Updating the Interpretive Turn: New Arguments in Hermeneutics [1 ed.] 103216459X, 9781032164595

Citation preview

Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy

UPDATING THE INTERPRETIVE TURN NEW ARGUMENTS IN HERMENEUTICS Edited by Michiel Meijer

Updating the Interpretive Turn

This book explores the meaning of the interpretive turn in the philosophy of the human sciences for a variety of contemporary philosophical debates. While hermeneutics seems to be firmly established as a tradition and methodology in the human sciences, interpretive philosophy seems to be under increasing pressure in recent philosophical trends such as the “posthuman turn,” the “nonhuman turn,” and the “speculative turn.” Responding to this predicament, this book shows how hermeneutics is gaining new force and fresh applications today by bringing together a group of leading interpretive philosophers to address such timely topics as the entanglement of social science, culture, and politics in liberal capitalist societies, the extremism with which some identities are held within those societies, the possibility of genuine, non-relativist dialogue in a “post-truth” era, the nature of the strong moral judgments people tend to make in that era, the significance of interpretation for understanding nonhuman life forms, and the inherently hermeneutic dimension of such practices as work and productive action, testimony and witnessing, and measurement in scientific practice. Updating the Interpretive Turn will be of interest to researchers working in critical social science, social philosophy, ethical theory, environmental philosophy, philosophy of work, philosophy of testimony, philosophy of measurement, and philosophical hermeneutics itself. Michiel Meijer is a Lecturer and Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Antwerp. His recent publications include “Articulating Better, Being Better: Ethical Emancipation and the Sources of Motivation.” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice (2022) 25: 1, 107–122 and “Clarifying Moral Clarification: On Taylor's Contribution to Metaethics.” International Journal of Philosophical Studies (2021) 29: 5, 705–722.

Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy

Evolutionary Debunking Arguments Ethics, Philosophy of Religion, Philosophy of Mathematics, Metaphysics, and Epistemology Edited by Diego E. Machuca The Theory and Practice of Recognition Edited by Onni Hirvonen and Heikki J. Koskinen The Philosophy of Exemplarity Singularity, Particularity, and Self-Reference Jakub Mácha Wealth and Power Philosophical Perspectives Edited by Michael Bennett, Huub Brouwer, and Rutger Claassen Philosophical Perspectives on Memory and Imagination Anja Berninger and Íngrid Vendrell Ferran Non-Ideal Foundations of Language Jessica Keiser Unconscious Networks Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Artificial Intelligence Luca M. Possati For more information about this series, please visit: https://www. routledge.com / Routledge-Studies-in- Contemporary-Philosophy/ book-series/SE0720

Updating the Interpretive Turn New Arguments in Hermeneutics

Edited by Michiel Meijer

First published 2023 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Michiel Meijer; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Michiel Meijer to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-1-032-16459-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-17003-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-25135-4 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003251354 Typeset in Sabon by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

Contents

Introduction: Hermeneutics in the Wake of the Interpretive Turn

1

MICHIEL MEIJER

PART I

American Case Studies

11

1 Worldmaking in the Social Sciences: Double-Hermeneutic Effects, As-If Scenarios, and Narrative Causality

13

JASON BLAKELY

2 Hermeneutics and Polarized Identities

30

GEORGIA WARNKE

PART II

Non-Relativist, Realist, and Non-Anthropocentric Approaches

51

3 A Hermeneutics of Dialogical Understanding in the “Post-Truth” Era: Ontology, Epistemology, and Ethics

53

HANNA MERETOJA

4 What Is Interpretive Metaethics and Why Do We Need It?

76

MICHIEL MEIJER

5 “How Other Kinds of Beings See Us Matters”: On the Scope of Interpretation ARNE JOHAN VETLESEN

97

vi  Contents PART III

Interpretation as Practice

115

6 Hermeneutics as a Metaphilosophy and a Philosophy of Work

117

NICHOLAS H. SMITH

7 Hermeneutics and Testimony: On Selfhood and the Constitution of the Social Bond

137

GERT-JAN VAN DER HEIDEN

8 Measurement, Hermeneutics, and Standardization: Why Gadamerian Hermeneutics is Necessary to Contemporary Philosophy of Science

157

LEAH McCLIMANS

Index

173

Introduction Hermeneutics in the Wake of the Interpretive Turn Michiel Meijer

This collection of essays explores the meaning of the so-called “interpretive turn” in the human sciences for recent philosophical debates. In so doing, this book partly seeks to revive the inspiration behind David Hiley, James Bohman, and Richard Shusterman’s The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science, Culture (1991) by arguing that we must once again take an interpretive turn yet in a much broader sense, that is, to show how interpretive theory explains not just the difference between the natural and human sciences but also further implications for a variety of contemporary philosophical debates. Since The Interpretive Turn forms part of the background for the chapters in this volume, it is helpful to summarize what inspired that book. In their introduction, the editors of The Interpretive Turn highlight the advent of “a new direction in philosophy characterized by an interest in interpretive activities” in a way that presents hermeneutics as a distinctive metaphilosophy about the core motivations and goals of philosophical theorizing (Hiley, Bohman, and Shusterman 1991, 1). On this metaconception, philosophical hermeneutics is characterized by two elements: “hermeneutic universalism,” that is, the claim that “interpretation is a universal and ubiquitous feature of all human activity,” and “hermeneutic contextualism,” which states that “interpretation always takes place within some context or background – such as webs of beliefs, a complex of social relations, tradition, or the practices of a form of life,” which implies the holistic view that “anything must be understood within some presupposed context, whole or ‘hermeneutic circle’” (Hiley, Bohman, and Shusterman 1991, 7–8). The implications of this view run deep. The predicament to which the present volume responds is not just that such fundamental implications tend to get lost from view when hermeneutics is treated as merely a “method” (among many) or a “tradition” (worth studying mostly for historical reasons).1 More importantly, these conceptions block from view the reality that hermeneutics is less a method or tradition than a distinctive view about the nature of philosophical theorizing, a “turn” away from foundationalist (allegedly DOI: 10.4324/9781003251354-1

2  Michiel Meijer interpretation free) conceptions of knowledge toward the recognition of the interpretive nature of all human understanding. We could ask, however, whether there really was an interpretive turn in the second half of the twentieth century, in the sense of establishing a whole new way of doing philosophy which has been influencing philosophical thought until today, like the “epistemological turn” from premodern thought to modern philosophy and the “linguistic turn” from knowledge to language that followed. In fact, one might object that, just as one swallow does not make a summer, neither does one book highlighting the centrality of interpretation in human practices point toward a new direction in philosophy, recognizing “the importance of interpretation in all of inquiry” (Hiley, Bohman, and Shusterman 1991, 1). Moreover, since The Interpretive Turn was a quite singular work coming out of a series of seminars organized by Hubert Dreyfus and David Hoy in the summer of 1988 at the University of California at Santa Cruz (which was itself inspired by an exchange among Charles Taylor, Hubert Dreyfus, and Richard Rorty in The Review of Metaphysics in 1980), it is representative more of a particular philosophical moment than of some enduring philosophical development. 2 Is it not perhaps true that, today, “hermeneutics” or “interpretivism” is mainly identified as a method with certain key concepts (such as interpretation and meaning) or a tradition with certain key historical figures (such as Heidegger and Gadamer) rather than recognized as a unifying philosophical movement on its own? If this is true, the upshot is that the interpretive turn in the philosophy of the human sciences has never really consolidated into a landmark in the development of philosophical thinking. This is precisely the predicament, however, which inspires the present volume. While an interpretive turn can be said to have taken place in the (philosophy of the) human sciences – the main inspiration of The Interpretive Turn – marking the key differences with the natural sciences, it is also true that the naturalism that book was fighting against has been growing ever since. Moreover, while hermeneutics seems to be firmly established as a tradition and methodology (at the very least) in the human sciences, 3 interpretive philosophy seems to be under increasing pressure. The point is not just that in many domains, interpretation, as a more general notion, is frequently taken for granted rather than being interrogated or elaborated upon. Rather, as Charles Taylor recently put it, “the whole hermeneutic dimension is considered to be taboo; I mean, it’s seen as muffling around, only a way of feeling. ‘Get that out of the Philosophy Department and send it off to the Literature Department and we can get on with more serious stuff’” (Meijer and Taylor 2020, 993). Indeed, in recent philosophical trends such as the “posthuman turn” (Braidotti 2013), the “nonhuman turn” (Grusin 2015), and the “speculative turn” (Bryant, Srnicek, and Harman 2011), hermeneutics is increasingly being put in a bad light or seen as having lost its grip on reality.

Introduction 3 That is, in the face of “the looming ecological catastrophe,” the “forward march of neuroscience,” and the “increasing infiltration of technology into the everyday world” (Bryant, Srnicek, and Harman 2011, 3), there is a growing sense that a focus on interpretation is incapable of confronting these events. What we need instead, the thought goes, is new ways of understanding reality beyond human “exceptionalism,” that is, to reexamine the question of what constitutes a human being in a way that recognizes our entanglement with nonhuman others – perhaps, first, through “a contestation of the excessive power granted to language to determine what is real” (Barad 2003, 802) and then “speculating once more about the nature of reality independently of thought and of humanity more generally” (Bryant, Srnicek, and Harman 2011, 3). Because of hermeneutics’ preoccupation with interpretation, meaning, (con)text, language, and culture as what constitutes reality, it is often named together with poststructuralism and deconstruction under the general rubric of “postmodern” thought, which is seen as leaving the door wide open to all kinds of relativism, skepticism, and anti-realism. Indeed, within a climate which calls for the rejection of interpretivism, poststructuralism, and deconstruction in defense of realism, materialism, and objectivity in facing such challenges as the ecological crisis, the increasing impact of science and technology on our self-understandings and social worlds, and the ever-growing danger of political polarization in a “post-truth” climate, it would seem that a postmodernist mode of thought such as hermeneutics even “actively limits the capacities of philosophy in our time” (Bryant, Srnicek, and Harman 2011, 3). On this conception, hermeneutics is simply outdated. At best, it is incapable of dealing with today’s problems; at worst, it is symptomatic of those problems. It is “incapable” because major issues such as climate change and technologization seem to reach way beyond our capacity for (self-)interpretation. It is “symptomatic” because the very interest in the capacity for interpretation may well have led to a fascination with an array of contingent (or even “patriarchal”) features of human life at the expense of nonhuman life forms. Moreover, the hermeneutic ­insistence on the autonomy of the human sciences may have blinded us to the c­ ontinuing breach of the divide between human and machine, while the fixation on textual and ideological critique may have hindered genuine and effective moral and political action. Perhaps, then, the very idea of the human being as a “text-analogue” has fostered a kind of tunnel vision, a “reduction of philosophy to an analysis of texts or of the structure of consciousness” as part of a “general anti-realist trend” in postmodern continental philosophy, “especially through preoccupation with such issues as death and finitude, an aversion to science, a focus on language, culture, and subjectivity to the detriment of material factors, an anthropocentric stance towards nature, a relinquishing of the search for absolutes, and an

4  Michiel Meijer acquiescence to the specific conditions of our ­h istorical thrownness” (Bryant, Srnicek, and Harman 2011, 4). The major point of this volume is to rectify this image by updating and thus reinforcing the turn to interpretation which inspired The Interpretive Turn in 1991. That is, to bring together a group of leading scholars who are, first, implicitly or explicitly, building on this conception of hermeneutics as a metaphilosophy and, second, whose views testify how hermeneutics is gaining new force and fresh applications today in elaborating on such timely topics as the entanglement of social science, culture, and politics in liberal capitalist societies and the extremism with which some identities are held within those societies, the possibility of genuine, non-relativist dialogue in a “post-truth” era, the nature of the strong moral judgments people tend to make in that era, the significance of interpretation for understanding nonhuman life forms, and the inherently hermeneutic dimension of such practices as work and productive action, testimony and witnessing, and measurement in scientific practice. The chapters in Part I, “American Case Studies,” draw attention to changing worldviews and identities in the United States and show how a philosophical understanding of these transformations requires an interpretive turn. The chapters in Part II, “Non-Relativist, Realist, and Non-Anthropocentric Approaches,” develop arguments that show the common criticism of hermeneutics as being relativist, anti-realist, or anthropocentric to be premature. The chapters in Part III, “Interpretation as Practice,” point out the practical significance of hermeneutics for debates in which interpretive attention is generally thought to be neither necessary nor sufficient. Although elaborated from different perspectives, the theme that transcends and connects the different chapters is that they all rely on a strong interdependence of theory and practice. This is perhaps the main implication of adopting a hermeneutic model for doing philosophy. To say that philosophy’s interpretive turn is a practical turn is not merely to say that interpretation is “context bound” because it involves applying a particular perspective in some specific situation or practice. Rather, the point is that the very act of interpretation is guided by our motives and needs as purposive agents in a way that shapes in large part the interpretandum. In short, interpretation is motivated by specific purposes and practices that help to define what those purposes and practices are. This means that interpretive theory and practice (or its “application”) cannot be ­separated because interpretation is always motivated by ­specific purposes in concrete situations (Hiley, Bohman, and Shusterman 1991, 11–12). One such concrete situation is the current ethico-political situation in the United States, the topic of the first two chapters. Jason Blakely’s chapter “Worldmaking in the Social Sciences: Double-Hermeneutic Effects, As-If Scenarios, and Narrative Causality” encourages us to reject the

