independent object, since we only cognize what we in some sense ‘construct’. Metaphysical realism, the favoured approach to knowledge over the centuries, remains extremely popular at the present time. Plato in ancient philosophy and Descartes in modern philosophy are metaphysical realists. With the exception of American pragmatism, the main twentieth-century philosophical tendencies (Marxism, so-called continental philosophy, and Anglo-American analytic philosophy) all feature forms of metaphysical realism. In recent debate, claims for metaphysical realism are found in the early Wittgenstein, Davidson, Brandom, and others. Constructivism, the main cognitive alternative to metaphysical realism, has never been popular. Mathematical constructivism arises in ancient philosophy in Euclidean geometry. Plane geometry relies on the construction of plane figures with a straight edge and compass. Thus the construction of a single isosceles triangle is regarded as demonstrating the existence of the class of such triangles. Though metaphysical realism continues to function as a cognitive criterion, no persuasive argument has ever been devised to show that we grasp the mindindependent world as it is. Metaphysical realism functions regulatively but not constitutively. Yet it must function constitutively for there to be cognition of mindindependent reality. Epistemic constructivism comes into modern philosophy as an alternative to metaphysical realism in Francis Bacon, Hobbes, Vico (who is influenced by Hobbes), and independently in Kant. Kant’s Copernican revolution, a term he never employs to refer to his position, illustrates epistemic constructivism. In a crucial passage in the B introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason at B xvi-xvii, he suggests that if intuition has to conform to objects then cognition is impossible, but progress is possible if objects must conform to the subject. There is a deep tension between epistemic constructivism and the critical philosophy. Modern philosophy features a subjective turn in that the approach to objectivity necessarily runs through subjectivity. Descartes defends a conception of cognition as apodictic in two ways. On the one hand, there is the view that God does not deceive me, for which there is no evidence. On the other hand, he thinks that in adhering to clear and distinct ideas any and all cognitive mistakes are avoided. Descartes, who rejects constructivism, claims to infer infallibly from ideas in the mind to the mind-independent world as it is. Kant follows Descartes in arguing for apodictic cognition, in his case through the a priori construction of cognitive objects. Since, in paraphrasing in Kantian language, intuition does not conform to

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objects, objects must conform to our cognitive faculty, in short to the human mind. This argument relies on analogy between mathematical construction and cognition. Kant, who apparently takes Euclidean geometry as his model, thinks the human mind constructs cognitive objects a priori that are necessarily illustrated a posteriori. In sum, Kantian constructivism aims to justify apodictic analysis of the general conditions of a priori cognition.

Hegel’s post-Kantian epistemic constructivism Kant’s Copernican revolution is often mentioned but only rarely discussed in any detail. Blumenberg, the author of the most detailed study, thinks Kant is not influenced by and probably never read Copernicus.3 There are many puzzles in Kant’s a priori epistemic constructivism. We cannot stop to consider them here. Suffice it to say that Kant famously calls attention to an analogy between the Copernican theory of celestial motion and the critical philosophy. Post-Kantian German idealists think the Kantian version of epistemic constructivism suggests a goal he aims at but fails to reach in the critical philosophy. There is a tension in the critical philosophy between epistemic constructivism and the Kantian subject. Kant seeks to isolate the logic of knowledge from psychology to avoid what in Husserl later becomes the problem of psychologism. Kant was one of the first to teach anthropology in German, and later wrote a book on the theme. Yet his theory of knowledge employs an anti-anthropological approach to the epistemic subject that he claims to deduce as the final step, the coping stone as it were, of the transcendental deduction. Epistemic constructivism points towards an anthropological approach to cognition by one or more finite human beings. The post-Kantian German idealists seek to reformulate Kant’s Copernican revolution on an anthropological basis in rethinking the view of the subject. In his transcendental philosophy (Transzendentalphilosophie) Fichte identifies the self or subject (das Ich) as the finite human individual. In a series of versions of the Science of Knowledge (Wissenschaftsehre), he works out a quasiCartesian theory of the subject as always active and never passive in constructing the world. Following Fichte’s lead, Hegel formulates a theory of the plural cognitive subject in a cognitive view that depends on individuals, but above all the group, in a social and historical context. Kantian epistemic constructivism is a priori. In reacting to Kant and Fichte, Hegelian epistemic constructivism is a posteriori. According to Fichte, the problem of knowledge requires an explanation of the contents of consciousness accompanied by a feeling of necessity, hence as independent of the subject. Following Fichte, Hegel explains experience understood as the contents of consciousness. He makes no claim to cognize anything other than or outside of consciousness. Kant, who denies we can know mind-independent reality, which does not appear, is inconsistent. He sometimes seems to suggest that sensory intuition is an effect for which things in themselves are the cause. Hegel describes cognition as the result of an ongoing process generated through the interaction between subject and object, knower and known, in which

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theories, or defeasible conceptions of knowledge, are put forward and evaluated, as the case may be, and either accepted or rejected in favour of a successor view. The Kantian and Hegelian conceptions of cognition are sharply opposed. Kant favours an apodictic view of cognition independent of time and place, without a historical dimension. Hegel favours an experimental approach, dependent on time and place, with a historical dimension, and potentially always defeasible. The Hegelian approach to cognition is only rarely scrutinized, in part perhaps because of the view that the problem of knowledge is already resolved in the critical philosophy, and much misunderstood. Engels and Marxism routinely accuse Hegel of incorrectly descending from the mind to the world instead of correctly rising from the world to the mind. In fact Hegel, who does not hold the view they reject, rather thinks experience necessarily precedes and limits our theories about it. In virtue of Kant’s concern with the deduction of the categories, Hegel’s view of cognition is often passed over in favour of his logical theory in either the smaller or the greater Logic. Hegel’s most accessible description of cognition is provided in the Introduction to the Phenomenology. Kant, in reversing the relation of the subject to the object, follows Descartes in seeking apodictic knowledge. He depicts the critical philosophy not as a theory, since theories are always at least potentially open to refutation, but rather as true, intended like the statue of Ozymandias to stand forever. Hegel, like Fichte, reverses the Kantian reversal in an experimental approach to cognitive claims that are never beyond the possibility of revision. In the critical philosophy, theory necessarily precedes theory of knowledge. According to Hegel, experience necessarily precedes theories about it. Cognition arises in an experimental process in which the subject formulates theories about the contents of consciousness before testing them against further experience. For Kant, cognitive claims are always final and never provisional, never open to later modification of any kind. For Hegel, cognitive claims are never final but always provisional, always later open to the possibility of later correction on the basis of further experience. There are only two possible outcomes of any attempt to cognize the contents of consciousness. Theory either agrees or disagrees with further experience. In the former case, the theory can be provisionally adopted until a later moment in which, on the basis of further experience, the theory no longer corresponds to epistemic practice. A theory that fails to correspond to experience needs to be reformulated. Hegel’s approach to cognition is constructivist. Cognition, which does not consist in the direct or immediate grasp of the contents of consciousness, is not intuitive or direct but rather indirect and discursive. The constructivist moment, which consists in the formulation of theories about conscious experience, is widespread in natural science. Hegel was deeply familiar with what was known about natural science when he was active. He criticized Newtonian mechanics from a historical perspective in his dissertation entitled ‘De orbitis planetarum’. The history of natural science consists in a long series of efforts, stretching back at least until the cosmological speculation of early Greek antiquity, to formulate acceptable theories about the nature of the universe and ourselves. These theories are routinely formulated, then tried out and if necessary modified to account for further experience. The ongoing accumulation of such theories constitutes the natural scientific tradition. Thus, in building on Kepler,

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Newton formulated the laws of planetary motion. Since Newtonian mechanics fails to account for a number of problems, such as the perihelion of Mercury, this approach eventually led to the general theory of relativity. And so on.

Hegel and phenomenology Hegelian epistemic constructivism is phenomenological, interpretive (or hermeneutical), and historical. Little attention seems to have been directed to Hegel’s specifically phenomenological approach to knowledge.4 Inattention to phenomenology in the Hegel discussion can be explained by several factors. One is the Husserlian claim, which is frequently reiterated but never justified, that Husserl invented phenomenology worthy of the name. This claim incorrectly suggests that Husserl had no predecessors. Another is that in the Phenomenology Hegel never employs the term ‘phenomenology’, hence never employs this term to designate his own position.5 When phenomenology arises depends on the normative view about it. There is not now and never has been agreement about the meaning of ‘phenomenology’. Heidegger, who favours ontological phenomenology, apparently thinks Aristotle is already a phenomenologist. Hegel was not a phenomenologist when he composed the Differenzschrift, and the term ‘phenomenology’ does not occur in this text. He only later turns to phenomenology in the course of working out his own position. Since phenomenology was in the air at the turn of the nineteenth century, there are many possible influences (e.g. Lambert, Reinhold, Fichte, and Bardili) on Hegel’s interest in this theme. His turn to phenomenology is especially influenced by Fichte. The latter’s turn away from the thing in itself while continuing to work out the Kantian approach to knowledge leads him towards phenomenology in his early writings before he even mentions the term. Fichte opposes the Kantian thing in itself that he describes as a pure invention with no reality whatsoever. His claim that to be committed to the thing in itself is to be a dogmatist implies Kant falls back into the very dogmatism that he officially rejects.6 Fichte suggests it is possible to reject the thing in itself and remain a Kantian. One way to put the point is to say that he reconstructs the critical philosophy without the thing in itself. In the 1804 Wissenschaftslehre, which was not published during Hegel’s lifetime and hence probably did not influence his position, Fichte reworks the Kantian distinction between false appearance and true appearance. This science, which turns on consciousness, is, Fichte notes, both ‘a doctrine of truth and reason’ and ‘a phenomenology, a doctrine of appearance [Erscheinungslehre] and illusion [Schein]’.7 For Fichte and later for Hegel, phenomenology is a theory of true appearance and false appearance as distinguished from the theory of being (Seynslehre), which attracted Heidegger and which Fichte understands as a ‘theory of reason and of truth’.8 Unlike Lambert and the early Kant, for whom phenomenology concerns false appearance, Fichte uses the term in a positive sense.9 In anticipating Hegel, Fichte defines phenomenology as the science of true appearing (Erscheinungslehre). Since truth is phenomenal, phenomena are not false, or false appearances, but true. Fichte, who depicts phenomenology as a description of the field of true appearing, here anticipates

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later efforts by Hegel and Husserl to understand philosophy as the science of the phenomenological approach to truth. Hegel participates in the post-Kantian shift away from a transcendental analysis of the a priori conditions of knowledge towards a description of knowledge arising in an a posteriori process that plays out in the social and historical context. He rehabilitates phenomenology, which Kant confines to false appearance, hence mere appearance, as distinguished from truth. What for Kant is a mere prolegomenal stage prior to and apart from the process leading to truth becomes its main and indeed only source. The critical philosophy, which is often described as representationalist, is better understood as anti-representationalist. Kant distinguishes sharply between noumena and phenomena, between what is true but cannot appear and what appears and is not true. In response, Hegel relativizes the distinctions between falsity, appearance, and truth in calling attention to false appearance as a stage on the way to truth. Mere falsity, which is not truth, is replaced by appearance (Schein) that, under the right circumstances, becomes true appearance (Erscheinung), or truth. There is apparently no single main theme in contemporary phenomenology. Heidegger, for instance, thinks that phenomenology grasps what is as it is, for instance, in the realm of art. Marion, who distantly follows but also criticizes Heidegger, thinks that ‘givenness’ is the necessary presupposition for phenomena to show themselves. We detect implicitly here, and perhaps more explicitly in the related concept of the saturated phenomenon, a Christian view of God widely anticipated in the debate, for instance by Descartes, as the support and perhaps even the source of the phenomenal world. The Phenomenology of Spirit describes the ongoing cognitive debate about the world and ourselves in a series of cognitive stages running from sense certainty to absolute knowing (absolutes Wissen). The Hegelian cognitive view is a circular, selfjustifying theory of what appears in consciousness. Claims to know are formulated according to different cognitive models, initially on the level of sense certainty, or the main view of classical British empiricism, later with respect to the Kantian view of reason, the Hegelian view of spirit, and so on. Different candidate claims for cognition are formulated and evaluated, and an ascending series of cognitive models is evaluated as well. The overall aim is the true appearance of what is, in Hegel’s difficult language, both in-itself, or the way it is, and also for-us, or given in conscious experience. False appearance (Schein) is a necessary dimension of true appearance (Erscheinung). On the level of true appearance, the difference between the object in itself, or that more precisely for cognitive purposes can be assumed to be in itself, and as it in fact appears within conscious experience is overcome. Hegelian cognitive circularity is sketched in the Differenzschrift, his initial philosophical publication, as his alternative to cognitive foundationalism. Cognitive foundationalism, which is often identified with Descartes, comes into the post-Kantian debate through Reinhold’s reformulation of the critical philosophy in Cartesian terms. Hegel follows Fichte’s rehabilitation of cognitive circularity in the German idealist debate. Hegel thinks that cognition, which unlike the other sciences can presuppose nothing, justifies itself in the ongoing process that rises through a series of stages to absolute knowing. The cognitive process, which is not foundationalist, cannot justify its claims initially, since it does not derive from a principle known to be true and from

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which the remainder of the theory follows. A cognitive theory rather justifies itself progressively in the process of being extended.

Hegel, the subject, and hermeneutics as historical Hegel’s historical approach to cognition derives from the modern understanding of the relation between subjectivity and historicity. Cognition is not independent of, but rather always depends on, the subject. This simple insight was only understood after some two millennia of discussion, that is, well after ancient philosophy. The idea of intuitive knowledge of mind-independent reality is plausible only for the so-called view from nowhere of a subject without qualities who casts no shadow, someone for whom the sun of reason is always at its zenith, who is neither male nor female, young or old, and who like a god speaks no human language. In the ancient tradition, this view is constitutive. A view of this kind is illustrated in the Republic where the possibility of knowledge depends on the idea that some among us on grounds of nature and nurture can literally ‘see’ reality. But in the modern tradition, where the subject looms very large, this view that becomes regulative is no longer constitutive. The shift from the ancient to the modern view of the subject occurs very early in modernity. Montaigne answers the cognitive question (What do I know?) in pointing out that he is himself the subject of his book. This answer, which leads to the revival of Pyrrhonism in the modern debate, is doubly scandalous: it violates the accepted literary canon, and it suggests that if cognition depends on subjectivity then knowledge according to the ancient Pyrrhonian norm is impossible. Montaigne infers that cognition necessarily depends in pointing towards scepticism. Descartes draws the contrary conclusion that it is only because cognition depends on the subject that it is possible. In the dispute between Montaigne and Descartes, the latter prevails in the modern tradition in which the subject looms large while inconsistently striving to maintain the ancient view of perfect knowledge. Kant is typically of two minds, divided against himself as it were about the subject. On the one hand, as already noted, on the basis of theory he invokes a purely epistemic subject that at least in principle yields apodictic cognition. On the other hand, he points to the practical requirement to interpret the same theory, the critical philosophy, that was supposedly misunderstood by its initial readers. His acknowledgement makes theory depend on a particular individual or individuals, the very idea supported by Herder, Kant’s former student, whose view the author of the critical philosophy violently rejected. The conflict is obvious. Kant’s neutral depiction of the transcendental subject deflects attention away from the modern theme that cognition depends on subjectivity. Yet his suggestion that theory must be interpreted along holistic lines in order to grasp authorial intent points to the characteristic modern cognitive dependence on the subject, more precisely on interpretation. Aristotle is one of the first to study interpretation. Aristotle famously prefers poetry to history since the former concerns what might happen, hence is universal, but history, which happens only once, has no lessons to teach. In his wake, hermeneutics, or interpretation, takes different forms. Kantian interpretation is ahistorical, focused

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on the idea of the whole presumably subtending all texts. Hegel is a historical thinker – one of the most, even the most, historical thinker in the Western tradition. Hegel’s historical view of interpretation derives from his rethinking of the plural subject as always and necessarily situated within a social and historical context. For Hegel, the historical component is linked with the dialectical development of the social context in and through what human beings do as they live out their lives. Historical phenomena do not unfold in linear, atemporal fashion, but rather through a complex process of human activity and their results in their surroundings. Thus, Hegel famously describes self-consciousness as deriving from the interaction of human beings within the productive process of modern industrial society. This leads to two insights that describe the Hegelian approach to interpretation. On the one hand, what we seek to interpret is always historical and never ahistorical, never beyond the historical flux, within which it must be understood. On the other hand, as Hegel thinks, and Gadamer in reacting against Heidegger also affirms, as human beings we are never wholly autonomous but always in some sense opaque to ourselves, hence heteronymous, never fully aware of the influences in the historical moment.10 It follows that self-consciousness that arises within the social process is always limited.

Hegel on the history of philosophy and aesthetics Hegel, like Aristotle, ranges widely over a vast range of topics. Though he interprets a broad series of human phenomena historically, it will not be possible here to consider more than a few samples. I will limit my remarks to four themes only, including in this section very rapid remarks on Hegel’s comparatively less well-known views of philosophy, the history of philosophy, and aesthetics as historical, and in the next section slightly more developed comments on his comparatively better-known account of the philosophy of history. Hegel’s conception of philosophy is based on historical interpretation in two ways: as concerns the relation between philosophy and its history, and as concerns the interpretation of the surrounding world and ourselves. His view of philosophy as evolutionary but not revolutionary is directed against the modern view of philosophy as simply sweeping away all that has been done in order to start afresh. Modern revolutionary thinkers often call attention to a supposed distinction between philosophy and the history of philosophy. They think that, despite the heroic efforts of talented individuals, nothing of lasting value has been accomplished. They think we need to start over, to finally make a true beginning on which we can build. Kant, the central modern philosopher, is a paradigmatic revolutionary thinker. He believes that prior philosophy is dogmatic, but philosophy as such is critical. According to Kant, philosophy itself only begins in the critical philosophy, which, since it is correct, also brings the discipline to an end. Hegel rejects the anti-traditional, revolutionary view of philosophy in his evolutionary view of philosophy as continuous with, hence necessarily building upon, the prior tradition. Kant, who thinks philosophy is ahistorical, draws attention to a distinction between philosophy and its history. Hegel, who thinks philosophy is

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historical, believes a distinction between philosophy and its history cannot be drawn. All theories, including his own, belong to an ongoing tradition. Hegel applies his evolutionary approach to philosophy to the interpretation of the history of philosophy. The theories that constitute the tradition are all concerned consciously, or more often unconsciously, with the central philosophical problem of the unity of subject and object. This is Hegel’s way of stating the Parmenidean theme of the identity of thinking and being. Hegel thinks that the critical philosophy is in principle speculative but falls short of realizing this impulse. Though he is critical of the critical philosophy, he thinks that the problem of the unity of thought and being cannot be solved by turning away from the critical philosophy, but rather only solved by realizing the unrealized speculative potential of Kant’s position. According to Hegel, the post-Kantian German idealist tradition consists in a series of related efforts to realize the Kantian theory in practice in demonstrating that at the moment of knowledge the view of the cognitive object and the object of that view coincide. According to Hegel, philosophy is not useless but rather useful in understanding the present context. Hegel, who defines philosophy as its own time captured in thought, thinks its task, which is interpretive, lies in grasping the rationality of the present moment. For instance, the Philosophy of Right describes Hegel’s view of the nature and place of human subjects within the modern industrial state. Since each person belongs to the historical context, no one evades the limits of human finitude nor transcends one’s own historical moment. Our grasp of the world in which we live and ourselves is never possible from a vantage point situated beyond time and place but is always situated, always limited. Though we know that our views are indexed to our historical moment, we do not and cannot evade that limitation. Hegel’s view of cognition as historical is illustrated in his theories of aesthetics. Hegel was interested in and deeply knowledgeable about Western and in some cases non-Western art, for instance, Egyptian antiquities. He regularly delivered lecture courses on aesthetics, initially in Heidelberg and then more often in Berlin. Hegel was not only aware of the aesthetic views of such contemporaries as Kant, Schiller, and Schelling, but also of the surrounding discussion. In the Phenomenology, Hegel studies art with religion and philosophy as one of the three main forms of cognition. His theory of art belongs to his overall philosophical system, though the interpretation of his view is controversial since Hegel did not publish his lecture notes, which have also not survived. Hegel depicts art as historical in two main ways concerning its development in different forms and its social function. He describes art in different ways in the Phenomenology of Spirit, in the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, and in the notes of his lecture courses. His account of aesthetics in his lecture notes stands out as unusually concrete as well as unusually broad. Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art ends with the statement that the function of aesthetics is to analyse ways in which art develops in comprehending its link to the beautiful. Hegel attributes a specific social function to art as making us aware of ourselves. Following the constructivist thrust of the Copernican revolution, Hegel thinks that we come to know ourselves in and through art, in which we objectify ourselves in the form of the art object. Winckelmann, who initiated the widely known German aesthetic grecophilia,

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thinks that art already reached a never later surpassed peak in ancient Greece. Though he deeply appreciates Greek art, Hegel thinks that the artistic tradition continues to develop after the Greek period. He divides the history of the artistic tradition into three broad periods, including symbolic, classical, and romantic art. Symbolic art, or pre-art, art that paradoxically is not yet art, is identified by Hegel with the god of light of Zoroastrianism. Classical art flourishes in ancient Greece, which for the first time successfully brings together the spiritual and the natural. An instance is the Greek treatment of the gods in idealized human form. If pre-art is art before art then perhaps romantic art is art after art, that is, after the Greek period in which art flourished in a way and on a level that has never later been reached. Hegel thinks that the unification sought in symbolic art and achieved in classical Greek art is transcended in romantic art, which arises on the ruins of Greek art. Hegel states in different ways his view that romantic art is the highest form of art for at least three reasons: the principle of inner subjectivity takes precedence; the true absolute reveals itself in art; and God is finally reconciled with the world. His complex view of the historical character of art takes into account the change in its social function in the modern world. Early in his lectures, Hegel points out that the world in which he lived was different from its predecessors, infamously writing that ‘art no longer affords that satisfaction of spiritual needs which earlier ages and nations sought in it, and found in it alone’, adding that ‘in all these respects art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past’.11 This view is sometimes interpreted as indicating that art has come to an end, for instance, through the contemporary profusion of aesthetic styles that impedes or even prevents the formulation of an aesthetic theory. Yet Hegel’s point is not that art itself has ended but that the period in which art could still play its traditional role had come to an end. For instance, from the end of the Greek period until the rise of the modernworld Christian art exerted a cognitive function as a window on reality. Yet as Hegel recognized, increasing secularization in the modern period means that art can no longer play this role.

Hegel on history as freedom Interpretation is a historical process. Hegel’s approach to history applies his general constructivist approach to knowledge. His famous quip about the failure to learn from history implies we can and should do so. Hegel’s assumption that all phenomena are intrinsically rational, hence can be grasped by reason, is one of his oldest conceptions. He points out that the world is rational for someone who looks at it rationally. According to Hegel, what philosophy brings to history is reason,12 which displays itself in history, through which human beings develop and know themselves. Though Hegel is often cast as a basically Christian thinker, unlike, say, Augustine, he believes history does not turn on the return to God but rather on the progress of the idea of freedom. Hegel takes a secular approach to history. He understands history as human history, made by, hence knowable by, finite human beings. Hegel paradoxically thinks no one has ever learned anything from history, but all actions, hence human history in all its

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forms, is cognizable. The Hegelian view of history as rational is distantly based on the Aristotelian view of human activity as goal-directed. Since what we do is in principle goal-directed, even the actions of a fool or a madman are cognizable. In his approach to history, Hegel, who was unusually well read, borrows widely from modern political economy, from Aristotle and many others. In his account of the ‘system of needs’ in the Philosophy of Right, he adapts Adam Smith’s invisible hand, which reappears as the cunning of reason. He further adapts the Aristotelian conception of human activity as teleological as key to modern industrial society. Hegel identifies the teleology of history as the growing consciousness of the idea of freedom. This idea begins in the East and ends in ‘Europe’, more specifically in ‘the Sun of selfconsciousness’ which is ‘absolutely the end of History’.13 He writes that ‘the East knew and to the present day knows only that One is Free; the Greek and Roman world, that some are free; the German World knows that All are free’.14 Yet there is a deep ambiguity, since self-consciousness and freedom should not be equated. For it does not mean that if we know that we are free then we are free other than on the level of self-consciousness. Hegel’s conviction that progress in history is the consciousness of freedom is taken over from Kant’s ‘Ideas Concerning a Universal History in a Cosmopolitan Spirit’. We recall Kant’s suggestion that ‘the realization of Nature’s secret plan’ lies in ‘a perfectly constituted state as the only condition in which the capacities of mankind can be fully developed’.15 According to Hegel, human history does not develop through some secret plan, nor through nature, nor again through Providence, but rather through the actions of finite individuals, whose aim is often different from what occurs. Since nothing human beings do is irrational and everything they do is rational, history is rational, hence can be cognized. Yet there is a difference between the intelligibility of history and the historical realization of human freedom. It is clear that Hegel thinks that history is the realization of the idea of freedom. Yet it is unclear what ‘freedom’ means in a historical context. There are different ways to understand freedom, hence different ways to understand history as progress towards freedom. One is, as noted, pure, hence abstract consciousness of freedom, which in this case consists in an awareness of oneself but without any social changes. Hegel can be understood as pointing towards that view in his suggestion that the West differs from the East through the former’s self-consciousness. Thus, the master–slave account in the Phenomenology, which is an ingredient in so many liberation movements in our time, can be read from a stoic perspective as freedom merely on the level of selfconsciousness. Sartre seems to exemplify this approach in his Cartesian conception of freedom.16 Yet the same Hegelian passage can also be read as calling for realizing social freedom by changing the social context, if necessary through revolution as following from revolutionary self-consciousness, as Lukács suggests through the conception of class consciousness.17 In that case, simple self-consciousness cannot replace the need for political struggle. If this is correct then we have three distinct models of freedom: freedom as self-consciousness; freedom as entailing basic social changes; and freedom as realized within the social structures of the modern state. Though we comprehend history, it no longer seems as clear as in Hegel’s time that the mere development of the social context necessarily realizes human freedom. An

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obvious example might be the familiar case of global warming, which is a by-product of the economic expansion that raises the living standard of many people though in the process many others fall even further behind. In many instances progress for some turns out not to be progress for others. More generally, only some individuals can be said to recognize themselves in the institutions of the modern state. In short, there is an obvious difference between human freedom and historical intelligibility.

Conclusion: Hegel on cognition as phenomenological, hermeneutical, and historical This chapter has expounded Hegel’s view of cognition as phenomenological, hermeneutical, and historical. Important philosophers are often understood, if at all, after extensive examination only. A grasp of Hegel’s views is impeded by the obscurity of his language, the novelty of his ideas, and tenacious misunderstandings about his views. It is, for instance, mistaken to think that Hegel, who eschews finality, thinks that he brings the tradition to an end; mistaken to believe that he relies on a transcendental absolute as the source of historical agency, since he understands historical agency as human; and mistaken as well to believe he turns away from the problem of knowledge that comes to an end in the critical philosophy since he focuses on reformulating Kantian epistemic constructivism. Epistemic constructivism is the main theme in German idealism that begins in Kant and continues in Fichte and Hegel. This chapter focused on Hegel’s a posteriori reformulation of epistemic constructivism from an interpretive and historical angle of vision. Hegel is a German idealist, and German idealism now belongs to this history of the tradition. If, as I think, there are only two main strategies, and metaphysical realism cannot be defended, then Hegel’s much-maligned view of cognition requires the attention of anyone who at this late date is still interested in the cognitive problem.

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Dilthey’s Path: From the Legacy of Boeckh and Droysen to the Foundation of the Human Sciences and a Hermeneutical Logic of Life Jean-Claude Gens and Translated by Mark C. R. Smith

Boeckh and Droysen initially carried out the expansion – a fundamental one, for Dilthey – of the field of hermeneutics from the linguistic realm to the set of historical productions as expressions of the human mind.1 The former did so both through his conception of the philological sciences, whose domain stretches to encompass practically the whole of the historical sciences and whose method is grounded in understanding, and also, as we shall see, through his own work as a historian. The latter did so by distinguishing sharply between such understanding and the kind of explanation proper to the natural sciences. Gadamer thus sees Dilthey as ‘merely the interpreter’ who formulated what the members of the historical school already thought, when he conceptualized the theory of history hermeneutically.2 Dilthey’s explicit project is nevertheless to move beyond theorizing the kind of knowledge proper to the historical sciences, which to his mind pertains to a local epistemology, and ground such knowledge at the level of an epistemological theory whose generality precedes the distinction between the sciences of mind and nature, in the framework of a philosophy of life. In order to determine the effective originality of his contribution to the deployment of the hermeneutical paradigm at the turn of the twentieth century in relation to Boeckh and Droysen, who transformed Enlightenment hermeneutics into a speculative–idealist hermeneutics, and thus determine both the debt Dilthey’s thought owes to their legacy and the portion that goes beyond it, we must begin by rehearsing the character of their relationships – all the more so, since Dilthey’s declared debt to Schleiermacher is itself mediated by the teaching of Boeckh and Droysen. Dilthey’s proximity to Boeckh, both on the personal and the intellectual fronts, contrasts with his seemingly much more distant relationship to Droysen. Upon his arrival in Berlin, where he continued the studies he had begun at Heidelberg, Dilthey wrote to his father in November 1853 about having twice tried, unsuccessfully, to visit Boeckh, and about having left a letter – no doubt a letter of introduction – at Boeckh’s home before going to enrol in his seminar. ‘From his Chair’, he confides in his letter, ‘Boeckh is an extremely amiable man, slender and of Attic appearance, very calm and

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with a pleasant and comfortable casualness’, whose witticisms were intended to amuse himself more than his listeners.3 Half a century later, in the 1903 address in which he recalls his apprentice years in Berlin, Dilthey underlines his intellectual qualities: Boeckh allied ‘perceptiveness and enthusiasm; the mathematical and artistic spirits; the most marked taste for everything that can be measured and counted in metrology, in finance, in astronomy; and for the ideal’.4 But Dilthey was only moderately interested in his course entitled ‘Antiquitates Graecae et maxime politica Graecorum disciplina’, a course which he would attend again during the winter semester of 1855–6, at the same time as a course of Ranke’s on the Middle Ages: ‘As interesting as he is, philological disputes, which to my eyes are stripped of value outside considerations of method, remain the essential thing for him.’5 Further evidence of this distance comes from his description of Boeckh in 1860, on the occasion of a student’s celebration: ‘In good humor, with his grand rector’s chain, old Boeckh strolled after the meal, and his dissatisfaction with Aristotelian scholia was very amusing.’6 Boeckh’s importance in the development of Dilthey’s thought stems from the fact that the inheritance of Schleiermacher was partly transmitted to him by Boeckh’s teaching. That transmission was fairly diffuse, as is suggested by Boeckh’s review of Lücke’s 1838 edition of Schleiermacher’s manuscripts on hermeneutics and criticism. Boeckh says there that his inspiration from Schleiermacher’s ideas did not come from those writings but rather from older conversations, though without his being able to recall what was his own and what was borrowed.7 In any event, and apart from his own later work on Schleiermacher, Dilthey confirms the decisive influence of those lessons when it comes to the transmission of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutical thought of that period.8 A student of Friedrich August Wolf and of Schleiermacher, Boeckh attended the latter’s courses on ethics, hermeneutics, and Plato. His 1808 review of Schleiermacher’s translations of Plato’s works praises ‘a masterpiece, finally opening Plato up to philological science’.9 Boeckh himself applied Schleiermacher’s interpretive technique to Pindar, whose works he edited in 1811 and 1822. But beyond this application, and his philological work in the narrow sense of the term, it was just as much theoretically as practically that Boeckh undertook the expansion of the field of hermeneutics beyond the sphere of written and oral discourse. Theoretically, that is, in the framework of the lessons on the Encyclopedia and Methodology of the Philological Sciences starting in 1809, hermeneutics in the strict sense certainly refers to just one of two aspects of the method, whose theory constitutes the first part of the encyclopaedia, its ‘formal part’, while the second or ‘material’ part bears on the whole of the materials elaborated by science.10 The formal part, which theorizes ‘the method of philological research’,11 thus encompasses both hermeneutics, in the strict sense, and critique, which together confer their principles on the philological art. But the method of philological science nevertheless stems from hermeneutics in the wider sense, to the extent that hermeneutics and critique are, for Boeckh, the two modalities of our understanding of an object, since an object can be understood either in itself, that is, absolutely, or in relation to other objects, that is, relatively.

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Furthermore, and as Dilthey also reminds us, if the field of philology covers the set of the human mind’s historical products, to the point of ‘coinciding with history in the more usual sense’, philology refers to ‘the set of activities thanks to which we come to understand the historical’,12 that is, those very products. Since such knowledge moves from the works or products to the activities of which they are the result, philology aims – to use a Hegelian and Schleiermachian phrase – at ‘knowing the known’, that is, at recognizing it.13 Dilthey’s assertion that humanity does not know itself through introspection, but rather through history, is therefore already Boeckhian.14 Practically speaking, beyond the mere transposition of Schleiermachian hermeneutics to Pindar’s works and perhaps in a more remarkable way than Droysen and Dilthey (who are more properly historians of ideas and politics), Boeckh himself concretely achieves this extension of hermeneutics to the signs of practical, economic, and social life of past societies. Indeed, Boeckh established a corpus of Greek inscriptions,15 and thus founded epigraphy, and contributed to knowledge of ancient economic life through his works The Public Economy of Athens (1817) and Investigations on Ancient Weights, Coins, and Measures (1838). Though the consistency of his theoretical writings with his actual practice should be further scrutinized, it is still the case that his historian’s work starting ‘from below’, as Dilthey puts it,16 gives a new valence to his lessons. Boeckh’s teaching is all the more pivotal for having also been received by Droysen, between 1826 and 1831. If it is significant that the latter was also a pupil of Franz Bopp and Hegel,17 we may legitimately think that part of Schleiermacher’s legacy was also transmitted to him through Boeckh. The originality of Droysen’s theses in relation to this heritage is nonetheless indubitable, and its impact on the development of Dilthey’s thought all the more pointed, when we consider that Boeckh’s thought converged in a more direct sense with the inspiration Dilthey got from Schleiermacher through studying Schleiermacher’s works and life. In contrast with Boeckh’s encyclopaedia, the term ‘hermeneutics’ no longer refers to just one of the methodological dimensions that Droysen’s lessons, entitled Enzyklopädie und Methodologie der Geschichte deal with. It is essentially among Dilthey’s students that the term would later come to refer to the mode of knowledge proper to what were then called the sciences of spirit.18 But, as with Boeckh, understanding remains the central concept in his reflection on the method of the historical sciences. Furthermore, the way that Droysen conceives such understanding is directly continuous with Schleiermacher. For he defines historical understanding first through understanding others’ discourse, at key moments in his lessons: when he determines historical method as understanding, and when he comes to address effective understanding, that is, defines what is proper to interpretation itself before distinguishing among its various modes.19 On the other hand, though the overall formal structure of Boeckh’s and Droysen’s lessons is identical – since the latter devotes a first part to method and a second to systematics20 – Droysen’s originality is shown initially by his substitution of ‘heuristics’ for ‘hermeneutics’ in the narrow sense. How should we read this? While positivist historians think that they can capture historical facts objectively in taking a critique of sources to be the essence of the historian’s work, and while Boeckh holds that understanding, of the life of a people for instance, implies having an Idea

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of it – an Idea that Boeckh conceives of in Hegelian and Schleiermachian fashion as the principle and ‘most intimate core’ of the people in question21 – Droysen instead emphasizes the fact that understanding, ‘that is to say the interpretation’ which is the ‘heart’ of methodological reflection,22 is only possible if it begins with a questioning.23 This thesis would be rediscovered the following century by Collingwood, by the French Annales school, and by Gadamer. From the methodological point of view, this means giving priority to heuristics (which determines the range of relics, sources, and monuments) in relation to the three subsequent moments of critique, interpretation, and theme (i.e. the various possible modes of the exposition). But this priority itself rests on two principles set out in the Grundriß der Historik and which determine the boundless and hermeneutical character of historical knowledge. The first of these principles is that historical science cannot take the past as its object, but rather what currently remains of it – in other words, that which is not yet past – and, from there, elaborate a representation of that past.24 Amid all the relics of the past, those that demand to be understood are those that immediately translate human activity, that is, those which are externalizations, expressions, or imprints (Äußerung, Ausdruck, Abdruck) of such activity.25 To put it differently, historical knowledge deals not with the past but with current remains or relics, that is, it deals with the present, or with the past as it survives ideally in memory today and which needs to be ‘awoken’; it deals with ‘extinguished voices, latent glimmers’ that one must make ‘gleam amid the empty darkness of the past’.26 Some of Dilthey’s sentences could just as easily have been written by Droysen, for instance, when the former writes: ‘Once life is past, nothing remains but its memory … . Grasping these vestiges is everywhere the same: to understand.’27 This first principle of method determines the second, the mode of the historian’s work: ‘The essence of historical method is to understand through seeking, it is interpretation.’28 In other words, the historian must learn to think historically.29 This means two things. First, the historian must own up to the relative, ‘unilateral’, and ‘limited’ nature of his ‘point of view’ in so far as it is determined by the folk-thought, the state and the religion he is a part of, and so accept the deficiency of the positivist ideal of objectivity that Droysen calls ‘eunuch’s objectivity’.30 Second is the fact that historical knowledge must be conceived in terms of creation. In other words, it is no longer merely a matter – as it is in Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics – of understanding works by relating them to the creative activity of their authors. Understanding vestiges, traces, is indeed to track them to the interiority of the centre and energy of which they are manifestations,31 but understanding pertains also to creation. It is in this sense that Droysen, like Humboldt in ‘On the Historian’s Task’, unhesitatingly compares the activities of historian and artist.32 Droysen’s work as historian bears witness to this creativity: that work, as is well known, renewed the conception of the era for which he coined the term ‘Hellenism’ by showing that it was not a period of decadence but rather the ‘modern age of paganism’.33 But it is not just this emphasis on the residual character of the past and the creative character of its understanding that will re-emerge in Dilthey.34 It is also the famous distinction between explaining and understanding – and the impossibility of ‘understanding’ the beings and phenomena of nature35 – that Droysen already

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thematizes.36 This distinction and the corresponding critique of the positivist tendency to ‘naturalize in history’37 are especially explicit in the long review of Thomas Buckle’s History of Civilization in England (1857–61),38 translated into German in 1861–2, which Droysen reprinted along with the Grundriß in the 1867 edition. The near-simultaneous review of Buckle’s book by Dilthey39 follows in the wake of Droysen’s theses. For though Dilthey’s diary through the 1860s surprisingly does not mention Droysen, who had arrived in Berlin in 1859, we should note that Dilthey’s review of Buckle explicitly refers to Droysen’s courses, which Dilthey had attended two years earlier.40 His diary for May 1860 notes: Buckle makes his task easy with his history of civilization to the extent that he squarely reduces the history of worldviews to the history of the knowledge proper to the natural sciences. Stifling the realms of religious and philosophical thought: it’s monstrous. What he does say of them is chatter that reveals his misunderstanding of Neander’s ecclesiastical history and works of that kind.

Perhaps inspired by Droysen’s course, Dilthey plainly read Buckle before the German translation appeared. Their critique of Buckle would be further extended in the Diltheyan critique of John Stuart Mill’s Logic: ‘The first effects [of Mill’s thought] upon our science came through Buckle’s influence.’41 Dilthey’s excoriation of the ‘prattle of induction and deduction’ in Comte, Mill, and Spencer42 echoes Droysen’s challenge to the dichotomy according to which any knowledge rests on either one or the other of these procedures. ‘Between heaven and earth’, Droysen writes, ‘there are, fortunately, things that behave as irrationally visà-vis deduction as vis-à-vis induction, which demand both induction and analytical procedure, and deduction and synthesis, so that, by the alternating application of both, they may be apprehended, not totally, but gradually; not completely, but by approaching them in a certain way; that is, things that demand not to be developed or explained, but understood’.43 Droysen does not deny that in the field of historical phenomena, or in the province of ethics, there are calculable and measurable features, and so does not deny the usefulness of statistical tools;44 but he affirms on the other hand that such an approach to the phenomena at issue misses ‘the essence’ of what constitutes them. Buckle’s confusion stems specifically from the fact that, in not considering the nature of the things he undertakes to know, he cannot see that they require a method that suits them, so that ‘method takes its vengeance’ since he is confined to uttering only trivialities.45 Mostly academic at first, Dilthey’s review moves from irony to a more conceptual critique. Recruiting the example of the statistical regularity of the number of dinner guests who prefer peas to turnips, Dilthey writes: ‘We cannot award ourselves the glory of having discovered this law; we have it on the authority of a cook whose experience and familiarity with the question is indubitably more sublime.’46 Conceptually, he points especially to the confusion between statistical regularity of relations and laws. To Dilthey’s mind, such regularity is not only unable to account for truly significant actions, but also far from capturing the nature of physical knowledge: knowledge of phenomena such as the formation of the solar system does not set out statistical

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regularities.47 The review concludes by declaring that if the issue is to capture the reason for historical phenomena, we learn more from Polybius and Machiavelli than from Buckle. A third aspect of Dilthey’s thought is already strongly present in Droysen, especially in his review of Buckle; it relates not to the starting point and method of historical knowledge, that is, to the requirement of understanding traces, but to the very end of understanding itself: its practical aim. To Droysen’s mind, historical knowledge needs to be conceived in terms of appropriation and Bildung. It is in this sense that, as his courses on the encyclopaedia had already done, his review of Buckle quotes Goethe’s saying: ‘What you have inherited from your fathers, acquire it, that you may make it your own’,48 thereby opposing the work of appropriation which defines Bildung – thanks to which life becomes more ‘intense’49 – to knowledge of ‘results’ that are purely external to Bildung: knowledge of civilization.50 This should be understood not just on the individual level – as when Droysen asserts that with ‘growing knowledge of men and of the human mode of being-there and having-become, what is most proper to us becomes broader, deeper, freer, and even accedes to being’51 – but also, following the thesis that the individual only exists within a community, on the political level.52 This telos is conceived against the background of the idealist conception of mind to the extent that, by Droysen’s lights, if everything is ‘directly or indirectly conditioned’ in the ethical or historical world, mind’s vocation is precisely to ‘enlighten and spiritualize’ these material conditions,53 a process that Dilthey, for his part, would conceive in terms of a ‘pathway from facticity to the ideal’.54 The Grundriß points to this practical dimension in affirming that ‘history delivers the genesis of the “postulate of practical reason” that pure reason has not been able to discover’.55 But, deploring the fact that historians confine themselves to an analysis of the materials they accumulate, and the fact that philosophers see in history only an ‘exemplification’ of logic, it is also by invoking Kant that Droysen invites us to scrutinize the origins of history, and therefore its very meaning; which is to say that he calls for what we could term a new historical spirit. ‘We would need a Kant to submit to critical examination, not historical matter’, he writes, ‘but theoretical and practical behavior toward and in history, which would bring to light an analogon, so to speak, of the ethical law, a categorical imperative of history, the wellspring from whence bursts humanity’s historical life’.56 That is precisely the Diltheyan project of a ‘critique of historical reason’, with the proviso that it is distinct from Droysen’s on two fronts. For Dilthey, accomplishing such a project implies a critique of metaphysics that would determine, among other things, Droysen’s thought on the one hand, and also the working out of a psychology which alone could allow access to this ‘wellspring’ on the other, these two tasks being inseparable. Dilthey’s explicit critique of Droysen points to a twofold inadequacy in his Historik. The first concerns the scope of his reflection: it is limited to considering questions of methodology. Though the preface to the Introduction to the Human Sciences does not name Droysen (perhaps because he was still alive), but rather the historical school more generally, the manuscripts that expand upon The Formation of the Historical World mention him by name among the representatives of that school, while granting him some merit: he was ‘the first to have made use of Schleiermacher and Boeckh’s

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hermeneutical theory’. But though Droysen thereby laid bare the hermeneutical dimension of historical knowledge, Dilthey immediately adds what amounts to a limitation: ‘as far as methodology is concerned’. This limitation is directly tied to a second inadequacy, arising from the fact that this methodological approach is grounded in what is, by Dilthey’s lights, an obsolete idealist metaphysics: ‘Droysen’s 1868 Historik is deliberately opposed to Ranke, though it is internally akin to him in virtue of the idealism of the era as a whole.’ Recognizing Humboldt’s impact on Droysen, who saw Humboldt as ‘the Bacon of historical science’,57 Dilthey continues: ‘More deeply still than Humboldt, Droysen is infused with the speculative character of the era, by the concept of ideas acting in history, of an external teleology in the historical configuration that makes the cosmos ethical’. The result of this double defect is that ‘these thinkers did not manage to build up the human sciences theoretically’58 – sciences that are in fact so named for the first time in the preface to the second volume of Droysen’s History of Hellenism (1843).59 It behoves us to examine the import of this diagnosis, especially as far as both Droysen and the new path that Dilthey invites us to follow in order to ground the human sciences are concerned. The preface to Introduction to the Human Sciences specifies the work’s intent when it points to the ‘internal limitations’ of the historical school, limitations that prevented it from achieving its desired goal of having ‘an influence upon life’, of transforming life. ‘The study, and the use it made of historical phenomena, lacked a relational encounter with the facts of consciousness’, Dilthey writes; ‘they therefore lacked a foundation on the only knowledge that, in the final analysis, is certain, in short … a philosophical foundation. A healthy relation to the theory of knowledge and to psychology were lacking’.60 Against the background of the principle of phenomenality, which anticipates what phenomenology would term the principle of intentionality and which is recalled in the preface,61 the Introduction tasks psychology – which Dilthey already in 1876 thinks of as descriptive – with leading our knowings back to the concrete totality of the whole of the psychic life from which they proceed. For in Dilthey’s eyes, the activity of a creating subject (which for Droysen is the source of historical knowing)62 is characterized, as with Kant’s transcendental subject, by its abstraction. This leadingback, which is the task of the ‘phenomenology of metaphysics’, and to which the whole of the second part of the Introduction is devoted, pertains to a hermeneutics of the history of Western philosophy. We know that Droysen read Introduction to the Human Sciences,63 but it must have been all the harder for him to admit the requirement of a psychological foundation64 for its signifying the inability of historical science to ground itself, possibly indeed the misunderstanding of what is historical.65 In the preface to the second volume of the History of Hellenism, Droysen judges that only ‘a deeper grasp of the concept of history is able to constitute the centre of gravity from which the human sciences, currently adrift, will find a true footing and will enjoy greater flourishing’.66 It was only in the following decade, when the contours of Dilthey’s thought took firmer shape, that comprehensive descriptive psychology would shed its initial ambiguity, on the one hand by distinguishing itself from psychologism67 (even though understanding and expression would still be conceived in relation to lived experience), and on the other against a background of aesthetic research, by giving new impetus to

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the concept of expression.68 It was also during the 1890s that Dilthey embarked on a deeper analysis of the structure of psychic life, especially in his Ideas for a Descriptive and Analytical Psychology. One might suspect that Droysen would have followed him more closely in this direction, since in several places the Historik claims that one must not conflate knowledge (physiological, anthropological, and psychological) of the internal, natural conditions of historical life, and properly historical knowledge.69 But, in Dilthey’s view, Droysen’s distinction, which seems to challenge his foundational project from the root, rests on a metaphysical conception of historical life and knowing. Understanding historical traces uncovers ‘a mobility, a continuity of human things that … points to something greater and higher’. Droysen writes: ‘From history, we learn to comprehend God’, that is, a creative externalization.70 In relation to other psychological analyses of the period, the originality of Dilthey’s reorientation of theoretical knowing to its wellsprings is manifest from the Introduction in passing through a critique of the metaphysics that stands in its way, and especially of the Greek categories of metaphysics, whose ocular, and therefore objectivist, nature Dilthey highlights.71 The critique, stemming from a phenomenology of metaphysics, is even more essential as it opens up to a twofold expansion, which leads Dilthey from a reflection on hermeneutics as a mode of knowledge proper to the human sciences to an attempt to work out a hermeneutics of life that precedes the distinction between natural and human sciences. First, in the Introduction we find the beginnings of a fundamental recasting of the theory of categories, which especially targets the abstract nature of the categories of causation and substance, and is deployed through the 1890s beginning with the original experience of the resistance the ‘I’ encounters, and which thereby permits this ‘I’ to discover and affirm itself as such.72 In this way, right through to his final writings, Dilthey seeks to conceptualize the specificity of the categories of meaning, significance, essence, value, and so on.73 Second, this is the phenomenology pursued in Types of Worldview of 1911, seeing in pretheoretical affective experience – in so many elementary understandings of the world – the origins of the philosophical systems deployed through history.74 Nearly thirty years after the Introduction, Dilthey tries once more to conceive the history of philosophy, but through worldviews that are in the final analysis ahistorical. As Droysen did not follow Dilthey in the project of grounding the human sciences in psychology, he would most likely have been more hesitant still if he had read Types of Worldview. On this point, Dilthey’s originality is further underscored if we compare his theory to the way in which Droysen conceives of methodological differences as ‘worldviews’. As it is for Trendelenberg,75 the expression’s meaning is metaphysical and manifests what Dilthey sees as a deplorable conflation of methodological and metaphysical considerations. Droysen indeed thinks of the difference between physical and speculative methods (understood as worldviews), that is of the difference between ‘exact and speculative sciences’, through the mind’s double mobility: its externalization and, at the terminus of that deployment, its reassembly or return to its own identity. To his eyes, it is historical knowledge of the ethical world, a world both material and spiritual, which allows for a conception of their unity and for a bridge over the chasm carved out between these two ‘moments’ of mind, moments that Droysen

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also calls naturalist and idealist or supranaturalist. Understanding will thus allow for ‘reconciliation’ between explaining and knowing.76 Nonetheless, we can see that Droysen does not rest content with discussing methodological issues, and Schnädelbach is quick to assert that he undertakes a ‘foundation of the historical school’s method on the ground of the implicit history of philosophy of the tradition’. It seems that we must at the very least admit that his Historik as ‘a theory of knowledge in the historical sciences’ rests on a conception of what is historical that would await its full thematization in Heidegger.77 For in Droysen’s view, understanding is not only an epistemological category but a social and political one, even ontological, since it determines people’s very being. Where Boeckh spoke of a native ‘philological impulse’ as one of the initial conditions of life, Droysen writes: ‘Understanding is the human being’s most human act, and any truly human act rests on understanding, aspires to understanding, and arrives at understanding. Understanding constitutes the most intimate link among people and the basis of any ethical being.’78 It is noteworthy that right after underlining the circularity of understanding relative to the fact that the individual is understood through the whole and the whole through the individual – a circularity that therefore does not concern only discourses – Droysen adds: ‘Man, according to his disposition, becomes a whole in himself only through understanding other men, through being understood by them, in ethical communities (family, folk, State, religion).’79 The circularity of understanding therefore constitutes his being, and to that extent can be characterized as ontological. This means not only that our knowing is always received and transmitted, that is, historically situated,80 but also, as Dilthey explicitly says in the Introduction, that to understand vestiges is to understand the traditions that make us.81 In fact, it is in these same terms that, in his review of Buckle, Dilthey contrasts a perspective such as the English historian’s with what, to his mind, is characteristic of the ‘contemporary German mind’: ‘To grasp man as an essentially historical being, whose existence can only be realized in community.’82 The emphasis on our own historicity renews the question of how to conceive of the relation between the temporality proper to our native affective being and properly historical temporality. But it is no less the case that the Diltheyan thesis, according to which we do not merely contemplate the historical world from the outside, since we are ‘embedded’ in it and ‘live in its atmosphere’ – as the possibility of considering history rests on the fact that we are historical beings83 – seems but an echo of Droysen’s lessons, in so far as Droysen says of our personal identity: ‘This world of facts and configurations we believe in … is as it were the ambiance, the [vital] atmosphere of our self, and simultaneously constricts it.’84 Moreover, and even though Droysen takes it that reflective thought allows us to free ourselves from this immersion in history, he nevertheless understands historicity in a way that moves beyond the idea that we only understand what we have created,85 something Gadamer would emphasize. When we read in Truth and Method: ‘In truth, it is not history that belongs to us, but we that belong to history’,86 it is hard to distinguish this assertion from Droysen’s: ‘Our knowledge, and more precisely the contents of our selves, stems first from what we have received, from what has been transmitted to us, ours, as though it did not belong to us … . It has us, more than we shall ever have it.’87 Though he only had a copy of the Grundriß to hand, it is understandable that

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Heidegger – who also had more than a few reservations concerning the psychological dimension of Dilthey’s thought – would have devoted a seminar to him in the summer semester of 1926. In relation to Droysen, for whom the task of the historical sciences consists in interpreting vestiges and traces creatively – a task which, concerning the explanatory project, amounts to an understanding, and whose telos is eminently practical – Dilthey’s originality lies foremost in his demand to ground the human sciences psychologically, but also in his intimately connected critique of metaphysics. This is why Dilthey’s major work as a historian is the history of metaphysics to which the second part of his Introduction to the Human Sciences is devoted. This history, which aims to discover a lived world buried in abstractions beneath the ruins of metaphysical systems, certainly has a paradoxical flavour, to the extent that it leads back, not to a metaphysics of Ideas or the logos as it does for Boeckh or Droysen, but to affective tones whose temporality is no longer historical. The demand to ground the human sciences in this original experience plainly brings Dilthey back into proximity not as much with Humboldt as with Schleiermacher’s thesis, according to which it is feeling as ‘immediate presence of the whole of indivisible existence’88 which is the condition of possibility of experience, that is to say, a knowing that entails judgement. At this level, we may doubt that Diltheyan hermeneutics still amounts to a foundational project, since it is less a matter of bringing an ultimate principle (and incidentally the activity of a transcendental subject) to light, as it is to shed light on the mode under which things or the world are given to us. But, and finally, this phenomenology of metaphysics is also the starting point from which Dilthey tries to work out a new logic: a new doctrine of properly hermeneutical categories, capable of grasping life, an undertaking that would be the focal point of a fair share of Heidegger’s investigations through the 1920s.

Part Two

Phenomenology in Dialogue with Hermeneutics

3

Phenomenology as Hermeneutics Kevin Hart

For some time now there has been a consensus, at least in some parts of the philosophical world, that phenomenology, as practised by Edmund Husserl, has run into insuperable problems and has either to be abandoned or radically reformulated. This broad agreement consists of a variety of grievances, some internal to Husserl’s thought and heritage and others generated by shifts in philosophical interest, methodology, and ambition over the last century. We find among anxious or disgruntled members of the extended family of phenomenology reservations about whether the reduction assumes itself because the person in the natural attitude already has an inkling of what abides in the transcendental attitude.1 We hear that Husserl relied uncritically on a notion of representation or even presence that perverted phenomenology from the very beginning, and even that he misconstrued the direction of intentionality.2 We also acknowledge the sharp assessment that since phenomenology presumably must be undertaken in a natural language, the self-same reduction on which it relies in order to describe a phenomenon is put in jeopardy; for one’s language must be reckoned to be transcendent, at least in part, in precisely the sense that Husserl thinks must be suspended when doing phenomenology.3 Finally, we duly take note of the long and loud censure that Husserl uncritically elects the noetic strand of phenomenology over the hyletic strand and that, in doing so, he commits himself to an ontological monism.4 From outside phenomenology one often hears criticisms that threaten the enterprise just as strongly as those voiced from within the fold. On the borderland of phenomenology and analytic philosophy, one gathers that the account of intentionality as Husserl develops it (from Franz Brentano with Duns Scotus in the background) in the fifth and sixth of the Logical Investigations (1900–1) might not be entirely coherent, and objections to his theory of meaning come thick and fast.5 If one goes deeper inside the world of analytic philosophy, challenges come from cognitive science as to whether Husserl’s account of transcendental consciousness can survive attacks by one or another sort of naturalism, some of which have been more surely buttressed by the success of the natural sciences since they were confronted in the Logos essay (1911).6 One also surmises that the doctrine of the noema, when taken to be a non-linguistic understanding of ‘sense’, is precisely what put Husserl on the wrong path and still keeps phenomenologists from acknowledging the holy family of Frege, Moore, and Russell.7

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Furthermore, one repeatedly hears serious methodological doubts as to whether a first-person attitude can ever yield tolerable philosophical results. Some of these derive from Wittgenstein’s strictures on the possibility of a private language; others stem from the third-person perspective promoted by natural science, and the assurance that philosophy, if it really is a pursuit of the truth, should stand on the same ground as the natural sciences.8 There is another sort of criticism that is, as it were, situated between internal complaints and external judgements of inadequacy, and it is this reproach to Husserlian phenomenology that will interest me here. As we will see, it includes bits and pieces of arguments already mentioned; in responding to it, then, I will also be parrying some of the objections already canvassed, which, if treated at all fully, would require a small library. The basic charge I wish to consider is that phenomenology became committed to a version of German idealism no later than the publication of the first volume of Ideas in 1913, which is followed by the claim that it can be saved by transforming it into hermeneutical phenomenology. The complaint is an old one, the solution less so. Members of the Munich Philosophical Society had already detected what they took to be a shift from realism to idealism in Husserl’s lectures after 1904, and they remained loyal to the descriptive psychology of the first edition of the Logical Investigations; nonetheless, in order to stay close to Husserl, some moved to Göttingen where, with growing unease, they still heard talk of the constitutive role of the pure ego. Of particular importance here is Roman Ingarden’s repeated insistence that constitution bespeaks human creation of being, the implication being that it is a return to Fichtean subjective idealism.9 Yet, for all Ingarden’s subtle analyses of the issue, a prima facie defence of Husserl can be made, namely, that ‘constitution’, as he uses the word, is quite different from how anti-realist neo-Kantians were using it in order to describe the creative actions of consciousness. In phenomenology, the word denotes no more than the circumstance whereby consciousness is a necessary condition for phenomena to appear, and is informed by the view, familiar in one or another form since Johann Friedrich Herbart, that this appearing gives being or, in Husserl’s crucial refinement, givenness [Gegebenheit].10 Husserl’s general statements about what he claims about world and mind are sometimes clearer than individual remarks, especially in Ideas I and Cartesian Meditations. If we hew to the general statements, though, we can see that the remarks are at heart about the nature of phenomenality, the manner in which phenomena give themselves, not an affirmation of idealism over realism.11 An equally important move, made a little later, is Martin Heidegger’s bold reorientation of Husserl’s thought in which there is a change in the sense of phenomenality, which he defends in Being and Time by a philological analysis of the two Greek words at the basis of the German word ‘Phänomenologie’, ϕαινóμενα and λόγος.12 Where, for Husserl, a phenomenon has a genitive and a dative aspect – it is a manifestation of something to someone – for Heidegger, who wishes to be more faithful to the Greeks than to Descartes, Kant, and the idealist tradition they spawned, it is a manifestation of something as such. Thus Heidegger quietly reminds us that there is no such thing as a human ‘subject’ for the Greeks when they speak of τὰ ϕαινóμενα, and thus he wordlessly sets aside the problem of constitution.13 The redirection of phenomenology is at times a continuation of it by other means, however, where Husserl insists on reduction to transcendental consciousness, Heidegger rethinks reduction as

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a passage from beings to being, and where Husserl proposes a theory of truth by way of Evidenz, Heidegger develops it along the lines of ἀλήθεια.14 The redirection is at heart away from Husserl’s putative absorption with θεωρία, whether it be metaphysical or epistemological, to a consideration of concrete situations of Geworfenheit and Befindlichkeit and then to a step back [Schritt zurück] from the ontic to the ontological, that proposes a mode of meditation that does not rely on ‘theory’.15 What makes Heidegger’s reorientation of Husserl so startling is that Dasein is not a ‘subject’ such as we have come to think of the human being since Descartes argued that the mind is an individual substance and not just an essential property of the body. Dasein is no more than a structure of open doors and windows.16 Let us take a moment to consider what follows for phenomenology from this redescription of human being. For the Husserl of Ideas I, the thinker’s task is to lead ‘real being’ to ‘absolute being’ by way of ἐποχή; that is, the transcendent res is to be conducted back to the pure immanence of consciousness.17 The language in which the enterprise is explained is taken from the Principia Philosophiæ (1644) and is plainly an attempt to rethink the Cartesian idea of substance; consequently, the venture appears to remain solidly within the metaphysics of the subject.18 One might think that, for Husserl, phenomenality would belong by right to this unconditioned consciousness, for it would confer on a transcendent thing the ability to become a phenomenon for me. Not so, Husserl says: phenomenality is divided between consciousness and phenomenon.19 There must be something ‘in’ the phenomenon that allows it to give itself, and this is what I have called its genitive aspect. The point is worth stressing, since the sharing of phenomenality between phenomenon and consciousness bespeaks a role for an intersubjective community. Solipsism has no place to pitch its tent here. Heidegger figures the problem otherwise. Having transformed phenomenology into phenomenological ontology, he insists that phenomenality is wholly to do with the phenomenon itself and assures us that τὰ ϕαινóμενα are τὰ ὄντα, an identity claim that Husserl finds wholly implausible, presumably because it fails to distinguish an object in itself and an object as intentionally experienced, as well as completely bypassing all consideration of regional ontologies, the different ways in which beings give themselves.20 At the same time, Heidegger maintains that Dasein has a definite existential structure, which involves an irreducible hermeneutical stance to the world. Our ‘hermeneutical situation’ is not simply the fact that we often find ourselves before texts and have to engage in explication (Auslegung); it also requires us to uncover the meaning of being, our own and that of other phenomena. Dasein is structured ecstatically so that we are always and already involved in the world by way of forehaving, fore-sight, and fore-grasping.21 In this manner Heidegger seems to have successfully rescued phenomenology from idealism and to have relaunched it as a hermeneutic philosophy. Intersubjectivity is conceived not as a problem to be addressed but as a pseudo-problem to be dismissed: Dasein is always and already Mitdasein.22 Criticisms of intentionality lose their force when the theoretical grounds for it are dissolved and one finds in its place an analytic of Sorge, besorgen, and Fürsorgen, while those arguments that come from cognitive science now seem somewhat beside the point, for Dasein has no ‘soul substance’, as Heidegger derisively puts it.23 Fights with

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Heidegger are usually engaged on other grounds, and do not always follow Marquis of Queensbury Rules. The disquieting sense that Husserl’s phenomenology, from its middle period on, tends ineluctably towards one or another sort of idealism has been a theme of contemporary philosophy, and in particular it has oriented much French philosophy, beginning with Maurice Merleau-Ponty.24 Jacques Derrida’s insistence that it calls for deconstruction still rings in our ears. Less radical, yet more enduringly influential, at least among some practitioners of continental philosophy, is Paul Ricœur’s diagnosis that classical phenomenology needs a supplement of hermeneutics in order to prevent such a philosophical regression. It is a position that is strongly influenced, from different directions, by Ingarden, Heidegger, and Gadamer.25 I would like to read Ricœur’s essay ‘Phenomenology and Hermeneutics’ (1975) and query two things: (a) whether Husserl is truly an idealist, as we are told there in no uncertain terms, and (b) whether a persuasive argument is then made to graft hermeneutics onto phenomenology at its core, a graft that saves the life of the struggling philosophy.26 I will also signal (c) which criticisms, if any, of Husserl should be accepted and if they can be folded into a reformulation of the original project. Finally, I will briefly reflect (d) whether a case can be made that classical phenomenology is itself a budding hermeneutics of some sort. Ricœur bases his schematic theses about phenomenology entirely on Husserl’s ‘Epilogue’ to the first volume of Ideas, a draft of which he wrote in 1930 as the prologue to the first English translation of that work. The text is written in Husserl’s most literary German and is a deeply pondered restatement of his views with the misunderstandings of his German critics in mind that they might not be repeated over the channel. If there is one short piece by Husserl that can serve as a lucid distillation of his mature views, this is it. Ricœur cannot be faulted for his choice.27 He maintains, elsewhere and later, that one should not interpret Husserl on the basis of his research manuscripts.28 On the face of it, this seems prudent, for some of these manuscripts are unrevised notes in which he sketched possible solutions to a broad range of questions, and it is likely that positions developed there would have been nuanced when the time came for revision. Yet these manuscripts do not call to be treated in the same way; some are Husserl’s attempts to restate his mature thought in a coherent and systematic manner. Just a year after writing the Epilogue he indicated plainly that he regarded his Nachlass to be the most important part of his work, and not to know it is to remain content with a truncated understanding of Husserl.29 Of course, the Epilogue does not always recapitulate everything that had been written by Husserl beforehand, including his work on genetic phenomenology, intersubjectivity, and generative phenomenology, all of which bear on the question of his commitment to idealism. Ricœur proposes two theses: (1) ‘what hermeneutics has ruined [a ruiné] is not phenomenology but one of its interpretations, namely its idealistic interpretation by Husserl himself ’, and (2) ‘beyond the simple opposition there exists, between phenomenology and hermeneutics, a mutual belonging [une appartenance mutuelle] which it is important to make explicit’.30 The first thesis takes phenomenology to have been properly articulated in the Logical Investigations and then interpreted by Husserl in Ideas I and thereafter by way of the reduction ‘in its idealist sense’, by which Ricœur, following Merleau-Ponty, means simply the reduction, since for him there is

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no reduction without a commitment to idealism.31 (He does not specify which sort of idealism or which sort of reduction, although he seems to have the Cartesian path in mind, which Husserl had repudiated by the time of the Epilogue.) Certainly the Epilogue emphasizes the importance of reduction in leading us to transcendental consciousness, an expression that calls for immediate clarification. This subjectivity is not to be understood in the Kantian conception of supplying conditions of possibility for knowing phenomena but as an unlimited, pure field of sense [Sinn], which is constituted by the intentional accord of consciousness and world, exactly as intended, and which reduction brings to light.32 An object is given to experience in a manifold of appearances, yet there is no concern about it being dissolved into an intentional object. On the face of it, this does not seem to be anything like subjective idealism in the manner of Berkeley or Fichte, at least as the latter is commonly read. Yet Husserl comes to use the word ‘idealism’ to describe his project, and to make sure I am treating Ricœur, one of the fairest of all modern philosophers, with all due justice, it would be a good idea to see how Husserl uses the word in the text in question. Husserl writes of ‘transcendental-phenomenological idealism’, and immediately distinguishes it from ‘that idealism against which realism battles as against its forsworn opponent’, and also tells us that this traditional understanding of idealism, most likely in both its metaphysical and epistemological forms, is ‘nonsensical’, and that phenomenological idealism does not deny the existence of nature.33 What Husserl means by ‘idealism’ in its traditional senses is momentarily rendered opaque when he groups together Berkeley, Hume, and Leibniz as idealists, and then commends Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature for being ‘an actual “transcendental” phenomenology, though a sensualistically perverted one’.34 Presumably, Berkeley (for whom objects are bundles of ideas) and Leibniz (for whom monads are simple substances) are idealists in the metaphysical sense, while Hume is a phenomenological idealist avant la lettre, if only to a limited extent. One reason why that extent would be limited is that there is no bracketing and reduction in Hume. Unquestionably, what Husserl values in the Scot is his attention to the genesis of our beliefs about the world (such as the law of cause and effect), and what disappoints him is that he remains within the natural attitude and fails to recognize the intentional relation of mind and thing.35 Hume does not ‘consciously practice – to say nothing of thinking out radically – the method of phenomenological reduction’, Husserl will later complain.36 It is as though Hume acknowledges an implicit reduction, much as Descartes practised in the Meditations before retreating to more familiar scholastic procedures.37 Like Merleau-Ponty, Ricœur does not distinguish tacit and radical reduction or the various paths it can take (Cartesian, ontological, etc.); the very operation is idealist, he thinks, and this is what renders Husserl’s entire enterprise of the same character. Is he right to say so? In Ideas I Husserl proposes a twofold operation that allows us to reach the infinite field of pure sense. First, we must bracket whether an object exists or does not exist and so attend to it exactly as experienced. (The object is contained in the noema as irreell.) In doing so we commence the second stage, which gives point to the adverb ‘exactly’, for the experience in question is refined by attention. We begin to shift our focus from the natural attitude, the world of ‘common sense’ (informed, needless to say, by the natural sciences we learned at school and college) in which we habitually live, to the

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phenomenological attitude. Once we have shifted our attention from an object as such to our intentional rapport with it, we can contemplate its εἶδος. Husserl does not use the word quite as Plato uses either εἶδος or ἰδέα; instead, we can make out the a priori laws that apply to a phenomenon in its region of being. We see how the object is given in intentional experience – that is, we see the phenomenon as anticipated, imagined, remembered, perceived, loved, and so on – and can analyse how it is constituted and can begin to establish its sense. We never pass in reduction from one world to another, whether behind it, above it, or to anything that might be characterized as a ‘fairy world’.38 No doubt there is a great deal here that requires commentary, and not a few clashes of interpretation (over the status of the noema, for instance), yet what is clear from the beginning is that, in his theory of reduction, Husserl rejects realism, understood as the thorough independence of being with respect to a knowing subject, which he takes to be a consequence of thinking within the natural or the naturalistic attitude. Yet he does not deny the reality of things outside human experience, or conclude that objects are mind dependent, as metaphysical idealism would require, or affirm that our knowledge of them is shaped by mental acts, as epistemological idealism urges.39 Even within the sphere of human experience there is, after all, a vast world of empty intentions: things exist when we have no rapport with them. Phenomena give themselves all at once, but always in perspective by dint of the human body’s place in space and time; there is no cause to doubt that the backsides of things we experience are given just because they are momentarily not present to us. Also significant is that the values we ascribe to phenomena depend on our intentional engagements with them. An object is not beautiful; a phenomenon might be. Value inheres in experience of objects, not in objects as such. So far it seems that what Husserl calls ‘phenomenological idealism’ is not anything like the metaphysical, epistemological, or psychological (let alone absolute) idealisms that populate the history of philosophy from Plato and Plotinus to Fichte and Hegel and to Bradley and McTaggart. Other texts could be added for further evidence.40 Yet Ricœur adduces no fewer than five theses which, he thinks, characterize phenomenology as idealist (without any nuance about the phenomenological rethinking of transcendental idealism). The five theses are tightly interconnected, although only the first four relate directly to idealism in its metaphysical and epistemological dimensions; the fifth concerns practical reason and its relation to the human subject. We have the following claims: (i) that Husserl seeks an absolute grounding for his thought; (ii) that intuition is foundational; (iii) that intuition is located in subjectivity; (iv) that this subjectivity is transcendental; and (v) that reflection is a self-responsible act. Since Ricœur opposes each thesis with one of his own that would transform classical phenomenology into hermeneutical phenomenology, it is necessary to assess them one at a time. There is no need to contest Ricœur’s distillation of the theses: there is ample evidence for each of them. The issue in play in each case is not what Husserl says but what he means. (i) Husserl distinguishes the empirical sciences from phenomenology, which he takes to offer a far more secure ground for thought than they can. In part, this strategy is an inheritance from Kant’s attempt to supply a firm ground for the sciences, and in part it is a way of protecting rationality from the relativism of naturalism, historicism,

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and Weltanschauung philosophy.41 His aim, as he says, is to philosophize without presuppositions. This does not mean to adduce, as though from nowhere, a ground that is completely unconditioned; it means, rather, not to admit any premise that presumes a transcendent entity that cannot be justified by intuition. (To call anything ‘absolute’ in Husserl’s sense of the word is simply to affirm that it is fully justifiable by intuition, which has no kinship with the same word as used in idealism.) Since transcendent items give themselves only in manifolds of adumbrations they can never attain very high degrees of Evidenz, the process by which something becomes selfevident. A high degree of Evidenz is available only in logic and mathematics, Husserl thinks, although not even these disciplines are properly basic, and attention has to be given to the passive syntheses, passive genesis, and ante-predicative experience that he believes underlies them.42 If Husserl is committed to foundationalism, it is plainly not to ‘sense data’, as British empiricism requires, or to an indubitable truth, such as the cogito, as Cartesian rationalism seeks, or to formal logic, as some analytic philosophers in the line of Frege conceive it. Sense data require duration, Husserl thinks; the cogito is an endless flow, not a determinate substance; and logic has a transcendental component based on ante-predicative experience. In acts of temporal consciousness the duet of constituting and constituted converges only in past phases of consciousness: what might have been a ground in the Cartesian manner turns out to be forever in retreat. The ‘ultimate foundation’ that phenomenology seeks, we are told in 1930, is ‘to be realized only by way of relative and temporary validities and in an infinite historical process’.43 As Husserl was to say earlier, in 1922 or 1923, the certainty one seeks in the ego occurs only in the possibility of repeating a fulfilled intention.44 That is, in the language of Ideas I, certainty is to be attained in specific acts of noetic–noematic correlation, which of course occur only after reduction, but which offer no more than momentary certainty. (ii) That intuition, considered broadly as Anschauung, and as including categorial intuition, is foundational for phenomenology cannot be contested; it is the burden of Ideas I § 24 where it is named ‘the principle of all principles’. But that it serves as sole ground in phenomenology is far less sure. If I am in constant intentional rapport with the world, my intentional relations are fulfilled or fulfilling only in and through adequate intuition; but intuition will itself depend on phenomena giving themselves, which itself relies on reduction. A conversion of the gaze [Blickwendung] – an original variation on a persistent theme that perhaps goes back to Plato (Republic 518c) – is required for reduction to take place. Not everything yields fully to intuition: perfectly satisfactory knowledge of some mathematical series is a limit, not anything to be expected in lived experience. I cannot have an adequate intuition of a set with infinite cardinality, for example.45 Nor is intuition always what gives the highest degrees of Evidenz. When I imagine something I may well have a very high degree of Evidenz as regards meaning but not reference.46 That Husserl prizes full or fulfilling intuition goes without saying, but it needs to be stressed that I must often be content with the absence of an object in question, as happens when I am reading about ecclesial courts in early modern France or Buddhist rituals in modern-day Tibet. As already noted, Husserl admits that ‘an abiding truth’ can be discerned only in the possibility of remembering a

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‘momentary truth’ once grasped in intuition.47 At the heart of the business of grounding truth in experience there is Vergegenwärtigung. (iii) ‘The central thesis of Husserlian idealism’, Ricœur insists, is that ‘plenary intuition is subjectivity’. There is no doubt that, for Husserl, as already indicated, psychic phenomena yield high degrees of Evidenz. Yet one must move with caution here, for Husserl does not accept Brentano’s notion of inner perception [innere Wahrnehmung], nor does he think that knowledge comes by way of mental representations.48 He seeks the apodictic, as can be found in the exact essences of geometry, for example, and believes that, by strictly schooling oneself in the method of imaginative variation, one can train oneself to see the εἶδος of an event or thing, and thus separate the empirical from the ideal. These essences can be ordered by way of regional ontologies (nature, consciousness, and culture) and their qualities, relations, properties, and so on can be described by a formal ontology. So far there is nothing idealist here: the ‘destruction of the world’ that disconcerts Ricœur is no more than a suspension of the existential thesis. Mathematicians and physicists look for eidetic essences, and Husserl is not even a Platonist in mathematics; he thinks that ideal entities need to be tied to phenomenal script.49 Just because I might seek to discern the εἶδος of a task I am asked to perform (in order to see if I can perform it), I am not committed to a metaphysical or epistemological idealism. Besides, subjectivity, for Husserl, is not wholly composed of essences but is traversed by instincts and drives, which are less easy to know in a theoretical manner. Ricœur’s third thesis could show its teeth more forcefully if attention were given to the privilege Husserl grants to acts of knowing over all other acts. As early as the Fifth Investigation, we are told, ‘Each intentional experience is either an objectifying act or has its basis in such an act’, and Husserl never deviates from this claim in his published works.50 Indeed, his talk of reduction as a ‘method’ tends to entrench it. Desires, feelings, fantasies, wishes, and such states depend for him on primary intentions, conducted within perception, anticipation, or memory, which have thetic moments. Yet need this always be so? My body senses the cushion on which I am sitting, and does so in a direct manner, without me forming any thesis at the time; and I walk upon the earth spontaneously, without thinking, for the most part, that it is moving at a vast speed around the sun. I never make it a theme that there will be air to breathe in a room into which I am to walk. Besides, many feelings do not seem to turn upon objectifying acts. I can daydream and, in doing so, entertain a desire, affect, or wish. I can be moved by a sense of thankfulness or wonder that comes over me on an April day and thereby be refreshed and see things better than before. I doubt, then, that intentional experience is always bound to epistemological concerns. It would follow that Husserl’s commitment is not only to the human being as subject but also, and more particularly, to the sovereign status of definite knowledge claims in the makeup of that subject. What edges Husserl towards modern idealist metaphysics is not intuition in its extended sense but his intellectualist concept of the subject that gives us a converted gaze cued solely to intuition and that therefore has a privilege with regard to cognition. It turns on the ‘theoretical senses’ of seeing and hearing.51 (iv) Ricœur’s fourth schematic point is that the subjectivity of the subject is transcendental, not empirical. Transcendental subjectivity is the unity of experience

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and its intentional correlate. Reduction does not disclose a separate substance or state, only givenness, and that to a greater or lesser degree. Actually, it is not the transcendental as such that worries Ricœur but the means of attaining the perspective it supposedly makes available. Like Fink, Ricœur diagnoses circularity in Husserl’s thinking: reduction ‘presupposes, in a certain way, that which it surpasses and which it reiterates as the same, although in another attitude’.52 Worse, this change of attitude is taken to concede a loss of being (in departing from the natural attitude) in order to disclose meaning (in attaining the phenomenological attitude). Realism is therefore replaced by idealism by dint of reduction; it is, as he says elsewhere, ‘an idealism reminiscent of Fichte’, an association that is underlined in Ricœur’s fifth point when he affirms that the foundational act of phenomenology ‘can only be self-positing’.53 The idealism in question, for Ricœur, is subjective idealism, much as Ingarden seems to have suspected, and it is rooted in reduction.54 Does Husserl affirm subjective idealism, as one finds in Fichte? A detour is needed in order to assess the nature and extent of the similarity, and it will be worthwhile in that it will help us to deal with Ricœur’s fifth thesis more quickly. Before undertaking the detour, however, one clarification can be made about Ricœur’s use of the word ‘being’ which might shorten the journey: Husserl does not think that departing from the natural attitude affects something’s existence, only that it enables us to see its essence (εἶδος) more clearly. (iva) There can be no doubt that Husserl knew some of Fichte’s thought, although exactly how much is unclear, and whether there is a wormhole from the one to the other is not at all certain. Nor can there be any doubt that Husserl sometimes writes sentences that seem to have a Fichtean inspiration: for example, ‘my phenomenologically selfenclosed proper essence can be posited absolutely, as the Ego (and I am this Ego) that bestows ontological validity on the being of the world of which I speak at any time’.55 ‘Seem’ is the operative word, however: for here Husserl is only making the point, admittedly in cumbersome language, that presentation to consciousness must be presumed in the determination of the being of anything in the world. Indeed, at least once Husserl even absorbs Fichte into his own prose, as when he writes of the ego being formed by an ‘inexplicable impetus’ [unbegreifliche Ansto]; yet this does not seem to be idealist in inspiration, for the impetus in question consists of sensations from the external world.56 In no way does Husserl adopt a weak reading of Fichte as promoting a subject that creates being as though by magic, nor does he endorse Fichte’s attempt to ground modern philosophy or even his own system, even though we might find elements of a proto-phenomenology here and there in the Wissenschaftslehre. If we turn to the second introduction to the same project (1798), we find the following: ‘The concept of a self-reverting act of thinking and the concept of the I … have exactly the same content. The I is what posits itself [Das Ich is das sich selbst Setzende], and it is nothing more than this. What posits itself is the I and nothing more.’57 The pure ‘I’ is given not by empirical intuition but solely by intellectual intuition, something that would disconcert a Kantian of strict observance. This is something else entirely than what Husserl has in mind when writing of the ‘proper essence’ of the ego being ‘posited absolutely’, that is, as transcendentally required for being to be disclosed in any act of

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manifestation. But what actually is this pure ‘I’? What could possibly be meant by its self-positing, and why would one seek it in the first place? The last part of the question is the easiest to answer; it is given in Fichte’s review of Aenesidemus (1794): ‘Following Kant, Reinhold performed an immortal service by calling the attention of philosophizing reason to the fact that philosophy in its entirety has to be traced back to one single first principle, and that one will not discover the system of the human mind’s permanent modes of acting until one has discovered the keystone of this system.’58 To say that Reinhold followed Kant can only truly mean that he wrote subsequent to him, since Kant in no way affirmed a single first principle; and yet the quest for that Grundsatz – a tracing back that Ricœur appears to figure as akin to reduction – is what launches German idealism. It was desired because, for Fichte if not for Reinhold, a single principle would hold together the two worlds of nature and freedom, which remain unconnected in Kant until the Critique of Judgment, and then in a manner that is at best perplexing. For Reinhold, without this first principle there would be nothing on which ethics could rest securely. That was announced in his essay “Über die Möglichkeit der Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft” (1790), the title of which might well have been in Husserl’s mind when he wrote ‘Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft’ (1911); but is there anything more than a verbal connection between the two proposals?59 Husserl’s essay was written after the discovery of phenomenological reduction, yet nowhere does he suggest that a rigorous philosophy would be grounded on a single principle.60 Its work is negative: to reject science, whether natural or social, as a ground on which philosophy can be conducted (and, as it happens, also to identify Dilthey’s hermeneutics as relativist). To see how far Fichte and Husserl diverge, we have only to see what Fichte had in mind by the self-positing of the ‘I’. The earliest indication we have of Fichte’s position is in his review of Leonard Creuzer’s Skeptische Betrachtungen über die Freiheit des Willens (1793). There we are told that we can explain the unity of consciousness only transcendentally: it presumes ‘the absolute self-activity of the human spirit’, which Fichte does not hesitate to identify as practical reason.61 To be sure, there are moments in Fichte’s early writings when he seems to claim that the self-positing of the ‘I’ is primarily the ground of theoretical reason. One beguiling instance is his highly polemic work of 1796, a comparison of Christian Erhard Schmid’s philosophical system with the lectures at Jena that announced the Wissenschaftslehre. It is also the barest description of the ‘I’ that he ever offers, since he does not even evoke the dialectic of the ‘I’ and not-‘I’. Upon introspection, Fichte says, it is possible for anyone to discern ‘that he is at once subject and object’ and that this identity is ‘absolute’.62 The ‘I’ arises out of a single act that has two poles: intuition and concept. At the heart of selfhood, for Fichte, these poles converge in a single act of self-reflexive cognition. Yet this formulation says nothing about the freedom of the ‘I’, which Fichte regards as necessary, and to see that freedom we must return to the second introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre. ‘Our intuition of self-activity and freedom has its foundation in our consciousness of this law [i.e., the Moral Law], which is unquestionably not a type of consciousness derived from anything else, but is instead an immediate consciousness’, he says, then adds that this pure ‘I’ ‘provides the only firm standpoint for any philosophy’.63 For Fichte, this ‘I’ is not substance but action: ‘I am given to

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myself, by myself, as “active in an overall sense” or “as such”’.64 It would be a stretch to see Fichte performing a proto-reduction to a pure ‘I’, but even were we to grant that claim, this movement is undertaken to establish a transcendental ‘I’ as action in and through acknowledgement of the moral law as well as to provide a basis for the worlds of nature and freedom.65 All this is quite far from Husserl who at first does not even seek to find the ego through ‘any phenomenological ἐποχή’, for he thinks it can be discerned as ‘living “in” the various acts of consciousness’ (‘I think’, ‘I perceive’, ‘I remember’, ‘I fantasize’, etc.); and, as he subsequently adds, it is transcendent in the midst of the immanence of lived experiences.66 (v) In his fifth thesis Ricœur observes that the self-positing of the Husserlian ego is foundational and at once epistemological and ethical. As we have seen, this is precisely what Fichte maintains but not quite what Husserl holds. Both philosophers would say that the pure ‘I’ is life, yet only the former proposes that the ‘I’ is an action in which different individuals participate.67 For Husserl, each ego is unique, correlated to a world that has been, is being, and will be experienced, with a particular passive genesis and a particular genetic development, even though those experiences are of a world that is actually held in common. Only because the ego, as it develops, can lay claim to its correlate as its world, one that is always being enlarged, can it be held to be responsible for its world and for itself.68 ‘Correlate’: the word reminds us that for the ego to have a world in the first place, to be responsible, it must have performed reduction. Only if one distances oneself from the natural attitude with its coded beliefs and expectations can one maintain an ethical stance, a point to which I will return. The life that Husserl affirms is perhaps indebted less to Fichte than to Dilthey, especially his notion of a ‘life nexus’ [Lebenszusammenhang].69 Phenomenological life is the stream of Erlebnisse, centred in an embodied pure ego; it is characterized by ὕλη as well as νόησις; it is ante-predicative; and it consists of ideas, to be sure, but also instincts and drives, of which we are seldom directly conscious although they have, Husserl surmises, a proto-intentionality: the drive to procreate, for example. When we view this life in the natural attitude we identify these instincts and drives in terms of our striving to survive in the world and to enjoy it; and when we pass to the phenomenological attitude we discern rational and moral goals, namely, the teleological character of self-responsible life that Ricœur determines as the fifth characteristic of Husserlian idealism. Yet once again there is a difference between Fichte and Husserl. There is no doubt that Fichte saw moral action as primary with respect to the ‘I’, but this is not so for Husserl, for whom value apperception [Wertnehmung], both moral and aesthetic, is a unity of cognition and emotion: a position that puts him at odds with Kant as well as Fichte. The teleological character of moral life, as Husserl develops it, is less to do with the transcendental ego than with a goal of reason that becomes apparent in human history when one examines it through a phenomenological lens.70 Ricœur opposes his five theses of Husserlian ‘idealism’ with counterparts in philosophical hermeneutics, and in so doing attempts to keep the two positions in a dialectical relationship. It is worth noting here that in the Epilogue Husserl himself observes that his vision needs ‘supplements’ to Ideas I in order to shield it from the criticism that it implies a commitment to solipsism or even the psychological idealism that Kant criticizes in the B edition of the first Critique.71 It is not hermeneutics,

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however, that Husserl has in mind, for what he recognizes as needed is a theory of transcendental intersubjectivity, which he indicates as commenced in Ideas II, though in truth it is neither started nor completed there and is left until the three posthumous volumes of Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, which cover his thoughts on the topic from 1905 to 1935.72 Another person is not merely an intentional object for me, for he or she transcends me, and indeed does so more starkly than any object can. Part of my experience of another person is brushing against a limit of my transcendental ego’s ability to master the world about me.73 Two things call for comment here. First, if this event happens with other human beings, it occurs all the more surely with animals, of whose feelings and thoughts we have even less idea than those of fellow humans we think we know. Second, here we see in the Nachlass a way in which Husserl can avoid the universality of objectifying acts, with respect to the other person and perhaps more generally than that. We are always and already in the world, Husserl maintains, and our relations to all other egos are asymmetrical: we recognize the transcendence of the other person, whether it is a human or non-human animal, and this realization assures us of the reality of the world. We have transcendental warranty of the world, note, not just the naive surety pregiven in and through the natural attitude. When Ricœur argues against (i) – that Husserl seeks an absolute grounding for his thought – by way of urging us to accept Heidegger’s idea of In-der-Welt-Sein and/or Gadamer’s notion of ontological belonging [gehören], we might respond that as it happens Husserl has a more capacious understanding of shared life with others than either later thinker, since he neither consigns non-human animals to a lesser status in the world nor requires them to be partners of conversation.74 (Gadamer plays on hören being at the root of gehören.75) Husserl also develops in his generative phenomenology a notion of Fremdwelt, an alien world, in which our assumptions of life, based on our Heimwelt, are called into question.76 We are inevitably in a hermeneutical situation by way of negotiating our experience of Heimwelt and Fremdwelt, although of course Husserl does not put it in quite that way. Against (ii) – that intuition is foundational – Ricœur maintains that all understanding is mediated by interpretation. Husserl argues that phenomenological description, based on noetic–noematic correlation, must be ‘always kept free from all interpretations that read into them more than is genuinely seen [von allen Hineindeutungen über das rein Geschaute freigehalten bleiben müssen]’.77 Two things need to be kept in mind here. The first is the caveat about looking and not interpreting in advance, which does not deny the hermeneutical aspect of describing a phenomenon but disavows laziness, whim, or prejudice in an act of description. All phenomena give themselves to subjects in a particular historical and cultural setting; and discernment of a phenomenon does not exclude the influence of the intersubjective community, including those elements of it that are more or less alien to the interpreter. In grasping the noematic sense of a phenomenon, Husserl thinks, one also discerns its noematic properties from the viewpoint of a specific intentional relation. Those properties have a subject, the innermost core of which becomes apparent over time; it is seized at one or more moments as X, and this apprehension [Auffassung], whether simple or relational, occurs before any judgement, for example that S is X.78

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Certainly, Husserl was not interested in interpreting texts, not even when teaching parts of the canon of Western philosophy; his concern was the description of other phenomena in their diverse regions of being, including anticipation, which Ricœur thinks important yet which he discusses solely within the framework of Being and Time, 32. To be sure, one does not find a rich discussion of natural language, speech acts, or even interpretation in Husserl, and his accounts of all three need to be extended greatly.79 One does not need to do so, though, in order to meet Ricœur’s principal objection, namely, that intuition comes at the beginning or the end of an investigation while ‘all interpretation places the interpreter in medias res’.80 As we have seen, Husserl maintains that phenomenological description occurs ‘only by way of relative and temporary validities and in an infinite historical process’.81 Apparent foundations trail away in the ante-predicative or escape into the distance of a τέλος of rationality that cannot be reached. The ego is, as Husserl says, a ‘flow’ with neither beginning nor end.82 Yet one can attain confidence in having seen aright, of having passed from apprehension to judgement; and when that occurs the phenomenologist is in much the same position as an interpreter when he or she has settled on an interpretation. Both are open to correction, which might involve a complete revision. Not that the two accounts always have equal appeal, though. Consider this example. I am walking home late at night and see a group of thugs a block or two ahead of me, just waiting for me to come by: my heart pounds. As I approach, I see that they are a poor family quietly waiting for a bus. I have not interpreted something – some shadows, say – in two distinct ways; rather, I have received two different appearances. The first has presented a phenomenon, thugs, by way of anxiety, given in a horizon of my knowledge of urban violence, and the intentional rapport is fulfilled by my imagination. Unlike perception, imagination does not supply reference, but it surely supplies a high degree of selfevidence (by way of meaning). My pounding heart tells me that I have not interpreted the shadows as thugs, at least not in the sense of a conscious activity overlaid on a perception. I have seen and grasped the εἶδος of a situation I am soon to confront. Whether the thugs actually exist is, strictly speaking, neither here nor there. Of course, there can be no question of interpreting the shadows as a family as I walk past the bus stop. Then the phenomenon gives itself to me by way of perception. When Ricœur turns to find a hermeneutical counterpart to (iii) – that intuition is located in subjectivity – he does so at first by following Heidegger and Gadamer before departing from them in order to accommodate a difficulty they tend to overlook. The first step is Heideggerian: ‘we see through language’, that is, by means of it.83 Yet this very endorsement of linguistic mediation allows, as Heidegger immediately admits, the possibility of deception and indeed self-deception. For Ricœur, although not for Heidegger, this possibility is intimately linked with ideology, which as an ‘interpretive code’ is not something that we pose but something in which we live and think.84 Thus put, one would have to crack the code in order to distance oneself from an ideology, and Ricœur thinks that this can be achieved by a critique of ideology. Understanding must be open and a perpetual programme, he urges; it must be publicly practised in all the shifts and shiftiness of the world. The best model for this, he believes, is textual exegesis. Two reservations suggest themselves here. In the first place, to combat one

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ideology as a code by the means suggested is not to guarantee that one does not succumb to another in doing so. The best we may hope for is to identify those codes we more or less inhabit and to develop a critical relationship to them and to the possibility of being oriented by such codes in general. (I might diagnose an ideological component in my response to seeing the ‘thugs’, for example.) We recall Heidegger’s black notebooks where fierce criticisms of the leaguing of technology and metaphysics hardly distance him from anti-Semitism, and Sartre’s self-criticism of his earlier humanism that lead him to embrace Maoism. In the second place, the model of textual exegesis does not seem to fit the ordinary hermeneutical situation of understanding something as well as it does explication of documents and literary artworks. There is a prima facie difference between interpreting an event or a state of affairs and interpreting a text, especially a literary one in which meaning can be considerably in excess of words. Many events may well be mediated by linguistic signs and other symbols but in such a minimal manner that no exegesis is called for: when the cry would go up, ‘Stop the clock!’ in the New York Legislature no one ever felt moved to interpret the statement in any thorough way, yet I might do so when reading W. H. Auden’s lyric ‘Stop all the clocks’.85 To assimilate events and situations to texts by way of a model can be done, as Derrida shows, by stipulating a quasi-transcendental sense to ‘text’, but then one places one region of being, archiécriture, as an epistemic filter for all other such regions.86 The concern is less to do with radical mediation of perception, say, than with allowing criticism of ‘full presence’ to become a criticism of presence in all its modes, including those well short of perfectly full or fulfilling intuition. The danger Ricœur faces is otherwise: he takes the empirical text as his model for all interpretation, and in doing so skews how one receives being by way of appearing. Phenomenology freed description from the one model of the natural sciences (of a century or so ago); hermeneutics, for Ricœur, seeks to offer another single model and forego the various ways in which things give themselves to us. More particularly, ‘hermeneutics’, for Ricœur, is narrower still. Although he acknowledges a hermeneutics of proclamation, he prizes a hermeneutics of suspicion and overlooks the various ways in which phenomena give themselves to contemplation in all the regions of being.87 To contemplate something is not just passively to see it; it is to see it in its proper way of giving itself and so to understand it. In fact, one might well ask if one really needs a hermeneutical counterpart to (iii). As early as the Logical Investigations Husserl affirms the irreducibility of ‘the “as what” of interpretation’ [des ‘als was’ der Auffassung], which Heidegger expands, with force and brilliance, into the Als-Struktur of understanding.88 In any text, to remain with Ricœur’s preferred model of interpretation, intersubjective features – including conventions, institutional norms, and social practices – are marked in its noematic structure, and the drive to correlate the noetic and the noematic serves to overcome distortions of understanding. We must recall that correlation begins only once the natural attitude has been suspended, and this is important. Everything in that attitude occurs in a horizon of culture and history that is as pregiven as a sense of the inevitability of cause and effect; and it is ideology that prowls around in claims about social practices being ‘natural’. The conversion of the gaze involves a critique of ideology, and is no more circular than ideology critique, which has an inkling of how

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the ‘natural’ is being misused before a critique takes place.89 Is this position so very far from what is supposed to replace it? In seeking a hermeneutical analogue for (iv) – that subjectivity, for Husserl, is transcendental – Ricœur once again elects the model of the text, and this time he writes only of textual exegesis and never of interpreting an event or a situation. Especially in poetry and prose fiction, he thinks, a text projects a second-order ‘world’ before itself, and its meanings constellate there and not in the hidden subjectivity of the author where they must be recovered by way of a ‘criticism of consciousness’, as the Geneva school would have it.90 Ricœur’s criticism is directed to granting a hermeneutical privilege to ‘the subjective intention’ of an author, which he glosses as ‘psychological intentions’.91 Yet Husserl brackets anything to do with the empirical ego (the ‘personality’ of an author, his or her ‘genius’, particular volitions involved in acts of composition) and attends to the intentional relations in play, which are far broader than any psychological intentions and which put one in direct contact with the world. There are no immanent representations, not even figures of the imagination, which mediate consciousness and the world, for Husserl. A poet performs a partial reduction, Husserl thinks – partial because he or she does not suspend all psychological investments when seeking the meaning of a phenomenon but is interested, rather, in its aesthetic possibilities.92 Fulfilment can occur by way of imagination rather than perception. What one finds in a poem, play, or prose narrative are one or more incidents in which phenomena – such as all those that we condense in the expression ‘being in love’ – are concretely rendered. It is merely abstract to say, as a psychologist might, that disappointed love makes one sorrowful, yet it is concrete to say, as Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil does, ‘With how sad steps, ô Moone, thou climb’st the skies/How silently, and with how wanne a face’.93 A psychologist is properly concerned to answer ‘What?’ and ‘Why?’; a poet, so often an anonymous phenomenologist, is animated by ‘How?’94 In the natural attitude cause precedes effect, yet after reduction one approaches a cause by way of effects; it is a difference between explanation and experience. That is the case here: we are invited to feel (‘With how sad steps’) before we encounter the moon (and then are puzzled until we realize that he is imagined to be a lover, just like Astrophil). A correlation is made between the lover’s intentional stream and the object exactly as he intends it (i.e. as touched by love); it is not made in perception but in phantasy. The noematic sense is detailed by way of slowness, silence, and paleness. Concretion, not the recovery of psychological intentions, would be the proper basis of phenomenological criticism. The meanings in play are not projected into a second-order world of meanings; strictly speaking, they are marked in a noematic surface, the sonnet on the page, and included in the noetic pole as the act’s intentional contents (i.e. they are irreell). Certainly, they do not abide in the poet’s empirical ego and have to be drawn from there each time we read the lyric. Finally, Ricœur counters (v) – that reflection is a self-responsible act – by urging that hermeneutical philosophy offers a better account of the relation of subjectivity and understanding by locating subjectivity at the termination of a quest for understanding and not at the origin of it. The movement envisaged here is from ‘responsibility’ to ‘response’ to a text, and it is in the complex play of distanciation and appropriation that one can understand oneself before a text. I apprehend myself as a lover by reading

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‘Astrophil and Stella’, for instance, by taking into account the Petrachanism adopted there and later developed and adapted (from Shakespeare’s to Berryman’s sonnets, let us say), criticism of it, deflation of it (Philip Larkin’s ‘Sad Steps’, for example), cultural changes in the expectations of men and women in their erotic lives, and then making the text my own in the light of this literary and ideological criticism.95 The process is open-ended, for the concept of love is frequently reset in new contexts, social and artistic, and there is always more to learn from poems and novels about it. What this indicates, Ricœur insists, is ‘the ruin of the ego’s pretension to constitute itself as ultimate origin’.96 Yet, as we have seen, Husserl does not maintain that the ego constitutes itself in quite that sense. If the ego forms itself through passive genesis, it is always related intersubjectively to other egos; and the self is constantly engaged in Fremderfahrung and in assimilating it into his or her self. I do not find a persuasive case made by Ricœur that Husserl is an idealist, certainly not a subjective idealist as Fichte was. Ludwig Landgrebe is wise to observe that we are not led to grasp ‘the sense of Husserl’s phenomenology through the goals of German idealism but rather just the reverse, to explain the possibility of understanding the problematic of idealism through a phenomenological interpretation’.97 Yet one could argue that Husserl’s commitment to a subject whose gaze is always grounded in an objectifying act is consistent with metaphysics, if not idealism, and that it tends to downplay the roles of language in our engagements with the world. If we discharge this assumption, phenomenology changes its role from that of epistemological builder of foundations. The Nachlass, bypassed by Ricœur, gives us an opportunity to do just that. Without losing rationality, it becomes possible to speak more fully and more tellingly of the affective side of life than once seemed possible in phenomenology, and this is necessary also if one is to speak of God who gives himself eminently in love. The possibility was raised in phenomenology by Scheler and Levinas, among others, but was occluded in part by the rise in prestige of hermeneutics. It also becomes possible to attend to a wider field of phenomenality, one that includes saturated phenomena, and in order to do so one must reposition hermeneutics, not as a replacement of phenomenology but merely as a consequence of givenness, for what is given is received by someone in a time and place.98 Ricœur’s displacement of phenomenology into hermeneutics does not yield a new position that can be dialectically linked to the old one but a restating of possibilities already in the old position, some of which Heidegger draws out and gives in cleaner, more dramatic lines. Classical phenomenology is already aware of the ‘hermeneutical situation’, which it seeks to engage by way of intentional analysis, and which yields clear description, from a certain perspective, rather than a response from a psychological subjective viewpoint. Indeed, Ricœur forecloses on classical phenomenology in large part by restricting it to static phenomenology, by attending only to the Cartesian path to transcendental consciousness, by overlooking Husserl’s genetic and generative analyses, and by thinking of reduction too literally as a method rather than as a contemplative practice. In doing so Ricœur misses the roles that intersubjectivity can play in apprehending our world and making judgements about it, exposes himself unnecessarily to the charge of relativism, and substitutes a single model of empirical text for the possibility of fine-grained intentional analysis, one that learns from a

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long meditation on language as Vergegenwärtigung and is therefore concerned with modes of absence as well as partial fulfilment. To be sure, Husserl did not show us how to engage in that style of textual analysis – Heidegger took it up and then dropped it – and, for all of the adventures in interpretation that have marked the humanities in the last fifty years, this particular task remains largely before us.99 It will be the development of a new hermeneutics, neither given to suspicion nor to recollection but to contemplation.

4

What ‘Phenomenon’ for Hermeneutics? Remarks on the Hermeneutical Vocation of Phenomenology Claudio Majolino and Aurélien Djian

Phenomena, phenomenologies, hermeneutical phenomenologies To some extent, the philosophical use of the term ‘φαινόμενον’ is as old as philosophy itself. To the best of our present knowledge, its oldest occurrence is found in a famous fragment attributed to Anaxagoras. If this is correct, Greek thinkers did not have to wait that much to see the ordinary vocabulary of phenomena enter into the philosophical discourse. By contrast, one has to wait until the seventeenth century to see the first ‘phenomenology’ appear, that is, the first philosophical discourse entirely and explicitly defined by its reference to a specific concept of ‘phenomenon’. But what kind of transformations did the concept of phenomenon undergo from Anaxagoras to, say, Lambert, in order to prompt the existence of a full-fledged philosophical discipline called ‘phenomenology’? About a century after Lambert’s phenomenology, a new turning point occurs. Phenomenology is no longer a mere branch – even if important – of philosophy. It becomes the most fundamental part of philosophy itself, a ground from which the whole of philosophical problems can be tackled in a new way. Brentano’s ‘descriptive phenomenology’, Peirce’s ‘phenomenology or phaneroscopy’, or Husserl’s ‘transcendental constitutive phenomenology’ are examples of this new trend. Then again: what kind of transformations did the concept of phenomenon undergo in order to prompt the existence of a whole new account of philosophy based on ‘phenomenology’ like Brentano’s or Husserl’s? This finally brings us to the following question. The second half of the twentieth century was characterized by a whole host of projects variously called ‘hermeneutical phenomenology’ or ‘phenomenological hermeneutics’. It goes without saying that not any phenomenology is ‘hermeneutical’ per se. For a great deal of philosophical projects have been called ‘phenomenology’ without harbouring any specifically ‘hermeneutical’ vocation. Conversely, many theoretical and practical endeavours can soundly be dubbed as ‘hermeneutical’ without being necessarily connected with

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phenomenology. But if not any understanding of ‘phenomena’ leads to the explicit elaboration of a ‘phenomenology’, and not any ‘phenomenology’ is apt to promote an overall renewal of philosophy as such, then a question arises: in what sense should the concept of ‘phenomenon’ be understood in order to lead to a form of ‘phenomenology’ apt to renew philosophy as a whole in a ‘hermeneutical’ way? To rephrase our previous question: what kind of transformations did the concept of phenomenon undergo in order to prompt the existence of a new account of philosophy based on ‘hermeneutical phenomenology’ or ‘phenomenological hermeneutics’? In trying to answer this question, the present study will be divided into three uneven parts. As famously suggested by Ricœur (EP, 9), ‘phenomenology in the broad sense is the sum of Husserl’s work plus the heresies stemming from Husserl’. To begin with, one might wonder whether hermeneutical phenomenology actually stems from the former or the latter. Despite Ricœur’s views, however, there are reasons to believe that very little of Husserl’s original understanding of ‘phenomena’ – grounding both his account of phenomenology and the breadth of the latter’s philosophical relevance – is left after the so-called hermeneutical ‘turn’. By contrast, it will be our contention that most of contemporary hermeneutics rests on the very same distinctive transformation of Heidegger’s technical strategy to define phenomena and phenomenology. Thus, in the first part of our study (§2) we will turn back to the famous §7 of Being and Time as to highlight how Heidegger’s account of ‘phenomenology’, grounded in a very particular concept of ‘phenomenon’, leads to the first explicit project of a ‘hermeneutical phenomenology’. In the second part (§3), we will try to show to what extent Heidegger’s overall account is both assumed and displaced, voided from its doctrinal contents and kept in its formal structure, as to give rise to the core concept of phenomenon active in many – although not all – contemporary forms of hermeneutic phenomenology. Detecting the ongoing presence of such a concept, prompting an alternative and non-Husserlian understanding of ‘phenomenology’ will also show how several apparently different waves of the contemporary continental mainstream can be consistently brought together under the common heading of ‘phenomenological hermeneutics’ – even if they do not explicitly label themselves this way. There is a third point to be made. If twentieth-century ‘phenomenological hermeneutics’, in a broad sense and taken as a whole, rests indeed (explicitly or implicitly, for better or worse) on a very specific understanding of ‘phenomenology’, which in turn both originates from and modifies Heidegger’s concept of ‘phenomenon’, then a new question arises. Are there other concepts of ‘phenomenon’ giving rise to different understandings of ‘phenomenology’ and, accordingly, to alternative varieties of ‘phenomenological hermeneutics’? We will briefly address this issue in the concluding section of our study (§4).1

Heidegger’s initial road to hermeneutical phenomenology Being and Time §7, devoted to ‘The phenomenological method of investigation’, follows a very distinctive path. After having insisted on the ‘significance’ of the question of ‘the meaning of Being in general’ and defined it as ‘the fundamental question of

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philosophy in general’, Heidegger asks about the ‘method’ appropriate for such a form of questioning. Introduced as a way to overcome the shortcomings of ‘historically transmitted ontologies’ (geschichtlich überlieferte Ontologien) having collapsed the difference between Being and beings, such a method is called ‘phenomenological’ (SZ, 24/27). Obviously, since it is ‘the concept of a method’, phenomenology is not defined with reference to a specific thematic domain (Was). What is relevant, instead, is the particular ‘manner’ (Wie) in which something, turning into the theme of a theoretical research, ‘shows itself ’ (zeigt sich). If one stops here, one might think that the word ‘phenomenology’ declines itself in the plural. Whenever the ‘confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) with the things themselves’ is preferred to ‘free-floating constructions’, ‘accidental findings’, ‘concepts that are only seemingly made evident’ and ‘pseudo-questions’, there we find something like a ‘phenomenological method’ at work. Accordingly, phenomenology would be more like a general rule of conduct, followed to investigate all kinds of beings according to the particular manner in which they each show themselves. One could thus consistently consider the idea of a phenomenological theology (as opposed to, say, a merely speculative theology), a phenomenological psychology (as opposed to a psycho-physiology or behaviouristic psychology), or a phenomenological sociology (as opposed to a constructive sociology), and so on – all guided by the maxim ‘zu den Sachen Selbst!’ (SZ, 24/27). Yet, as Heidegger puts it, this later claim is ‘abundantly self-evident’ (reichlich selbstverständlich) and boils down to the mere formulation of ‘the general principle of all scientific knowledge’ (SZ, 24/28). The phenomenological method, so understood, would be nothing but a general epistemic norm, valid for all science. However, since Heidegger’s main concern is Being in general, phenomenology has to prove itself to be the only method of a philosophy truly intended as ontology. What Heidegger is interested in is thus the idea of a phenomenological philosophy, that is, an ontology that can only be carried out phenomenologically. In order to justify such a ‘non-self-evident’ idea, Heidegger turns to analyse what he calls the ‘preliminary concept’ (Vorbegriff) of phenomenology (SZ, 25/28), a concept obtained by ‘fixing the meaning’ of the compound name whose etymological components are the Greek words ‘φαινόμενον’ and ‘λόγος’ (SZ, 24–5/28).2 Heidegger famously begins by distinguishing four different meanings (Bedeutungen) of ‘φαινόμε νον’ (SZ, 27/31). Just as in Aristotle’s treatment of the ‘manifold meanings of Being’ in Met. Γ 2, this ‘confusing multitude’ (verwirrende Manngfaltigkeit) is ultimately traced back to the unity (πρὸς ἓν) of an ‘original’ or ‘fundamental’ meaning (ursprüngliche Bedeutung, Grundbedeutung) (SZ, 25/29). According to the latter, a ‘phenomenon in its genuine original meaning’ (SZ, 27/30) is something that ‘shows-itself-from-itself ’ (das Sich-an-ihm-selbst-zeigende) (SZ, 25–7/28–31). Once reached this point, Heidegger’s treatment of ‘phenomenon qua phenomenon’ and Aristotle’s strategy to reduce the equivocity of ‘Being qua being’ part ways. For the ‘original’, ‘genuine’, ‘fundamental’ meaning of ‘phenomenon’, providing the πρὸς ἓν unity needed to bring order into a multiplicity of senses turns out to be a merely formal one. As Heidegger puts it: ‘If in the way we grasp the concept of phenomenon we leave undetermined which beings are to be addressed as phenomena, and if we leave altogether open whether the selfshowing is actually a particular being or a characteristic of the being of beings, then we are dealing solely with the formal concept of phenomenon’ (SZ, 27/31). Having

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reached the original focal meaning of ‘phenomenon’ is not enough. In order to lose its indeterminacy and serve the cause of philosophy, the formal concept ‘what showsitself-from-itself ’ should be ultimately ‘deformalized’ according to the ontological difference, that is as Sein, or as Seiende. Both cases are illustrated by means of Kantian examples. The ontic deformalization of the original concept of phenomenon is exemplified by Kant’s notion of ‘Erscheinung’. ‘What-shows-itself-from-itself ’ is now the object of an empirical intuition, that is, a worldly being. This leads to what Heidegger calls ‘the vulgar concept of phenomenon’ (der vulgäre Phänomenbegriff) (SZ, 27–31). Just as the ‘vulgar concept of time’ (der vulgäre Zeitbegriff) will be ‘found in things at hand and objectively present encountered in the world’ (SZ, 372/405), the ‘vulgar concept of phenomenon’ is nothing but the phenomenon as experienced in everydayness by a Dasein constantly lost in a world of beings. This ‘vulgar’ concept is opposed to the ‘phenomenological concept of phenomenon’ (der phänomenologische Begriff von Phänomen). Kant’s forms of intuition are conveyed as examples of ‘phenomena in the phenomenological sense’: space and time do not ‘vulgarly’ show themselves. They do appear ‘within’ (in) vulgar phenomena, and yet can also be thematized and ‘become phenomena’ in themselves (SZ, 28/31). We reach here one of Heidegger’s key claims, whose importance for our purpose can barely be underestimated: not any concept of phenomenon is phenomenological. There is the ‘original’ concept of phenomenon – which is formal, that is, without content. There is the ‘vulgar’ one, whose content is a being encountered as initially and for the most part showing itself in the world. There is finally the ‘phenomenological’ one – whose content is ‘something that is concealed (verborgen), in contrast to what initially and for the most part does show itself ’ (SZ, 31/35). The original/formal concept of phenomenon leads to a merely formal concept of phenomenology. In a formal sense, ‘phenomenology means: ἀποφαίνεσθαι τὰ φαινόμενα – to let what shows itself be seen from itself, just as it shows itself from itself ’ (SZ, 30/34). This ‘formal’ concept, however, merely boils down to a sophisticated way of expressing the maxim ‘to the things themselves!’ from which Heidegger had started. In this very broad sense, all ‘genuine’ and ‘true discourse’ becomes eo ipso phenomenological and phenomenology is trivially concerned with whatever shows itself from itself (SZ, 30/35).3 The vulgar/deformalized concept of phenomenon, by contrast, applies this injunction to the different kinds of beings variously encountered in the world and whose knowledge appears to be theoretically relevant. In this case, Heidegger says, ‘every way of indicating beings as they show themselves in themselves’ turns out to be ‘phenomenology’ (SZ, 31/35). It is precisely in this sense that all phenomenology turns out to be ‘tautologically descriptive’, for there can be as many phenomenologies as there are beings brought to discourse and described just as they show themselves in themselves (SZ, 30/35). But, stricto sensu, vulgarly deformalized phenomena do not need phenomenology to show themselves; they already show themselves in the world. Only a phenomenologically deformalized concept of phenomenon needs phenomenology; and it needs a concept of phenomenology that is neither solely formal nor merely descriptive, a concept apt to become the ‘concept of the method’ for a philosophy entirely revolving around the question of Being. But there is more. Being – as the theme of ontology – is more than a simple ‘phenomenologically deformalized phenomenon’. Even more than Kant’s pure forms of intuition or any other categorical notion, Being is unlike any other phenomenological

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phenomenon. It is not just characterized by the fact that it is initially and for the most part concealed within vulgar phenomena. Being is rather ‘phenomenon in a distinctive sense’ (in einem ausgezeichneten Sinne). It is something that is concealed in an ‘exceptional sense’ (in einem ausnehmenden Sinne). As Heidegger puts it, It is something that does not show itself initially and for the most part, something that is concealed, in contrast to what initially and for the most part does show itself. But at the same time it is something that essentially belongs to what initially and for the most part shows itself, indeed in such a way that it constitutes its meaning and ground. (SZ, 31/35)

A ‘distinctive’ phenomenon has thus two features: (1) it is exceptionally concealed, structurally invisible to ‘vulgar’ sight, precisely because (2) it essentially belongs to what vulgarly shows itself and makes the object of a descriptive phenomenology. Beings are not ‘distinctive phenomena’: they are sometimes hidden, sometimes show themselves as they are not – but they are all, ‘initially and for the most part’, encountered as showing themselves from themselves in the world. By contrast, Being is precisely the most distinctive phenomenon: it is the ‘phenomenon κατ’εξοχήν’. Heidegger’s existential analytics provides several reasons to justify this claim: the ‘falling prey’ (Verfall) of Dasein; his/her ordinary ‘tendency’ (Tendenz) to understand his/her own being in terms of that being to which he/she is ‘essentially, continually and most closely related – the world’ (SZ, 14/15–16); and the fact that, being drawn in the world, Dasein questions Being from within a certain tradition – a tradition that is the form, left in the world, of the self-understanding of the Dasein (SZ, 31/35). All these claims are meant to suggest that Being is, on the one hand, exceptionally and essentially concealed and, on the other, exceptionally and essentially related to the self-showing of beings. This is the reason why ‘ontology’ is indeed ‘only possible as phenomenology’ (SZ, 31/35). Yet phenomenology, so understood, has to do neither with a ‘formal’ phenomenon (something showing-itself-from-itself) nor with a ‘vulgarly deformalized’ phenomenon (beings, like Kant’s objects of empirical intuition), and not even with some regular ‘phenomenologically deformalized’ phenomenon (entities like Kant’s forms of intuition). It has to do with the one and only phenomenon κατ’εξοχήν, that is, Being. It is precisely through this concept of phenomenology that Heidegger’s ‘phenomenological hermeneutics’ enters the scene. Because of its distinctive phenomenality and eminent concealment, the exceptionally phenomenological phenomenon of Being cannot show itself without some exceptional aid. As Heidegger puts it, ‘the way of encountering Being and the structures of Being in the mode of phenomenon must first be wrested (abgewonnen) from the objects of phenomenology. Thus the point of departure of the analysis, the access to the phenomenon, and passage through the prevalent coverings must secure their own method’ (SZ, 32/36–7). As Heidegger will explain later, Being is initially open to ‘understanding’ (Verstehen), in a way that, consistently with Dasein’s historicity (Geschichtlichkeit), is always submitted to a ‘fore-structure’ (Vor-Struktur) bound to a particular hermeneutical situation (SZ, 137/146). ‘Intuition’ (Anschauung), by contrast, is only a derived form of understanding, corresponding to the ‘traditional ontological primacy of what is readyto-hand’ (SZ, 138/147). In the latter case ‘we just stare at something’, Heidegger says,

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‘just-have-it-before-us’ (SZ, 140/149). It does not come as a surprise, then, if showing Being as a phenomenon in the phenomenological/deformalized sense turns out to be incompatible with the naivety of such a straightforward, ‘immediate and unreflective beholding’ (SZ, 32/37). On the other hand, however, one has also to avoid the shortcomings of ‘traditionally historical ontologies’, held captive by the fore-structure of the hermeneutical situation within which they are elaborated. Hence, in order to be brought to self-showing, Being can neither be ‘intuited’ nor should be merely ‘understood’; it has to be ‘interpreted’, ‘made explicit’. This is what phenomenological hermeneutics is all about: a way out from the alternative between an impossible intuitive grasp of Being and its tacit historical-relative understanding. This brings us to Heidegger’s final, quite famous, statement: ‘The methodic sense of the phenomenological description is interpretation (Ausegung). The λόγος of the phenomenology of Dasein has the character of ἑρήνεύειν, through which the proper meaning of Being and the basic structures of the very being of Dasein are made known to the understanding of being that belongs to Dasein itself ’ (SZ, 33/37). What Heidegger calls here ‘Auslegung’ will later be spelled out as the way in which ‘understanding appropriates what it has understood in an understanding way’ (SZ, 139/148). This self-appropriation of understanding is a ‘development’ of understanding itself, going through the articulation of its sense. Such articulation takes the form of the famous ‘hermeneutical-as’. ‘The “as” – as Heidegger explains – constitutes the structure of the explicitness (Ausdrücklichkeit) of what is understood; it constitutes the interpretation’ (SZ, 139–40/149). A ‘sense’ is therefore what is projected by the understanding of something, that from which something is understood, what is articulated in the process of interpretation as to reach the self-appropriation of what is understood. In view of that, ‘sense’ turns out to be the unitary structure of understanding and interpretation, expressed by the famous ‘hermeneutical circle’ – a circle that, notoriously, should not be broken but appropriately lived from within (SZ, 143/153). Living within the hermeneutical circle signifies accomplishing the back-and-forth movement from understanding to interpreting. When it comes to the question of Being, such movement ultimately amounts to the fact of confirming or infirming the fore-structure by its confrontation to the ‘thing itself ’. It is only by means of such a ‘test’, as it were, that Being can finally show itself from itself – not from the tacit assumptions of ‘traditionally historical ontologies’. Thus, if phenomenology – intended as the method of ontology – consists in making Being manifest as the ‘phenomenon’, hermeneutics is nothing but the methodic sense of phenomenology itself. For ‘interpretation’ (Auslegung) is the only way in which Being’s structural concealment and constitutive significance can be made manifest ‘as it shows itself from itself, just as it shows itself from itself ’. In this sense ‘Phenomenology of Dasein is hermeneutics in the original signification of the word, which designates the work of interpretation’ (SZ, 33/38). This conclusion calls for a last remark. Just as in Heidegger’s analysis of ‘φαινόμενον’ and ‘λόγος’, the definition of ‘ἐρμηνεύειν’ as ‘the work of interpretation’ (Geschäft der Auslegung) ultimately leads to an original focal meaning. The ‘primary meaning’ (der primäre Sinn) of ‘hermeneutics’ is that of ‘an analysis of the existentiality of existence’ (SZ, 33/38). Having previously applied the formal structure of the question to the question of Being, Heidegger is indeed persuaded that the ontological quest should begin by inquiring into that being

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which, in its very being, comports itself understandingly towards that being, that is, Dasein. This implies a prior access to Dasein and assigns a priority to the analysis of its being in order to uncover the structures on which the understanding of Being as such ultimately rests (something Heidegger will eventually find in temporality). The concept of phenomenological hermeneutics, defined in §7 of Being and Time, finally appears as inextricably bound to a specific philosophical project, having a rather precise doctrinal content. The ontological road from phenomenon to phenomenology and from phenomenology to hermeneutical phenomenology ultimately leads to the elaboration of an existential analytics. For Heidegger could not be clearer: existential analytics is the fundamental form of hermeneutical phenomenology. It not only ‘establishes the conditions of the possibility of every ontological investigation’ – which includes the particular ontological investigations related to specific kinds of being and dealing with ‘vulgar phenomena’ (SZ, 33/38). By ‘elaborating ontologically the historicity of the Dasein as the ontic condition of the possibility of the discipline of history’, hermeneutical phenomenology has also a foundational priority over all those hermeneutical projects intended as methods for the Geisteswissenschaften – something Heidegger dubs as ‘“hermeneutics” in a derivative sense’ (SZ, 33/38–9).

Towards an overarching concept of phenomenological hermeneutics On its way to the question of Being, Being and Time §7 has (1) established a rigorous concept of hermeneutical phenomenology; (2) resting on a very distinctive account of phenomenology; (3) rooted on an equally distinctive account of phenomena, culminating in (4) the idea of a phenomenon κατ’εξοχήν, that is, Being. This can be summarized in the following diagrams: Phenomenon

Deformalized (Wie + Was) "Phenomenon" Formal (what shows itself from itself )

Phenomenological (like Kant's forms of intuition)

(Being)

Vulgar (like Kant's empirical intuition)

(...)

Hermeneutical Phenomenology Phenomenological Deformalized (Wie + Was) "Phenomenology"

(...) Vulgar (descriptive sciences of different kinds of beings encountered in the world)

Formal (to let what shows itself from itself be seen just as it shows itself from itself = zu den Sachen Selbst!)

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Within such a complex strategy, ‘hermeneutical phenomenology’ appears down the line as the only way to let the phenomenon of Being ‘be seen as it shows itself from itself, just as it shows itself from itself ’. The only way to make Being manifest – not despite, but precisely in virtue of its exceptional concealment and essential significance – is to ‘interpret’ its authentic sense. Now, why should this view be taken as the guiding thread to reconstruct the implicit unity of contemporary phenomenological hermeneutics as a whole? Why should Heidegger’s account be supposed to have established the core concept of phenomenon active not only in all forms of ‘hermeneutical phenomenology’ but also in other strands of contemporary continental phenomenology that do not overtly define themselves as ‘hermeneutical’ – as we have suggested in our introduction? Several serious objections are likely to be raised. To begin with, one might protest that, at best, Heidegger’s specific understanding of phenomenology may count as the source of one or even some particular strands of hermeneutics – certainly not all of them. Second, it seems quite hard to believe that all philosophical projects of the second half of the twentieth century inspired, by near or by far, by Heidegger’s or Husserl’s views, could be lumped together under a somehow broad concept of ‘hermeneutical phenomenology’ or ‘phenomenological hermeneutics’. Even assuming this unlikely fact to be true, it would be even harder to suppose that such a large variety of projects should be, by hook or by crook, traced back to the very specific conception of hermeneutics qua ‘existential analytics’ defended at the end of Being and Time §7 (how about, for instance, French ‘phenomenologies’ like Levinas’s, Henry’s, and Marion’s?). It would be easy to remind us how none of these authors is willing to follow Heidegger’s early ‘subjectivism’, as it were, implied by the project of a phenomenological hermeneutics fixed to the understanding of a Dasein which in its very being comports itself understandingly towards that being. But the killing blow comes from Heidegger himself, for whom the idea of hermeneutic phenomenology promoted in Being and Time will be eventually put aside, overcome – together with the ‘transcendentalhorizontal model of thinking’ (ZEG, 36) – by a form of thinking focused more on Being qua Being than on the Being of Beings, driven by the Truth of Being rather than by the problem of its Sense (ZEG, 27, 36–9, 49). Are these legitimate and compelling objections strong enough? If we consider the doctrinal content of Being and Time – already rejected by Heidegger at a very early stage – the answer has to be yes. Yet if we stick to the formal strategy followed in §7 to build the concept of hermeneutical phenomenology on a phenomenon, what appeared to be a quite implausible claim might turn out to be more acceptable. In fact, Heidegger’s overarching legacy for all explicitly or implicitly construed ‘hermeneutical phenomenologies’ is not to be found in the specific content of what Being and Time calls ‘hermeneutical phenomenology’. It is rather in the general configuration of the path leading to a ‘distinctive phenomenon’ that, because of its exceptional concealment and essential significance, structurally requires to be relentlessly ‘made manifest’ by a phenomenology that cannot be but ‘hermeneutical’. As we have pointed out, Heidegger’s phenomenon was ultimately meant to deformalize the phenomenological concept of ‘phenomenon’, as to recognize Being as its most specific and exclusive theme. In post-Heideggerian phenomenologies, what for Heidegger was supposed to be the most deformalized concept of phenomenon

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(i.e. the non-formal and yet ‘original’ concept of phenomenon providing a non-formal and yet original unity to anything called ‘phenomenon’) becomes a formal concept again. Once re-formalized, as it were, the defining features of its ‘distinctness’ (exceptional concealment and essential significance) can be variously used to identify other forms of phenomena: structurally invisible to everyday sight and yet constantly at work, essential to whatever manifests itself as a ‘vulgar’ or an ordinary phenomenon, and so on. Such substitutive phenomena, precisely because of their distinctness and disregarding their specific content (the Other, Life, Givenness, etc.), will all need to be exemplarily ‘wrested’, as Heidegger put it, and ‘let be seen as they show themselves from themselves’ by a – tacitly or explicitly vindicated – hermeneutical operation. This is an operation that, as we will see shortly, should be understood in its formal sense and not conflated with its various deformalizations – of which Being and Time’s ‘work of interpretation’ (Geschäft der Auslegung) is only the first historical realization. If this is correct, it is not the doctrinal content of Being and Time §7 that has set the agenda for all hermeneutical phenomenology. It is rather (1) the adoption of a whole strategy to define phenomenology on the basis of a phenomenon; (2) the latter’s ‘re-formalization’, that is a ‘phenomenon’ as whatever is eminently concealed, essentially significant, and so on; plus (3) the endorsement of a methodic action to ‘let see’ what constantly shows itself not as an entity, a worldly being or a vulgar phenomenon and thus appears to be prima facie invisible. Whenever we find varieties of such heuristic configuration at work, both taking for granted and transforming Heidegger’s early account of phenomena and phenomenology in the way just mentioned, we are entitled to talk consistently about ‘hermeneutical phenomenology’. Phenomenology defines itself with reference to phenomena, and whenever the phenomena at stake have the formal features of a phenomenon, variously deformalized, the corresponding form of phenomenology can soundly be called ‘hermeneutical’. Additionally, such a broad and overarching concept would also have a non-negligible advantage. It would show in a quite rigorous way the actual reasons behind the undeniable family resemblance linking authors as different as Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Gadamer, Ricœur, Derrida, and Marion, authors who are often either lumped together in a very vague manner (as ‘continentals’, as ‘post-Heideggerians’, etc.) or attached to otherwise different philosophical projects (phenomenology, ontology of the flesh, ethics as first philosophy, hermeneutics, hermeneutical phenomenology, deconstruction, etc.). Of course, having made a bold claim palatable is not tantamount as having shown its rightness. Some evidence to test its overall appropriateness should now be in order. Let us begin with Paul Ricœur, whose work constitutes one of the most famous philosophical projects explicitly carried out under the heading ‘hermeneutical phenomenology’. At least at first sight, Ricœur wants to remain extremely close to Heidegger’s original account of ‘hermeneutical phenomenology’. His whole hermeneutical project seems in fact to unfold entirely within the ontological– phenomenological context established by Being and Time. In his essay ‘On a Hermeneutical Phenomenology’, for instance, after having defined what he calls the ‘most fundamental phenomenological presupposition of hermeneutics’ as the idea that

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‘every question concerning any sort of being (étant) is a question about the meaning of that being’, Ricœur writes: ‘Thus, in the first few pages of Being and Time, we read that the forgotten question is the question of the meaning of being. In that respect, it is a hermeneutical problem only insofar as the meaning is concealed, not of course in itself, but by anything that forbids access to it’ (PH, 55/38). Right after having connected his own hermeneutical project to Heidegger’s, Ricœur hastens to add: ‘However, in order to become a hermeneutical problem – a problem about concealed meaning – the central question of phenomenology must be recognized as a question about meaning’ (PH, 55/38). This text, apparently trivial, is in fact extremely revealing and suggests already two crucial remarks. (1) To begin with, Ricœur defines ‘phenomenology’ in extremely formal terms: any question about any being whatsoever (un étant quelconque) is phenomenological insofar as it has to do with that being’s meaning (sense). This holds true for the question of Being as well as for any question about whichever being one might encounter in everyday experience. Heidegger’s effort to deformalize the phenomenon in two alternative ways according to the ontological difference has clearly collapsed. Yet we are not back to square one. We are not dealing with a merely formal concept. The ‘phenomenon’ of Ricœur’s phenomenology is neither entirely undetermined (‘whatever shows-itself-from-itself ’, etc.) nor determined either as beings or as Being (as what already shows itself in the world vs. what is concealed and needs to be brought to self-appearance). It is determined – but as ‘meaning’. (2) This brings us to our second remark. The phenomenon of ‘meaning’, Ricœur says, needs hermeneutics because it is always a ‘concealed meaning’ (sens dissimulé). As a result, since phenomenology has to do with meaning and hermeneutics deals with concealed meanings to be uncovered, phenomenology turns out to be the presupposition of hermeneutics (PH, 55/38). On the other hand, since, because of human finitude and historical situatedness (PH, 41/29), the ‘notion of meaning obeys the double condition of the als and the Vor-’ (PH, 42/31), just as in Heidegger, and meanings are always structurally concealed and need to be ‘interpreted in an open process that no single vision can conclude’ (PH, 43/33) – then hermeneutics is, in turn, the presupposition of phenomenology (PH, 62/43). Qua hermeneutical, phenomenology only deals with phenomena. Yet instead of ‘Sein’, the new phenomenon of hermeneutical phenomenology – exceptionally concealed, essentially significant, in need to be brought to self-manifestation by ‘distanciating’ ourselves from and somehow ‘interrupting’ our everyday life (PH, 57/40), revealed by an infinite interplay of understanding and interpretation, and so on – is now called ‘Sense’. Another example of ‘re-formalization’ of Heidegger’s phenomenon eventually ‘re-deformalized’ in terms of sense (and therefore indifferent to the ontological difference between Being and beings) can be found in the closing section of The Rule of Metaphor, where Ricœur addresses the question of the implicit ontology ‘implied in the movement that carries the investigation from rhetoric to semantics’ (MV, 323/304), as well as in the opening lines of Time and Narrative I. ‘The power of metaphor’, he writes, consists in the fact that it is ‘the revealer (révélateur) of a “being-as” on the deepest ontological level’. Yet what is revealed by a metaphor, ‘re-describing a reality inaccessible to direct description’ (TR I, 12/xi), is something

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that cannot show itself otherwise as ‘meaning’. Poetic discourse fulfils in fact a truly phenomenological task, for it ‘brings to language a pre-objective world … which at once precedes us and receives the imprint of our works’. It is precisely in this sense that it can be said to be ‘inventive’ as both ‘discovery and creation’ (MV, 387–8/361–2). As for the speculative discourse, it has the complementary role of making explicit the ‘ontological vehemence’ (véhémence ontologique) implicit in the metaphor (MV, 99/48). The ontological interplay of Being and beings is somehow absorbed by the hermeneutical tension between the openness of an implicit new sense and the always relative and contingent closure of its explicitness, an interplay that can be found not only in semiotic (language, symbols, texts) but also in non-semiotic phenomena (actions, the figures of passivity-alterity in Oneself as Another, etc.). Gadamer’s ‘philosophical’ or ‘universal hermeneutics’ follows a parallel, although quite distinct, path. If compared with Ricœur, Gadamer does not define his own project as ‘phenomenological’. Whenever he talks of ‘hermeneutical phenomenology’, the expression is explicitly referred to Heidegger (WM, 240/258). Moreover, in his essay ‘The Phenomenological Movement’, he openly endorses a quite deflationist view of phenomenology, repeatedly stressing the great heterogeneity of its accounts (PB, 115–16). It is nevertheless interesting to note that, though deliberately avoiding the talk of phenomenology to describe his own hermeneutical project, Gadamer does not shy away from talking of ‘the hermeneutical phenomenon’ (das hermeneutische Phänomen) (WM, 478/470). But what is the phenomenon of hermeneutics? At the very beginning of Truth and Method one finds already a first answer: it is ‘the phenomenon of understanding’ (das Phänomen des Verstehens) (WM, 1/xx) or, as we will learn later on, ‘the unity of understanding and interpreting’ (die Einheit von Verstehen und Auslegen) (WM, 380/421). Then again, in what sense is ‘understanding’ or ‘the unity of understanding and interpreting’ properly a ‘phenomenon’? ‘Understanding’ is neither a cognitive activity nor a psychological fact; it is not even, as in Being and Time, something like an existential structure of Dasein. As Gadamer puts it, such a ‘hermeneutical phenomenon’ is rather ‘an experience of truth’ (Erfahrung von Wahrheit) (WM, 3/xxii), of which Plato was already aware (WM, 351/377) – an experience whose ‘original form’ (Ursprünglichkeit) and exemplar ‘model’ (Modell) are to be found in the always open-ended linguistic dialogue characterized by the structure ‘question/answer’ (WM, 352/378, 360/386), always bringing to the fore, in a mediated new form, something that was previously out of reach, although not completely out of sight. The unity of understanding and interpretation qua ‘hermeneutical phenomenon’ thus shows itself as the dialogue-like interplay of something structurally concealed uncovering itself as and through language. But ‘the phenomenon of language and understanding’, Gadamer adds, is also ‘the universal model of Being and knowledge in general’ (WM, 493/483). To use Heidegger’s wording, the phenomenon hermeneutics ultimately deals with can finally be described as Being showing-itself qua language and letting-be-seen in understanding without ever being exhausted by such a movement of exposure. It is precisely in this sense that, as Gadamer puts it, ‘the hermeneutical phenomenon … projects its own universality back onto the ontological constitution of what is understood, determining it in a universal sense as language and determining its own relation to beings as interpretation’ (WM,

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478/470). To put it in more emphatic terms, ‘Being that can be understood is language’ (WM, 478/470). Unlike Heidegger, however, the word ‘Being’ bears no particular technical sense here (WM, 1/20). In Truth and Method, ‘Being’ means everything that can be brought to language, be it actually or potentially. Hence, everything that is (the world as a whole or any of its denizens) insofar as it is understood (and given man’s finitude it can only be ‘understood’, not given intuitively) shows itself only as language. Since literally everything is involved in a process of understanding and every understanding is finite,4 whatever is understood (name it ‘language’, ‘world’, ‘being’, or ‘beings’) ends up necessarily showing itself in a garb of manifestation and concealment. What Being and Time had painstakingly tried to distinguish is now in Gadamer less clear-cut; even Heidegger’s technical vocabulary, although massively conveyed, is often employed in a loose way. Gadamer’s use of ‘phenomenon’ in particular is extremely loose and does not respect the stipulations of Being and Time §7. One thing still holds, though. When used to talk about the theme of hermeneutics, the language of phenomena keeps only one particular meaning: the idea of an exceptionally concealed and essentially significant phenomenon, a ‘phenomenon’ that can be variously deformalized as ‘Language’, ‘Being/World that can be understood’, ‘unity of understanding/interpretation’, and so on. Gadamer’s name for the exceptional concealment proper to such phenomena will be Selbstdarstellung, a notion illustrated by a quite detailed account of Plato’s metaphysics of Beauty and Light. ‘Being present’ (Anwesenheit), Gadamer writes, belongs in a convincing way to the being of the beautiful itself. However, much beauty might be experienced as the reflection of something supraterrestrial, it is still there in the visible world. That it really is something different, a being of another order, it shows itself in the mode of its appearance (zeigt sich in der Weise ihres Erscheinens). It appears suddenly; and just as suddenly, without any transition, it disappears again. (WM, 485/476)

Harbouring the formal features of a modified phenomenon, Gadamer’s hermeneutics – though never explicitly presented qua phenomenology – appears to be, at least in this sense, ‘phenomenological’. By interpreting/understanding – and by doing this from the structural point of view of their finitude – human beings let Being/the world show itself as language. As suggested by Plato’s account of beauty, this happens always in a glimpse, as it were – without ever being steadily uncovered. Heidegger’s ontological difference can be smoothened, as it were; the many deformalizations of the phenomenon can be put aside; the concealment of World and that of Being might even overlap; the self-showing of the φαινόμενον and the making-manifest function of the λόγος could finally merge – and yet the re-formalized structure of the phenomenon, with all its defining features, is still there to be deformalized again. Often referred to as representatives of post-Heideggerian French phenomenology, the names of Levinas and Marion are seldom associated with hermeneutics. Yet there are reasons to believe that some of their most distinctive claims are quite compatible with – if not clearly indistinguishable from – the family picture of ‘hermeneutical phenomenology’ sketched so far.

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If Ricœur’s hermeneutics (explicitly) recognizes itself as phenomenology, and Gadamer’s hermeneutics (explicitly) ignores its phenomenological character, Levinas’s Totality and Infinity appears to be a good example of a phenomenology (explicitly) ignoring itself as hermeneutical.5 Of course, the formal structure of the phenomenon – structurally concealed, essentially significant, impossible to bring to self-manifestation within everyday experience, whose self-showing can never be totalized or brought to full presence, and so on – is now deformalized according to a new figure, that is neither Being or World nor Sense or Language (or any of their combinations). This new figure is famously called ‘the Other’. The originality of Levinas’s de-formalization of Heidegger’s previously re-formalized concept of phenomenon is precisely in the attempt to apply the formal features of Heidegger’s phenomenon outside the borders of the ontological question. As is well known, Levinas’s ‘Other’ does not show itself as a being or an object, nor its everyday concealment and sudden revelation should be conflated with the concealment and the revelation of Being. On the contrary, according to Totality and Infinity, the whole Western tradition, dominated by the primacy of ontology (revolving around concepts such as totality, representation, politics, morality, war, egoism, and philosophy) is utterly blind to the self-manifestation of such an exceptional phenomenon, and deaf to the call of infinity, exteriority, ethics, justice, peace, exposure, eschatology, and so on (TI, 5–16/21–31). Husserl’s or Heidegger’s phenomenologies make no exception. Claiming that ‘truth regarding a being presupposes the prior openness of Being’ or that ‘a being is understood in the measure that thought transcends it, measuring it against the horizon whereupon it is profiled’ are just varieties of the very same ‘ontological imperialism’ (TI, 35/44). Yet criticizing Heidegger does not entail discarding his way of understanding phenomenology on the basis of a distinctive and original phenomenon. The fact that Heidegger’s everyday blindness to the self-showing of Being is now paralleled and superseded by the ontological blindness of the ego-subject to the Other should already put us on the right track. But it is Levinas’s explicit account of ‘the sense of phenomenon’ (sens du phénomène) that indicates in the clearest way the kind of transformation that Heidegger’s road to phenomenology had undergone. ‘The phenomenon’, he writes, ‘is the being that appears, but remains absent’ (TI, 197/181). This understanding of phenomenon is quite consistent with the primacy of totality and being and entirely unfolds within the latter. Hence, the phenomenon of Levinas’s phenomenology, the ‘original manifestation of the Other’ (manifestation originelle d’Autrui) in its irreducible transcendence (TI, 197/180), cannot be described by the language of ontology. It cannot be thought by the ordinary categories of formal logic either (TI, 197/180–1). It is so exceptional, so otherworldly, that only the language of eschatology (‘a surplus always exterior to the totality’) (TI, 7/22) or that of revelation (‘the epiphany of the exteriority’) (TI, 196/180) could suitably be employed. But there is also another path, leading to the concept of ‘expression’ (expression). Being is not the totality of everything that is; ‘Being is a world in which one speaks and of which one speaks’ and ‘presents itself in its speech’ (se présente dans sa parole). The speech of Being, the way in which Being shows itself as speech and to speech, is called expression. ‘Expression’, Levinas says, ‘manifests the presence of being, but not by simply drawing aside the veil of the phenomenon. It is of itself presence of a

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face, and hence appeal and teaching, entry into relation with me – the ethical relation’ (TI, 198/181). Thus, the Other’s exceptional self-manifestation, the face instituting an ethical relation, should not be thought as ‘phenomenon’, but as ‘expression’ or ‘speech’. As Levinas unambiguously claims, ‘speech is an incomparable manifestation’ (une manifestation hors pair) (TI, 198/182).6 On the other hand, if the Other does not show itself as a phenomenon (be it ‘vulgarly’ or ‘phenomenologically’ deformalized), it is precisely because – as stated in a subsection tellingly called ‘Expression is the Principle’ – ‘The Other is the principle of phenomenon’ (Autrui est principe du phénomène). In fact, ‘to receive what is given’, Levinas says, ‘is already to receive it as taught – as an expression of the Other’ (TI, 92/92). This is what hermeneutics should look like, one freed from the cage of ontology: not as the interplay of understanding and interpretation but as the experience of the epiphany of the face, showing itself as infinity, as excess, as breaking the totality – as speech. A quite similar picture can be found in Marion’s Being Given, whose declared task is to show how Heidegger’s ontological difference, Levinas’s face of the Other, Henry’s self-affection of Life, Ricœur’s or Gadamer’s hermeneutic phenomena, Derrida’s difference, and so on, indistinctly ‘fall within’ the phenomenon of Givenness, ‘whether they admit it or not’ (ED, 381/333). The acknowledged goal of Marion’s ‘phenomenology of givenness’ is thus to challenge all previous deformalizations of the phenomenon, so as to show the true original figure which each of them secretly refers to as its πρὸς ἓν unity. The project is explicitly presented under the heading ‘phenomenology’. ‘To show’, so Marion, ‘implies letting appearances appear in such a way that they accomplish their own apparition, so as to be received exactly as they give themselves’ (ED, 11/7). But phenomenology is supposed to do more than that. It has the task of ‘letting apparition show itself in its appearance according to its appearing’ (ED, 13/8). Of course, this is far from being ‘self-evident’, for knowledge always starts from us, cognitive subjects, not from phenomena themselves (ED, 14/9). Hence, we find ourselves again in a situation of initial blindness: blind to phenomena qua phenomena, prisoners of what appears and yet incapable of letting the phenomenality of phenomena show itself. Such ‘phenomenality of phenomena’ – what is initially and for the most part concealed to sight although, unbeknownst to us, constantly at work – is now named ‘givenness’ (donation). Again, the phenomenon of givenness, as every other phenomenon, turns out to be essentially significant and exceptionally concealed. Following the late Heidegger, its structural concealment is accounted in terms of ‘withdrawal’ (retrait) and illustrated by the exemplary structure of the gift: ‘for the giving is held back from the gift … precisely because, in giving it, it undoes itself and withdraws from it, therefore turns itself away from the gift and abandons it to itself ’ (ED, 60/35). Again, the ‘logic’ of the gift has nothing to do with ordinary logic, elaborated on the basis of what is given and not for the event of givenness itself. Again, it is presupposed by science and ordinary knowledge, and again it has its own peculiar form of phenomenological ‘method’ to be recognized – a method that might be called ‘hermeneutical’. Thus to recognize the gift implies a strict and particular phenomenological gaze: that which, faced with the fact, sees it as a gift. It is, if one wants, a matter of

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Marion’s work has definitively shown that the concept of hermeneutics can be separated from the notion of ‘sense’ and applied to whatever shows itself by deformalizing the formal features of Heidegger’s phenomenon.

Other phenomena, phenomenologies, hermeneutical phenomenologies  Although certainly incomplete and necessarily sketchy, our previous remarks should have shown, at least, the legitimacy of our hypothesis.7 But they should also have suggested that (1) if a phenomenology whose corresponding phenomena are varieties of variously deformalized phenomena leads to a certain form of hermeneutical phenomenology then (2) other accounts of phenomena may lead to different forms of phenomenology and, consequently, different forms of hermeneutical phenomenology. Two options seem now to be available; the first is somehow more experimental, the second quite empirical–comparative. On the one hand, one could bypass Heidegger’s inaugural move and turn back to Brentano or Peirce or Husserl, as to see if and to what extent their specific concepts of phenomenon, phenomenology, and phenomenological philosophy did or could lead to some alternative form of hermeneutics. The task is especially difficult as for Husserl, whose work has been so insistently reinterpreted in the light of Heidegger that not only the concept of ‘interpretation’ (Auslegung) but also the very idea of ‘concealment’ (Verdecktheit) are often seen as belonging to the very core of his transcendental phenomenology – making it already ‘hermeneutical’ ante litteram.8 One should nevertheless be reminded that Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology is not meant as a ‘method’ but as a science, a science with its own thematic field: the full concreteness of transcendental experience with its eidetic structures (correlation, reflection, synthesis, horizon, etc.) to be imaginatively captured and conceptually fixed by the very specific work of the variation (see CM, 103–6/69–72).9 There is no formal concept of phenomenon to be variously deformalized, for even the most general phenomenon of the universal correlation is materially determined. An εἶδος is not an empty form (see ID I, 13–16/8–11). But if this is the case, what kind of hermeneutics, if any could be generated from such an account of phenomena and phenomenology? Choosing to follow this first option and spell out Husserl’s account of ‘phenomena’ in its full extent, would clearly fall beyond the limits of the present study. Moreover, all our latter claims about Husserl’s overall project might of course sound dogmatic or controversial, and we do not have the ambition to settle the issue here. Having suggested that reading Husserl otherwise as already gesturing towards a Heidegger-like form of hermeneutics could be a good way to find out whether his transcendental phenomenology has actually the resources to lead to a new, unfamiliar concept of phenomenological hermeneutics, should suffice for the moment.

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As for the second option, we would like to conclude with a short remark. As a less contentious alternative, one could also try to find whether there are already actually existing forms of phenomenological hermeneutics that do not rest on the concepts of phenomenon and phenomenology discussed above. The answer is definitively less controversial. It is certainly a fact that, for instance, Anton Marty’s descriptive semasiology, Roman Ingarden’s account of the literary work of art, Gustav Špet’s phenomenological semiotics, but also Wolfang Iser’s phenomenology of reading or Hans Robert Jauss’s theory of reception are all projects to which already applies, for various reasons, the name ‘phenomenological hermeneutics’. The latter explicitly rest, however, on a certain appropriation of Gadamer’s hermeneutical framework, bringing back hermeneutics from a universal endeavour having to do with the ‘experience of truth’ to the particular study of literary texts as they actually work and come to existence, making the endorsement of Gadamer’s ontological–phenomenological assumptions less binding. If it is certainly true that – following Gadamer – Iser or Jauss sometimes claim that ‘understanding is understanding otherwise’ (AR, 64–7; LP, 29–32), given the narrower scope of their contention, there is no need to assume that it actually needs, by near or by far, the implicit reference to a phenomenon to be held true. All these hermeneutical projects are said to be phenomenological in a low key, as it were. Quite less ambitious, none of them pretends to extend hermeneutics beyond being, inflate understanding and interpretation to the point of redefining entirely the scope of a philosophy intended as ontology or post-ontology or giving an account of the place of human beings in the world. Then again in what sense are they ‘phenomenologies’ after all? On what concept of phenomenon do they rest? To what extent does such a concept sustain the ambitions of each correlative form of phenomenology? Only extensive comparative research could give an answer. This brings us to a final hypothesis. It may well be that all these relatively different projects – each in its own way – operate with concepts of phenomena doing without the idea of a phenomenologically deformalized original concept of phenomenon. Maybe, as in Husserl, they do not need to assume that there is an ‘original’ concept of phenomenon, but only a specific ‘attitude’ turning into phenomena all kinds of facts (see ID I, 3/xvii; 65–6/60–2), some of which could not exist otherwise as being interpreted. Perhaps they do not even need to rest on the distinction between a formal and a deformalized concept of phenomenon. Maybe they all rely on ‘vulgar’ phenomena. One might ask though if, considering the still ongoing escalation of phenomena – all displaying the same formal features, to the point that picking up one rather than the other becomes somehow a matter of taste – the project of a multitude of ‘vulgar’ ‘phenomenological hermeneutics’ would really be such a bad idea.