Introduction 5 idea that the social sciences are descriptive and thus neutral regarding the social-political process they seek to theorize. To show why, Blakely examines four ways in which social science involves “worldmaking” in the sense of creating new social realities: “top-down technocratic” cases where politicians construct authority by evoking the human sciences, “bottom-up techno-populist” cultural movements which mobilize in part by drawing on the supposedly scientific authority of theories borrowed from the human sciences, cases of “ideological resonance” where theorists seek to resonate their theory with some already existing ideological phenomenon, and by considering “as-if scenarios” in which social science theories are examined for their potential to generate or reinforce new social realities. A similar focus on the American social-political situation characterizes Georgia Warnke’s chapter, “Hermeneutics and Polarized Identities.” In an attempt to make sense of people’s multiple identities (religious, gender, racial), Warnke explores the issue of what might be involved in moderating the dogmatism and rigidity with which people often hold their identities. In conversation with Amartya Sen and Kwame Anthony Appiah, she argues that identities need to be restricted to the specific spheres within which they have their meaning. Using textual interpretation as a model for identity, Warnke concludes not only that in many contexts it makes no sense at all to identify someone in strong identity terms (e.g., religion, gender, or race), but also that the very notion of identity becomes unintelligible when a single identity is held dogmatically. As noted, one of the central elements of interpretive philosophy is a commitment to holism, the view that something cannot be understood independent of context (referred to above as “hermeneutic contextualism”). While the hermeneutic tradition has often been criticized for being relativist, anti-realist, or anthropocentric in this regard, the point of insisting on the contextuality of interpretation is rather to acknowledge that all understanding involves self-understanding. That is, if we are to understand and respond to the major problems of our time, then we must also understand what and who we ourselves are, and that must mean understanding our own nature as self-interpreting beings inhabiting different meaningful worlds. The point that foregrounding interpretation, context, and self-understanding is neither relativistic nor anti-realist nor anthropocentric is the topic of the next three chapters. These chapters show that in the background of Blakely’s and Warnke’s hermeneutic ­illuminations of American culture, there are also more general questions about the status of hermeneutics as a philosophical discipline. For example, how does hermeneutics relate to poststructuralism? To what extent does a hermeneutic preoccupation with interpretation and context have “poststructuralist effects,” such as a decentering of the

6  Michiel Meijer subject, a relativist conception of social discourse, and a view of language and knowledge as rooted in power relations? Hanna Meretoja explores these questions in her chapter “A Hermeneutics of Dialogical Understanding in the ‘Post-Truth’ Era: Ontology, Epistemology, and Ethics.” Gradually laying out the similarities and differences with poststructuralism (and, occasionally, posthuman and new materialist approaches), Meretoja explains her understanding of hermeneutics on three levels: ontological, epistemological, and ethical. Ontologically, she argues that we become who we are only in a fundamentally relational and dialogical way because our relation to the world is fundamentally mediated by narratives. Epistemologically, she shows how a hermeneutic, “world-disclosing” conception of language invokes historically situated truth-claims in a way that makes possible critical evaluation of such claims. Ethically, Meretoja concludes that a hermeneutic conception of language allows for (at least) the possibility of ethical understanding to the extent that new experiences can shape and transform our conceptual resources and thus remain open to change. The ontological, epistemological, and ethical dimensions of hermeneutics are also central in Michiel Meijer’s chapter “What Is Interpretive Metaethics And Why Do We Need It?” It reraises the question about the status of hermeneutics from the perspective of moral philosophy. What is the place of interpretation in ethical theory? What are the implications of prioritizing interpretation and meaning for the nature of moral judgment? Does stressing contextuality rule out moral realism? Resonating with Meretoja’s non-relativist view, Meijer underlines the realist force of what he calls “interpretive metaethics” by explaining how a hermeneutic-constitutive conception of moral language supports, rather than undermines, moral realism. In so arguing, Meijer challenges a view of metaethics as being neutral about the normativity it seeks to theorize (in this regard, mirroring Blakely’s strategy regarding the social sciences) to make room instead for issues of moral self-understanding and philosophical anthropology in building on the views of Charles Taylor. Finally, there are questions about the contribution of hermeneutics to environmental philosophy. Is the interpretive turn necessarily a turn to the human? What could it mean to be involved in interpretation for nonhuman agents, such as forests and animals? That is, how do other kinds of beings see us? In his chapter “‘How Other Kinds of Beings See Us Matters:’ On the Scope of Interpretation,” Arne Johan Vetlesen explores such questions by drawing on the work of anthropologist Eduardo Kohn. In an attempt to make room for different types of interpretive capacities (such as those of forests, dogs, and jaguars), Vetlesen shows there is more to articulation than mere linguistic articulation. He continues to clarify this view in comparison with non-Western worldviews (such as Amerindian cosmologies) to highlight the major consequences of denying expressivity to nonhuman creatures. In a final effort to show why

Introduction 7 the capacity for interpretation needs to be understood more broadly, he discusses Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition as an example of the traditional anthropocentric understanding of interpretation. While Meretoja’s, Meijer’s, and Vetlesen’s chapters are revealing of hermeneutics’ broad theoretical potential, it is worth noting that hermeneutics is gaining new force in understanding specific human practices as well. One is the philosophy of work. In his chapter, “Hermeneutics as a Metaphilosophy and a Philosophy of Work,” Nicholas Smith starts by elaborating on his understanding of hermeneutics as a metaphilosophy. In Smith’s view, hermeneutics is partly a retrieval of a classical conception of philosophy, which aims at “theoretical” insight into the human condition only for the “practical” purpose of contributing to the human good. The task of a hermeneutic renewal of this ancient conception of philosophy, Smith argues, is to recover lost meanings, criticize sham meanings, and reflect on hidden meanings that have hitherto remained in the background of hermeneutic reflection. One example of the latter, he continues to argue, is the meaning of work. Arguing that both Gadamer and Ricoeur remain ambivalent about the possibility of a hermeneutics of work, Smith concludes by clarifying how their views can still be used for an “updated” hermeneutic recovery of meaning in work. Another example of a human practice for which hermeneutics provides important resources is the practice of testimony or witnessing, the topic of Gert-Jan van der Heiden’s chapter “Hermeneutics and Testimony: On Selfhood and the Constitution of the Social Bond.” Refuting the same quasi-scientific framework, it is Meijer’s purpose to transcend in developing interpretive metaethics, Van der Heiden challenges the view that testimony essentially involves objectively establishing or communicating facts. Criticizing the distorted anthropology behind this view by drawing on the work of Heidegger and Ricoeur, Van der Heiden argues that testimony or witnessing is better understood as a shared dialogical practice by which humans establish a social bond. Echoing Smith’s essay, Van der Heiden emphasizes how a better understanding of witnessing involves a hermeneutic reinterpretation of ancient philosophical motifs of seeing and knowing beyond instrumental conceptions, while also arguing along the lines of Blakely’s, Meretoja’s, and Meijer’s arguments in highlighting testimony’s “poetic” (world-making, world-disclosing, world-constituting, object-shaping) capacity to constitute new ways of understanding the world for the addressees, that is, to create new realities through the articulation of what is witnessed by the witness as part of their self-understanding and self-authentication. Smith and Van der Heiden demonstrate the significance of hermeneutics for understanding everyday practices such as working and witnessing. In her chapter “Measurement, Hermeneutics, and Standardization: Why Gadamerian Hermeneutics is Necessary to Contemporary Philosophy of Science,” Leah McClimans shows interpretation is manifest even

8  Michiel Meijer when applying scientific knowledge in the practice of measurement. McClimans’ proposal for a hermeneutics of measurement presents the so-called “coordination problem” in the philosophy of measurement as a classic example of the hermeneutical circle: evaluating the validity of one’s measuring instrument requires at least some knowledge of the object to be measured. Reflecting on Hasok Chang’s views about measuring temperature from the perspective of Gadamer’s hermeneutics, McClimans urges us to make productive, not vicious, the fundamental role the hermeneutical circle plays in measurement. The implications of this view become clear in her follow-up discussion of Eran Tal’s work on the measurement of time: to recognize the hermeneutic nature of measuring is to recognize that the ideal of standardization in measurement is just that, an ideal, to the extent that even a fixed everyday notion such as the “second” depends on an on-going hermeneutic practice of fitting part to whole. This point is underlined in McClimans’ final example, in which she argues that some psychometricians deliberately cut off hermeneutic dialogue between their concepts, models, and instruments by modeling their constructs (such as intelligence or quality of life) to fit underlying assumptions and so fail to learn more about the constructs they hope to measure – indeed, in a way quite like the ideological resonances of the social sciences in Blakely’s chapter.

Notes 1 Such understandings of hermeneutics are exemplified by the many edited books on interpretive philosophy, which are historical (focusing on the major themes, concepts, and figures of the hermeneutic tradition), or methodological (focusing on hermeneutics as a method or art of interpretation), or comparative (focusing on how hermeneutics relates to other philosophical and interdisciplinary areas), or a combination of these approaches. 2 I thank an anonymous reviewer for making this point. 3 See, for example, Bernstein (1978), Rabinow and Sullivan (1987), Bevir (2010), Rhodes (2017), and Bevir and Blakely (2018).

References Barad, Karen. 2003. “Posthumanist Performativity: Towards an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter”. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (3): 801–831. Bernstein, Richard. 1978. The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bevir, Mark (ed.) 2010. Interpretive Political Science. London: Sage. Bevir, Mark and Jason Blakely. 2018. Interpretive Social Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bryant, Levi, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman (eds.). 2011. The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Melbourne: re.press. https://www .re-press.org/book-files/OA_Version_Speculative_Turn_9780980668346.pdf

Introduction 9 Grusin, Richard (ed.) 2015. The Nonhuman Turn. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hiley, David, James Bohman, and Richard Shusterman (eds.) 1991. The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science, Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Meijer, Michiel, and Charles Taylor. 2020. “Fellow Travellers on Different Paths: A Conversation with Charles Taylor”. Philosophy & Social Criticism 46 (8): 985–1002. Rabinow, Paul and William M. Sullivan (eds.) 1987 [1979]. Interpretive Social Science: A Second Look. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rhodes, Rod. 2017. Interpretive Political Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Part I

American Case Studies

1

Worldmaking in the Social Sciences Double-Hermeneutic Effects, As-If Scenarios, and Narrative Causality Jason Blakely

Introduction Just as certain lizards camouflage by suddenly changing colors or ­caterpillars metamorphosize within their cocoons, so humans naturally undergo dramatic transformations through the embodiment of different cultural and historical meanings. This leads to the apparent paradox that humans are naturally unnatural animals—agents whose beliefs, actions, practices, institutions, and entire social worlds are expressive of contingent historical traditions. This is one way of understanding Martin Heidegger’s (2010, 266) famously cryptic dictum that “being in the world” for humans is pervaded by “uncanniness.” One possible interpretation of the notion that humans are existentially uncanny or not at home in the world is to consider how they dwell in epochal and cultural spaces that render them strangers to other members of their species and mark them out within the wider system of nature (Blakely 2013). Regardless of how one parses Heidegger’s uncanniness, his phenomenology has undoubtedly become one major source for an interpretive turn in the human sciences. In fact, in the last century an impressive array of philosophers hailing from a variety of schools of thought has converged on the thesis that interpretation is central to the study of human behavior—including hermeneuticists like Hans-Georg Gadamer (2004), analytic philosophers like Peter Winch (1958), idealists like R.G. Collingwood (1946), pragmatists like Richard Bernstein (1978), and many more. The emerging consensus among these otherwise quite ­different thinkers is that the explanation of human behavior ought to be treated as a narrative or interpretive art and not the search for predictive scientific laws. This means the social sciences are philosophically located closer to history, literature, and the other narrative disciplines instead of, say, physics, chemistry, or biology. Social science is not on the road to “hard” scientific status, but is instead a historical and cultural form of inquiry. In what follows I draw on the phenomenological tradition’s turn toward interpretation in the social sciences—particularly Charles DOI: 10.4324/9781003251354-3

14  Jason Blakely Taylor’s (1985) ontological thesis that humans are “self-interpreting animals” whose identities and communities are constituted by selfunderstandings. Taylor’s philosophical anthropology holds that the object of study in the human sciences (including political science, economics, sociology, psychology, and so on) is importantly different from the natural sciences. Where the dominant philosophy of social science today— known to philosophers as naturalism—attempts to explain human behavior via ahistorical, formal causal mechanisms, an interpretive approach instead insists that explanations are a form of cultural and historical storytelling (Bevir and Blakely 2018, 24–25). The naturalist attempt to treat humans as another object in the system of nature has also generated various mistaken habits of mind. In this chapter, I will focus on only one such naturalist error. Namely, there is a tendency among social theorists under the sway of naturalism to tacitly assume that the relationship between theory (or word) and object (in this case human behavior) is descriptive. The word-object relationship suggested by philosophical naturalism is one in which social scientific theory largely exists in a splendid isolation, outside the stream of culture and politics. This laboratory-like quarantining of theory in the human sciences supposedly ensures that it remains uncontaminated by ideology. On the dominant naturalist view, social science carefully recounts facts and this is logically distinct from any assertion of values. Thus, the word-object relationship supports the doctrine that true social science offers neutral, value-free knowledge about the world. The goal of this chapter is to begin to upend this naturalistic way of looking at the word-object relationship in the human sciences while also suggesting various themes for interpretive inquiry. Interpretive philosophy makes possible an entirely different form of perception and research. Where naturalists see the word and object as divorced, interpretive theorists instead show how theories can penetrate and change selves and society. I will refer to these infiltrations of social theory into human life as double-hermeneutic or “double-H” effects. What I mean by these double-H effects is the potential that social theories have to both describe existing social realities and inspire and constitute new ones. Therefore, the causal narratives interpretive theorists tell about double-H effects can take on a number of forms, including but not limited to top-down technocratic impositions and bottom-up technopopulist surges. But interpretive theorists can also offer non-causal readings of social science’s worldmaking potential by treating texts as ideological artifacts and hypothetical, “as-if” scenarios. In what follows, I will conceptually define these different breakdowns of the word-object divide while also drawing on prominent examples from the social science literature. An interpretive turn in the social sciences makes clear that all social scientific texts have worldmaking potential. Social science is always a participant within culture and history. Once social scientists make this

Worldmaking in the Social Sciences 15 paradigm shift into understanding themselves and their theoretical output as a self-interpretive activity inside the historical process, this not only opens a new range of empirical topics, but also suggests a normative, humanistic line of criticism. Interpretive social science properly conceived is a critical social science: unmasking technocratic takeovers in all their various guises. In short, this chapter hopes not only to philosophically sketch a typology of word-object breaches in the human sciences, but also to suggest new topics in a critical, interpretive social science.