Bibliography Becker, Oskar. ‘Von der Hinfälligkeit des Schönen und der Abenteuerlichkeit des Künstlers.’ In Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung. Ergänzungsband: Husserl-Festschrift. Halle 1929, 27–52. Courtine, Jean-François. Archéo-logique. Husserl, Heidegger, Patočka. Paris: PUF 2013.

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Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Wahrheit und Methode (WM). Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck) 1990 (Truth and Method, trans. J. Weinsheimer and D. G. Marshall. New York: Continuum 2004). Gadamer, Hans-Georg. ‘Die phänomenologische Bewegung’ (PB). In: Gesammelte Werke, Bd. 3: Neuere Philosophie. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck) 1987, 105–45. Grondin, Jean. Le tournant herméneutique de la phénoménologie. Paris: PUF 2003. Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit (SZ). Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann 1927 (Being and Time, trans. J. Stambaugh. Albany : SUNY Press 1966). Heidegger, Martin. ‘Zur Erörterung der Gelassenheit’ (ZEG). In: Gelassenheit. Pfullingen: Günther Neske 1959, 29–73. Husserl, Edmund. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenlogie und phänomenlogischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie (ID I). Husserliana III/1. The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1950. (Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans. F. Kersten. The Hague, Boston and Lancaster: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers 1983). Husserl, Edmund. Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge (CM). Husserliana I. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973 (Cartesian Meditations and the Paris Lectures, trans. D. Cairns. The Hague, Boston and London: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers 1982). Iser, Wolfgang. Der Akt des Lesens. Théorie ästhetischer Wirkung (AL). Stuttgart: Fink/ UTB 1976. Jauss, Hans Robert. Literaturgeschichte als Provokation der Literaturwissenschaft (LP). Konstanz: UVK Universitäts-Verlag 1967 (Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. T. Bahti. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1982). Levinas, Emmanuel. Totalité et Infini: Essai sur l’extériorité (TI). Paris: The Hague/Boston/ London: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers 1961 (Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. A. Lingis. The Hague, Boston and London: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers 1979). Majolino, Claudio. ‘Multiplicity, Manifolds and Varieties of Constitution: A Manifesto.’ The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, 2013, 155–82. Marion, Jean-Luc. Étant donné: Essai d’une phénoménologie de la donation (ED). Paris: PUF 2013 (Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. J. L. Kosky. Redwood City: Stanford University Press 2002). Ricoeur, Paul. Temps et Récit I (TR I). Paris: Éditions du Seuil 1983 (Time and Narrative I, trans. K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press 1984). Ricoeur, Paul. ‘Phénoménologie et Herméneutique’ (PH). In: Du texte à l’action. Paris: Édition du Seuil 1986, 39–72 (From Text to Action, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson. Evanston: Northwestern University Press 2007, 25–52). Ricoeur, Paul. À l’école de la phénoménologie (EP). Paris: Vrin 1986. Ricoeur, Paul. La métaphore vive (MV). Paris: Éditions du Seuil 1975 (The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. R. Czerny, K. McLaughlin and J. Costello. London and New York: Routledge Classics 2003).

5

Phenomenology and the Givenness of the Hermeneutic Circle James Mensch

The relationship between hermeneutics and phenomenology has always been problematic. If a single doctrine can be said to characterize hermeneutics, it is that of the circle of interpretation. At its broadest, the circle relates the interpreter to the text he wishes to understand. The text, at work in determining the historical tradition in which the interpreter works, determines his interpretation in determining this tradition. His interpretation, however, contributes to this tradition and hence plays its part in determining the text that is presented through it. Here, text and interpretation enter into a circle of mutual determination. Phenomenology, however, was initially conceived as a method that allows us to avoid such circularity. Its most characteristic moment, that of the epoché, was conceived with this in mind. As Roman Ingarten points out, its purpose is to avoid the reasoning in a circle that arises when we assume, as part of our demonstration, the conclusion we wish to prove (Ingarten, p. 12). To prevent this, we perform the epoché: we suspend all our judgements regarding the world and focus on the evidence we have for them. Thus, from the phenomenological perspective, we have to suspend the thesis that our interpretations are determined by a historical tradition. Only then can we examine the intuitive evidence for such determination. The same, a fortiori, applies to the thesis of the hermeneutic circle. The phenomenological question is: What is the evidence for assuming such a circle? This, however, is precisely the question that hermeneutics considers illegitimate. It claims that there is no ‘intuitive foundation’ for our judgements that is ‘ultimate’ (Ricoeur, p. 91). In fact, to assert that there is amounts to misunderstanding what it means to understand. Understanding, it claims, is essentially circular. In what follows, I will first examine hermeneutics’ account of the circular structure of understanding. I will then raise the question of the intuitive evidence for this structure.

Heidegger and the circular nature of understanding For Heidegger, the claim that understanding is circular – that is, always involves presuppositions – comes as a response to the inevitable circularity that arises in our

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raising the question of being. As he observes, ‘Everything we talk about, everything we have in view … is being; what we are is being, and so is how we are’ (Heidegger, p. 26). Given this, must we not presuppose being in asking about it? The nature of this presupposition becomes clear when, in a move reminiscent of Descartes (and Husserl), he chooses to begin his investigation by examining the subjects who engage in it. The success of the inquiry, he claims, depends on our making transparent the Dasein – the human existence – that conducts the inquiry.1 This reflexive turn to the being of the subject raises the question of the circle: Are we not presupposing being in our definition of Dasein and employing this presupposition in our inquiry into the nature of being? As Heidegger expresses this: ‘If we must first define an entity in its Being, and if we want to formulate the question of Being only on this basis, what is this but going in a circle? In working out our question, have we not “presupposed” something which only the answer can bring?’ (p. 27) His response to this question is highly ambiguous. On the one hand, he asserts that the circularity in question is not ‘vicious’, as would be the case were the presupposition that of a ‘concept’ used as a basis for deductive reasoning. On the other hand, he admits that, in starting with Dasein, he does presuppose a certain understanding of being. This is the ‘average understanding of Being in which we always operate and which in the end belongs to the essential constitution of Dasein itself ’ (ibid., p. 28). In explicating Dasein, he will explicate this understanding. There will be a ‘back and forth relation’ between the question of being and that of this average understanding (ibid.) Thus, Heidegger’s response to the question of circularity is not to deny it but rather to analyse our ‘average understanding’ of being in terms of the constitution of Dasein. According to this analysis, Dasein’s relation to the world is essentially pragmatic. Things appear to Dasein as ‘equipment’, that is, as means for his projects. Thus, understanding how to cross a lake in a sailboat, Dasein takes the wind as wind to fill his sails; understanding how to make a bookcase, he interprets nails and wood accordingly, and so on. Such understanding is inherent in acquiring and using the objects that we need. The interpretation that makes this explicit is based on this tacit understanding. The ‘essential constitution’ of Dasein that this points to is that of our projective being. For example, in deciding to cross the lake, I grasp this as a possibility I am capable of and project it forward as the future I will actualize. Engaging in this activity, I not only disclose my being as the person who has crossed the lake in a sailboat, I also exhibit both the boat and the wind as means for my purposes. This grasping of crossing the lake as a possibility is part of my understanding of how I make my way in the world. Understanding something as something, for example, wind as wind to fill my sails, and projecting myself forward as the person who will accomplish something, for example, cross the lake, are one and the same. In Heidegger’s words, ‘As understanding, Dasein projects its Being upon possibilities’. This ‘Being-towardspossibilities, which understands, is itself a potentiality-for-Being, and it is so because of the way these possibilities, as disclosed, exert their counter-thrust [Ruckschlag] upon Dasein’ (Heidegger, p. 186). Their counter-thrust is their role in the defining of Dasein’s being as having realized one of his possibilities. If understanding and projecting are the same, then we never initially grasp anything as it is in itself apart from the uses to which we can put it. Such uses and, hence, our

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understanding involve the ensemble of things required for our projects. The nail, for example, is grasped with the hammer; and both are understood in relation to the boards we are nailing. The thing that we are making, say, a bookcase, is intelligible in terms of the books that we are making it for; and these books themselves are grasped in terms of further references. Things, then, are always interpreted in terms of their relations with other things, the ensemble corresponding to the possibilities we have of engaging with them. Granting this, all interpretation of things involves presuppositions. In Heidegger’s words, ‘An interpretation is never a presuppositionless apprehending of something presented to us’ (Heidegger, pp. 191–2). It articulates a tacit understanding – a way of being in and using the world – that is given in advance. Having explicated this average, tacit understanding, Heidegger raises again the question of the circle. If all interpretation presupposes a pregiven understanding, ‘how is it to bring any scientific results to maturity without moving in a circle?’ (Heidegger, p. 194) The circle consists of the results of interpretation presupposing the understanding that interpretation makes explicit. Heidegger’s response to this is not to deny such circularity but rather to affirm the circular nature of human understanding. To see the circle as vicious, he claims, is to misunderstand the act of understanding, that is, its basis in projection (ibid.). The interpretations that follow from Dasein’s understanding express his projecting himself forward in terms of the possibilities he has to use things. In his words, ‘the forestructure of understanding and the as-structure of interpretation show an existential-ontological connection with the phenomenon of projection’. This points back ‘to a primordial state of Dasein’s Being’ (ibid., p. 192). Given this, we have to affirm that ‘the “circle” in understanding belongs to the structure of meaning, and the latter phenomenon is rooted in the existential constitution of Dasein, that is, in the understanding that interprets. An entity for which, as Beingin-the-world, its Being is itself an issue, has, ontologically, a circular structure’ (ibid., p. 195). The reference here is to Dasein, defined as the entity that must choose what he will be – this through the projects that he engages in. The projective grasp of himself involved in such projects gives his being this ‘circular structure’. This structure affects our ‘historical interpretation’ of the world. Such interpretation can never be without presuppositions. It is always circular and, thus, can never ‘be as independent of the standpoint of the observer as our [scientific] knowledge of nature is supposed to be’ (Heidegger, p. 194). The point follows since understanding expresses the possibilities that we project forward in our engagement with the world. Such possibilities, however, are rooted in both our personal histories as situated, finite beings and in the transpersonal history that defines our common historical situation. Both change over time. The possibilities of our childhood are distinct from those that we now possess as adults. Similarly, the possibilities available to the ancient Greeks are distinct from our own. In each case they express different pragmatic engagements with the world. Does this mean that historical knowledge is less rigorous than that of the exact sciences of nature? According to Heidegger, for a science to make this claim is a sign that it misunderstands its own understanding, that is, the historical presuppositions that understanding involves. For Heidegger, as we cited him, ‘interpretation is never a presuppositionless apprehending of something presented to us’. This holds for the interpretations engaged in by the exact sciences. This means

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that ‘the ontological presuppositions of historical knowledge transcend in principle the idea of rigor held in the most exact sciences’. They do so insofar as the ‘existential foundations relevant for it’ are broader (ibid., p. 195). Those of mathematics, for example, ‘lie within a narrower range’ than history. Given this, historical research can never be completed. The interpretations that it advances are not independent of the standpoint of the researcher, and this standpoint changes with the advance of history. By implication, the same holds for science. Do these conclusions also apply to Heidegger’s inquiry into the nature of being? In the latter part of Being and Time, Heidegger restates the problem of attempting to derive the sense of being from the being of Dasein. He again asks: ‘Does it not then become altogether patent in the end that this problem of fundamental ontology, which we have broached, is one which moves in a “circle”?’ (Heidegger, p. 362). The reply is the same as that given earlier: human understanding is, as such, circular. In Heidegger’s words, ‘We have indeed already shown, in analysing the structure of understanding in general, that what gets censured inappropriately as a “circle”, belongs to the essence and to the distinctive character of understanding as such’ (ibid.). What is presupposed is not ‘some proposition from which we deduce further propositions’. It is, rather, something that has ‘the character of an understanding projection’ (ibid.). As such, it is rooted in the nature of Dasein’s understanding. Thus, ‘we can never “avoid” a “circular” proof in the existential analytic’ (ibid., p. 363). We cannot, because ‘Dasein is already ahead of itself. As being, it has in every case already projected itself upon definite possibilities of its existence; and in such existentiell projections it has, in a pre-ontological manner, also projected something like existence and Being’ (ibid.). Thus, the inquiry into the question of being, as a research carried out by Dasein, ‘is itself a kind of Being that disclosive Dasein possesses’. Given this, ‘can such research be denied this projecting which is essential to Dasein?’ (ibid.) For Heidegger, it cannot. The objection of moving in a circle thus ‘fails to recognize that entities can be experienced “factually” only when Being is already understood, even if it has not been conceptualized’. In other words, it ‘misunderstands understanding’ because it fails to grasp Dasein’s ‘circular being’ (ibid.). Given this response, we have to say that ontological research is in the same position as historical research. Like the latter, it cannot be completed. The Dasein that has ‘projected something like existence and Being’ is a finite, situated being. His interpretations are never independent of his standpoint, and this changes over time. What is ultimately indicated here is a transformation of the notion of philosophy. Our inability to avoid the circle indicates an inability to remain within the boundaries that traditionally distinguished philosophical argumentation, namely, those set by premises and conclusions linked by syllogistic reasoning. What remains seems to be a kind of Denken, a thinking that, aware of its own interpretative presuppositions, embraces its circular structure.2

The transformation of the hermeneutic circle To see how such thinking transforms hermeneutics, we have to note that traditionally hermeneutics also embraced a circular conception of understanding, one involving

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the relation of part to whole. The circle arises because we cannot understand the one without the other, which means ‘that we must understand the whole in terms of the detail and the detail in terms of the whole’ (Gadamer, p. 258). Thus, the meaning of a sentence is understood in terms of the meanings of the words composing it. Such meanings, however, can vary widely. They depend upon the context in which the words are used. Given this, we have to understand the meanings of the words in terms of the meaning of the sentence in which they occur. The same argument can be applied to the sentence, whose sense is also dependent on its context. As Gadamer relates, for Schleiermacher, this relation of part and whole can be expanded through a series of concentric wholes, one where, just ‘as the single word belongs in the total context of the sentence, so the single text belongs in the total context of a writer’s work, and the latter in the whole of the literary genre of the literature’ (ibid., p. 259). The ultimate whole here is the historical–cultural tradition to which the work belongs. In spite of this expansion, traditional hermeneutics keeps intact the norm of a correct, final understanding of the text. As Gadamer expresses it: ‘The harmony of all the details with the whole is the criterion of correct understanding’ (ibid.). Such harmony signifies that all the details are fully comprehensible in terms of the whole, and the whole itself is fully comprehensible in terms of the details. When we achieve this, the work of interpretation is done. The interpretation is no longer something intended, that is, projected. It articulates an ‘actual’, fully confirmed understanding of the text (ibid., p. 261). When we understand this circular part-whole relation in terms of the circular structure of Dasein, this criterion is no longer available. As Gadamer notes, ‘Heidegger describes the circle in such a way that the understanding of the text remains permanently determined by the anticipatory movement of fore-understanding’ (ibid., italics added). This means that there is no final interpretation, no transformation of fore-understanding (or projecting) into an actual, fully confirmed interpretation. Rather, we have to see the understanding ‘as the interplay of the movement of tradition and the movement of the interpreter’ (Gadamer, p. 261). In this interplay, ‘the anticipation of meaning that governs our understanding of a text … proceeds from the commonality that binds us to the tradition’ (ibid.). Such commonality determines us even as we contribute to it through our interpretations. Given this, we can never abstract ourselves from the ‘prejudices’ that are part of the ‘fore-having’ of this tradition. Just as the understanding of the part determines the understanding of the whole, which in turn determines the understanding of the part, so the interpreter, through his interpretations, determines the tradition, which determines the interpreter in his projective understanding of the tradition. As Gadamer expresses: ‘Tradition is not simply a permanent precondition; rather, we produce it ourselves inasmuch as we understand, participate in the evolution of tradition, and hence further determine it ourselves.’ Here, ‘the circle of understanding’ is not simply a technique of hermeneutics, ‘but describes an element of the ontological structure of understanding’ (ibid.). Implicit in the above is a radical historization of our understanding of texts. According to Gadamer, ‘Every age has to understand a transmitted text in its own way.’ The age focuses on the aspects of the tradition that interest it. It does so in the interests of its own self-understanding. As for the text itself, its ‘real meaning … is always co-determined by the historical situation of the interpreter and hence by the totality of the objective course of history’ (Gadamer, p. 263).

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Since the historical situation is ongoing (and hence changes over time), ‘the discovery of the true meaning of a text … is never finished; it is, in fact, an infinite process’ (ibid., p. 265). Thus, through careful hermeneutic practice we can attempt to eliminate the projections that are not born out by the text. But the movement of history brings in ‘fresh sources of error’ as well as ‘new sources of understanding’ (ibid., pp. 265–6). In such a context, the ‘correct’ or ‘true’ meaning of a text is the very process that results in the continuous transformation of our relation to the text (ibid., p. 267). For Gadamer, then, ‘true historical thinking must take account of its own historicity’ (ibid.). To do so is to recognize that the ‘true historical object is not an object at all’. It is continually constituted in the ongoing relation between ‘the reality of history and the reality of historical understanding’ in their mutual determination (ibid.). True historical thinking is thus an example of the Denken mentioned above. Like ontological research, its examination of its own interpretative presuppositions can never be completed.

Ricoeur’s critique of phenomenology Heidegger is noticeably reticent in criticizing Husserl. Gadamer as well does not make explicit the impact of his position on Husserl’s phenomenology. For this, we have to turn to Paul Ricoeur’s ‘Phenomenology and Hermeneutics’, which focuses on ‘the development of the antithetical position between the two projects’ (Ricoeur, p. 86). At issue is the role of experience in validating our claims. In Ricoeur’s reading of Husserl, all our assertions must be founded on intuition. In his words, ‘The principal foundation is on the order of intuition; to found is to see’ (Ricoeur, p. 86). This means that ‘the first truth’ for phenomenology is ‘‘an experience’. In opposition to every ‘speculative construction’, every radical question is decided at the level of vision’ (ibid., p. 87). For hermeneutics, however, experience is not ultimate. What is ultimate is the ‘belonging to’ – the subject’s ‘adherence to the historically lived’ – that links the experiencing subject to the world. Enmeshed in history, the subject’s lived experience is not an independent source of evidence. Rather, ‘to the “lived” of phenomenology corresponds, on the side of hermeneutics, consciousness exposed to historical efficacy’ (ibid., p. 98). In other words, the experiencing consciousness is itself historically determined. The same holds for its interpretations. For phenomenology, interpretation directs itself to experience: to interpret is to make a claim about what we are experiencing; and the validity of this claim depends upon the intuitive experience that either fulfils or fails to fulfil our interpretation. By contrast, ‘the hypothesis of philosophical hermeneutics is that interpretation is an open process that no single vision closes’ (ibid., p. 91). In fact, once we admit that a subject’s experiences are not an ultimate foundation, we cannot even say that the author’s interpretation of his text in terms of his situation and those he addresses is definitive. Interpretation is subject to the efficacy of history, which means that, for hermeneutics, ‘the meaning of the text has become autonomous in relation to the intention of the author, the critical situation of discourse, and its first addressee’. What we encounter in the ongoing, historical process of interpretation is ‘a polysemy of text which invites a plural reading’ (ibid., p. 90).

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It would be a misreading of Ricoeur’s position to claim that he is entirely negative with regard to phenomenology. Hermeneutics, he points out, shares at least two presuppositions with phenomenology and, in this sense, can be said to presuppose it. The first is the view that questions about being are actually about ‘the meaning of being’. This ‘choice for meaning is the most general presupposition of all hermeneutics’ (Ricoeur, p. 96). The second, closely related, presupposition is that sense is not to be reduced to ‘merely linguistic meanings’ (ibid., p. 98). For hermeneutics, ‘consciousness, as exposed to the effects of history, which makes total reflection on prejudices impossible …, is not reducible to only linguistic aspects of the transmission of the past’ (ibid.).3 What Ricoeur does oppose is Husserl’s idealism, namely, his belief that we attain sense through the suspension of our Seinsglaube, that is, ‘our belief in the being’ that we are investigating. Here, Ricoeur takes the reduction as the way phenomenology reduces being to sense – the sense that consciousness makes of its experiences. For Ricoeur, this idealism is absent in Husserl’s Logical Investigations. In it, ‘one discovers a state of phenomenology in which the notions of “expression” and “meaning”, of consciousness and intentionality, of intellectual intuition are elaborated without the “reduction”, in its idealistic sense, being introduced’ (ibid., p. 96). Husserl’s phenomenology is thus capable of being reformed as long as it ‘keeps being submitted to the critique of hermeneutics’ (ibid., p. 102).

The phenomenological response Ricoeur’s reference to the Logical Investigations is surprising given the focus of this work, which is that of securing knowledge from all forms of relativism. Husserl defines ‘relativism in the widest sense of the word as a doctrine which somehow derives the pure principles of logic from facts’ (Husserl 1968, I, 122). Thus, psychologism is a form of relativism insofar as it derives these principles from the factual conditions of our reasoning. For Husserl, such psychologism would include Heidegger’s account of the circular structure of our understanding. The fact that we project, and thus presuppose what we claim to discover, has no bearing on the truth of logical principles. To assert that it does is simply to fall into a form of relativism. Husserl’s insistence on this point can be put in terms of the priority of the epistemological or knowing relation. Whenever some other relation is taken as prior to this, we fall into a selfundermining scepticism. This holds not just for the attempt to understand knowing in terms of the psychological makeup of the knower. It also obtains for the relationships of history, language, culture, and so on, when we take them as external to the knowing relationship and as determinative of its content. The point follows, since to justify the claim that some particular relationship is the determining one, one has to argue for its truth, that is, attempt to justify it as an item of knowledge. But to do so is to presuppose the independence and priority of the knowing relationship – the very thing that one is attempting to deny. Here we may note that a number of things have been asserted as determining our understanding: history, economics, language, our evolutionary origins, and so on. How are we to know which is correct? In the absence of any criteria, we can fall prey to ideological conflicts.

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For Ricoeur, Husserl’s belief in the deciding role of intuitive evidence is itself an ideology. The appeal to intuitive evidence presupposes that the subject is transparent to himself, that he possesses a self-knowledge that is capable of attaining such evidence without its being distorted by external factors. But ‘the critique of ideologies and psychoanalysis’ make this implausible (Ricoeur, p. 91). The phenomenological question, however, is that of the evidence for this critique. In the absence of such evidence, we have no way to adjudicate its claims. Once again, we return to Husserl’s insistence on the priority of the epistemological standpoint. His position is that ‘epistemology must not be understood as a discipline that follows metaphysics or even coincides with it, but rather as one which precedes metaphysics just as it precedes psychology and all other disciplines’ (Husserl 1968, I, 224). As prior, it determines their claims to knowledge. Because it does, it cannot take its standards from them but must supply these standards itself.4 It does so in appealing to intuitive evidence. Such evidence can be more or less clear, more or less detailed, and so on. In allowing us to gauge these differences, it manifests its own internal standards. Given that claims to knowledge find their justification in the evidence presented for them, the internal standards of intuitive evidence are those set by the epistemological standpoint. Thus, for Husserl, the escape from ideology is provided by intuitive evidence. His ‘return to the things themselves’ is a return to the evidence we have for them. The epoché, in its suspending our various judgements about them, is simply a method for focusing on the evidence that supports them. In the absence of such evidence, nothing confirms our claims. We constantly presuppose what we claim to know and reason in a circle. The point holds for Heidegger’s ontological research. To claim, as Heidegger does, that the process of understanding is essentially circular, and hence such research cannot ‘be denied this projecting which is essential to Dasein’, is to undermine the arguments that lead to his claim. Hermeneutics cannot avoid the question of evidence. It is inherent in the notion of a ‘correct’ interpretation. Heidegger implies such correctness when he writes, ‘In the circle [of understanding] is hidden a positive possibility of the most primordial kind of knowing’. We grasp this ‘only when, in our interpretation, we have understood that our first, last, and constant task is never to allow our fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception to be presented to us by fancies and popular conceptions, but rather to make the scientific theme secure by working out these fore-structures in terms of the things themselves’ (Heidegger, p. 195). This remark is crucial for Gadamer since it delineates the task of the hermeneutics that adopts Heidegger’s view of the understanding. Gadamer writes with regard to it: ‘All correct interpretation must be on guard against arbitrary fancies and the limitations imposed by imperceptible habits of thought, and it must direct its gaze “on the things themselves” (which, in the case of the literary critic, are meaningful texts, which themselves are again concerned with objects)’ (Gadamer, p. 236). The question he faces is: How are we to do this? How, given the circular structure of understanding, are we to know that our interpretation is ‘correct’? To call understanding ‘circular’ means that it is always projective. In Gadamer’s words, ‘A person who is trying to understand a text is always performing an act of projecting. He projects before himself a meaning for the text as a whole as soon as some initial meaning emerges in the text’ (ibid.). How does he gauge the accuracy

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of this projection, that is, know whether the meaning is correct? Responding to this, Gadamer turns to the text itself, that is, to the evidence that it provides. The text either supports or fails to support the projected meaning. In the latter case, the interpreter revises it ‘in terms of what emerges as he penetrates into the meaning’ of the text. What we have here is a ‘constant process’ of projection and revision. The intended meaning is revised when it proves inadequate. In Gadamer’s words, ‘interpretation begins with fore-conceptions that are replaced by more suitable ones. This constant process of new projection constitutes the movement of understanding and interpretation.’ Suitability, in this process, signifies that the projected meanings are ‘borne out by the things themselves’, that is, by the text in question (ibid.). Those that are not borne out ‘come to nothing in [their] being worked out’ (ibid., p. 237). He adds that we have the sense of their failure through ‘the experience of being pulled up short by the text. Either it does not yield any meaning at all or its meaning is not compatible with what we had expected’ (ibid.). What guides this process, he later remarks, is the belief ‘that only what really constitutes a unity of meaning is intelligible’ (ibid., p. 261). The individual meanings that we project must fit together. If the text supports contradictory ones, ‘we start to doubt the transmitted text’, that is, suspect that it has in some way become corrupted in the process of its transmission. The process that Gadamer is describing is essentially that of the Husserlian relation between ‘intention’ and ‘fulfilment’. To intend to see something is to try to make sense of what we perceptually experience. The goal is a ‘unity of meaning’. The process of intending such a meaning is apparent when we regard a visual illusion – for example, that of an arrow that seems to be pointing inward and then outward from the page. As we regard it, the two senses of the arrow appear alternately. This is not by chance since visual illusions are constructed to provide data that support different interpretations. Such illusions in fact show that ‘perception is interpretation’. As Husserl explains this: It belongs to perception that something appears within it, but interpretation makes up what we term appearance – be it correct or not, anticipatory or overdrawn. The house appears to me through no other way but that I interpret in a certain fashion actually experienced contents of sensation. I hear a barrel organ – the sensed tones I interpret as barrel organ tones. … They are termed ‘appearances’ or, better, appearing contents precisely for the reason that they are contents of perceptive interpretation. (Husserl 1984, p. 762)

Husserl’s point is that to intend to see something is, concretely, to form an interpretative intention. It is to attempt to interpret what one sees in terms of a unitary sense. As experience shows, not every intention is fulfilled. Our interpretative intentions are constantly adjusted in terms of the perceptual evidence. For example, what looked like a rabbit hiding under a bush can turn out, on closer inspection, to be merely a play of light and shadow. As Husserl makes clear, this process of adjustment between intention and perceptual fulfilment is one where neither side dominates the other. Even though every sense of the object is a sense intended by consciousness, consciousness in its intending the object cannot, in its act of interpretation, inform the object with every possible sense (see Husserl 1968, II/2, 74; ibid., II/2, 188). Only those senses that are

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fulfilled or embodied by the intuitive presence of the object pertain to it as such (see ibid., II/2, 93). In other words, consciousness’ interpretive, intending sense informs the object’s intuitive presence only to the point that the object’s intuitive presence fulfils or embodies this interpretive sense. The distinction between this view and that which informs hermeneutics is readily apparent. For Husserl, to know is to see, and seeing (be it sensual or intellectual) involves interpretation. According to Ricoeur, hermeneutics also embraces ‘a universal concept of interpretation, which has the same extension as that of comprehension’ (Ricoeur, p. 89). Hermeneutics, however, opposes interpretation to intuition. In Ricoeur’s words, ‘The Husserlian exigency of the return to intuition is opposed by the necessity for all comprehension to be mediated by an interpretation’ (ibid.). That this opposition is more apparent than real is shown by Gadamer’s adoption of Husserl’s mutually determining relation between intention and fulfilment. His return to the ‘things themselves’ in the form of ‘meaningful texts’ would be useless were it not for the materials such texts provide for our interpretations. Such materials, of course, include more than just the text itself. Ultimately, they include the whole historical, cultural tradition that informs the writing of the text and our subsequent reception of it. To the point that the sense of the text is informed by this tradition, correct interpretation must avail itself of the evidence it offers.

The evidence for the hermeneutic circle Given the above, we have to say that evidence for the hermeneutical procedure comes from the perceptual process itself. The relation of intention and fulfilment, which hermeneutics presupposes, is given by Husserl’s analysis of the perceptual process. With this, we may raise the question of the evidence for the hermeneutical circle. Is this also to be found in the analysis of perception? To answer this, we must first recall the circle’s origin. Gadamer takes it from Heidegger’s description of the understanding, a description that interprets this in terms of the essential structures of Dasein. These are the structures of Dasein’s projective being. Thus far, we have described such being in terms of Dasein’s pragmatic engagements with the world. But, for Heidegger, such descriptions are not ultimate. His aim is to exhibit ‘temporality as the meaning of the being that we call Dasein’. This, he adds, involves ‘the repeated interpretation … of the structures of Dasein … as modes of temporality’ (Heidegger, p. 38, trans. modified). Given this, the evidence for Gadamer’s hermeneutical circle can be traced back to that for our projective being; and the evidence for this can be sought in the relations between the ‘modes’ of past, present, and future that underpin its structures. For Heidegger, these relations are essentially teleological. As underpinning our projective being, the future is understood as determining the way Dasein regards his past, which in turn is taken as determining his present activity. Suppose, for example, I wish to build a bookcase. This goal determines how I regard the materials I previously accumulated. I see the hammer, nails, and boards I find in my basement as materials for my purpose. Regarding them as such, I engage in my present activity

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of constructing the bookcase. In the temporality of this goal-directed activity, the past and the future exhibit the same mutual dependence that we find between intention and fulfilment. As Heidegger notes, without the possibilities given by my own past and the ‘past of my generation’, I could not project at all. But without my being able to be ahead of myself in projecting a future, such possibilities would not exist as possibilities. Thus, by virtue of my own past, I have the materials needed for the bookcase. Their presence makes its construction possible. By virtue of the ‘past of my generation’, there are such things as books and bookcases and, hence the possibility of forming the intention of constructing a bookcase. But for a being that is incapable of projecting – and hence of projects – such possibilities do not exist. This means, as Heidegger writes, ‘Dasein can authentically be past only insofar as it is futural. Pastness originates in a certain way from the future’ (Heidegger, p. 326). The pastness here referred to is not that of clock time. To be ‘authentically’ past is to have a storehouse of possibilities. But these are such only for a being that is ‘futural’, that is, capable of goal-directed activity. Given the equivalence between understanding and projecting one’s being on possibilities, the same goal-directed temporality is to be found in understanding. As based on Heidegger’s account of understanding, the hermeneutic circle must therefore also exhibit this teleological temporality. It must, accordingly, show the same mutual dependence between past and future. In the context of hermeneutics, the future is the meaning that I am attempting to project on the text in the back-and-forth process that Gadamer describes. The past is the text grasped within its historical context – a context that includes the tradition of interpreting it. Text and context, as representing the past, are similar, respectively, to the materials needed to construct a bookcase and to the tradition that includes such things as bookcases and books. Both text and context are required for my project of understanding a text. They give me the range of possibilities for my interpretation. They also provide its confirming evidence. As I read the text, certain possibilities are confirmed, and others are ruled out. The same thing happens when I address myself to the context. I realize, for example, that a certain historical element in my interpretation is anachronistic, while another is accurate. As this backand-forth process continues, the possibilities for interpreting the text narrow and my projected meaning becomes more definite. Such possibilities, however, would not be present at all if I had not had the project of interpreting the text. Were I not capable of projecting a meaning on it, they would never have arisen. Thus, once again we find the same goal-directed temporality, which signifies that the evidence for the circle is to be found in such temporality. The phenomenological question is whether such temporality can be exhibited without presupposing it. Both our pragmatic relations to the world and our interpretive relations to the text in its context presuppose a goal-directed temporality. As such, they cannot be used as evidence for it. Is there a source of evidence for such temporality once we bracket them? For Husserl, this source is provided by the perceptual process itself. The process exhibits lived time as teleological. It is inherent in our attempt to interpret what we see. This becomes clear when we consider the process of attempting to see a rabbit hiding under a bush. Regarding the bush from a distance, we seem to see a rabbit and project this meaning. As we move to get a better look, its features

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seem to become more clearly defined. One part of what we see appears to be its head, another its body, still another its paws. Based upon what we see, we anticipate that further features will be revealed as we approach: this pattern of light and shadow will be seen as the rabbit’s ears, another will be seen as its eyes, and so forth. If our interpretations are correct, our experiences should form a part of an emerging pattern that exhibits these features, that is, that perceptually manifests the object we assume we are seeing. If, however, we are mistaken, at some point our experiences will fail to fulfil our expectations. What we took to be a rabbit will dissolve into a collection of flickering shadows and light. As this example indicates, to interpret is to anticipate. It is to expect a sequence of contents that will present the object. This expectation, even if we are not directly conscious of it, makes us attend to some contents rather than others. It serves, in other words, as a guide for connecting our perceptions according to an anticipated pattern. It also allows us to see the perceptions we have as either fulfilments or disappointments of our interpretative intention. If we had never seen a rabbit, we would never form this expectation. What would guide us would be some schematic representation based on our past experience of seeing small creatures. Our past here forms the context of our seeing. It gives us the possibilities for our interpretive intention. In this, it is like the text in its context. As we read the text in its context, the meaning we project on the text refines itself and achieves clarity. The same thing happens in the perceptual process. As we approach the object, what we experience both fulfils and makes more definite the intended sense that guides us. Such experience, as it accumulates, contributes to our ‘past’ in the Heideggerian sense. This past includes the whole history of our perceptual life, a history that includes seeing small animals, including rabbits. The possibilities of interpretation preserved in this history are essential to our seeing. Without them, we would have no possibilities to anticipate, that is, to project a meaning on our visual experience. We would thus be unable to interpret our experience as an experience of some object. To reverse this, we can say that such possibilities are only there for us if we can project. Without the relation to the future given by our anticipation, they vanish. As the example makes clear, perception exhibits the teleological temporality presupposed by the hermeneutical circle. Given this, we cannot, as Ricoeur does, oppose interpretation to Husserl’s demand that we return to intuition. Returning to it, we find that it exhibits the temporality assumed by the hermeneutical process. Such temporality is in fact implicit in Gadamer’s account of reaching the ‘correct’ interpretation. It also underlies hermeneutics’ choice for meaning, once we realize that meaning in the interpretative process is not merely a signitive or empty intending. As projected, it demands fulfilment. It exists as a goal seeking to embody itself in the text and its context. The evidence that phenomenology provides for the teleological structure of interpretation is prior to all the claims that hermeneutics makes about the historical determination of our interpretations. It is not, per se, historical. Because it is not, it cannot be relativized. Given this, hermeneutics must presuppose phenomenology – not in the general sense that Ricoeur urges, but rather in order to sustain the integrity of its interpretative work.

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References Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method, trans. Garrett Barden and John Cumming. New York: Crossroads Publishing Company, 1988. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper and Row, 1962. Husserl, Edmund. Logische Untersuchungen, 5th ed., 3 Vols. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1968. Husserl, Edmund. Logische Untersuchungen, ed. Ursula Panzer. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984, Husserliana, XIX/2 (used to cite from the first edition). Ingarten, Roman. On the Motives Which Led Husserl to Transcendental Idealism, trans. A. Hannibalsson. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975. Ricoeur, Paul. ‘Phenomenology and Hermeneutics.’ Noûs, Vol. 9, No. 1, 1975.

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Husserl’s Hermeneutics: From Intuition of Lived Experiences to the Horizonal Lifeworld Dermot Moran

I shall explore in this chapter those aspects of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology – specifically his conceptions of phenomenological intuition, horizon, historicity, and lifeworld – that influenced the hermeneutical philosophies of Heidegger and Gadamer. Of course, Husserl rarely mentions hermeneutics explicitly, only in his mature writings, and usually only in relation to the work of others, specifically Dilthey or Heidegger. Husserl’s phenomenological methodology, which focuses on the givens of experience as apprehended by theoretical reflection purified by the epoché and reduction, is more usually contrasted with Heidegger’s hermeneutics, which focuses more on uncovering the essential existentiale framework governing what is pregiven and assumed in Dasein’s practical engagement with the world of interests.1 Nevertheless, as I shall demonstrate here, Husserl – especially in his mature works – pursues a hermeneutics that proposes to break up sedimented tradition and its pre-judgements in order to allow human life to be lived in a self-aware, rational, free, and essentially universalist manner, committed to pursuing ‘infinite tasks’. Husserl’s later genetic phenomenology and his attempt to uncover the meaning of boundary phenomena such as birth, death, and the realm of the unconscious need a roundabout approach which can indeed be classified as hermeneutical.2 Of course, it must also be conceded immediately that there are specific, and quite central, aspects of Husserl’s project – especially his projection of ‘infinite tasks’ for scientific philosophy – which seem essentially at odds with the finitude and even anti-scientistic stance embraced by hermeneutics. (It was remarked that Gadamer’s seminal book could have been called Truth Against Method.) Furthermore, in another departure, Husserl would not have agreed with either Heidegger or Gadamer concerning the absolute centrality of linguisticality (Sprachlichkeit). As Gadamer asserts in his Truth and Method (1960), ‘language is the medium of the hermeneutic experience’, that is, language is the medium in which understanding is realized.3 Husserl would have given the foundational role to embodied perception and practical comportment in the always already given and boundless lifeworld. Nevertheless, I hope to demonstrate here that Husserl’s phenomenology, and especially his consideration of phenomenological intuiting and horizonality, was in

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fact a major, although under-acknowledged, inspiration for the ‘new hermeneutics’ of both Heidegger and Gadamer. Gadamer is resolutely phenomenological in his approach. For instance, he presents philosophy as making manifest (darstellen) ‘the matters themselves’ (die Sache selbst), shedding light on the essence of these matters in an ‘essence illumination’ (Wesenserhellung), all of which sounds deliberately and distinctly Husserlian. In fact, hermeneutics for Gadamer is the project of selfunderstanding and understanding others, and as such it can be said to develop a phenomenology of the process of understanding (Verstehen). In this regard too Gadamer interpreted Heidegger’s Being and Time as an essay in self-understanding. In so far as phenomenology is also a project of reflective self-understanding, hermeneutics and phenomenology align in terms of their objectives. But let us turn now to examine the actual early encounters between phenomenology and hermeneutics.

Early confrontations between Husserlian phenomenology and hermeneutics Husserl first had a critical encounter with Wilhelm Dilthey, one of the chief proponents of hermeneutics and life-philosophy, who himself generalized Schleiermacher’s methodology into a general theory of understanding, Verstehen, in his ‘Philosophy as Rigorous Science’ essay, published in Logos (1910/1911),4 Husserl’s first publication after Logical Investigations (1900/1901). Strictly speaking, however, phenomenology and hermeneutics were brought together methodologically (in print for the first time in Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927),5 where Heidegger proposed that phenomenology cannot be purely ‘presuppositionless’ and ‘descriptive’, in what is actually a rather superficial reading of the Husserlian demands, but must proceed instead through a hermeneutics of human existence (or Dasein) as already embedded (‘immer schon da’) in a pre-formed and largely intuitively apprehended, historical, and cultural world. In fact, already several years before the appearance of Being and Time, Heidegger had been proposing a ‘hermeneutics of factical life’ in his earliest lecture courses in Freiburg (1919–23), lectures that ran in parallel to Husserl’s more advanced seminars.6 Although Heidegger’s Freiburg lectures where not published until after his death, the contents were, of course, known to his students, and indeed it is precisely these lectures that led to the view that Heidegger was articulating or even mirroring, as Gadamer astutely diagnosed, the prevailing post-war Zeitgeist that rejected Neo-Kantian ‘problem philosophy’ and sought meaning in existence, given that the pretence of Enlightenment rationality had been destroyed in the slaughter in the Great War. Heidegger’s very first lecture course already proposed a phenomenology that remains loyal to life experience as it is lived in a practical way.7 In his early 1920 Freiburg lecture course, ‘Phenomenology of Intuition and Expression’, furthermore, Heidegger states that a principal task of philosophy is to awaken and strengthen the sense of life’s facticity: ‘Philosophy has the task of preserving the facticity of life and strengthening the facticity of existence’ (Die Philosophie hat die Aufgabe, die Faktizität des Lebens zu erhalten und die Faktizität des Daseins zu stärken).8 Life is the original phenomenon, Heidegger declares, showing his attachment to Kierkegaard and Dilthey (as well as to

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Augustine and St. Paul), and insisting philosophy is to be, as he puts it in 1919, a ‘pre-theoretical’ or ‘super-theoretical [übertheoretische] science’.9 Heidegger even gives a brief history of hermeneutics in his 1923 lecture course in Freiburg, where he explains hermeneutics as the task of making Dasein accessible to itself, that is, the project of self-understanding in nuce. This orientation away from general theorizing about human nature (as zoon echon logon) in favour of a ‘hermeneutics of factical existence’ continues in his early Marburg courses, shortly before Heidegger began the first drafts of Being and Time.10 It must be remembered that Heidegger was in close personal relationship with his mentor Husserl at that time, especially in his Freiburg days, but also after Heidegger moved to Marburg. They walked together daily to discuss philosophy, and Heidegger even vacationed with the ‘old man’ Husserl and his wife Malvine. While we can trace Heidegger’s deviations from Husserl very clearly in these lectures, it is not an easy hermeneutic task to decide who is influencing whom in the mid-twenties. Their dialogues and projects were intimately intertwined at that time. Indeed, Husserl thought naively that Heidegger was developing his phenomenology in the direction of religious life whereas Heidegger seemed to be absorbing Husserl’s novel way of attending to phenomena while seeking to articulate these insights in a new language that ‘destroyed’ the old metaphysical frameworks. It is certainly true that in his early lectures Heidegger is often sharply critical of Husserl’s formulations, and especially of the degeneration that he sees in phenomenology (already in 1923). Thus, he proclaims in Ontology – The Hermeneutics of Facticity: ‘Phenomenological research, which was supposed to provide a basis for scientific work, has sunk to the level of wishy-washiness, thoughtlessness, and summariness, to the level of the philosophical noise of the day, to the level of a public scandal of philosophy.’11 On the other hand, Heidegger defends phenomenological intuiting against the neo-Kantians (Rickert, Natorp) who had criticized it for neglecting concept formation, and sees the true value of phenomenology as its unique way of gaining access to lived experience, especially uncovering the structures of everydayness (Alltäglichkeit). What phenomenology needs, Heidegger says in 1923, is a way of getting beyond the sedimented tradition that is covering up and concealing access to the phenomena. It is all about breaking up supposed certainties to uncover the dynamic, existential processes that connect Dasein to its world. A major confrontation between hermeneutical life-philosophy and phenomenology was also explicitly developed in Georg Misch’s (1878–1965) book, Lebensphilosophie und Phänomenologie. Eine Auseinandersetzung der Diltheyschen Richtung mit Heidegger und Husserl (1930),12 where Misch portrays Heidegger as more sensitive to the whole question of interpreting life.13 Misch was married to Dilthey’s daughter and was promulgating the Dilthey–Heidegger line against more sedate Husserlian phenomenology. When Husserl eventually read Being and Time, probably for the first time around 1929, he was disturbed by its ‘anthropological’ tendency, as he saw it, and its failure to understand the transcendental reduction. He was also particularly annoyed by Misch’s book, which he also read at that time, since it cast his phenomenology in a poor light in contrast to Heidegger’s more existential and hermeneutical turn. The deeply wounded Husserl was anxious to establish the validity, intrinsic rationality,

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and scientific rigour of his own approach over and against what he took to be a certain ungroundedness, irrationalism, and decisionism, in contemporary life-philosophy (in which category he included Dilthey and Heidegger, as well as Nietzsche and Simmel). Husserl himself began in the early 1930s (of course he had been writing about life since the 1920s, but the theme of historicity is given a new emphasis) to focus particularly on the themes of human life, the experience of the ‘flowing, living present’ (strömend lebendige Gegenwart),14 intersubjectivity, and historicity, which culminated in his Crisis of European Sciences (the first parts of which appeared in 1936 but which remained unfinished on his death in 1938).15 Husserl even went so far as to say, in his Nature and Spirit lectures, that phenomenology was a truly scientific life-philosophy. Husserl claims to have been completely misunderstood when phenomenology was presented as a more or less Cartesian philosophy of transcendental consciousness and the pure ego, in contrast to the supposedly more ‘concrete’ conceptions of life espoused by Heidegger, Max Scheler, and others. For Husserl, transcendental phenomenology alone could explore the true meaning of intentional life and laid bare for the first time its network of hidden intentional implications (as he makes clear in his Amsterdam lectures of 1928). It is most likely that Husserl became aware of hermeneutics initially through Heidegger. Heidegger himself encountered hermeneutics presumably already during his early theological formation in the seminary and in his first two years in Freiburg University as an undergraduate, but, as Gadamer recounts, he was also carefully reading Wilhelm Dilthey in his lecturer years in Freiburg (especially around 1923). Once he moved to the University of Marburg (1923–8), Heidegger’s collegial connections with Rudolf Bultmann and others led him to a very distinctive sense of the importance of hermeneutics in the phenomenology of everyday life.16 Bultmann had become a full professor in Marburg in 1921, two years before Heidegger arrived, and his hermeneutics – which sought to demythologize New Testament scripture to reveal the living existential dimensions beneath – in particular influenced Heidegger. Bultmann in turn adopted Heidegger’s existential analytic of Dasein and the two remained friends in later life.17 In his Marburg lectures (which were really the testing ground for Being and Time), Heidegger proposed – inspired by Dilthey – a hermeneutics that tracked practical life, and he especially considered Aristotle’s account of ethics in his Nicomachean Ethics as just such a hermeneutics.18 Indeed, Heidegger’s early conception of hermeneutic intuition can be summarized in the slogan, intuition as following life. This is a radical rethinking of the Husserlian commitment to intuition. Heidegger also, however, paid tribute to his mentor Edmund Husserl and especially his Logical Investigations for teaching him how to see in the phenomenological manner.19 How exactly did Husserl’s phenomenology inspire Heidegger? This also was Gadamer’s question. Gadamer himself studied with both Husserl and Heidegger for a short period in Freiburg in 1923 (Gadamer travelled from Marburg) and remained a lifelong friend and dialogue partner of Heidegger’s. Heidegger recalled that Husserl’s phenomenological practice meant that one could not invoke the authority of traditional philosophers in argument. Heidegger was deeply influenced by Husserl’s concept of attending to what is given in intuition, but he criticized the misleading

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impression Husserl himself gave that phenomenology was a new beginning ‘which denied all previous thinking’.20 Phenomenology had to come to terms with the fact that it belonged in history (a Hegelian point, surely – and it is not an accident that Heidegger chose to lecture on Hegel when he arrived back in Freiburg in 1928). Part of Husserl’s originality was his claim that phenomenology rejected speculative theorizing and epistemological ground-clearing in favour of a direct practice of intuiting – and especially an intuition that rendered more than the sensory characteristics of things. Even before Husserl refined the practice of intuiting through the application of the epoché and the reductions, intuiting was meant to deliver essential insights through patient attention unclouded by metaphysical or naturalistic presupposition. Husserl defended both categorical intuition of non-sensuous features of states of affairs and also proposed eidetic intuition of idealities. Indeed, Heidegger redefines phenomenology in Being and Time as the attending to what shows itself in the very manner in which it shows itself. Heidegger also redefines the sense of phenomenological ‘description’ in his own peculiar manner: The expression ‘descriptive phenomenology’, which is at bottom tautological, has the same meaning. Here ‘description’ does not signify such a procedure as we find, let us say, in botanical morphology; the term has rather the sense of a prohibition – the avoidance of characterizing anything without such demonstration. The character of this description itself, the specific meaning of the logos, can be established first of all in terms of the ‘thinghood’ [Sachheit] of what is to be ‘described’ – that is to say, of what is to be given scientific definiteness as we encounter it phenomenally. (BT § 7, p. 59; GA 2 47)

Description here means designating, ‘demonstrating’, or ‘exhibiting’ [Ausweisung] – (i.e. making manifest), and hence it is already inscribed in the very notion of phenomenon, according to Heidegger. Of course, it is a foundational principle for Heidegger that whatever manifests at the same time conceals, and what is revealed can be covered up again, hence the need for hermeneutic retrieval. Although Heidegger is here radically reinterpreting Husserl’s conception of intuition, it is evident, I suggest, that Husserl’s own conception must tolerate or at least prefigure this hermeneutic reading. Let us look, therefore, at the possibilities for hermeneutic understanding within Husserl’s own conception of intuition.

Husserl’s conception of phenomenological intuition Husserl’s phenomenology burst onto the twentieth century with his claim in the Introduction to his Logical Investigations (1900–1)21 that philosophy had to proceed primarily by intuition. He made a forceful rejection of metaphysical speculation and theorizing in favour of a return to the sources of experience. For Husserl, philosophy is a rigorous science based on the clarification of concepts through rooting them in intuition. Thus, he speaks of ‘clarification’ (Klärung), ‘illumination’ (Erhellung), even ‘enlightenment’ (Aufklärung). Philosophy is the project of making sense, clarification

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(Klarlegung), casting critical light on the achievements of ‘cognition’ (Erkenntnis), understood in the broadest sense to include the whole human encounter with the world. Philosophy, moreover, aims to provide the ‘final’ or ‘ultimate clarification’ (Letztklärung) or ‘ultimate grounding’ (Letztbegründung) of the sense of our entire cognitive accomplishment. As we shall see, this procedure of clarification and ultimate grounding continues into his late work, especially in his analyses of the role of the lifeworld. Clarification, moreover, is never a matter of getting clear about meanings in ordinary language. Rather, it is about identifying the kind of underlying intuitive ‘givenness’ (Gegebenheit) that grounds our concepts evidentially. Husserl is quite willing to be flexible about the role of language. What is important most of all is to have a grounded knowing that responds only to what is given in the manner it is given. In this sense Husserl prioritizes intuitive understanding over linguisticality, even though he also always acknowledges that scientific cognition needs exact linguistic expression. In the Logical Investigations, as is well known, Husserl proposes a new standard of ‘presuppositionlessness’ (Voraussetzunglösigkeit) that is to govern all attentiveness to lived experiences (Erlebnisse). This attentiveness involves a rejection of hypotheses, of metaphysical theorizing, of causal explanation, in favour of remaining loyal to the phenomena and to what is given in what Husserl calls ‘originary giving intuition’ (originär gebende Anschauung). Husserl writes in the Introduction to his Logical Investigations (quoting from the Second Edition of 1913): Pure phenomenology represents a field of neutral researches, in which several sciences have their roots. … Proceeding in purely intuitive fashion, it analyses and describes in their essential generality … the experiences of presentation, judgement and knowledge, experiences which, treated as classes of real events in the natural context of zoological reality, receive a scientific probing at the hands of empirical psychology. Phenomenology, on the other hand, lays bare the ‘sources’ from which the basic concepts and ideal laws of pure logic ‘flow’, and back to which they must once more be traced, so as to give them all the ‘clearness and distinctness’ needed for an understanding, and for an epistemological critique, of pure logic. (LU, I, p. 166; Hua XIX/1 pp. 6–7)

This is very close to Heidegger’s language about phenomenology disclosing the sources of concepts in Being and Time. Intuitions, moreover, are already disclosive of essence; they are what they are precisely because the essence shines through. This culminates in the famous ‘principle of principles’ enunciated in Ideas I (1913)22 where Husserl writes: But enough of erroneous theories. No conceivable theory can make us stray from the principle of all principles: that each intuition affording [some-thing] in an originary way is a legitimate source [Rechtsquelle] of knowledge, that whatever presents itself to us in ‘Intuition’ in an originary way (so to speak, in its actuality in person) is to be taken simply as what it affords itself as, but only within the limitations in which it affords itself there. (Italics in original, Ideas I § 24, p. 44; Hua III/1 pp. 43–4)

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Husserl’s concept of intuition is very complex. In his account in the Logical Investigations he already sees that sensory data given in the senses have to be grasped, taken up, or apprehended in a specific way. There is an ‘interpretation’ (Deutung) or ‘grasp’ (Auffassung) or interpretive taking up of sense-contents already happening at the level of sensibility, according to which the intuitive apprehension encounters an already ordered, structured, continuous, and senseful manifold (Husserl becomes clearer about the complexity of this already given manifold in his later writings). But sensuous intuition is simply the bottom rung of the ladder of knowledge. In the Sixth Logical Investigation Husserl distinguishes between sensuous and what he calls ‘categorial intuition’ (kategoriale Anschauung). Kant had explicitly denied that humans could intuit concepts. Husserl agrees with Kant concerning the sensory matter of most of our concepts, but holds that in higher order intuitions we do have the capacity to intuit ideal ‘categorial’ entities, from the ‘mixed category’ of the concept of colour to pure categories and, at the highest level, logical categories such as unity, plurality, and existence. For Husserl, categorial acts are founded on the sensory acts of perceiving, but do not reduce to them. Husserl treats ‘categorial intuition’ as akin to a special kind of perception. For Husserl, categorial acts grasp states of affairs and in fact constitute them in the very categorial act. Categorial acts yield up the grasp of the pure categorial concepts, ‘if … then’, ‘and’, ‘or’, and so on, which have no correlates in the objects of the perceptual acts themselves. As Jaakko Hintikka puts it, for Husserl, intuitions are not about appearances in the Kantian sense but render access to various components of reality as we have seen.23 Reality, or being itself, is what grounds intuition. Furthermore, Husserl thought one could intuit not just individuals (as Kant held) but also universals and various kinds of ideal entity. For Husserl, seeing an essence is an intuition – what he will call an essential seeing or eidetic intuition (Wesenserschauung, Ideas I § 3, § 4). Husserl retains a commitment to eidetic intuition into his mature philosophy.24 Thus he can write in Formal and Transcendental Logic (1929), ‘Only through an eidetic intuition can the essence of eidetic intuition be elucidated’, a statement quoted by Merleau-Ponty in his Phenomenology of Perception.25 Husserl’s espousal of intuition was strongly resisted by the neo-Kantians (Natorp, Rickert) who could not accept this conception of immediate intuiting as having any philosophical significance. Heinrich Rickert, for instance, in fact understands phenomenology as meaning ‘the doctrine of a newly discovered kind of intuitive and immediate phenomena [Erscheinungen]’,26 but he rejects immediate intuition as a kind of knowledge and articulates a sense of life which is close to that of the early Heidegger. He writes, ‘What is immediately experienced as reality cannot be known. Thus, there is no metaphysics of life. … Life, as the unmediated reality, can only be lived through. As immediate life, it mocks any attempt to get to know it.’27 Heidegger was a student of Rickert originally. Nevertheless, in his early Freiburg lecture courses, he defends Husserlian intuition against the Neo-Kantian critique. But Heidegger makes an essentially new move when he reinterprets phenomenological intuiting as essentially hermeneutical, and even talks of ‘hermeneutic intuition’ (hermeneutische Anschauung). For instance, Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Religious Life lectures contain the following notes: ‘Problem: The intuitive eidetic is, as hermeneutical, never neutral-theoretic; rather it itself has only “eidetically” the

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oscillation (die Schwingung) of the genuine lifeworld.’28 Heidegger sees Husserl’s phenomenological intuition as best understood as a kind of flexible apprehension of the movement of life itself. Heidegger is deliberately moving Husserl’s Anschaulichkeit into a close relation with Dilthey’s hermeneutics of understanding life. In other words, Heidegger is claiming to release the hidden, immanent intention within Husserl’s thought, an intention perhaps clouded by Husserl’s adherence to the metaphysical language of modern Cartesian philosophy (with its addiction to ‘clarity and distinctness’). Let us now turn to the broadening of intuition in Husserl’s philosophy which prefigures Heidegger’s new expansive interpretation that led to his call for ‘hermeneutic intuition’.

The phenomenological intuition of the world: from Weltanschauung to Lebenswelt Husserl had begun to introduce the term ‘lifeworld’ in his research notes from around 1917,29 and it is quite remarkable that in his early Freiburg lectures (as early as 1919, in fact) Heidegger was already employing the term ‘lifeworld’ (Lebenswelt) in relation to the world of the early Greeks, for instance. What is not so often recognized in the discussion of lifeworld is that the concept of intuition is widened by both Husserl and Heidegger to include an overall intuition of the world as ‘horizon of horizons’ and ultimate backdrop of all experience. However, this concept of a phenomenological intuition of worldhood is deliberately and explicitly kept at a distance from contemporary discussions (in Dilthey and Jaspers) of the notion of ‘world view’ (Weltanschauung – literally ‘intuition of the world’). Thus, for example, Heidegger offers his own critique of ‘world view philosophy’ as he had encountered it in both Dilthey and in Jaspers (whose Psychology of Worldviews [Psychologie der Weltanschauungen, 1919] Heidegger had reviewed in 1920).30 In contrast to the young Heidegger, Husserl, in his earlier philosophy, seemed to be oblivious to the wider concept of intuition of the world – what Dilthey call ‘Weltanschauung’. This kind of global apprehension of the world horizon appears for the first time in Husserl’s Ideas I inspired by his contact with Avenarius and also Dilthey (discussed in ‘Philosophy as Rigorous Science’, 1910/1911). For Dilthey, for instance, philosophy has ‘the task of coming to terms with the incessant need for ultimate reflection on being, ground, value, purpose, and their interconnection in a Weltanschauung’.31 Husserl initially opposed Dilthey’s view that a rigorous science could be founded on historically closed and shifting world views, but Husserl does begin to recognize that phenomenological intuition apprehends not just objects and their properties but also a series of contexts that he calls (borrowing from William James) ‘horizons’.32 The term ‘horizon’ is introduced in print by Husserl in Ideas I (1913) and Husserl also goes on to speak of the phenomenon of the ‘world’ (something that would be given particular prominence in Heidegger’s ‘worldhood of the world’ chapter in Being and Time). Husserl generally opposed Kant’s view that the world as a whole could not be an object of possible experience. He writes in 1925: ‘Kant insists that the world is not an object of possible experience, whereas we continue to speak in all seriousness

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of the world precisely as the all-inclusive object of an experience expanded and to be expanded all-inclusively.’33 Similarly Husserl writes in the Crisis: The contrast between the subjectivity of the lifeworld and the ‘objective’, the ‘true’ world, lies in the fact that the latter is a theoretical-logical substruction [Substruktion], the substruction of something that is in principle not perceivable, in principle not experienceable in its own proper being, whereas the subjective, in the lifeworld (das lebensweltlich Subjektive), is distinguished in all respects precisely by its being actually experienceable. (Crisis § 34d, p. 127; Hua VI 130)

Thus, a major step in the evolution of Husserl’s conception of intuition – moving in the direction of Heidegger’s explicitly named ‘hermeneutic intuition’ – is the recognition that intuition can not only yield direct awareness of particulars, universals, and states of affairs, but also had a capacity for grasping larger temporal segments, even involving our capacity to have an ‘overview’ (Übersicht) on our lives. The late Husserl begins to embrace the idea of an ‘overview’ (Überschau) of life – the opportunity to take the long view, having an evolving general intuition of life. For instance, he writes in 1923/1924 Erste Philosophie: Finally, I can also cast a panoramic, universal view [universale Überschau] on my entire life and make decisions regarding my whole life, similar to what I can do for finite stretches of life. Thus, I can carry out a universal critique of my life up to the present moment and at the same time be determined to shape my entire future life: be it from the point of view of a universal value that I accept as valid without questioning it (such as power, success, and the like) or be it in the above sense of ethical self-reflection, self-critique and self-regulation. If we follow this second sense and, so to speak, we look for its ideal-form, we get to a peculiar reflective form of self-regulation connected to a universal panoramic view on life [universale Überschau des Lebens].34

Husserl’s late philosophy allows for this possibility of taking an overview of the course of one’s life and evaluating it critically, as he puts it in a late text: The human being does not posit for himself only singular goals and then – in case of failure – try to attain new singular goals. Rather the human being posits for himself ‘life-goals’ and envisages a ‘methodology’ for his practical existence. This methodology rests upon a panoramic view on life [Überschau] up to the present moment in its successes and failures, on satisfaction and dissatisfaction so far. [In other words], it rests upon self-reflection, critique, universal resolution of the will. In this way [the human being] produces a method for life and correlatively a relation to the surrounding world defined by a striving in order to give to this surrounding world a more favorable form.35

It is important, then, to see that Husserl is always expanding his conception of intuiting and recognizing new domains of experience, new contexts and horizons of meaning that are accessible to intuitive explication. This is surely what Heidegger learned from Husserl.

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Husserl’s hermeneutics of the history of philosophy Whereas Heidegger during the 1920s, up to Being and Time, is claiming that phenomenology needs to be freed of its metaphysical presuppositions through a radical ‘destruction’ (Destruktion, Abbau) of the history of philosophy,36 in his mature writings of the twenties, Husserl is also offering his own hermeneutical reading of the history of philosophy and especially the breakthrough to the transcendental outlook which he locates in Descartes rather than in Kant. Husserl had been offering this view – which he calls a ‘kritische Ideengeschichte’ – from the time of his 1923/1924 lecture course, Erste Philosophie. Husserl already has a particular focus on the breakthrough to modernity in the work of Descartes, Hume, and others. Subsequently, in his Crisis of European Sciences (the first two parts of which appeared in the journal Philosophia in 1936) Husserl offers a new account of the evolution of modern science, concentrating on the archetypal breakthrough of Galileo. Here he already speaks of ‘interpretation’ (Interpretation, Deutung) or ‘exposition’ (Auslegung, see Crisis, 11; Hua VI 9), which he characterizes as primarily achieved through a kind of ‘backwards questioning’ (Rückfragen) or ‘backward reflection’ (Rückbesinnung) which is a reminiscence of the ‘zig-zag’ method he had already spoken of in his Logical Investigations. Husserl is performing a critical retrieval of the inner sense of the movement of philosophical history in Western modernity. He is trying to recover a foundational meaning that has become covered up or obscured in our present understanding. Husserl turns to a founding moment for modernity, when there was a ‘transformation’ (Verwandlung, Crisis, 56; Hua VI 57) of the ‘meaning-form’ or structure of nature in modern physics. According to Husserl, this revolutionary transformation essentially went unnoticed and uninterrogated, and for this reason now stands in need of ‘clarification’ (Klärung, Aufklärung, Crisis, 56; Hua VI 57). There is an urgent need to interrogate and bring to ‘clarity’ (Klarheit) the ‘origin’ (Ursprung) and formation of what he calls the ‘modern spirit’ (Crisis, 57; Hua VI 58), that is, the spiritual and cultural formation of the modern world view dominated by science and technology. In particular, Husserl seeks to uncover the concealed thought-formations and intentions that led to the ‘construction’ of the idea of nature as understood by modern science. As he puts it: In order to clarify the formation of Galileo’s thought we must accordingly reconstruct [rekonstruieren] not only what consciously motivated him. It will also be instructive to bring to light what was implicitly included in his guiding model [Leitbild] of mathematics, even though, because of his direction of interest, it was kept from his view: as a hidden, presupposed meaning it naturally had to enter into his physics along with everything else. (Crisis, 24–5; Hua VI 21–2)

Husserl wants to identify motivations but also what would have appeared ‘obvious’ to or was ‘taken for granted’ (selbstverständlich, Crisis, 24; Hua VI 21) by Galileo and which would have not appeared to him. This seems extraordinarily close to Heidegger’s conception of Abbau and hermeneutical retrieval of original sense.

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Husserl – in a manner similar to Heidegger – also speaks about clarifying and exploring the original ‘bestowal of meaning’ (Sinngebung, Crisis 58; Hua VI 58) and revealing the various ‘shifts and concealments of meaning’ (Sinnverschiebungen und Verdeckungen, Hua VI 58) that have taken place across history. This is very similar to Heidegger’s attempt to recover the original breakthrough significance of the foundational moments in early Greek philosophy – insights that later get covered up in the tradition. Furthermore, Husserl in the Crisis is not primarily looking backwards in the sense of simply trying to understand and interpret the past. He is not doing history or historiography but rather what he calls elsewhere ‘inner history’ (innere Geschichte). As he puts it, history is not a ‘storehouse’ of items; rather one picks and chooses depending on one’s motivation. Husserl sees himself as trying to gain access to the ‘inner meaning and hidden teleology’ of history; he is seeking, in quasi-Hegelian fashion, ‘reason in history’: ‘We shall attempt to strike through the crust of the externalized “historical facts” of philosophical history, interrogating, exhibiting, and testing their inner meaning and hidden teleology. Questions never before asked will arise. … In the end they will require that the total sense of philosophy, accepted as “obvious” throughout all its historical forms, be basically and essentially transformed’ (Crisis, 18; Hua VI 16)

Husserl is more concerned with making sense of the past as it shapes the present and seeking to understand how the future has been set on a particular course by the meanings instituted in the past. Husserl frequently uses the term Nachverstehen (‘re-understanding’ or, as David Carr translates it, ‘sympathetic understanding’ or ‘empathetic understanding’) as his version of the hermeneutic task to comprehend the other. Nachverstehen involves a kind of openness to others, the intention to grasp their intention (see Crisis, 177; Hua VI 180 and Crisis, 236; Hua VI 239).37 Thus at Crisis § 9 (l), he characterizes his approach to the history of meaning as moving in a ‘kind of circle’ (Crisis, 58; Hua VI 59) – involving what Heidegger calls, in Being and Time § 2, a kind of ‘relatedness backwards and forwards’, a conception often called the ‘hermeneutic circle’. In the Crisis Husserl speaks of moving in a zig-zag manner (‘im Zickzack’, Crisis, 58; Hua VI 59), but he is not borrowing from Heidegger here. In fact, he is repeating a characterization of his method that he had already employed as early as in his Logical Investigations, where he first speaks of moving in a ‘zig-zag’ manner (im Zickzack, LU Introduction § 6 I, 175; Hua XIX/1 22). According to this methodology, Husserl will begin, for instance, from the contemporary positivistic understanding of the sciences and move back to try to understand their ‘origin’, and their ‘development of sense or meaning’ (Sinnesentwicklung, Crisis, 58; Hua VI 59). In this sense, Husserl’s phenomenology always involves the uncovering of sedimented presuppositions (a foundational aspect of Gadamer’s hermeneutics also). Husserl believes that we are all caught up in the ‘spell’ (Bann, Hua VI 58) of our times and that there is a need to get out from under this bewitchment. Going backwards and forwards between current understanding and the understanding of beginnings produces an ‘interplay’ (Wechselspiel) that helps to free up our concepts. Husserl summarizes the process as follows: ‘Relative clarification (Klärung) on the one hand brings some elucidation (Erhellung) on the other, which in turn casts light back on the

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former’ (Crisis, 58; Hua VI 59). He is never simply narrating a historical development for its own sake but is attempting to uncover necessary structural features that make such meaning-formation possible. Paul Ricoeur has written that the ageing Husserl, whom he styled initially as an apolitical and non-historical thinker, was in his later years ‘summoned by history to interpret himself historically’.38 Husserl then is primarily practising a hermeneutics of historical, communal existence but also a hermeneutics of the emergence of modern science as the distinctive marker of the European West’s achievement.

The turn to history Finally, let us briefly consider Husserl’s hermeneutics of historical consciousness. Husserl has an interesting approach to what he calls the ‘poetizing of history’ (die Dichtung der Geschichte) sketched in some of the research manuscripts that were to be the basis of the Crisis, and later explicitly taken up by Gadamer. Husserl writes that philosophers identify their historical predecessors not by some factual documenting of the external facts of the history of philosophy but through a kind of inner alignment or harmony, an ‘interweaving’ (Ineinander) of intention, rather in the manner in which poets choose those whom they have decided to have influenced them. Poetry and philosophy make their own traditions in similar ways, through taking up the works of earlier generations and revivifying them and seeing them as precursors to themselves (see Crisis, 392–5; Hua VI 511–13). Philosophers of the past are joined with those of the present into a single ‘community of philosophers’ (Philosophengemeinschaft) or ‘community of thinkers’ (Denkergemeinschaft, Hua VI 444). This is a kind of active intentional sense-making – which Gadamer will adopt in his conception of carrying out a dialogue with the past. In this sense, Husserl has his own understanding of the dynamics of historicity – a term he also explicitly employs in his later writings, especially in the 1930s. Human communities or ‘socialities’ have their own historical orientation and trajectories, their own outlooks, horizons, paths, and destinies in history, which Husserl loosely terms ‘historicities’ (Historizitäten, Geschichtlichkeiten). These historicities can be more or less narrow or broad and interweave with one another in complex ways. Some cultural groupings even lack history and are thereby closed in on themselves. Historicity, for Husserl, does not have quite the same technical sense it has in Heidegger. For Husserl, it means the way in which human groupings constitute and live out, across the interchanges and transmissions of the generations (what, as we have seen, Husserl terms ‘generativity’), a common history. A historicity is a ‘unity of becoming’. For Husserl, every social grouping has its own ‘historicity’ or structural way of evolving its history: ‘Each kind of cultural formation has its historicity, has its character of having become [Charakter der Gewordenheit] and its relation to the future and, indeed, in reference to its historical, living, productive and utilizing humanity’ (Crisis, Hua VI 504, my translation). Husserl speaks of ‘transcendental historicity’ (Hua XXIX 80), meaning the a priori conditions that make possible living historically. Husserl even speaks of a ‘hidden teleology’ in history which can be uncovered through an act of

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‘self-understanding’. He writes: ‘Our task is to make comprehensible the teleology in the historical becoming [in dem geschichtlichen Werden] of philosophy, especially modern philosophy, and at the same time to achieve clarity about ourselves, who are the bearers [Träger] of this teleology, who take part in carrying it out through our personal attentions’ (Crisis, 70; Hua VI 71). Communal lifeworlds are unified by a shared sense of a common world formed by tradition, even if, as Husserl acknowledges, that tradition consists entirely of erroneous beliefs (Crisis, 326; Hua VI 305). In his Intersubjectivity volumes Husserl declares in a note written around 1921/1922: ‘Life in prejudgment, life in tradition. In the widest sense, it belongs to every ego-life [Ichleben] to be life in tradition’ (Hua XIV 230, my translation). Husserl is acknowledging, in a manner very similar to Heidegger and Gadamer, that people live primarily in a realm of ‘pre-judgement’ (Vorurteil). Husserl’s engagement with culture, tradition, history, and the lifeworld was essentially hermeneutical, although he did not use this term. Husserl understood himself as exploring the full sense of his radical transcendental phenomenology. Thus, he thinks a radical epoché is vital for understanding the true intentional motivations governing culture, history, and society. For him, the great breakthrough of ancient Greek philosophy – and a permanent acquisition for Western humanity – is precisely the uncovering of the theoretical attitude, because this new attitude necessarily involves a shift of attention or focus away from practical engagements and embeddedness (Einbettung was a term originally introduced into phenomenology by Husserl’s student Gerda Walther), for instance, in mythopoeic thinking. The theoretical attitude itself already involves applying an epochē to all practical interests and focusing purely on the demand for truth, and in this way, Husserl believes it prepares human subjects for the life of ‘self-responsibility’ (Crisis, 283; Hua VI 329). The theoretical attitude opens up a world of infinite tasks and unites humans together on the quest for rational ‘self-responsibility’ (Selbstverantwortung, Crisis, 197; Hua VI 200 and Crisis, p. 283; VI 329). For Husserl, in the ‘Vienna Lecture’, philosophical life has ushered into history a new kind of praxis, ‘that of the universal critique of all life and of all life-goals’ (Crisis, 283; Hua VI 329). Henceforth human life has to be lived as an absolutely self-critical, constant re-evaluation of all its aims and achievements.