Top-Down Technocracy and Bottom-Up Technopopulism Interpretive philosophy makes it possible to perceive and account for double-H effects in which theories in the human sciences enter into and alter the social realities they are chiefly thought to describe. But how do these infiltrations of social reality actually occur in terms of an empirical causal claim? In this section, I will first briefly define double-H effects as a form of narrative causality and then distinguish top-down versus bottom-up variants that interpretive social theorists might explore as future research topics. All double-H effects are forms of narrative causality, which is to be distinguished from the impersonal, mechanistic causality typical of naturalism. The latter form of causality involves identifying antecedent conditions from which (all things being equal) a predictable set of consequent conditions occur (Bevir and Blakely 2018, 35–38). By contrast, the interpretive turn in the human sciences places a different form of causality at the center of the explanatory enterprise: one marked by contingency and narrativity. Because humans are self-interpreting animals, their beliefs and actions are the result of other beliefs they hold. Particular agents can always devise new ways of holding their beliefs, such that no set of antecedent conditions can mechanistically predict a consequent belief or action. Instead of formal, ahistorical laws, social theorists need to practice an art of interpretation that seeks to establish the best narrative or story explaining the beliefs and actions of the agents in question. This means not only that human science like the other humanities (e.g., literature and history) is a narrative discipline, but also that the primary explanatory form is the same kind that guides human behavior itself. As Alasdair MacIntyre (2007, 216) summarized this point: human agency embodies narratives and humans are a “story-telling animal.” Human science is therefore a form of a narrative about narrative animals. A double-H effect, in the sense that I am using the term, refers to a narrow set of causal narratives within the much larger enterprise of human science. Specifically, double-H effects are a form of causal narrative in which a social theorist’s narrative or account about human life

16  Jason Blakely is itself absorbed via creative self-interpretation by agents in the social world. A double-H effect seeks to illuminate the concrete ways in which human science has grafted itself into modern societies—altering identities, institutions, architecture, law, public policy, and so on. When theories that claim to be impersonal sciences of human behavior infiltrate society in this way, a kind of technocratic mode of understanding frequently takes hold. A certain delusion then occurs: agents think they are grasping a timeless science of human behavior—often consisting of value-neutral predictive laws—when in fact they are unwittingly adopting a set of contingent meanings and narratives. Interpretive theory therefore highlights how double-H effects often occur as a technocratic takeover of culture, politics, and power. Interpretivism makes it possible to see what to many remains invisible: modern technocracy is not an inescapable process of rationalization—a vision famously associated, whether wrongly or rightly, with Max Weber (1999)—but rather a cultural process highly specific to modernity. When investigating double-H effects as technocratic takeovers, interpretive theorists might loosely distinguish between two kinds of causal narrative—top-down impositions and bottom-up mobilizations. These two types are by no means exhaustive but suggest some of the range and complexity of double-H effects. Top-down impositions consist of cases in which elite actors in society—politicians, administrators, managers, educators, the intelligentsia, and other such figures—construct authority by evoking the human sciences. This exercise of authority often involves very substantially redesigning existing institutional realities and implementing policy directives over ordinary people. Consider, for example, the way in which order-maintenance strategies in policing—and more narrowly the policies associated with “brokenwindows” approaches—began their life as purportedly descriptive, criminological theories. In 1982, two social scientists—James Q. Wilson and George Kelling—wrote an article arguing that visible signs of minor disorder in a neighborhood (e.g., broken windows, vandalism, and panhandling) were causally bonded to the rate of violent crime (e.g., muggings, homicides, and assaults). “Disorder and crime are … inextricably linked,” Wilson and Kelling (2013, 65) declared, because “one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing.” This account of stimulus in the environment claimed not only a scientific account of the significance of “disorder,” but also a predictive theory of how agents would respond to such stimuli. Elsewhere I have analyzed the complex matrix of social theories and racialized, militarized policing practices that became enmeshed in this theoretical agenda (Blakely 2019). But the point here is the way in which elites drew upon a supposedly scientific, descriptive theory as a kind of social script for substantially changing the performance of criminal

Worldmaking in the Social Sciences 17 justice and policing. In this case, Mayor Rudy Giuliani of New York City and his police commissioner William Bratton explicitly used the theory as a guide for implementing a style of policing that was zero tolerance. Police were to crack down on a specific set of minor infractions with the assumption that by doing so they were at the same time reducing violent and serious crimes. The result was a dramatically different strategy of policing at the street level, one in which small violations of law were met with heightened surveillance and overwhelming force (Harcourt 2001). This is, therefore, a possible case of a double-H effect occurring empirically and infiltrating social reality from the top-down. Unfortunately, under the influence of philosophical naturalism, social theory is too often treated as a collection of descriptive propositions (e.g., the minor disorder causes major crime rates to rise) and not as a social script for staging a new culture or politics. Yet far from hardnosed empiricism, texts like Wilson and Kelling’s broken windows can be read instead as a kind of theater of political action complete with new characters, setting, plots, subplots, and climax. Social science in this way is capable of rewriting the performative meanings of politics. In this example, terms like “disorder” are given new meanings, and the role of the character “panhandler” or “vandal” takes on new status in the plot (a story of order-maintenance). The hero of this story becomes the scientifically guided officer, led and schooled by the enlightened rationalism of technocratic elites. The interpretive turn thus allows social science texts to be read not simply under the rubric of empirical description but scrutinized as sociopolitical plays offering new performances for a uniquely modern authority: one derived from a claim to scientific expertise. Social science as a web of meanings can thus be instrumental in signifying and re-signifying social phenomena. The social scientific theory is an interpretive grid that calls new cultural actions and performances into being. As part of this, it can also organize and structure the perception and stories of many ordinary citizens. Consider, in this light, the George W. Bush administration’s promulgation and execution of the so-called “War on Terror” as part of its response to the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York City. In speeches that President Bush gave justifying his policy of invading Afghanistan and Iraq, he drew on the authority of one of the most celebrated theories of political science at that time—democratic peace theory. This theory helped to tell the story of the War on Terror in a specific way that wedded scientific rationalism and enlightened democratic freedoms. Democratic peace theorists had argued for decades that democracies were statistically unlikely to engage in military conflict with one another. The Harvard political scientist, Michael Doyle, was particularly important to the modern revival of this thesis that had roots in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Doyle (2001, 10) claimed that it was a matter of verifiable fact that liberal democracies tended to build a growing “zone

18  Jason Blakely of peace” internationally. The claim was first and foremost an empirical one: the observation of a regularity and perhaps even a predictive causal law. For many, that argument then became framed as whether the empirical law was true and, as part of this, what counted as a factual case of a democratic regime or not (Maoz and Russett 1993). But looking at social science as a performative script for the construction of technocratic authority makes a different set of features appear. One thing that becomes apparent is that democratic peace theory was able to offer a web of cultural meanings that helped elites creatively fill out the significance of military policy—in the case of the Bush administration, the empirical enemy of the “War on Terror” itself. After all, given that “terror” was a massively abstract term and did not refer to any one specifiable regime or to a traditional battlefield, there was a problem with the construction of a concrete object of attack. Without some conception of the enemy, terror might be ascribed to innumerably various actors and politics (indeed, as a tactic of asymmetric violence aimed at civilians, terrorism might be employed by actors from all kinds of ideological perspectives). The term “terror” was therefore too fluid and needed some hard-nosed, factual content. This is where social scientific theory was able to play an ideological role. Bush (2010, 375) himself explicitly alluded to the findings of democratic peace theory in various speeches including a 2006 rally for the troops in Afghanistan, in which he stated that: “history has taught us democracies don’t war” and “democracies yield the peace.” Political science as technocratic authority offered not only a justification for military strategy but also a more traditional opponent to the diffuseness of terrorist networks: authoritarian regimes. In the case of the invasion of Iraq, it helped to target a nation uninvolved on September 11th. If democracies did not fight with one another, then regime change via warfare on a global scale was not so much an act of war as one of peace. Social scientific expertise crafted and imposed from the top-down offered a map for the resignification of acts of war into forms of scientifically established peacemaking against a specifiable opponent that was at least somewhat familiar to elites who had been raised on the global regime-antagonisms of the Cold War. A theater of action or social script could in this way be enacted and oriented on the global stage—the War on Terror therefore took on the features of a deadly serious form of enacted performance or play guided by a story. So far, I have been trying to show how double-H effects might infiltrate and significantly alter social reality via top-down elite directives that both guide social policy and help to signify certain phenomena within a social script or story (e.g., “criminal disorder,” “The War on Terror”). But another manner in which double-H effects occur is not from the elite side but from the bottom-up. This problematizes the view that technocracy is always or even primarily an elite politics. Instead,

Worldmaking in the Social Sciences 19 there exists in modern societies a range of bottom-up movements that mobilize in part by drawing on the supposedly scientific authority of a given theory (albeit often in a vulgarized form). This is related to the puzzles surrounding what has recently been referred to as “technopopulism” (Bickerton and Accetti 2021). By technopopulism, I will mean something specific: namely, a form of bottom-up politics that organizes action through the use of theories borrowed from the human sciences. Here interpretive social scientists might focus on the study of widely circulating discourses or ideas. This would be a hermeneutic form of the study of discourses pioneered by Michel Foucault and his students, in which the theorist takes as his or her major object of inquiry a system of ideas or mode of perceiving reality that has roots in the human sciences (Burchell et al. 1991). However, unlike Foucault’s post-structuralism which sometimes slides into neglecting agency, hermeneutics affirms human self-interpretive activity and therefore the deep pluralism and variations existing in all societies (Taylor 1984). No single discourse determines the beliefs of particular agents in a time or place because individual agents can always creatively modify their beliefs and draw on rival discourses or traditions. Society itself is also not reducible to a single discourse but consists of rival cultural strains. Nonetheless, with these caveats in place, Foucault remains an invaluable model for how a research program into bottom-up double-H effects might be conducted. For example, scholars have argued that the influence of neoclassical economics on society was not always through the top-down implementation of these theories by an elite, expert class (although this did also occur). Rather, historians and sociologists of economics have also tracked a “soft version of the economic style of reasoning” that diffused throughout society and became increasingly ubiquitous among policymakers and the general public (Hirschman and Berman 2014). Such a mode of reasoning shaped economistic modes of experience and ways of being in the world. But it also was instrumental in the creation of certain discursive objects and a shared social ontology that did not exist before. An example might help clarify this point. Consider, in this vein, the popular concept of “the economy”—with the definite article to refer to a particular, concrete object. Composed of purportedly neutral and quantifiable indicators, like stock and consumer indexes, gross domestic product, and the unemployment rate, “the economy” became a significant reference point in American political discourse in the late twentieth century. So strong was its influence that even the fate of political candidates was said to be determined by how their terms in office coincided with the bundle of indicators constituting this object. This folk economism not only often held presidents and their policies directly responsible for the economy at any one given moment, but was also often held up as an objective, scientific benchmark (Fair 2002).