Gadamer’s reception of Husserl: Horizon and lifeworld As we saw above, Gadamer encountered the philosophy of Husserl very early, indeed already when he was a young student at Marburg studying with Paul Natorp and others. Gadamer even travelled to Freiburg in the summer semester of 1923 in Freiburg, primarily to listen to the young Heidegger, but while there he audited a course by Husserl. This course, supposedly entitled ‘Transcendental Logic’, convinced Gadamer that Husserl had taken an idealist turn. Gadamer would befriend Heidegger who would soon be teaching in Marburg. Gadamer was disappointed that Husserl’s phenomenology, after so promising a start in his Logical Investigations, effectively collapsed back into a kind of Neo-Kantian idealism.39 Nevertheless, in various essays throughout his career, Gadamer has offered an account of Husserlian phenomenology

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as a theoretical inquiry into essence or eidos, one that failed to account for the ‘uniqueness, finitude and historicity’ of human Dasein, as he puts it in his 1963 essay on the phenomenological movement.40 What phenomenology promised to do was to go behind the accepted world of science and inquire into the foundations of what the late Husserl would call the ‘lifeworld’ (Lebenswelt). As Gadamer would later recall: But the phenomenological school [in the 1920s] had an even stronger impact by no longer sharing the Marburg School’s orientation to the facts of the sciences as self-evident. It went behind scientific experience and the categorial analysis of its methods, and brought the natural experience of life – that is, what the later Husserl named with the now famous expression, the ‘lifeworld’ – into the foreground of its phenomenological investigation.41

The lifeworld (especially as discussed in Husserl’s Crisis of European Sciences) features prominently in Gadamer’s Truth and Method. Gadamer was able to read the newly edited texts of Husserl, including the Crisis, Ideas II (which appeared in 1952),42 and the Intersubjectivity volumes (which appeared only in 1973).43 These texts alerted Gadamer to a very different Husserl, one engaged with history, community, personhood, and the meaning of tradition. Gadamer sees the Crisis as Husserl’s belated attempt to address the themes of finitude and historicity, which had been discussed so vividly and inspirationally by Heidegger in Being and Time (1927).44 Indeed, Heidegger’s very popularity is for Husserl, on Gadamer’s reading, an indication of the decline of the spirit of philosophy as a rigorous science. Gadamer correctly interprets the late Husserl’s lament that the ‘dream was over’ as a regretting of the abandonment of the ideal of philosophy as a rigorous science. He also interprets Husserl correctly as never abandoning the doctrine of the transcendental ego even in his later work, when, according to Husserl’s assistant Ludwig Landgrebe and others, Husserl was turning away from Cartesianism. In Truth and Method Gadamer acknowledges the importance of Husserl’s relation to hermeneutics and pays particular attention to the later Husserl’s concepts of horizon, intersubjectivity, and lifeworld (the latter concept Gadamer acknowledges has ‘found an astounding resonance in the contemporary mind’45). Gadamer always begins from the centrality of phenomenological intentional description. Intentionality, for Gadamer, signifies the correlation between ‘the object of experience’ and its ‘modes of givenness’. Phenomenology focused on these modes of givenness and thereby uncovered not just the objects presented in experience but also the ‘horizons’ within which they are so presented.46 Gadamer writes in Truth and Method concerning the peculiar manner the stream of experiences unfolds in time as described in Husserl’s phenomenology: ‘Every experience has implicit horizons of before and after, and finally fuses with the continuum of the experiences present in the before and after to form a unified flow of experience’ (TM, 245). Gadamer writes that he was, already from his 1923 exposure to Heidegger, impressed by what Heidegger spoke about as the hermeneutics of facticity. Gadamer recalls: From this critique of the concept of consciousness, which Heidegger would later radicalize, we can take to be of special significance that Heidegger already before Being and Time introduced the expression ‘hermeneutic of facticity’, setting it

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Hermeneutics and Phenomenology against his own questioning of the idealism of consciousness. Facticity is obviously that which cannot be clarified, that which resists any attempt to attain transparency of understanding. Thus it becomes clear that in every understanding there remains something unexplained, and that one therefore must ask about what motivates every understanding.47

Gadamer then continues to offer a view of Husserl as a philosopher of consciousness over and against Heidegger’s analysis of the pre-conscious Vorhabe which has to be revealed. However, as we have seen, Husserl himself was exercising his own kinds of questioning of tradition, his own way of breaking up the sedimentations of encrusted assumptions, and his own form of hermeneutic intuiting that had a major influence on the formation of Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s own hermeneutic methods.

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The Stuff that Dreams are Made of: Max Scheler and Paul Ricoeur on Productive Imagination Saulius Geniusas

I wish to inquire into the scope and limits of productive imagination by focusing on Max Scheler’s phenomenology of phantasy1 in light of Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic critique of the phenomenology of imagination.2 By productive imagination, I will understand a peculiar type of intentional experience, which not only produces what does not exist but also – always and necessarily – augments and transfigures the surrounding world. Here I will understand the concept of the surrounding world in accordance with the fundamental principles of Husserlian phenomenology, namely, as a personalistic rather than naturalistic world. The naturalistic attitude reduces the concept of the surrounding world to pure nature, devoid of everything that is subject-dependent. Thus, in the naturalistic world, we cannot find any values, utility, desirability, or practicability. By contrast, conceived personalistically, the world is filled with perceived, affective, and practical qualities. The personalistic world, in which we continuously find ourselves, is our own constitutive accomplishment: due to our engagement in it, this world has become what it is. It is my thesis that this engagement largely rests on productive phantasy, both personal and social. A return to Scheler’s phenomenology of phantasy in the aftermath of Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology of imagination3 might strike one as an ‘orthodox’ rejoinder to a more ‘heterodox’ philosophy of imagination. Yet a closer look will make clear that such a return can help us achieve three important goals: it can help us (1) to broaden our understanding of the phenomenology of productive imagination; (2) to correct a number of misunderstandings of the phenomenology of imagination, including misunderstandings that derive from the hermeneutically oriented philosophy of imagination; and (3) to provide the resources needed to reopen the question concerning the relation between phenomenology and hermeneutics in general, and the phenomenologically and hermeneutically oriented philosophies of imagination in particular.

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Phenomenology and hermeneutics: A standard dialogue Philosophical hermeneutics, as it has been pursued in the second half of the twentieth century, is a tradition with strong phenomenological roots which underpin its fundamental philosophical commitments. The ‘unremitting aversion to all forms of metaphysical reductionism’ as well as the ‘abiding concern for the integrity of our own lived experience’4 constitute the central tenets of philosophical hermeneutics and both these tenets are of phenomenological origin. Yet no matter how undeniable the phenomenological heritage of recent philosophical hermeneutics might be, the relation between phenomenology and hermeneutics continues to be a puzzling issue. Can one qualify phenomenology as that tradition which lays the ground for philosophical hermeneutics? Or should one say that phenomenology only appears to be the entrance gate to hermeneutics, while in truth, when viewed from the hermeneutic standpoint, it turns out to be a highly ambiguous doctrine, which presents a plethora of hermeneutically fruitful insights, yet interprets them within a highly problematic conceptual framework, which hermeneutics ultimately rejects? Consider Ricoeur’s ‘Phenomenology and Hermeneutics’ – a programmatic study which presents what one could call a standard account of the relation between hermeneutics and phenomenology. Ricoeur’s study is concerned with the ‘destiny of phenomenology’ and ‘the ways in which philosophy can still be pursued today’.5 Ricoeur contends that, on the one hand, ‘phenomenology remains the unsurpassable presupposition of hermeneutics’ and that, on the other hand, ‘phenomenology cannot constitute itself without a hermeneutical presupposition’.6 Does this mean that the relation between phenomenology and hermeneutics is one between two parties with equal powers and rights, both of which are open to what the other has to say? There are good reasons to doubt that such is the case. Ricoeur’s analysis leads to the conclusion that phenomenology and hermeneutics could be said to presuppose each other, yet only if phenomenology’s idealistic tendencies are first subjected to a hermeneutic critique.7 We thus face here a relation between two traditions, where one tradition is given the right to speak only if it is first cleansed of all ‘idealistic misconceptions’ which supposedly obscure its message and significance. Thus, we do not face here a relation between two parties with equal powers and rights but the absorption of one party by another, both from above and from below. Supposedly, only after the hermeneutic turn in phenomenology can we understand classical phenomenology’s conceptual basis and realize its philosophical import. While I share Ricoeur’s conviction that the future of both phenomenology and hermeneutics to a large degree depends on their capacity to enter into dialogue with each other, I would nonetheless contend that the standard way of pursuing this dialogue is unsustainable phenomenologically and damaging hermeneutically. On the one hand, it is hard to expect that the hermeneutic demand to give up the conceptual framework of classical phenomenology will be met with straightforward phenomenological endorsement. On the other hand, this very demand raises doubts about the seriousness that underlies the hermeneutic claims concerning the significance of listening. By addressing Scheler’s phenomenology of productive imagination in light of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of imagination, I hope to clarify why there is a need for a fresh dialogue

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between phenomenology and hermeneutics, which not only formally asserts but also full-heartedly subscribes to hermeneutical openness and hermeneutical generosity.

Mapping the field: Ricoeur’s phenomenology of productive imagination In 1975 – the same year that ‘Phenomenology and Hermeneutics’ appeared in print – Ricoeur delivered a set of nineteen lectures on imagination at the University of Chicago. These lectures constitute the most detailed analysis of imagination that Ricoeur ever offered. Here Ricoeur addresses imagination as it was conceptualized in ancient and modern philosophy (Aristotle, Pascal, Spinoza, Hume, and Kant), in analytical philosophy (Ryle, Price, and Wittgenstein) and in phenomenology (Sartre and Husserl). In the final part of the lectures, Ricoeur presents his own original contribution – his hermeneutic phenomenology of productive imagination. In these lectures, no other philosophical tradition is subjected to such close scrutiny as phenomenology. All in all, five lectures focus on the phenomenology of imagination (two on Husserl and three on Sartre). For Ricoeur, phenomenology represents the culmination of Western philosophy of imagination. Moreover, Ricoeur conceives of classical phenomenology as a direct precursor to his own investigations. As such, phenomenology both lays the ground of Ricoeur’s own contribution and constitutes the chief target of his critique. According to Ricoeur, phenomenology’s chief limitation boils down to the alleged fact that this tradition, like all others before it, is exclusively focused on reproductive imagination. Supposedly, productive imagination, which is the focus of Ricoeur’s own investigations, is absent from the available phenomenological studies of imagination.8 Ricoeur, however, does not coin the term ‘productive imagination’ but takes it directly from Kant and the tradition that followed him. Thus, paradoxically, Ricoeur’s interest in productive imagination places him in a tradition that he accuses of being predominantly reproductive. Yet one should not overlook that, for Ricoeur, Kant’s account of productive imagination remains severely constrained: in neither the Critique of Pure Reason nor the Critique of the Power of Judgment does Kant clarify how imagination can continue to transform our everyday reality. It is precisely this capacity to augment and transfigure reality that Ricoeur identifies as the fundamental trait of productive imagination. It is this capacity that he finds wanting in the history of philosophy, including that philosophy which speaks of productive imagination. The problem we confront here is that of the reduction of the field of imagination to its reproductive function. With the aim of avoiding this form of reductionism, Ricoeur problematizes the field of imagination as a cluster of problems, and he further argues for the need to dismember the field and reassign different problems to different areas. How does Ricoeur redraw the map of this tremendously vast, highly developed, while at the same time strangely archaic region known by the name of imagination? It is by no means an easy undertaking, since no one really knows what territories it entails or how far its borders extend. Some contend that this region is not as vast as one might think and that it borders four other regions, namely, those of conception,

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perception, memory, and anticipation. Others contest the validity of these borders and contend that these so-called other regions are at best the subservient provinces of imagination. They claim this because they are committed to the view that imagination lies at the heart of conception, perception, memory, and anticipation. How, then, does Ricoeur redraw the map of imagination? Ricoeur’s method is distinctly hermeneutical. In the introductory lecture, he argues that we need to begin with how the word ‘image’ is employed in everyday language. In this framework, he distinguishes four fundamental senses of this term. (1) The term ‘image’ can refer to a picture, a painting, a drawing, or a diagram, that is, to a physical thing that represents another thing. Here one thing stands in for another thing, like a picture of a loved one, which constitutes her quasi-presence. (2) This term can also refer to mental images, such as we entertain in memories, dreams, or daydreaming. Here we are faced with purely psychic appearances, which do not rest on anything physical and which are conceived as immaterial photographs, which refer to and replicate other experiences in the absence of any material foundation. Within this group of images, memory images are paradigmatic: they present us with traces of former experiences. (3) The third group of images comprises fictions. These can be entertained both through physical imagination and in mere phantasy. The distinctive characteristic of fiction is that it does not have a real reference; it refers not to absent but to non-existent things. This is a loose group; insofar as paintings, literary works, dreams, or daydreaming intend non-existent things, they fall into this group of images. (4) The final group is comprised of illusions, which are marked by the confusion of reality and irreality and which stem from a deceptive belief. Like the third group of images, the fourth one entails both phantasmatic and picture-like images. Ricoeur conceptualizes these four different senses of the term ‘image’ around two axes: a horizontal axis that runs from presence to absence and a vertical axis that extends from belief to unbelief. Such a schematization of imagination is heavily phenomenological. In Ricoeur’s own words, the axis of presence and absence is noematic (i.e. it concerns the side of the object) while the axis of belief and unbelief is noetic (concerning the side of the subjective act). Thus, Ricoeur’s redrawing of the map of imagination relies on a strategy that is distinctly hermeneutico-phenomenological. Within this newly redrawn map, Ricoeur assigns a place to the dominant accounts of imagination that we come across in the history of philosophy.9 Consider the horizontal axis, which runs from presence to absence. A number of philosophers have followed this axis by placing the image at one end or the other. Hume and the whole empiricist tradition conceive of the image under the paradigm of mental images (the second group of images identified above) as a kind of mental photograph or trace of previous perception. Here the image is granted presence and reality, although its presence is a lesser presence and its reality is a shadow of reality. By contrast, Sartre’s early writings on imagination appear at the other end of the horizontal axis; the image, be it mental or physical, is conceived as an embodied form of nothingness. The vertical axis, which runs from belief to unbelief, is no less commonly adhered to in the philosophical tradition. At one end we come across those accounts that confuse the image with the real. Pascal’s and Spinoza’s accounts represent this approach most forcefully.10 Here the fourth group of images is paradigmatic. At

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the other end of the axis, we face those accounts that conceive of imagination as an instrument of the critique of reality. Husserl’s phenomenology of imagination is the most forceful embodiment of such a strategy. Ricoeur further suggests that we can consider not only each axis independently but also the quadrants that the combination of the axes creates. He offers us the following schema: Unbelief or Critical Distance

Picture

Fiction

Presence

Absence

Trace

Hallucination

Belief or fascination Ricoeur’s Board Drawing (from editors’ notes)

First, insofar as one conceives of the image as a trace, one relates to it in terms of belief in presence. Second, insofar as the image is a hallucination, belief in absence is its qualifying characteristic. Third, a picture conceived noematically is something that is present, although noetically, one does not believe in its presence. One takes critical distance from its presence, since one is fully absorbed in what the picture represents. Finally, as far as fiction is concerned, one takes critical distance from the image in that one refuses to believe that the image is only absent. According to Ricoeur, we cannot conceive of imagination as productive if we think of it either as a trace, as hallucination, or as a picture, since none of them has the power to transfigure our surrounding world. While the trace and the picture in the most direct way reproduce what we either have or could have experienced in our surroundings, hallucination pretends to place us in the midst of presence while in fact it only places us in touch with absence. According to Ricoeur, if we can meaningfully speak of productive imagination, we must do so by focusing on fiction. Yet our challenge is to speak of fiction without reducing it to something other than it is, for as Ricoeur further remarks, there is a constant tendency in classical philosophy to reduce fiction to illusion, that is, to hallucination.11 Thus even though fiction as such remains at the margins of classical studies of imagination, for Ricoeur, philosophy of productive imagination must be a phenomenology of fiction. It thereby becomes understandable why Ricoeur would claim that ‘the phenomenology of fiction remains to be done’.12

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Ricoeur conceives of the lower left quadrant in the figure drawn above as most problematic. It is twice defective, he argues, for it lacks not only in absence but also in critical distance. ‘The most unfortunate theories of imagination proceed from this overemphasis on the problem of the trace, because in the trace we have as little absence as possible and as little power of neutralization as possible.’13 As he further remarks, ‘Trace and fiction are absolute opposites… . What interests me is a theory of fiction, a theory of fiction as opposed to a theory of trace.’14 Has Ricoeur not drawn the limits of productive imagination in too narrow a way? Is productive imagination reducible to fiction? If one is to conceive of imagination in terms of belief in presence, does one necessarily thereby become an empiricist and a proponent of a theory of a trace? So as to broaden the field of productive imagination, it is important to problematize Ricoeur’s contention that the lower left quadrant must be conceived in accordance with a theory of the trace. By turning to Scheler’s writings on imagination, I wish to demonstrate that it is precisely at the lower left quadrant – the very one that Ricoeur has qualified as most removed from productive imagination – that we come across an alternative phenomenology of productive imagination, which can significantly complement Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology of fiction and broaden the framework of productive imagination. Yet I am not merely interested in opening a forgotten page in the history of ideas so as to demonstrate that Ricoeur’s critique of the phenomenology of imagination to a large degree is an instance of a misplaced criticism. Rather, what interests me are the prospects of a fresh dialogue between phenomenology and hermeneutics. Although such a dialogue cannot be offered in the confines of this chapter, turning to Scheler’s phenomenology of imagination in light of Ricoeur’s critique can deepen significantly our understanding of the phenomenology of imagination.

Primary perception and productive phantasy Scheler’s theory of drive- and motor-dependent perception (triebmotorische Wahrnehmungstheorie) constitutes the general framework within which we come across his phenomenology of productive phantasy. Scheler argues that perception is largely dependent upon the involuntary and spontaneous performance of the organism, which is largely regulated by drives and impulses. According to Scheler, ‘Without any degree or direction of instinctual attention, without the comprehension of values, and, furthermore, without the initiation of motor-processes, there can be no perception, no matter how simple it might be.’15 Such rootedness of perception in what Scheler calls ‘the vital stratum of the soul’ should be understood as an involuntary and spontaneous projection of sense upon one’s perceptual surroundings. For Scheler, ‘our natural perception is always threefold: sensation + memory + phantasy’.16 This means that the involuntary spontaneity of perceptual consciousness motivated impulsively and emotively consists of the projection of recollections and phantasma upon reality. To be sure, perception’s dependence upon phantasy cannot be understood as a magical production of perceptual reference. After all, the greater one’s wishes or desires, the greater the feeling of limits that circumscribe the boundaries of

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perceptual experience. How, then, does Scheler’s claim that phantasy is an essential and irreducible perceptual ingredient square with the common experience of a conflict between phantasy and perception, that is, with the all-too-common recognition that the world of our experience does not live up to our deepest wishes and expectations? Moreover, does the claim that productive phantasy is an ingredient of perceptual consciousness not disrupt the distinctions between different types of intentional presentations, namely, between perception, recollection, anticipation, and phantasy? Is it not these distinctions that enable us to define each intentional presentation? These objections harken back to what Nietzsche in his Human, All-Too-Human has identified as an inherited fault of philosophers. ‘Lack of historical sense is the family failing of all philosophers.’17 Arguably, precisely such a ‘family failing’ underlies the common partition of intentional presentations into perceptions, phantasies, recollections, and anticipations. This common classification is itself a historical and psychological accomplishment. Relying on Husserlian terminology, one could say that in contrast to the static approach, which offers a clear-cut distinction between the essential types of intentional presentations (perception, memory, anticipation, and phantasy), Scheler offers a genetic alternative which relies upon the insights of child psychology, cultural anthropology, and clinical experience. We face here a distinctly genetic approach which suggests that the distinction we draw between perception, recollection, anticipation, and phantasy is not found at the origins of experience but itself emerges in the course of experience. There is a more original level of psychic and historical development that precedes this common differentiation of intentional presentations. Scheler calls this level ‘primary perception’ (Urperzeption) and argues that productive phantasy constitutes its essence. Scheler maintains that productive phantasy is ‘the fundamental form of perceptual life itself ’.18 At this basic developmental level, productive phantasy fundamentally lacks self-consciousness; it does not recognize itself as ‘mere phantasy’ and therefore does not conceive of itself as merely one kind of intentional presentation among others. At the genetically primary level of primary perception (Urperzeption), each presentation is ‘taken as true’, that is, it is taken up as though it were an actual perception. Only on the basis of ‘dissociation’ (not association, as the empiricists suggest) do we learn how to distinguish between perceptual objects and phantasy formations. Just as dreams have to be recognized as dreams if one is to become conscious of the distinction between wakefulness and dreams, so also, both phantasy and other forms of conscious presentations need to become self-conscious so that we could draw distinctions between them. The kind of self-consciousness I am referring to is not an inherent quality of conscious presentations but a conscious feature that emerges in the course of psychic and historical development. In the early stages of this development conscious presentations are undifferentiated and are all experienced as types of original perception (Urperzeption). As far as subsequent levels of psychic and historical development are concerned, any content of self-conscious perception is a content of productive phantasy, which has withstood the test of experience. The genetic analyses of productive phantasy have much to gain from child psychology, cultural anthropology, as well as psychoanalysis. We cannot understand

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the magical world of a child, the enchanted world of the native, or the whimsical world of psychic illness if we are unwilling to concede that these worlds are largely formed by productive phantasy. To be sure, the child crawling like a cat is reproducing the familiar movements of the animal; the psychic patient engaged in a conversation with himself is reproducing discussions he either has or could have held with others; so also, a native, who finds himself in a world inhabited by spirits, is reproducing in his natural surroundings what is ‘human, all-too-human’. Nonetheless, one cannot account for the emergence of these different worlds on the basis of mere reproduction. The view that focuses only on imagination’s reproductive function remains blind to the motivation that underlies the genesis of these worlds. Scheler maintains that all these imaginary worlds spring from the vital form of psychophysical life, which in his latest work, Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos, he qualifies as the lowest stage of psychophysical development. We are confronted here with a form of psychophysical life that falls under Scheler’s category of impulsion (Drang).19 For Scheler, productive phantasy springs from such impulses as hunger, thirst, sexual appetite, honour-drive, struggle-drive, and so on. In the case of the child, the psychic patient, and the native, phantasy springs from the vital stratum and projects a layer of sense upon the actual world, thereby augmenting and transfiguring it.

The genetic development of productive phantasy For Scheler, these different worlds – of the child, the mentally ill, and the native – can tell us something highly important about our own world. Our ‘normal’ world view, which is characterized by the established, accepted, and relatively stable set of shared beliefs that characterize our daily engagement with things and other human beings, is based upon a psychic and historical development. Even a limited exposure to these strange and seemingly inaccessible worlds can enable us to identify the overwhelming presence of those vital forces whose existence is largely unrecognized. Our surrounding world itself is largely constituted through productive phantasy. We can derive a telling illustration of the social nature of productive phantasy from Scheler’s contention that ‘history, too, is, in part, realized “utopias”’.20 With an eye on Ricoeur’s analyses of the social imaginary, one could further suggest that besides utopia, ideology constitutes another form of productive phantasy, which in a direct way transfigures social reality. What we face here are two fundamental forms of social imaginary, through which the personalistic world is constituted on the basis of the resources provided by productive phantasy. Scheler speaks of the ‘psychic’ and ‘historical’ development of productive phantasy. In the development of an individual psychic life, phantasy is most pronounced in childhood and youth while it becomes more and more restrained in the subsequent course of experience. In human history as well, phantasy plays a much more prominent role in ancient civilizations than in the modern positivistic age. From a historical perspective, Scheler speaks of a progressive decline of productive phantasy in human history and emphasizes the ‘colossal fact that all psychic and historical development of humanity is an immense process of disenchantment’.21

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It is regrettable that Scheler did not explicitly complement his account of social phantasy across the ‘vertical line’ with a ‘horizontal investigation’, that is, an investigation that would schematize different phantasy formations not only historically but also cross-culturally. If it is indeed true that our surrounding worlds are constituted through productive phantasy, it must also hold that the differences between what Husserl calls different ‘homeworlds’ and ‘alienworlds’ largely rest upon different phantasy formations. It is to a large degree productive phantasy that renders the worlds we live in as diverse as they are. From a naturalistic standpoint, the natural surroundings we inhabit are not different enough to explain most of the cultural differences that are characteristic of human existence. These differences are to be accounted for not naturalistically but personalistically. Although Scheler does not explore this issue explicitly, the metaphysical implications that he draws from his phenomenology of productive phantasy provides the basis to maintain that these differences are to be seen as different social formations of productive phantasy. Scheler’s emphasis on the role that productive phantasy plays in the constitution of the surrounding world further suggests that productive phantasy is inseparably tied not only to drives and impulses but to instincts and desires. This means that phantasy is not reducible to the vital form of psychic life since, according to Scheler, instinct constitutes the second essential form in the objective stages of psychic life.22 That the actual world is largely constituted instinctually and affectively can be already discerned among animals. The bird does not build its nest after reflecting on the nests it has seen or heard about, or by comparing what it builds with what others have built. Much like the structures that ants build in the absence of any blueprint, the nest the bird builds is a direct expression of the drives and instincts that underlie this activity. More so than in the case of animal life, in human life desires, instincts, wishes, urges, and wants are expressed not only in direct practical activities but also phantasmatically. Moreover, just as productive phantasy is dependent upon instincts, it is also formed through what Scheler identifies as the third and fourth stages of psychophysical development, namely, through associative memory and practical intelligence. With all this in mind, Scheler maintains that productive phantasy plays an irreducible role in the life of a businessman, statesman, artist, and scholar. For Scheler, the highly diverse aesthetic, practical, and theoretical formations are largely determined through productive phantasy. In all these cases, we are confronted with productive phantasy as expressive of all four stages of psychic life. As we saw, with an eye on the significance of productive phantasy in the early stages of personal and historical development, Scheler maintains that the world of a child is incomparably richer than the world of an adult, just as the ancient world of a primitive society is incomparably richer than the positivistic world of an overripe civilization. Should we take this to mean that productive phantasy is fundamentally pre-conscious and that the moment phantasy gains self-consciousness, it becomes reproductive phantasy? This would be a naive form of romanticism, and there are good reasons to resist it. Productive phantasy is controlled, diminished, yet not extinguished in the course of experience. Even as it loses its unrestrained, wild, and magical flavour, it continues to function in more advanced stages of psychic and historical development, both individual and social. Yet now it functions not only in the service of the

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constitution of diverse personalistic worlds. Once restrained and ‘civilized’, it enters into the service of purely aesthetic goals and purposes.23 At the more advanced stages of psychic and historical development, productive phantasy is reducible neither to its merely aesthetic manifestation nor to its service in various practical and theoretical fields. Psychic life, in all its individual and social forms, continues to depend upon drives, instincts, needs, urges, and wishes, and productive phantasy is the vehicle of their expression. For Scheler, ‘our natural perception is not only initially, but always a complex structure, which entails sensations, memory, and phantasy’. Moreover, ‘the structure of drives … is a dynamic invariable for both the phantasy world as well as the world of perception’.24 All of this means that there is no break that separates the initial stages from the more advanced stages of psychic and historical development.25

The limits of productive phantasy So far I have focused on the vertical depth and horizontal breadth of Scheler’s reflections on productive phantasy. The vertical depth concerns the historical and psychological genealogy that underlies the personalistic relation between the subject of experience and the world at large. The horizontal breadth concerns the irreducible presence of productive phantasy in our most basic perceptual, affective, and cognitive activities. Yet are there any limits that constrain productive phantasy? Can any power resist its force? We encounter these limits in the context of Scheler’s reflections on the philosophical attitude, which is won through the phenomenological reduction. Scheler conceptualizes the reduction as the imaginative process of dismantling the intuitive content that covers the presumed reality of things. Allow for all the colours to fade, for all the tones to die away, for all the embodied forms to disappear, for space, time, and all the categories of being to be levelled. Such a process of dismantling the presumed reality of things further corroborates Scheler’s central claim, namely, that our personalistic worlds to a large degree are constitutive accomplishments of productive phantasy. Moreover, this process of dismantling the presumed reality of things leads to the realization that ‘resistance’ (Widerstand) constitutes the essential and irreducible nature of reality. Emphasizing each and every word, Scheler writes: ‘The being of reality is not the being of an object … but rather the being of resistance’.26 This claim is sharply opposed to the insight that the reality of our surrounding world is constituted through productive phantasy. The reduction, conceived as the process of dismantling the presumed reality of things, is nothing other than the process of bracketing the achievements of productive phantasy. We face here a tension between two fundamentally different conceptions of reality. This tension makes it comprehensible why Scheler would qualify the objects we come across in our surrounding world not as things but as phantasmatic images (Bilder)27 and why, in the concluding pages of Erkenntnis und Arbeit, he would further qualify the world of these images (i.e. our actual surrounding world) not only as objective but as essentially contingent. No necessity underlies the emergence of those configurations of sense,

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which make this phantasmatic world into what it is; the content of this contingent world of phantasmatic images might just as well have been different. Nonetheless, Scheler maintains that ‘the greatest tension between the two attitudes [the practical and the philosophical] and the overcoming of this tension in the unity of the person marks the birth of philosophical knowledge’.28 Although Scheler does not clarify the meaning of this highly suggestive claim, it is hard to overestimate its significance as far as the scope and limits of productive phantasy are concerned. One should stress that we do not face irreconcilable claims here: it is possible to conceive of reality as resistance while holding to the view that reality is to a large degree a constitutive accomplishment of productive phantasy. What is more, to make good sense of the concepts of resistance and productive phantasy, one needs to think of them alongside each other. If reality were nothing more than resistance, it would be an empty concept without any positive determinations; so also, if reality were nothing more than a product of phantasy, it would be anything the subject of experience would want it to be. Scheler maintains that we misunderstand the concept of resistance if we think that it is originally experienced when drives and impulses lead to disappointment. Quite on the contrary, it is the experience of resistance that sparks the activities of drives and impulses.29 Phantasy-driven constitution of reality is established on the basis of a more basic experience of reality as resistance. The conception of reality as resistance thereby limits the powers of productive phantasy, although it does not rob phantasy of all constitutive force. In short, it is nothing less than the original experience of reality that resists the force of productive phantasy.

Phantasy and metaphysics Recall two of Scheler’s claims. First, there is the suggestion that ‘phantasy is a capacity of the vital soul’;30 second, there is the argument that philosophy originates on the basis of the phenomenological reduction, understood as a form of liberation from the vital soul. Consistency requires one to maintain that insofar as the reduction is a liberation from the vital soul, it must ground philosophy’s distance not only from drives and impulses but also from phantasy. Yet such a view is highly contentious, and Scheler himself rejects it. He argues that metaphysics begins at the point where sensory experience ends, and therefore all metaphysical positions ‘are works of phantasy’.31 Thus Scheler wants to have it both ways: he wants to situate phantasy within the boundaries of the vital stratum and conceive of phantasy as the vehicle of philosophical thought. If phantasy is indeed ‘a capacity of the vital soul’, there is no room for phantasy in metaphysics. Conversely, if ‘in metaphysics phantasy leads to evident knowledge’,32 phantasy cannot be reduced to the capacity of the vital soul. I would contend that a clear resolution of this predicament is missing in Scheler’s writings. The reason for this stems from Scheler’s metaphysical commitment to the dualism of life and spirit – a commitment that is especially strongly pronounced in Scheler’s last work, Man’s Place in Nature. Although a detailed analysis of this issue would take me too far afield, I should nonetheless stress that to recognize the presence of productive phantasy both at

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the vital and the spiritual levels would mean to transform phantasy into a bridge which binds life and spirit and thereby overcome the dualism in question. According to the fundamental principles of Scheler’s metaphysics, the spirit is originally impotent, while the demonic drives and impulses are powerful yet blind. Such being the case, it remains incomprehensible how spirit can ‘lure the drives with a bait of appropriate images’33 if, being cut off from phantasy, it does not have the capacity needed to generate any images. What Scheler calls ‘sublimation’, conceived as the vitalization of spirit and the spiritualization of drives, presupposes a deeper tie between spirit and life, which in Scheler’s own writings remains unexplained. Scheler’s arguments seem weakest when he reflects upon the metaphysical limits of productive phantasy. This brings us to a further problem: insofar as philosophy fails to demonstrate the limits of productive phantasy, does it not thereby also fail to define it? Scheler dismisses the possibility of defining phantasy by distinguishing it from other types of intentional presentation, namely, perception, anticipation, and memory. Additionally, he dismisses the standard ways of distinguishing it from conceptual consciousness. Yet if any form of intentional consciousness can be qualified as a form of phantasy then we lose the possibility of understanding what phantasy is. By becoming everything, phantasy becomes nothing. It becomes a superfluous term which no longer circumscribes a field of phenomena. One of the great merits of Scheler’s phenomenology of productive phantasy lies in its capacity to answer this objection. Phantasy does not lose determinacy just because it forms a significant dimension of other forms of intentional consciousness. The reason for this leads us back to the concept of resistance and its fruitfulness in drawing a phenomenological distinction between productive phantasy and ‘mere phantasy’. Phantasy can be productive only if it augments and transforms our surrounding world. Yet such a productive function of phantasy presupposes a more basic givenness of reality. I have in mind the following: mere phantasy can intend any object whatsoever just as it can transform any object into anything else. This it can do precisely because nothing resists its freedom and its power. By contrast, the hands of productive phantasy are largely tied. It cannot transform the surrounding world into anything it wishes the world to be. Something limits its freedom and its power, and this something is nothing other than reality itself. Thus, even though productive phantasy is one of the essential powers that constitutes our surrounding world, it nonetheless cannot give this world any shape or form. The insight that the being of reality is the being of resistance humbles the claims of productive phantasy, while the recognition that reality is a constitutive accomplishment of phantasy liberates the concept of reality from empty indeterminacy. Productive phantasy is not a peculiar type of intentional presentation but a constitutive quality of intentional experience, in virtue of which one can augment and transfigure reality itself. We encounter this quality at the heart of perception, memory, and anticipation; we encounter it in the conceptual relation to the world as well. Productive phantasy largely derives from the vital forces, namely, from impulsion. Yet it is also shaped by impulses, associative memory, and practical intelligence. It also lies at the heart of metaphysics.

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It is a matter of contingency what exact configuration of sense productive phantasy might give rise to. By contrast, there is nothing contingent about the realization that the being of reality is the being of resistance. Nonetheless, no matter how irreducibly contingent the creations of productive phantasy might be, in the absence of any kind of phantasy formations, reality would lack any kind of determinacy. On the basis of the foregoing analysis, I am led to maintain that the being of reality is not just the being of resistance but the being of compliant resistance, which I understand as a form of resistance that now and again opposes and now and again submits to the constitutive force of productive phantasy. From such a perspective, the personalistic world turns out to be a constitutive accomplishment which derives from the play of resistance and productive phantasy.

Concluding Remarks The foregoing analysis leads to a clear realization that the hermeneutic critique of the phenomenology of imagination calls for significant modifications. Ricoeur’s central point of contention, namely, that the phenomenology of imagination is nothing more than phenomenology of reproductive imagination, needs to be given up as a claim that lacks either hermeneutical justification or phenomenological verification. Moreover, phenomenology of productive imagination cannot be reduced to the phenomenology of fiction. Belief in presence – that very sphere that Ricoeur considers to be furthest removed from the realm of productive imagination – proves to be a source of an alternative phenomenology of productive imagination. With this in mind, one would be right to claim that phenomenology and hermeneutics offer us two highly different (although not incompatible) accounts of productive imagination, which, taken alongside each other, significantly enrich our understanding of the breadth and limits of productive imagination. It is only with attention to these differences that one can open a fresh dialogue between phenomenology and hermeneutics. As far as Scheler’s and Ricoeur’s philosophies of imagination are concerned, for a fresh dialogue between phenomenology and hermeneutics of imagination to be possible, Schelerian phenomenology needs to reconceptualize its metaphysical commitment to the duality of life and spirit, while Ricoeurian hermeneutics needs to distance itself from the distortions that plague its critique of the phenomenology of imagination and to abandon the view that hermeneutic phenomenology of productive imagination is reducible to the phenomenology of fiction.

8

Ricoeur’s Unrecognized Debt to Merleau-Ponty John Arthos

It has always struck me that Ricoeur’s well-known judgement of Merleau-Ponty as ‘the greatest of the French phenomenologists’ sounded like damning with faint praise.1 Ricoeur’s writings on phenomenology repeatedly and conspicuously leave Merleau-Ponty out: ‘If it is from Husserl that I needed the method designated by the term eidetic analysis, it is from Gabriel Marcel that I need the problematic of a subject both incarnate and capable of putting at a distance his desires and capabilities.’2 Merleau-Ponty, for his own reasons, kept a distance from Ricoeur: ‘Merleau-Ponty always avoided contact. He never responded to his letters … which grieved Ricoeur terribly.’3 There were political reasons for this, owing to Ricoeur’s militant Christianity and Merleau-Ponty’s atheism.4 But the principal reason for the distance is clearly Ricoeur’s resistance to Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the immanence of the flesh and world as the focal point of human understanding. To the extent that this resistance moved Ricoeur in the synthesizing direction he took as a mediator of intellectual discourses, it was a healthy reaction in the productive conflict of influence. But what it tends to mask is a deep unbroken continuity, a debt that is responsible, I believe, for one of the most compelling aspects of Ricoeur’s writing. How significant would his mediation of German and Anglophone philosophical traditions be absent this influence? It is because Ricoeur carries within himself the intimate humanity and pathos of his French mentors, the strong imprint of personalism, the close shadows of Christian intellectual culture, and the indelible inflections of French literary sensibility, that the work again and again achieves a humanist eloquence one does not hear in Husserl, Austin, Heidegger, or Wittgenstein. I do not mean by my title to indicate that Ricoeur did not acknowledge a debt to Merleau-Ponty or give him the honour that was his due as a student to his teacher. No one who reads Ricoeur’s retrospective essays devoted to Merleau-Ponty’s work can miss the respect shown there. What I intend instead is that Ricoeur could not have understood the full extent of his debt, any more than any one of us can appreciate fully the influence of those who are closest to us.5 To make this argument I am going to undertake a literary rather than philosophical analysis, and my concerns will wander from the normal focus of phenomenology on philosophical arguments.6 Instead I am interested in a manner of thought, both in the way it speaks about its subject and in its general disposition as a speculative mode of expression. Merleau-Ponty, at least, would

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not have been suspicious of this approach: ‘From now on the tasks of literature and philosophy can no longer be separated.’7 Ricoeur had crossed paths at numerous points with Merleau-Ponty in the late 1940s both because of their mutual interest in the Husserl Archives and at Lyon where Merleau-Ponty taught. Several of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical commitments were foundational to the development of Ricoeur’s thought – the dialectical expression of phenomenological being-in-the-world, the desire to cultivate a rapprochement between humanist and scientific discourses, and the unwillingness to abandon the French reflective tradition stemming from Descartes. Ricoeur was genuinely fascinated by Merleau-Ponty’s hybrid of existentialism and phenomenology, and it was characteristic of Ricoeur that, while most of French intellectual culture was busy disavowing its phenomenological and existential heritage in the early structuralist moment, ‘it was to the honor of Ricoeur that he never repudiated Merleau-Ponty’.8 But a friend of Ricoeur shared with the biographer François Dosse a rather remarkable fact in the teacher-student history of influence: ‘He confided to me a short time ago that he had been so fascinated by The Phenomenology of Perception that it was to escape from this quasi-immanentist phenomenology that he had set out upon his Philosophy of the Will.’9 That the great three-volume work that established Ricoeur as a philosopher in his own right should have been motivated by this negative inspiration is some indication of the conflicted relationship he had to this predecessor. Ricoeur explained how he engineered this retreat from immanence in his autobiographical statement: I strove to eliminate from my own conception of the thinking, acting and feeling subject everything that would make it impossible to include a phase of structural analysis within the reflexive operation … . I distanced myself from a self-consciousness that would be immediate, direct, and transparent to itself, and pleaded instead for the necessity of a detour by the signs and the works displayed in the cultural world.10

Although Merleau-Ponty, of course, did not avow self-transparency, his preoccupation with phenomenal evidence as the material of introspection is what Ricoeur turns from, and this explains a good deal why we do not hear much at all of MerleauPonty over a long career devoted almost singularly to the detour of the sign. If we are to find the profound influence Merleau-Ponty had on Ricoeur, it will be in more indirect evidence. I will use the word ‘pathos’ as shorthand in this chapter for the characteristic blend of phenomenological introspection, passional embodiment, and prose lyricism characterizing Merleau-Ponty’s voice. I use the word pathos because it touches what I think is the peculiar character of the written record, a testamentary commitment to feeling humanity imbued in its rhythm, tone, and texture, as a kind of magnetic north for the movement of his thought. Merleau-Ponty’s political commitments were folded into this general sensibility, as well as the constituting force of his polemical ends, but but this pathos is mainly the affect embedded in the prosody itself, like the frequencies modulated in the signal spectrum of a carrier wave. Merleau-Ponty’s ‘I’ is a kind of ironic inversion of the sovereign Cartesian ‘I’, although an earnest one. The pathos of

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Merleau-Ponty’s moi-même is precisely not some sovereign, imperious self, but rather the singular body’s nakedness, its fragility and resonance, its vulnerability and isolation – a tattered coat upon a stick, in Yeats’s phrase, its vanity yes, but also its precariousness, the homeless vagrant, the hunched figure of age, the exposed infant in need of infinite care.11 Embodiment is more than a philosophical position; it is the thousand nerves on every surface exposed, the capacity to feel surpassing pain and joy, and the keening elegance of poetic expression. The passional colorations of Merleau-Ponty are as present in his voice as they are absent in the philosophical commentary. The distance between the philosophy of the subject or the self and Merleau-Ponty’s ruminations on existence lie in the fact that he chooses to say, precisely, and in an idiom all his own, moi-même. A meditation within the boundaries of Merleau-Ponty’s personal reflexive is quite a different exercise from most subjective analysis in philosophy, as I will try to show in this chapter. The denomination of pathos is important for another reason as well; it is a strong connection with Ricoeur, for whom the word came to have the most complex and pivotal resonance. At the beginning phase of his career, under the influence no doubt of his strict Protestant background, Ricoeur wrote suspiciously of the passions, and then in mid-career, the compounding semantic field of passion, pathos, and the passive voice all combined or blended across their psychological, linguistic, and narrative dimensions in his new respect for and attention to the role of reception, listening, understanding, and interpretation. The pathetic became a generic term for the opposite of active agency, the capacity for receptivity in human nature, the ability to take impressions, to feel, to suffer. Its increased presence in the middle period is one of those signs, for me, that the threads of tradition expressed most poignantly in Merleau-Ponty were never far from Ricoeur’s commitments and being.

Pre-history One strand of my argument about voicing is a history of influences. If we look at the indebtedness of Ricoeur to Merleau-Ponty from the angle of style, then a very different line of influence emerges from the normally recited philosophical provenance. The stylistic trait I want to isolate is a modality of thought, a specific type of engagement that fills the wellspring of literature from which Merleau-Ponty so bountifully drew. This can only be a brief foray into its long and deep history. To be sure, we have learned to eschew the kind of categorical judgement the German rhetorical scholar Ernst Robert Curtius made when he claimed that literature ‘plays a far larger part in the cultural and national consciousness of France than it does in that of any other nation’, but there is at least a kernel of truth in the idea that literature, belles lettres, is that ‘nation’s most representative form of expression’.12 Literary sensibility, culture, and authority were never marginalized in France during the ascendancy of the sciences in the Enlightenment and its sequels. The radical Parisian intellectuals who used science as a cudgel to drive out the old guard classicists of the Sorbonne in the 1960s were all themselves consummate literary stylists and rhetoricians. A generally felt pride in its literary culture has permeated French custom in ways of thinking,

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speaking, and writing into disciplinary regions that would be in other intellectual traditions hostile territory. The classic expression of this sensibility is from SainteBeuve: Cette tradition, elle ne consiste pas seulement dans l’ensemble des oeuvres dignes de mémoire que nous rassemblons dans nos bibliothèques et que nous étudions: elle a passé en bonne partie dans nos lois, dans nos institutions, dans nos moeurs, dans notre education hereditaire et insensible, dans notre habitude et dans toutes nos origins; elle consiste en un certain principe de raison et de culture qui a penétré à longue, pour le modifier, dans le caractère meme de cette nation gauloise, et qui est entré des longtemps jusque dans la trempe des esprits.13

Charles du Bos famously identified the French genius specifically with the music of its prose: Il existe un grand dialogue dont il nous faut souhaiter qu’il dure aussi longtemps que notre race, car il s’en dégage la musique la plus compréhensive et la plus solennelle que le génie français ait fait rendre à l’instrument qui lui est propre: le dialogue Montaigne-Pascal. Un Français est profond dans la mesure, où, à son rang, il sait maintenir ce dialogue vivant en lui.14

A tradition that is habituated to idioms of poetic expression, that exalts the personal essay and the apophthegm as art, and that situates the writer at the centre of its intellectual and cultural life colours the way philosophy is done. Also to be sure, there is a kind of bipolarity in French literary culture; on the one hand, the most biting scepticism, exalted abstraction, and crystalline objectivity, and on the other hand, a warmth of filial feeling, social solidarity, and genuine courtesy. The withering wit of satire (Boileau, La Bruyère, Voltaire) is alter ego to an earnest sentiment and sympathy (Chateaubriand, Hugo). In many of the greatest writers and thinkers, these sensibilities were subtly blended, but many iconic figures of the tradition manifested the extremes. Merleau-Ponty fell cleanly on one side of the equation; undeviatingly humane, sensitive, earnest, and committed, a profile fully embodied in the passional, intimate, personal voice of his prose. The stream of tradition where the seedbed of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical sensibility can be discerned and felt – its intimacy of voice, its idioms of interiority, its attention to the affective dimensions of abstract questions – developed long before the modern reflective tradition or the genre of the personal essay, long before the form of the court that flavoured the distinctive courtoisie of the French aristocracy. This influence draws from the immense cultural impact of the cult of the Virgin and the monastic orders in France. The voice of Francis de Sales, who in his ‘Letters to Persons in the World’ reassured his flock that the Son looks ‘with greater tenderness insofar as you have greater infirmity’ is indicative,15 as so much later is Bossuet’s sermon ‘On the Passions’, which features not the temptation but the suffering of the flesh: ‘His Being nailed to an infamous piece of wood, his hands and feet pierced, held up only by his wounds, his hands torn from their flesh, the weight of his body in a broken heap.’16

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This responsiveness to the pathos of the human condition has a peculiar effect in the speculative tradition, and its characteristic quality is plainest in the most unlikely place: the Meditations of René Descartes. The great paradox is that that thinker’s intention to imagine an independent self stripped of all context, doubt, and passion was, in the first place, occasioned by an accident of personal luck (‘I have freed my mind of all kinds of cares … I have found a serene retreat in peaceful solitude’), enacted in an exercise charged with a sense of its own frail humanity (‘but I must remember that I am a man’), and performed in a mode of expression that sounds nothing like its purpose (‘how could I deny that these hands and this body are mine … accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine’).17 Descartes’s withdrawal from the world is undertaken in the language of autobiography (‘I am here, seated by the fire, wearing a winter dressing gown, holding this paper in my hands’) and in the ascetic’s perennial struggle with the flesh (‘whose brain is so troubled and befogged by the black vapors of the bile that they continually affirm’) (p. 76). His phenomenological reduction, because it is enacted in an autobiographical meditation, is charged with a strange contradiction, meticulously excising itself as a performative act before our eyes. This act of dispossession was so difficult a proposition that Descartes knew he had only a small window of opportunity to accomplish it (‘I have realized that if I wished … I would have to undertake … I have delayed so long’), and as we watch him do it, it has the feel of a momentous event (p. 75). We know as we witness it that this act is the dispossession of an entire cultural heritage, but most ironically, it is a dismantling of the master’s house with the master’s tools – an act of expulsion undertaken with an exquisite command of stylistic grace, spare yet supple with the rhythms of its rhetorical competence, clear not with the barrenness of unadorned instruction but with the elegant perfection of the accomplished rhetor. In the trajectory of the history of the genre of personal meditation, Descartes’s monologue is not like those of Montaigne or Rousseau, whose journals contain so much of the historical details of their lives. Its affinities are with another tradition that starts much earlier, with the interiority of Augustine’s speculative writings that surface in the meditations of Malebranche and Maine de Biran. In its earnestness, rigour, and devastating candour Augustine’s Confessions set the standard for this mode of philosophical self-interrogation. Its style of reflective inquiry (‘my thoughts, the innermost bowels of my soul, are torn apart with the crowding tumults of variety’), the subjective intimacy of conscious reflection (‘It is in you, my mind, that I measure time’), the motif of personal frailty as it touches this interiority (‘I am admonished by all this to return to my own self, and, with you to guide me, I entered into the innermost part of myself ’), and the pathos that flows from this frailty (‘oh that I might find my rest and peace in you’) taught the West a style of personal reflection that, I would maintain, resonates in the tenor of French phenomenology, where the speculative exercise of introspection is taken as a personal charge.18 Let us look at an early example. In attempting a synthesis of the self-reflection of Augustine and Descartes, Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1713) used as the material of rational analysis his own felt experience: If my own mind were my Reason or my light, then my mind would be the Reason of all intelligent beings. For I am sure that my reason, or the light which enlightens

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me, is common to all intelligent beings. No one else is able to feel my pain; but any man is able to see the same Truth which I contemplate.19

As the habits of this religious tradition are secularized they affect the character of humanistic thought. We hear it clearly in Maine de Biran (1766–1824) with the rise of the new discipline of psychology, turning his analytic gaze not on some hapless subject but upon himself: And our own existence? The phenomenon of sensibility, of thought? This host of modifications which succeed each other, of performances which repeat each other and accumulate since the beginning? This me, which escapes itself in the apparent simplicity and the extreme facility of its own acts, which ceaselessly eludes itself and is everywhere present to itself … how should one reflect on its habits, the most intimate, the most profound of all?20

This interrogation of elusive self-awareness bears the traces of Augustine’s rhetoric of inward searching, and in its cadence, the rhythm of its thought and subject matter, anticipates the French translation of the phenomenology of inner time consciousness from something clinical into something deeply existential. We can see this habit of turning abstract issues towards the feeling self in the nineteenth-century philosophy of Maurice Blondel, who unites a theory of rational action and an ethic of personal frailty in this characteristically French blending of the pathetic with the speculative: Between what I know, what I will and what I do there is always an inexplicable and disconcerting disproportion … . And these actions that I did not completely foresee, that I did not entirely order, once they are accomplished, weigh on all of my life and act upon me, seemingly, more than I acted upon them. I find I am like their prisoner; they sometimes turn against me, like an insubordinate son before his father. They have fixed the past, they encroach on the future.21

The examples can be multiplied ad infinitum, and this has been an all-too-brief sampling, but what I hope to have indicated is the particularly close bond of style of thought expressed in the terms of the personal, the existential, and the passional resident in this heritage. A great part of what Merleau-Ponty did in his phenomenology is contained in his prose, which cannot be separated from his subject matter, because it was through style that he approached the ineffable subject matter he was chasing after, and, as I will maintain, because the accumulated resources of the literary tradition I have invoked are manifest in his unique achievement as a philosophical thinker.

Phenomenology embodied Part of my claim is that the rhythm and form of Merleau-Ponty’s thought are part and parcel of the phenomenological quarry he is after. The manifest pathos of his struggle to name is an indirect reflection of what is at stake and carries a significant

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part of its philosophical import. He says this himself in his quite radical rejection of the use of the principle of correspondence for his task: But philosophy is not a lexicon, it is not concerned with ‘word-meanings’ [significations des mots], it does not seek a verbal substitute for the world we see, it does not transform it into something said, it does not install itself in the order of the said or of the written as does the logician in the proposition, the poet in the word, or the musician in the music. It is the things themselves, from the depths of their silence, that it wishes to bring to expression [conduire à l’éxpression].22

This placement of the things themselves between silence and expression situates the philosopher’s work, to borrow the equivocity of the Greek, in logos, speech-thought. What he is performing is an exercise in speech-thought, and it is a frustration of mine that commentary rarely tackles this aspect of Merleau-Ponty’s work – the extent to which what he is trying to say is embodied in how he is trying to say it. In doing this, it is not just his search for the right word (le mot juste) or the right turn of phrase, but rather, and in addition, the orchestration of the long period, the growing effect of its accumulations, and the structural effect of the composition that give some sense of the question at issue. Style is, of course, endemic to the French way of doing philosophy, but there is something intensified in Merleau-Ponty’s case. Because his subject matter is always receding to the periphery of what he wants to lay hold of, its elusiveness is reflected in the passion of his search. I will point out two technical features of this stylistic function: (a) how he adapts the fluency of classical prose sentence to the pathos of the phenomenal, and (b) how he constructs a modernist (Proustian) cadence to manifest the indirect evidence of the phenomenal. What classical rhetoric calls the periodic sentence, ‘a long and frequently involved sentence, marked by suspended syntax, in which the sense is not completed until the final word – usually with an emphatic climax’, is the characteristic rhythm of MerleauPonty’s thought.23 Its strategies of denial and deferral perfectly suit his subject. The power of the sense-claim reserved for the end, whether as the fulfilment of a thought or its disappointment, has just as much to do with the suspense of the deferral as the satisfaction of the resolution. Here in a typical example, the variations on the registers of negation that precede the climax accumulate their own momentum, allowing the period to sustain the interval of suspense as a technique of (not) naming: first a refusal of the possible alternatives (a paradox that sustains the energy of the negations all the way through), then a series of contrary-to-fact conditions, then a cascading series of negatives of various types, so that the revelation of the claim is held in abeyance until it can be sustained no longer: Cette intériorité-là ne précède pas l’arrangement matériel du corps humain, et pas davantage elle n’en résulte. Si nos yeux étaient faits de telle sorte qu’aucune partie de notre corps ne tombât sous notre regard, ou si quelque malin dispositif, nous laissant libre de promener nos mains sur les choses, nous empêchait de toucher notre corps – ou simplement si, comme certains animaux, nous avions des yeux latéraux, sans recoupement des champs visuels – ce corps qui ne se réfléchirait pas, ne se sentirait pas, ce corps presque adamantin, qui ne serait pas tout à fait

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chair, ne serait pas non plus un corps d’homme, et il n’y aurait pas d’humanité. Mais l’humanité n’est pas produite comme un effet par nos articulations, par l’implantation de nos yeux (et encore moins par l’existence des miroirs qui pourtant rendent seuls visible pour nous notre corps entier). Ces contingences et d’autres semblables, sans lesquelles il n’y aurait pas d’homme, ne font pas, par simple sommation, qu’il y ait un seul homme. L’animation du corps n’est pas l’assemblage l’une contre l’autre de ses parties – ni d’ailleurs la descente dans l’automate d’un esprit venu d’ailleurs, ce qui supposerait encore que le corps lui-même est sans dedans et sans ‘soi’. Un corps humain est là quand, entre voyant et visible, entre touchant et touché, entre un oeil et l’autre, entre la main et la main se fait une sorte de recroisement, quand s’allume létincelle du sentant-sensible, quand prend ce feu qui ne cessera pas de brûler, justquà ce que tel accident du corps défasse ce que nul accident n’aurait suffi à faire … .[sic].24

At the end of this weighted accumulation, the dam breaks and the positive claim reveals itself, driven home finally in a virtuosic inversion that combines a double negative with a contrary-to-fact condition, as though the simple statement could not contain the full measure of its positivity: ‘lighting the fire that will not stop burning until some accident of the body will undo what no accident would have sufficed to do’.25 The grammatical ellipsis at the very end is Merleau-Ponty’s final indication of the elusiveness of his quarry. I have said that Merleau-Ponty’s voice resonates with a long line of French writers who often make it difficult to distinguish their literary and philosophical expression. I have said that French phenomenology, even its earliest incarnations, exhibited this same tendency to style its thinking in personal cast and passional timbre. But if we want to find a prose comparable to Merleau-Ponty, it will not be in Bergson or Blondel or Marcel or Mounier. The closest cadences to those of Merleau-Ponty are those of the narrator Marcel in À le Recherche du Temps Perdu. Here is a typical Proustian sentence chosen almost at random: Oui si le souvenir grâce à l’oubli, n’a pu contracter aucun lien, jeter aucun chaînon entre lui et la minute présente, s’il est resté à sa date, s’il a gardé ses distances, son isolement dans le creux d’une vallée ou à la pointe d’un sommet, il nous fait tou à coup respirer un air nouveau précisément parce que c’est un air qu’on a respiré outrefois, cet air plus pur que les poètes ont vainement essayé de faire régner dans le Paradis et qui ne pourrait donner cette sensation profonde de renouvellement que s’il avait été respiré déjà, car les vrai paradis sont les paradis qu’on a perdus.26 [Yes, if, thanks to our ability to forget, a past recollection has been able to avoid any tie, any link with the present moment, if it has remained in its own place and time, if it has kept its distance, its isolation in the depths of a valley or on the tip of a mountain peak, it suddenly brings us a breath of fresh air – refreshing just because we have breathed it once before – of that purer air which the poets have vainly tried to establish in Paradise, whereas it could not convey that profound sensation of renewal if it had not already been breathed, for the only true paradise is always the paradise we have lost.27]

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This distinctive periodic style achieves its effect by an accumulation of repetitive forms, a differentiated series of anaphoric variations: anaphora (aucun lien … aucun chaînon), end rhyme (s’il est resté … s’il a gar∂é), amplification (ses distances, son isolement), opposition (d’une vallée ou à la pointe d’un sommet), eye rhyme (respire … respiré), chiasm (régner dans le Paradis … les paradis qu’on a perdus). This luxurious orchestration of rhythmical pairings convey, in their cumulative effect, in their interminable deferral, something of the dissipated idleness of the dilettante, but also in their tensive mixture of affirmation and denial, in the longing for a beauty that is impossible, an expression of the pathos of the human predicament. A similar repertoire of techniques deployed in a similar way – deferral through accumulation, anaphoric doublings, wrestling with the negative – gives MerleauPonty’s mode of expression a strikingly similar affective signature. The more complex periods are at the crests of his thought, when an idea has developed so much density that it rests for a moment in its own weight. This happens, for instance, in the fourth paragraph of ‘Reflection and Interrogation’, when after fighting through the series of denials I have already quoted, the text has to resolve, if only for a moment, on some firm ground: Car enfin, autant il est sûr que je vois ma table, que ma vision se termine en elle, qu’elle fixe et arrête mon regard de sa densité insurmontable, que même, moi qui, assis devant ma table, pense au pont de la Concorde, je ne suis pas alors dans mes pensées, je suis au pont de la Concorde, et qu’enfin à l’horizon de toutes ces visions ou quasi-visions, c’est le monde même que j’habite, le monde naturel et le monde historique, avec toutes les traces humaines dont il est fait; autant cette convictions est combattue, dès que j’y fais attention, par le fait même qu’il s’agit là d’une vision mienne.28 [For after all, sure as it is that I see my table, that my vision terminates in it, that it holds and stops my gaze with its insurmountable density, as sure as it is that when, seated before my table, I think of the Pont de la Concorde, I am not then in my thoughts but am at the Pont de la Concorde, and finally, sure as it is that at the horizon of all these visions or quasi-visions it is the world itself I inhabit, the natural world and the historical world, with all the human traces of which it is made – still as soon as I attend to it this conviction is just as strongly contested, by the very fact that this vision is mine.29]

This sentence has an extraordinarily complex temporal–spatial structure, a tourde-force really, enacting the philosophical claim it is making by its performance. It establishes two physical coordinates (ma table, le pont de la Concorde), united in one temporal locus (je pense), itself then stretched out twice: first, from its initial nodal point (elle fixe et arrête), the Husserlian nunc stans of my attention, the odd simultaneity of a sequential present (même, alors), now in the sequential mode of the Husserlian series of now points, and then, second, spreading out to include and pull in ‘the historical world, with all the human traces of which it is made’, and then further hallucinated by this oscillating double vision, the table and the bridge, so that the writer somehow sits ‘at the horizon of all these visions or quasi-visions’, what Proust called

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stereoscopic vision, an equivocity undermining his own solid sense of certain presence and perception (cette convictions est combattue), but finally re-secured to that singular gathering-in-a-point by the assurance of the writer’s own indubitable being, which he does not attach to the language of the self, but merely to the personal possessive (mienne). Crystallized and secured in that last word, its climactic force derives from its contrastive simplicity. The perceiver’s fluctuating, evanescent impressions are anchored in this endpoint against the precariousness of its dispersions, enacted in the structure of the prose period. We are quite a distance from Husserl now. Instead of scientific objectivity, we have flesh and blood, we have testimony. Merleau-Ponty is bringing to expression the thing itself, and the thing itself is himself, in his embodied presence. Ownership is achieved by a Proustian conquest, by the same accumulation of repetitions, the same variety of schemas, the same lyrical quest, but porting the same techniques of expression to the genre of philosophical claims. Merleau-Ponty is straining at something almost inexpressible, and so we feel constantly the pathos of his effort in the struggles of his prose to find just the right configuration. The pathos of the struggle lives in the restless performance of his restless search, expressed through its endless experimental trying on of form. But at the same time this restlessness – his performed inadequacy – is disciplined or contained by a lyricism that reassures us of the prize that animates the struggle. In the elegant orchestration of his periods with their rhythmical juxtapositions, accelerations, and retardations, expansions and contractions, inversions and repetitions, the secret that he cannot access is nevertheless present in its harmonic resonances. The text registers them indirectly like the waveform analysis that detects the geological layers of the earth’s core through its seismic vibrations. The passage I have just quoted is the opening of a paragraph that goes on for several pages, and we can note its larger context to show how meaning develops at this larger level of composition. ‘Reflection and Interrogation’ begins with the simple question of perception, the writer’s perception of a table, and he begins by engaging it in the conventional posture of the phenomenologist – the perceptual experience of this thing here now in its concreteness. But then invariably this question serves for MerleauPonty as an instigation to take off on his irrepressible Proustian flights, unable to be contained by the methodical attention of the scientific observer, transforming the banal act instantly into a wonderment: ‘Thus in perception we witness the miracle of a totality that surpasses what one thinks to be its conditions or its parts, that from afar holds them under its power, as if they existed only on its threshold and were destined to lose themselves in it.’30 Why is the dry phenomenological investigation always transformed for him into a miracle? In conformity with standard phenomenological practice, Merleau-Ponty’s reflective meditation improvises itself out of the rigour of its effort to exhaust all aspects of the initial question, what seeing is, what it means for a table to be at the end of my perception. Thus it is natural that he should turn to the perspective of another: ‘What if I took not only my own views of myself into account but also the other’s views of himself and of me?’ (8) This rumination brings its own questions: ‘But upon what then do they open?’ and to its own resolution: ‘And it is this unjustifiable certitude of a sensible world common to us that is the seat of truth within us’ (11). Following the train of thought this far as it develops out of the initial

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question is already enough to see the method. Starting with a typical phenomenological question implies, incites, and grants Merleau-Ponty access to a universe of epistemic, ontological, and metaphysical questions. He will not be contained. To ask about perception is an opportunity to address who the perceiving is, his relation to the world, and then his own humanity: ‘Philosophy does not raise questions and does not provide answers that would little by little fill in the blanks. The questions are within our life, within our history’ (105). Merleau-Ponty’s humanity will not be contained within the arid limits of its own scientific ambition. I have dilated on the matter of style in Merleau-Ponty because my claim is that the pathos of his phenomenology is figured in his prose, and that one way to understand Ricoeur’s relation to Merleau-Ponty is by their respective relation to style and method. So to him I now turn.

Ricoeur and the irruptions of the flesh The project on which Ricoeur set out, once he had gained his intellectual footing, was to bridge phenomenology, hermeneutics, and analytic philosophy, all of which he believed made crucial contributions to what he conceived as a philosophical anthropology. This syncretic project sought to articulate these various discourses in an integrated discourse. For example, Ricoeur’s 1960 essay, ‘The Question of the Subject’ attempts to join the topographical mapping of the unconscious in psychoanalysis to ‘the objective science of signs’ as the portal between the unconscious and culture in structuralism by means of the reflexive operations of hermeneutics as mediator between these two operations.31 His early masterpiece, Freud: An Interpretation, attempts an integration of psychology, phenomenology, and theological mythopoetics under the framework of a hermeneutics of faith and suspicion. His middle-period masterpiece, Time and Narrative, bridges what he called the world of the text and the world of the reader by theorizing the permeable membrane between the lifeworld of personal experience and the distanced practice of reading, fusing literary interpretation, historical research, and philosophical metaphysics in a unified, if incomplete, theory. Oneself as Another takes a stepwise progression from a semantic, pragmatic, and narrative to an ethical approach towards a unified conception of personal identity. His late great work, Memory, History, Forgetting, brings together history, rhetoric, legal studies, and political theory in a meditation on the troubled overlap between personal, cultural, and institutional being. In all of these efforts of integration he developed his own peculiar, powerful, and sometimes devastatingly beautiful brand of analysis and description, but his writing style was not pivotal to his project in the way that it was for Merleau-Ponty. The suturing of explanation and understanding, memory and imagination, religion and philosophy, cognitive science and hermeneutics, rhetoric and ideology, and so on were all instantiations of his programme of architectonic bridge-building between discourses, and as such, his work is, to use his own dialectical formulation, more explanative than understanding. He conceived his writing as a kind of exchange, a habituation to pass-throughs in and out of relevant academic fields, overseen at the top by ‘a philosophy of language’.32

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Such joint operations would marry different idioms of discourse, different conceptual fields, finding, if not a common tongue, a manner of synthesis. I have called this method of working architectonic. It attempted a collaborative synthesis and is to be judged by the success of that collaboration. Looking at it as a style of thinking on the page, it is a kind of metadiscourse that acts analytically, because it operates at one remove from the intellectual operations he is welding together. It passes in and out of various discursive registers, but it stands in sharp contrast to the poetic exploration of the boundaries of a feeling language that occupies most of Merleau-Ponty’s thought and work. One way of characterizing this difference is to say that Ricoeur was simply working at a synthesis, and that the architectonic work he engaged in includes the intimate phenomenological work of Merleau-Ponty as one of the fields that have to be synthesized. But interestingly, Ricoeur himself took the relationship to Merleau-Ponty differently. He characterized Merleau-Ponty’s project as a ‘partial failure’ because ‘from the beginning, he placed the phenomenological attitude and the objective attitude … in opposition’.33 Ricoeur accused Merleau-Ponty of the subsumption opposite to that of which Merleau-Ponty accused ‘the scientist’: ‘The phenomenologist tries to incorporate the objective viewpoint in the subjective viewpoint, to show that a synchrony of speech envelops the diachrony of language’ (248). Ricoeur’s meliorative project was to show ‘how past language lives in present language’, that is how structures are at work in immediate invention (248). In good hermeneutic fashion, Ricoeur insisted that system is indeed not a separate and prior object but emergent and caught up in each speech act: ‘Can a system exist anywhere but in the act of speech?’ (249) This seems to me to be right, but a judgement about Merleau-Ponty’s relation to this view is a judgement we can postpone, because it does not relate directly to the question of influence I am pursuing here, which is the extent to which, pace Ricoeur’s own assessment and despite the methodological difference I have just described, Merleau-Ponty’s style of thought had a deep subterranean effect on Ricoeur’s work. Let us look at how Merleau-Ponty’s presence can be felt in Ricoeur’s project. There are a few isolated instances in the early work where Ricoeur breaks out into full phenomenological mode. Although Ricoeur’s thematic focus is Husserlian, his rhythm and cadence is pure Merleau-Ponty: At the beginning of our investigation of the idea of perspective, we said that our body was primordially – that is, before we noted its perspectival function – an opening onto the world … . Openness indicates that my point of view is transgressed, that I am not enclosed within each silhouette, but that I have access to a space of expressibility through the very appearance of the thing under its successive aspects.34

Abandoning the Husserlian voice of phenomenological description, he dives right into the subjectivist poetics of Merleau-Ponty: ‘Feeling is understood, by contrast, as the manifestation of a relation to the world that constantly restores our complicity with it, our inherence and belonging in it, something more profound than all polarity and duality’ (85). When Ricoeur arrives at the theme which so preoccupied Merleau-Ponty,

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the constitutive bond between self and world, it would be hard to find more faithful explication: For it is on the things elaborated by the work of objectification that feeling projects its affective correlates, its felt qualities: the lovable and the hateful, the desirable and the loathsome, the sad and the joyous; thus it seems to play the game of the object. But since these qualities are not objects facing a subject but the intentional expression of an undivided bond with the world, feeling appears at the same time as a coloring of the soul, as an affection: it is this landscape which is cheerful, and it is I who am elated. Feeling expresses my belonging to this landscape that, in turn, is the sign and cipher of my inwardness. Now, since the whole of our language has been worked out in the dimension of objectivity, in which the subject and object are distinct and opposed, feeling can be described only paradoxically as the unity of an intention and an affection, of an intention toward the world and an affection of the self. This paradox, however, is only the sign pointing toward the mystery of feeling, namely, the undivided connection of my existence with beings and being through desire and love. (88–9)

From Baudelaire to Proust to Merleau-Ponty to Ricoeur, a philosophical anthropology accepts the principle of correspondence: ‘It is this landscape which is cheerful, and it is I who am elated. Feeling expresses my belonging to this landscape that, in turn, is the sign and cipher of my inwardness’ (89). Most notably, Ricoeur acknowledges the limits of objective description in approaching this ontological bond: ‘We betray this unity of intention and affection as soon as we allow ourselves to be taken in by the language of objectivity in which we are condemned to express it’ (89). But then Ricoeur begins to turn the corner from what has up to this point been a full embrace of an existential phenomenology, and starts to explicitly negotiate its parameters. He talks about this, in 1960, in the terms of formalism: The virtue in formalism was in transforming what was at first only an immense and confused emotion into a philosophic problem. But what has been gained in rigor has been lost in richness and depth. Is it possible to win back that plenitude by beginning with this rigor? Is it possible to understand feeling beginning with what reduced it and excluded it?35

This is more than a rhetorical question, and Ricoeur will spend the rest of his life responding to it. From a programmatic perspective, Ricoeur thought about the connection with Merleau-Ponty and established the boundary explicitly himself. It is Husserl’s use of metaphor to describe internal time consciousness that gave Ricoeur the opportunity to situate the limit point for analytic description: ‘These metaphors in no way constitute a figurative language that we might translate into a literal language. They constitute the only language available to the work of returning toward the origin. The use of metaphor is thus the first sign of the non-mastery of constituting consciousness over consciousness constituted in this way.’36 Because at some point Husserl acknowledges

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that in the description of time, ‘for all this, names are lacking’, Ricoeur specifies a particular legitimacy for this territory that Merleau-Ponty would make his own: ‘From metaphor to a lack of words, it is this failure of language that points toward the ultimate “impressional” consciousness, concerning which we may say it is the flux that constitutes it, in constituting itself – and not the reverse’ (268). But having marked out the incapacity of literal language, on the one hand, and the inchoateness of impressional consciousness, on the other, he spent the balance of his life ferrying between them. We can see this ambassadorial function clearly at the other end of his career, at a time when neurophysics was emerging as the latest manifestation of the objectivist challenge. Ricoeur engaged in a book-length dialogue with the neurophysicist Jean-Pierre Changeux, and the nub of their debate running all the way through the discussion was the limit of objective description for understanding consciousness. The engagement was genuinely a dialogue, because Ricoeur tries to find a common ground, and his double allegiance becomes clear. He reaches back through Merleau-Ponty to Augustine to describe the phenomenon of introspection: ‘This is what I find expressed in the phrase for intérieur, one’s heart of hearts – literarily, a “forum” in which one speaks to oneself. This heart of hearts has its own particular status that it would appear you will never succeed in explaining in your science.’37 To throw a bridge between the internal and external worlds, Ricoeur invests worldly space and time with affective resonance: ‘In the case of the most memorable events, these places are “marked” by collective memory, as a result of which the events linked to them are made memorable; they are inscribed in geographical space just as commemorable events are inscribed in historical time’ (145). The Proustian language of inscription here is not merely metaphorical, since Ricoeur wonders out loud ‘whether it is possible to escape the connection between memory and language’ (145). Then there is the shared attribute that I have called pathos. Pathos is less embodied in Ricoeur’s work than thematized as the consequence and attribute of the split in phenomenological being-in-the-world. Between action and passion, production and reception, we are creatures of the in-between, shuttling back and forth endlessly. The bimodal structure of this being and its affordances constitutes its passional and affective dimensions, and leads in a series of steps which Ricoeur outlines in Fallible Man to the pathos of the human condition. It is a dimension of the anthropology that complicates his attachment to analytic idioms, from the monotonality of Anglophone empiricism and rationalism, and the more consistent objectivity of Husserlian phenomenology, and it is here that we hear Merleau-Ponty’s voice creeping back in. It is simply impossible to imagine Austin, Putnam, Parfit, or Husserl writing something like this: The ‘heart’, the restless heart, would be the fragile moment par excellence. All the disproportions that we have seen culminate in the disproportion of happiness and character would be interiorized in the heart. But the question is whether a philosophy of the ‘heart’ is possible. It must be a philosophy which is not a relapse into the pathetique, but which is brought to the level of reason – in the literal sense of the word level – to the level of that reason which is not satisfied with the pure and the radical, but which demands the total, the concrete.38

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Although it is especially the case in the earlier works, Ricoeur will to varying degrees find himself breaking into Merleau-Ponty’s register.39 Sometimes the idiom is patently obvious, as is often the case in Fallible Man: ‘By means of feeling, objects touch me.’40 ‘The universal function of feeling is to bind together. It connects what knowledge divides; it binds me to things, to being, to beings’ (131). In the middle-period work, Oneself as Another, Ricoeur at various points adopts both idiom and theme, averring ‘that the selfhood of oneself implies otherness to such an intimate degree that one cannot be thought of without the other, that instead one passes into the other’.41 In the introduction to that book Ricoeur consciously reflected on the need to attempt this chiasmatic effort: ‘It is because we think and speak in concepts that language has to repair, as it were, the loss caused by conceptualization’ (28). But he balanced this need with another, which might as well have been spoken directly to Merleau-Ponty, because it was the balance he was struggling to discover: ‘The recourse to analysis, in the sense given to this term by analytic philosophy, is the price to pay for a hermeneutics characterized by the indirect manner of positing the self’ (17). I have said that Ricoeur’s writings are architectonic, which constitutes his thinking as an analytic project, a structure predetermined for a given problem methodically built up. I have to qualify this characterization immediately, because something else does frequently seep in. There is around the edges of every analytic effort a marked inflection of voice, the encroachment of the pathos of humanity at the second degree. Frequently it is just an inspired turn of phrase that moves the thought out of the register of the analytic, and this happens to an extent that is not incidental, not simply a stylistic flourish, but rather a value: ‘Le symbole donne à penser’.42 At other times Ricoeur seems to find a nearly perfect equipoise between the phenomenological investment in sense and the analytic distance of observation: Language does not constitute a world for itself. It is not even a world. Because we are in the world and are affected by situations, we try to orient ourselves in them by means of understanding … . Language is for itself the order of the Same. The world is its Other. The attestation of this otherness arises from language’s reflexivity with regard to itself, whereby it knows itself as being in being in order to bear on being.43

A frequent point of poetic contamination is when Ricoeur describes how he intends to think through an issue as the structure of a problem. He will chart his intended path through it as a narrative journey, grafting his rationalist and methodological intention to a passional adventure: If we so heavily underscore the two figures of ideology and utopia, it is because they repeat, at the other end of the trajectory through which this essay moves, the ambiguities and aporias that arise at our starting point … . A philosophical investigation into the problem of imagination cannot but encounter, right from the start, a series of obstacles, paradoxes, and stumbling blocks that, perhaps, explain the relative eclipse of the problem of imagination in contemporary philosophy.44

In these moments, Ricoeur faces Merleau-Ponty. But it is more emphatically a mixed mode, and we have to ask what is lost and gained by this genre of integration. We

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can attempt this assessment by asking how Merleau-Ponty remains within the register of pathos. Despite or perhaps because of its rigour, the structure of MerleauPonty’s word-thought is a kind of meditation, evoking the classic French tradition of the essay, a building thought, one thing leading to another, as though a reflection is simply developing the train of its thought discursively. The rhythm of the prose is as various as the novelist’s; like the waves on a beach, it masses quietly, developing an accumulated momentum, cresting, then subsiding, moving on. The poetic mode is what allows Merleau-Ponty to incorporate reflection without leaving sensibility. He has the philosopher’s analytic distance, but it is a distance that is never cleaved from its essential belonging. The vast majority of Ricoeur’s analytic work occupies a middle ground between the close immediacy of phenomenological description and the distanced objectivity of logical and empirical analysis, but already here he could establish its basic orientation: ‘By whatever name this primordial duality is called – opinion and science, intuition and understanding, certainty and truth, presence and sense – it forbids us to formulate a philosophy of perception prior to a philosophy of discourse and forces us to work them out together, one with the other, one by the other.’45 The relation between feeling and knowing is complex; there is, on the one hand, a ‘differentiation from knowing’, but on the other hand, a ‘completion in feeling’ (91). Ricoeur’s precise formula for the role of feeling, ‘proportionately to knowing yet different from knowing’, creates enough daylight from Merleau-Ponty that he can announce a method and programme with a distinct hierarchy, ‘in order to understand the range of feeling in light of the range of reason’ (91, 92). The rest of the work follows from this. A philosophy of discourse and a philosophy of perception are thereafter worked out together, ‘one with the other, one by the other’.46 Although this formulation seems very close to the dialectic to which Merleau-Ponty was committed, the separation of the different philosophies as discursive fields was decisive. What comes to preoccupy Ricoeur’s thought in the decades after Fallible Man was a philosophy of discourse, the philosophy of perception acting as an underlayment that would periodically irrupt to the surface, or live embedded in the pathos of his analytic, inflected in a way that analytic philosophers found alienating, but for those who can hear it, it makes these other philosophical discourses sound anaemic in its wake. Merleau-Ponty was not just one piece in the mosaic of Ricoeur’s architectonic synthesis. His sounding of Husserlian phenomenology in the register of existential pathos helped Ricoeur keep faith with the full humanity of his discourse as he extended its analytic range. He was never able, ultimately, to separate his philosophy from ‘the intentionality peculiar to feeling’.47

Part Three

Hermeneutics in Dialogue with Phenomenology

9

The Metaphysical Dimension of Hermeneutics Jean Grondin

Hermeneutics and metaphysics are two disciplines one is not used to seeing together. Indeed, one often sees in hermeneutics a ‘post-metaphysical’ form of thinking. This is claimed not only because metaphysics would belong to a bygone age of philosophy but also because hermeneutics would contain or imply a repudiation of metaphysics (as appears evident in the work of Heidegger, for instance). Hermeneutics, it seems, highlights our interpretive relation to the world: to say that our world-experience is ‘hermeneutical’ means that it is governed by worldviews, ‘frameworks’, and interpretations that would impose themselves upon reality and make it impossible to speak of the things as they are in themselves. If, for hermeneutics, ‘everything is a matter of interpretation’, which is a way of renewing the universality claim of classical philosophy under hermeneutical auspices, there would be no access to Being, much less an ultimate account of Being, which would signify the end of metaphysics, understood as a reflection on Being and its ultimate principles. This is a non- or even anti-metaphysical reading of hermeneutics that was promoted by postmodern authors and readers of Hans-Georg Gadamer such as Gianni Vattimo and Richard Rorty. It is striking to note, however, that the most important representatives of hermeneutical thought, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur, never claimed that their thinking wanted to overcome metaphysics. On the contrary, they at times discretely underlined the metaphysical bent of their thinking. This is particularly evident in the case of Gadamer, on whom I will concentrate here.