20  Jason Blakely As an object of social ontology, the economy could also have the role of foreclosing certain possibilities through what appeared to be a brute or inescapable set of facts. For instance, “the economy” in popular discourse is often assumed to simply measure material well-being within society. Yet at the same time, as a discursive object, it also excludes various salient features of such well-being like persistent homelessness, entrenched poverty, and ecological devastation. Thus, although the economy reflected a particular ideological and ethical vision of material health in public discourse, it was able to evoke an undeniable and supposedly value-neutral reality. Economic and statistical measurements thus might be treated to further inquiry by interpretive social scientists trying to examine a technopopulist mobilization of economic social objects and ideas. Popular mobilizations of technocratic ideas might also be found in the form of popular adages or bits of folk wisdom. These could be thought of as folk naturalisms, in which political common sense and wisdom are forged by tacitly relying on a supposed science of markets. Such adages might include those commonly found in American political life at the turn of the century across the two major parties, such as: “government is always inefficient” or “it’s the economy, stupid.” The latter phrase was famously coined by Bill Clinton’s campaign advisor James Carville, but it was meant to capture the widespread intuition that the American populace would judge candidates almost exclusively by the measures of the popular social object, “the economy.” Campaigns should thus recognize this purported folk belief and run their strategy in such a way that emphasized the importance of the economy to winning elections. Interpretive social scientists might delve deeper into the discursive circulations of such folk naturalisms as part of a broader sociological narrative concerning the United States’ uniquely hostile relationship to social democracy, socialism, and other egalitarian forms of democracy. After all, much of such popular discourse implies that entire policies and ideological traditions are simply not scientific or “good for the economy.” Indeed, the sedimentation of such discourse might help explain what Mark Fisher (2009, 2) refers to as “capitalist realism,” or “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible to imagine a coherent alternative.” After all, a popular science of society seems to reinforce the notion that a single set of economic institutions and policies around the free market are rational. Mass movements as momentous as Reaganism and the Tea Party might be reconceived not as simply populist shifts but as explicitly technopopulist upsurges that interface with top-down neoliberal policy directives. Regardless the outcome of particular interpretive sociologies, the overall implication of such bottom-up double-H effects is to open the

Worldmaking in the Social Sciences 21 question at least in principle of whether populism is always or simply the opposite of technocratic elitism in the modern world. Massive movements like neoliberalism might be marked by technocratic forms that are both top-down and bottom-up. There are, moreover, many more areas in the popular human sciences where folk naturalisms might be investigated, including: psychology and self-help; managerialism and behavioral science; politics and rational choice theory; and so on. The discursive study of such empirical, causal narratives would consist in establishing and interpreting the prevalence of a popular discourse that circulates in the world with roots in the human sciences. Of course, I have only hinted at that here in the hopes that readers grasp that the persuasiveness of bottom-up empirical claims in part rests on the identification of a system of popularly circulating ideas. But bottom-up and top-down narratives do not exhaust areas where interpretive theorists can study double-H effects. For example, one site where the entire distinction between top-down and bottom-up might be blurred is in the case of long-standing scientistic traditions that are inherited as forms of ideology by both elites and the general populace. For example, this might be found to be the case with various forms of ethnonationalism and racial hierarchies. A distorted version of the human sciences is certainly far from the only source of racist thinking (e.g., religion and philosophy can also fuel such sentiments). Nonetheless, a major feature of modern racism is in fact a double-H effect in which fraudulent empirical descriptions of biology lead to the construction of racial hierarchy. As is well known, biology’s system of classification was devised and articulated by Carolus Linnaeus as a prime example of a purely descriptive enterprise. Linnaeus’s binomial system employed a conjunction of Latinate names to denote a generic genus and species. What is less often remembered is how Linnaeus along with other Enlightenment luminaries such as Georges-Louis Leclerc and Immanuel Kant also used this system to naturalize social and political subcategories of Homo sapiens that were explicitly racist. Cultural and moral qualities were used to demarcate subspecies like “White European,” “Asiatic,” “African,” and “American” Indian as having either laudatory or condemnatory characteristics such as “lazy,” “avaricious,” “acute,” or “inventive” (Baum 2006). This established the interpretive grid for the modern, popular pseudoscience of race, in which both elites and ordinary individuals learn to look at the world through racist classifications and taxonomies. What racist traditions teach both elites and ordinary adherents is a pseudoscience of racial hierarchy. Aaron Panofsky (2014, 193) has described this widely circulating pseudoscience as an “astrological genetics” or peculiar modern practice of reading biological signs on human bodies (said to reveal the genetic code) and determining a particular individual or group’s social destiny.

22  Jason Blakely The many pseudosciences of race—and all their sociobiological and ultra-Darwinist variants—are often born by ideological traditions that cut across the elite-ordinary person divide as part of various ethnonationalisms. Double-H effects can thus enter into social reality through complex overlapping causal pathways: top-down directives, bottom-up mobilizations, and inherited traditions. Clearly, many times a particular double-H effect if large enough will participate in all three forms. But the distinctions remain useful not only for understanding how the object in the social sciences is often infiltrated by word or theory, but also as areas that interpretive social scientists can explore as future research topics.

Ideological Artifacts and As-If Stories Reading social science for double-H effects complicates our relationship as readers to this textual genre as a whole. A certain naivete about the text as an empirical mirror reflecting the world is suddenly shattered. Instead, the dense and opaque shadowy recesses of meaning begin to flicker before the eye. This is the case even when reading social science texts without any clear causal thesis about double-H effects. The final part of this chapter shifts attention away from empirical causal narratives that break down the word-object split and, instead, focuses on noncausal situations. This is possible because once social scientists make the interpretive turn, they can read human science texts for cultural and ideological resonances even when the theory in question has not been empirically linked to worldmaking. I will define and illustrate two ways of reading social science texts in this way—first, as ideological artifacts and, second, in the form of hypothetical, as-if scenarios. Ideological artifacts consist of cases where theorists already know an ideological phenomenon exists in the social-political world and the social scientific text is argued to resonate in complex ways with that reality. Consider, for example, the rise of what the clinical psychologist Philip Cushman (1990) famously observed as a new kind of “empty,” economistic self. This personality type was a form of homo economicus: perceiving all relationships as market transactions and vaunting celebrity lifestyles as the most desirable form of life. Cushman cataloged the ways in which such individuals suffered various acute mental health pathologies around self-image, depression, and anxiety. The growing prevalence of an economistic and atomistic self was likewise empirically studied in the late twentieth century by the great sociologist Robert Bellah. Bellah’s et al. (1985) Habits of the Heart delved into interviews and other forms of empirical research to establish the increasing spread in the United States of a self that saw moral and ethical decisions as subsumed in an economic rationality of preference maximizing. As with Cushman, the goal of such agents was

Worldmaking in the Social Sciences 23 autonomy of choice with all relationships subsumed into a homo economicus model. We have already seen how neoclassical economic theory, as a diffuse form of reasoning, was linked to certain technocratic policy trends and folk naturalisms. But moving beyond the naïve word-object split in the social sciences also allows one to read social science texts in the other direction: not as generating a belief or practice in the first place, but as expressive of it and solidifying its already established existence. In other words, the human science text or theory is read for ideological resonances with a sociological reality, rather than the sociological reality as stemming from the text or theory. This can be discerned in vulgarized popularizations of neoclassical economics. One might, for example, read the work of Nobel laureate and neoclassical economics popularizer, Gary S. Becker, in this manner. Becker had argued for an expansion of homo economicus notions of agency to encompass the entire human sciences. Thus, he declared that far from just an ideal model of rationality (which was the dominant view of homo economicus within the discipline), economists had instead discovered nothing short of the “unified framework for understanding all human behavior” (Becker 1976, 14). For Becker, the key feature of economic theory was the logic or structure of choice in which individuals treated all goals or aims as commensurable consumer goods on a market. Becker made this the basis for his belief that economics as a discipline was imperial: the foundation for all the other social sciences and able to explain everything from marriage rituals to crime patterns. Later Becker’s framework was adopted and further disseminated by University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner who turned the imperial conception of economics into the Freakonomics (2005) franchise. Free of the dry technicalities of formal choice theory, Freakonomics nonetheless advanced a homo economicus vision of human life with enough panache to become the most popular economics phenomenon in the United States during the early aughts. Levitt and Dubner offered their readers economistic explanations for the whole of human behavior—delighting in their ability to show that their models could be applied not merely to market scenarios but also to areas that seemingly had nothing to do with an exchange of commodities, like cultural trends in naming children, abortion policy, sumo wrestling, organ donation, voting, and much more. Everywhere Levitt and Dubner looked, they saw the preference maximizing and rational calculation of homo economicus at work. Readers were thus vividly invited to imagine all of human life as peopled by market actors. Through Freakonomics, millions of readers were offered a vision of human life and politics as reducible to market-like incentives. Did the Freakonomics sensation cause the sorts of selfhood observed by Cushman and Bellah to come into being? It certainly could not have

24  Jason Blakely been the original fountainhead for such worldmaking—even if the act of reading it very likely reinforced or recruited particular individuals deeper into this way of being. After all, both Cushman and Bellah made their observations before Freakonomics was written. But interpretive theorists might bracket the empirical question of whether or not double-H effects occurred in this instance, while nonetheless reading and interpreting the Freakonomics phenomenon as an ideological artifact that is expressive of the sociopolitical reality that preceded it and troubled Cushman and Bellah. This would be done by interpreting the meanings found in social scientific texts and locating them within a wider ideological tradition—in this case neoliberalism. The search for such ideological resonances in social scientific thought would be akin to Foucault’s efforts to read texts within a discursive field. Rather than simply empirically describing the world, such ideological artifacts help bring a particular vision of life into articulacy. Far from value-neutral and floating above politics, human science could be read as participating inside of particular cultural and ideological traditions. What claims to be mere science turns out to have a complicated relationship to ideology. Of course, my example only begins to sketch how certain neoclassical economics texts might be read as expressive of a social and ideological background—but they hopefully give readers the sense of another possible route for overcoming the word-object split. Reading social science in this manner is closely related to a final way in which interpretive theorists can move past a naïve empiricist mindset when encountering social science texts. This involves critically scrutinizing human science theories for an as-if potential to generate, reinforce, or spread new social realities. These are readings of social science texts where once again the empirical question of actual causality and ­double-H effects is momentarily bracketed to read them for a hypothetical potential to generate worlds. Here interpretive theorists are trying to discern the as-if potential of all social science to be involved in various kinds of worldmaking. Indeed, a given social science text may have multiple, rival, and incompatible generative or worldmaking potentials. The goal in this case is to go through hypothetical, imaginative scenarios in order to recognize a text’s worldmaking features even if the latter have not been activated per se. Consider, for example, the political scientist Samuel Huntington’s infamous clash of civilizations thesis. Huntington wrote a massively influential article in 1993 claiming that the existence of violently rival civilizational identities was simply an empirical fact of contemporary social science. These basic blocs of “civilization consciousness” were purportedly “defined both by common objective elements” like language, history, and religion and “the subjective self-identification of people” (1993, 26, 24). The contemporary world was divided into eight massive civilizational identity groups including Western, Islamic,

Worldmaking in the Social Sciences 25 Confucian, Japanese, Hindu, Slavic Orthodox, Latin American, and African. Although Huntington accepted the possibility of some mixing of civilizations into hybrids, he nonetheless stressed that civilizations were the highest form of cultural identity that was intensely felt and above which existed no other. He then suggested that the future of global conflict would occur over “differences among civilizations” that were “not only real” and “basic” but “the product of centuries” and “far more fundamental than differences among political ideologies and political regimes” (25). Interpretive social scientists could, of course, read Huntington’s thesis as part of an empirical causal narrative about the influence of political science on the actual politics of American foreign policy and the War on Terror. But even putting such empirical claims aside, interpretive theorists could imaginatively ask themselves: What would it look like if the world became more like what Huntington claims simply to describe? How might existing global and regional alliances change? What would military conflict look like? How would domestic nationalisms be modified or subverted? How would borders inside of civilizational blocs be effaced or amended? This imaginative and counterfactual thinking would not simply be an idle intellectual exercise. Rather, it would overcome the naïve empiricism of reading social science by considering the multiple complex potentials held by social scientific meanings. It would also alert readers to the ways in which such theories might be involved in future worldmaking or contain within them deep ideological hazards. Social science would lose its descriptive patina. Beneath the surface would be lurking deep and sometimes disturbing ethical and ideological possibilities. Social science no less than political or ethical tracts could hold different value resonances. For example, throughout his essay, Huntington characterizes the divide between the West and Islam as uniquely deep and violent—a “fault line” that has purportedly “been going on for 1,300 years” and exacerbated by the fact that Islamic civilization has “bloody borders” (31, 35). One latent ideological potentiality in Huntington’s text, therefore, is that readers in the United States learn to identify themselves with a civilization (the “West”) that is on an inevitable crash course with a rival (“Islam”). Islam, of course, might instead be viewed as a global religion that crosscuts regions and cultures and takes multiple forms. Yet studying Huntington’s texts could instead recruit readers into civilizational and Islamophobic politics. Suddenly borders harden and new sentiments and attachments form. The reader might learn to swell with pride at reading the words “the West” and feel aversion or even violent hatred or scorn when encountering “Islam.” A reader of Huntington’s tract could be imbibing a purported empirical theory of social science at one level, while also undergoing a deep cultural and identity transformation at another (into a warrior defending “the West”). To describe these

26  Jason Blakely civilizational classifications might also subtly enact them. Civilizational identity might appear to be merely taxonomized even as it is an invitation to perform and carry out a particular political script. The key philosophical point here is that readers of such human science texts could imagine various such scenarios as a helpful exercise in critical hermeneutic understanding, even without yet conducting research into whether or not such an effect had actually taken place in the world. A text might be criticized for its ideological potential as much as its actual participation in politics. Of course, such lines of thought concerning Huntington’s political science could later be treated as double-H effects with empirical and causal dimensions. But it is not necessary to take this step to break down the word-object split.

Conclusion The dominant philosophy of social science at present tacitly holds that the function of social science as theory is descriptive and explanatory. One classic articulation of this view is Max Weber’s (2004, 279–280) hugely influential assertion that facts and values “are completely heterogeneous” such that “whenever a man of science brings in his own value-judgment, a full understanding of the facts ceases.” Although the doctrine that social science proper is always value-neutral is perhaps an oversimplification of Weber’s own intentions, it has nonetheless become enormously influential in contemporary social science disciplines (Farr 1995). Expertise in these disciplines is often constructed around a claim to offer empirical theories that are straightforwardly factual and separate from the frenzy and pandemonium of human ethical and political life. The social scientist as an expert stands apart from society and history in a posture of detached observer. Yet the foregoing argument subtly complicates the notion that facts and values are utterly dichotomous in the human sciences. If social theories do not simply describe existing realities, but also have the potential to create new ones, then the normative question can always be posed: Is this form of worldmaking ethically desirable? Should we make the world look more like this theory or on the contrary ought we to try to enact alternative forms of worldmaking? Although a distinction between facts and values remains helpful, a social theory has many complex layers of normative and ideological potential, precisely because such theories are always constituted by meanings composed by self-interpreting creatures (the social scientists) and about self-interpreting creatures (their objects of study). Sometimes a theory can clearly be seen to bear certain markings of the surrounding culture and politics. The meanings of human science do not exist outside these various streams and may be inspired or generated by them in various ways. At the very least, interpretive social theorists are better philosophically equipped to recognize and explore such dimensions.

Worldmaking in the Social Sciences 27 The latter sensibility might also lead some interpretive social theorists to study the way in which particular theories have been important to worldmaking—radically restructuring identities, practices, and social realities. This allows for a critical study of the human sciences as often appearing to construct value-neutral authority, when in fact what is being erected is a form of technocratic power. But even in cases where such empirical, causal narratives are not sought out or suspected, it remains the case that the word-object divide has been breached. Interpretive readers of social science can speculatively and imaginatively devise as-if scenarios that help illuminate the otherwise hidden and opaque ideological and political possibilities of human science. In all these ways, the facts of the human sciences can be enacted or performed in such a manner that infiltrates and alters social reality. This opens up the possibility of a unique sociology that shares some family resemblances with Foucault’s project of discovering the paths by which the human sciences helped generate the unique cultural and epistemological landscape of modernity. On this view, modernity is uniquely susceptible to a kind of knowledge (human science) that disciplines, forms, and shapes human subjective experiences. By contrast, interpretive social science is effectively a critical social science—one whose goal is to unmask naturalistic epistemologies and their role in buttressing technocrats and technopopulist cultures. This implies an emancipatory horizon for interpretive understanding. Yet, I should conclude by noting that if the interpretive view of humans is true, then interpretive social science is not less subject to the possibility of double-H effects and worldmaking. All the human sciences—interpretive or otherwise—must be read for their generative potentials. The very text I am writing and which you are reading right now could have double-H effects both intended and unintended. However, unlike the epistemological reading habits encouraged by naturalism, the reader who takes up the interpretive turn will not remain wholly blind to these aspects of the word-object relationship in the human sciences. A critical, hermeneutic reader will learn to always look at texts with a creative, imaginative awareness with the understanding that some meanings may evade his or her power of insight at that time. A hypothetical, as-if scenario held by interpretive social science is that both the epistemological discourses of the human sciences and the policy and political worlds will take a turn toward far greater sensitivity to the art of interpreting meanings and away from technocratic power either in its top-down or bottom-up forms. Self-interpretation implies a humanistic vision of agency, which is itself not neutral (Blakely 2020). Reading for the art of interpretation might create a new political world where hermeneutic understanding is revived against the tendency to reduce all problems to a “science.” The future of such a politics is one of humanistic counsel and not technocratic domination.

28  Jason Blakely

References Baum, Bruce. 2006. The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race: A Political History of Racial Identity. New York: New York University Press. Becker, Gary S. 1976. The Economic Approach to Human Behavior. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Bellah, Robert, Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven Tipton. 1985. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bernstein, Richard. 1978. The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bevir, Mark and Jason Blakely. 2018. Interpretive Social Science: An A ­ ntiNaturalist Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bickerton, Christopher and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti. 2021. Technopopulism: The New Logic of Democratic Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Blakely, Jason. 2013. “Returning to the Interpretive Turn: Charles Taylor and His Critics.” The Review of Politics. 75:3: 383–406. Blakely, Jason. 2019. “The Hermeneutics of Policing: A Critique of Law and Order Technocracy.” Critical Review 31:2: 160–178. Blakely, Jason. 2020. We Built Reality: How Social Science Infiltrated Culture, Politics, and Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Burchell, Graham, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller. 1991. The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Chicago: University of Chicago. Bush, George W. 2010. “Remarks to United States and Coalition Troops at Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan, March 1, 2006.” In Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, George W. Bush. Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office. Collingwood, R. G. 1946. The Idea of History. Ed., T. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Cushman, Philip. 1990. “Why the Self is Empty: Toward a Historically Situated Psychology.” American Psychologist 45:5: 599–611. Doyle, Michael W. 2001. “Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs.” In Debating the Democratic Peace. Eds., Michael Brown, Sean Lynn-Jones, and Steven Miller. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Fair, Ray C. 2002. Predicting Presidential Elections and Other Things. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Farr, James. 1995. “Remembering the Revolution: Behavioralism in American Political Science.” In Political Science in History. Eds., James Farr, John Dryzek, and Stephen Leonard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Hants, UK: O Books. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 2004. Truth and Method. Trans., Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Continuum. Harcourt, Bernard. 2001. Illusion of Order: The False Promise of Broken Windows Policing. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 2010. Being and Time. Trans., Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York Press. Hirschman, Daniel and Elizabeth Popp Berman. 2014. “Do Economists Make Policies? On the Political Effects of Economics.” Socio-Economic Review 12: 779–811.

Worldmaking in the Social Sciences 29 Huntington, Samuel. 1993. “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72:3: 22–49. Levitt, Steven D. and Stephen J. Dubner. 2005. Freakonomics. New York: Harper Perennial. MacIntyre, Alasdair. 2007. After Virtue. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Maoz, Zeev and Bruce Russett. 1993. “Normative and Structural Causes of Democratic Peace, 1946-1986.” American Political Science Review 87:3: 624–638. Panofsky, Aaron. 2014. Misbehaving Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Taylor, Charles. 1984. “Foucault on Freedom and Truth.” Political Theory 12:2: 152–183. Taylor, Charles. 1985. “Self-Interpreting Animals.” In Human Agency and Language, 45–76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weber, Max. 1999. “The Bureaucratization of Politics and the Economy.” In Essays in Economic Sociology, 109–115. Ed., Richard Swedberg. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Weber, Max. 2004. “The Vocation of Science.” In The Essential Max Weber. Ed., Sam Whimster. New York: Routledge. Wilson, James Q. and George Kelling. 2013. “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety.” In Thinking about Crime, 63–77. New York: Basic Books. Winch, Peter. 1958. The Idea of a Social Science. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

2

Hermeneutics and Polarized Identities Georgia Warnke

Introduction In a part of his 2007 book, Identity and Violence, Amartya Sen asks whether it makes sense to ask Muslim clerics to take the lead in fighting violent extremism by excommunicating those Muslims who take part in terrorist acts. His answer is no. Apostasy is a matter of basic religious belief and specified practice; it is not a matter of the correctness in interpreting social or political principles, or the rightness of civil society, or even of ­identifying what most Muslims would see as terrible civil conduct or ­abominable political behavior. (Sen 2007, 82) To conflate one’s understanding of the beliefs and practices of one’s religion with one’s understanding of the social and political principles of one’s society or with one’s civil conduct and political behavior is to suppose what Sen calls a “solitarist” view of identity (Sen 2007, xii). It attributes to individuals a single identity or at least a single fundamental identity that dictates all their views and actions. To be sure, Muslim extremists aim to fuse their version of Islam with politics and civic life and want Muslims to take their Muslim identity and, moreover, a single form of that Muslim identity, as their only identity, one that is to direct all their social and political decisions. Nevertheless, Sen argues that delegating the fight against extremism to Muslim clerics bolsters such a solitarist view rather than dismantling it: What religious extremism has done to demote and downgrade the responsible political action of citizens (irrespective of religious ethnicity) has been, to some extent, reinforced, rather than eradicated, by the attempt to fight terrorism by trying to recruit the religious establishment on “the right side.” In the downplaying of political and social identities as opposed to religious identity, it is civil society DOI: 10.4324/9781003251354-4

Hermeneutics and Polarized Identities 31 that has been the loser, precisely at a time when there is a great need to strengthen it. (Sen 2007, 83) Identities are important. They can be “a source of richness and warmth,” as Sen points out (Sen 2007, 4), connecting us to significant others and offering us a community. They can give us our bearings, help arrange the order of significances and concerns for us, and provide us with general orientations or what the hermeneutic philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer calls “horizons” for understanding and evaluation (Gadamer 1960/1992, 302). Yet Sen is not alone in his effort to remind people that they have many identities and belong to many communities. Although we may have religious identities, we also have political and social ones as well as gender, ethnic, racial, and national ones. And we possess family and personal identities: we are sons and daughters, urban and country dwellers, music lovers, perhaps, and avid swimmers. Such reminders about the multiplicity of our identities intend to discourage reductions by others or by ourselves to only one or even a few of them and to highlight the various connections we have to various others that our multiple identities involve. In contrast, even short of ­extremist ­violence, solitarist ideas about identity animate mutual estrangement and polarization. In this chapter, I want to ask whether these reminders are sufficient on their own. I begin by looking at some dimensions of contemporary polarized identities in the United States that I think serve as an example weighing against Sen’s solution. I then look briefly at Kwame Anthony Appiah’s intervention before turning to aspects of a hermeneutic approach that allow us to explore another way of understanding and approaching our identities that works against their mutual estrangement. For the most part, this analysis takes its orientation from the current role of identities in the United States. Nevertheless, a 2019 report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace found that the dangers of polarization so prominent in the United States are widespread and are “tearing at the seams of democracies around the world, from Brazil and India to Poland and Turkey” (Carothers and O’Donohue 2019). In any case, I think the claims I make about identities and their conditions have a general scope.

Identities One important advantage of acknowledging that we have a variety of identities and belong to a variety of communities is that doing so increases the possibility that these various identities can provide mediating influences on one another. If one takes seriously both one’s identity as a religious fundamentalist, for example, and one’s identity as a citizen

32  Georgia Warnke of one’s country, one may take one’s relationships with one’s fellow citizens more seriously than were one to regard those people only through one’s faith, as members of rival religions or of none. Another advantage of acknowledging one’s variety of identities and communities is that doing so allows for the way they can crosscut and moderate one another. As both a feminist and mother of sons, for example, one might be able to recognize stereotypes and excesses in some feminist views of men, on the one hand, and to call out sexist male behavior, on the other. As both a devout Catholic and a supporter of abortion rights, one might be able to perform a translation service, explaining each community or “side” to the other. In both cases, the effect of an appreciation of both identities encourages and sustains balance while working against polarization. Yet it is not clear that individuals can always depend on the multiplicity of their identities and community relationships to offer this balance. In the present United States, for example, identities are not only polarized but also sorted along two polarized lines. Evangelical, white, and conservative identities have aligned as have liberal and secular ones (Huddy and Bankert 2017, 17). If one takes a liberal position on abortion, one likely takes a liberal position on environmental protection, minimum wage laws, and capital gains taxes whereas the opposite holds if one takes a conservative position (Pildes 2011, 279). These positions are further aligned with the two American political parties: liberals currently identify with the Democratic Party and conservatives with the Republican Party (Mason 2015, 128). Moreover, these parties line up with racial and gender identities. African American women are more likely to identify with the Democratic party and white American men with the Republican (Huddy and Bankert 2017, 16). The two opposed party identities even split with regard to lifestyles and consumption patterns. According to a 2014 study, citizens in Democratic congressional districts were more likely to buy food at stores such as Whole Foods, Safeway, and Trader Joe’s while in Republican districts they were more likely to go to Walmart and Kroger. For clothes, those in Democratic districts tended to shop at American Apparel and L.L. Bean while those in Republican districts favored Belk and Old Navy (Wilson, Johnson and Rebala 2014). These all-encompassing identity alignments in the United States have increased intolerance towards those with the opposite alignments. American Republicans and Democrats like each other less and less, distrust and distance themselves from each other, and are increasingly upset at the thought of one of their children marrying someone from the other party (Iyengar and Westwood 2015, 691). Democrats find Republicans closed-minded (Pew Research Center 2016) while Republicans view Democrats members as unpatriotic, badly informed, and selfish (Iyengar and Westwood 2015, 691). Between 1960 and 2008, negative stereotyping of Republicans by Democrats and Democrats by