Two revealing testimonies of Gadamer At the end of Truth and Method, Gadamer unfolds his grand thesis on our relationship to Being that would happen through language and which is summed up in his famous, albeit ambiguous, dictum, ‘Being that can be understood is language’. It is in this context that he writes that hermeneutics ‘leads us back into the problem dimension of classical metaphysics’ (führt uns in die Problemdimension der klassischen Dimension der Hermeneutik zurück).1 This passage is seldom discussed or thought to its end in Gadamer scholarship. It does suggest that in the eyes of Gadamer hermeneutics

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does not lead us beyond metaphysics, but on the contrary back into it. I would like to suggest here how this is the case by developing some of these overseen and underplayed metaphysical elements of his thought.2 The other passage comes from a less well-known text titled ‘Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Metaphysics’ from 1983. Gadamer writes in the last sentence, which always enjoys a particular hermeneutical significance, of this text: ‘Phenomenology, hermeneutics and metaphysics are not three different philosophical points of views, but philosophy itself.’3 This affirmation is worth pondering for it says essential things and goes against the grain of some of the ‘conventional wisdom’, which is not always wise, regarding phenomenology and hermeneutics. It certainly does not present metaphysics as something that one should overcome at all cost. On the contrary, it says that it corresponds to the act of philosophizing itself. (Gadamer uses the verbal expression Philosophieren, which is perhaps reminiscent of Kant’s bon mot at the end of his Critique that one cannot learn philosophy, only to philosophize.) It remains to be seen in what sense this is the case. I would like to give an idea of this sense by scrutinizing the metaphysical import and consequences of certain central tenets of Truth and Method. I speak of the metaphysical import and consequences, because Gadamer appears very discreet when he alludes to this metaphysical dimension of his thought, as he obviously does. This discretion is perhaps attributable to the shadow that his master Heidegger cast on him. This is why I prefer to speak of the metaphysical ‘dimension’ of Gadamer’s hermeneutics, which is real, albeit often disregarded.

The metaphysics in the title, Truth and Method By its own admission, Gadamer’s book wants to account for the truth experience of the sciences of the spirit (to translate literally the term Geisteswissenschaften, which corresponds to the humanities). Gadamer hopes to free them from the purely methodological and methodical understanding they have of themselves. It is a noble project, all the more so considering the fact that this methodo-centric tendency has only accelerated since 1960, when the book was first published. Many of its analyses remain very actual in this regard. But the mere fact that Gadamer likes to speak of an experience of ‘truth’ in the sciences of the ‘spirit’ is not insignificant for an inquiry into the metaphysical dimension of this thought. ‘Truth’ (irrespective of the alphabetical order in German where Method would normally precede Wahrheit or truth) is the very first word in its title. Gadamer can thus hardly be lumped together with the postmodern writers who are eager to bid farewell to the notion of truth and precisely because they judge it to be too metaphysical.4 Quite on the contrary, Gadamer seeks to reconquer or rediscover an experience of truth that a purely methodological understanding of knowledge would recover. Gadamer insistently speaks of an ‘experience’ of truth in the strong sense to underline the fact that it transforms the one who experiences it. There is something metaphysical, and courageous, in this attempt to give back to the humanities, the ‘sciences of the spirit’, their truth ‘density’: they are not only concerned with historical

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or psychological accounts of cultural artefacts but provide us with hard truths. Did Aristotle not say that first philosophy was a ‘science of aletheia’ (Met. 993 b 20)? This remains true of Gadamer’s metaphysics. This truth pertains more particularly to those sciences that the German tongue has the genius of calling the sciences of the spirit, the Geisteswissenschaften. To be sure, this is the conventional term, used without thinking (always a bad thing), to characterize what we would call the humanities or the social sciences. The history of the German term reveals, however, that the notion stems at least in part from the Hegelian distinction of the ‘real’ sciences between those of nature and of spirit (Geist). Gadamer never wanted to amputate the humanities of their spiritual dimension5 – quite the opposite, as illustrated by his lifelong goal of doing justice to their truth experience.

The truth of art: A metaphysical experience The starting point of this rediscovery of the truth experience in the humanities is provided, as is well known, by the experience of art. Gadamer’s main argument in this opening section is rife with metaphysical undertones. His basic idea is that art is not a matter of mere subjective play or ‘entertainment’ which would distract us from the seriousness of life. Gadamer sees in this widespread view of art as subjective play and entertainment a trivialization of the experience of art. This is why he presents, on the contrary, art as an experience of ‘truth’, better still as a ‘revelation’ about the ‘essence’ of things. This is so much the case that Gadamer speaks of a ‘play of art’ that is almost autonomous since it is the things themselves that come to present themselves in it in a form of epiphany, as if the artist had no say in the matter. (One can regret Gadamer’s omission of the point of view of the artist, but it is not a real fault of Gadamer’s analysis since his task is not to account for the conditions of the production of a work of art but to describe the truth experience that takes place in it.) What is ‘revealed’ (sich kundtut, offenbart sich, manifestiert sich, ereignet sich, geschieht, etc. are Gadamer’s favourite expressions in this regard) in art is, for Gadamer, what remains that is, the essence of things. Every artwork is an illustration of this, but I like to think in this respect of Goya’s picture of ‘The Third of May’ (because it is while contemplating it that I understood Gadamer) which presents poor Spanish peasants fired upon at point-blank range by Napoleon’s soldiers; this depicts the occupation of Spain in 1808, and indeed this is the essence of all occupation! All the same, Picasso’s Guernica tells us what happened, as do Leonardo’s Annunciation, Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, Milo’s Venus de Milo, or ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’ of Bob Dylan. The artwork, says Gadamer, confers an ‘increase in Being’ (Seinszuwachs) to that which it brings to the fore; it calls attention to the ‘true Being’ that comes to be presented in the work, so much so that this Being cannot be distinguished from its transformation into a work of art (Verwandlung ins Gebilde). Gadamer insists in this regard as much on the ontological as on the cognitive import of the work of art. He emphasizes its ontological dimension to counter the tendency to relegate the artwork to the realm of illusion or appearance, and its cognitive import to protest against the exclusion of art from the realm of knowledge. One will note in this respect that when Gadamer speaks of truth, Being,

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knowledge, and even of essence, he never attempts, as did Heidegger, to redefine these terms. He takes them as they can be found in common parlance and never wants to modify their meaning. Nowhere does he claim, for instance, that the notion of truth as correspondence (adaequatio) is derivative or must be overcome. This approach of art displays strong metaphysical traits that are impossible to overlook. First, it puts the emphasis on what Gadamer likes to call the ‘transcendence of art’.6 By this he means that the artwork speaks to us from a certain height. It elevates our gaze and makes us participants in an ‘experience of truth’ that overwhelms us. If the artwork distracts us from our daily routine, it is to invite us to dwell in it in order to experience a form of truth that we could not otherwise experience (the artwork, Gadamer often says, resists any attempt to translate it into another medium than its own). This sojourn in the vicinity and height of the work, which is at the same time an encounter with ourselves, leads us to a new perspective on the essence of things. Art thus provides for a gathering, an elevation, to the altitude of the work. Second, it is as important to observe that what the artwork has to say from its height or transcendence is at the same time something that addresses us directly, in the middle of our situated finitude, as it were. Every artwork, insists Gadamer, says to me: ‘you must change your life!’ The formula, which is taken from a verse of Rilke (‘Du mußt Dein Leben ändern’, in his poem on The Archaic Torso of Apollon), but also from the Don Giovanni finale, stresses that the artwork has something spiritual in that it induces a metamorphosis of the one who dwells in it: the one who has read Kafka’s Castle or Waiting for Godot will not see life with the same eyes. The truth of the artwork lets us discover the essence and also the sense (following the felicitous assonance) of things, and often much more forcefully than the truth assured by method alone. Methodical truth is most honourable – it is indispensable, and Gadamer does not want to ‘criticize’ it (which would be ludicrous) – but the truth of art carries with it another metaphysical stature. The grand lesson of art is to make us discover another experience of truth than that of science, where the implication of the spectator or the participant – to use a Platonic term – is not a catastrophe, following Gadamer’s image of a ‘fusion of horizons’, where the horizons of the work and the interpreter are fused into one another. Gadamer suggests by this that the implication of the spectator or the interpreter in what she understands does not lead to relativism since the interpreter experiences a truth that is irrecusable. This notion will bear fruit in the second section of his opus.

The metaphysical truth of the humanities The purpose of the second section of Truth and Method is to rediscover (wiedergewinnen) an experience of truth which has been lost, one can say a lost metaphysical experience: that of the humanities. For Gadamer, the humanities do not deliver a barrage of information on the worldviews of culture and society that could be considered as forms of knowledge because they are methodically verifiable and stand the test of mathematical and objective criteria. Far more than that, they teach us truths and reallife lessons, in the sense that history used to be seen as a magistra vitae.

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The main argument of this second part is precisely to teach that the truth offered by the humanities is more akin to the ‘metaphysical’ experience of art (where truth happens as a revelation and an increase in Being), which implies the spectator in its play, than to that of the exact sciences, which presuppose the exclusion of the standpoint of the spectator. The truth of the humanities is furthermore an experience that resists any historical relativization, whereas the truth of science can itself be relativized by history and always is. It is important to recall this because Gadamer is often perceived as a proponent of relativism on the grounds that the second part of his work promises to elevate ‘historicity to the rank of a principle’.7 It has often been thought that Gadamer resolutely defends historicist theses in this second part, and some of its catchphrases have inspired Gadamer’s postmodern heirs (‘we do not understand better, only differently’, ‘meaning always goes beyond its author’). But when one reads him more carefully, it becomes clear that his main goal is, on the contrary, to overcome this historicism. In a key chapter of the second part, Gadamer famously calls attention to works that transcend their time and that are called for that reason ‘classics’. One could thus speak of the ‘metaphysical’ character of what has been elevated to the status of a classic. This topic raised heated debates in the 1960s, with the literary critic Hans Robert Jauss, for instance, when the assault against the classics (and all that reeked of ‘tradition’) was the order of the day. This chapter recalled that in the humanities there are works and references that ‘stand out’ and that therefore merit being called ‘classics’ (a distinction that is already obvious in the works, among the millions that would be available, that we choose to read and to teach; in fact, according to Gadamer, this choice is not really ours since it is by and large the work of history, which is also accurate). One only needs to think of the important works of art, of the past as well as of the present, of the interpretations of them that have become standard or influential, of the philosophical masterpieces of Plato, Aristotle, Thomas, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, or Levinas. Philosophy and the humanities thrive on these works. What is ‘classical’, Gadamer argues, is that which transcends history, while obviously remaining a fruit of history. It is precisely this mystery, this fusion of past and present, that fascinates Gadamer in the example of the classical: the classics do not fall from the sky, they have a genesis, they are the expression of their time, captured in those works (in the sense that Hegel could say that philosophy is its time captured by thought), but to which they cannot be reduced, because they can be read and studied today as if they were written for our time. Their truth transcends the context of their epoch (which is not the case in the works that history forgets, at times wrongfully, but in this case it is because one deems they should be or become again classics: history teaches that these ‘renaissances’ are the stuff history is made of). There is an important metaphysical idea here about history: the undoubtable historicity of works and spiritual productions does not have to lead one to relativism. Quite the opposite: not all the works produced by history are of equal value. Some stand out because they help us to better understand the sense of things and of what we are. That is why we call them ‘classics’, that is, inescapable milestones of our humanity, however their estimation may and must vary. It goes without saying that the canon will also vary because the present always has a say in this, whether it is conscious of it or not. Some authors who were once very highly regarded and

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considered as classics – one could think of Cicero or Bergson, for instance – are read much less today (but they could become again widely read classics). Far from calling into question the idea of truth, which is often viewed as the obvious consequence of historicism, historicity is thus what permits us to distinguish what remains, what is fruitful from what is less so. It is the purpose of what Gadamer calls the ‘work of history’ (Wirkungsgeschichte) to help us distinguish the prejudices of understanding that do not hold up from those that are really illuminating. Gadamer’s metaphysical insight here is that history does not dissolve everything into the same oblivion (‘all is vanity’, omnia transit); it remembers things. Gadamer insists on the orientation that history provides us with in the selection of prejudices (or avenues of interpretation) that are fertile (and who does not depend on them when seeking to orient oneself in the field of philosophy, art history, or history?). Many believe that he goes too far, decrying his ‘historical optimism’ by recalling that history can also cover up and is often written by the winners (Benjamin). This criticism is not unwarranted, yet one must recall that it is also possible to write history from the point of view of the victims. One can indeed speak of the Spanish Civil War from the vantage point of the ‘Republicans’ who ‘lost’; and who is really interested today in this history from the point of view of Franco? But is a historical pessimism on the whole preferable to Gadamer’s relative optimism? It would be far more demobilizing. Gadamer unquestionably has hope in history, but what is there to gain from not sharing that hope? Gadamer also teaches us to respect the works that we study in the humanities and the history that has handed them down to us. This might sound old-fashioned, but the first attitude towards works of the spirit is, for him, one of openness to what they have to say. Critique, deconstruction, and mistrust are not excluded – and can never be as long as we remain thinking reeds (Pascal) – but they are not primary. The works that history and its present have handed down to us are works with which we must engage in dialogue. This openness to the sense of a work – instead of its genesis or structural organization, which interest other conceptions of the humanities which have their merits (source critique is absolutely indispensable) – has a metaphysical ring to it. This is so much the case, Gadamer claims in this context, that when we try to understand works we do so out of an ‘anticipation of perfection’. It means ‘that only what constitutes a unity of meaning is intelligible’.8 I can only read or understand something by supposing, charitably perhaps, that what is said forms a perfectly coherent and intelligible sense. ‘So when we read a text we always [!] assume this perfection’.9 To be sure, this expectation will more often than not be disappointed. It is then, and only in those situations, claims Gadamer, that we have to rely on more suspicious types of reading, of a genetic, psychological, or sociological nature like those favoured by the depth hermeneutics of ideology critique or psychoanalysis. However, for Gadamer, this type of reading is not primary because it does not let the works speak for themselves, that is, say what it is they have to say. For the reader who lets the works speak and even seeks to make their point stronger, instead of forcing them into the straitjacket of an ideological reading, the expectation of perfection is the regulatory ideal. One often says that perfection is not of this world, but a thinker of human finitude such as Gadamer is not afraid to state that it is at the root of every effort of understanding.

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There is no need to recall in this context the metaphysical origins and underpinnings of this notion of ‘perfection’. Finally, Gadamer’s analysis of the humanities courageously recalls that historical truths are truths in which we partake and that respond to our quest for meaning. We study the works of the spirit because they enrich our understanding of meaning and of a meaning in which we recognize ourselves. The truth of the humanities, Gadamer claims, is geared towards its meaningful application in our lives; it is always understood out of our questions and essential concerns, which it in turn helps to broaden. In this type of truth, it is not the distance of the scientist to its object that offers the sole guarantee of knowledge. As, if not more, important is the participation of the scholar in her object that speaks anew for our time, thanks to her translation, which remains all the more successful in that this translation or application remains unnoticed. Historical truth transcends its time: stemming from the past, it addresses a present that recognizes itself in it. This truth enlarges our horizons, contributes to our humanity, to our humanization, and carries to this extent a metaphysical trust.

The ontological bent of hermeneutics The metaphysical import of Truth and Method is obviously more prominent in its third part, since it evokes the discipline of general metaphysics, or ontology, when speaking in its title of an ‘ontological turn of hermeneutics’. It is true that the meaning of this turn remains somewhat enigmatic and hidden. Assuredly, Gadamer does not develop in this section a full-fledged ontology, like what can be found in the textbooks which nobody reads anymore. He speaks more modestly of an ontological ‘turn’ (Wende). In what does it consist? On a more formal level, one can say that what is at stake is a philosophical enlargement of hermeneutics. It signifies that hermeneutics can be something else and more than a simple methodology of the human sciences, in the sense of Dilthey, a sense which remained current when Gadamer published Truth and Method.10 We all know that it is not a methodology Gadamer wants to deliver. His proposition is that of a more universal and ontological hermeneutics. But in what does this ontological turn consist more positively? We recognized that we are not dealing with a metaphysics or an ontology that would be developed in a systematic way, but what is its ultimate point? Are we only dealing, as is widely assumed, with a general ‘ontology’ of our historical condition? This common answer is not entirely off the mark, but it has the inconvenience of overlooking Gadamer’s expressed intention to overcome the problematic of historicism. In order to grasp this ontological shift, one has to start with the famous dictum that crystallizes so many debates, and misunderstandings, about hermeneutics: ‘Being that can be understood is language.’ We know how Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo understood this principle.11 They saw and celebrated in it the expression of Gadamer’s historicism and nominalism (disregarding the fact that Gadamer was expressly criticizing nominalism in those sections of his book). They pressed upon Gadamer – in what has to be described as an infelicitous fusion of horizons12 –

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their own understandings of history and language according to which it would be impossible for us to transcend our linguistic, historical, and cultural ‘frameworks’. ‘Being that can be understood is language’ would basically mean – contrary to what the dictum expressly states – that we would have no access whatsoever to Being (!), since all discourse on Being would be just that, discourse (an argument reminiscent of Gorgias’ treatise on Non-Being). This ‘mediating’ linguistic component would serve as a screen or ‘frame’ for Being, which is deemed inaccessible. Rorty draws from this a nominalist pragmatism (some descriptions appear more ‘useful’ than others, but none is ever verifiable) and Vattimo a ‘nihilist ontology’ (for which Being is ‘nothing’). I have discussed Vattimo’s perspective elsewhere, which I find consequent for a nihilist but which I fear fails to do justice to hermeneutics.13 What I would like to do here is to suggest a more metaphysical reading of Gadamer’s dictum. In this adage, ‘Being that can be understood is language’, it is striking that the first word in it is … Being. It is thus a saying on Being, out of Being. What does it say about Being? It states first and justly that it can be understood. If this banality has any importance, it is because it is often alleged that, according to Gadamer, Being could not be understood, say, ‘in itself ’, since it could only be grasped through language or our cultural ‘frameworks’. This is not what the saying states. It says that we are very well able to understand what is, that is, Being (we can of course also misrepresent it, but this misunderstanding presupposes that understanding is possible): mutual understanding is possible, we can also understand the world, the functioning of a human heart, of a flower, historical events, just as we understand what we are reading and what it is about, we (generally) can sort out what is a matter of fact from what is a matter of opinion, and so on. In short – and it is almost painful to have to say this triviality in a world where the incomprehensibility of all things is so much celebrated – we can understand the world and Being, even if our projects of understanding are at times lacking or incomplete. It remains that it is Being that we understand and Gadamer’s dictum (re)states it usefully. After that, it specifies that it is ‘in language’ (is language) that we understand the world. We are perhaps again dealing with a banality, but Gadamer wants to stress by this that our world understanding unfolds in the linguistic medium. When we understand others, history, the world, texts, news of the world, this understanding ‘is language’. For Gadamer, language (which remains a very vague term) characterizes the object (Gegenstand) as well as the unfolding (Vollzug) of understanding; all understanding unfolds in the linguistic medium. But does that mean that all understanding must be expressed in words? What about the limits of language to express our understanding (‘I can’t find the words’)? Gadamer sees precisely in this failure of language a confirmation of his thesis: ‘The failure of language (das Versagen der Sprache) testifies to its capacity to search expression for everything (bezeugt ihr Vermögen, für alles Ausdruck zu suchen) – so that it is also a way of expression to say that we can’t find words – and furthermore a way of expression with which one doesn’t stop, but one starts to speak’.14 The only way to refute Gadamer on this count would be to show that there are modes of understanding that are not necessarily linguistic. I believe this is not impossible – there is the understanding of emotions, of the heart for instance, to say nothing about

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the understanding of newborn infants or of the deaf and mute – but it is difficult to refute Gadamer or to invoke a counterexample against him without using language.

Back into classical metaphysics Gadamer’s dictum also contains a thesis on Being in the sense that it proposes that it is the Being of the things themselves that comes to be articulated in language (it is this metaphysical thesis, on Being and not only on the linguistic nature of understanding, that I wish to develop). By this, Gadamer recalls that the discourse we hold on Being is not a simple construction or a mere invention on the all-pervading basis of our ‘frameworks’. No, the language we hold on Being is or comes from Being itself. To use a Platonic image Gadamer is found of in the last section of his book, language ‘emanates’ from Being. This, for us, curious idea of an emanation of Being in language is the least well-understood portion of Gadamer’s hermeneutics, perhaps because it is its most metaphysical element. It is nonetheless of the highest importance since it is formulated after all in what is for all intents and purposes the conclusion of the book. It has everything to do with an understanding of language that Gadamer sketches more than he truly develops. But its outlines are recognizable enough to allow one to draw valuable lessons. As is often the case in philosophy, it is easier to identify the conception that Gadamer wishes to oppose. Throughout the last section of Truth and Method, he takes issue with the notion that language could be described as a simple ‘sign’ of thinking and the things to which it refers. This nominalist understanding (words are mere nouns, conventional nomina we use to describe things) is widespread, and as such honourable, but Gadamer detects in it a certain instrumentalism: it views the words of language as instruments of a sovereign thinking which would itself be independent of language, thus presupposing that our mind could relate to things before they present themselves in language. We do have the ability to create new words for new things (an iPod, ‘globalization’, etc.), and one can say that those ‘signs’ function as instruments of thinking, but they all presuppose, following Gadamer, that Being has already presented itself in language and that linguisticality is the element of all thought. To this nominalist and instrumental understanding of language as a ‘sign’ Gadamer discreetly opposes another conception for which the word is less a sign than an ‘image’ (Bild, which also means ‘picture’) of the thing. The difficulty here, which is relative, is that this understanding of language as Bild owes a lot to the notion of (artistic) image which Gadamer developed in the first part of Truth and Method and of which he underscored the ‘ontological import’ (Seinsvalenz).15 By ontological valence, one must understand the idea that the image (or artistic presentation) bestows upon what it represents an ‘increase in Being’ by letting it appear in its truth.16 The image or picture (Bild) does not have less being than what it (re)presents and of which it is the image (Abbild); it has more. It can even be seen, Gadamer says, following and adopting neoplatonic terminology, as an ‘emanation of its model’ (Urbild).17 The true image ‘proceeds’ from its model or the original, but also lets it emerge in its truth, as if for the first time. One could say that it is ‘more real’ than the things themselves insofar as it is the image that

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remains and that imposes itself because it conveys the essence of what is. The image becomes inseparable from the thing. Who can separate, for instance, the Last Supper from its depiction by Leonardo or the personality of Descartes from the portrait of Franz Hals? It is in an analogous sense that one must think the being of language, for Gadamer, as an emanation of the things and not of thinking. It is the things themselves, and their essence, that become manifest in language. This ‘manifestation of things’ is to be understood in the subjective sense of the genitive as a self-manifestation of the things thanks to the light that language bestows upon them. Language even confers upon them an increase in Being, claims Gadamer, because it is by being presented in language that the things reveal their ‘Being’, their reality and their presence: all reality is the reality that becomes present in language. The accent does not lie in Gadamer on the ‘framing’ of reality that our thinking would accomplish by schematizing the real in this or that way. Gadamer takes issue with this widespread view of language as a ‘framework’ or a mere way of seeing things, as in Cassirer’s conception of language as a ‘symbolic form’, influenced by Kant’s idea that it is our mind that introduces order into things. Rather, Gadamer puts the emphasis on the ontological revelation provided by language, on the self-manifestation of things in language. Language does not stand in a position of exteriority to Being; it is inherent to it to the extent that it is in it that the sense of things comes to be deployed. It is with this idea, says Gadamer, that hermeneutics ‘leads us back into the problem dimension of classical metaphysics’.18 The allusion is again somewhat general, but the meaning is clear from the context. The classical metaphysics Gadamer is here thinking of is the Platonic tradition that saw in the transcendental predicates of the One, the Beautiful, the True, and the Good first and foremost traits of Being and not only of the thinking that stands in front of Being. What this metaphysics (whose main defenders besides Plato will not be named) saw very clearly is what Gadamer calls the insertion of thought into Being, the intimate and primordial link between Being and thinking. It did not see in the relation of Being and language a face to face (as in the objectsubject distinction) but an original unity.19 Gadamer speaks here of an ‘integration (Einbezogenheit) of knowledge into Being’ as the common ‘presupposition of ancient and medieval thinking’, which his hermeneutics wants to rediscover and renew by focusing on language. Language appears here primarily as the language of Being which corresponds to the sense of things. This essential thesis forms the metaphysical conclusion of Truth and Method.

Traces of metaphysics in Gadamer’s later debates: Lost sheep in the dried up pastures of metaphysics? It is a strong thesis of Gadamer who, however, did not speak much of it after Truth and Method. The debates sparked by his oeuvre, most notably with the more methodologically inclined conception of hermeneutics of Emilio Betti and with the militant ideology critique of Jürgen Habermas, drew him in other directions, and his

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critics were not very familiar with the (not very popular either) tradition of classical metaphysics.20 Yet Gadamer’s closeness to this metaphysical tradition shines through in his important essay of 1968 on ‘Heidegger and the Language of Metaphysics’.21 It is, of course, Heidegger who famously spoke of the ‘language of metaphysics’ in his Letter on Humanism of 1946 and elsewhere as an ‘obstacle’ which Being and Time had not yet overcome. Metaphysics, understood as the urge to explain beings with the help of the, in Heidegger’s eyes, inherently calculating principle of sufficient reason, led directly to the dominion of technology which would smother any attempt to think Being (or Beying for ‘Seyn’) for itself as sheer emergence and unfolding (Ereignis, Seyn, phusis) which his thinking was clearly after. The simple question Gadamer asks Heidegger is whether there is such a thing as a closed language of metaphysics that would limit from the outset the possibilities of thinking (and of thinking, of all things, Being). Is language not always able to overcome its own barriers and develop new ways of expression for that which strives to be said? Assuredly, the linguistic predeterminations of thinking are real and numerous, but these can come to be recognized as such, with the aid of another effort of language that would do more justice to Being itself. It is thus possible to identify these (pre) schematizing forms of expression as such and to overcome them with other ways of saying. ‘But is there no rising above such a pre-schematizing of thought?’22 The very idea of a ‘language of metaphysics’ already testifies to this since it seeks to overcome a predetermination of thought that is deemed fatal because it would not do justice to what is. The only language of which Gadamer knows is the one we all speak, and this is always capable of rising above the sclerotic expressions that have ceased to speak to us and to what needs to be said. There is no need for this to ‘overcome’ metaphysics, only to pay attention to the things themselves (phenomenology has no other task) and our ways of saying and thinking which can always be enlarged, nuanced, and remain open to new insights. By this, Gadamer confirms that his relationship to metaphysics is less fraught and obdurate than that of Heidegger, a master he venerated but did not always follow. But Heidegger himself, as we argued elsewhere,23 cannot but defend some form of metaphysics: if the ‘language of metaphysics’ constitutes for him a roadblock, it is because he has another discourse on Being to put forward, thus a better metaphysics. Indeed, he cannot express this ‘other’ way of approaching Being without using (and by playing on the sense of) terms that stem from the vast repertoire of metaphysics: aletheia, logos, phusis, ground (Grund), essence (Wesen), to say nothing of Dasein, thinking (Denken), Being, or time. In this respect, it is no coincidence that the theme of metaphysics played such a key role in Gadamer’s later debate with Jacques Derrida. Derrida’s obsession with the ‘language of metaphysics’, which he inherited from Heidegger, is well known, and we have just recalled that it was not shared by Gadamer. Central to the debate between Derrida and Gadamer (if one can speak of a debate, because their dialogue was difficult24) was the issue whether there is such a thing as a closed conception of metaphysics that we would need to overcome or at least deconstruct. Derrida suspected in Gadamer’s ‘good will to understand’ a relapse into metaphysics. ‘With my hermeneutics’, Gadamer confessed in a remarkable retrospective text, ‘am I nothing but “the lost sheep in the dried up pastures of metaphysics?”’25 Gadamer meant by this

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that he could not recognize in his thinking, nor in his willingness to engage in dialogue with Derrida, the metaphysics of fixed presence which Derrida was stigmatizing in his deconstruction (which pays far more attention to the play of signs than to the sense and meaning of words). Nor could he find this obsession with sheer presence in the history of metaphysics which offers infinitely diverse and nuanced ways of speaking of Being. The idea of a metaphysics of presence is, in his eyes, a construction or a fetish of deconstruction that blinds thinking more than it illuminates it on the possibilities of metaphysics. If Gadamer did not present himself as a card-carrying advocate of metaphysics, we see that he did not want to overcome it either, and that in a few precious instances he was well aware of the metaphysical elements of his thinking and pointed them out expressly. He certainly spoke less of metaphysics than of ontology, but that was natural for a pupil of Heidegger who knew that his teacher could read his book with a critical eye. Ontology was in some ways acceptable if one wanted to reawaken the sense for Being (Heidegger had used the term profusely in Being and Time), but the notion of metaphysics had its pitfalls. Nonetheless, Heidegger is one of the rare authors who noticed very clearly the metaphysical inspiration of Gadamer. In a letter he wrote to the late Otto Pöggeler on 11 January 1962, he wrote after having read, or perused, Truth and Method: ‘It is also quite odd (merkwürdig) to see how Gadamer takes up without further ado at the end of his book the metaphysics of Being that sees in language a transcendental determination of Being.’26 This passage certainly reflects Heidegger’s perplexity, but it demonstrates that he was also an excellent reader of Gadamer. Gadamer’s modest, perhaps too modest,  ‘metaphysics’ resides primarily in his ontological understanding of language: language is not a mere system of signs which thinking would invent to refer to a meaningless reality; it is the expression of Being itself (in the subjective sense of the genitive). One can say, following the vocabulary of classical metaphysics, that Gadamer’s thesis is situated on the level of ontology or metaphysica generalis. It does not venture much into the field of metaphysica specialis or theologia, which was widely abandoned, on the surface, by the thinkers of the twentieth century, at least until Levinas. Gadamer was less preoccupied by theological or religious matters than Heidegger was and did not receive the Thomistic education his teacher had. He certainly did recognize in the theological quest an expression of the mystery and the question that existence is for itself, but for him it was more in the realm of art and poetry, which he liked to call the religion of interiority, that this quest expressed itself. Nevertheless, it is not impossible to draw from Gadamer’s ontological oeuvre teachings for the problems of metaphysica specialis, even if Gadamer himself refrained, out of Socratic docta ignorantia, to do so. We can claim this because his hermeneutics develops an understanding of Being which breaks de facto with the nominalism of modern thought. For the latter, Being has no meaning in itself; the entire realm of meaning is but a ‘projection’ of thinking which would inject its general concepts into the world (out of the blue?) which would only be comprised of individual physical masses devoid of any meaning and purpose. What Gadamer shows is that this nominalist understanding is an abstraction since the sense that we articulate in language is not

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for the most part a pure creation of our mind but the sense of things themselves. What Gadamer thus renders thinkable, or thinkable again, is the idea that there is sense to the world itself. It is this sense of the world that we strive to grasp and to guess in our modest and hesitating attempts at understanding. The world is intelligible, and it is this intelligibility of the world that our understanding seeks to reach. The only thing that is incomprehensible, said Einstein, is that the world is comprehensible. Meaning, sense, purpose, and finality are already there in the world, and one just has to raise one’s gaze to discover and admire its beauty. For classical metaphysics, this was a sign that the world was not a product of blind happenstance and that human existence was perhaps something more than a useless passion.

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The Hermeneutical Turn of Phenomenology in the Young Heidegger’s Thought Sophie-Jan Arrien

If the ties between phenomenology and hermeneutics are manifold and well established from Dilthey to Ricoeur by way of Gadamer, their initial convergence is mainly due to Heidegger, notably in section 7 of Being and Time: ‘The phenomenology of Dasein is a hermeneutic in the primordial signification of this word.’1 This convergence and its initial signification has its source, however, much prior to Heidegger’s magnum opus. Indeed, it is in the very first lecture course given by Heidegger, the Kriegsnotsemester of the 1919 fall semester (KNS in what follows), held during the exceptional context of the immediate post-war period, that one can witness the birth, still brimming with phenomenology, of the young Heidegger’s hermeneutical thinking.2 I will thus rely on this crucial and exceptionally rich lecture course to circumscribe the stakes of ‘genuine philosophy’ (echte Philosophie) in which the young Heidegger identifies what is to become his phenomenological hermeneutics of factical life. In this lecture course Heidegger’s hermeneutics takes shape under the guise of what he programmatically calls a ‘primordial pretheoretical science’, of which I will attempt to retrace the initial stakes and its more structural moments. It will become possible thereby to witness the very birth of hermeneutics from the womb of phenomenology. First, it is crucial to clarify what Heidegger’s ‘idea of philosophy’ was in 1919, for it is in trying to uncover the essence of philosophy that he would be led, on the basis of phenomenology but also beyond it, to a hermeneutical thinking.

The idea of philosophy: Against the primacy of the theoretical It is mainly because Heidegger considers that ‘the cardinal question concerns the nature and concept of philosophy’ (12) that he would upset what philosophy prior to him is all about. Probing the legitimacy and primordiality of philosophical concepts, he discovers that their rigorous usage does not come from a supposed theoretical purity

The Hermeneutical Turn of Phenomenology in the Young Heidegger’s Thought 139 but from the possibility of thinking them within the horizon of factical life, of lived life (Erleben). Yet Heidegger refuses to subscribe to vitalist conceptions of philosophy or to the irrationality of those currents of thought which, under the pretence of thinking life, dissolve the origin of thought in the obscure flow of lived experiences (Erlebnis).3 Quite on the contrary, philosophy must maintain its fundamental orientation, that is, to formulate principles and concepts adequate to their object, outside the field and scope of particular sciences. Yet these principles and concepts need to be redefined, or rather reinvested and re-experienced, in opposition to what they meant in the metaphysical tradition. ‘Philosophical concepts’ cannot simply be used as quasi-fixed ‘data of signification’, which one could simply reshuffle or reassign to some new functions, or whose content could simply be redefined according to some new perspective. Instead, and in a way that will later be clarified, they bear witness to the mobile and ‘event character’ of meaning, rather than to any given signification or representation. In this sense, the destruction (Destruktion) of metaphysical categories which characterizes Heidegger’s thought in one way or another throughout his philosophical career implies first and foremost a destruction of the concept’s very meaning, of its function or mode of functioning, its way of naming and indicating, its way of showing or hiding, its tendency to freeze within a doctrine, system, or world view, instead of maintaining its vivacity in the disquiet mobility of thought. This is the general critique of philosophical thinking that Heidegger undertakes from 1919 onwards, so ‘the entire traditional system of categories will be blown up’ (GA 60, 54). More specifically, the aim of the KNS is to determine a philosophizing understood in a more primordial manner than anything previously attempted. Heidegger tries to tear the concept from its usual anchor point, that is, the supposedly pure domain of the theoretical: ‘the primacy of the theoretical must be broken’ (59). The concept, as deconstructed by the young Heidegger, no longer recognizes as its own the theoretical aim which had been traditionally imparted to it, that is, achieving the greatest universality which would simultaneously coincide with the unveiling of the quiddity of beings. Rather, the primordial determination of the concept refers to the nontheoretical dimension of all thinking, which Heidegger will try to elaborate in 1919 by way of a ‘primordial pretheoretical science’ (Vortheoretische Urwissenschaft): ‘there must be a science that is pre-theoretical or supra-theoretical (Übertheoretische), at any rate non-theoretical, a genuinely primordial science from which the theoretical itself originates. This science of the origin is such that not only does it not need to make any presuppositions, but, because it is not theory, it cannot make them’ (96–7). Hence, in probing the horizon proper to philosophy, Heidegger is seeking the emergence point of meaning, of all meaning, not simply logical meaning. But if one wishes to grasp meaning itself at its emergence point, can it or should it be done exclusively within the scope of the theoretical? If the theoretical offers no access point to the primordial sphere of meaning, how does the latter manifest itself, and how should it be rigorously accounted for? Such is the stake of the ‘destruction’ of the theoretical, which will need to be clarified in light of the primordial idea of philosophy as well as the hermeneutics of life that claims to actualize the latter. I will thus begin by examining the project of a ‘primordial pretheoretical science’ in order to deepen, on the basis of Husserlian

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phenomenology, the question of ‘theorization’ and ‘formal indication’ as they structure Heidegger’s attempt to found philosophy and phenomenology anew, as hermeneutics.

The primordial, pretheoretical science In order concretely to set his work in motion, Heidegger must account for the domain of emergence of all possible meaning. What will this domain be? As the phenomenologist he is, Heidegger identifies, with Natorp and Dilthey but especially Husserl, the taking into account of lived experience (Erlebnis) as an unavoidable moment in the emergence of meaning in general and philosophical questioning in particular. It is this initial questioning of the concept of lived experience, towards its pretheoretical and yet ‘significant’ articulation, that will lead to the proper categorial specification of the phenomenon of life, as well as the identification of the factical horizon within which all philosophy takes place.4 In a crucial passage from the KNS, Heidegger favours the pretheoretical lived experience which constitutes our concrete and habitual experience of the world, namely, the lived experience of our surrounding or environing world (Umwelt) and the experience of our (un-)familiarity with things, as the access point to the domain of meaning. These now-famous early analyses of lived experience take place during the second half of the 1919 lecture course and constitute the start of Heidegger’s original thought. I will briefly recall their content (Cf. 70–3). Heidegger wishes to show how each lived experience, even the most trivial one, is simultaneously the active and configuring experience of a pretheoretical context of significance, which he calls the ‘surrounding world’. To illustrate this lived experience of the surrounding world, Heidegger describes the lectern standing in the classroom. What is grasped by the professor’s gaze is the place from which he will address his audience; what the students see is the stand from which the professor will give his lecture course, as was the case so many times before. The lectern, given in an individual lived experience, is thus given in one stroke (in einer Schlag) and along with it the complex of objects related to it (a book or a pen lying upon it, for example). In any case, this wooden assembly which occupies a given space in the classroom is given right away to the professor and the students as something meaningful, which does not imply that this immediate significance, proper to lived experience, must be universal or absolute. For a peasant, for instance, this complex of meanings could transform into a single meaning, or at least would not be enlarged by memory or habit: the lectern would simply be ‘the professor’s spot’. More radically, for a Senegalese having known only the savannah, writes Heidegger, the lectern might not hold any known or familiar meaning at all: he would stand perplexed in front of what he could possibly interpret as a trap, an altar for some ritual, or a shelter against wild beasts. Or else, not knowing how to make sense of what he is seeing, he would simply see a complex of shapes and colours, a simple thing, a ‘something’ (eine bloße Sache, ein Etwas). But at the same moment he would be experiencing the lectern as this simple thing, this something would hold a meaning for him; it would imply a meaningful

The Hermeneutical Turn of Phenomenology in the Young Heidegger’s Thought 141 moment, if only that of an ‘instrumental strangeness’ (zeuglichen Fremdsein) he would not know what to make of (72). In our concrete experience of things, every object is the bearer of a context of meaning; it opens up a world or, as Heidegger says, ‘it worlds’ (es weltet): ‘living in an environment, it signifies to me everywhere and always, everything has the character of world. It is everywhere the case that “it worlds”’ (73, Cf. 94). Yet lived experience is neither anonymous nor impersonal but is always mine or yours: ‘whenever and wherever it worlds for me, I am somehow there’ (73). The ‘I’ that appears is not a spontaneous first function – whether psychical or transcendental – that is able to constitute meaning and knowledge or emerge to itself within the experience of the world; it appears alongside the significance of the world and does not constitute it. As a matter of fact, Heidegger would speak of a ‘Self-world’ from the winter semester of 1919–20 onwards. The opening of a world is always, in this sense, an appropriation. Each lived experience is an appropriating event (Er-eignis). The latter lets us simultaneously apprehend the primary temporal sense of lived life and the condition of possibility or (even better) advent of the Self, which actually brings us back to the fundamental determinations of factical life which Heidegger will begin to describe during the 1919– 20 lecture course, but especially during the summer of 1920. Heidegger is thus rapidly advancing towards a first specification of the pretheoretical sphere of lived experiences. But how can one conceive of philosophy as a primordial ‘science’? In what kind of ‘rigorous’ discourse can the determination of lived experience as an appropriating event be preserved? Apprehended as a given fact, in the manner of neo-Kantians, lived experience is immediately brought back to its reified character; it is ‘un-lived’ (ent-lebt) (74). But the stake is precisely to escape this reduction and to respect ‘the rhythm of experience’ (98). On the other hand, is the simple act of describing or even comparing a specific lived experience to another already a form of objectification and a blunting of its determination as an appropriating event? (cf. 76) It would be the case if one were to remain within the theoretical perspective, but not if one is working within a new horizon, a pretheoretical one, which is able to respect lived experience as lived experience, that is, as pretheoretical. For Heidegger, it is because ‘the theoretical itself and as such refers back to something pre-theoretical (Vortheoretisches)’ (59) that one should rely on the latter as a primordial sphere. In other words, if the origin of meaning is to be reached, it must be done by way of a pretheoretical thinking which would constitute the source of all theoretical stances. More precisely, it would be the elaboration of a discourse which would explicitly recognize and assume its rootedness in pretheoretical lived experience and draw its explicating categories from it – not in order to ‘describe’ the pretheoretical, intentional lived experience (Husserl), or to ‘reconstruct’ it (Natorp), but simply to conform to the mobility of the ‘event character’ of life from which this discourse stems and which it expresses or, better, embodies. Strictly speaking, if one locates the origin of meaning in the pretheoretical or in ‘the experienceable as such’ (das Erlebbares überhaupt) (115), one would have to say that every discourse and every theory constitutes a more or less sophisticated expression of this primary configuration of meaning. This is not untrue, but whereas previous philosophical theories and doctrines ignored their reliance on the pretheoretical,

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or failed to account for it, the rigorous philosophizing envisioned by Heidegger springs forth expressly from the pretheoretical, according to its very mobility. This is, albeit still inchoate in 1919, the whole idea of a hermeneutics of life which aims to pick up the very movement of pretheoretical, lived experience (and thus factical life) in order to clarify it by means of its inner comprehensive, expressive, and (self-) interpretive resources. To achieve this, Heidegger must abandon the descriptive categories of Husserlian phenomenology based upon the idea of a presentive intuition, which he enacts by provisionally introducing, towards the end of the KNS, the hybrid idea of a ‘hermeneutical intuition’ (hermeneutische Intuition) (117, 219), about which I will say more later. He thus underlines that the phenomenon of life is less seen than understood and interpreted as a surrounding world [Umwelt], a shared or communal world [Mitwelt], and a Self-world [Selbstwelt]). In this constant ‘worldly’ appropriation of meaning, life always appears as that which understands, expresses, and interprets itself without having to go outside of itself. Paraphrasing Dilthey, Heidegger will say that life speaks its own tongue to itself (GA 58, 31). Characterized by its significance (Bedeutsamkeit) and expressivity (Ausdrucksamkeit), life is simultaneously selfsufficient (Selbstgenügsam); it has the possibility of turning back upon itself and grasping itself without the need to tower over and objectify itself.5 A hermeneutics of facticity, led by formal indications (in a sense which will be clarified later), will constitute no less than the concrete expression of this primordial possibility of life and will embody what genuine philosophy should be, for the young Heidegger. But in the KNS, Heidegger’s goal is not to detail this hermeneutics but rather to indicate, prior to it, what makes its emergence possible as a primordial philosophical discourse as it stems from the pretheoretical domain of life. What conceptual linchpin allows us to move from the pretheoretical to the theoretical, how does it function, and how does it legitimize the possibility of a primordial, pretheoretical science? In other words, what key will open the pretheoretical sphere to (phenomenological) hermeneutics, so the latter might uphold its title of ‘primordial science’?

Two modes of theorization: Generalization versus formalization From a pretheoretical standpoint, Heidegger realizes how phenomenological description remains a problem, since although it is firmly anchored in intuition it remains subject to the generalizing nature of language, and thus to the double process of objectification and theorization. Undoing this apparently unavoidable implication between language and generalization, objectification and theorization, will necessitate an inquiry into the emergence and formation of philosophical concepts. Heidegger’s aim will be to show how his phenomenological hermeneutics has the advantage of using concepts that do not betray the primordial, pretheoretical sphere from which they stem, and of which they safeguard the access, a feat which no traditional epistemology, whether idealist, realist, or critical, could hope to accomplish.

The Hermeneutical Turn of Phenomenology in the Young Heidegger’s Thought 143 To achieve this, Heidegger analyses the question of theorization on the basis of the Husserlian distinction between generalization and formalization. Both modes of theorization Heidegger will put on trial in order to clarify the specifics of an eventual primordial, pretheoretical science. Heidegger takes over from Husserl, in the last chapter of the Logical Investigations as well as §13 of Ideas I, the opposition between generalization, conceived as a conceptualization of beings in a hierarchical structure regulated by the relations between species and genus, and formalization, which directly links the phenomenon to its formal ontological category, to its eidos. Whereas generalization, whose process dominates the history of philosophy, defines a singular being with and within a particular region (species) which is itself defined by a more encompassing region (genus), formalization, as claimed by phenomenology, lets one characterize a being through the mode of intuition (sensitive, eidetic, categorial, etc.) which will determine the eventual mode of fulfilment of its intentional aiming, independently of any determination of content immanent to a sphere of objects. Generalization sticks to the phenomenon’s real content-sense, to its quid, which it crystallizes in a hierarchical succession of increasingly encompassing concepts. Formalization, by contrast, is not beholden to the content-sense (Gehaltssinn) of the object to determine. It does not determine a region of objects and is not primarily concerned by the Was of the object but by its mode of givenness. In formalization ‘the object is determined as that which is grasped; as that to which (Worauf) the cognizing relation refers’ (GA 60, 61). Formalization implies first and foremost the relation through which something is given in intuition (Bezugssinn). It designates the general modalities of an intentional aim (and its intuitive fulfilment) much more than the content-sense of a phenomenon by way of a fixed concept. Heidegger, who recognizes along with Husserl that the theoretical process of generalization ignores the vast possibilities of formalization, nevertheless modifies the latter’s focus. Contrary to Husserl, who envisions the possibility of a strictly formal ontology structured as pure logic (mathesis universalis) through formalization, Heidegger interprets and enlarges the idea of formalization towards the concrete horizon of the experienceable as such (Erlebbares überhaupt): [Formalization] is also not simply bound to the theoretical sphere, to the domain of objects as such. The range of possible formally objective characterization is obviously greater. … The environmental is something; what is worth taking is something; the valid is something; everything worldly, be it, for example, aesthetic, religious or social in type, is something. Anything that can be experienced at all is a possible something, irrespective of its genuine world-character. The meaning of ‘something’ is just ‘the experienceable as such’. (GA 56/57, 115.)

The experienceable as such (Erlebbares überhaupt) is what Heidegger calls the ‘primordial something’ (Ur-etwas) upon which the looked-for pretheoretical science must anchor itself; it is the fundamental pretheoretical moment of life in general. In this sense, it constitutes the kernel of the KNS from which all the rest will follow, hence the importance of looking into it, in spite of the somewhat drab nature of the exercise.

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Prior to the theoretical It is on the basis of this idea of a pretheoretical, ‘primordial something’, understood as the experienceable as such, that Heidegger transforms formalization’s aim. Whereas Husserl searched for logical forms, pure eidetic singularities identified to the supreme genus of ‘any signification whatever’,6 Heidegger will point towards a sphere entirely dependent upon the lived experience of life: While the absolute and most radical ligature (Unterbindung) of factically vital, personal life-relations lies in the meaning of the formal-logical something in general (‘empty’-form), the pre-theoretical carries the most complete uncanniness of life and indeed of its opaque, and yet still living, contexts of expectation, but without the least prominence of the particular style of world and of experience being put forward. (GA 58, 107)

But there is something else. With the idea of ‘the experienceable as such’, Heidegger keeps the notion of a formal category not limited by a specific domain of objects while dynamizing it: the experienceable as such is an essential moment of life in and for itself (ein Wesensmoment des Lebens an und für sich) because it represents the dunamis, the potentia, the still undifferentiated power of worlding or, put differently, the ‘eventful’ power of life insofar as life is endowed with the ‘event character’ (Ereignischarakter) of lived experiences as such. In itself undifferentiated and in this sense pre-wordly (vorweltlich), this primordial moment harbours the possibility of a concrete and plural differentiation of lived experiences and worlds (surrounding, communal, and Selfworld, religious or aesthetic experience, etc.). With the ‘primordial something’, we come upon the place out of which meaning springs forth, that is, the expressive possibility of life prior to any theorization and prior even to any specific worlding. This pre-worldly indifference (Indifferenz) represents the ‘index for the highest potentiality of life’7 (115). The ‘experienceable as such’ functions as dunamis, in the sense of what is yet to become, what is not yet actualized and undifferentiated, what has ‘not yet’ happened (das ‘noch nicht’), but also in the sense of a dynamic principle, a properly expressive principle, that is, as a principle for the mobility of life towards a world. This means that Heidegger ascribes an intentional movement to life itself, prior to the eventual distinction between subject and object, as its expressive sense and mobility prior to any intuitive fulfilment. Intentionality is not the aiming of an object by a consciousness (as with Husserl) but the intentionality of the experienceable as such towards its inscription in a world, from which only the appropriating advent of the Self to itself can be thought.8 Heidegger thus reaches the place from which the origin of the concept can be understood, which is prior to the division of the theoretical under the double guise of formalization and generalization. Although the experienceable as such – the pretheoretical Ur-Etwas – opens onto the factical experience of the world, it cannot be confused with any of the derived forms of objectivity conceived as the basis of knowledge in epistemological theories.9 For example, it clearly does not fall under the neo-Kantian ‘something in general’ (Etwas überhaupt). The latter refers to objectivity in general, to what would always

The Hermeneutical Turn of Phenomenology in the Young Heidegger’s Thought 145 already be determined, or what could be determined by thought. It comes from an objectifying process under which experience is subjected to laws from which the lived experience of the world’s significance is completely discarded. Such a determination of the ‘something in general’ represents the ultimate degree of de-vivification (Ent-lebung). In this movement of theorization, lived experience disappears in favour of a space of meaning which is ‘the absolutely worldless, world-foreign … which takes one’s breath away and where no one can live’.10 For Heidegger, on the contrary, the possibility of an authentic theorization which would not be de-vivified or de-mundanized is based on the assumed anchoring of ‘what can be known’ upon ‘the experienceable as such’ (116). Heidegger thus wishes to instil and preserve the mutability of the Ur-Etwas within the concept. It is this power of transformation which the analysis of the surrounding world’s lived experience has uncovered, and precisely what was looked for under the (working) title of a primordial, pretheoretical science. With ‘the experienceable as such’, Heidegger believes he has discovered the inaugural moment of his phenomenological hermeneutics, worthy of being the primordial, pretheoretical science. At this point, however, one could ask what is the precise status of the ‘primordial and pre-wordly something’. Could not the latter fall under an abstract concept of potentiality – in the Aristotelian sense, for example – just as much as under the concrete categorial anchoring searched for within life itself? Could we be dealing with a purely metaphysical category here?

The hermeneutical intuition As early as the lecture course of 1919, Heidegger proposes an initial answer which he would later develop more fully: the potentiality of the primordial something is not an abstraction. It rather expresses life in ‘its motivated tendency or tending motivation’, that is, in its proper mobility (Bewegheit) or movement which corresponds to its being – if we care to follow a path Heidegger will only truly explore in his analysis of proto-Christianity and Aristotle.11 The ‘primordial something’ expresses the preceptive anticipations (Vorgriff) and retroceptive turnabouts (Rückgriff) of life itself; it never manifests itself under the de-vivified guise of the concept; it appears within lived experience and thus as significance, in the world: ‘Finally, with the horizon of meaningfulness there is the undetermined something’. The lived experience of what is worldly (welthaft) plays against the mobile background of the pre-worldly Ur-etwas, constituting its redoubled expression, while marking at the same time the ‘event character’ in which life is always engaged: ‘What is essential about the preworldly and worldly signifying functions is that they express the characters of the appropriating event, i.e. they go together (experiencing and experiencing experienced) with experience itself, they live in life itself and, going along with life, they are at once preceptive and retroceptive, i.e. they express life in its motivated tendency or tending motivation’ (117). The ‘primordial something’ phenomenalizes itself only within the significant experience of the surrounding, communal, and Self-world. The significances (Bedeutsamkeiten) of life are lived; they express themselves and are always apprehended in this life. From a phenomenological-hermeneutical standpoint,

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this immersion of worldly significances in the primordial mobility of life, which they necessarily express, precludes the possibility of ‘freeze-framing’ this or that lived experience of meaning. Thus, grasping them cannot result from a pure eidetic intuition, from a pure vision. It rather necessitates a comprehensive intuition or, more precisely, a hermeneutical intuition. Indeed, the Husserlian idea of a primordial intuition constitutes ‘a decisive step of phenomenology’ (GA 58, 146), but it only guarantees evidence and an adequate phenomenological description of intuition if it is considered in terms of ‘comprehension’ and is analysed in its contents (Was or content-sense), its destination (Worin or referential-sense), and its how (Wie or enactment-sense). Without this ‘comprehensive turn’, Heidegger insists, ‘the problem of description as phenomenological is not posed at all’ (GA 58, 146). Within this ‘improved intuition’ resides the possibility of a primordial expression of life’s anticipating tendencies and motivations. Concepts, whether they originate from formalization or generalization, far from securing any access to the pretheoretical sphere, only come afterwards. They themselves remain conditioned by this primordial intentional sphere of life. Even the universality of language underlying them refers to this origin, to the ‘worldliness of experienced experiencing’ (erlebte Erlebens) (117).12 In other words, any transcendent position, any conceptual position, and even eidetic phenomenology itself arrive at the theoretical (most of the time unknowingly) from lived life; this is the path that phenomenological hermeneutics, which announces itself as the pretheoretical science of the origin, will have to retrace. Its main challenge will be to find ‘concepts’ that are adequate to the mobility of life from which they stem – ‘concepts’ which refer to neither generalization nor formalization but to a different kind of theorization which, anchored to a factical understanding (and by way of a hermeneutics of facticity), will succeed in turning back towards lived experience without betraying it, as does life itself, of which they are no more than a privileged expression: lived experience – not as an irrational flux but as a structuring and structured possibility of all possible meaning (albeit pretheoretical). Such ‘concepts’ should be written with a bar (concepts) to distinguish them from everything that is traditionally related to conceptuality, which Heidegger is striving to surpass.

The formal indication These concepts Heidegger would soon name ‘formal indications’. This idea of formal indication, which constitutes a good part of the originality of the early Heidegger’s hermeneutical thought, appears as well in his annotations (written between 1919 and 1921) to Karl Jaspers’s Psychology of Worldviews and in the lecture course of the winter semester of 1919–20, and it regularly punctuates the methodological development of the philosopher up to 1923, notably in the introduction of The Phenomenology of Religious Life of the winter semester of 1920–1, which provides important clarifications on the matter (Cf. GA 60, 55–65). What, then, is a formal indication? It is the concept’s substitute; the former being understood as a theoretical grasp or a closed definition of the named thing. In the concept understood in this sense, life is un-lived (ent-lebt); the lived meaning is frozen,

The Hermeneutical Turn of Phenomenology in the Young Heidegger’s Thought 147 objectified, or even reified. The factical dimension that spans lived experience, that is, its historical and appropriating dimension, becomes fixed and gets lost in the aim for universality, and the formal indication will have to ‘unbolt’ it. On the contrary, ‘the formal indication and that which is indicated by it is not hypostasized and made into the goal and object of philosophical consideration’ (GA 59, 85). As formal indications, concepts ‘are not clearly fixed. Rather, they just point to certain phenomena’ (GA 58, 248). Life, history, lived experience, the I, the self, all of these crucial concepts present a formal indicative aspect which a methodical work of destruction must uncover, not only in order to liberate their content-sense (Gehaltsinn), which was the traditional task of philosophers interrogating beings, and not only their relational sense (Bezugssinn), as Husserl does by uncovering the intentional structure of all signifying aims, but truly their enactment-sense (Vollzugssinn), that is, the ‘how’ of the factical fulfilment of meaning, that moment when the grasping of the phenomenon as a significant ‘performance’, as an event, becomes possible. It is from this ‘performative’ dimension that the meaningful possibilities of lived experience can be concretely appropriated, and the eventful and historical horizon of meaning uncovered. Let us return to the lectern example. The content-sense of the lectern as a distinctgiven object, as well as its relational sense, that is, its possibility of being (variously) aimed by the professor, student, peasant, or Senegalese, only deploys or actualizes itself through the enactment-sense: the lectern properly appears to the student, the peasant, or the Senegalese as this or that from their own concrete, factical situation; it is only given as such because this significant lived experience enacts itself in one direction or another, because they each appropriate the surrounding world which opens up to them. In this process, Heidegger does not seek to identify the enactment-sense of the lectern which would triumph over the others, but he is nevertheless seeking, in treating the common concept of the lectern as a formal indication deploying itself in multiple directions of meaning, to uncover the most primordial enactment-sense, which primarily opens onto the Self-world through which life always accentuates itself (cf. GA 58, §14). In the context of a hermeneutics of life, this dimension of lived meaning, carried by formal indications, will be the most pertinent. In a way, the enactment-sense of the phenomenon of life (which is the phenomenon at stake in the Freiburg hermeneutics) is the intentional correlate of the lived experience’s character as an appropriating event. It is within it that factical life concretely takes hold of itself in one way or another as meaningful experience. By this enactment, the phenomenon’s factical dimension imprints itself upon the concept’s meaning. In this way, the role of formal indication in the Heideggerian project is to primordially open the grasping and understanding of phenomena without inducing any theoretical bias. Hence, the task of primordial philosophical thinking will be to preserve the formal indication’s proper task of opening the renewed possibilities of enactments of meaning. The formal indication guarantees the primordiality of philosophical investigation, on the one hand, by preventing it from anchoring itself to a theoretical standpoint or limiting itself to regional considerations and, on the other hand, by preserving the factical character of philosophical concepts themselves.