Hermeneutics and Polarized Identities 33 Republicans increased by 50% (Iyengar, Sood and Lelkes 2012, 16) and voters became even more hostile toward the opposing party in subsequent years (Iyengar and Krupenkin 2018, 203). Alarmingly, these developments are independent of differences or lack of differences on particular issues (Mason 2015, 141). If we want to avoid the sort of polarization that can lead to the extremism that concerns Sen, these divisions and alignments suggest that simply emphasizing our multiple identities and affiliations may not be sufficient. Americans may acknowledge their separate religious, ideological, and political party identities but if they are Evangelical Christians, conservatives, and Republicans, these now amount to the same thing. One might also recognize that one is a liberal in terms of one’s political ideology and a consumer in terms of the cars one buys, but in the United States, “Democrats…are more likely to drive hybrids or EVs… Republicans lead in the trucks, luxury, sporty and family vehicle categories” (Howard 2020). Perhaps most indicative of the scope of alignment and convergence in American identities is a famous Club for Growth TV advertisement from 2004. In it, a couple calls then U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean a “tax hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show” (Ehrenreich 2004). The assumption behind the ad is that the identity alignments on which it focuses will make sense to the voters it targets – that quite obviously those who favor higher taxes and a bigger federal government also drink lattes and that, by extension, those who favor lower taxes and smaller government prefer less effete drinks. The description also indicates that the United States may be well on its way to a deep, unbridgeable split, with one fundamental cleavage undermining the “variety of parties and interests” that James Madison, like Sen, thought could mitigate the “mischiefs of faction” (Hamilton, Madison, and Jay 1787–1788, 28). If polarized identity alignments such as those we find in the United States undermine the value Sen attaches to appealing to the multiplicity of our identities, suppose that in addition we stress their internal heterogeneity? This is the tact Kwame Anthony Appiah takes in his 2018 book The Lies that Bind. Appiah’s argument is one against essentialism, which for him is the tendency to think that once a set of people acquires a common identity, there is something about those people, some essence they share, that explains their commonalities and justifies conceiving of them in terms of that identity. But identities are simply labels, he argues, ways we have of sorting people with no core substance they need all possess. We may think, for example, that adherents of a particular religion share a set of common beliefs as the core of their shared identity. Yet although one can be a religious Jew, one can also have a Jewish identity without believing in God or accepting Maimonides’ principles of faith, nor does

34  Georgia Warnke accepting all 13 of Maimonides’ principles make one Jewish. Or take the story Appiah relates of Sen asking his grandfather about Hinduism but also informing him that he did not believe in the Hindu gods. “There you are his grandfather replied, you belong to the atheist branch of the Hindu tradition” (Appiah 2018, 37). Even Billy Graham, the American evangelist, when asked to define who evangelical Christians were in the late 1980s, replied, “Actually, that’s a question I’d like to ask somebody too” (Merritt 2015). The difficulties in defining a particular religious identity in terms of a shared core or essence extend quite obviously to racial identities. Even if one does not try to define that identity in terms of a discredited racialist conception that supposes genes come in racial packages, the difficulties are clear. One might try to define an American Black identity, for example, in terms of a distinct collection of practices, values, and beliefs. Yet which practices, values, and beliefs? Which are the ones that make one Black and can one not be Black without possessing any of them just as one can be Jewish or Hindu without believing in God? Alternatively, one might look to a definition of an American Black identity in terms of a shared cultural heritage. Nevertheless, again, what is this cultural heritage? As Tommie Shelby asks, “Should black Americans see themselves as essentially tied to Africa, and if so, what African culture(s) should be given privileged status? Can this shared identity include elements from European, Anglo-American, or Western culture and still be authentically black or must it remain, in some sense, ‘pure’? How much, if any, of the cultural legacy of slavery – for example, southern Negro folk culture – should blacks embrace?” (Shelby 2005, 225). Shelby does accept what he calls a thin conception of Black identity, one that is a “vague social marker” and can involve one or more inherited physical traits such as dark skin or tightly curled hair as well as connections to certain ancestors who are presumed to have had one of the more similar traits (Shelby 2005, 23). Still, given the variety and variability of the relevant traits, as well as the extent to which they can be shared by non-Blacks, this vague social marker cannot substitute for a shared essence. Appiah concludes that the thought that there is some common core possessed by all those with a certain racial identity or those with a certain religious identity is a 19th century invention that should be discarded (Appiah 2018, xiv). Moreover, he thinks the same holds for all our identities, including our cultural, national, and class identities. Like religions, cultures are internally diverse and this diversity characterizes not only a Black culture but also any other one as well. National identities are clearly internally diverse, despite all efforts to match nations with countries with homogeneous ethnicities. Finally, with regard to class, Appiah says that Marx’s opposition between capitalists and proletarians leaves out a number of people and that the more variables such as wealth, status, and proximity to power that one tries

Hermeneutics and Polarized Identities 35 to account for, the more heterogeneous class identity becomes (Appiah 2018, 143). Yet despite their internal diversity, Appiah sees no need to try to wean ourselves from our identities and, furthermore, no point. Instead, he thinks that we need to wean ourselves only from the idea that they involve a shared essence. Indeed, if we emphasize their heterogeneity – allowing in all our identities for the differences we recognize in a Jewish or a Black identity – then we can inhabit them in more generous and less dogmatic ways, in ways that honor the solidarity they can promote without the sectarian divisions they can empower. We can value them while recognizing that they have been and can be lived in different ways and, crucially, without assuming that the way we happen to live a particular identity or label reflects that label or exhausts that identity’s possibilities. Thus, while Sen’s advice for alleviating the potential for reductive identitarian polarization and extremism is to recognize that we possess multiple identities, Appiah’s advice is that we live all of those identities in less doctrinaire and more open-ended ways. At the same time, if Sen’s advice falters on the way our multiple identities can align themselves along a single dimension, as has been the case with regard to American social and political identities, Appiah’s falters on its optimistic confidence, for even without the sorting characteristic of American identities, identities in general show little sign of becoming less doctrinaire or more open-ended. Take the controversies within contemporary feminism over the identity of women. According to some of those who call themselves gender-critical feminists and whom their critics call Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists or TERFs, women are those born as biological females, allowing for some statistical intersex outliers (Stock 2018). The idea that one’s sense of one’s gender or, in other words, one’s gender identity should decide what gender one is and be dispositive over one’s biological sex is anti-feminist on this view; it trades on stereotypical ideas about preferences, behaviors, and modes of self-presentation that different genders should have. Sheila Jeffreys thus claims that calling trans women ‘women’ shores up “the naturalness of sex roles” and militates against the aim of feminism to abolish gender in the name of equality (Jeffreys 2014, 17). Others who deny that trans women are women stress socialization: here being a woman has less to do with biology than with being brought up as a woman, internalizing certain norms, and dealing with the sexism and deprivations this upbringing involves (Greer 2015). Nevertheless, whether the criticism objects to prioritizing gender identity over biological sex or to prioritizing gender identity over female socialization, the claim is that either prioritization threatens cis women and limits protected areas and spaces for them (Stock 2018). On the other side, anti-TERF or anti-gender critical arguments take on both biological and socialization definitions of women. Arguments against a biological definition ask which criterion one is to use to specify

36  Georgia Warnke biological sex. Are chromosomes the key? Gamete type? Testosterone levels? Bodily features? Some combination? Which combination? What if the criteria conflict? What if one’s body conforms to female stereotypes while one’s chromosomes do not, for example? (For discussion of these topics, see Karkazis 2019.) For their part, arguments against the socialization definition emphasize the various paths people can follow in becoming women. Gender socialization takes different forms in different cultures and different forms even within a single culture. Western working class female socialization can differ from Western upper class female socialization and both from Indian female socialization. Which form of gender socialization makes one a woman, then, and if more than one, what are the limits? Although these questions may be worth pursuing, much of the debate is simply vituperative. Germaine Greer sneers, “Just because you lop off your dick and then wear a dress doesn’t make you a … woman” (Abeni 2015) while some of those critical of TERFs or gender-critical feminists advocate deplatforming, sanctioning, and boycotting their academic and public presentations, even on unrelated topics. On the one hand, even a discussion of the question of what makes someone a woman is deemed “complicity with systemic violence and active encouragement of oppression” (Lance 2019). On the other hand, Greer writes, “I’ve asked my doctor to give me long ears and liver spots and I’m going to wear a brown coat but that won’t turn me into a …cocker spaniel” (Abeni 2015). Against Appiah’s call to acknowledge an identity’s capacious character, then, identitarian dogmatism and mutual vilification predominate with regard to both what it is to be a woman and what it is to be a feminist. Indeed, while Appiah’s attempt is to open up the bounds of our various identities, prevailing identitarian tendencies seem closer to George Orwell’s complaint about Socialists: for them, he said, “the whole Socialist movement is no more than a kind of exciting ­heresy-hunt—a leaping to and fro of frenzied witch-doctors to the beat of tom-toms and the tune of ‘Fee fi, fo, fum, I smell the blood of a rightwing deviationist!’” (Orwell 1933, 200). In what follows, I want to ask whether, in order to mitigate the extremism, sectarianism, and polarization to which identitarian thinking can lead, we can do more than emphasize the multiplicity of our identities, as Sen does, or plead for their open character, as Appiah does. What about taking seriously a hermeneutic approach that delimits their place? Identities, whether multiple and generous or not, are ways we identify ourselves and others. We identify ourselves and others as gays, conservatives, Muslims, and the like. Yet to identify ourselves and others in certain ways is to understand ourselves and others in certain ways. To identify as gay or conservative is to understand oneself as gay or conservative and to identify another person as gay or conservative is to understand them in this way. It is not the only way of understanding

Hermeneutics and Polarized Identities 37 them or us as Sen points out and the specific content of an understanding of gayness or conservativeness must be open-ended as Appiah stresses. Nevertheless, it is at this point that a hermeneutic approach becomes relevant. If identities are ways of understanding others and ourselves, we can ask what the conditions of this understanding are. In other words, we can ask what the conditions of identities are and what must hold of them if they are forms of understanding. I begin with the traditional home base of hermeneutics in its account of understanding the meanings of texts.

Hermeneutic Understanding The German hermeneutic tradition’s account of understanding texts stresses the circle of whole and part (Schleiermacher 1838/1998). In ­trying to understand the meaning of a text, we project a preliminary or skeletal meaning for it as a whole on the basis of its title or first few paragraphs and we use this skeletal understanding as an orientation to the following paragraphs. If these fail to cohere with or amplify the title or first few paragraphs as we have understood them, we revise our understanding of the meaning of one or the other: either the title and first paragraphs or the subsequent ones. On the basis of its initial paragraphs, for example, we may take a particular article to be a technical piece on groundwater seepage and we may assume that its following paragraphs will provide further details while raising some issues for further exploration. If instead these next paragraphs describe certain dance exercises (as a paper printed in one of the journals published by Springer Nature does (Bartlett, 2021)), we may need to reconsider what sort of text it is and revise our understanding of either these latter paragraphs or the first ones so that we can integrate the subsequent paragraphs with them as parts of an internally unified text. We continue on in this fashion, trying to integrate subsequent parts of a text with the parts the meaning of which we think we grasp and then revising our understanding of either first or subsequent parts where necessary until we have an understanding of the text as a coherent whole. Even when our interest is in deconstructing a text or in showing the way in which its language undermines its surface unity, we must still locate this surface unity in order to understand what it is that is undermined. Of course, in the end a particular text may not compose a unity at all. As Tom Bartlett describes the paper in the Springer Nature journal, It begins with a highly technical section about groundwater seepage before delving into a lively discussion of dance training. The paper shifts back and forth between the two topics, informing the reader about rare-earth elements before urging dancers to “tighten buttocks” during warm-ups. There are tables and graphs, citations

38  Georgia Warnke and hyperlinks. It’s all very sober and scientific-seeming and yet, at the same time, completely bonkers. (Bartlett 2021) Where a text, as we understand it, shifts back and forth between topics without any evidence we can find of a unifying thread, our inability to integrate the topics into a cohesive meaning may oblige us to come to the same conclusion: the text is “bonkers.” Yet this obligation also indicates the reverse: where a text is intelligible to us it is because we can understand how its parts fit together and because we can understand it as an integration of its parts while understanding those parts in terms of their meaning within the integrated whole. As the founder of modern hermeneutics Friedrich Schleiermacher puts the point, “Complete knowledge is always in an apparent circle, that each particular can be understood only via the general, of which it is a part, and vice versa” (Schleiermacher 1838/1998, 24). Here Schleiermacher underscores the contextual nature of our understanding of a particular part of a text. If we understand the whole as the integration of its “particulars,” we understand each particular “only via the general, of which it is a part.” In other words, what a particular part means to us, it means only as part of a particular whole and as a contribution to the meaning of that particular whole. Take the famous “The Whiteness of the Whale” chapter of Moby Dick describing Ishmael’s dread of the color white. For Ishmael, white is a reflection of “the heartless voids and immensities of the universe,” a reflection that “stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation” (Melville 1851/2003, 211). Together with our understanding of other parts of the novel, emphasizing this description supports an understanding of the whole of the novel as a campaign against this white void, as “an existential voyage to see if life has any meaning” (Bellot 2019). The meaning we see in the chapter is thus part of and significant for the meaning we see in the whole. At the same time, the meaning we see in the whole is the unified structure within which our understanding of the chapter and its account of the color white belongs. We understand the meaning of the chapter and the color white in terms of and as support for the meaning we ascribe to the novel as a whole. What the chapter or the color means for the novel, then, it means only within the novel. Indeed, outside of Moby Dick, the color white can and does have very different meanings. Characters within a novel are also part of the reciprocal relation between part and whole. Who they are, they are only within the novel to the meaning of which they contribute. Thus, Ahab is captain of the Pequod and Queequeg the son of a South Sea chieftain only within the context of Moby Dick. Furthermore, if we understand the meaning of Moby Dick as an existential voyage, we can see Ahab as an existential hero whose quest to kill the white whale is an effort to strike a blow

Hermeneutics and Polarized Identities 39 against what Ishamel sees as the “heartless voids” and give Ahab’s life meaning. Nevertheless, he has this meaning or identity only in the context of our understanding of Moby Dick as a whole. Moby Dick cannot be the novel we understand it to be without Ahab (together with the other parts of the novel such as the meaning of the color white.) Yet nor can Ahab have the identity we take him to have outside of our understanding of Moby Dick. We cannot extract him from the novel and deposit him, say, in The Mill on the Floss and suppose that he maintains his identity. How we understand characters in a text or, in other words, their meaning or identity for us is thus contextual; they are who they are only as a part within our understanding of a particular text or whole for which our understanding of them composes a contributing part. Our understanding of Moby Dick is conditioned by our understanding of Ahab, Ishmael, and Queequeg and the way the understanding of their characters integrates with other parts of the text to create a meaningful whole. At the same time, they cannot have the identities they have outside of the novel. If our understanding of literary characters is thus contextual, so too is our understanding of features of our world outside of texts. Michael Walzer (1993) offers the example of a religious altar. The “holiness” of an altar, he says, is “one feature of a more complex whole” or “set of connected constructions: socially meaningful occasions (holy days), spaces (churches), officials (priests and bishops), performances (religious services), texts (scriptures, prayers, homilies, catechisms), and beliefs (theologies or cosmologies)” (Walzer 1993, 168). Altars, holy days, spaces, officials, performances, and beliefs compose what we understand as a religious whole or context, and the religious context, in turn, gives these elements their meaning. Outside of this context, we may view the altar as a beautiful table but insofar as it lacks the “whole” that gives it a religious meaning, we cannot understand it as an altar. Hence, it cannot have the identity of an altar any more than Ahab can have the identity of Ahab in The Mill on the Floss. Moreover, as it does with regard to the character of Ahab in Moby Dick, this mutually constitutive function of context and feature extends to the officials involved, to the priests, rabbis, and the like. Although there are certainly religious contexts that do not require religious officials, where individuals possess identities as religious officials, they serve with other elements to constitute the religious whole. By the same token, these identities, these ways of self-identifying and identifying others, are plausible ways of understanding oneself and others only as insofar as they constitute parts of religious wholes. In the same way as characters in a text, individuals possess these identities as parts within a specific context. These hermeneutic conditions for the identities of religious officials can be generalized: who we are, our ways of understanding ourselves and being understood by others, are parts of contexts outside of which

40  Georgia Warnke the identities that are constituted by and are constitutive of those contexts lose their sense. In other words, intelligibly identifying others or oneself as something requires their or our participation in a whole of which they or we can be a part. On a cultural and historical level, this point is familiar. One cannot be a religious official in a culture that has no religion. Nor can one intelligibly understand oneself or possess the identity of a feudal knight without a social and cultural nexus that includes the feudal assumptions, norms, and structures that provide the necessary whole or context of which one’s identity as a feudal knight can be a comprehensible part. Outside of this cultural and historical context, one can tilt at windmills but one cannot be or be intelligibly understood as a feudal knight. Yet the same holds for the multiple identities one possesses within a culture. If our identities as priests and rabbis are what they are only as parts of a religious context, our identities as professors and students, for example, are what they are only as parts of contexts of learning and our identities as nurses and patients are what they are only as parts of a medical context. These identities as professors and students, nurses and patients are parts of what compose the respective wholes and, in turn, they are the identities they are within those wholes. If one is asked who one is at a wedding, intelligible answers are usually closer to “a bridesmaid” or “a friend of the couple,” than to “a stamp collector” or “a Democrat.” Of course, if one is shopping in a grocery store and is wearing a clerical collar or bumps into one of one’s students, one may be recognized as the minister in one’s church or one’s professor. Nevertheless, neither is an identity that has any purchase on, or meaning within, the context. While shopping for groceries, one is a shopper like everyone else engaged in that activity. The attempt to convert random strangers in the checkout line to one’s religion or to lecture them on Kant’s antinomies will be met with a puzzlement that underscores the incongruity between the attempt to be and to be understood as the particular identity and the context within which it has no role or meaning. This incongruity also explains the experience we sometimes have where we fail to recognize people we know when we encounter them outside of the contexts in which we normally interact with them and it also explains the embarrassment or discomfort we often feel on meeting our students or religious leaders outside of the context in which they and we possess the appropriate identities. Indeed, both are at least somewhat akin to meeting Ahab in The Mill on the Floss. To be sure, if insisting on our religious identity while shopping or trying to read Ahab into The Mill on the Floss reflects a failure to integrate part and whole and is thus “bonkers” to use Bartlett’s term, this assessment does not entail that we can understand either the parts of wholes or the wholes of which they are parts always in only one canonical way. Despite Schleiermacher’s reference to “complete knowledge,” we can

Hermeneutics and Polarized Identities 41 understand and have understood the novel Moby Dick in different ways: in addition to understanding it as a cry against meaninglessness, we can understand it as a revenge story, for example, or a depiction of the sublime (Glenn 1976). Accordingly, we can understand and have understood Ahab in many different ways as well: in addition to understanding him as someone trying to give his life meaning, we might understand him as a sublime figure or as a “singularly self-righteous man” who confuses his “blind hate” with justice (Kim 2019). An inability to integrate part and whole indicates a failure of understanding, whether because the text in question does not comprise a unified whole or because one’s own ability to understand it is inadequate. Still, as Gadamer, who was one of Schleiermacher’s 20th century successors, makes clear, a particular success in integrating part and whole does not preclude other successful integrations (Gadamer 1960/1992, 296–297). Rather different interpreters will approach texts from different horizons of understanding that emerge from different histories and experiences as well as from different concerns and interests. Interpreters will consequently emphasize the importance of the overall meaning of a text of different parts of it and will take as constitutive of the meaning of identical parts a different understanding of the whole. The same holds with regard to identities as professors, nurses, and so on. Some might understand the sphere of higher learning as an endeavor devoted to knowledge and see professors as guides to their own knowledge and intellectual development while others may see higher learning in career terms and understand professors as tickets to a degree. Some may understand modern medicine as the mostly successful practice of diagnosing, treating, and preventing disease and nurses as health providers while others may understand modern medicine as a mostly useless practice and nurses as charlatans who invent disorders and pathologize normal conditions (Stegenga 2018, 47). In each case, however, the identities are dependent on context as parts of a whole and we can thus intelligibly possess them only as parts of specific and delimited spheres, no matter how we understand those spheres and the meaning our identities have in them. What about what appear to be more fundamental identities such as gender and racial identities? Do these have a non-contextual meaning? Sen reminds us that these are only some of our identities while Appiah suggests that we learn to live them in capacious terms. A hermeneutic approach allows us to make two additional points. First, attention to context gives us grounds for this capaciousness. Take the issue of sex/ gender identity that sets different camps of feminists against one another. According to philosopher Paul Griffiths, biologists divide sexes by looking at the ways organisms organize their DNA into gametes: males produce small gametes and females produce large ones (Griffiths 2020). To this extent, it seems that biologists agree with gender-critical feminists

42  Georgia Warnke or TERFs. Yet Griffiths also denies that this division means that every living creature is either male or female: nematode worms are either male or hermaphrodite and among other species there are simultaneous hermaphrodites that are both male and female, sequential hermaphrodites that are first one sex and then the other, and individual organisms that are neither male nor female. More to the point, Griffiths explains that although the definition of sexes according to gamete production serves biologists well, its scope is not universal: While the biological definition of sex is needed to understand the diversity of life, that doesn’t mean it’s the best definition for ensuring fair competition in sport or adequate access to healthcare. We can’t expect sporting codes, medical systems and family law to adopt a definition simply because biologists find it useful. (Griffiths 2020) What it is to be male, female, both, or neither – or a man, woman, nonbinary, and so on – just as what it is to be Ahab, will differ according to the different concerns, interests, and perspectives motivating the understandings of the context or wholes of which the understanding of the person is a part. If for biologists, what is it to be male is to produce small gametes and what it is to be female is to produce large ones, these understandings rely on the biologists’ understanding of the ­diversity-of-life whole that is their concern and interest. This whole or context, however, need not dictate the understanding of sex and gender identities by the International Olympic Committee or social justice organizations insofar as these take different contexts as their concern. We can naturally question these contexts and the way the organizations understand both it and the parts that belong to it. Nevertheless, this point does not undermine the hermeneutic argument that how we understand sex and gender and who we understand as male, female, nonbinary, men, and women will depend upon context. Or as Griffiths writes, “There’s no need to reject how biologists define the sexes to defend the view that trans women are women” (Griffiths 2020). A second hermeneutic point is that we might also recognize the limited spheres in which we can intelligibly possess sex and gender identities at all, however we define them. As understandings of who individuals are, sexed and/or gendered understandings are intelligible only in terms of specific contexts or wholes. Indeed, we might define discrimination against people due to their identity in just these hermeneutic terms: as a failure to integrate part and whole. Thus, while it might make sense to identify oneself or another person as a woman in certain contexts such as biological examinations of two distinct strategies that organisms use to propagate their genes, to define someone as a woman in the context of their application for a job or place at a university is to mistake the

Hermeneutics and Polarized Identities 43 identity they have in those contexts. They are applicants, not genders. Similarly, in a society that has inherited racial concepts that were used to enslave and oppress people, there are contexts in which others or oneself might intelligibly hold an identity as a Black. In the United States, celebrations of Juneteenth might exemplify one such occasion. To be sure, even if confined to contexts in which racial identities make sense, such identifications and self-identifications cannot define the identities too narrowly, as Appiah advises. To insist, for example, that only those all of whose direct ancestors were enslaved will count as Black Americans in the context of celebrating Juneteenth is overly strict. Nevertheless, the sarcastically phrased American crime of “driving while Black” makes the contextual point well. In the context of driving, we are drivers just as we are shoppers while shopping. A practice of racial profiling that understands individuals as Black people in the context of driving fails to integrate part and whole and hence misidentifies who they are. Thus, although we can understand what constitutes a racial or gender identity differently, in very many contexts it makes no sense to identify someone in racial or sex and gender terms at all. Of course, the attempt to use textual interpretation as a model for identity – whether racial, gender, professional, or whatever – may seem to ignore what would appear to be a sharp difference between textual contexts and extra-textual contexts. The specific and delimited sphere that constitutes the context for which literary characters are parts is determined by the text. Nevertheless, texts are bounded in a way that extra-textual contexts are not. To be sure, we can understand the same text in different ways but however we understand it, it remains the context for its characters. Nevertheless, while a text is bounded by its two covers, however we interpret it, extra-textual contexts are unbounded. Who is to say that a grocery store might not one day become a church and the identities intelligible within it become religious ones? After all, as consumers we already seem to worship the commodity. Moreover, is it not in part because identities that were formerly unintelligible as parts of certain contexts insist on intruding into them that contexts change? Citizens may not have been recognized parts of the prerevolutionary French absolutist monarchy, under which people were more subjects than citizens. Yet in part by emphasizing their identities as citizens, citizens abolished the very forms of government under which they did not exist (Merrick 1990, 455). What are the implications, then, of claiming that identities are constituted by the whole of which they are parts even as they help to constitute those wholes? Does this analysis not preclude changing those wholes? This question is closely related to a second one: how are we to determine the appropriate whole for identities in the first place? Why is Juneteenth and not highway patrol an appropriate whole for Black American identities, for example? Moreover, if we can understand both

44  Georgia Warnke texts and contexts in different ways, why might we not understand the U.S. policing as an inherently racist activity and consequently as the whole within which a Black driver is a part so that being a Black person while driving a car is a coherent integration of part and whole? One might try to argue that American policing is not only a context within which we can define identities, not only a whole for which certain identities are the parts. It is also itself a part within the larger whole of the U.S. criminal justice system while that criminal justice system is itself a part within the larger whole of American justice, which is itself a part ultimately of American history and society. As a part, then, what we take the U.S. policing to be we must be able to integrate within a nesting of progressively larger wholes. Yet, here again, many people would deny that racial profiling by the police reflects a conflict here. In this view, the criminal justice system is biased against individuals it considers Black and the United States has a racist history and is a racist society. Systemic racism pervades its every pore and racial profiling is ultimately consistent with the larger racist contexts of which it is a part so that understanding someone as a Black person in the context of driving is always a coherent identification (see Gooding-Williams 2010, 592). These two questions – why not allow for the possibility that our identities can change the contexts within which they cannot currently be parts so that they become intelligible parts and how do we determine the context for our identities in the first place – stem from the same circumstance. The issue in each case is that the contexts for our identities are not predetermined and do not remain fixed. Why is it American policing and not American racism that is the contest for the capacity to drive while being Black? And why should American Blacks accept this context? To answer the first question, we can emphasize the skewering punch that the phrase “driving while Black” delivers. Were we to insist it is American systemic racism rather than driving that constitutes the appropriate whole within which to contextualize an identity as a Black driver, we would fail to account for this punch, a punch that stems precisely from the failure of part and whole to cohere. Indeed, one need not deny the existence of racism in the United States to see a difference between the phrase “driving while Black” and “driving while unlicensed” or “driving while inebriated.” This difference suggests that the whole of which policing is an intelligible part is not systemic racism and, consequently, that the part for which policing is the whole cannot be a racialized identity. At the same time, to turn to the second question, one might look to the history of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States to argue that the skewering nature of the punch delivered by the phrase “driving while Black” is a historical development and, moreover, that the development was made possible precisely by the insistence of individuals on identities discordant with a whole that could not accommodate them. On this