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The appearance of formal indications thus marks the emergence of a possible primordial theorization which, albeit theoretical, structurally assumes its anchoring in the pretheoretical horizon of meaning. Heidegger thus points to formal indication as a key component not only of phenomenology but of the theoretical in general: ‘The problem of the “formal indication” belongs to the “theory” of the phenomenological method itself, in the broad sense, to the problem of the theoretical, of the theoretical act, the phenomenon of differentiating’ (GA 60, 55). Here we find again the initial stake of the KNS: the possibility of accounting for a pretheoretical meaning and simultaneously the possibility of a primordially founded theory, that is, one that avoids the conceptual systemization based on the generalizing function of language. This is what formal indication makes possible. By keeping the factical enactment-sense of phenomena open, it avoids any a priori generalization and objectification; it injects the enactmentsense into the concept itself and with it the historical and appropriating character of lived significance. In a way, it becomes the conceptual relay that accounts for the passage from lived, factical experience to meaning in general and phenomenological hermeneutics in particular. The proper implementation of this phenomenological hermeneutics will be developed on the foundations laboriously acquired during the year 1919, of which some benchmarks were identified here. Hence the following will be implicitly preserved and used in the coming hermeneutics of facticity: the refusal of classical epistemological standpoints (idealist or realist) featuring, in an invariably theoretical perspective, a knowing subject facing a known (or about to be known) object; the recognition of a pretheoretical sphere commanding the whole investigation and allowing the uncovering of the research’s very own categories; the identification of this primordial sphere with lived experience and, more precisely, with what can be experienced as such, within a world and as an event; the necessity of rethinking the possibility of the theoretical on the basis of this pretheoretical sphere of lived experience and its primordial concepts (formal indications) prior to any process of formalization or generalization. Thus, is delineated, on the basis of phenomenology, but also from beyond its frontiers, the primordial region which the early Heidegger’s hermeneutics, immediately after the KNS, will expressly make its privileged ‘affair’ under the unitary concept of life.13

11

Gadamer and the Philosophy of Science Lawrence K. Schmidt

Mainstream or ‘analytic’ philosophy of science has not acknowledged any relevance of phenomenology or hermeneutics to their philosophy of science. To a large extent phenomenologists and hermeneuts have been critical of analytic philosophy of science. However, some have developed the relevance of phenomenology or hermeneutics to the analysis of this field.1 With the exception of Joel Weinsheimer’s ‘Introduction’ to Gadamer’s Hermeneutics, little has been written specifically about Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics and the analysis of understanding in the natural sciences.2 For many, a hermeneutic philosophy of science is an oxymoron. For them, the differences between natural scientific explanation and hermeneutic understanding exactly demarcate the natural sciences and the humanities.3 On the other hand, the universality claim of philosophical hermeneutics, that is, that ‘Being that can be understood is language’, and that understanding language occurs through the ‘Elements of a Theory of Hermeneutic Experience’, implies that natural scientific understanding contains the same elements of hermeneutic experience as understanding in the humanities.4 In Truth and Method, Gadamer is certainly critical of the scientific method. The purpose of Truth and Method is to uncover and justify ‘the experience of truth that transcends the domain of scientific method’.5 Gadamer worries that the humanistic disciplines perceive the need to emulate the natural sciences if they are to justify any truths and not be relegated to the status of meaningless endeavours. He speaks of the general Wissenschaftsaberglaube der Öffentlichkeit, the public realm’s superstition or false belief in science.6 The whole of Truth and Method is an extended analysis of understanding in the humanities and a philosophical justification of the truthfulness of their conclusions. Gadamer concludes: ‘What the tool of method does not achieve must – and really can – be achieved by a discipline of questioning and inquiring, a discipline that guarantees truth.’7 The theory of science and the scientific method that Gadamer criticizes in Truth and Method are from the early logical positivists. In the first edition Gadamer does not reference any philosophers of science. He writes that in the 1930s when he began to develop the ideas that became Truth and Method, ‘the opposing position was physicalism and the unity of science’.8 In a review article, Dieter Misgeld writes,

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‘He [Gadamer] may challenge beliefs hardly anyone since the early days of logical positivism would still entertain. Yet the matter is not quite so obvious.’9 Although Gadamer recognizes the self-critical developments in logical positivism, most of his critical arguments also apply to the analytic philosophy of science as it existed in the 1950s. ‘Today not metaphysics but [natural] science is dogmatically abused.’10 Most analytic philosophers of science argued then that the scientific method is the best means to justify knowledge concerning the empirical world and the place of humans in it.11 In the 1972 ‘Afterword’ Gadamer writes that upon the completion of Truth and Method he felt that it had come too late due in part to the ‘increased receptiveness toward Anglo-American theory of science’.12 Without explicitly mentioning Heidegger’s ‘The Age of the World Picture’, Gadamer follows his characterization of science. Gadamer’s central, critical point is that the natural sciences restrict the domain of scientific investigation and thereby exclude other truths about the world in which we live. Quoting Heidegger, Gadamer writes, ‘The natural sciences’ mode of knowledge appears, rather, as a subspecies [Abart] of understanding “that has strayed [verlaufen] into the legitimate task of grasping the present-at-hand in its essential unintelligibility”’ [Sein und Zeit, 153].13 Heidegger argues that present-at-hand objects are derivative from the ready-to-hand things that are originally encountered by Dasein. Gadamer agrees, writing: ‘The later Heidegger himself emphasized that the experience of the thing has as little to do with merely establishing simple present-at-hand as with the experience of the so-called experimental sciences.’14 Heidegger argues that the natural sciences project a fixed ground plan before their investigations begin. This ground plan determines what kinds of objects are permitted to be investigated by the natural sciences. Gadamer concurs: ‘The being-in-itself toward which research, whether in physics or biology, is directed is relative to the way being is posited in its manner of inquiry. … Each [natural] science, as a science, has in advance projected a field of objects such that to know them is to govern them.’15 The projected field of objects to be investigated in the natural sciences disallows other modes of being in which things appear in the world. This limitation restricts the manner in which things can appear in language. It is finally a decision on the part of the natural scientists. ‘The world of objects that science knows, and from which it derives its own objectivity, is one of the relativities embraced by language’s relation to the world. In it the concept of ‘being-in-itself ’ acquires the character of a determination of the will’.16 Gadamer criticizes the claimed certainty of the natural sciences. ‘Scientific certainty always has something Cartesian about it. It is the result of a critical method that admits only the validity of what cannot be doubted.’17 Carnap argues that the protocol sentences that report the scientific facts and constitute the foundation of objective science are indubitable. ‘It [what exists “in itself ” in the sense of modern science] is determined as certain knowledge, which permits us to control things. The certified facts are like the object (Gegenstand) and its resistance (Widerstand) in that one has to reckon with them.’18 In the tradition of analytic philosophy of science, even if the technical indubitability of protocol sentences was questioned, the individual observation statements of sensations or Popper’s basic statements are argued to be the most certain empirical knowledge that is available. Gadamer emphatically denies his

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own rhetorical question: ‘But is it really the case that this world is a world of being-initself where all relativity to Dasein has been surpassed and where knowledge can be called an absolute science?’19 Gadamer rejects the supposed neutrality of the scientific observer. ‘What makes modern scholarship scientific is precisely the fact that it objectifies tradition and methodically eliminates the influence of the interpreter and his time on understanding.’20 Heidegger argues, ‘Understanding is never a presuppositionless grasping of something previously given.’21 He notes that any appeal in interpretation to ‘what “is there” … is nothing else than the self-evident, undisputed prejudice of the interpreter’.22 The selfunderstanding of the logical positivists is just such a naive, unconscious application of their prejudices and the resulting false claim to directly know the given. The forestructures of understanding are inherited from the interpreter’s past. It is the effect of effective history and applies to the natural scientist just as to the interpreter. Each person who understands has a historically effected consciousness whether they recognize this or not. ‘The aim of science is so to objectify experience that it no longer contains any historical element. Scientific experiment does this by its methodological procedure.’23 An experiment is ‘the scientist’s technical procedure of artificially inducing processes under conditions that isolate them and render them capable of being measured’.24 The question is whether this objectifying aim is realizable even in the scientific experiment. Gadamer argues that the central problem for hermeneutics is the question of application. Application concerns the relationship between the universal and the particular in the translation of what the text has to say into the interpreter’s horizon of meaning. In the natural sciences, understanding, as explication, is the subsumption of the particular under the universal law, Hemple’s deductive–nomological explanation. ‘Historical research does not endeavor to grasp the concrete phenomenon as an instance of a universal law. The individual case does not serve only to confirm a law from which practical predictions can be made.’25 By implication, the natural sciences do exactly that. Gadamer asks whether application occurs in natural scientific understanding. ‘From the point of view of modern science the answer will be that it does not, and it will be said that the kind of application that makes the interpreter the person to whom the text was originally addressed, as it were, is quite unscientific and is to be wholly excluded from the historical sciences.’26 Analytic philosophy of science claims that the natural sciences progress in a linear, cumulative manner. ‘Nevertheless, it is not just historical naivete when the natural scientist writes the history of his subject in terms of the present state of knowledge. For him errors and wrong turnings are of historical interest only, because the progress of research is the self-evident standard of examination’.27 Gadamer objects to the claimed linear progress in the natural sciences. Although Gadamer is quite critical of the natural scientific methodology, he does present in Truth and Method several hints concerning the hermeneutic elements in natural scientific understanding. Primarily the hermeneutic situation determines what questions will be investigated, even in the natural sciences: ‘It [effective history] determines in advance both what seems to us worth inquiring about and what will appear as an object of investigation.’28 The philosophy of science claims to be able to overcome effective history and see just what is there. ‘When a naïve faith in scientific

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method denies the existence of effective history, there can be an actual deformation of knowledge. We are familiar with this from the history of science, where it appears as the irrefutable proof of something that is obviously false.’29 Gadamer may be thinking of those cases in the history of the natural sciences where for a time a theory is claimed to be true and justified only later to be discovered to be false, for example, the phlogiston theory. Gadamer notes the role of tradition in the natural sciences: ‘There is, then, no need to deny that elements of tradition can also affect the natural sciences – e.g., particular lines of research are preferred at particular places.’30 He also notes a similarity between philology and early natural science as found in Bacon: both are interpretations. ‘Just as naturalness in the art of philology means understanding from a context, so naturalness in the investigation of nature means deciphering the “book of nature.” To this extent scientific method is based on the model of philology.’31 In the decades following the publication of Truth and Method and in response to criticism, Gadamer clarifies his position concerning scientific understanding in several essays. Already in the ‘Forward’ to the second edition (1963), Gadamer explains the meaning of his title. The difference between the humanities and the natural sciences ‘that confronts us is not in the method but in the objectives of knowledge’.32 The natural sciences aim at control, to discover the best means for a given end. It is claimed that the use of the scientific method results in the only reliable knowledge attainable. The objective of hermeneutic understanding is to uncover justified truths, unattainable using the scientific method, which concern human being in the world and especially the choice of ends to be pursued. Gadamer is not against the use of method in the humanities, as many critics thought: ‘The methodical spirit of science permeates everywhere. Therefore I did not remotely intend to deny the necessity of methodical work within the human sciences.’33 ‘No productive scientist can really doubt that methodical purity is indispensable in science.’34 Of course, ‘desired non-objectivity is no longer science’.35 Concerning the relation between hermeneutics and the natural sciences, Gadamer writes, ‘The question I have asked seeks to discover and bring into consciousness something that does not so much confine or limit modern science as precede it and make it possible.’36 The elements of hermeneutic experience identified in Truth and Method apply to the scientific researcher as well. The hermeneutic situation as embedded in effective history first establishes the questions or topics of research for the scientist. On the other hand, the analysis of the hermeneutic situation of the natural scientist does clarify and restrict the self-understanding of analytic philosophy of science. Gadamer understands his project to be the extension of Heidegger’s radical questioning of the natural sciences. His philosophical hermeneutics will analyse ‘the conditions and limits of science within the whole of human life’.37 It criticizes ‘the one-sided orientation toward the scientific fact’, as seen in positivism, that is, the certainty of facts and that they are the only basis for knowledge.38 It further discloses the ‘conditions of truth in the sciences that do not derive from the logic of scientific discovery but are prior to it’, that is, that one is embedded in effective history and belongs to a tradition that determines what questions to pursue.39 ‘Fortunately, there can be agreement about the fact that there is only one “logic of scientific investigation” – but also that it is not sufficient, since at any given time the viewpoints that select

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the relevant topics of inquiry and foreground them as subjects of research cannot themselves be derived from the logic of scientific investigation.’40 They come rather from the hermeneutic dimension of finding the right questions to ask, and this is partly a result of effective history. One mistaken claim of the early logical positivists is that science was grounded on indubitable observations. Logical positivism moves away from the foundation of knowledge in sensible perceptions to the analysis of protocol sentences ‘about whose truth no possible doubt can arise’.41 From these certain statements ‘the logical structure of the world was supposed to be attained’.42 Gadamer reports ‘that a hermeneutic problematic is contained in the natural sciences, became clear to me already in 1934 with Moritz Schlick’s victorious critique of the dogma of the protocol sentences’.43 Without mentioning Schlick, Gadamer indicates the hermeneutic aspect in the natural sciences uncovered by Schlick’s critique of protocol sentences. He writes: There was also a dogmatic element in the conception of the logical empiricists that the immediacy of sensible perception, or observation, essentially established the foundation of all knowledge. Whether the so-called basic statements of a scientific theory had an exceptional claim to certainty, was basically already disputed in the beginning of the Vienna Circle. And anyway, soon the concept of the protocol sentence had been proven to be insufficient [unzulänglich] to justify such a claim to certainty. In the end such a function can only be accomplished by the function of sentences in a whole theory. That is, however, just the fundamental hermeneutic law that the part is determined by the whole just as the whole is determined by the many parts.44

The natural scientific view ‘raises the claim that on the basis of its methodological procedure it is the only certain experience, hence the only mode of knowing in which each and every experience is rendered truly legitimate’.45 This is the universal claim of the natural sciences. Both neo-Kantianism and positivism reject metaphysics and claim to ‘ground the totality of possible knowledge – and that meant to justify the claim of science’.46 Given the linguistic presentation of our experiences in the world, it is clear that the ‘metaphysically free’ natural sciences restrict the experiences that they investigate. ‘Only that which agrees with method, the objectified [Objizierte], can become an object of scientific knowledge’.47 This is accomplished by the application of mathematics to describe the objects of science and the exclusion of linguistic preunderstanding. What is excluded by the scientific method and yet present in our linguistic pre-understanding of the world is ‘that tacit dimension that Michael Polanyi named and discussed’.48 This dimension, Gadamer continues, concerns the logic of questioning and has been at the centre of contemporary philosophy of science, especially since Kuhn’s work and his debate with Popper. Further, new horizons of scientific questioning are ‘to a large degree constituted by the ruling, theoretical predeterminations (Vorbestimmtheiten)’.49 Another limit to the self-understanding of the philosophy of science concerned their criterion of meaning. In a manner similar to Popper’s critique of the positivists’ theory of meaning, Gadamer writes, criticizing Popper: ‘A philosophy of the sciences

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that understands itself as a theory of scientific method and dismisses any inquiry that cannot be meaningfully characterized as a process of trial and error does not recognize that by this very criterion it is itself outside science’.50 For the philosophy of science to be meaningful itself, it must acknowledge meaningful statements beyond the reach of its methodology. Gadamer notes that the debates between Adorno and Popper and between Habermas and Albert demonstrate the difficulties in recognizing this extra-scientific context.51 Referring to Albert, Gadamer writes: ‘By raising “critical rationality” to the status of an absolute measure of truth, empirical theory of science regards hermeneutic reflection as theological obscurantism.’52 To understand the present relation of philosophy to science, Gadamer, following Heidegger, argues that one must return to the new idea of science that developed with Galileo’s mechanics. ‘Galileo subjected nature to mathematical construction and so achieved a new notion of natural law.’53 He ignored visible experience and projected an ideal situation. The laws are verified ‘by means of measuring, counting and weighing’.54 This allowed for ‘the complete application of science to the technical transformation of nature for humanly conceived purposes’.55 The method for knowing means the justification of knowledge by the ideal of certainty, which found expression in Descartes’s philosophy. Heidegger’s radical questioning demonstrated that ‘science originates from an understanding of being that compels it unilaterally to lay claim to every place and to leave no place unpossessed outside of itself ’.56 Today, science has become dogmatic. To the question of whether the new science that developed with Galileo is just a paradigm shift, as Kuhn argues, Gadamer replies: ‘It seems to me that it was not just another paradigm that came to be with Galileo’s creation of mechanics in modern natural science. It was not just a paradigm change, but a reconstitution (Umgestaltung) of what science can at all be.’57 He suggests that from this time forward one could speak of paradigm shifts, but that the change that came with Galileo is radically different. The critique of the possibility of a principle of induction also contributed to the logical empiricists’ recognition that ‘the justification of knowledge, in the sense of a certitude removed from all doubt, was an impossible task’.58 Although scientific theories are confirmed to some degree by experience, it is more the absence of counterinstances that supports them. Gadamer refers to Popper’s idea of falsifiability as ‘the logical condition of scientific propositions’.59 Although researchers do not strictly follow this process of attempting falsification, Gadamer does say that the fruitfulness of scientific questioning comes from experience refusing the anticipated result. Gadamer claims that Kuhn’s proposals of paradigms and scientific revolutions do not contradict the logic of inquiry. Rather, for Gadamer, Kuhn’s theory ‘rightly criticizes the false linear stylization supposedly connected with the progress of science’.60 The influence of a dominating paradigm and its change to another demonstrates, for Gadamer, that ‘the whole problem area of the relevance of questions depends on this, and that constitutes a hermeneutic dimension’.61 Another area of self-critique concerns the attempt to construct ‘an unequivocal scientific language capable of reconstructing the logical structure of the world’.62 In the natural sciences ‘experiment regulates conceptual usage, and thus commits them to the ideal of unambiguousness and pre-arranges the logical content of statements’.63 In

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the non-natural scientific context the connotation of a word sheds light on the whole situation and ‘makes something visible in the how of its meaningfulness’; it does not aim at a ‘univocal designation of the data (Gegebenem)’.64 Gadamer credits Wittgenstein with the ‘grand insight’ that ‘language is always in order’.65 With Wittgenstein, ‘The univocal scientific language was replaced by the primordial relationship to the practice of all speaking.’66 The analysis of language games means that the meaning of a statement depended on the language game, that is, the context within which it occurred. This, Gadamer again notes, is ‘ultimately a hermeneutic principle: that the way any given utterance, discourse, or text is to be understood depends upon its particular scope’.67 ‘That the final meta-language, the language that is spoken in the current lifeworld, can never be completely eliminated, exactly this justifies the universal claim of hermeneutics.’68 Gadamer refers here to Heisenberg’s interest in the role of language in presenting scientific results.69 The hermeneutic dimension of the natural sciences is prior to the context of justification. In asking a precise question there is always the previous work that begins with a vague question or feeling that has to be carefully developed. ‘At any rate, the methodical rationality of the sciences is preceded by a whole dimension of productive imagination in which linguistic articulation participates.’70 Gadamer argues that Popper’s method of trial and error is not ‘at all confined to the logic of scientific discovery’.71 Although foreshortened and stylized in this phrase, the idea of ‘logical rationality’ applies to all sciences and not just the natural sciences, and even to ‘practical reason’. ‘Nevertheless, the art of questioning in which problems are first proposed lies prior to “the logic of scientific discovery”. The relegation of this other dimension to the psychology of invention (Popper), is just an evasion (Ausweichen).’72 Science does not begin with some first protocol sentence and construct its theories. ‘The “interpretatio naturae” always presupposes a problem context that first makes possible the identification of facts; one may call this a pre-understanding, a paradigm, or whatever.’73 Gadamer intended to demonstrate the hermeneutic context within which natural scientific investigation occurs: ‘They all mistake the reflective claim of my analyses and thereby also the meaning of application which, as I have tried to show, is essential to the structure of all understanding. … They fail to recognize that reflection about practice is not methodology.’74 ‘For since science views its purpose as isolating the causes of events – natural and historical – it is acquainted with practice only as the application of science.’75 They do not understand that the hermeneutic dimension of praxis is the deliberation over the goals or ends that are chosen first, before the causes are sought. As stated in Truth and Method, application is not the subsumption of the particular under the universal.76 The sense of application in philosophical hermeneutics is that ‘the universal under which the particular is subsumed continues to determine itself through the particular’.77 As in precedent law, the new precedent modifies the understanding of the law. In natural science this would be the modification of a hypothesis to include new results, as opposed to its refutation. The problem today is that ‘modern science adds to the common quality of life to such an extent that its voice, the voice of experts, barely leaves any space for free decisions based upon reasonable contemplation (Besinnung)’.78 These normative judgements have been the purview of the humanities in general. Gadamer writes, ‘The sciences

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of man cannot wish to ignore this characteristic of man (his practical reason), and should not, therefore, rely on the objectivizing methods of [natural] science and wish to just apply their results.’79 After the examination of the self-critical changes in logical empiricism and the hermeneutic elements uncovered within scientific understanding, Gadamer asks rhetorically whether these modified theories of science ‘are not subordinated to an instrumental ideal of knowledge’.80 This means that they would just be ‘a means and instrumental scaffolding for the progress of knowledge’.81 This would present a limit to theories of science and their philosophical justification would require going beyond this limit. Even though Gadamer has identified hermeneutic aspects in natural scientific understanding, he still affirms a qualitative difference between ‘the world of natural science that as science has a hermeneutic component’ and the historical world of human acting and suffering that shows the hermeneutic dimension of understanding. ‘No matter how these two worlds are interwoven and whether one understands theory as the highest human praxis or praxis as the mere application of theory – these two world horizons will not flow together into one.’82 In ‘From Word to Concept’ Gadamer distinguishes two ways of measuring that Plato discusses in The Statesmen. One method of measuring concerns the quantitative, and the scientific method uses this standard. In this case ‘one goes after things with a ruler in order to make them available and controllable’.83 The other way of measuring concerns quality. ‘One aims at the correct measure, the appropriate (Angemessene) itself ’.84 This form of measuring requires judgement. This form of judgement ‘is found in living life (Lebenspraxis) and in all experience – namely everywhere, where one is concerned with the reasonable application of rules. To open our eyes to this is the central task of philosophical hermeneutics’.85 Gadamer’s point in discussing these two ways of measuring is not that ‘one form of measuring is more important than the other. No, rather the opposite: both forms are important’.86 The universal claim of philosophical hermeneutics implies that understanding in the natural sciences will also contain the elements of hermeneutic experience. To what extent are these elements in natural scientific understanding similar to the ones identified in Truth and Method for understanding in the humanities? The natural scientist, as the humanist, is a being-in-the-world, Dasein, and the existentials of Dasein apply equally to both. Understanding in the natural sciences is therefore also thrown projection. The natural scientist is thrown into the world and any act of understanding begins from the fore-structures of understanding, which Gadamer collectively terms Vorurteile, prejudices.87 The natural scientist has inherited a set of prejudices in the process of her acculturation into a particular temporal and historical context. This acculturation includes learning a particular language and receiving a particular education, including one’s particular discipline. These prejudices are consciously and unconsciously held and form the horizon of possible meaning in that particular hermeneutic situation. Understanding is always understanding as a projection of a more complete understanding developed from the fore-structures of understanding. As Heidegger argued and Gadamer reiterated, understanding succeeds when these fore-structures are based on the things themselves and not on fancies or

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popular conceptions. This is the unavoidable circular structure of understanding and means that all understanding is always also interpretation. Since the natural scientist understands from within a particular hermeneutic situation, scientific observation must be understood from this position. Fundamental to Heidegger’s and so Gadamer’s analysis of the hermeneutic situation is that what is experienced presents itself as already meaningful based on one’s inherited prejudices. Heidegger experiences all at once that the lectern is set too high for him. 88 He does not experience brown surfaces that meet at right angles and then interpret this information to mean that the lectern is too high. The prejudices of understanding reveal the environment in its meaningful structure. This is just as true in the everyday situation as it is in the scientific laboratory. The scientist reads the temperature of the liquid in the vial, just as I read the temperature outside by looking at the thermometer.89 Depending on the pragmatic situation, the scientist may need to be more accurate in his reading. What he does not do is assemble all the myriad sense data and then begin interpreting what data belong to what so that he could finally record the temperature. This has become more accepted in analytic philosophy of science in their self-critique. As Hanson says, ‘There is more to seeing than meets the eyeball.’90 On the other hand, many scientists have been taught and accepted a particular theory concerning perception and would claim that what is really happening is an interpretation of sense data. This theory, however, is just the result of the inherited prejudices that form the hermeneutic situation of those scientists. In The Logic of Scientific Discovery Popper discusses his proposal concerning basic statements that serve as the foundation for science. The basic statement is ‘a singular existential statement’, like ‘“There is a so-and-so in the region k” or “such-and-such an event is occurring in the region k”’, where k is a particular space–time region.91 Such basic statements satisfy the two logical conditions set for the foundational sentences of science. In addition, ‘basic statement[s] must be testable, inter-subjectively, by “observation”’.92 In being testable, basic statements are falsifiable and so part of natural science. Basic statements are used in testing theories and in such a test one ‘must stop at some basic statement or other which we decide to accept’.93 Importantly, for Popper, basic statements are not verified, nor are they indubitable; rather we, the ‘scientific observers’, come to agree on the acceptability of some basic statement. Popper points out that if agreement cannot be reached, the basic statement can itself be tested by deriving another basic statement from this one using some accepted theory. Again, there may be agreement or not. If not then further testing can occur. Significantly for a hermeneutic analysis, Popper writes, ‘If some day it should no longer be possible for scientific observers to reach agreement about basic statements this would amount to a failure of language as a means of universal communication.’94 What is surprising is that one has not noticed the hermeneutic elements inherent in Popper’s discussion of basic statements. In 1985, Gadamer writes, ‘It was only much later [certainly after Truth and Method] that I came to realize that in Popper’s critique of positivism there were related motives with my own orientation’.95 Grondin presents a 1970 letter from Popper to C. Grossner where Popper writes that he sees himself ‘as distanced from positivism as (for example) Gadamer’.96 Popper continues that the natural sciences use ‘essentially a method that works with “Vorurteilen” [prejudices]’.97

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According to Popper, the difference in his use of prejudices, as opposed to Gadamer’s, is that his prejudices are usually new, falsifiable, and subjected to a strenuous critique. Popper and Gadamer agree that there is no indubitable foundation, the given, from which the edifice of science is constructed. Popper and Gadamer also agree that Carnap’s criterion for meaningful sentences is incorrect. Most importantly, one has not noticed that Popper’s discussion of the process involved in the acceptance of basic statements parallels Gadamer’s analysis of understanding and the hermeneutic event of truth. Basic statements are exactly how Heidegger and, following him, Gadamer speak of our original relation to at least part of the world we inhabit. The experienced world is already endowed with meanings. The sentence, ‘At k, the lectern is set too high (for Heidegger),’ would qualify as a basic statement for Popper. Neither Heidegger nor Gadamer nor even Popper restricts these statements to mere sense data reports. Rather, they concern the everyday pragmatic situation in which we find ourselves. Scientific statements may use specific scientific terms, but each discipline has its technical vocabulary. Gadamer and Heidegger would agree with Popper that if one could not reach agreement concerning these basic statements then this would amount to the failure of language. Central for Popper is that basic statements are falsifiable and can be empirically tested by deriving further test implications. Heidegger and Gadamer both acknowledge the finitude of human being, and this implies that any statement may be questioned. In particular, Popper argues that the acknowledgement of a basic statement occurs when the scientists involved decide to accept the basic statement. The scientists come to agree, for the time being, that the basic statement is correct. This parallels Gadamer’s discussion of coming to agree in the hermeneutic conversation that is the fusion of horizons in the hermeneutic event of truth. Discrepancies among prejudices constitute the differences in the interpreter’s and text’s or other’s horizons. These discrepancies are resolved in the fusion of horizons where the correct prejudices shine forth (enlighten) and convince the conversation partners. An agreement is reached concerning the correct prejudices or interpretation. Popper admits that one’s personal observational experience may motivate the decision to accept a basic statement. Gadamer writes that what enlightens ‘is always something that is said – a proposal, a plan, a conjecture, an argument, or something of that sort’.98 This would include the meaningful experience of the presently observed situation. Popper’s discussion of basic statements demonstrates that hermeneutics is intimately involved in the very foundation of the natural sciences, in the agreement concerning what basic statements to accept. Popper notes in an addendum from 1968 at the end of the chapter on basic statements that the sentence ‘now, here, red’ presupposes theories of time, space, and colours.99 Facts are theoryladen. However, this is exactly one of the hermeneutic elements in natural science that Gadamer identifies: the meaning of a statement depends on its scope.100 In distinction to Gadamer, Popper claims his prejudices are usually new, falsifiable, and subjected to a strenuous critique. Certainly, some of Gadamer’s prejudices are new in the sense of coming from the linguistic presentation of new experience, although many are inherited. However, since Popper acknowledges that basic statements depend on accepted theories and the normal use of language, they too depend on a historical element. The truth of experience, for Gadamer, is recognizing human finitude, that

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one knows that one does not know and is therefore open to new experience, so the prejudices one has are certainly able to be called into question. Although Gadamer does not emphasize the critique of tradition, his reply to Habermas demonstrates that prejudices may be critiqued. In fact, Gadamer’s usual case is the one where the interpreter discovers his own prejudice to be false. The fusion of horizons implies the critical appraisal of the proposed conflicting prejudices and the adjudication of the legitimate one that leads to agreement among the conversation partners. Since understanding in the natural sciences is necessarily conditioned by the prejudices that the one who understands has inherited, the natural scientist is also affected by history and the traditions in which she stands. Therefore, Gadamer’s critique of the Enlightenment’s prejudice against prejudices applies equally to the natural scientist. Especially the natural scientist’s education and training imbue her with a conceptual matrix, that is, a set of prejudices, from a particular tradition located in a particular historical setting. At that time there are accepted and unquestioned theories and methods as well as open questions or areas for research. Kuhn argues for the importance of education in establishing the paradigms under which one works. The justification of the authority of natural scientific traditions parallels Gadamer’s justification of the authority of tradition. The recognition of an inherited and acknowledged theory from tradition is a rational act in that this theory has demonstrated its success in understanding that particular aspect of nature. Since it has worked and has been acknowledged, it formed part of the scientist’s education. Gadamer argues that tradition ‘needs to be affirmed, embraced, cultivated. It is essentially preservation … . Preservation is an act of reason, though an inconspicuous one.’101 Those theories that have survived in a natural science have proven their mettle; if a theory becomes unsuccessful, it is dropped from the tradition and replaced by another, much as a text may lose its status as a classic. The classical as a historical mode of being exists within natural scientific traditions, not only as text, but especially as classical experiments and inventions. The paradigms that support normal science in Kuhn’s analysis are classical in Gadamer’s sense. The effect of history, then, operates in the natural sciences as well as in the humanities. The analytic tradition of philosophy of science shared the prejudice of the Enlightenment, believing that they had some ahistorical access to descriptions of the natural world. With Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions the philosophy of science underwent a revolution. Kuhn’s historical studies in the development of the natural sciences called into question many then-current theories in the philosophy of science. However, most analytic philosophers of science rejected Kuhn’s position as being too relativistic. Nonetheless, Kuhn’s historical research demanded recognition by analytic philosophers of science. After Kuhn, two analytic philosophers of science introduced theories of the functioning of tradition within the history of natural science. Imre Lakatos proposed his theory of research programmes to resolve the differences between Popper and Kuhn, avoiding Kuhn’s relativism and expanding Popper. Lakatos argued that a research programme is constituted by a series of theories.102 It consists of two major parts. One part is the ‘hard core’ that is a dominant law or principle of the research tradition.103 The negative heuristic of a research programme means that the hard core is protected from refutation instances. The hard core functions much

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like Kuhn’s major paradigm for a community of scientists. In Gadamer’s terms, the hard core is constituted by the major unquestioned prejudices of a particular tradition. Surrounding the hard core is the protective belt, the second part of a research programme. It contains additional theories or hypotheses that permit explanations and predictions. The positive heuristic presents possible directions by which the protective belt may be modified and sophisticated to overcome countervailing results. ‘The positive heuristic sets out a programme which lists a chain of ever more complicated models simulating reality.’104 The notion of research programmes agreed with the historical evidence that major theories or ideas were not simply dismissed when falsifying evidence presented itself; rather there was an attempt to make other changes to protect the major theory. For Lakatos, changing a research programme is a rational process. The series of theories that constitutes a research programme is a progressive problem shift when the later theories have a higher empirical content with reference to the earlier ones and are intermittently corroborated.105 A degenerating problem shift is when this does not occur. In the historical development of science there are competing research programmes.106 A degenerating problem shift for one programme can lead to its demise and the success of its competitor. However, it is possible that the previous degenerating programme may turn around with a new theory in the series that presents a progressive problem shift in relation to its rival theory. ‘If such a comeback, after sustained effort, is not forthcoming, the war is lost and the experiment proved, with hindsight, “crucial”.’107 Although research programme change may take a while to be decided, the winner is rationally chosen since it proved to have the more progressive problem shift. In Progress and Its Problems Larry Laudan develops his theory of research traditions. Like Lakatos, Laudan wants to avoid the relativism he finds in Kuhn’s account but also wants to account for the historical development of science. Like Kuhn’s paradigms, Laudan recognizes more fundamental commitments that form the centre of a tradition. Like Lakatos, he argues that traditions change through time, but unlike Lakatos, research traditions are not constituted by a series of theories. Laudan claims that research traditions exist in scientific and non-scientific disciplines. The elements of tradition that Gadamer identifies in the humanities (prejudices, the authority of tradition, effective history, and the fusion of horizons) would also apply to natural scientific research traditions. For Laudan, a research tradition has three characteristics: one concerns the specific set of theories that illustrates and partly constitutes the tradition, some of which are temporally successive; another concerns beliefs about what entities and methodological norms are accepted for the domain of inquiry; the third concerns the longer temporal duration of a tradition which undergoes different formulations.108 Research traditions are not explanatory, predictive, nor testable; only the theories that constitute the tradition and allow for predictions can be tested and modified.109 Successful research traditions exhibit an increase in the number of conceptual and empirical problems that it can solve. Empirical problems are like Kuhn’s anomalies. Conceptual problems are about internal consistency and consistency with other areas of research. Laudan argues that rival research traditions are the norm in science, unlike Kuhn’s reigning paradigm or Lakatos’s hard core. Research traditions evolve not only through replacing theories with more successful theories but sometimes by emending

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small parts in the core assumptions.110 An established research tradition can influence a culture’s world view, modifying it or being in opposition to it. Concerning changing research traditions, Laudan suggests two rational criteria. The central one concerns the quantity of problems a research tradition has solved. This indicates what tradition should be accepted. The second one concerns the rate of problem resolution. This allows a new research tradition that may not have solved as many problems but has a higher rate of problem resolution to be worthy of being pursued.111 Using these criteria, Laudan argues that there may be gains and losses in changing research traditions and so scientific progress is not strictly cumulative.112 If one accepts Lakatos’s or Laudan’s discussions to be a further step in the selfcritical development of analytic philosophy of science, it is demonstrable that there are more hermeneutic elements in natural scientific understanding than Gadamer thought. In fact, the elements of hermeneutic experience discussed in Truth and Method occur in natural scientific understanding. The natural scientist is acculturated into a particular tradition, learning and accepting the unquestioned central ideas, paradigms, or prejudices of her discipline. The authority of tradition justifies these basic presuppositions as well as the scientist’s background knowledge. The preconception of completion is the natural scientist’s presumption that nature presents a coherent structure so that inconsistencies are not tolerated. Further, though nature may hide, what nature reveals in appropriate investigation is initially accepted as truthful. Effective history affects the research programme or tradition not only in the establishment of the tradition in the first place but also in its emendations and developments or demise. The hermeneutic circle is exhibited in the recognition that facts are theory-laden and that there is a back-and-forth movement between parts, experimental results, and wholes, the corroborated theories and even the hard core or central ideas of a research tradition where change comes in discovering the coherent relations among the parts and the whole. The central problem of hermeneutics, application, occurs in natural science as well. The particular is not just subsumed under the universal but, as in precedent law, the universal is developed through the recognition of the particular. This can be seen in the modification of theories due to particular countervailing results. Laudan even permits modification of the central tenets in a research tradition. As Gadamer remarks, the natural sciences primarily advance through negative experiences, as Popper emphasized. Natural scientific inquiry is a dialectic of question and answer, a dialectic of hypothesis and accepted, observable facts. The fusion of horizons, the adjudication of legitimate prejudices, and the hermeneutic event of truth occur in the natural sciences in a manner similar to the humanities. As Gadamer argues, what decides a question is the weight of argument for one position and the dissolution of the counterarguments or seeing the illegitimate prejudices of previous positions.113 As Gadamer argues in the discussion of the hermeneutic event of truth, the legitimate prejudice shines forth and convinces the conversation partners.114 Popper, as we have seen, argues the same for the acceptance of basic statements. Even Kuhn argues that, in the end, ‘there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community’ in resolving a revolution.115 Although initial proponents of a new paradigm may have very subjective reasons, in the end agreement is reached because of predictive success and the promise of future fecundation of the new paradigm. In terms of changes

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between research programmes, Lakatos relies on higher empirical content and some corroboration, while Laudan relies on the number of problems solved and the rate of problem resolution. Certainly, there are differences in the various domains of research in the natural sciences and humanities. Today, even in the philosophy of science, many claim that there are different methodologies and object domains among the various branches of the natural sciences; therefore, one would also acknowledge that there are greater differences among the various branches of the humanities and the natural sciences. Only one who held the prejudice of radical reductionism and belonged to that tradition would argue that all true knowledge must be formulated in terms of a certain level of physics. This would, of course, eliminate as folk psychology most of what is now considered knowledge. As noted, Gadamer understood natural science as physicalism and the unity of science; this reductionist position was contrasted to the experience of truth in the humanities. As demonstrated, the self-critique of analytic philosophy of science has exposed the essential role played by hermeneutics in natural scientific understanding. Another widely held prejudice is the fact/value dichotomy. Gadamer’s claim that the ‘world horizons’ of natural science and the humanities will not become one horizon is justified by this dichotomy. On the other hand, the universal claim of philosophical hermeneutics has been justified by demonstrating that the elements of hermeneutic experience are to be found in natural scientific understanding as well as in understanding in the humanities.

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Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, and Religion: Restoring the Fullness of Knowing Jens Zimmermann

One lives only that which one imagines, and metaphysical imagination resides in symbols; even Life is a symbol, an image, before being experienced and lived.1 – Paul Ricoeur

Introduction: Moving beyond secularism Many of the important debates in Western cultures boil down to the determination of what counts as true knowledge. For example, most of the contentious issues pertaining to the relation of religion and secularity come down to the correlation between reason and faith. Discussions about secularism or debates concerning the role of religion in modern, democratic, and pluralistic societies are still shaped by a deeply ingrained belief that economic, educational, and social policies depend on evident facts, while religion operates on the rather different, and potentially dangerous, basis of irrational beliefs. Recent Islamist and Hindu violence in the name of religion seems to confirm the inherent irrationality of faith and encourages people to continue insisting on the mistaken division between reason and faith. It is less obvious, and thus often overlooked, that the same opposition of knowledge to belief is a major cause for the ongoing crisis of higher education. The modern university, essentially a product of Western culture, emerged from medieval Cathedral schools. Medieval scholastics pursued knowledge, research, and education with a deep confidence in human reason, rooted in their belief in an intelligible cosmos that was accessible to reason and governed by discernible objective, universal moral and physical laws.2 Best summarized by the adage ‘faith seeking understanding’, the medieval roots of our modern knowledge culture were nourished by the productive correlation between, rather than opposition of, reason and faith. It is widely acknowledged that neither the scientific revolution nor modern research would have occurred without this medieval confidence in human reason.3 Renaissance humanists inherited and cultivated the medieval conviction that human reasoning reflected a divine logos or unifying rational word that sustained and ordered the cosmos and human experience. If all existing things came to be

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through the power of the divine Word, and if human beings as made in God’s image participated in this Word, then humans could be co-creators with God in poetry and literature.4 For this reason, Renaissance humanists pursued the study of literature and were passionate about education because they believed in the power of a wellschooled imagination for the improvement of society. With the modern separation of the self from transcendent sources, and with the reduction of knowledge to scientific objectivism, we have lost the notion that the human mind participates in a greater non-material reality and by this loss effectively degraded knowledge in the humanities and the study of literature, philosophy, and theology to mere subjective insights. Even after decades of postmodern criticism of the division between facts and value, society’s persistent preference of the hard sciences and practical business education over the supposedly subjective opinions pursued in the humanities testifies to our inveterate inability to recognize that the separation of reason from faith is a historical accident rather than the self-evident nature of knowledge. Thus, reason and belief will remain at odds as long as reason is equated with objective truth determined by the experimental verifiability of the natural sciences. This definition of objective knowledge has a long history, which we cannot possibly review in detail here. What is most important for our argument is to realize that the opposition of knowledge based on verifiable facts to mere religious beliefs is in fact a historically developed viewpoint and not simply a natural or common-sense understanding of how we come to know reality. The rise of this reduction of true knowledge to the model of scientific certainty has been documented and criticized in countless publications, beginning as early as the seventeenth century with Giambattista Vico’s critique of Descartes’s rationalism, and extends, to name a few major figures, from Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Husserl, Heidegger, Scheler, and Gadamer to more recent accounts in Louis Dupré’s Passage to Modernity and Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age.5 Taylor, perhaps more than any other contemporary thinker, has demonstrated that the reason-faith opposition depends on a ‘subtraction narrative of secularism’ that depicts human moral and scientific evolution as a gradual departure from religion. Taylor’s work shows that modern secularists’ exclusion of religion from a realistic assessment of life is not a self-evident truth to be discovered by all who care to look, but depends itself on a certain interpretive grid.6 The interpretive grid of this ‘exclusive humanism’7 is dogmatically closed to the possibility of transcendence and therefore easily allied to naturalism, the belief that all of reality, including the human mind, is reducible to biochemical and ultimately physical processes. As Thomas Nagel, a selfavowed non-theist, has cogently argued, however, this physicalism is itself reductive and implausible because it cannot account for consciousness.8 Nagel equally rejects the theistic solution of explaining physical matter as a consequence of (a divine) mind. Such an appeal to God, he argues, makes the ultimate explanation for the intelligibility of the world extrinsic to nature, rather than intrinsic to a comprehensive natural order that includes mind.9 This brief and inadequate sketch of our current cultural landscape reveals two things. First, what we often consider debates about irresolvable issues are actually grounded in historically emergent ideas about what counts as knowledge, wherefore we first need to settle epistemological matters before dealing with the claims built on

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them. Second, we are beginning to leave behind secularism, and should therefore also move beyond the reductive concept of knowledge that sustains it. What we require instead is a broader conception of human knowledge that does justice to the fullness of human experience, precisely the sort of model developed within phenomenology and philosophical hermeneutics.

Deepening phenomenology Phenomenology originated with Husserl’s desire to move beyond the reductive concept of evidentiary knowledge held by empiricists because adherence to this model had led to a ‘crisis of the sciences’.10 What is the crisis to which Husserl refers? The crisis originated in extending the empirical model of verifiable knowledge from the natural sciences to all human knowing, with the result that scholarly research can no longer offer any insight into the most burning question people have in ‘our current disastrous times’ in which many are subject to ‘fateful social upheavals’, namely, ‘the question about the meaning or meaninglessness of our entire human existence’.11 Husserl argued that we should not expect from the natural sciences any evaluative pronouncements on human action. Yet the human sciences should offer reasonable evaluative judgements on human behaviour and culture. Tragically, however, the humanities have imposed on themselves a narrow scientific definition of knowledge as ‘that which is objectively ascertainable only in this way’.12 Consequently, humanities scholars, in the name of this supposed scientific rigour, limit themselves to describing what the physical and mental world is, eschewing judgements about whether any cultural work is valuable or humane. Husserl’s comment on this state of affairs is as trenchant now as it was then: ‘Can, however, the world and human existence within it have any meaning … when history has nothing else to teach than that all shapes of the mental world, all the liferelations, ideals, and norms which sustain human beings arise and disintegrate like fleeting waves? … Can we live in this world, in which historical events are nothing but an unceasing concatenation (Verkettung) of illusionary upsurges and bitter disappointments?’13 Thus, for Husserl, researchers’ absurd self-limitation to scientific objectivism imposes an unnatural fact-value split on human knowing and effectively denies our natural desire for meaning together with science’s responsibility to provide meaningful knowledge based on an evidentiary footing. Husserl pursued this course, however, not in order to dismiss stringent scientific work but to establish the foundation for ‘real fact-oriented science (Tatsachenwissenschaften) and for a true universal philosophy in the Cartesian sense of absolute grounding (absoluter Begründung)’.14 With this purpose in mind, he exposed how scientific empiricism, under the guise of neutral observation, suppresses phenomena that escape its presuppositions. Empirical scientists purport to be ‘positivists’, yet the natural sciences actually discount all kinds of experiences that do not fit their view of what counts as ‘given’. Husserl argued that empiricists naively believe in a meaningful, immediate, or ‘direct’ experience of facts. Direct experience, however, ‘only yields singular particularities and no generalities, and is thus insufficient’.15 Empiricists pretend simply to see what is there, but forget that the quality of each fact depends

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on the theoretical grid through which facts are integrated into a meaningful whole. In other words, judgements about the value or meaning of an experienced fact are not derived from raw, immediate experience. Empiricists want to be ‘positivists’, dealing strictly with what is given to experience, yet they do not apply the same empirical demand to the presuppositions by which they judge all knowledge16 and deem inferior experiences that do not conform to their prejudices. Empiricists, avers Husserl, are not empirical enough, and are certainly not self-reflexive enough. Instead, he claimed, phenomenologists are the ‘real positivists’, for ‘we indeed do not allow any authority to cripple our right to acknowledge all ways of seeing as equally legitimate sources of knowledge, not even the authority of the “modern natural sciences”’.17 Phenomenology is guided by the ‘principle of all principles’, namely, ‘that each originary-given intuition (Anschauung) be a legitimate source of knowledge, that everything which presents itself to our intuition originarily (in its incarnate reality, so to speak) is to be accepted as it represents itself, but only within the limits within which it presents itself ’.18 This principle expresses Husserl’s fundamental conviction that objective reality only exists in the correlation of mind and being. Thus, any supposed gap between a thing in itself and its appearance makes no sense, in Husserl’s view. Rather, objects present themselves to consciousness within certain boundary conditions that allow us to perceive them as what they are. Since we have a world only as it appears in many varied ways to consciousness, strict science requires the patient, detailed description of the modes and structures of appearance in order to arrive at the essence of objects or ideas. Husserl’s explicit identification with Descartes’s attempt to found human knowledge on rational principles reveals his conviction that phenomenology is a renewed effort at ‘first philosophy’, a science ‘grounded in radical realness’ (Echtheit) and in the ambition to ‘a universal science’.19 Like Descartes (and Kant), Husserl chooses the path of transcendental philosophy to respond to the empiricist denial of universal meaning structures. At the same time, however, Husserl’s first philosophy proceeds from a decidedly different starting point than Descartes’s prima philosophia, since phenomenology does not begin with the methodological doubt of reality but with the suspension of our natural way of perceiving it, in order to enter a descriptive mode of reflection. Unlike Descartes’s radical doubt, the phenomenological ἐποχή does not question the existence of the world but merely suspends any received judgements about existing things. Husserl never questions whether the world exists, but is concerned with how it appears to consciousness.20 Husserl suggests diplomatically that in Descartes’s philosophy, methodical doubt is so dominant that ‘one can say his attempt at universal doubt actually constitutes an attempt at universal negation’.21 By contrast, Husserl’s own phenomenological attitude merely ‘brackets’ claims and judgements about reality, without questioning their veracity. This bracketing (ἐποχή) is ‘a certain suspension of judgment, which is compatible with an unshaken and potentially unshakeable – because evident – conviction of truth’.22 Suspension of judgement does not mean that one takes a kind of hypothetical stance towards reality or tries to imagine it in a certain way. Rather, in assuming the phenomenological attitude, one brackets ‘this entire natural world which constantly exists and is present for us, and which will always remain present as reality to consciousness, even when we prefer to bracket it’.23 Again, the point of the exercise is

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not to achieve a neutral scientific stance free from prejudicial theories or metaphysical assumptions, but to focus on how ideas and objects appear to our consciousness in their essential nature and character, apart from any judgements we may want to exercise on them. What gives itself to consciousness in this ‘pure’ transcendental experience appears in its essential qualities. We touch here on Husserl’s well-known postulate of intentionality, that consciousness is always consciousness of something and thus also as something determinate: ‘The essence of experience comprises not only that it is consciousness of [something] but also what it is consciousness of, and in what determinate or indeterminate sense this is the case.’24 Phenomenology is essentially a philosophical realism that overcomes the epistemological scepticism initiated by Descartes and continued with Hume’s empiricism. Kant, we recall, had tried to respond to Hume with his own analysis of the formal structures of consciousness by identifying the a priori categories of sensation and judgement. Yet Kant did not truly reconnect consciousness to the lifeworld we experience. In his attempt to show how formal a priori structures of consciousness enable objective judgements about reality, Kant’s world remains split into the appearance of phenomena and the thing in itself to which his transcendental ego has no direct access. Husserl’s ego, by contrast, ‘is not the “res cogitans” of Descartes or the disembodied “thinker” of Kantian transcendentalism; it is inserted and involved in the dense world of human life; it is, in his own terms, “life-experiencing-the-world (welterfahrendes Leben)”’.25 By assuming a basic correlation between the lifeworld and consciousness, phenomenology rejects any reality or world behind appearances. Our experience of the world or lifeworld also grounds ‘thought-life’, and thus precedes and exceeds any theoretical concepts or judgements.26 In examining the ways in which we are conscious of experience, phenomenology can legitimately claim to be a foundational discipline. We have called Husserl’s phenomenology a realism, however, it is a realism with idealist tendencies. The contrast between the idealist Husserl and ontological phenomenology of Martin Heidegger, for example, should not be exaggerated. Heidegger did not so much depart from Husserl as deepen his notions of consciousness and intentionality.27 Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein’s existential, ontological structures owes much to Husserl’s belief that intentionality is rooted in the lifeworld we experience rather than in a self-contained mirror of consciousness.28 One could also cite passages from the late Husserl that stress the ‘historical being’ of the phenomenologist. What Heidegger called Destruktion, the careful peeling away of historically sedimented layers of meaning of concepts, Husserl describes as ‘historical reflection’, in which ‘one has to bring back to life the sedimented conceptuality in its concealed historical meaning, which is taken as the self-evident ground of [the philosopher’s] private and unhistorical work’.29 Husserl is an idealist insofar as he, like Kant, pursues a transcendental philosophy that is anchored in ‘the knowing subject as the primordial place (Urstätte) of all objective meaning formations and validations of being (Seinsgeltungen), and thus endeavours to understand the existing world as object of meaning and value, and in this way pave the way for a new kind of science and philosophy’.30 Surely overcoming the subject–object opposition and acknowledging the importance and life context of the subject in knowledge acquisition are common to Heidegger and Husserl.

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Husserl is also an idealist in the sense that his confidence in phenomenology ultimately derives from the metaphysical, indeed religious, conviction that a universal mind or logos endows reality with purpose and renders it intelligible to the mind. Husserl made no secret of his ‘firm belief in a divine meaning of world and humanity’, and thus in ‘a universal teleology’ on which his own philosophy was based.31 Recently published texts from Husserl’s literary estate show clearly that ‘this religious belief in a divine universal teleology virtually provides the material that the philosopher Husserl tries to appropriate rationally and ground phenomenologically in his research manuscripts’.32 Husserl’s phenomenological method was non-theological in the sense that he distinguished clearly between phenomenological intuitions about God and ‘naïve’ or ‘irrational’ beliefs based on the kind of revelation that characterizes positive religion. At the same time, however, his philosophy was certainly not atheistic but open to religion. Indeed, for him, phenomenology conceived as the radical turn to examining the relation of consciousness to the lifeworld ultimately leads to a completion (Abschluss) of his universal teleology in an absolute Ego, to the ‘same world-transcending, supra-human (übermenschlichen) pole of God’.33 In a so-called theological turn, phenomenology’s basic openness towards transcendence has been explored to the full predominantly by French phenomenologists such as Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Marion, and Jean Chrétien. In each case, the assertion of phenomenology’s suitability for the description of transcendent, religious phenomena is preceded by a critique of the illegitimate expansion of scientific reasoning to human knowledge as a whole. Henry, for example, wrote his early work on the revelatory power of emotions and their suppression by the prevailing Western proclivity to associate objectivity with impersonal ‘exteriority’.34 Writing in a decidedly Christian vein, he later argued that Christianity, far from being otherworldly, discovered the true source of worldly phenomena: life itself, namely a personal God, whose generation of the ‘Arch-Son’ renders imaginable the essential unity of life and individuality, as has no other form of thought.35 Hegel’s philosophy, along with science, ends up annihilating individuality for the sake of impersonal objective truth, either of the world spirit (Hegel) or of impersonal facts (science). Thus, the necessary balance between subjective interiority and objective knowledge is lost, together with the full range of our affections, by which God, world, and others properly reveal themselves to us. For Henry, nothing less than our humanity is at stake here. Our human ways of seeing, knowing, and being disappear in a world still dominated by the mechanistic spirit of Galileo’s science which reduces life to physics: ‘in the field opened by modern science, there is no person’. Thus science simply suppresses what constitutes ‘essential Being’. Henry claims that the supposedly obsolete knowledge of Christianity about human nature furnishes us with the personalist conception of humanity we desperately need. Today, he claims, Christianity ‘alone can tell us, in the midst of the general mental confusion, what man is’ – man, ‘who is only possible as a Self ’.36 From a different angle, but with similar intentions for restoring a fuller range of human knowing, Jean-Luc Marion’s notion of ‘saturated phenomena’ also includes a penetrating critique of the conditions under which the Western mind allows phenomena to appear. In particular, he questions Husserl’s own ideal of objective truth as adaequatio rei et intellectus, as the object’s fitting with the intending consciousness.

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In other words, we only recognize an object fully as object, and thus with certainty, when it fits the rational grid of our intellectual seeing without remainder. Yet this ideal, argues Marion, is only fulfilled in purely ideational constructs such as mathematics. Yet why, he wonders, should we privilege this particular model of adequation? Although theories of knowledge, ‘from Plato to Descartes, from Kant to Husserl’, have thus favoured logical and mathematical phenomena as ideals of truth, why should such a narrow definition of phenomenality be paradigmatic? Marion argues that in both Kant and Husserl the appearance of phenomena is unfairly conditioned by the intuitive capacities of the finite ego: ‘In order for a phenomenon to be reduced to an obviously finite I who constitutes it, the phenomenon must be reduced to the status of finite objectivity.’37 Marion, however, wants to explore the possibility of unconditioned phenomena that in fact overwhelm and condition the beholder. He finds the precedent for such phenomena in Kant himself, who in the case of aesthetic ideas had already admitted that phenomena exist to which no rational concept is adequate. Hence, Kant implies phenomena so rich in their givenness, so saturated with intuition, that they exceed any objectivization and conceptualization.38 According to Marion, the saturated phenomenon gives itself ‘free from any analogy with the experience that [the subject] has already seen, objectivized, and comprehended’.39 Such a phenomenon ‘is no longer reduced to the I that would look at it. Incapable of being looked at, it proves irreducible’.40 Marion stresses that introducing saturated phenomena is motivated not by a theological commitment but by his philosophical concern to acknowledge phenomena that appear at the limit of human perception. Kant’s sublime and Descartes’s idea of infinity are examples of such saturated phenomena, which Marion divides into two types. The first are ‘pure historical events’, events one cannot immediately comprehend but merely witness; these are events that comprehend and shape us.41 Nonetheless, such events remain essentially communicable. Not so, according to Marion, with the second type of revelatory phenomena. Marion insists that he uses revelation in a non-theological sense of connoting ‘an appearance that is purely of itself and starting from itself, that does not subject its possibility to any preliminary determination’.42 Such revelation occurs in the case of an image, painting, or picture (tableau) that the I cannot constitute but still behold by looking at it. The beholder knows that the picture exceeds a comprehensive or reductive understanding, but it does not commune with the beholder as if it had personal qualities. This ‘idol’ is contrasted with the ‘icon’, that is, with the face of someone I love, in which I want to see ‘its invisible gaze weighing on mine’. The final revelatory saturated phenomenon is the theophany, characterized ‘by the paradox that an invisible gaze visibly envisages me and loves me’. According to Marion, this third type opens the way for a phenomenology of religion.43 The religious turn of phenomenology has been criticized most heavily by the French philosopher, Dominique Janicaud (1937–2002). His main complaint is that theologically motivated thinkers like Marion are trying to ‘render phenomenological what cannot be’.44 For Janicaud, those who in the wake of Heidegger claim to deepen phenomenology and to overcome metaphysical prejudices – Marion and others – abandon the rational foundations and descriptive neutrality of Husserl. Janicaud remarks wryly on Marion’s notions of ‘pure givenness’ and ‘saturated phenomena’ that

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‘we have to do, here, with a rather dry mystical might; the superabundance of grace has been put through the Heideggerian wringer’.45 Did not Husserl explicitly bracket divine transcendence from phenomenology in order to preserve the research arena of ‘pure consciousness’?46 Janicaud advocates returning to a ‘minimalist phenomenology’,47 defined by a ‘methodological atheism’48 that avoids the temptation of finding either theological or ethical transcendence, either the divine or human other, within the immanent itself.49 Such things are by definition invisible to consciousness, and a phenomenology of the invisible is ‘a contradiction in terms’.50 At the same time, however, he acknowledges that phenomenology does not have to be a unified field but can have different ‘furrows’, including religious phenomenology. Janicaud’s critique begs the question. Phenomenological thinkers from Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty to Levinas, Marion, Henry, and Chrétien have argued that transcendence, in some form or other, does show up in the intentionality of finite consciousness as objective realities. Paradoxically, what is invisible does in fact imprint itself on the visible and should be recognized as legitimate phenomena.51

Deepening hermeneutics: The need for religious symbols For Janicaud, with the recent theological turn, ‘phenomenology has been taken hostage by a theology that does not want to say its name’.52 While one may disagree with Janicaud’s verdict that real phenomenology ought not deal in phenomena that are beyond the ken of the finite self, his criticism raises another important issue. Is not the theological turn in effect a Judeo-Christian turn? Do not the biblical references and Christian concerns that mark these recent openings to a phenomenology of religion reveal that what is passed off as universal phenomena prove to be products ‘of a Christian phenomenology’, whose ‘properly phenomenological sense must fall away, for a nonbeliever, midway through the journey?’53 In other words, are the supposedly universal phenomena and structures by which the transcendent shows up in immanent consciousness not rather the particular concerns of a certain religion that pretends to conduct a neutral description while ‘the dice have been fixed’ for a religious apologetic for divine transcendence?54 This criticism is taken up by Paul Ricoeur. Since Heidegger, hermeneutics has called into question Husserl’s confidence that objects appear to consciousness without any ontological mediation and conditioning through pre-conscious structures. In Being and Time, Heidegger tried to demonstrate that the way we comport ourselves in the world influences our perception of objects. Put differently, intentionality is a matter not of mental but of existential conditions. Hans-Georg Gadamer worked out in greater detail how history, tradition, and language shape our understanding of the world, others, and ourselves. In the same vein, Ricoeur fully condones a phenomenology of religion but questions the ‘immediacy that could be claimed by the dispositions and feelings’ discovered by its proponents.55 Phenomenologists like Marion, Henry, and Chrétien suggest that phenomenological analysis reveals universal transcendent phenomena such as ‘icon’, ‘response and call structures’, ‘prayer’, and the like. Ricoeur argues that these supposed general structures

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are in fact conditioned by a particular religious tradition and by a particular field of symbols germane to it. For Ricoeur, ‘religion is like language itself, which is realized only in different tongues’.56 Just as languages develop over time and thus require a cultural and historical mediation, so religious intuitions are historically conditioned. Understanding such phenomena requires a critical hermeneutics. In the case of the Judeo-Christian tradition and its interaction with Greco-Roman and Islamic thought, religious feelings and dispositions are structured by the long history these religions have with their scriptures. For this reason, what our phenomenologists of religion take to be immediate, general intuitions are in fact particular ones, and their understanding requires a textual and scriptural hermeneutics to perceive how texts have shaped cultural perception. Ricoeur himself demonstrated this hermeneutic procedure brilliantly in The Symbolism of Evil. Evil and consequent suffering are universal experiences, yet we can only talk about them by means of religious symbols, which in turn have a definite history. This history begins with primary symbols, utterances already interpreting a lived experience of an imbalance or evil within reality as ‘stain’ or ‘defilement’.57 Such primal symbols are later developed into myths or supra-historical narratives that account for the existence of evil.58 In the context of such narrations, the meanings of primary symbols are transformed in accordance with myths particular to certain religions. In contrast to Jewish belief, many religions held that suffering came about by upsetting cosmic structures in which everyone participated. Such representations of defilement, writes Ricoeur, dwell ‘in the half-light of a quasi-physical infection that points towards a quasi-moral unworthiness’.59 Such a quasi-biological or systemic concept of evil made impossible the distinction ‘between the divine and the diabolical’, subsuming both under some impersonal, cosmic force.60 Understandings of defilement changed with the Jewish creation myth, which explained evil as resulting from a broken relationship between human beings and a personal, sovereign creator God. The Jewish concept of ‘sin’ is thus no longer material – the upsetting of some natural, cosmic balance – but rather ethical, originating from a broken relationship with God.61 Ricoeur points out that with the appearance of Jesus in the New Testament, the concept of sin changes even more profoundly. God himself participates in suffering in order to redeem it.62 Ricoeur’s analysis demonstrates that human reflection is not based on immediate intuition; rather, as he puts it, ‘symbols give rise to thought’. Ricoeur contributes profoundly to our understanding of human knowledge with his insistence that human experience cannot unfold rationally without the imagination, and that our imagination is shaped by the symbols we inherit and through which we conceptualize the world. Images and symbols are the media through which we perceive reality. They are ‘like the innate ideas of the old philosophy. I encounter them, I find them’.63 According to Ricoeur, symbols and images both precede us and yet are culturally contingent. Even what we deem to be simple, straightforward notions, such as ‘evil’, ‘suffering’, or ‘life’, are already interpretations rooted in a world of symbols. The symbolic structure of human reason indicates the basic participatory nature of our perception, showing that ‘the Cogito is within being, and not vice versa’.64 Ricoeur thus demonstrates that no immediate intuition is possible. Indeed, the hermeneutic unfolding of our intuited

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meanings itself requires us to take a certain point of view from which we try to move towards establishing comparative meanings. Thus, for hermeneutics, our historical being-in-the-world affects the intentionality of consciousness in two important ways. First, a point of view is given to us as those who inhabit a symbolic and conceptual world created by our historical Greco-Roman-Judeo-Christian context.65 Second, as Gadamer points out, every description of phenomena is driven by application, that is, by our own contemporary interest that shapes our appropriation of the past,66 so that ‘our past never stops changing its meaning; the present appropriation of the past modifies that which motivates us from the past’.67 In short, given the historicity of our own consciousness of phenomena, including guilt, evil, and suffering, together with our implicit understanding of life, nature, and justice, our knowledge is always interpretive and requires the kind of careful grammatical-historical unfolding that Ricoeur demonstrates in his work. In this way, Ricoeur deepens phenomenology by insisting on a critical hermeneutical unfolding of what we believe to be immediate intuitions. Ricoeur believes incorporating this hermeneutic dimension into phenomenology is warranted by Husserl’s own view that sense and image data appear as objects through the integrative work of consciousness. Especially in the Cartesian Meditations, Ricoeur finds Husserl’s recognition that intuition is already explication.68 Adding this hermeneutical dimension addresses Janicaud’s worry that a phenomenology of religion may be lost on the unbeliever. For even the unbeliever or the agnostic’s use of terms, indeed his or her very attitude towards religion, derives from a historically developed consciousness; no one, in other words, is exempt from the responsibility for historical reflection on the presuppositions that underlie one’s use of terms. For religious phenomenology, this responsibility would entail the second step to compare one’s own particular intuitions of ‘prayer’, ‘grace’, or ‘donation’ with the symbols, myths, and narratives of other religions in order to establish any universal phenomenological structures. Ricoeur thus makes a solid case for the insight that perception is always an act of interpretation, the integration of experienced impressions into a meaningful whole on the basis of the cultural tradition we inhabit. No one simply ‘sees’ what is there, but every seeing, as Heidegger already argued, is a seeing as, an understanding of objects within an existing framework of meaning based on our practical-historical being-inthe-world.69 All knowledge, to press home our main point, is acquired by an interpretive act of integrating impressions into a meaningful whole based on a rationally defensible framework which we already inhabit. We never merely observe; perception itself is already meaningful. To know is already to understand. For Heidegger, the natural sciences’ way of seeing things is merely one possible, and necessarily reductive, way of understanding reality. The Scottish-Canadian philosopher John Macmurray (1891–1976) provides one of the best descriptions for the various complementary ways in which we perceive reality. Macmurray agrees with the hermeneutic starting point that ‘nothing is understood until it is expressed, nothing can be expressed except through thinking, and thinking is the result of reflection upon what is already present but unexpressed in our experience’.70 For Macmurray, experience of reality is already a pre-reflective knowing. He rejects the popular view that knowledge is the result of thought; rather, thought

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or reflection unfolds what we already know from our practical comportment in lived experience. For example, ‘if we did not know what water is by drinking it and washing in it and boiling it in our kettles, the scientific statement that water is H2O would be merely a meaningless noise’.71 Like Ricoeur, Macmurray suggests that our understanding of experience unfolds through images or symbols which we arrange in an interpretive schema or what he calls a ‘unity pattern’. A unity pattern is a formal conception of the way in which different symbols can be united so as to constitute a whole, a conception in which ‘symbols are arranged in a way that is determined by the reality which they are to represent. This, obviously, is only possible through some representation in imagination of the unity which is given in immediate experience itself … . The unity is thus the conception of a unity constructed by the imagination. Without such a conception, which we can use as a rule to guide the imagination in the development of ideas, there could be no guarantee that the ideas were related in such a way that the results could be referred back to the concreteness of immediate experience. Without the unity pattern, thought would be impossible’ (33). Macmurray posits three major unity patterns: the ‘mechanical unity pattern of mathematical thought’;72 the ‘organic unity pattern of biological thought’;73 and the personalist ‘unity-pattern of psychological thought’.74 The first pattern is valid for, and characteristic of, our experience with objects, allowing us to account for individuating, quantifying, and efficient calculating of material objects. The second pattern builds on, but also surpasses, the first by allowing us to express our experience of living matter in terms of growth, teleology, and the unity of differences in a harmonic whole. The unity pattern of biological thought, however, cannot adequately represent human consciousness, for consciousness is not organic, and personality cannot be symbolized or represented properly by biological notions. Rather, the reflection on human consciousness requires the relational interpretive pattern of personal communion that goes well beyond the mechanical (viewing others as objects) or the organic, which always wants to explain everything in terms of an overarching telos contained within itself. The personalist unity pattern, by contrast, employs relational and ethical language to acknowledge a person’s ability to transcend his environment, and the personalist schema acknowledges that emotions are intrinsic to objective reasoning. According to Macmurray, objective knowledge in its fullest form occurs in personal relations, in which all the capacities of our consciousness are called upon at once: ‘It is only the objectivity of our conscious relation to other persons which can express our rationality fully and so reveal its essential character.’75 Human knowledge can only be exhibited at its fullest and most objective range and also at its most complex in personalist categories. The objective understanding of myself and my world depends on my relationship with others. For Macmurray, the best description of the community of conscious beings is friendship, and its highest form occurs in those religions in which God is the absolute, personal ground of communion. For ‘the universality of reason in the personal field demands an infinite and personal ground of the particular and limited phenomena of personal experience in the personal field’.76

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If Macmurray’s argument for different models of knowledge is correct, as I believe it is, phenomenology and hermeneutics remain highly relevant in demonstrating how important it is that we understand how we see things. Hermeneutics reminds us that all seeing is ‘seeing as’, a participatory rather than detached process of perception. Knowledge acquisition is circular, proceeding from a prior understanding of the thing one wishes to understand by interpreting it.77 Moreover, if we fully grasp that perception is interpretation (the integration of aspects of reality into meaningful reflections on experience through unity patterns), and that there are different modes or patterns of interpretations, we should be able to move beyond the classic standoff between reason and belief, between factual and subjective knowledge. We would no longer have to measure real knowledge in the hard sciences against interpretation in the humanities. Recognizing the legitimate use and limitations of each model will also reintegrate religion as an intrinsic form of knowing – at least the religions based on a personal God, whose character grounds and encourages personal communion by fostering freedom, equality, and friendship. At the very least, these faiths have the potential to furnish us with the much-needed imagery or language to articulate the full range of phenomena that make us human.

13

Traces of Endings: The Time of Last Things Felix Ó Murchadha

The question of ‘last things’, the question, that is, of eschatology, concerns meaning in the intersection of its horizontal and vertical senses. While the meaning of things depends on the horizon of appearance, both spatially and temporally understood, such horizons do not simply indicate the question of the finitude of particular meaning, whether of things or their context, but rather the finitude of meaning as such. That latter question is one that eschatology poses by positing the end of the world, the absolute rupture of meaning projection and sedimentation. Such an end exhausts the very conditions of horizonality itself. Understood in horizonal terms the end is always deferred; the end is always displaced into a new horizon of meaning, which includes and envelopes it. Yet, we know of events – those of death, birth, evil, justice, and peace among others – which are in a radical sense endings; in that they foreclose the very conditions by which they could be objects of experience. They are in that sense vertical phenomena. Vertically understood, the end is an event which explodes the very horizonal conditions in terms of which they would only be relative ends. To think such endings, these ‘last things’ within the world, is to ask of the fragility of the world, the vulnerability of experience. While ‘horizon’ suggests oversight, preparedness, and synthesis of past, present, and future, the verticality of endings is that which looks back at us, disturbs, and breaks asunder temporal synthesis. Eschatology challenges the very basis of phenomenological and hermeneutical accounts of experience and interpretation by suggesting the possibility of another place beyond them, or rather the impossibility of experience and interpretation at their horizons. In this chapter I wish to examine these questions first by showing how eschatology is rooted in a sense of endings which escape all experience. Part two will then explore the affective dimension of such a sense of endings. Part three will examine the temporality of this sense of endings. The chapter will conclude with some brief reflections on forgiveness and repetition.

I Eschatology, the discourse concerning the end or the most remote things, presses upon the religious consciousness in diverse ways. Early Christianity marks an intensification

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and at the same time a shifting of that discourse. The belief that the Messiah had come led to an expectation of the imminence of the world’s end, while the deferral of that ‘second coming’ led to a sense that the end had already come.1 Clearly there is a shift here in the meaning of end, or remote things, from a distant future to a presence and a shift also from the communal sense of an ending to a notion of individual crisis whereby conversion is a leaving of the world, an ending of the world for the individual. There is no necessary bifurcation of individual and community here; the conversion of the individual is one which happens with respect to that ‘word of God’ maintained by an ecclesiastical community which in turn prepares for the ‘kingdom of God’.2 The latter process, which Kevin Hart refers to as a ‘basilaic reduction’, is one of seeing the world in terms of the kingdom of God, that is, seeing the world in its finitude, indeed hoping for its passing.3 Hart understands the basilaic reduction as that which is performed in the parables of Jesus of Nazareth whereby ‘the world is put out of play … and we are led back to a state that is anterior to it, namely the Father’s kingly rule’.4 The latter is characterized by compassion and only that which transcends the world can realize the kingdom manifest in the father’s (understood as God the father, but also as the father in the parable of the prodigal son) compassion: ‘Yet it is in our acts of compassion, forgiveness, and sacrifice … that parts of its outline are discerned on Earth.’5 Such a reduction discloses anteriority (and posteriority as Hart affirms) and does so in forms which can be discerned in the present ‘on Earth’. This temporal structure is crucial: the eschaton disclosed here is one which permeates time in its threefold sense. In so doing it opens up the world to its own contingency in a manner which goes beyond any phenomenological reduction – that discloses both the contingency of the world to transcendental subjectivity and the (paradoxical) embeddedness of such subjectivity in the world – by showing the world itself as a gift of creation. However, this reduction depends on a distinction between the religious and the secular, such that only in the realm of the former (and perhaps only the Christian) can this reduction be performed.6 While reductions can proliferate – already in Husserl and more recently in the work of Marion in relation to which Hart articulates a fourth reduction7 – the crucial question is whether the reduction as performed by any philosopher (or indeed in Hart’s account by Jesus of Nazareth) finds a motivation within experience itself. This is so because the phenomenological claim to return to the things themselves can only be justified if so to speak experience (if only implicitly) has always already begun to reduce itself. The phenomenological reduction, whether understood voluntaristically as Husserl tends to, or responsively as we find for example in Heidegger’s account of Angst, is a sceptical movement of thought, but it is sceptical in an operative rather than a dogmatic manner. The sceptical suspension of judgement does not deny the world, but rather discloses that which the natural attitude knows implicitly, namely the primordial faith in the world as the already given horizon of meaning.8 Such a faith is not a decision9; rather, it gives the context in which any decision is possible. In this sense to say, as Heidegger does,10 that the point with respect to the hermeneutical circle is getting into it in the right way is already potentially misleading: we always already find ourselves in the hermeneutical circle whereby the concrete interpretation of meaning implies a formal projection of meaningfulness.

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But while the sceptical epoché can disclose this primordial faith, it discloses it precisely as faith. Faith is worldly in the sense that it recognizes in the world that which remains constant through all practice and reflection. The constancy of that world is one which survives the collapse or slow disintegration of specific worlds. The faith in the world is a faith that the world is, and that the world endures. It is a faith in the ultimate worldliness of meaning, whereby the sense of things is immanently given within a worldly context. Yet the collapse or even slow disintegration of a world shows worldliness itself to be subject to ending and in so doing discloses also the contingency of worldly origins; both these senses of ending and beginning are prefigured in the human self ’s own mortality and natality. All meaningful things are such in a context of meaning which, as subject to ending, shows itself to be contingent. The finitude of worlds is their contingency; the self which finds itself in a world through its birth and finds itself as a being which will depart the world through its death, finds the world as a context of meaning which poses for it the question of its own origin and ultimate destiny. That such an origin and destiny are not reducible to the world – to any world – is already suggested by the manner in which we speak of birth and death in terms of coming into and departing the world. Faith in the world is a faith that the world is as we see it both with respect to truth and with respect to goodness. This can be characterized in a threefold sense: in terms of survival, in terms of life, and in terms of spirit. The faith in the world is a trust that openness to the world is an openness to that space in which the conditions for fulfilling my needs are present. It is a faith that the world offers me the possibility to survive and that it is more or less suited to my survival. This entails that I can for the most part accept appearances at face value and that the world – in terms of natural conditions and societal, economic, and cultural structures – is constituted such that my needs can be satisfied. On the level of life, such a faith in the world is a matter of desire, desire for truth and goodness. At that level such a faith is directed towards the world as that in which my efforts can discover truth which is not simply directed at survival, but rather seeks that which is in and of itself. Similarly, with respect to goodness, faith in the world at the level of life is trust that my efforts to live a good life are rational, that they have a basis in the structure of the world as such. Both of these levels remain rooted in the capacities of the self. They are fundamentally horizonal in the sense that they take their orientation from the correlation between things in the world and the self ’s capacities on the level of perception and practice. The self reaches beyond the level of capacity and towards the level of spirit, however, when its faith in the world is challenged by the question of the world itself. The question of the world emerges precisely when the self is faced with that which the world cannot give, that which appears in the world but shows itself, names itself, as not of the world.11 It is in such moments that the faith in the world becomes faced with the issue of horizon as such. Merleau-Ponty speaks of horizon as having the being of pure porosity.12 The horizon is that moment of transition, of metamorphosis, or rather of becoming shaped between the thing for me and in itself. The horizon is nothing to which thetic correlation is possible, nor is it an unthinkable or unknowable thing in itself. Rather, horizon is the always receding becoming itself of a thing. Its being is to withdraw and to let be. The horizon is the dynamic movement of continual crossing

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out of each apparent limit, throwing forth the thing as both meaningful for me and inexhaustible to me. Temporally understood it stretches towards the aspects I am yet to see, and recedes into the past of those aspects I have seen and those I recollect. But more fundamentally the horizon is temporal as anterior to the self: the horizon is that in which I find myself in this particular relation to things in the world. But the horizon as such cannot appear in the thing, but only where there is no thing: for the thing to appear is for it to already be in a horizon and in a ‘totality of relevance (Bewandtniszusammenhang)’, as Heidegger describes it.13 Only through a suspension of the thing, a suspension that is of any meaningful object and with it the ‘hermeneutical as’, can horizon as such appear. But such appearance is paradoxically the appearance of nothing. The horizon as such is the end as end, which cannot be found among things, but rather can only be as an event. To speak of ‘event’ here is of course itself paradoxical, as an event is a coming to be, whereas we are speaking of ending. But horizon is both ending and the hint of beginning, and in that it reflects the eschatological: the eschatological is a discourse about ending and beginning, about the end of the world and the beginning of something radically new, but the nature of event is that that which is to come is not guaranteed. The event brings to a close and forecloses any claim of the past to sufficiently justify the coming to be. In that sense an event is a coming to be out of nothing. It is in such events that the appearing of the end of the world traced in the world and we find such eschatological phenomena in the events of birth, death, evil, justice, and peace. The moment of birth is not a moment of sense, but rather the becoming possible of sense. It amounts to a coming to be of a newly experiencing being. This is not to preclude prenatal awareness, but rather to claim that something new and – for the newborn – unprecedented happens in that moment, namely experience. While experience as we know it in the world is never originating – the very experience of surprise depends on a prior protention – birth is for every newborn an originating of experience, allowing that being the freedom to experience and to be as an experiencing being. That sense of newness is a singular sense of itself which every experiencing being has, such that we can with Arendt speak here of the ‘miracle’ of action. 14 Indeed, we are not wrong to state that such a being is in a sense a world, a world of sense which comes from elsewhere, comes out of nothing – nothing, that is, which is already in the world. This miracle of action and of personhood ‘saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, “natural” ruin is ultimately the fact of natality. … It is this faith in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most glorious and succinct expression in the few words with which the gospels announced their glad “tidings”: “A child has been born onto us.”’15 It is that profound sense of personhood, such that no matter how many times an experiencing being is born, it is in each case a new and unprecedented entity, which gives birth its fundamental place within eschatological discourse. If birth is the coming to be of a world, death is the going out of being of a world. If birth is the possibility of experience, death is its impossibility. It is not that which gives capacity to the self, but rather the coming to an end of that capacity. While the self is capable of relating to death, of being towards death as Heidegger says,16 death itself is that of which it is incapable. Indeed, we can go so far as to say – with Spinoza and Levinas, who in this respect give two sides of the coin17 – that suicide is

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impossible: before death the self is passive, ‘death is never assumed; it comes. Suicide is a contradictory concept’.18 Even in suicide, we can only wait upon the moment of death. Such waiting is not a matter of linear time, it is a waiting on that which breaks open the moment and ends the capacity of the self towards the future. But such a capacity with respect to the future is itself vulnerable and fragile: in each moment the self awaits a future which may not come, expects a continuity which is not secure. More fundamentally still, in facing that of which it has no certainty the self does so with its past which remains outstanding, a past which cannot be undone and for which it still must account. Awaiting death, living towards a future which is to come, the self is faced with its own relation to itself as a being which remains as yet incomplete, which indeed cannot find completion in itself. This lack of completion is not simply that it has more experiences to undergo and more pleasures and sufferings to endure, but rather that it remains unredeemed: reflection cannot encompass a life, at its core a secret folding back on itself in its joy and its guilt troubles life to its close. It is not without reason that this lack of redemption has been understood as fundamental to the question of evil – not simply a question of wrongdoing, but a sense of the inescapabilty of fault.19 To the extent to which eschatology represents a discourse of redemption, it centres on the problem of evil. In doing so it may seem to deflect from the paradox that the origin of evil poses. This paradox can most readily be expressed in theistic terms: if God is all good and all powerful, how can evil exist, while if God is its originator ‘he’ cannot be wholly good, or if he is not the origin of evil, but could not prevent it, he cannot be all powerful. This dilemma does not disappear if one rejects the theistic starting point or if it does only at the price of naturalizing (and hence neutralizing) evil itself.20 The Genesis myth in the Hebrew Scriptures marks an attempt to affirm both the goodness of God and the human origin of evil: the origin of evil itself is implicitly eschatological. However, such an account raises the difficulty of a turn from good to evil. This turn seems inexplicable, hence the serpent whose evil itself is not explained.21 Following Kant, Ricoeur understands this turn to evil as occurring in an Instant, whereby innocence and sin are not successive, but superimposed on one another: ‘Sin does not succeed innocence, but, in the Instant, loses it.’22 The transformation from evil to good seems equally inexplicable, leading Kant (following Leibniz) to appeal to divine grace as an unapparent aid to human frailty. But such grace marks the end of the world, the end, that is, of worldly possibility when faced with the fundamental phenomenon of evil. Birth, death, and evil mark those moments where the self becomes capable of action, ‘falls’ into evil and ceases to be that capable self. Such a self finds itself in a world with others. Such being-with lies at the origin of both coexistence and conflict, in the sense that a common framework of meaning, both in terms of truth and good, is necessary for any conflict to take place. But in such conflict and agreement we sense a moment of peace which is beyond all such common accords,23 a peace in which there is a harmony whereby all can be and where no hierarchy, no power, no violence is present.24 Eschatological visions have in common this peace which ‘the world cannot give’.25 While it would be wrong to equate such visions and utopian projects, those utopian visions of peaceful harmony share a clear lineage with such eschatological

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accounts which we find, for example, in Isaiah where natural enemies forget their enmity: ‘The wolf will live with the lamb, the panther lie down with the kid, calf, lion and fat-stock beast together with a little boy to lead them.’26 An impossible eschatological and utopian peace is one in which both singular entities and the general good are recognized and fully acknowledged. Such a peace is one in which justice reigns. In Latin the word ius, from which we derive the word ‘justice’, meant law as such, while lex referred to specific laws. Specific laws respond to particular situations in the effort to uphold lawfulness itself. But while law aims towards lawfulness, such lawfulness differs from law in the sense that while law is constructed, has meaning within the horizon of a world, lawfulness, justice is not.27 The appeal to justice at the heart of eschatological discourse is essential to its sense: the appeal namely to that which cannot be denied in the world, because it is ultimately not of the world, but rather indicates an ending of the world, the contingency of all worldly regimes. Again, the close kinship yet tense relationship of eschatology and utopian projection can be seen here, as is evident, for example, in Kant’s account of perpetual peace and his discussions in Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason of the desire for the Kingdom of God and the gradual fading away of ecclesiastical faiths.28 The eschatological account of the end of the world finds its phenomenal motivations in the events of birth, death, evil, peace, and justice. In each case the event itself is apparent not in itself but in terms of the ripples that we can trace in the field of experience. In each case the meaning of things loses all anchorage without appeal to these events of sense, which direct and give place to the interpretative projects of human existence. Each calls for interpretation and yet in doing so risks that which is most likely to betray them by transposing them into the mundane, the horizonal. In attempting to overcome that dilemma, we need to explore more deeply the mode by which these primordial phenomena appear.

II In his account of the transition from evil to good, Kant speaks of it as a change of heart which happens in an instant, as a revolution, but it is invisible, does not appear, can in fact only be intuited by that being to whom the self owes its moral being. In this instant, at once, the evil principle is abandoned and the good principle is accepted.29 This instant is one of splitting apart of past and future – Kant appeals here to the Biblical notion of being born anew – through which in the moment the heart is transformed. Such a transformation from evil to good is one in which one world ends and a new one begins: the opening up of a new world is that which the self cannot know but can only hope for, because the transformation is one which occurs in the depth of the self and of which the self can only sense its traces. While outwardly, in the world of sense, all that is apparent is reform, inwardly the turn from evil to good can only occur as a revolution.30 This transformation occurs in the heart. The heart only features in Religion as an explicit theme for Kant, yet it is essential to his understanding of religion. As Kant states, religion is ‘the heart’s disposition to fulfil all human duties as divine commands’.31 As is true of many themes in that book, this account owes much to

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Rousseau. Rousseau gives a Pelagian reading of Pascal’s ‘reasons of the heart’ and Kant goes a long way to accepting Rousseau’s account, yet in one fundamental way remains closer to Pascal, namely in his acceptance of original sin. Kant denies the Augustinian doctrine of inherited sin and in so doing rejects the sacramental account which Augustine gives. Yet in his account of radical evil Kant implicitly problematizes the Rousseauian account of the heart. When he comes, in Religion, to speak of the heart he does so with respect to the inner sentiment of the moral person, but it is a heart which is necessarily open to that which goes beyond all reason, namely, grace.32 The question of hope here is a question of what we can hope for beyond the capacities of the self or even human reason to achieve. The ‘good heart’ is capacity arising from the human being’s natural predisposition (Anlage) to adopt the moral law in its maxims.33 This turning of the natural predisposition towards actual following of the good involves a manner of being in the world whereby the self sees itself in its proper place with respect to the moral law which transcends the world both in its economy and its source. The heart is that general disposition to itself, the world and the law which inclines the self to act morally or immorally. The movement of the heart which Kant is addressing in speaking of a ‘change of heart’ is a revolution, a transformation, whereby the world itself becomes new. For this change of heart to be possible is to be faced with that which cannot be known, can only be thought, but that which can only be thought affectively: in hope or in despair. The self, for Kant, can hope to be pleasing to God: ‘In the practical faith in this Son of God (so far as he is represented as having taken up human nature) the human being can … hope to become pleasing to God (and thereby blessed).’34 This is the hope that the moral law which she follows has validity and being beyond the immanence of its own injunctions. The self in recognizing the rationality of the moral law knows nothing of its origin and must hope that its author is the moral God, a God wholly other than the world of experience, which alone can know the self in the depths of its being. The specific manner in which Kant discusses the object of hope is not the crucial issue here. What needs to be stressed is both the temporal and affective framework in which Kant places his account. The moment of transformation is instantaneous and can only be understood in terms of a dispositional shift. Although Kant discusses this solely in relation to the transformation from evil to good, this account goes to the core of the question of ending which we have been discussing (and indeed his account has for Kant too direct relevance for the issues of peace and justice), because what it recognizes is the radical transformative nature of all such endings and beginnings, which is not the transformation of any object of perception, but rather of the mode of being towards such objects. This transformation is an affective one. Heidegger speaks in this respect of Fundamental Moods.35 While eschatological literature gives grounds for understanding the affective relation here as being of anxiety, terror, and joy, these affects relate to different ways in which the eschaton is interpreted: as the coming of the messiah to reward or to punish.36 Fundamental to such interpretations is an orientation to the end as one which through transfiguration of the world reveals its inner sense or on the contrary discloses the emptiness at the heart of the world. We see this in the case of the events discussed: these can indicate a transcending sense or a transcending nonsense. The dominant affectivities which guide such orientations are hope and despair.

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To live the end of the world in hope is to live towards ending in its transformative moment as that which reveals the origin of the world in the event of excessive gift; to live the end of the world in despair is to live towards ending as that which discloses the emptiness of the world and its end as the event of destructive nothingness. In the face of the eschaton the world appears as that which is in its incompleteness. Desire finds in the world that which appears as its correlate, but does so as the face of a hiding, of a secret, withdrawing like a mirage, leaving desire bereft as in a desert. That sense of desert, that sense of the meaning structure of the world as so much dust on the tongue of the one who desires it, inspires the moods of hope and despair. This existential situation, this situation of emotional incertitude, is the condition of philosophy itself which, as Merleau-Ponty says contrasting it with science, cannot share a belief in the correlation of knowledge and being, but rather is a letting the self who questions be herself called into question.37 While Kant speaks of hope with respect to the ending of evil, and this hope extends for him to the hope for life after death, nevertheless, as faith is only with doubt, similarly there is hope only with despair. It is striking that Kierkegaard in discussing despair does so in ways which parallel Kant’s account of hope. For Kierkegaard there is despair only for a self, that is, ‘a relation that relates to itself ’. That ‘relation relates itself to that which established the entire relation’.38 The basic situation here is that of Kant’s moral self: a being relating to itself with respect to an author of its being to which it can relate in hope or despair. Kierkegaard speaks of hope as a passion for the possible, and in its most fundamental sense hope affirms the primacy of possibility over both actuality and more decisively necessity.39 Such a passion for the possible is a passion precisely for that which is impossible in the world; it is a relation to the ending as the becoming possible of the impossible. Conversely, a self without possibility and a self without necessity is in despair. This is so because the self is not a given, but rather a task: the task to become itself in relation to what it is. The self comes to recognize its own dependence on the eternal, on that which is both constitutive of it and yet that which it cannot command and in losing faith in that eternal, falls into despair. With despair comes narrowness, an ethical narrowing of the self to a losing of itself in the world, becoming merely a number in the economy of the world: ‘Despairing narrowness is to lack primitivity or to have robbed oneself of one primitivity.’40 In despair, the self in relating to itself relates to an origin which transcends all worldly relations, but sensing this origin as empty relates to its own ending as reflective of the meaninglessness of its origin.41 In both hope and despair, as Kant and Kierkegaard articulate them, respectively, the worldly domain of appearance and interpretation is related to that which escapes it. The dispositions of hope and despair are essentially related to the world, to the relation of self to the world, but have a source in a sense of that which has no worldly correlate. This involves a certain kind of implication of the self which we find in each of the endings we have discussed. Each arises for the self as moments which transcend its capacities while in each case implicating it fundamentally: I do not choose to be born, but my self in its concrete identity owes its very existence to that moment; even if I were to kill myself, I have to await death, but am uniquely responsible in my dying; my fall into evil is that which comes from a guilt much deeper than myself, but I am responsible for my evil actions; I cannot bring about peace or justice, yet my actions

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can be judged according to their peacefulness and justice. In the face of this extreme situation in which the self in its own existence, its constitution as a responsible self and its accountability in its actions is both accountable to itself and others and yet depends on that which is outside its own power is that which is sensed affectively in hope and despair. Relating hopefully or despairingly to birth, death, evil, peace, and justice is expressed in the manner in which the self understands itself with respect to the economy of the world. The reciprocities of crime and punishment, gift and counter-gift, selling and buying, all place the self in a position which is both substitutable and singular: it is my crime, my gift, my merchandise for which I am responsible, but reciprocal action is one in which I find myself interpreted and dealt with as an instance of a general category: criminal, gift giver, vendor. In facing endings, however, I face the limits of those identities and find myself as a singular being in relation to the finitude of the world and hence of the economies which regulate the worldliness of my being; in facing such endings, I face that alterity to which I owe my singular being itself. In that sense we can speak of a higher level of reciprocity, whereby I recognize my dependence on that which gives me to myself in showing me the limits of my own worldliness. This excessiveness in the face of the world is the phenomenal basis for the discourse of forgiveness, redemption, and love which we find in eschatological discourse on the last things. The excessive command to love one’s enemies is eschatological in seeing the enemy not in her place in the economy of friend and enemy, but rather in the singularity of her being. In violating the precept of do ut des this command responds to that excess of world which is glimpsed in hope and despair.42 The affectivities of hope and despair are rooted in heteronomy; this is true despite or indeed precisely because of the autonomy of the self which gives itself a law the grounds of which it cannot know. I hope in a law which comes from elsewhere. This hope is in that which intersects the horizon of my world, which is irreducible to that world and which does not obey the mundane economy. Hope is an openness to that which the possibilities of my world do not sustain; it is a hope beyond that world, and in that sense, it is passive. In striving for certain goals those things on which and with which the self acts have sense within the bounds of that world in which it encounters them. In encountering a foreign world the self recognizes things as having meanings which escape its own capacity for understanding at this time, but which can in varying degrees be brought to understanding through what Gadamer terms a ‘fusion of horizons’.43 Encountering in hope that which calls for interpretation, the self encounters it as gift, as manifesting in itself an origin which makes sense of the world around it. In other words, seeing something in that affectivity of hope is not to see it in its context of involvements with other things, but rather as a singular presence which transforms all around it. In despair the self encounters the heteronomous as arbitrary and without foundation, as that which is constitutive of the sense of things for me, but which is itself senseless, without direction or origin. These moods are not specific to particular things but disclose the world as such; they arise of a sudden, like a jolt from elsewhere. This is not to say that we cannot retrospectively chart out an aetiology of these moods (in an auto- or hetero-biographical manner). Rather it is to say that as general tendencies towards the world these moods

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arise through a rupture with the past. Nothing in the events themselves makes hope or despair impossible. In the most hopeless of situations we find those who – manifest in their testimonies and actions – live in hope; while those in the most outwardly idyllic of situations live lives of despair. The moods themselves arise through transformation and are open to transformation.

III It is misleading to think of hope or despair as exclusively futural in their orientations. Rather, hope and despair involve expansion or contraction of the temporal as such. All time, time indeed from beginning to end, is illuminated in hope as that which is forever redeemable, forever open to be refigured and transformed or is darkened in despair such that temporal trajectories eventually fall away into indifference. In other words, hope and despair are constitutive of the world as such, allowing the opening in which things are or foreclosing appearance in the indifference of meaninglessness. Hope and despair are in that sense kairological: past and future as open or closed to refiguration in a manner which is anterior to any empirical experience. It is anterior to that experience, but remains subject to it: specific experiences can be the occasion of a change of heart from hope to despair, from despair to hope, but they are occasions rather than causes. Nothing in the experience can explain the disposition, such that ‘hopeless’ situations can still be faced with hope and bright prospects can be faced with despair. The issue is not one of temporal trajectory but of understanding the temporality of transformation itself. The endings which eschatology speaks in terms of are affectively encountered in hope and despair, and these endings themselves are reflected in the ‘falling into’ and ‘turning around’ of despair and hope. It is here that we can revisit the account of ‘revolution’ which we found in Kant’s account of the change of heart. Eschatology retrieves origins. In Genesis, the myth of Adam as an account of the origin of evil is eschatological through an appeal to an anterior goodness of creation and the promise of a final renewal of that creation. In this sense the eschatological indicates a deviation in the world from its original source and a constant movement of return to that source in response to the initial and continuing turning away. But this movement of return is impossible to complete, and the very attempt marks a growing distance from that origin. Two intertwining dialectics are evident here, that of turning away and turning back, on the one hand, and that of return and departure, on the other, which mark the eschatological discourse as a continual attempt at recapitulation and projection. This hermeneutical tension is one which Ricoeur most clearly articulated as one of archaeology and teleology/eschatology.44 But fundamental to such historicity is the sense of temporal transformation which refuses experience, but which is felt, sensed affectively. The question here is one of the temporality of that which appears not of itself, but rather through the ripples it sends in the world of appearances. In short, the question here is one of understanding time in its verticality.

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The tendency to flatten out temporality into a sequence of nows arises from the horizonal structure of time. Time appears as horizonal in the synthesis of past and future in the living present. Time so understood is horizonal in the sense that it relativizes the new, the surprising, to the context of its emergence. The model of the melody confirms this picture in important respects. But, as Heidegger already saw in his reworking of the phenomenology of time consciousness in Being and Time, this model cannot make sense of those limit situations, and in particular those moments of ending, which are our concern here. Such moments are qualitatively distinct, transformative, in which something new comes into the world. Crucial to such moments is that they break apart; that which for the self upheld a meaningful structure in the past collapses, opening up a new world, that is, possibilities which had been impossible. Such moments occur under the figure of the possibility of transfiguration, of the coming to be of ‘a new heaven and a new earth’ or do so under the figure of the arbitrary chance, the coming to be of new and ever more pointless sufferings. This distinction of hope and despair is, however, foreign to Heidegger’s account of temporality in Being and Time, which is rooted in the framework of Dasein’s capacities.45 The hermeneutical phenomenology which develops out of this account is in Judith Wolfe’s terms an ‘eschatology without an eschaton’ where the ‘last things’ become understood as death,46 or rather as being towards death where the significance of death itself is necessarily methodologically excluded. To think death as a moment of ending, to think that ending as always already occurring through the natality and mortality of the self, we need to think the discourse on appearances and interpretations with respect to the moment as the passing away and coming to be. It is precisely here that the faith in the world transforms into a hope in that which transcends the world, a principle out of which the world as sense arises; conversely doubt in the world transforms into a despair in that which transcends the world. Neither hope nor despair can be thought, however, without a sense of ending, a sense of the world as ending, hence as having a principle of being which exceeds it. This sense of ending is that which happens temporally. While the sense of ending has necessarily a futural sense – the ending is to come – such a sense must also relate to the present, to the now as that time where the ending is announced. The sense of ending cannot simply occur in a linear, temporal experience as such a sense is one in which the next moment leads naturally from the previous one. To have a sense of ending is to experience time qualitatively: this moment is the moment of ending, which may not give way to a future but precisely insist itself in the present, be a present without end in the sense of a present which does not pass, but rather stands still. This sense of a present which stands still is of course a sense of the eternal, a futureless present. The end of time is that sense of a present which refuses to give way to the future, a present which is experienced as blocking all further possible experience, a possible which allows for no possibility. Strictly speaking, such a moment is not experienced; it is a moment of death which denies the possibility of experience. But while such a moment cannot be experienced, conversely every moment is constituted by such a blocking of the future. Nothing in the present guarantees the future; every now stretches out towards a possible future while being itself the impossibility of that future. Every moment is in that sense a moment of death, the realized future a stay of

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execution. In that way each moment appears as that moment in which an end may occur, in which the world of sense is vulnerable to ending, and in which that world of sense needs to be renewed. Such a moment is as much a moment of birth as of death. As a moment of ending it opens up the possibility of the new, of that which was until then impossible. Again, with respect to birth the moment stands still. It is a moment in which the new comes to be, but such a coming to be has not yet given itself to duration, it has not yet endured, but rather is in the process of coming. As death blocks the future, so the moment of birth blocks the past. It does not yet allow the birthing of the self to pass, but remains suspended. To think this moment we can appeal to a term which appears in Plato’s Parmenides: exaiphnes. Plato is attempting to account for the moment of transformation, of qualitative change – change knowing of no degree – between being and non-being. This happens, he says, in ‘this queer thing’, ‘the instant (exaiphnes) in which such change occurs: a moment in which the one changes from being to ceasing to be or from not being to coming to be’.47 There is a moment between states of motion and rest. This notion plays a similar role to those of chora (in the Timaeus) and apeiron (in the Parmenides and the Philebus); the problem is one of articulating a third which is neither being nor non-being, being nor becoming, rest nor motion, same nor other, but can mediate between these. It is precisely this question that lies at the heart of many perplexities in phenomenology and hermeneutics: between subject and object in Husserl’s static phenomenology, between misunderstanding and understanding in the hermeneutical tradition, in particular in the work of Schleiermacher, between body and mind in the work of Merleau-Ponty. In each case what we find are oppositions which are related in ways that seem at first to escape the methodological tools available. The relation is precisely not apparent but occurs, so to speak, behind the back of the phenomenologist and the hermeneuticist. Yet that coming to be is traced in the very appearances and the interpretative sense of the objects of appearance. This motivates the philosophical movement through and beyond the appearances themselves to that which is indicated but does not show itself in them, calling for precisely those eschatological texts that in heralding the end of the world draw on those events which prefigure them.

IV Events of ending are momentary, reflected in the instantaneous change of heart, the affective shift of disposition towards the world as such. Such moments are transformative of past and future. They show time in another sense than the natural progression of decay and rebirth, the cycle of seasons in which there is ‘nothing new under the sun’. Two modes of being temporal reflect this non-natural time: forgiveness and repetition. It goes beyond the confines of this chapter to discuss these in any detail, but in conclusion the possibility of such modes of being in time may illustrate the sense of eschatological ending in the vertical interruption of horizonal time, whereby the very hermeneutical situation of action and sense is articulated.

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In his remarkable epilogue to Memory, History, and Forgetting, Ricoeur speaks of forgiveness as giving ‘the tone of an eschatology of the representation of the past’.48 Forgiveness encounters the irreversibility of time: what is past has a certain eternity about it, it is what it is for all time. In this sense forgiveness is ‘exceptional and extraordinary, standing the test of the impossible: as if interrupted the ordinary course of historical temporality’.49 Forgiveness brings about the impossible through a reversal of the irreversibility of time and does so through releasing the agent from her act. Such an unbinding from the past occurs not at the level of fact, but rather is an anticipation of ending, that the chronology of all past deeds is not the sum of the time of a person but rather that every moment holds out the possibility and the risk of ending and of new beginning. To be towards an ending is to live time in the mode of repetition. To be born and live natally, to die and exist mortally, to fall into evil, to act under the criterion of peace and of justice, is to repeat the lives and actions of others, but in each case to live and act in a unique manner. Nobody else can be born for me, die for me, take my responsibility for evil, violence, or injustice from me. To repeat is to take up in the singularity of my own being possibilities and necessities which are inescapable. Such repetition can be despairing or hopeful, but in each case they are moments of temporal ending in which the fragility of the world is revealed in the very engagement with the possibilities of meaning that emerge for me in the situatedness of my being. The time of the last things is not a time at the end of all, but rather that time which constitutes the world as a horizon of meaning in which there is no simple brute reality but only contingent comings to be of meaning in which human selves can emerge, transform, and die with or without sense.

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Hermeneutics, Pragmatism, and Foucault C. G. Prado

Writing in the early 1980s and prior to publication of Michel Foucault’s ethical works, The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self, Richard Rorty contended that ‘James and Dewey were not only waiting at the end of the dialectical road which analytical philosophy traveled, but are waiting at the end of the road which … Foucault and Deleuze are currently traveling’.1 To appreciate the negative force of Rorty’s contention, it is necessary to understand its intellectual and textual contexts. Its intellectual context was Rorty’s defection from analytic philosophy as worked out in his groundbreaking and controversial Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.2 Rorty’s defection turned on his rejection of truth as mirroring reality, as mimesis or ‘correspondence’, hence the book’s title. After his defection from analytic philosophy, Rorty’s pragmatic understanding of truth was that ‘“true” has no explanatory use’ and that there is no relation of being made true – no mirroring, no replication, no correspondence – between beliefs or propositions and states-of-affairs in the world.3 The contention’s textual context was a critical summation that Rorty offered in Consequences of Pragmatism of where analytic and continental philosophy stood at the time. The critical thrust of Rorty’s contention is clear in his comment: ‘I think that analytic philosophy culminates in Quine, the later Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Davidson – which is to say that it transcends and cancels itself ’.4 Rorty saw analytic philosophers travelling the road to pragmatism as the consequence of stagnation caused by precisely what he rejected in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: the conception of truth as mimetic with its attendant and inconclusively unproductive objectivist epistemology. Rorty saw philosophers in the continental tradition as also heading towards pragmatism because they were immersed in the ultimately sterile criticism of modernism and structuralism. He specifically mentioned Foucault and Gilles Deleuze because of his interest in Foucault and the fact that both Foucault and Deleuze were garnering attention in North America at the time and, as paradigmatic postmodern and poststructuralist philosophers, they represented what was current on the Continent. With respect to Foucault, what Rorty focused on and could not accept was that Foucault presented his archaeological and genealogical histories and analyses as factual in a way Rorty saw as mimetic by either design or default. Rorty also thought Foucault’s archaeological and genealogical analytics were intended as replacements

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for traditional epistemology, replacements that offered new investigative methods capable of yielding objectively true accounts.5 To Rorty, Foucault was illegitimately juggling, on the one hand, an avowed commitment to historicism or the view that rationality is not ahistorical but a product of history and that all descriptive accounts are interpretive, and on the other hand, his unacknowledged commitment to mimetic truth.6 Rorty was not the only one who saw Foucault as inconsistently presenting his histories and analyses as mimetically factual. Jürgen Habermas was critical of Foucault on precisely this point, failing to understand how Foucault could present his genealogical accounts as factual while at the same time describing them as historical interpretations.7 Similarly, Todd May maintained that Foucault claimed to be problematizing the presumed objectivity of established histories while he systematically ignored the obligation he incurred to explain ‘how it is that we can accept his inquiries as justified, and possibly as true’.8 Charles Taylor went further, dismissing Foucault’s genealogical writings as bad philosophy.9 Foucault’s answer to criticism of this kind was to reiterate his avowed historicism by claiming his works were not true or false accounts but new interpretive perspectives.10 His critics, though, took this response as further evidence of indifference to or obliviousness of inconsistency. In what follows, I will refer to this basis of Rorty’s charge as the presentation issue. Another practice that appears to corroborate Rorty’s perception of inconsistency in Foucault’s work is that, in addition to how he presented his histories and analyses, Foucault several times drew a contrast that initially looks to be between objective or mimetic truth and discursive or power-produced truth. As I considered in detail in Searle and Foucault on Truth, Foucault on a number of occasions contrasts discursive or power-produced truth with truths that seem to be of an objective nature.11 For example, in his discussion of ‘the battle for truth’ in Power/Knowledge, Foucault stated he was not concerned with ‘the ensemble of truths which are to be discovered and accepted’.12 Again, Foucault spoke of his interest in ‘the technology of truth-event, truth-ritual, truth-power relationship, as opposed to the truth-discovery, truthmethod, truth-knowledge relationship’.13 The contrast is repeated as late as The Use of Pleasure, where Foucault declared he was interested in ‘an analysis of the “games of truth”’ and not with ‘what might be true in the fields of learning’.14 In what follows, I will refer to this as the contrast issue. Contrasts between discursive and apparently objective truth added to seemingly mimetically factual presentations prompted other critics to go further than Rorty. Robert Nola argued that Foucault differentiated ‘objective, i.e., discovered, truth from his own use of the term’, claiming that Foucault ‘needed the distinction between what is true and what we take to be true’ in order to map how power or power-relations ‘determine our discourses about what we believe to be true or false’.15 Nola’s and similar critical treatments essentially cast Foucault’s work as having no philosophical content regarding truth and being only about the sociological and political–cultural influences that determine what is accepted as true and how ‘true’ and ‘truth’ come to be used in diverse idioms. Foucault was aware of this deprecating interpretation of his work, remarking derisively that whenever he posited ‘a relation between truth and power’ traditional philosophers responded by saying: ‘“Ah good! then it is not the truth.”’16

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Regarding Rorty’s perception of Foucault as a pragmatist, others have also linked Foucault with pragmatism, though more positively. Colin Koopman notes that the connection has been made ‘in passing from time to time’ and laments that it ‘has been little explored’. Koopman adds that ‘among pragmatists there has been some work … but still not a great deal’.17 However, most of the works Koopman refers to on Foucault and pragmatism are broadly comparative. My concern is with Foucault’s position on truth and the view, paradigmed by Rorty’s specific contention, that due to his philosophizing being flawed by inconsistency regarding truth, Foucault was heading towards pragmatism whether he liked it or not. What I will attempt to do is explain how commitment to mimetic truth would have precluded the viability of Foucault’s ethics. Foucault could not have missed the consequence of such a commitment. Foucault’s shift to ethics did reveal that his understanding of truth was compatible with Deweyan and Jamesian pragmatism and even with the pragmatic understanding of truth held by Rorty himself to the effect that talk about truth is not talk about a property but about endorsement of beliefs and propositions.18 But the point here is that the compatibility of Foucault’s view of truth with pragmatism shows he was not a closet mimeticist and so was not on the road to pragmatism because of inconsistency. I begin with Hans-Georg Gadamer’s succinct statement of what is at the heart of the hermeneutical standpoint: ‘There are no eternal truths. Truth is the disclosure of being that is given with the historicity of Dasein.’19 Central to what follows is that for ‘eternal’ one should read ‘mimetic’ because the point of Gadamer’s statement is that there are no truths that faithfully and objectively mirror or replicate aspects of reality and are independent of individuals’ historically situated interpretations. In short, truth is historical, not mimetic, and it is crucial to appreciate this to understand Foucault on truth. To this end, I will expand a little on Gadamer and truth to provide something of the hermeneutical background for what follows regarding Foucault and pragmatism. The key point here is that Gadamer, like Rorty and Foucault, was not a philosopher committed to a theory of truth. He did not, like most analytic and some continental philosophers, believe that truth was correspondence or coherence: that truth could be theoretically analysed and its essential nature formulated. Putting the point in a way perhaps more significant to some, Gadamer was not doing epistemology when he considered, discussed, and wrote about truth. For Gadamer, truth had to do with interpretation and understanding, and with anticipation of meaning, not with objective mimesis or replication or some other form of relatedness holding between propositions and their subject matter. Speaking of texts, but just as readily referring to oral exchanges instead or as well, Gadamer described a reader – or listener – as having expectations about meaning: expectations that involve ‘working out this fore-projection, which is constantly revised in terms of what emerges as he[/she] penetrates into the meaning’. This ‘penetration’ is ‘understanding what is true’.20 Truth is internal to meaning and its construal; truth is not something relational; it is not something to be discerned and comprehended as what makes propositions true by ‘corresponding’ to something external to them. Hermeneutics is, above all, about interpretation and understanding, and truth is something integral to both, not something separate that is only instantiated in uttered

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and written statements. To this extent, Gadamer followed Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the first and most vehement adversaries of mimetic truth, of truth as a quality of statements stemming from accurate representation of external states-of-affairs through verbal replication. Barry Allen remarks that Nietzsche was among ‘the first critics of the “Correspondence Theory of Truth”’, seeing ‘the metaphysical idea of truth as correspondence or mimesis [as] hopeless’.21 Nietzsche had a great influence on Foucault, significantly affecting Foucault’s understanding of truth. Foucault acknowledged this, saying that what he owed Nietzsche ‘derives mostly from the texts of around 1880, where the question of truth, the history of truth and the will to truth were central to his work’.22 This Nietzschean influence is well recognized. Frédéric Gros remarks that ‘if truth, in Foucault’s thought, is involved with correspondence, it can only be one that is historically produced’.23 Speaking of Foucault’s ‘regimes of truth’, Don Deere sums up by saying that a regime or game of truth ‘should be understood as a set of rules and constraints divided between true and false discourses and practices’, adding that ‘with this notion, Foucault displaces the traditional correspondence theory of truth’.24 Reading Foucault as a mimeticist runs counter to this compelling evidence. With respect to Foucault’s manner of presenting his histories and analyses, what is most useful to consider as explanatory are not philosophical commitments but two psychological factors that were operant in how Foucault wrote, and which clarify his manner of presentation better than would a philosophical commitment to mimetic truth. One factor was Foucault’s profound confidence in the uniqueness of his own thought, a confidence reflected in his adamant rejection of philosophical labelling. Most notably, he denied being a structuralist, saying in the ‘Foreword to the English Edition’ of The Order of Things that ‘half-witted’ commentators had labelled him a structuralist and that he had been ‘unable to get it into their tiny minds’ that he used ‘none of the methods, concepts, or key terms that characterize structural analysis’.25 This particular denial well illustrates the depth of Foucault’s confidence in the uniqueness of his thought because from a more objective perspective the denial was unwarranted. James Miller commented that in reviewing Les Mots et les Choses (The Order of Things), the L’Express reviewer ‘never used the magic word “structuralism” because she did not need to’, given Foucault’s ‘system’ talk and references to Lévi-Strauss.26 Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow point out that early in his career Foucault ‘used variants of a strict analysis of discourse’, thereby justifying the description of him as a structuralist at least at the time he wrote The Order of Things.27 A second psychological factor was the priority Foucault put on novelty of thought, a priority that is evident in the following passages and others like them: ‘Modifying one’s own thought and that of others seems to me to be the intellectual’s reason for being.’28 The job of the intellectual is ‘to shake up habitual ways of working and thinking, to dissipate conventional familiarities, to re-evaluate rules and institutions’.29 Most telling is this personal declaration: ‘When I write, I do it above all to change myself and not to think the same thing as before.’30 Given Foucault’s confidence in the uniqueness of his thought and the priority he conferred on novelty, it is not surprising that he presented his ideas and conclusions forcibly. But forceful presentation does not entail acceptance of or reliance on mimetic truth.

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With regard to the philosophical aspect, if Foucault was committed to mimetic truth and if that is what his forceful presentations correctly implied, Foucault’s account of the workings of power precluded the viability of his ethics. To see why, we need to recall that his ethics differed significantly from traditional ethics, which are mainly about the treatment of others. Foucault’s ethics were first and foremost about ‘the self ’s relationship to itself ’.31 In turning from genealogy to ethics, Foucault left behind how external influences form subjects and concerned himself with how we form ourselves as subjects. His ethics, Nietzschean in their inspiration, were about self-definition. The central consequence of this was that ethical conduct regarding the treatment of others was determined by how individuals defined themselves rather than by preexisting codes or principles. Being ethical in the traditional sense, acting morally in the treatment of others, became acting in accordance with the values and principles that governed individuals’ self-determination and were embodied in the persons they defined themselves as being. The priority of self-definition therefore meant that, contrary to traditional ethics, being ethical or moral ceased to be a matter of complying with external laws, rules, or commandments and became a matter of literally being oneself in acting towards others as one’s self-determined ethical nature established how others should be treated. But if Foucault intended his genealogical account of power as mimetically true, as objectively the case, power would prevent his ethics from being about the self ’s relationship to itself because anything that impedes or distorts the self ’s access to itself precludes the realization of self-definitional ethics. Power would do just that since it shapes both external and internal perceptions and consequent beliefs. Foucault, then, would have had to retract his account of power as mimetically correct, to have claimed it to be mistaken in part or in whole, prior to the presentation of his ethics. The account of power could not have been simply dismissed as a superseded interpretation of subject formation. Foucault’s treatment of power in the first of his ethical works hardly constitutes a retraction or qualification of the account he gives in Discipline and Punish and the first volume of The History of Sexuality.32 Aside from theoretically innocuous references elsewhere in the book, Foucault offers only a brief discussion of power early in The Use of Pleasure.33 On page six the term ‘power’ occurs in deprecating quotation marks, but there is no acknowledgement or mitigation of the preclusive implications power would have had for the introspective autonomy at the core of Foucauldian ethical redefinition if the account of power was intended as mimetically factual.34 It is also unclear how Foucault could have retracted or qualified power if its presentation in Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality was intended as mimetically factual. Foucault described power as totally pervasive and claimed that there is ‘no escaping from power’ because it ‘is always already present, constituting that very thing which one attempts to counter it with’.35 To restate the point, in The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self, subjects are capable of autonomous introspection and able to act independently in effecting ethical self-determination. Subjects are able to do what subjects in Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality could only believe they could do or were doing. Subjects in the two main genealogical works could only think they were veraciously assessing

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their ethical beliefs, values, and inclinations because power conditioned their internal perceptions and conclusions. It is hard to imagine that Foucault would not have seen this difference and the problem it generated. He could not have been unaware that, if his account of power was intended as mimetically factual, his contention that ethics are about how ‘a human being turns him- or herself into a subject’ could only be darkly sardonic because individuals’ introspection and self-assessments would always be conditioned by power.36 As much of the foregoing suggests, Foucault’s shifts from archaeology to genealogy to ethics raise questions about his view of truth. The questions arise not only because of charges and issues about mimetic truth, but also because of the need to better understand how contentions made in any one of his archaeological or genealogical or ethical periods related to contentions made in his other two periods. Admittedly, the shift from archaeology to genealogy was relatively unproblematic and did not by itself raise questions about truth, aside from those posed by critics. For one thing, as Dreyfus and Rabinow maintain, there was a good deal of overlap between the two analytical methodologies.37 But the shift from genealogy to ethics involved incompatible accounts of the formation of subjects or of subjectivity. In the former, subjectivity is a product of conditioning; in the latter, subjectivity begins as a product of conditioning but admits of self-redefinition. The introduction of possible veracious introspection enabling genuine selfredefinition in the ethics and the implicit facilitating curtailment of power’s determinative role make it look as if the shift to ethics was the abandonment of one position and adoption of another, incompatible one. Foucault’s treatment of the shift, though, is basically of ethics as a progressive advancement on genealogy. Nonetheless, even putting mimetic truth aside, it does appear as if the truth of some contentions about subjectivity made in the context of the ethics must be at odds with the truth of related contentions about subjectivity made in the context of the genealogical account of power. We need to clarify what Foucault thought about truth. Foucault’s understanding of truth was complex. He held that truth is produced, not in an epistemological sense, but as an operant element in and of diverse discourses. ‘We are subjected to the production of truth through power’ through sociopolitical discursive validation of certain propositions as true.38 Truth is produced ‘by virtue of multiple forms of constraint’. Foucault offered some detail by describing how ‘the “political economy” of truth is characterized by five important traits’. These traits are that truth (i) ‘is centred on the form of scientific discourse and the institutions which produce it’; (ii) ‘is subject to constant economic and political incitement (the demand for truth, as much for economic production as for political power)’; (iii) ‘is the object, under diverse forms, of immense diffusion and consumption (circulating through apparatuses of education and information whose extent is relatively broad in the social body)’; (iv) ‘is produced and transmitted under the control, dominant if not exclusive, of a few great political and economic apparatuses (university, army, writing, media)’; and (v) ‘is the issue of a whole political debate and social confrontation (“ideological” struggles)’.39 As these traits indicate, Foucault meant it when he spoke of a ‘political economy’ regarding truth because the traits describe

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complex machinations bearing on and occurring in professional and lay idioms – machinations that result in propositions being deemed true. The foregoing traits do not in themselves pose compatibility problems for Foucault’s view of truth with pragmatism, because they describe the processes that establish what is deemed true in diverse discourses. However, the traits taken together do highlight a significant difference between Foucault’s and pragmatists’ understandings of truth. For pragmatists generally, truth is what works; what is true is what it is best to believe in light of goals and interests. William James articulated this point when he said that truth is ‘whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief ’.40 For pragmatists, ascription of truth is commendation. But Foucault’s mappings of how ‘true’ and ‘truth’ work in discourse were intended to explain how and why something comes to be counted as true and believed in given contexts and at given times.41 As a product of power, as a consequence of various sociopolitical influences, truth may not be what works in that what is produced as truth, what comes to be held true and believed, may not be what it is best to believe and hold true. This was the whole point of Discipline and Punish and the first volume of The History of Sexuality: what was taken to be true about correctional institutions and about the nature of sexuality was precisely not for the best and called for genealogical analysis to discern how it came to be taken as true. This difference, while significant, is not decisive regarding the compatibility of Foucault’s understanding of truth and pragmatism. For some apparent truths to turn out not to be for the best is compatible with interpretations of pragmatism allowing for assessment of long-term consequences. I am less sure about James, but both John Dewey and Charles Sanders Peirce would accept that something might be held true for a substantial period of time and then be shown not to be or have been for the best. There are reasons that would have kept Foucault from formally embracing pragmatism as a position. I am referring to the nebulous nature of the pragmatic definition of truth as what works or what is best to believe, in light of goals and objectives. Foucault would have been quick to point out that what is best to believe regarding consequences depends on the historical period in which something is deemed true and the perspectives held at the time. He also would have pointed out that Peirce’s description of truth as ‘the opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate’ is difficult to take seriously because it is hopelessly open-ended due to ‘ultimately’ being historically indeterminable.42 Any judgement made at any time that an opinion has been agreed to by all who investigate it can be overturned by developments in the next hour. In addition to the traits of truth he lists, Foucault used ‘true’ and ‘truth’ in five interrelated but different senses. In Searle and Foucault on Truth, I labelled these senses or uses as the (a) criterial, (b) constructivist, (c) perspectivist, (d) experiential, and (e) tacit-realist uses.43 Briefly, the criterial, constructivist and perspectivist uses were employed when Foucault discussed discursive truth-defining practices, power’s shaping of beliefs and discursive practices, and the role and importance or value of truth in the forming of intentions and in conduct. The experiential use was employed in the description and discussion of perspectival changes prompted by limit-experiences. The first three senses or uses, (a), (b), and (c), have to do with how ‘true’ and ‘truth’ come to be and are used in discourse. The fourth use or sense, (d), is basically selfreferential or self-descriptive and, to a point, self-determinative in articulating the

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import or consequences of new attitudes. But as interesting as (a), (b), (c), and (d) are, I cannot pursue them here. It is (e), the tacit-realist use or sense of ‘true’ and ‘truth’, that raises serious questions. This is the use employed in Foucault’s apparent references to objective truth, as when he speaks of ‘the ensemble of truths which are to be discovered and accepted’.44 Clarification of the tacit-realist use requires appreciation of how Rorty, Nola, and other critics impose a strict dichotomy when assessing Foucault’s work. The dichotomy is an exclusive one between mimetic truth and purely doxastic conviction. That is, as is clear in Nola’s criticism of Foucault, there is only ‘what is true and what we take to be true’.45 Though writing in a post-Heideggerian, hermeneutical epoch, Nola’s analytic background makes him ignore Gadamer’s statement, quoted above, that from the hermeneutical standpoint, ‘there are no eternal truths’.46 Truth is not mimetic; truth is historical. Foucault saw this; Nola did not or would not accept it. Appreciation of how critics like Nola disregard or discount truth as historical also shows how they then presuppose exactly what is at issue when they read Foucault as distinguishing between what is objectively true and what we take to be true. I believe recognition of this misguided presupposition is what underlies the dismissive nature of Foucault’s remark about traditional philosophers responding to his claims about power producing truth by thinking that he was not considering mimetic or capital ‘T’ Truth. With respect to the contrast issue, there is a decisive point to be made regarding the non-mimetic nature of Foucault’s references to what initially appear to be mimetic or objective truths. Making the point begins with acknowledgement that one can be a realist without holding a mimetic view of truth. Rejection of truth as replication, as a relation of a representative identity between propositions and states-of-affairs, is not thereby an adoption of idealism or irrealism where truth is wholly internal to ‘the mind’ and ‘the world’ is a projection or postulation. Too many traditional philosophers assume this is the case. But contrary to this assumption, the independent reality of the world can be recognized without that reality having to be either ideationally replicated or only conjectured on the basis of sense data or relinquished as an unknowable thing-in-itself. Foucault’s occasional references to the world, to the things themselves, are actually intended to focus attention on discourse, not on bits of the world. He was essentially uninterested in physical reality and what we might learn about it. This is evident in The Archaeology of Knowledge where he wrote that he wished ‘to dispense with “things”’ and to ‘substitute for the enigmatic treasure of “things” anterior to discourse, the regular formation of objects that emerge only in discourse’.47 Foucault added that ‘in analysing discourses themselves, one sees the loosening of the embrace … of words and things’, and this loosening enabled ‘the emergence of a group of rules proper to discursive practices’. As for the rules, they ‘define not the dumb existence of a reality … but the ordering of objects’.48 Perhaps unexpectedly, we see here another aspect of compatibility with pragmatism. In his treatment of dumb reality or the things themselves, Foucault was close to Peirce, who in ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’ considered the concept of the world or reality and defined ‘the real’ simply as being ‘that whose characters are independent

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of what anybody may think them to be’.49 Peirce includes no epistemological, much less metaphysical, content or implications in his recognition and putting aside of brute reality. Rorty himself made a similar contention, saying, ‘“the world” is either the purely vacuous notion of the ineffable cause of sense … or else a name for the objects that inquiry at the moment is leaving alone’.50 Rorty’s ‘ineffable cause of sense’ is Peirce’s ‘characters independent of what anybody may think them to be’ and both are ‘the dumb existence of … reality’ for Foucault and what his inquiry into discursive truth was leaving alone. Dreyfus and Rabinow saw this point because they perceptively rendered Foucault’s reference to ‘the ensemble of truths which are to be discovered and accepted’ as Foucault meaning ‘those true things which are waiting to be discovered’.51 The implication of this rendition is that Foucault would have been better advised not to speak of ‘truths’ in this and similar references to brute reality. In short, what Foucault was setting aside was not truths in the world but the world. His occasional references to the world, to the things themselves, were essentially asides; they were incurious references, the main purpose of which was to keep our attention on discursive truth. This is clearest in how Foucault summed up his concern with truth: ‘My problem is to see how men govern (themselves and others) by the production of truth (not the production of true utterances but the establishment of domains in which the practice of true and false can be made at once ordered and pertinent).’52 Rorty cites James and Dewey in his contention about where Foucault was headed. They provide a standard on truth with respect to Foucault’s understanding of truth being compatible with pragmatism. Like Nietzsche, both Dewey and James rejected the mimetic conception of truth as well as the construal of true beliefs and propositions as made true by particular states-of-affairs, events, or occurrences in the world. Both also rejected how the mimetic conception of truth invariably carries with it a fundamentally Cartesian conception of the world or reality as ‘external’ to the mind, thereby requiring traditional epistemology to bridge the resulting gap between awareness and reality. James understood truth as ‘the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief ’ and held that ‘“the true”, to put it briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking’.53 Dewey’s briefest and, I believe, most representative definition of truth is that ‘truth means fulfillment of the consequences to which an idea or proposition refers’.54 For James and Dewey, and for Rorty himself, ‘true’ and ‘truth’ are terms applicable to beliefs and propositions on the basis of their assessment as beneficial to hold or accept because of their productive consequences. Statements about truth are not about a property of replication; they are about the valuation of propositions in light of objectives and benefits. Regarding another aspect of the compatibility of Foucault’s understanding of truth and pragmatism, in ‘Educating the Self: Dewey and Foucault’, I compared Foucault with Dewey with respect to subjectivity.55 The comparison does not focus on truth but rather on the role of habit in the formation of subjectivity. Dewey summed this up by saying that ‘the basic characteristic of habit is that every experience enacted and undergone modifies the one who acts and undergoes [it]’, adding with respect to subsequent experiences that ‘it is a somewhat different person who enters into them’.56 Experience imbues habits and thereby forms the subject. Foucault held just this

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constructivist view. Admittedly, he took it further, adding something of an impersonally deterministic quality to his ‘history of the different modes by which … human beings are made subjects’.57 But Dewey would have readily understood and possibly accepted Foucault’s account of power or the myriad influences that shape subjects’ attitudes and beliefs and specifically what they take to be true. The constructivist view was central to both Foucault’s and Dewey’s views on subjectivity and therefore on how individuals come to hold things true. Though not focused on truth, comparison is relevant here because it indicates that Dewey and Foucault shared a constructivist conception of the formation of subjects and subjectivity. The import of this is that compatibility of Foucault’s views on truth with at least Deweyan pragmatism was not precluded by conflict of something as basic as their respective conceptions of subject formation. The conclusion that I believe must be reached is that Foucault was not heading towards pragmatism as a consequence of inconsistency due to commitment to – or occasional employment of – mimetic truth, as Rorty claimed. Instead, Foucault’s views on truth were all along compatible with pragmatism. This compatibility may add little to his genealogical and ethical analytics from the perspective of those who use his methodologies, analyses, and histories. However, discerning it is of major importance because doing so disproves charges such as Rorty’s and Nola’s and eliminates the apparent conflict between genealogical power and ethical self-definition.

Notes Editors’ Introduction 1 ‘Si bien que la phénoménologie au sens large est la somme de l’oeuvre husserlienne et des hérésies issues de Husserl’ (Ricoeur 1987, 9). Alongside Ricoeur’s insistence that there are various types of phenomenologies, one can further ask whether one could not say the same about phenomenological hermeneutics. Some chapters invite us to answer this question affirmatively.

Chapter 1 1 G. W. Leibniz, Philosophische Schriften, edited by C. I. Gerhardt (Berlin: Weidmann, 1875–90), vol. IV, pp. 559–60. 2 See Tom Rockmore, German Idealism as Constructivism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 3 See Hans Blumenberg, The Genesis of the Copernican World, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). 4 For instance, Michael Forster’s detailed study of the Phenomenology of Spirit concerns Hegel’s conception of his book, not his conception of phenomenology. See Michael N. Forster, Hegel’s Idea of a Phenomenology of Spirit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 5 The word ‘phenomenon’ (Phänomenon), which does not occur either in the Differenzschrift nor in Faith and Knowledge, occurs only a total of four times in the Phenomenology. 6 See ‘First Introduction to the Science of Knowledge’, in Fichte, Science of Knowledge, trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 10. 7 J. G. Fichte, Wissenschaftlehre 1804 (second series, 1804), trans. Walter E. Wright (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), p. 107. See also J. G. Fichte, Die Wissenschaftslehre. Zweiter Vortrag im Jahre 1804, ed. R. Lauth and J. Widmann (Hamburg: Meiner, 1986), p. 138; Hereafter cited as WL 1804/II. 8 Fichte, Wissenschaftslehre 1804/II, pp. 150–1. Ibid. 9 See, for a detailed study of this text, Joachim Widmann, Die Grundstruktur des transzendentalen Wissens nach Joh. Gott. Fichtes Wissenschaftslhere 1804 (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1977). 10 See, for an interpretation of Gadamer’s concept of Wirkungsgeschite in this sense, Jerome Veith, Gadamer and the Transmission of History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015). 11 G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 10, 11.

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12 See G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Cover, 1956), p. 9. 13 See ibid., p. 103. 14 Ibid., pp. 103–4. 15 See the Eighth Proposition in Kant’s Idea for A Universal History with A Cosmopolitan Aim, ed. Amélie Rorty (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 19. 16 See Jean-Paul, Sartre, ‘La liberté cartésienne’, in Situations 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), pp. 314–27. 17 See Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971).

Chapter 2 1 The fact that such an expansion was not self-evident is shown by the challenge raised against it by Heymann Steinthal, one of the founders of Völkerpsychologie, who, in his lecture ‘Die Arten und Formen der Interpretation’ (1877), denies it to the ‘mute productions of a folk’ such as buildings, sculptures, paintings, and tools, considering that the only object of philology is constituted by oral or written discourses. 2 H.-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method, in Gesammelte Werke (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1990), vol. 1, p. 202. Hereafter cited as GW followed by volume and page numbers. 3 Der junge Dilthey. Ein Lebensbild in Briefen und Tagebüchen. 1852-1870, ed. C. Misch (Leipzig and Berlin: B.G. Teubner, 1933), p. 10. 4 W. Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften (Leipzig and Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1924), vol. 5, p. 8. Hereafter cited as GS followed by volume and page numbers. 5 Der junge Dilthey, p. 21. 6 Ibid., p. 127. 7 A. Boeckh, Enzyklopädie und Methodologie der philologischen Wissenschaften (Leipzig: Teubner, 1877), p. 75. For an abridged English version, see Boeckh, Interpretation and Criticism, trans. John Pritchard (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968). 8 Dilthey, GS vol. 5, p. 329 and GS vol. 4, p. 372. In the same vein, the supplements drawn from the manuscripts of Die geistige Welt send the rebirth of hermeneutics a little further back, jointly to Schleiermacher and to Boeckh (GS vol. 5, p. 333). See also GS vol. 7, pp. 95f. 9 GS vol. 5, p. 329. 10 Enzyklopädie, p. 53. 11 Ibid., p. 48. 12 Respectively, Boeckh, Enzyklopädie, p. 46, and Dilthey, GS, vol. 5, p. 336. 13 See, respectively, Schleiermacher’s 1805–6 course on ethics that Boeckh attended, and which comes back to the fact that any knowledge implies an act of recognition or appropriation (Schleiermacher, Draft of an Ethics); G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989), p. 35; Boeckh, Enzyklopädie, pp. 10, 33, 46, 53. 14 GS vol. 5, p. 180, and vol. 7, pp. 86f. 15 Boeckh, Corpus inscriptionum Graecarum, 1825–59. 16 GS vol. 15, p. 273. 17 He attended courses on the philosophy of history in the winter semesters of 1827–8 and 1828–9, on ‘Logic and Metaphysics’ (1827), on ‘Philosophy of Religion’ (1827) and ‘Philosophy of Mind’ (1827–8).

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18 See Rodi’s reading of the Diltheyan invitation to unite hermeneutics and the theory of knowledge: Frithjof Rodi, Erkenntnis des Erkannten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), p. 81. 19 ‘It is the speech of times past, that has often become half incomprehensible, often barely audible, that we strive to understand in a way perfectly similar to the way in which we understand any speech and psychical expression today.’ Johann Gustav Droysen, Historik. Vorlesungen über Enzyklopädie und Methodologie der Geschichte, ed. Rudolf Hübner (Munich: R. Oldenburg, 1937), p. 27; and see also p. 163. 20 Historik, pp. 57 and 399. 21 Enzyklopädie, p. 57. 22 Historik, p. 57. 23 ‘Only correct questioning allows things to speak’ (Historik, p. 104). In the same vein: facts ‘would be mute without the narrator who makes them speak’ (p. 236). See also § 91 of the abridgement Grundriß der Historik (Leipzig: Verlag von Veit, 1882), referred to hereafter as Grundriß. 24 E.g. Historik, p. 31. 25 ‘Natur und Geschichte’, Historik, p. 477. See also Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, in which the second part of the Logic, the ‘Doctrine of Essence’, explores the relationship of whole and parts, of force and its externalization, and therefore of the inner and the outer. 26 Historik, pp. 67f, 397 and 422 (Grundriß §§ 5 and 6). 27 GS vol. 7, p. 227, and see also p. 229. 28 Historik, pp. 22 and 423 (Grundriß § 8). 29 Historik, pp. 5, 64 (60). 30 Ibid., p. 236. 31 Ibid., p. 22. 32 Ibid., p. 108, and in the same vein pp. 27 and 57; and Humboldt, ‘On the Historian’s Task’ (1821). 33 See ‘Theologie und Geschichte’, in Historik, p. 379, and more broadly his History of Hellenism (1836). 34 For example, GS vol. 7, p. 316 (historical knowledge as a ‘new creation of the mind’). 35 Historik, pp. 22 and 423 (Grundriß § 9). 36 Historik, pp. 29, 163 and 293. 37 ‘Kunst und Methode’, in Historik, p. 484. 38 Thomas Buckle, History of Civilization in England, 2 vols. (London: J.W. Parker & Son: 1857 & 1861). 39 First published in the Berliner Allgemeine Zeitung of 29 May 1862; reprinted in Dilthey, GS vol. 16, pp. 100–6. 40 GS vol. 16, p. 105. 41 GS vol. 5, p. 57; and GS vol. 1, p. 109. 42 GS vol. 19, p. 44. 43 ‘Erhebung der Geschichte zum Rang einer Wissenschaft’, Historik, pp. 453 and 461; and also Grundriß § 10. 44 Historik, p. 463. 45 Ibid., p. 464. 46 GS vol. 16, p. 104. 47 Ibid., p. 105. 48 Goethe, Faust, Part I, lines 682–3. 49 Historik, p. 459, and GS vol. 1, p. 91. On practical finality, see GS vol. 21, pp. 23f.

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50 Historik, p. 460. 51 Ibid., p. 461. 52 This should also be understood through the idea that the politician is a ‘practical historian’ (Historik, p. 269). Let us recall that Droysen took an active role in the work of the Frankfurt Parliament in 1848. 53 ‘Natur und Geschichte’, Historik, p. 477. In the same vein, see the theme of history as the oxidization of the earth, Historik, p. 15, as well as Schleiermacher, for whom ethics is the science of the life of the mind, that is, of the action of reason on nature. 54 GS vol. 7, pp. 287f. 55 Historik, p. 444 (Grundriß § 82). 56 See ‘Theologie der Geschichte’ which prefaces the second volume of his History of Hellenism (1843), and Historik, p. 378. 57 See the foreword to Grundriß, Historik, pp. 419 and pp. 52f. 58 GS vol. 7, p. 114, and see p. 115: they did not query the presuppositions of the historical school, and simply connected them to the metaphysics of idealism. This criticism didn’t stop Dilthey from recognizing the value of Droysen and Humboldt’s work. In his June 1859 letter to his father, at a time when he was working on primitive Christianity, Dilthey wrote of Humboldt: ‘I would like to do for religion even a fraction of what he achieved in his research concerning the essence of language’ (Der junge Dilthey, p. 76) And he would praise Droysen’s historical works in his reviews of them, for example, reviews published in 1876 and 1882 in the Westermanns Monathefte of Droysen’s History of Prussian Politics and History of Alexander the Great, respectively. These are reprinted in GS vol. 17. 59 ‘Theologie der Geschichte’, Historik, p. 378. 60 GS vol. 1, p. xvi f. 61 Dilthey specifies that though ‘all science is a science of experience, experience only finds its original coherence, and thereby its value, in the conditions of the consciousness within which it is produced, in the whole of our nature’ (GS vol. 1, p. xvii; see also p. xix). 62 ‘No one would think of denying the title of science to physics, or of denying its scientific results, though it is not nature itself, but a way of considering it; nor would anyone think of arguing against mathematics from the fact that the whole of its proud edifice is erected only in the knowing mind’, Droysen writes. ‘Our wise language takes its word for what is certain (gewiss) from the participle of the verb “to know” (wissen); it does not denote as certain the external and so-called “objective” being of things, but the being as known, which we know has been produced’ (‘Natur und Geschichte’, Historik, p. 478). 63 Briefwechsel II: Deutsche Geschichtsquellen des 19. Jahrhunderts 25, 26: StuttgartBerlin, 1929, p. 970. 64 Karl-Otto Apel was led to wonder if this psychological foundation might not be a regress in relation to Droysen (see Die Erklären/Verstehen-Kontroverse in Transzendentalpragmatischer Sicht). 65 GS vol. 1, p. xvi. 66 Historik, p. 378. 67 See, on the one hand, GS vol. 5, p. 180 and vol. 7, pp. 86f, and, on the other, GS vol. 7, pp. 84f. 68 GS vol. 7, pp. 205f. On the evolution of the Diltheyan conception of the concepts of lived experience and expression, I refer the reader to my book La Pensée herméneutique de Dilthey (Lille: Éditions du Septentrion, 2002), pp. 51f, 113f, and 119f.

Notes 69 70 71 72 73

74 75

76 77 78 79 80

81 82 83 84 85 86 87

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See Historik, pp. 29, 36, and 53. Historik, pp. 28f and 30f. GS vol. 1, pp. 179, 188f, and 423. See ‘Beiträge zur Lösung der Frage vom Ursprung unseres Glaubens an die Realität der Außenwelt und seinem Recht’ (1890), in GS vol. 5. See GS vol. 1, p. xviii, and also pp. 31, 360, and 365–7; and, at the same period, the course on logic in GS vol. 20, pp. 201f. On the subsequent Diltheyan doctrine of the categories of life, see GS vol. 19, pp. 359–88 and GS vol. 7, pp. 228–45. GS vol. 8, p. 81. On the distinctiveness of Dilthey’s concept of worldview vis-à-vis Trendelenburg’s, I refer the reader to my article ‘Une phénoménologie de la Métaphysique. L’inspiration aristotélicienne de la fondation diltheyenne des sciences de l’esprit’, in Aristote au XIXe siècle, ed. D. Thouard (Villeneuve-d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2004), pp. 141–56. Historik, pp. 32f and 424 (Grundriß §§ 13–14), and pp. 468f. H. Schnädelbach, Philosophie in Deutschland. 1831-1933 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), pp. 71f. Respectively, Enzyklopädie, pp. 11f, and Historik, p. 26. My emphasis. Historik, pp. 424 and 398; see also Grundriß § 12. Historik, p. 17 (‘we began by admitting that our initial consideration of history is marked by a multitude of presuppositions, for we are, each of us, in fact a product of history’) and p. 425 (Grundriß § 19.) GS vol. 1, p. 25. Der junge Dilthey, p. 125. Respectively, GS vol. 7, pp. 147 and 277–8. Historik, p. 31. GS vol. 7, p. 148. GW vol. 1, p. 281. See Historik, p. 106. Gadamer manifestly did not notice this aspect, as he simply follows Dilthey (see GW vol. 2, p. 387). Moreover, the description in the Grundriß of the act of understanding retrospectively evokes what Gadamer would make of hermeneutical experience in terms of enlightenment and a fusion of horizons. Droysen indeed describes this act as belonging to an ‘immediate intuition, as though one soul plunged into another, as creative as conception in mating’ (Historik, pp. 424 (Grundriß § 11), 398, and 107ff.) Schleiermacher, Glaubenslehre (Leipzig: C. Strange, 1910), § 3, p. 8.

Chapter 3 1 See Eugen Fink, Sixth Cartesian Meditation: The Idea of a Transcendental Theory of Method, with Textual Notations by Edmund Husserl, trans. and intro. Ronald Bruzina (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), § 3. 2 See Emmanuel Levinas, ‘The Ruin of Representation’, Discovering Existence with Husserl, trans. Richard A. Cohen and Michael B. Smith (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 111–21, and Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. and intro. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973). Also see Jeff Mitscherling, Aesthetic Genesis:

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6

7 8

9

10

11

12 13 14 15

16

Notes The Origin of Consciousness in the Intentional Being of Nature (Lanham: University Press of America, 2010). See, for example, Suzanne Cunningham, Language and the Phenomenological Reductions of Edmund Husserl (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976). See Michel Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, trans. Girard Etzkorn (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), section 1. See, for example, Claude Romano, At the Heart of Reason, trans. Michael B. Smith and Claude Romano (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2015), ch. 2, and Ernst Tugendhat, ‘Phenomenology and Linguistic Analysis’, Husserl: Expositions and Appraisals, ed. and intro. Frederick A. Elliston and Peter McCormick (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1977), pp. 325–37. See Jean Petitot, et al., ed., Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). Also see Husserl, ‘Philosophy as a Rigorous Science’, Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, trans. and intro. Quentin Lauer (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), pp. 71–147. See Michael Dummett, Origins of Analytical Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 26. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967), § 243; Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1991), ch. 4. See Roman Ingarden, On the Motives which Led Husserl to Transcendental Idealism, trans. Arnór Hannibalsson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975). Ingarden does not name Fichte, yet see the allusion to Husserl’s apparent commitment to idealism in Göttingen at 21. Also see, for a statement of appreciation of Husserlian transcendental idealism as a possible solution to the problem of realism v. idealism, his Time and Modes of Being, partly trans. Helen R. Michejda (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1964), esp. 9. See J. F. Herbart, Hauptpunkte der Metaphysik in Sämmliche Werke, 19 vols, ed. Carl Kehrbach et al. (Aalen: Scientia, 1964), II, 187, Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, 6, 7, and Jean-Luc Marion, Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Phenomenology, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), esp. ch. 1 and 2. See Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, I: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. Fred Kersten (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1983), p. 109, and Ingarden, On the Motives, p. 32. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973), p. 7. See Heidegger, Four Seminars, trans. Andrew Mitchell and François Raffoul (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), p. 36. See Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, rev. ed., trans., intro. lexicon Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 21. See, for example, Heidegger, ‘Ἀγχιβασίη: A Triadic Conversation on a Country Path between a Scientist, a Scholar, and a Guide’, Country Path Conversations, trans. Bret W. Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), p. 48. See Jean-Yves Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute: Disputed Questions on the Humanity of Man, trans. Mark Raftery-Skeban (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), p. 11.

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17 See Husserl, Ideas I, 110. Later, Husserl was to distinguish ἐποχή and reduction, but for the purposes of this chapter I use the two words to name the same thing. Also see The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. and intro. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), § 35. 18 Husserl writes of absolute being that it is ‘nulla “re” indiget ad existendum’, Ideas I, 110, and Descartes writes, ‘Per substantiam nihil aliud intelligere possumus, quam rem quae ita existit, ut nulla alia re indigeat ad existendum’, Descartes, Principia Philosophiæ in Oeuvres de Descartes (Paris: Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, 1964), VIII-I, 24. 19 Husserl, ‘The Amsterdam Lectures’, Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (1927-1931), ed. and trans. Thomas Sheehan and Richard E. Palmer (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997), p. 217. 20 See Husserl, ‘Marginal Remarks on Being and Time’, Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger, p. 296. 21 See Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 32. 22 Ibid., p. 26. Heidegger distinguishes Mitsein, Mitdasein, mit-da-sein, and miteinander. 23 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 72. 24 See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), p. xi. 25 See Ingarden, ‘Probleme der Husserlschen Reduktion. Vorlesung gehalten an der Universitat Oslo, Oktober/November 1967’, Analecta Husserliana, 4, 1–72. 26 See Paul Ricœur, ‘Phenomenology and Hermeneutics’, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge and Paris: Cambridge University Press / Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1981), pp. 101–28. 27 For the importance of the ‘Epilogue’, see Aron Gurwitsch, ‘Critical Study of Husserl’s Nachwort’, The Collected Works of Aron Gurwitsch (1901-1973), II: Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology, ed. Fred Kersten (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009), pp. 119–27. 28 Ricœur, Time and Narrative, 3 vols, III, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 281 n. 1. 29 See Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Dritter Teil: 1929-1935, ed. Iso Kern (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), p. lxvi. 30 Ricoeur, ‘Phenomenology and Hermeneutics’, p. 101. 31 Ibid., p. 115, and Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. xi. 32 See Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), §§ 12–13. 33 Husserl, ‘Epilogue’, Ideas II, pp. 417, 420, 418. 34 See Husserl, ‘Epilogue’, pp. 421, 423. Also see Formal and Transcendental Logic, § 66. 35 See David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd ed., ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, rev. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), I, iii. 14. Also see Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, p. 257. 36 Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, p. 257. 37 See Husserl, Ideas I, § 32, and Cartesian Meditations, First Meditation, esp. § 10. 38 Ingarden, On the Motives, p. 28. 39 See Husserl, Ideas I, p. 109. 40 See, for instance, Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, § 41. 41 See Husserl, ‘Philosophy as a Rigorous Science’, pp. 71–147.

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42 On Evidenz, see Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay, 2 vols (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), II, vi, § 38, and on the ante-predicative experience at the heart of logical judgement, see Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic, rev. and ed. Ludwig Landgrebe, trans. James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973). 43 Husserl, ‘Epilogue’, p. 406. 44 See Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic, trans. Anthony J. Steinbock (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001), p. 457. 45 See Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, § 74. 46 See Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay, 2 vols (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), II, p. 725. 47 See Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, p. 457. 48 See Husserl, Logical Investigations, II, Investigation VI, Appendix §§ 6–7. 49 See Husserl, ‘The Origin of Geometry’, in Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s ‘Origin of Geometry’: An Introduction, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., ed. David B. Allison (Stony Brook: Nicolas Hays, Ltd., 1978). 50 Husserl, Logical Investigations, II, p. 648. 51 On the theoretical senses, see G. F. W. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), I, p. 38. 52 Ricœur, ‘Phenomenology and Hermeneutics’, p. 104. 53 See Ricœur, ‘On Interpretation’, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin, Philosophy in France Today, ed. Alan Montefiore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 188. Also see Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 109. 54 See Ricœur, A Key to Edmund Husserl’s ‘Ideas’ I, pp. 48, 99. 55 Husserl, ‘Epilogue’, p. 416. 56 Husserl, Phänomenologische Psychologie: Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1925, ed. Walter Biemel (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968), p. 487. 57 J. G. Fichte, ‘Second Introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre’, Introductions to the ‘Wissenschaftslehre’ and Other Writings (1797-1800), ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1994), p. 108. 58 Fichte, ‘Review of Aenesidemus’, Early Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. Daniel Breazeale (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 73. 59 Karl Leonhard Reinhold, Über das Fundament des Philosophischen Wissens: Über die Möglichkeit der Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft (1790), ed. Wolfgang H. Schrader (Hamburg: Meiner, 1978), p. 367. 60 See Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, trans. William P. Alston and George Nakhnikian (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), p. 4. 61 See Fichte, ‘Review of Leonard Creuzer’, Skeptical Reflections on the Freedom of the Will, with Reference to the Latest Theories of the Same (Giessen: Heyer, 1793), trans. Daniel Breazeale, The Philosophical Forum 32, no. 4 (2001), 293. 62 Fichte, ‘A Comparison between Professor Schmid’s System and the Wissenschaftslehre’, Early Philosophical Writings, p. 323. 63 Fichte, ‘Second Introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre’, p. 49. 64 Ibid. 65 Yet see E. Scott Scribner, ‘Reduction or Revelation? Fichte and the Question of Phenomenology’, in Fichte and the Phenomenological Tradition, ed. Violetta L. Maria Waibel, J. Daniel Breazeale and Tom Rockmore (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), pp. 41–56.

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66 Husserl, Ideas I § 34, § 57. Also see Ideas II, § 58. 67 See Fichte, ‘Second Introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre’, p. 49, and, for his distinction between the pure ‘I’ and the individual, p. 88. 68 See Husserl, Erste Philosophie, II, p. 416. 69 See Wilhelm Dilthey, Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften (Berlin: Verlag der Königlichen Akademie der Wisswenschaften, 1910), pp. 71, 83, 113. 70 See Husserl’s Kaizo essays in his Aufsätz und Vorträge, 1922-1937, eds. Thomas Nenon and H. R. Sepp (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989). 71 See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B xl and B 274. 72 Husserl, ‘Epilogue,’ p. 417. See, for instance, Ideas II, § 53. 73 Husserl approaches the point in Cartesian Meditations, § 50, but see especially, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, III, p. 631, and Erste Philosophie, II, p. 495. 74 See Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), Part II, ch. 4. 75 See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2004), p. xv. 76 See Husserl, Die Lebenswelt. Auslegungen der vorgegebenen Welt und ihrer Konstitution. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1916-1937), ed. Rochus Sowa (New York: Springer, 2008), pp. 158, 170–2, 175–9, 345. 77 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, p. 36. 78 See Husserl, Experience and Judgment, Part I. 79 Yet see Husserl, Logical Investigations, ‘Prolegomena,’ § 9, and Logical Investigations, VI § 26. 80 Ricœur, ‘Phenomenology and Hermeneutics,’ p. 108. 81 Husserl, ‘Epilogue,’ p. 406. 82 Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, p. 79. 83 Heidegger, Introduction to Phenomenological Research, trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), p. 22. 84 See Ricœur, ‘Science and Ideology,’ Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, p. 227. Also see his Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, ed. George H. Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), esp. p. 120. 85 W. H. Auden, ‘Twelve Songs,’ p. IX, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Random House, 1976), p. 120. 86 See, for example, Derrida, ‘Living On,’ trans. James Hulbert, Parages, ed. John P. Leavey, trans. Tom Conley et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), p. 110. 87 See Ricœur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), pp. 27, 32–6. When I speak of the hermeneutics of contemplation, I have in mind a phenomenological hermeneutics, which is distinct from that sketched by D. Z. Phillips in his Religion and the Hermeneutics of Contemplation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Also, it is more than what Günter Figal has in mind when he notes that phenomenology contemplates the structure of presentation. It is a matter of the self-givenness of a phenomenon having a dative in space and time. See Figal, Objectivity: The Hermeneutical and Philosophy, trans. Theodore D. George (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), p. 123. 88 Husserl, Logical Investigations, II, p. 741, and Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 32. 89 See Husserl, Ideas I, p. 172. 90 See, for example, Georges Poulet, La conscience critique (Paris: J. Corti, 1971).

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91 Ricoeur, ‘Phenomenology and Hermeneutics,’ pp. 111–12. 92 See Husserl, ‘Husserl an von Hofmannsthal (12. 1. 1907),’ Briefwechsel, 10 vols, VII: Wissenschaftlerkorrespondenz, ed. Elisabeth Schuhmann and Karl Schuhmann (Boston: Kluwer, 1994), p. 135. 93 Sir Philip Sidney, ‘Astrophil and Stella,’ in The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William A. Ringler, Jr. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), p. 180. 94 I take the expression ‘anonymous phenomenologist’ from Jean-Yves Lacoste who is bending a figure drawn by Karl Rahner. See Lacoste, La phénoménalité de Dieu: Neuf études (Paris: Cerf, 2008), p. 62. 95 See Philip Larkin, ‘Sad Steps,’ in Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite (London: The Marvell Press / Faber and Faber, 1988), p. 169. 96 Ricœur, ‘Phenomenology and Hermeneutics,’ p. 113. 97 Ludwig Landgrebe, ‘The World as a Phenomenological Problem,’ trans. Dorion Cairns and Donn Welton, The Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl: Six Essays, ed. Donn Welton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 146 n. 9. 98 See Jean-Luc Marion, Negative Certainties, trans. Stephen E. Lewis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), p. 202. 99 See Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferenei (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), Part II, ch. 3–4. As an indication only of what this sort of reading might look like, I cite my essay, ‘Eliot’s Rose-Garden: Some Phenomenology and Theology in “Burnt Norton”’, which is the third chapter of my Poetry and Revelation (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).

Chapter 4 1 In what follows, one should have to distinguish between at least three different senses of ‘phenomenological hermeneutics’. (1) In a narrow sense, the expression refers to historically existing hermeneutics having explicitly defined themselves as phenomenological (the early Heidegger, Ricœur, Špet, Iser, etc.). (2) In a broader sense, it indicates any philosophy having assumed and transformed in a specific way the concept of ‘phenomenon’ developed by Heidegger in Being and Time §7 (this includes Gadamer, Levinas, Marion, etc.). Finally, (3) taken in a third extremely broad sense, ‘phenomenological hermeneutics’ refers to any philosophical project having elaborated a hermeneutics resting on some rigorously construed concept of phenomenon. This could include projects that have already been realized (like Marty’s descriptive semasiology or Peirce’s phaneroscopy) but also possible lines of research to be explored (like a hermeneutics resting on Husserl’s concept of phenomenon). 2 It goes without saying that such a preliminary analysis will not tell the whole story about phenomenology. As we will learn in §69, since a ‘completely adequate existential interpretation of science cannot be carried out until the meaning of Being and the “connection” between meaning and truth have been clarified in terms of the temporality of existence’ (SZ, 327/357), it is only within the latter that ‘the idea of phenomenology can first be developed, as opposed to the preliminary concept indicated in an introductory fashion’ (SZ, 327/357). This preliminary concept, however, will be enough to promote the idea of a ‘hermeneutical phenomenology’. 3 Heidegger’s analysis of ‘λόγος’ has roughly followed the same path as the analysis of φαινόμενον: it begins by detecting a multitude of meanings; traces it back to the

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unity of a ‘fundamental meaning’ and, following Aristotle, characterizes the latter as ‘discourse’ (Rede) (SZ, 28/32). But, as Heidegger hastens to add, a discourse is a way to ‘make manifest’ (δηλοῦν) or ‘bring to sight’ (φαίνεσται) what is talked about (ἀπὸ…). As a result, a λόγος intended as ἀπόφανσις has an eminently phenomenological mission. It has to make manifest in speech something that is otherwise rooted in what is spoken of. In a ‘genuine’ (echt) discourse, Heidegger says, ‘what is said should be derived from what is being talked about’ and make it accessible to another (SZ, 28–9/32). Additionally, a ‘true’ (wahr) discourse lets what is talked about ‘be seen as something unconcealed’ (SZ, 29/33). This is also the reason why the problem of ‘application’ becomes the central problem of hermeneutics: ‘In the process of understanding, a real fusing of horizons occurs – which means that as the historical horizon is projected, it is simultaneously superseded. To bring about this fusion in a regulated way is the task of what we called historically effected consciousness. Although this task was obscured by aesthetichistorical positivism following on the heels of romantic hermeneutics, it is, in fact, the central problem of hermeneutics. It is the problem of application, which is to be found in all understanding’ (WM, 312/306). In the preface to the German edition of 1987, Levinas writes, ‘This book wants itself and considers itself as having a phenomenological inspiration’ (se veut et se sent d’inspiration phénoménologique) (TI, i). The language of ‘expression’ has also the advantage of being two-sided without necessarily being symmetrical. ‘To be oneself is to express oneself, that is, already to serve the Other. The ground of expression is goodness. To be καθ’αὐτό is to be good’ (TI, 200/183). A legitimacy that could also be confirmed by two recent studies which, following different paths than ours, lead to similar conclusions. Courtine (2013) explores the ‘ways and the impasses of hermeneutical phenomenology’ (10) intended in a sense as broad as to include Husserl and Patočka. As for Grondin (2003), the term is used to deal not only with Heidegger, Gadamer, or Ricœur, but also Derrida and Husserl. Gadamer agrees with Becker’s (1929, 32) claim according to which ‘the tendency of hermeneutical phenomenology (although not exclusively) goes in the direction of a further concretization of the transcendental-idealist basic tenet of Ideas’ (PB, 128). This is also a claim made by Ricœur (PH, 62–3/43–52). Its most fundamental phenomenological principle is not concealment/ unconcealment (leading to the pair understanding/interpretation) but unity/ multiplicity (whose corresponding pair is bringing together/falling apart). On the topic see Majolino (2013).

Chapter 5 1 In his words, ‘Looking at something, understanding and conceiving it, choosing, access to it – all these ways of behaving are constitutive for our inquiry, and therefore are modes of Being for those particular entities which we, the inquirers, are ourselves. Thus to work out the question of Being adequately, we must make an entity – the inquirer – transparent in his own Being’ (Heidegger, pp. 26–7). 2 Whether or not this is the inevitable result of having to presuppose being in the investigation of being is, of course, another issue.

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3 Ricoeur also compares phenomenology’s epoché with hermeneutics’ ‘recourse to distantiation’ (Ricoeur, p. 97). In his view, the epoché ‘involves a moment of distantiation, placing at a distance “lived” experience’ (ibid.). This distantiation allows us to interpret what we experience by signifying it. 4 From a phenomenological perspective, this point also holds for Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. As prior, epistemology cannot derive its notion of being from any other science – including such ontology. It must establish this in its own context.

Chapter 6 1 See, for instance, Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Hermeneutics and Reflection: Heidegger and Husserl on the Concept of Phenomenology, trans. Kenneth Maly (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2013). 2 See Edmund Husserl, Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie. Analysen des Unbewusstseins und der Instinkte. Metaphysik. Späte Ethik, Husserliana XLII (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014) and Vittorio De Palma, ‘Der Ursprung des Akts. Husserls Begriff der genetischen Phänomenologie und die Frage nach der Weltkonstitution’, Husserl Studies 31, no. 3 (2015): 189–212. 3 H.-G. Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode. Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik (Tübingen: Lohr, 1960, 2nd edn, 1965). The English translation by Joel Weimsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, Truth and Method, 2nd revised edn (London: Sheed & Ward, 1989) actually translates the Fourth German Edition. Hereafter ‘TM’ followed by page number of English translation; followed by the pagination of the German Second Edition. Hence this reference is TM 384; 361. 4 E. Husserl, ‘Philosophy as a Rigorous Science’, trans. M. Brainard, New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy II (2002), pp. 249–95; originally Logos. Internationale Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Kultur 1 (1910–11), pp. 289–341 (reprinted in Husserliana vol. XXV). 5 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York/Oxford: Harper and Row/ Blackwell, 1962); Sein und Zeit, Gesamtausgabe 2 (Frankfurt: Klostermann 1977). 6 See Heidegger’s summer lecture course of 1923, Ontologie (Hermeneutik der Faktizität), ed. Käte Bröcker-Oltmanns, GA 63 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1988); trans. John van Buren as Ontology – The Hermeneutics of Facticity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). 7 Martin Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie: Frühe Freiburger Vorlesungen, Kriegsnotsemester 1919 und Sommersemester 1919, Gesamtausgabe Vol. 56/57, ed. Bernd Heimbüchel (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1987), trans. Ted Sadler, Towards the Definition of Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2000). Hereafter ‘Gesamtausgabe’ will be abbreviated to ‘GA’ followed by the volume number. 8 M. Heidegger, Phänomenologie der Anschauung und des Ausdrucks. Theorie der philosophischen Begriffsbildung (Sommersemester 1920), hrsg. Claudius Strube, GA 59 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1993), p. 174. 9 Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie. 1. Die Idee der Philosophie und das Weltanschauungsproblem (Kriegsnotsemester 1919) / 2. Phänomenologie und transzendentale Wertphilosophie (Summer semester 1919) / 3. Anhang: Über das Wesen der Universität und des akademischen Studiums (Summer semester 1919), ed.

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B. Heimbüchel, GA 56/57 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1987), pp. 96–7, trans. Toward the Definition of Philosophy: With a Transcript of the Lecture Course ‘On the Nature of the University and Academic Study’ (London: Athlone Press, 2000), pp. 75–6. Heidegger, Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung: Marburger Vorlesung, Wintersemester 1923/24, Gesamtausgabe Vol. 17, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hermann (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1994). Heidegger, Ontology – The Hermeneutics of Facticity, p. 58; GA 63, 73. Georg Misch, Lebensphilosophie und Phänomenologie. Eine Auseinandersetzung der diltheyschen Richtung mit Heidegger und Husserl (Life-Philosophy and Phenomenology: A Dispute Concerning the Diltheyan Tendency in Heidegger and Husserl) (Bonn: Cohen, 1930; 3rd edn, Stuttgart: Teubner, 1964). For a discussion of Misch’s impact, see Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 454–8. Husserl himself wrote to Misch in 1929 to clarify what he meant by phenomenology and to explain that the ‘relativity of nature’ meant not the interrelation between things in nature but rather the dependence of the concept of nature of the intersubjective community of researchers who define it. See Husserl, Briefwechsel, vol. 6, pp. 276–77. See Jean Grondin, ‘Georg Misch und die Universalität der Hermeneutik: Logik oder Rhetorik?’ Dilthey-Jahrbuch 11 (1997–8): 48–63. See Iso Kern’s editor’s introduction to Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Zweiter Teil. 1921–1928, ed. Iso Kern, Husserliana XV (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973), pp. xliv–xlv. E. Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, hrsg. W. Biemel, Husserliana VI (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1962), partially trans. David Carr, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970). Hereafter ‘Crisis’ followed by English pagination and Husserliana (‘Hua’) volume number in Roman and page number of the German edition. See, for instance, Rudolf Bultmann / Martin Heidegger: Briefwechsel 1925 bis 1975, ed. Andreas Grossmann und Christof Landmesser (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2009). Bultmann’s major work was Die Geschichte der synoptischen Tradition (1921), trans. as History of the Synoptic Tradition (San Francisco: Harper, 1976). A good summary of Bultmann’s mature position can be found in Karl Jaspers and Rudolf Bultmann, Myth and Christianity: An Inquiry into the Possibility of Religion without Myth (New York: Noonday Press, 1958). See, for instance, Heidegger’s 1924 summer semester lecture course in Marburg: Martin Heidegger, Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy, trans. Robert D. Metcalf and Mark B. Tanzer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009) as well as his earlier Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle: Initiation into Phenomenological Research (1921–2), trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008). Heidegger, ‘My Way to Phenomenology’, in The Phenomenology Reader, ed. D. Moran and T. Mooney (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 151–256. See also Heidegger’s Foreword to his Ontology – Hermeneutics of Facticity, 4. Heidegger, ‘My Way to Phenomenology’, The Phenomenology Reader, p. 253. E. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen. Erster Band: Prolegomena zur reinen Logik. Text der 1. und der 2. Auflage, hrsg. E. Holenstein, Husserliana vol. XVIII (1975)

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Notes and Logische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Band: Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis. In zwei Bänden, Husserliana XIX/1 and XIX/2, hrsg. Ursula Panzer (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1984), trans. John Findlay, Logical Investigations, 2 vols., ed. Dermot Moran (London: Routledge, 2001). Hereafter LU followed by the Investigation number, paragraph number and pagination of English translation (vol. 1 = I; vol. 2 = II), followed by Husserliana volume and page number. Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie 1. Halbband: Text der 1-3. Auflage, ed. K. Schuhmann, Husserliana III/1 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977); trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom as Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2014). Hereafter the work will be cited as ‘Ideas’ followed by the paragraph number (§), page number of the translation and then the Husserliana volume number and page. Jaakko Hintikka, ‘The Notion of Intuition in Husserl,’ Revue internationale de philosophie, n° 224 (2003/2): 57–79. For a discussion of Rickert’s Neo-Kantian critique of Husserl’s Wesensschau, see Andrea Staiti, Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology: Nature, Spirit, and Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 112ff. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 460. Heinrich Rickert, Die Philosophie des Lebens: Darstellung und Kritik der philosophischen Modeströmungen unserer Zeit (Tübingen: Mohr, 1920), pp. 28–9. Rickert, Die Philosophie des Lebens, 113: ‘was als Realität unmittelbar erlebt wird, kann nicht erkannt werden. Also gibt es keine Metaphysik des Lebens. … Das Leben als das unmittelbar Reale lässt sich nur erleben. Es spottet als unmittelbares Leben jedem Erkenntnisversuch’. M. Heidegger, Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens, GA 60 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1995), trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, The Phenomenology of Religious Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). The reference here is English, 254 (trans. modified); GA 60, 336. See Dermot Moran, Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). See Heidegger, ‘Comments on Karl Jaspers’ Psychology of Worldviews,’ trans. John van Buren, in Martin Heidegger: Supplements, ed. John van Buren (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), pp. 71–103. Jaspers actually wanted to justify the world view of a humanity founded in rationality. But Heidegger severely criticized Jaspers’s analysis, although he acknowledged that Jaspers is the first to attempt a radical account of human existence. For Heidegger, it is important to uncover the fundamental experience that gives rise to philosophy and to distinguish philosophy from other religious or natural world views. Husserl also tends to use the term ‘world view’ (Weltanschauung) somewhat negatively. See Dermot Moran, ‘“Even the Papuan is a Man and Not a Beast”: Husserl on Universalism and the Relativity of Cultures,’ Journal of the History of Philosophy 49, no. 4 (October 2011): 463–94. Wilhelm Dilthey, Abhandlungen zur Grundlegung der Geisteswissenschaften, Gesammelte Schriften vol. 5, ed. Georg Misch (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1924), p. 416. See Saulius Geniusas, The Origins of the Horizon in Husserl’s Phenomenology (Dordrecht: Springer, 2012).

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33 E. Husserl, Phänomenologische Psychologie. Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1925, ed. W. Biemel. Husserliana IX (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1968), 95; trans. J. Scanlon as Phenomenological Psychology. Lectures, Summer Semester 1925 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977), p. 71. 34 E. Husserl, Erste Philosophie (1923/1924), Zweiter Teil, ed. Rudolf Roehm, Husserliana VIII (Dordrecht: Springer, 1956), p. 154, my translation. 35 E. Husserl, Die Lebenswelt. Auslegungen der vorgegebenen Welt und ihrer Konstitution. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1916-1937), ed Rochus Sowa, Husserliana XXXIX (Dordrecht: Springer, 2008), p. 156. 36 See Moran, ‘The Destruction of the Destruction: Heidegger’s Versions of the History of Philosophy’, Paper Read to the Colloquium on 100th Anniversary of Heidegger’s Birthday, Yale University, October 1989, Proceedings, ed. K. Harries and C. Jamme, Martin Heidegger: Politics, Art, and Technology (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1994), pp. 175–96. 37 Husserl’s Nachverstehen is discussed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his ‘Course Notes on Husserl’, see M. Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, ed. Leonard Lawlor and Bettina Bergo (Northwestern: Northwestern University Press, 2002), p. 23. For a discussion, see Leonard Lawlor, Thinking through French Philosophy: The Being of the Question (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), p. 74ff. 38 See Paul Ricoeur, ‘Husserl and the Sense of History’, in his Husserl: An Analysis of his Phenomenology, trans. Edward G. Ballard and L. Embree (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967), p. 144. 39 See H.-G. Gadamer, ‘Reflections on My Philosophical Journey’, in The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn, Library of Living Philosophers (La Salle: Open Court), p. 7. 40 See H.-G. Gadamer, ‘The Phenomenological Movement’, in Philosophical Hermeneutics, ed. David Linge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 135. 41 See Gadamer, ‘Martin Heidegger and Marburg Theology’, in Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. and ed. David Linge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 198–212, esp. 200. 42 Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution, hrsg. Marly Biemel, Husserliana IV (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1952), trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer as Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989). Hereafter ‘Ideas II’ followed by English pagination, Husserliana (hereafter ‘Hua’) volume and German pagination. 43 See E. Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass, Husserliana vols. XIII, XIV and XV, ed. Iso Kern (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973). 44 M. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (1927; 17th edn, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1993), trans. John Macquarrie and E. Robinson, Being and Time (New York: Harper and Row, 1962). Hereafter ‘SZ’ followed by the section number and pagination of the English translation, and then the page number of the German. 45 See Gadamer, ‘The Phenomenological Movement’, in Linge, ed., Philosophical Hermeneutics, p. 151. 46 Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 235. 47 See H.-G. Gadamer, ‘Subjectivität und Intersubjektivität, Subjekt, und Person’, in Gesammelte Werke (Tübingen: Mohr, 1990), vol. 10, pp. 87–99; trans. ‘Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity, Subject and Person’, Continental Philosophy Review 33 (2000): 275–87, see esp. 281.

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Chapter 7 1 Scheler’s writings on productive phantasy are little known. We come across them in two short texts: ‘Perception and Phantasy’ (‘Wahrnehmung und Phantasie’) which was originally published in 1926 as part of Erkenntnis und Arbeit (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977), and in ‘Metaphysics and Art’ (‘Metaphysik und Kunst’) – a manuscript which Scheler completed in 1923 yet never published himself, although it was subsequently included in Vol. II of his Schriften aus dem Nachlass, and subsequently translated into English and published as part of Max Scheler (18741928): Centennial Essays, ed. Manfred S. Frings (Dordrecht: Springer, 2012), pp. 101– 21. Although both essays appeared in print in the 1920s, Scheler had been working on subjects of Erkenntnis und Arbeit since 1909; see in this regard Manfred S. Frings, The Mind of Max Scheler (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2001), pp. 194 and 212. Some other helpful references to productive phantasy are also to be found in Max Scheler, Man’s Place in Nature, trans. H. Meyerhoff (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961). 2 Ricoeur’s hermeneutic critique of the phenomenology of imagination is to be found in virtually every essay on imagination that Ricoeur ever published. However, we come across the most detailed critique of the phenomenology of imagination in Ricoeur’s Lectures on Imagination. These lectures are scheduled to appear in print shortly. I am grateful to George Taylor, the editor of Ricoeur’s Lectures on Imagination, for permission to quote Ricoeur’s lectures. When citing this work, I will indicate the lecture number before the manuscript page number. 3 A terminological clarification is in order. While Ricoeur speaks of productive ‘imagination’ Scheler speaks of productive ‘phantasy’. These terms refer to somewhat different phenomena. While phantasy refers to a purely mental activity which does not rest on any physical basis, imagination is a broader term which covers not only mere phantasy but also physical imagination. One can thus ‘see’ an image in a piece of canvas, just as one can hear a melody in physical sounds. Ricoeur’s analysis of productive imagination almost exclusively concerns physical imagination, whether it occurs in poetic, literary, historical, political, scientific, or religious texts, or whether it emerges in a visual work of art. By contrast, Scheler no less consistently speaks of phantasy – an exclusively mental, or conscious, activity which unfolds in the absence of any physical medium. 4 Gary B. Madison, ‘The Interpretive Turn in Phenomenology: A Philosophical History’, in Between Description and Interpretation: The Hermeneutic Turn in Phenomenology, ed. A Wiercinski (Toronto: Hermeneutic Press, 2005), p. 50. 5 Paul Ricoeur, ‘Phenomenology and Hermeneutics’, in Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. J. B. Thomson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008) p. 101. 6 Ricoeur, ‘Phenomenology and Hermeneutics’. 7 Ibid., p. 128. 8 As Ricoeur puts it at the start of the Fifteenth Lecture, ‘my claim is that until this point we have discussed only ‘reproductive imagination’ and not yet productive imagination’ (Ricoeur, Lectures on Imagination, 15:1). Ricoeur puts it even more forcefully in his paper on Sartre’s and Ryle’s philosophies of the imagination: ‘In a general way, philosophy of the imagination – ancient as well as classical and modern – fails to account for “productive” imagination in terms that do not reduce it to “reproductive imagination”’ (Paul Ricoeur, ‘Sartre and Ryle on the Imagination,’ in The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, ed. P. A. Schilpp (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1981), p. 167.

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9 Ricoeur conceptualizes the noetic and noematic axes of imagination not only in his Lectures on Imagination but also in his essay ‘Imagination in Discourse and in Action’. Ricoeur offers significantly different interpretations of the horizontal and vertical axes in these two works. My goal here, however, is not to nitpick through these differences. In the present context, I will largely rely on Ricoeur’s later interpretation of this schema, which we come across in ‘Imagination in Discourse and Action’. This essay overcomes some of the confusions which were still present in the Lectures on Imagination. 10 See Ricoeur’s Third Lecture on Imagination, which provides a study of Pascal’s and Spinoza’s philosophies of imagination. 11 See Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Function of Fiction in Shaping Reality’, Man and World 12, no. 2 (1979): 135. 12 Lectures on Imagination, 15:3. Although a detailed account of Ricoeur’s phenomenology of fiction in the present context is not possible, I should nonetheless emphasize that, for Ricoeur, phenomenology of fiction must be language based. More precisely, it must rely on a theory of metaphor. Just as metaphor enables us to transcend the boundaries of literal meaning while reconfiguring meaning figuratively, so also fiction enables us to escape our everyday surroundings. For a more detailed analysis of these themes, see Saulius Geniusas, ‘Between Phenomenology and Hermeneutics: Paul Ricoeur’s Philosophy of Imagination’, Human Studies (2015): 223–41. 13 Lectures on Imagination, 1:15. 14 Ibid., 1:16. 15 Ibid., p. 127. 16 Centennial Essays, p. 116. 17 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All-Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 13. 18 Erkenntnis und Arbeit, p. 217. 19 Scheler maintains that impulsion always has a specific direction, which could be understood as a pre-conscious goal orientation. One can therefore qualify this stage of psychophysical development in terms of a pre-conscious movement towards something or away from something. 20 Centennial Essays, p. 117. 21 Erkenntnis und Arbeit, p. 211. 22 See Man’s Place in Nature, p. 14. 23 If art is to be conceived as a refined form of productive phantasy, it must be further understood as a late formation in the course of psychic and historical development, which relies upon as well as transfigures productive phantasy’s more basic manifestations. 24 Erkenntnis und Arbeit, p. 224. 25 It thereby becomes understandable how fundamental Scheler’s opposition to the reproductive model of phantasy actually is. According to Scheler, the contention that phantasy formation is either a reproduction or a more complicated combination of previously given perceptual formations is misguided, among other reasons, because it does not consider the possibility that perception itself is soaked in phantasy. In direct contrast to sensualism in general and to British empiricism in particular, Scheler maintains that what comes first in the flow of experience is not pure sensation but a wild fusion of phantasy, memory, anticipation, and perception, which Scheler names primary perception (Urprezeption). For Scheler, phantasy has always already been, and always will be, an irreducible perceptual component. 26 Erkenntnis und Arbeit, p. 237.

216 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

Notes For a good analysis of this concept, see Frings, The Mind of Max Scheler, pp. 236–41. ‘Erkenntnis und Arbeit, p. 236. Ibid., pp. 246–7. Centennial Essays, p. 116. Ibid., p. 117. Ibid., 118. Man’s Place in Nature, p. 62.

Chapter 8 1 Paul Ricoeur, ‘New Developments in Phenomenology in France: The Phenomenology of Language’, Social Research 34 (1967): 1. 2 Ricoeur, Philosophie de la Volonté 1: Le Volontaire et l’Involontaire (Paris: Aubier, 1988), p. 318. 3 Roger Mehl in François Dosse, Paul Ricoeur: Les Sens d’une Vie (Paris: La Découverte, 2001), p. 134. 4 See, Dosse, Paul Ricoeur: Les Sens d’une Vie, pp. 134, 140–3. See also Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘The Yogi and the Proletariat’, Humanism and Terror, trans. John O’Neill (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), pp. 149–77. 5 Q: ‘Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida ont été vos contemporains. Que reste-t-il de Sartre aujourd’hui?’ R: ‘Sartre m’a pas très influencé. Au contraire de Merleau-Ponty, son ennemi absolu, dont j’étais très proche’. Ricoeur, ‘Ce que je suis est foncièrement douteux’, Philosophie Magazine 67 (21 January 2013). web. 6 A fine example of this type of work is Thomas W. Busch, ‘Perception, Finitude, and Transgression: A Note on Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur’, Merleau-Ponty, Hermeneutics and Postmodernism, ed. Thomas W. Busch and Shaun Gallagher (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), pp. 25–36. 7 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), p. 28. 8 Renau Barbaras in Dosse, Paul Ricoeur: Les Sens d’une Vie, p. 133. 9 Guy Petitdemange in Dosse, Paul Ricoeur: Les Sens d’une Vie, p. 130. 10 Ricoeur, ‘Intellectual Autobiography’, in The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, ed. Lewis E. Hahn (Chicago: Open Court, 1995), p. 19. 11 The phrase comes from William Butler Yeats, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1969). web. 12 Ernst R. Curtius, The Civilization of France, trans. Olive Wyon (New York: Vintage, 1962), p. 91. 13 Charles A. Sainte-Beuve, ‘De la Tradition en Littérature et dans Quel Sens il la Faut Entendre’, Causeries du Lundi, vol. 15 (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1948), p. 358. 14 Charles du Bos quoted in Curtius, The Civilization of France, p. 121. 15 Francis de Sales, Thy Will Be Done, trans. Henry B. Mackey (Manchester: Sophia Institute Press, 1995), pp. 183–4. 16 Jacques-Bénigne Boussuet, Sermons (Paris: Librairie Larousse, 1975), p. 64, my translation. 17 René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations, trans. Laurence J. Lafleur (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1960), p. 75. 18 Augustine, Confessions, Books 9–13, trans. William Watts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1912), pp. 279, 276, 139.

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19 Nicolas Malebranche, Treatise on Ethics, trans. Craig Walton (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993), p. 45. 20 Maine de Biran, The Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking, trans. Margaret D. Boehm (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1929), p. 47. 21 Maurice Blondel, Action (1893): Essay on a Critique of Life and a Science of Practice, trans. Oliva Blanchette (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p. 5. 22 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 4; Le Visible et l’Invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 18. 23 Richard Nordquist, ‘Periodic Sentence’, Grammatical and Rhetorical Terms, about. com. web. 24 Merleau-Ponty, L’Oeil et l’Esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 21; The Primacy of Perception, trans. James M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp. 20–1. 25 Merleau-Ponty, L’Oeil et l’Esprit, 21; The Primacy of Perception, trans. James M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 163. 26 Marcel Proust, Le Temps Retrouvé (Paris: GF-Flammarion, 1986), pp. 260–1. 27 Proust, The Past Recaptured, trans. Frederick A. Blossom (New York: Modern Library, 1959), p. 195. 28 Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l’Invisible, p. 19. 29 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 5. 30 Ibid., p. 8. 31 Ricoeur, Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, ed. Don Ihde (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), p. 247. 32 Ricoeur, ‘Rhetoric – Poetics – Hermeneutics’, in Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time: A Reader, eds. Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 61. 33 Ricoeur, Conflict of Interpretations, pp. 247–8. 34 Ricoeur, Fallible Man, p. 40. 35 Ibid., p. 81. 36 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1984), p. 267. 37 Ricoeur in Jean-Pierre Changeux and Paul Ricoeur, What Makes Us Think? trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 69. 38 Ricoeur, Fallible Man, trans. Charles A. Kelbley (New York: Fordham University Press, 1986), p. 82. 39 This happens most evidently in L’Homme Fallible, partly because of the subject matter, and so I will draw heavily on this work to illustrate my point. 40 Ricoeur, Fallible Man, p. 89. 41 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 3. 42 ‘The symbol gives rise to thought.’ Ricoeur, La Symbolique du Mal, Philosophie de la Volonté: Finitude et Culpabilité II (Paris: Éditions Montaigne, 1960), p. 324. 43 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, p. 78. 44 Ricoeur, From Text to Action, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991), p. 169. 45 Ricoeur, Fallible Man, p. 92. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid., p. 89.

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Chapter 9 1 H.-G. Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (= WM), in his Gesammelte Werke (= GW), Band I (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1986), p. 464; Truth and Method (= TM), second revised edition, trans. (quoted with modifications) J. Weinsheimer and D. G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1989), p. 460. 2 See also my Du sens des choses. L’idée de la métaphysique (Paris: PUF, 2013). 3 H.-G. Gadamer, Hermeneutik im Rückblick, in GW, Band 10 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1995), p. 109: ‘Phänomenologie, Hermeneutik und Metaphysik sind nicht drei verschiedene philosophische Standpunkte, sondern Philosophieren selber’; French translation in: L’herméneutique en rétrospective (Paris: Vrin, 2005), p. 141. 4 See Gianni Vattimo, Farewell to Truth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). 5 Heidegger, for his part, was quite allergic to the notions of spirit and culture. In a letter to his wife of 20 June 1932 ( Mein liebes Seelchen!  Briefe Martin Heideggers an seine Frau Elfriede (München: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 2005), p. 180), he wrote: ‘It is true that the Nazis force us to pinch our nose, but it is still better than the creeping poisoning with the catchwords of “culture” and “spirit” which we had to endure over the last years’ (so viel Überwindung einem die Nazis abfordern, es ist immer noch besser, als diese schleichende Vergiftung, der wir in den letzten Jahren unter dem Schlagwort ‘Kultur’ und ‘Geist’ ausgesetzt waren). 6 ‘On the Transcendence of Art’ (Zur Transzendenz der Kunst) is indeed the title of an important section of essays that can be found in Gadamer’s last book, his Hermeneutische Entwürfe (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000), pp. 143–91. The following section (pp. 193–223) is plainly entitled ‘Aletheia’. 7 Following the title of the determining section of TM (p. 265) on ‘The elevation of the historicity of understanding to the status of a hermeneutical principle’. 8 WM, 299; TM, p. 294 (which translates Vorgriff der Vollkommenheit by the ‘foreconception of completeness’). 9 Ibid. (the English translation uses again completeness instead of perfection). On the proximity of hermeneutics to Leibniz see my essays “The Possible Legacy of Leibniz’s Metaphysics in Hermeneutics,” in J. A. Nicolás, J. M. Gómez Delgado, M. Escribano Cabeza (ed.), Leibniz and Hermeneutics (Oxford: Cambridge Scholar Publishing, 2016), pp. 170–82 and ‘Das Leibnizsche Moment in der Hermeneutik’, in M. Beetz und G. Cacciatore (dir.), Die Hermeneutik im Zeitalter der Aufklärung (Köln/Weimar/ Wien, Böhlau: Verlag, 2000), pp. 3–16. 10 WM, GW I, 479; TM, pp. 475–6 (mod.): ‘By seeing that language is the universal medium of this mediation [between the past and the present], we were able to expand our inquiry from its starting point, the critiques of aesthetic and historical consciousness and the hermeneutics that would replace them, and give hermeneutics a universal scope. For man’s relation to the world happens absolutely and fundamentally through language and understanding. Thus hermeneutics is, as we have seen, a universal aspect of philosophy, and not just the methodological basis of the so-called human sciences’ [emphasis added]. 11 See R. Rorty, ‘Being that can be Understood is Language’, London Review of Books 16 March 2000, pp. 23–2; G. Vattimo, ‘Histoire d’une virgule. Gadamer et le sens de l’être’, Revue internationale de philosophie 54 (2000), pp. 499–513. 12 On the fusion of horizons that can degenerate into a confusion des horizons, see my ‘La fusion des horizons. La version gadamérienne de l’adaequatio rei et intellectus?’ Archives de philosophie 68 (2005), pp. 401–18.

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13 ‘Vattimo’s Latinization of Hermeneutics. Why Did Gadamer Resist Postmodernism?’ in Weakening Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Gianni Vattimo, ed. S. Zabala (Montreal/ Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), pp. 203–16. 14 Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘Sprache und Verstehen’, in his GW 2, p. 185. 15 See TM, pp. 134–44: ‘The ontological valence of the picture (Bild)’. 16 TM, p. 140 (mod.; WM, p. 145): ‘Hence presentation (Darstellung) remains essentially tied to the original represented in it. But it is more than a copy. That the presentation is a picture – and not the original itself – does not mean anything negative, any mere diminution of being, but rather an autonomous reality. So the relation of the picture to the original is basically quite different than in the case of a copy. It is no longer a one-sided relationship. That the picture has its own reality means the reverse for what is pictured, namely that it comes to presentation in the representation. It presents itself in person. … But if it presents itself in this way, this is no longer any incidental event but belong to its own being. Every such presentation is an ontological event and bestows upon what is represented its ontological dignity. Through this representation, it experiences as it were an increase in Being. The proper content of the picture is ontologically defined as an emanation of the original.’ 17 TM, p. 140; WM, p. 145. 18 WM, p. 464; TM, p. 460. 19 WM 462; TM, 458 (mod.): ‘As was to be expected [!], we penetrate by this in a realm of questions with which philosophy has long been familiar. In metaphysics [the reference is again obvious], belongingness (Zugehörigkeit) signifies the transcendental relation between Being and truth, that conceives knowledge as an element of Being itself and not primarily an activity of the subject. This insertion (Einbezogenheit) of knowledge into Being is the presupposition of ancient and medieval thinking.’ On the importance of this notion of belongingness for Truth and Method and its roots in medieval metaphysics, see the outstanding work of Mathieu Scraire, ‘Laisser s’imposer l’être : Appartenance et métaphysique des transcendantaux dans Vérité et méthode de Hans-Georg Gadamer’, PhD dissertation, Université de Montréal, 2015. 20 It is to be noted, however, that Habermas very pertinently evoked metaphysics in the title (!) of the tribute he wrote for the 100th anniversary of Gadamer on 11 February 2000, which originally appeared in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, ‘After Historicism, is Metaphysics Still Possible? On Hans-Georg Gadamer’s 100th Birthday’, trans. Paul Malone, in Gadamer’s Repercussions, ed. B. Krajewski (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 15–20. 21 GW 3, pp. 229–37. ‘Heidegger and the Language of Metaphysics’, trans. David E. Linge, in The Gadamer Reader: A Bouquet of the Later Writings, ed. R. Palmer (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), pp. 346–55. 22 GW 3, p. 237; The Gadamer Reader, p. 355. 23 See again Du sens des choses, chapter 1, pp. 13–20. 24 See our ‘Le dialogue toujours différé de Gadamer et Derrida’, in Les Temps modernes 67 (2012), n° 669/670, 357–75. 25 GW 10, p. 139; H.-G. Gadamer, ‘Letter to Dallmayr’, in Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter, ed. D. P. Michelfelder and R. E. Palmer (Albany: Suny Press, 1989), p. 94. 26 Unpublished letter of Martin Heidegger to Otto Pöggeler from 11 January 1962 (quoted following Martin Heidegger/Otto Pöggeler Briefwechsel 1957-1976, herausgegeben von Kathrin Busch und Christoph Jamme, forthcoming): ‘Merkwürdig ist ja auch, wie Gadamer am Schluss seines Buches die Seinsmetaphysik ungeprüft aufgreift, die Sprache

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Notes als eine transzendentale Bestimmung des Seins fasst.’ On this text and a few others that document Heidegger’s distance towards his pupil, see my ‘The Neo-Kantian Heritage in Gadamer’, in R. A. Makkreel and S. Luft, eds., Neo-Kantianism in Contemporary Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), pp. 92–110.

Chapter 10 1 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 62. This article is based on my book, L’inquiétude de la pensée. L’herméneutique de la vie du jeune Heidegger, 1919-1923 (Paris: Puf, 2014). 2 One could translate Kriegsnotsemester in English as ‘war emergency semester’. See Heidegger, ‘Die Idee der Philosophie und das Weltansauungsproblem [KNS 1919]’ in Gesamtausgabe (GA) 56–7, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, pp. 3–117; ‘The Idea of Philosophy and the Problem of Worldview’, in Towards the Definition of Philosophy, trans. Ted Saddler (London: Continuum, 2000). Except for Being and Time, all quotations and references refer to the pagination of Heidegger’s Gesamtsausgabe (GA) (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann 1976). When no other information is given, page numbers in brackets in the text refer to GA 56-57. 3 See GA 9, 14; GA 59, 15, 23, 59; GA 58, 24, 231. 4 For an extensive account of the development of Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity from the idea of a primordial, pretheoretical science, see my L’inquiétude de la pensée. L’herméneutique de la vie du jeune Heidegger 1919–1923, (Paris: PUF, 2014). 5 This does not mean life can grasp itself in complete transparency. On the contrary, it is characterized by a certain ‘nebulosity’ (Diesigkeit) which the hermeneutical work will have to take into account. (See GA 61, 131.) 6 E. Husserl, Ideen [1913], op. cit., §13, p. 27. See also ibid., p. 26. 7 Heidegger clarifies: ‘It does not mean an absolute interruption of the life-relation, no easing of de-vivification, no theoretical fixing and freezing of what can be experienced… . Its meaning resides in the fullness of life itself, and implies that this still has no genuine worldly characterization, but that the motivation for such quite probably is living in life’ (GA 56/57, 115). 8 See GA 56/57, 115: ‘But this means that the sense of the something as the experienceable implies the moment of “out towards” [auf zu], of “direction towards,” “into a (particular) world,” and indeed in its undiminished “vital impetus”.’ 9 See GA 56/57, 116: ‘To be sharply separated therefore are: the pre-worldly something of life itself, the formally objective arising from this (only from this?) as de-vivification, and the objectlike [objektartig] theoretical. The first sphere, as that of life, is absolute, the two others are relative, conditioned. They exist by the grace of an “if ” – if de-vivified, the experienceable looks like this and this, and is graspable only in concepts. This fundamental “if ” belongs to the object-specific and to the formally objective.’ 10 See GA 56/57, 112: ‘In this all content is extinguished, its sense lacks all relation to a world-content be it ever so radically theorized. It is the absolutely worldless, worldforeign; it is the sphere which takes one’s breath away and where no one can live.’ 11 See GA 60, GA 61, and GA 62. See my “Faith’s Knowledge: On Heidegger’s Reading of Saint Paul,” Gatherings: Heidegger Circle Annual 3 (2013). Also see Chapter 5 of my L’inquiétude de la pensée. 12 Heidegger clarifies: ‘At this point the puzzling presence of determination prior to all theoretical description is clarified. Theoretically I come out of experiencing as from a

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provenance; something experienceable is still brought along from this experiencing, with which one does not know what to do, and for which the convenient title of the irrational has been invented’ (117). 13 This concept of life, specific to the first Freiburger Period (1919–23) of Heidegger’s thought, will be replaced from 1923 onwards by the concept of Dasein, opening the so-called Marburger period (1923–7) directly prior to Being and Time.

Chapter 11 1 See, for example, Theodore Kisiel, ‘A Hermeneutics of the Natural Sciences? The Debate Updated’, in Hermeneutics and the Natural Sciences, ed. Robert P. Crease (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997), pp. 71–83; Hermeneutic Philosophy of Science, Van Gogh’s Eyes, and God, ed. Babette Babich (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002). 2 Joel C. Weinsheimer, Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 1–59. 3 Martin Eger notes and criticizes this position in ‘Achievements of the HermeneuticPhenomenological Approach to Natural Science’, Hermeneutics and the Natural Sciences, ed. Robert P. Crease (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997), p. 71. Richard Rorty understands Gadamer’s hermeneutics as a rejection of scientific epistemology in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p. 357f. In ‘A Hermeneutics of the Natural Sciences? The Debate Updated’ Theodore Kisiel writes, ‘Thus, Gadamer, despite his promulgation of the universality of hermeneutics, has over the years steadfastly refused to admit the very possibility of a hermeneutics of the natural sciences.’ Hermeneutics and the Natural Sciences, ed. Robert P. Crease (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997), p. 331. 4 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hermeneutik I: Wahrheit und Methode. Grundzüge einer Philosophischen Hermeneutik (1960), 1986, vol. 1, Gesammelte Werke (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1986), p. 478. Hereafter cited as GW1. Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1991), p. 474. Hereafter cited as TM. ‘Elements of a Theory of Hermeneutic Experience’ is the title of section 2 part 2 of GW1; TM. 5 GW1, p. 1; TM, p. xxii. 6 Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘Das Faktum der Wissenschaft’, Das Erbe Europas (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1989), p. 102. My translation. 7 GW1, p. 494; TM, p. 491. 8 Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘Zwischen Phänomenologie und Dialektik’, GW2, p. 4. My translation. 9 Dieter Misgeld, ‘On Gadamer’s Hermeneutics’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences 9, no. 2 (1979), p. 223. 10 Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘Philosophie oder Wissenschaftstheorie?’ Vernunft im Zeitalter der Wissenschaft (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1976), p. 140. ‘Philosophy or Theory of Science?’ Reason in the Age of Science, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), p. 163. Hereafter cited as VZW; RAS. 11 One need only examine The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, ed. Theodor Adorno, trans. G. Adey and D. Frisby (London: Heinemann, 1976). 12 GW2, p. 449; TM, p. 551.

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13 GW1, pp. 263–4; TM, p. 259. The English translation could be misleading. The context of this passage in Heidegger’s Being and Time indicates that the ‘independence of the standpoint of the observer’ claimed by the natural sciences is in fact impossible since the fore-structures of and the circularity in all understanding are existential conditions of Dasein’s being and therefore occur in natural scientific understanding as well. This passage could be translated as follows: ‘The natural sciences’ mode of knowledge appears, rather, as a degenerate type [Abart] of understanding “that has gone astray [verlaufen] into the law-like task of grasping the present-at-hand in its essential unintelligibility”’ [SZ, p. 153]. 14 GW1, pp. 459–60; TM, pp. 455–6. 15 GW1, p. 456; TM, p. 452. 16 GW1, p. 454; TM, p. 450. 17 GW1, p. 243; TM, p. 238. 18 GW1, p. 454; TM, p. 450. 19 GW1, p. 455; TM, p. 451. 20 GW1, p. 338; TM, p. 333. 21 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 12th edn (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1972), p. 150. 22 Ibid. 23 GW1, p. 352; TM, p. 346. 24 GW1, p. 354; TM, p. 348. 25 GW1, p. 10; TM, p. 4. 26 GW1, p. 338; TM, p. 333. 27 GW1, p. 288; TM, p. 283. 28 GW1, pp. 305–6; TM, p. 300. 29 GW1, p. 306; TM, p. 301. 30 Ibid. 31 GW1, p. 185; TM, p. 182. 32 GW2, p. 439; TM, p. xxix. 33 Ibid. 34 GW2, p. 449; TM, p. 551. 35 Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘Natur und Welt’, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 7 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1991), p. 432. This part of the essay has not been translated into English; my translation. Hereafter cited as NW. 36 GW2, p. 439; TM, p. xxix. 37 GW2, p. 450; TM, p. 552. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 GW2, p. 453; TM, pp. 554–5. The ‘logic of scientific investigation’ in German is the title of Popper’s major work, The Logic of Scientific Discovery. 41 VZW, p. 130; RAS, p. 155. 42 Ibid. Gadamer does not mention Carnap by name, although the editor adds a footnote referring to Carnap. ‘The logical construction of the world’ in German is the title of Carnap’s The Logical Structure of the World, 1928. 43 GW2, 3–4. 44 VZW, pp. 140–1; RAS, p. 163. My translation. It is the case that Schlick criticized Carnap’s concept of the protocol sentence as the firm foundation for all knowledge (p. 373). He demonstrates that the theory of protocol sentences would lead to relativism. Concerning the truth of scientific sentences, he continues, it would seem that ‘truth

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46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

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can consist only in the mutual agreement of the propositions with one another’ (p. 374). He notes that this is the position that Otto Neurath supports. Schlick, however, does not conclude here, as Gadamer presents the case. Rather, Schlick continues to criticize this position and proposes another type of sentence, observation sentences or affirmations (Konstatierungen), that are to be granted that absolute certainty and from which scientific knowledge develops (p. 381). Moritz Schklick, ‘Über das Fundament der Erkenntnis’, Erkenntnis 4 (1934): pp. 79–99; ‘On the Foundation of Knowledge’, trans. Peter Heath, Moritz Schlick: Philosophical Papers (1925–1936) (Dordrecht: Springer, 1980), pp. 370–87. Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘Theorie, Technik, Praxis’, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1987), p. 244. ‘Theory, Technology, Practice’, trans. Howard Brotz, Social Research 44, no. 3 (1977): 530. VZW, p. 130; RAS, p. 155. NW, p. 434. Ibid. Ibid. GW2, p. 452; TM, p. 554. See The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, ed. Theodor Adorno, trans. G. Adey and D. Frisby (London: Heinemann, 1976). GW2, pp. 452–3; TM, p. 554. VZW, p. 131; RAS, p. 156. Ibid. Ibid. VZW, p. 140; RAS, p. 163. NW, p. 439. VZW, p. 141; RAS, p. 163. VZW, p. 141; RAS, p. 164. Ibid. VZW, p. 142; RAS, p. 164. Ibid. Ibid. GW2, p. 462; TM, p. 563. VZW, p. 144; RAS, p. 166. VZW, p. 142; RAS, p. 164. VZW, p. 143; RAS, pp. 164–5. NW, p. 434. Gadamer makes no specific reference, but may be thinking of Heisenberg’s section on language in Ordnung der Wirklichkeit 1942, accessed 20 November 2015, http:// werner-heisenberg.unh.edu/ordnung.htm. NW, p. 435. VZW, p .143; RAS, p. 165. My translation. NW, p. 435. Ibid. GW2, p. 454; TM, pp. 555–6. GW2, p. 454; TM, p. 556. GW1, p. 317; TM, p. 312. GW2, p. 455; TM, p. 557. NW, p. 429. NW, p. 431.

224 80 81 82 83

84 85 86 87 88

89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111

Notes VZW, p. 144; RAS, p. 165. Ibid. NW, p. 442. Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘Von Wort zum Begriff ’, in Gadamer Lesebuch, ed. Jean Grondin (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1997), p. 104. ‘From Word to Concept’, trans. Richard E. Palmer, The Gadamer Reader, ed. Richard E. Palmer (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), p. 114. Ibid. My translation. Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘Eurpoa und die Oikoumene’, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1995), p. 278. My translation. Gadamer, ‘Von Wort zum Begriff ’, p. 106. ‘From Word to Concept’, p. 116. My translation. Gadamer argues that prejudices (literally pre-judgements) are either positive, aiding understanding, or negative, hindering understanding. Martin Heidegger, ‘Die Idee der Philosophie und das Weltanschauungsproblem’ (Kriegsnotsemester 1919), Gesamtausgabe 56/57 Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie (Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 1987), section 14. ‘The Idea of Philosophy and the Problem of Worldviews’, in Towards the Definition of Philosophy (GA 56/57), trans. Ted Sadler (London: Continuum, 2002), section 14. See, for example, Don Ihde, Expanding Hermeneutics (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998). N. R. Hanson, Patterns of Discovery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 7. Karl Popper, Logik der Forschung, 7th ed. (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1982), p. 67. The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Routledge, 1959), p. 102. Ibid., pp. 68; 102. Ibid., pp. 69; 104. Ibid., pp. 70; 104. GW2, p. 4. Jean Grondin, Hans-Georg Gadamer: Eine Biographie (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999), p. 336. Ibid. GW1, p. 489; TM, p. 485. Popper, Logik der Forschung, p. 76; The Logic of Scientific Discovery, p. 111. This addendum appears in some English translations, but not others. VZW, p. 143; RAS, pp. 164–5. GW1, p. 286; TM, p. 281. Lakatos, ‘Criticism and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, 69 (1968–9): 165. Ibid., p. 168. Ibid., p. 171. Ibid., p. 170. Ibid., p. 176. Ibid. Larry Laudan, Progress and Its Problems (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), pp. 78–9. Ibid., pp. 81–2. Ibid., pp. 96–100. Ibid., pp. 109–11.

Notes 112 113 114 115

225

Ibid., p. 150. GW1, p. 370; TM, p. 364. GW1, p. 493; TM, p. 489. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 94.

Chapter 12 1 P. Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), p. 278. 2 This belief is, of course, much more ancient than Christianity and pervades the ancient world. 3 See, for example, E. Grant, God and Reason in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); R. W. Southern, Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995); R. W. Southern, The Heroic Age: Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, vol. 2. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001). 4 E. Grassi, Heidegger and the Question of Renaissance Humanism: Four Studies (Binghamton: Center for Medieval & Early Renaissance Studies, 1983), p. 68. 5 Many other thinkers have decried the intellectual confines stemming from the expansion of the scientific method into a world view. In theology, Karl Barth was one of the first to break with the ‘scientific’ presuppositions of historical–critical exegesis to free biblical interpretation from the narrow, rationalist presupposition that discredited theological interpretation as subjective and naive under the guise of impartial, scientific investigation of the text (wissenschaftliche Auslegung). Within the natural sciences, Michael Polanyi, whose name remains curiously underrepresented in hermeneutic discussions, demonstrated the limitations of the scientific method conclusively in his Gifford lectures, published in 1958 as Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974). 6 C. Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2007), p. 275. 7 Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 242. 8 T. Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 44–5. 9 Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, p. 26. 10 Husserl shared this criticism with Hermann Brentano and, to some extent, with William James, whose ‘radical empiricism’ aligns with Husserl’s realism and interest in how things become objects of consciousness within ‘the stream of your experience’. W. James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking and The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to Pragmatism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 32. 11 E. Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften in Philosophische Bibliothek, ed. E. Ströker (Hamburg: Meiner, 1996), p. 4. 12 Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften, p. 5. 13 Ibid. 14 Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen in E. Ströker, ed., Philosophische bibliothek (Hamburg: Meiner, 1995), p. 160. 15 Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie (Ideen I) (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 2002), p. 37.

226

Notes

16 Ibid., p. 38. 17 Ibid., § 20, 38. 18 ‘daß jede originär gebende Anschauung eine Rechtsquelle der Erkenntnis sei, daß alles, was sich uns in der “Intuition” originär, (sozusagen in seiner leibhaften Wirklichkeit) darbietet, einfach hinzunehmen sei, als was es sich gibt, aber auch nur in den Schranken, in denen es sich gibt, kann uns keine erdenkliche Theorie irre machen.’ Ibid., pp. 43–4. 19 Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, p. 9. 20 Elisabeth Ströker draws attention to this difference in her introduction to Cartesianische Meditationen, p. xxiii. 21 Husserl, Ideen I, p. 55. 22 Ibid., p. 55. 23 Ibid., p. 56. 24 Ibid., p. 64. 25 J. Edie, ‘Introduction’, in What is Phenomenology? And Other Essays, ed. P. Thévenaz (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1962), p. 23. 26 Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, p. 64. 27 Heidegger himself noted Husserl’s path-breaking discover of intentionality by which philosophy could move beyond psychologism, rationalism, and empiricism to his own ontological investigations: ‘With this discovery of intentionality the way has been prepared explicitly, for the first time in the entire history of philosophy, for radical ontological research.’ M. Heidegger, Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1994), p. 260. 28 R. Sokolowski, Introduction to Phenomenology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 216. 29 Husserl, Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften, p. 7. 30 Ibid., p. 110. 31 Husserl, letter to Mahnke (5 May 1933), in: K. Schuhmann and E. Schuhmann, eds., Briefwechsel, bd 3 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), p. 493. 32 R. Sowa and T. Vongehr, eds., ‘Einleitung’, in Edmund Husserl: Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie (Texte aus dem Nachlass, 1908–37) (Dortrecht: Springer, 2015). 33 Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik, Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft (Halle: Niemeyer, 1981), p. 234. 34 See, for instance, his conclusion that Heglianism has imprinted on modern philosophy ‘the absence of all positive ontology of subjectivity, the abandonment of man to the absolute milieu of exteriority, despair’. M. Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, trans. G. Etzkorn (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), p. 737. 35 Henry, I Am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 121. 36 Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 262. 37 J.-L. Marion, ‘The Saturated Phenomenon’, in Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’: The French Debate, ed. D. Janicaud (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), p. 194. 38 Marion, ‘The Saturated Phenomenon’, p. 197. 39 Ibid., p. 208. 40 Ibid., p. 211. 41 Ibid., p. 215. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid.

Notes

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44 D. Janicaud, ‘The Theological Turn of French Phenomenology’, in Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’: The French Debate (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), pp. 16–106, 62. 45 Janicaud, ‘The Theological Turn of French Phenomenology’, p. 63. 46 Ibid., p. 62. See Husserl, Ideen I, §58, 111. 47 Ibid., p. 79. 48 D. Janicaud, Phenomenology ‘Wide Open’: After the French Debate (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), p. 3. 49 Janicaud, Phenomenology ‘Wide Open’, p. 80. 50 Ibid., p. 78. 51 Chrétien in particular has criticized the privilege accorded to the visual metaphor in phenomenology and drawn attention to the importance of language and the voice. J.-L. Chrétien, The Call and the Response: Perspectives in Continental Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), pp. 35–6. 52 Janicaud, ‘The Theological Turn of French Phenomenology’, p. 42. 53 Ibid., p. 67. 54 Ibid., p. 68. 55 P. Ricoeur, ‘Experience and Language in Religious Discourse’, in D. Janicaud, Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’, p. 129. 56 Ibid., p. 130. 57 Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, p. 15. 58 Ibid., p. 18. 59 Ibid., p. 35. 60 Ibid., pp. 214–15. 61 ‘The symbolism of sin, then, suggests the idea of a relation broken off ’. Ibid., p 74. 62 Sin is now not explained by but taken up into God’s own being in order to eliminate it so that the original intent of his relationship with humanity, to raise it up in a new creation, may be realized. Any organic or ontological understanding of sin is undermined, as is evident from Jesus’s own correction of his disciple’s question whether the man he was about to heal was blind on account of his parents’ or his own sin: ‘It is not this man’s sin or his parents’ sin that made him blind. This man was born blind so that God’s power could be shown in him’ (Jn 9.3). 63 Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, p. 19. 64 Ibid., p. 356. 65 Ibid., p. 20. 66 H.-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. J. Weinsheimer and D. Marshall (London: Continuum, 1989) p. 301. 67 Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, p. 22. 68 ‘All phenomenology is an explication of evidence and an evidence of explication. An evidence which is explicated, an explication which unfolds evidence: such is the phenomenological experience. It is in this sense that phenomenology can be realised only as hermeneutics’. Ricoeur, ‘Phenomenology of Hermeneutics’, in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 128. 69 M. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993), §32, pp. 148–53. 70 J. Macmurray, Interpreting the Universe (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1996), p. 3. 71 Macmurray, Interpreting the Universe, p. 7. 72 Ibid., p. 48. 73 Ibid., p. 68.

228

Notes

74 Ibid., p. 80. 75 Ibid., p. 76. 76 Macmurray, Reason and Emotion (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1992), pp. 123–6. 77 Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, p. 352.

Chapter 13 1 In the Synoptic gospels and in most of St. Paul’s letters the emphasis is on the imminence of the second coming. Mt. 25.31-46 (Jerusalem Bible [Darton, Longman and Todd, 1994]) has Jesus speak of his future coming taking his ‘throne of glory’, while Mk 13.26 speaks of the ‘Son of Man coming in the clouds with great power and glory’. St. Paul in Romans makes clear that the Law has been fulfilled and in that sense history has already come to an end in the death and resurrection of Christ. This is all the more clear in John where he who has heard the words of Jesus of Nazareth has passed from death to life: ‘I all truth I tell you, whoever listens to my words and believes in the one who sent me has eternal life … the hour is coming – indeed it is already here – when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and all who hear it will live’ (John v.24-5). 2 See R. Bultmann, History and Eschatology (Edinburgh University Press, 1957), pp. 33–57. 3 K. Hart, Kingdoms of God (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), pp. 148–51. 4 Kingdoms of God, p. 148. 5 Ibid., p. 136. 6 Ibid., p. 148. For a critique of Hart on this point see the author’s review of Kingdoms of God in the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 3 September 2015. 7 See ibid, 131. 8 See Merleau-Ponty ‘The Philosopher and his Shadow’, in Signs (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 164: ‘There is a preparation for phenomenology in the natural attitude. It is the natural attitude which by articulating its own procedures seesaws in phenomenology’. 9 See Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 3. 10 Heidegger, Being and Time (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), pp. 143, 153. 11 See the author’s A Phenomenology of Christian Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), pp. 91–102. 12 Merleau-Ponty: Visible and Invisible, pp. 148–9. 13 Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 78–9, 84–5. 14 Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 236, 246–7. 15 Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 246–7. 16 Heidegger, Being and Time, §48. 17 See B. Spinoza, Ethics (Penguin, 1996) Part 4, Proposition 20, Scholium; E. Levinas, Time and the Other (Duquesne 1997). 18 Levinas, Time and the Other. 19 Here as elsewhere I am attempting to navigate a narrow path between the religious and the philosophical. The notion of redemption certainly invokes theological issues

Notes

20

21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36

37

229

of original sin and grace, but it is not at all self-evident that philosophy can inoculate itself against these questions. We will find them arising in the work of Kant and, as Stephen Mulhall has shown, redemption can be shown to be a theme in the work of such post-Kantian philosophers as Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger, who in different ways relate to the history of hermeneutical phenomenology. See S. Mulhall, Philosophical Myths of the Fall (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2005). This naturalistic option is not available to phenomenology or hermeneutics despite all attempts to naturalize both. The fundamental phenomenological move is to reject any reductionist account of meaning, and this is true also of Dilthey’s distinction between explanation and understanding. I. Kant, Reason within the Bounds of Mere Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 64–5. P. Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), p. 250. Thereby, as Ricoeur goes on to point out, the contingency of radical evil is affirmed. The phrase is Gadamer’s. See his ‘Universality of the Hermeneutical Problem’, in Philosophical Hermeneutics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), p. 7. Such a ‘utopian’ projection can be seen at the heart of Habermas’s critique of Gadamer that in effect the common accord is a goal to be aimed at, not a presupposition of understanding. Jn 14.27: ‘a peace which the world cannot give, this is my gift to you’. Isa. 11.6. See Derrida, ‘The Force of Law’, in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 14–15. Kant, Religion, p. 128: ‘Without either refusing the service of ecclesiastical faith or feuding with it, we can retain its useful influence as a vehicle yet equally deny to it – as the illusion of a duty to serve God ritually – every influence on the concept of true (viz. moral) religion. And so, in spite of the diversity of statutory forms of faith, we can establish tolerance among their adherents through the basic principles of the one religion of reason, with reference to which teachers ought to expound all the dogmas and observances of their various faiths; until, with time, by virtue of a true enlightenment (an order of law originating in moral freedom) which has gained the upper hand, the form of a degrading means of compulsion can be exchanged, with everybody's consent, for an ecclesiastical form commensurate to the dignity of a moral religion, viz. a free faith.’ Kant, Religion, p. 68. Ibid., p. 66. Ibid., p. 98. See ibid., pp. 65–73. Ibid., p. 53. Ibid., p. 80. See K. Held, ‘Fundamental Moods and Heidegger’s Critique of Contemporary Culture’, in Reading Heidegger: Commemorations, ed. J. Sallis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 286–304. On the eschatological accounts see von Balthasar, U., Theodrama Vol. 5 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1998), pp. 19–54; K. Rahner, ‘The Hermeneutics of Eschatological Assertions’, in Theological Investigations vol. 4 (Darton, Longman and Todd, 1974), pp. 323–46; G. von Rad, ‘The Origin of the Concept of the Day of Yahweh’, Journal of Semitic Studies 4 (1959): 97–108. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, pp. 46–7.

230

Notes

38 S. Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 13. 39 See P. Ricoeur, ‘Freedom in the Light of Hope’, in The Conflict of Interpretations (Continuum, 1974), pp. 402–3. 40 Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, p. 33. 41 See ibid., pp. 13–21. 42 See Ricoeur, ‘Love and Justice’, in Figuring the Sacred (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), pp. 300–1. 43 H-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method (Crossroad, 1990), pp. 306–7. 44 See Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), pp. 525–9. 45 See on this issue J. Wolfe, Heidegger’s Eschatology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 65. 46 Wolfe, Heidegger’s Eschatology, pp. 116–21. 47 Plato, Parmenides (London: Hackett, 1996), p. 156d1. 48 P. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 457. 49 Derrida quoted in ibid., pp. 469–70.

Chapter 14 1 Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. xviii. See also Richard Rorty, ‘Foucault and Epistemology’, in Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed. David Couzens Hoy (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 41–9. Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990); Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1988). 2 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). 3 Richard Rorty, ‘Pragmatism, Davidson and Truth’, in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 126–50, 127. 4 Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, p. xviii. 5 Rorty, ‘Foucault and Epistemology’, pp. 203–8; see also Hoy, Foucault: A Critical Reader, pp. 1–26, esp. pp. 1–6. 6 Robert Audi, ed., The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 331. 7 Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), pp. 273–4. 8 Todd May, Between Genealogy and Epistemology: Psychology, Politics, and Knowledge in the Thought of Michel Foucault (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), p. 71. 9 Charles Taylor, ‘Foucault on Freedom and Truth’, in Hoy, Foucault: A Critical Reader, pp. 69–102. 10 Michel Foucault, Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 2000), pp. 239–46. 11 C. G. Prado, Searle and Foucault on Truth (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 83–97, 96. 12 Michel Foucault, ‘Truth and Power’, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980a), p. 132.

Notes

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13 Michel Foucault, Psychiatric Power, Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973-1974, ed. Jacques Lagrange, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2003), p. 238. 14 Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, pp. 6–7. 15 Robert Nola, ‘Post-Modernism, A French Chernobyl: Foucault on Power/Knowledge’, Inquiry 37, no. 1 (1994): 3–43, 39. 16 Michel Foucault, ‘The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom’, in The Final Foucault, ed. James Bernauer and David Rasmussen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), pp. 1–20, 17. 17 Colin Koopman, ‘A New Foucault: The Coming Revisions in Foucault Studies’, review essay discussing Eric Paras’s Foucault 2.0, Johanna Oksala’s Foucault on Freedom, David Hoy’s Critical Resistance, C.G. Prado’s Searle and Foucault on Truth, and Paul Rabinow’s Anthropos Today, in Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy 11, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 167–77. 18 Richard Rorty, ‘Solidarity or Objectivity?’ and ‘Pragmatism without Method’, in Objectivity, Relativism and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 21–34, 63–77. 19 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), p. 546. 20 Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 267. 21 Barry Allen, ‘Pragmatism and Gay Science: Comparing Dewey and Nietzsche’, in John Dewey and Continental Philosophy, ed. Paul Fairfield (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois Press, 2010), pp. 69–89, 69. 22 Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 19771984, ed. L. D. Kritzman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), p. 32. 23 Frédéric Gros, ‘Michel Foucault, Une Philosophie de la Vérité’, in Michel Foucault: Philosophie Anthologie, ed. Arnold Davidson and Frédéric Gros (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2004), pp. 11–25, 11. 24 Don T. Deere, ‘Truth’, Entry #88, The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon, ed. Leonard Lawlor and John Nale (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 517–27, 517. 25 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), p. xiv. 26 James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), p. 148. 27 Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Brighton, Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1983), p. 104. 28 Michel Foucault, Foucault Live, trans. John Johnston, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989), p. 303. 29 Foucault, Foucault Live, p. 305. 30 Michel Foucault, Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori, trans. James Goldstein and James Cascaito (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991), p. 27. 31 Arnold Davidson, ‘Archaeology, Genealogy, Ethics’, in Hoy, Foucault: A Critical Reader, pp. 221–33, 221. 32 Michel Foucault, 1979, Discipline and Punish, trans. Allen Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979); Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume One trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1980b). 33 Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, pp. 6, 23, 80–2, 253. 34 Ibid., p. 6. 35 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, p. 82.

232 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

55 56

57

Notes Foucault, Michel Foucault, p. 208. Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault, pp. 79–126. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 93. Ibid., pp. 131–2. William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 42. Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture, p. 107. Charles Sanders Peirce, The Essential Peirce, Vol. 1, ed. Peirce Edition Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 139. Prado, Searle and Foucault on Truth, pp. 83–97. See also Peter DeAngelis, ‘C.G. Prado, Searle and Foucault on Truth’, Foucault Studies January, no. 5 (2008): 118–22. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 132. Nola, ‘Post-Modernism, A French Chernobyl: Foucault on Power/Knowledge’, p. 39. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 546. Foucault, Power, p. 47. Ibid., p. 49. ‘Pragmatism’, 2013, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu, Sec. 3.1. Richard Rorty, ‘The World Well Lost’, in Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, pp. 3–18, 15. Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault, p. 117. Foucault, Power, p. 230. James, Pragmatism, pp. 42, 106. John Dewey, ‘The Problem of Truth’, in John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899-1924, Vol. 6, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern University Press, 1978), pp. 12–68, 56; see also ‘A Short Catechism Concerning Truth’, Dewey, ‘The Problem of Truth’, pp. 3–11. C. G. Prado 2010, ‘Educating the Self: Dewey and Foucault’, in ‘Fairfield, John Dewey and Continental Philosophy’, pp. 174–93. John Dewey, ‘Experience and Education’, in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925–1953, Vol. 13, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), pp. 1–62, 18. Michel Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, Afterword to Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault, pp. 208–26.

Index acts categorial 84 objectifying 38, 42, 46 agreement 7, 11, 152, 157–9, 161, 179 appearances false 11–12 true 11–12 Aristotle 11, 13–14, 17, 95, 127, 129, 145 art experience of 127, 129 truth of 127–8 work of 127, 129 being increase in 127, 133 meaning of 50, 71 philosophers interrogating 147 possibility of 44, 147 being-in-the-world 172 Being-towards-possibilities 66 Being and Time 59 circle, hermeneutical 53, 65–9, 72, 75 claims hermeneutic 94 universal 153, 155–6, 162 classical phenomenology 34, 36, 46, 94–5 cognition 5, 7–13, 15, 17–18, 38, 41, 83 circularity 12 claims 10 concepts formal 50–1, 56–7, 62 philosophical 138–9, 142, 147 Heidegger 146 consciousness contents of 9–10 human 173 impressional 119 perceptual 98–9 constitution 32, 64, 66, 101–3, 183 constructivism 7–8

critical philosophy 8–15, 18 critique, hermeneutic 94, 105 Dasein being of 53, 68 phenomenology of 53, 138 understanding 67–8 deferral 112, 114, 176 deformalized phenomena 51, 62 denial 112, 114, 191 Descartes, René  154, 166 Dilthey, Wilhelm hermeneutics 40, 85 thought 20 dimension, historical 10 divine 164, 168, 170–1 dreams 5, 93, 96, 99, 110 economy 181–3 eidetic intuition 82, 84 empirical intuition 39, 51–2, 54 enactment-sense 146–8 endings, sense of 175, 177, 185 epistemic constructivism 8–9, 18 eschatology 60, 175, 178–80, 183– 4, 186–7 ethics, traditional 192event character 139, 141, 144–5 events, appropriating 141, 145, 147 evidence, intuitive 65, 72 Evidenz, high degrees of 37–8 evil, origin of 179, 184 existential analytics 54–5 experience ante-predicative 37 conscious 10, 12 direct 165 hermeneutic 78, 149, 152, 156, 161–2 immediate 166, 173 intentional 36, 38, 93, 104 meaningful 147, 158

234

Index

new 158–9 original 26, 28, 103 subject of 102–3 ‘experienceable as such’ 141, 143–5 experiment, scientific 151 factical life 138–9, 141–2, 147 facticity, hermeneutics of 80, 91, 142, 146 features, formal 56, 59–60, 62–3 fiction characteristic of 96 phenomenology of 97, 105 trace and 98 finitude 59, 78, 91, 175–7, 183 formal indications 140, 142, 146–8 formalization 142–4, 146, 148 Foucault, Michel 191, 193–4, 196 frameworks, conceptual 94 France 108–9 freedom 16–17, 40–1, 104, 174, 178 human 17–18 idea of 16–17 Freiburg 79–82, 90 French phenomenologists 106, 168 French phenomenology 59, 110, 113 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 19, 22, 42–3, 56, 63–4, 72–5, 77–9, 81, 164, 170 analysis 127, 131, 157 claim 162 dictum 132–3 hermeneutic phenomena 61 hermeneutical circle 74 hermeneutical framework 63 hermeneutics 58–60, 88–92, 125–6, 133, 149 historicism 131 notes 69, 152, 154 philosophical hermeneutics 149 reception of Husserl 90–2 refute 132–3 sense 159 statement 190–1, 195 terms 160 Truth and Method 91 words 72–3 Galileo 87, 154 genealogy 192–3 generalization 142–4, 146, 148

German idealism 7, 18, 32, 40, 46 givenness, phenomenology of 61, 64 habits 111, 140, 196 hard core 159–61 Heidegger, Martin account of temporality in Being and Time 185 analysis 53, 92 circular structure of understanding 71, 75, 176 claim 169 conception of Abbau and hermeneutical retrieval 87 hermeneutics 78, 138 key claims 51 language 83 phenomenologies 49, 60 Phenomenology of Religious Life 84, 146 phenomenon 49, 55, 57, 60, 62 redefines phenomenology in Being and Time 82 reorientation of Husserl 33 response 66–7 sense 76 words 66–8 hermeneutics circle 53, 65, 67–9, 71, 73–7, 88, 161, 176 dimension 25, 153–6, 172 elements 151, 156–8, 161 of factical life 79 intuition 142, 145–6 life-philosophy 80 metaphysics 125–6 new 47, 79 phenomenology and 4–6, 32, 36, 48–9, 54–6, 57–9, 62, 185 philosophies in 45, 78 problem 57 projects 54, 56–8, 63 Ricoeur’s 98 situation 33, 42, 46, 53, 151–2, 157, 186 task 80, 88 tension 58, 184 tradition 69, 186 historical and psychic development 99–102

Index historical ontologies 53 historical process 16, 37, 43, 70 historical sciences 19, 21–2, 25, 27–8, 151 history of philosophy 14–15, 26, 36, 87, 89, 95–6, 143 History of Sexuality, The (Foucault) 192, 194 horizons, fusion of 128, 158–61, 183 human sciences 5, 19, 24–6, 28, 131, 152, 165 Husserl, Edmund belief 72, 167 claims 81 commitment 38, 46 concept of intuition 81–2, 84, 86 concepts of horizon 91 hermeneutics 5, 78–9, 83, 85, 87, 89, 91 hermeneutics of historical consciousness 89 homeworlds and alienworlds 101 idealism 38, 41 insistence 71–2 Logical Investigations 31–2, 34, 71, 79, 82–4, 87–8, 90, 143 phenomenological idealism 36 phenomenological intuition 85 phenomenological method 78, 168 phenomenological practice 81 phenomenology 31, 34, 46, 70–1, 78, 80–1, 88, 90–1, 167 phenomenology and hermeneutics 79 phenomenology burst 82 phenomenology of imagination 97 philosopher 168 philosophy 85 relation 73, 91 terms 89 thought 31–2, 85 transcendental phenomenology 62 voice of phenomenological description 117 idealism

7, 25, 32–7, 39, 41, 46, 71, 92, 195 idealist 7, 27, 34–6, 39, 46, 142, 148, 167–8

235

ideology critique 43–4, 130 imagination, phenomenology of 93, 95, 98, 105 intention, interpretative 73, 76 interpretation 72, 74, 76 intuition 8, 36–8, 40, 42–4, 51–2, 54, 70, 78–9, 142–3, 166, 169 adequate 37 categorial 37, 84 hermeneutic 81, 84–6, 146 immediate 84, 171–2 interpretation to 74, 76 Kant Copernican revolution 8–9 forms of intuition 51–2 and Hegelian conceptions of cognition 10 κατ’εξοχήν 49, 53, 55–7, 59–63 knowledge 15–16, 18–19, 27, 36–8, 71–2, 83–4, 126–8, 150–3, 156, 162, 164–6, 172 historical 21–2, 24–6, 67 human 165–6, 168, 171, 173 theory of 7–10, 25, 27 true 162–4 Kriegsnotsemester (KNS) 138–40, 142–3, 148 language failure of 119, 132, 157–8 games 155 literal 118–19 scientific 154–5 understanding of 133 laws, moral 40–1, 181 life hermeneutics of 26, 139, 142, 147 historical 24, 26 human 78, 81, 90, 101, 152, 167 level of 177 phenomenon of 140, 142, 147 psychophysical 100 life-experiencing-the-world 167 life-philosophy, scientific 81 lifeworld boundless 78 genuine 85 literature 69, 107–8, 164

236

Index

Logical Investigations (Husserl) 31–2, 34, 71, 79, 82–4, 87–8, 90, 143 logic of scientific investigation 152–3 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 111–12, 117 metaphor 57–8, 64, 118–19 metaphysical dimension 126 metaphysical experience 127, 129 metaphysical import 126, 131 metaphysical realism 8, 18 metaphysics 33, 35–6, 38, 72, 82–4, 103–4, 125–6, 130–2 classical 125, 134–7 history of 28, 136 language of 135 phenomenology of 24–6, 28 mimetic truth 189–93, 195, 197 modes of givenness 91, 143 natural attitude 31, 35, 39, 41–2, 44, 176 natural sciences 10, 19, 23, 31–2, 44, 149–59, 161–2, 164–5 history of 159 modern 154, 166 natural scientific understanding 149, 151, 156, 161–2 natural scientist 150–2, 156–7, 159, 161 objectification 118, 141–2, 148 objects, cognitive 7–9, 15 ontological differences 51, 57, 59, 61 ontology 50–3, 56, 60–1, 63, 80, 131, 136 pathos 106–8, 110, 112, 114–16, 119–21 perception, philosophy of 121 personalistic world 93, 100, 102, 105 phantasy formations 99, 101, 105 phenomena appearance of 167, 169 approach 11–12 being-in-the-world 107, 119 concept 49, 51, 55, 63 distinctive 52, 55 hermeneutics 55 interpretation 46 life 41 phenomenality of 61 saturated 12, 46, 168–9 sense of 60

universal 170 vulgar 51–2, 54, 56, 63 phenomenality 25, 32–3, 46, 169 phenomenology 5, 10–12, 14–18, 24–6, 86–8, 90–2, 104–8, 110–12 attitude 36, 39, 41, 117, 166 description 42–3, 53, 117, 121, 142 hermeneutics 34, 48–9, 52–5, 62–3, 70, 77, 79, 94–5, 98, 105, 126, 138, 142, 145–6, 148, 174, 186 idealism 35–6 intuition 78, 80, 82, 85, 168 method 35, 49–50, 148 philosophy 50, 62, 64 reduction 35, 40, 102–3, 110, 176 relevance of 149 religious 170, 172 sense 51, 82, 170 phenomenologists 11, 31, 43, 115, 117, 140, 166–7, 170–1, 186 Phenomenology of Perception, The (Merleau-Ponty) 84, 107 Phenomenology of Religious Life (Heidegger) 84, 146 phenomenon κατ’εξοχήν 52, 54 philosophers, traditional 81, 189, 195 philosophy analytic 31, 116, 120, 149, 188 ancient 8, 13 commitments 191 first 56, 127, 166 hermeneutic 41, 70, 94, 149, 152, 155–6, 162, 165 modern 8, 39, 90, 95 traditions 95–6 poets 45, 89, 112–13 positivism, logical 150, 153 power, account of 192–3 pragmatism 5, 188–91, 193–7 pragmatists 190, 194 pretheoretical science 5, 138–43, 145–7 pretheoretical sphere 141–2, 146, 148 primordial pretheoretical science 138–9 primordial something 143–5 problem resolution 161–2 process, perceptual 74–6 productive imagination alternative phenomenology of 98, 105 hermeneutic phenomenology of 93, 95, 105

Index productive phantasy limits of 102–4 phenomenology of 98, 101 projects, philosophical 48, 54–6 propositions 68, 110, 112, 131, 188, 190, 193–6 psychic and historical development 99–102 psychic life 25–6, 101–2 pure phenomenology 83 realism 7, 32, 36, 39, 167 reality mind-independent 8–9, 13 presumed 102 reduction, basilaic 176 relation ethical 61 intentional 35, 37, 42, 45 relationship broken 171 self ’s 192 truth-knowledge 189 religion 5, 15, 22, 27, 116, 136, 163–5, 167–74, 180–1 research, historical 68, 116, 151, 159 Ricoeur, Paul analyses 94, 100, 171 commitments and being 108 critique 70, 98 hermeneutics 93–4, 105 phenomenology 95, 172 philosophies of imagination 105 redrawing map 95–6 work 117, 119 Scheler, Max 81 school, historical 19, 24–5 science analytic philosophy of 149–52, 157, 159, 161–2 cognitive 31, 33, 116 exact 67–8, 129 historical development of 160 modern 87, 89, 150–2, 155, 168 natural 153 philological 19–20 philosophy of 153–5 scientific discovery 152, 155

237

scientific investigation 150, 152–3 scientific objectivism 164–5 Searle and Foucault on Truth (Prado) 189, 194 secularism 163–5 self-appropriation 53 self-consciousness 14, 17, 99, 101, 107 self-definition 192 self-regulation 86 self-responsibility 90 self-understanding 79–80 Self-world 141–2, 144–5, 147 sense 49–51, 57–60, 62–3, 71, 73–4, 82–4, 88–90, 128–31, 139–41, 143–4, 175–80, 194–6 data 37, 157 distinctive 52, 81 formal 51, 56 fundamental 96, 182 historical 99 inner 87, 181 interpretative 186 making 82, 88 methodic 53 noematic 42, 45 phenomenological/deformalized 53 relational 147 subjective 134, 136 traditional 35, 192 world of 180, 186 surrounding world 14, 86, 93, 97, 100–2, 104, 140, 142, 145, 147 task, hermeneutic 80, 88 theories scientific 153–4 series of 159–60 theorization 140, 142–6 tradition artistic 16 authority of 159–61 historical 65 modern 13 natural scientific 10, 159 particular 159–61 transcendental consciousness 31–2, 35, 46, 81 transcendental phenomenology 35, 62, 81

238

Index

truth and being 189 discursive 196 ensemble of 189, 195–6 experience of 63, 126–8, 149, 162 Foucault’s understanding of 194, 196 games of 189, 191 hermeneutic event of 158, 161 mimetic conception of 190, 196 objective 164, 168, 189, 195 power-produced 189 pragmatic understanding of 188, 190 understandings of 190, 194 Truth and Method (Gadamer) 27, 58–9, 64, 77–8, 91, 125–6, 128, 131, 133–4, 136, 149–52, 155, 157, 161 unbelief 96–7 understanding 59 average 66 circularity of 27 circular structure of 65, 72 common-sense 164 fore-structures of 151, 156 hermeneutic 82, 149, 152 historical 21, 70 historical-relative 53

human 67–8, 106 nominalist 133, 136 non-Husserlian 49 objective 173 phenomenon of 58 possibility of 46, 104 projects of 75, 132 scientific 152, 156 tacit 66–7 unity pattern 173–4 Use of Pleasure, The (Foucault) 188–9, 192 vulgar

51, 54, 56, 63

world conceptual 172 historical 24, 27, 114, 156 mental 165 mind-independent 8 modern 16, 87 natural 93, 114, 159, 166 new 180, 185 phenomenal 12 pre-objective 58 views 23, 26, 85, 125, 128, 146 worldliness 146, 177, 183