Hermeneutics and Polarized Identities 45 analysis, the courage of Black activists in the 1950s and 1960s in insisting on their identities as equal citizens even within a context that comprised legally sanctioned segregationist practices and institutions forced Americans to revise that context at least partially. The parts altered a whole so that it had to include them in a way Ahab could never alter The Mill on the Floss to force it to include him. Nevertheless, another way of looking at Black activist courage is to suggest that Black activists understood themselves as parts of a larger whole within which it was segregationist practices and institutions that did not fit as parts. The activists’ claim was that the United States needed to live up to that whole the ideals of which it articulated in its founding documents – that is, it needed to “achieve” its country, as James Baldwin put it (1962, 105), or “rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed,” as Martin Luther King Jr. put it (1963) and hence to do away with the disjunct between the whole as expressed in its ideals and the parts as revealed in segregationist practices and institutions. On this alternative analysis, progress in civil rights issued not from discordant identities within a racist whole that sought to change it to include them but from identities who understand themselves and forced others to understand them as already parts of a larger whole within which it was racism that was the discordant part. Even if this alternative understanding is a plausible interpretation of the reforms made possible by the Civil Rights Movement, it remains the case that while history, and the relation between whole and parts within it, might be analogous to a book, it is an unfinished book. We do not and cannot know what the final whole of history will be and hence cannot know what our future identities as parts within it will be. One can point to the 2020 protests that arose across the United States following the death at the hands of the police of yet another Black victim, George Floyd, as well as efforts to reform police departments in many U.S. cities to argue that the understanding of the whole remains one characterized by aspirations toward social justice. Given two options, either revising our understanding of the part, namely, identities as Black drivers and Black citizens, or revising our understanding of the whole so that American society is explicitly racist and certain people are always Black, the first appears to be the trajectory on the United States is currently embarked. The effort to “achieve our country” currently continues on the path set out by the Civil Rights Movement, one that means achieving coherence of identities and the whole of which they are a part by understanding that whole in terms of the commitment to principles of egalitarian justice and revising the parts so that they consist of non-racialized identities. Nevertheless, a hermeneutic approach to identities clearly cannot provide a guarantee. The future direction for integrating part and whole and for deciding the character of that whole as well as the identities that compose it are in the hands of people, not theories.

46  Georgia Warnke

Conclusion One of the points Sen stresses in Identity and Violence is the need to make choices between our various identities. Although we have multiple identities, some will be more significant to us than others. Moreover, we may need to decide which of our identities are most significant to us in which contexts. In the context of fascist Italy, Sen’s father-in-law had to weigh the relative importance of his identities as an Italian, philosopher, academic, democrat, and socialist. He discarded philosopher and academic and joined the Italian resistance (Sen 2007, 30). Other choices between identities are less momentous. “For example, when going to a dinner, one’s identity as a vegetarian may be rather more crucial than one’s identity as a linguist, whereas the latter may be particularly important if one considers going to a lecture on linguistic studies” (see 2007, 25). This reminder of the contexts in which different identities that we possess become more or less salient is important. Yet a hermeneutic approach shows that context informs not only the salience of our identities but also their intelligibility. Identities are ways of understanding who we and others are. As forms of understanding, they necessarily comply with contextual conditions that hermeneutics explores. Contextuality is thus not simply a feature that makes one or another of them more or less important under particular conditions. It rather constitutes their capacity to have a meaning at all. We may take certain of our identities as fundamental to who we are and as the most important to us. Indeed, our racial, gender, religious, and political identities may be of such importance to us that we think we would not be who we are without them. Yet their importance to us does not mean that they have meaning in all contexts. Despite its divergence from Sen’s analysis, this conclusion reinforces the arguments he and Appiah make. Sen emphasizes the multiplicity of our identities. Yet, his analysis has no way of countering the stacking of our identities along a single dimension so that the value of their multiplicity disappears. A hermeneutic approach, in contrast, restricts identities to the specific spheres within which they have their meaning. Without that context, we have no identity at all, just as Ahab has no identity outside of Moby Dick. To insist on a solitarist identity that holds across all circumstances and contexts is thus not only extremist but unintelligible. For his part and against the rigidity with which we hold to our identities, Appiah emphasizes their porous and open nature. Yet to those who deny this nature, Appiah has no answer. Again, a hermeneutic approach can go a step further. To hold an identity dogmatically is to violate its conditions. Identities are understandings of meanings and meanings can be understood in different ways. Not all understandings will be plausible – Moby Dick is not Mill on the Floss and Ahab cannot be misidentified

Hermeneutics and Polarized Identities 47 as Maggie Tulliver. Still, the history of humanistic disciplines shows us that more than one understanding of how a particular part and whole cohere with one another is possible. Understanding is both contextual and horizonal. We understand parts in terms of whole and wholes in terms of part and we do so from a particular perspective with particular concerns and interests that allow for more than one plausible account. Were we to transfer the recognition of these hermeneutic conditions of understanding to our identities, we might be able to avoid polarization and the extremist violence to which identities can lead.

References Abeni, Gleis. 2015. “Feminist Germaine Greer Goes on Anti-Trans Rant Over Caitlyn Jenner.” In The Advocate (October). https://www.advocate.com/ caitlyn-jenner/2015/10/26/feminist-germaine-greer-goes-anti-trans-rantover-caitlyn-jenner. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2018. The Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity. New York: Norton and Norton. Baldwin, James 1962. The First Next Time. New York: Vintage International Bartlett, Tom. 2021. “The Mysterious Case of the Nonsense Papers: A Peerreviewed Journal Published Hundreds of Them.” The Chronicle of Higher Education (September 28). Bellot, Gabrielle. 2019. “The Literal (and Figurative) Whiteness of Moby Dick.” Literary Hub (August 1). Carothers, Thomas and Andrew O’Donohue. 2019. “How to Understand the Global Spread of Political Polarization.” https://carnegieendowment. org/2019/10/01/how-to-understand-global-spread-of-political-polarization-pub-79893 (October 1). Ehrenreich, Barbara. 2004. “Dude, Where’s the Elite.” The New York Times (July 1). Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1960/1992. Truth and Method. Revised Translation by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Crossroad Publishing Company. Glenn, Barbara. 1976. “Melville and the Sublime in Moby-Dick.” American Literature. Vol. 48, No. 2 (May), 165–182. Gooding-Williams, Robert. 2010. “After Identity: Rethinking Race, Sex, and Gender by Georgia Warnke.” Constellations. Vol. 17, No. 4 (December), 589–594. Greer, Germain. 2015. BBC Interview (October 23). https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=7B8Q6D4a6TM. Griffiths, Paul. 2020. “Sex Is Real.” Aeon (September 21). https://aeon.co/essays/ the-existence-of-biological-sex-is-no-constraint-on-human-diversity. Howard, Bill. 2020. “Vehicles and Voting: What Your Car Might Say about How You’ll Vote.” Forbes Wheels (October 1). https://www.forbes.com/wheels/news/ what-your-car-might-say-about-how-you-vote. Huddy, Leonie and Alexa Bankert. 2017. “Political Partisanship as a Social Identity.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics (May 24).

48  Georgia Warnke Iyengar, Shanto and Masha Krupenkin. 2018. “The Strengthening of Partisan Affect.” Advances in Political Psychology. Vol. 39, No. Suppl. 1, 201–218. Iyengar, Shanto and Sean J. Westwood. 2015. “Fear and Loathing across Party Lines: New Evidence on Group Polarization.” American Journal of Political Science. Vol. 59, No. 3, 690–707. Iyengar, Shanto, Gaurav Sood, and Yphtach Lelkes. 2012. “Affect, Not Ideology A Social Identity Perspective on Polarization.” Public Opinion Quarterly. Jeffreys, Sheila. 2014. Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism. New York: Routledge. Karkazis, Katrina. 2019. The Misuses of “Biological Sex.” The Lancet. Vol. 394, No. 10212 (November 23), 1898–1899. Kim, Seong-kon. 2019. “Captain Ahab and the White Whale.” In Korean Herald (June 4). King, Martin Luther Jr. 1963. “I have a Dream,” delivered August 28, 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D.C. https://www.americanrhetoric.com/ speeches/mlkihaveadream.htm. Lance, Mark. 2019. “Taking Trans Lives Seriously.” Inside Higher Ed (July, 30). www.insidehighered.com/views/2019/07/30/philosophers-should-recognizeserious-risks-trans-people-face-opinion. Madison, James. 1787–1788. “Federalist 10: The Same Subject Continued.” In The Federalist Papers. Edited by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay. Zurich: International Relations and Security Network. https://www. files.ethz.ch/isn/125481/5008_Federalist%20Papers.pdf. Mason, Lilliana. 2015. “I Disrespectfully Agree”: The Differential Effects of Partisan Sorting on Social and Issue Polarization. American Journal of Political Science. Vol. 59, No. 1, 128–145. Melville, Herman. 1851/2003. Moby-Dick. New York: Bantam Books. Merrick, Jeffrey. 1990. “Subjects and Citizens in the Remonstrances of the Parlement of Paris in the Eighteenth Century.” Journal of the History of Ideas. Vol. 51, No. 3 (July–September 1990), 453–460. Merritt, Jonathan. 2015. “Defining Evangelical.” In The Atlantic (December 7). https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/12/evangelical-christian/418236. Orwell, George. 1933. The Road to Wigan Pier. Project Gutenberg of Australia. https://libcom.org/files/wiganpier.pdf. Pew Research Center. 2016. “Partisan Stereotypes, Views of Republicans and Democrats as Neighbors.” http://www.people-press.org/2016/06/22/4-­ partisan-stereotypes-views-of-republicans-and-democrats-as-neighbors. Pildes, Richard H. 2011. “Why the Center Does Not Hold: The Causes of Hyperpolarized Democracy in America.” California Law Review. Vol. 99, No. 2 (April), 273–333. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 1838/1998. Hermeneutics and Criticism and Other Writings. Translated and edited by Andrew Bowie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sen, Amartya. 2007. Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny. New York: W.W. Norton. Shelby, Tommie. 2005. We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Stegenga, Jacob. 2018. Medical Nihilism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hermeneutics and Polarized Identities 49 Stock, Kathleen. 2018. “Changing the Concept of “Woman” Will Cause Unintended Harms.” The Economist (July 6). https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/07/06/changing-the-concept-of-womanwill-cause-unintended-harms. Walzer, Michael. 1993. “Objectivity and Social Meaning.” In The Quality of Life. Edited by Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 158–177. Wilson, Chris, David Johnson, and Pratheek Rebala. 2014. “Are You a J. Crew Democrat or a Pizza Hut Republican?” Time (November 6). https://time .com/3559482/stores-politics/#57.

Part II

Non-Relativist, Realist, and Non-Anthropocentric Approaches

3

A Hermeneutics of Dialogical Understanding in the “Post-Truth” Era Ontology, Epistemology, and Ethics Hanna Meretoja

Introduction We live in a strange world – one dominated by what has been dubbed a “post-truth” era. Scholars who have problematized the notion of scientific objectivity are now commonly blamed for contributing to “truth decay” (Kakutani 2018). Some critics have linked “interpretativism” to the position that denies the existence of facts and fuels distrust in science (see e.g. Macintyre 2018, 144; D’Ancona 2017). Allegedly, competing narratives have now taken the place of truth and facts. According to Michiko Kakutani, for example, “there are no more objective truths anymore—only different perceptions and different story lines” (2018, 160). In such criticism, poststructuralism and hermeneutics are often lumped together and merged under the general rubric of “postmodern” thought, which is seen as a key culprit of the “interpretativism” that reigns in the “post-truth” era. Against such a tendency, I will suggest that hermeneutics, in fact, provides a way out of central impasses to which poststructuralist thinking has led, namely, the impasses of reification of social systems, of relativism, and of seeing all knowledge and understanding as inherently violent. I will argue that crucial here are differences in the poststructuralist and hermeneutic conceptions of language and of symbolic systems more broadly. When poststructuralism dominated critical theory, there was a strong tendency to emphasize that we are mere effects of social structures, which entailed that there was little room left for subjectivity or agency and social structures were easily reified (see Berger and Luckmann 1987), that is, seen as existing independent of human actions. Second, poststructuralism led, many felt, to a “prison-house of language” (Jameson 1972; see also Habermas 1987; Hacking 1999) and hence to the problem of relativism. Third, the poststructuralist emphasis on the inherent violence of all symbolic systems has led to the problem of how to theorize the possibility of ethical understanding of DOI: 10.4324/9781003251354-6

54  Hanna Meretoja the other. While many intellectuals and journalists are now calling for a return from relativism and interpretativism to facts, objectivity, and truth, I suggest that hermeneutics provides a way out of the poststructuralist impasses without falling back on the problematic dichotomies between subjectivity and objectivity or realism and relativism. In critical theory, at the same time, some scholars who identify with the posthuman or new materialist approach are now calling for a turn from “textualism” to materialist ontology, which is seen as a turn from language and texts to reality, matter, and the so-called real world, whereby they risk reinserting a problematic opposition between meaning and matter, or – as Sara Ahmed (2008, 35) puts it, reintroducing to critical theory a “binarism of materiality and culture.” While their point about the need to critically engage with the anthropocentrism of the traditions of humanism we have inherited is legitimate, it is unclear how turning away from issues of interpretation would serve this goal. If we are not attentive to the ways in which we interpret the world, we are likely to be blind to our habits and practices of interpretation and simply perpetuate them. It seems to me that posthumanism would benefit precisely from a critical analysis of our interpretative practices, including our narrative practices and their anthropomorphic aspects. In this chapter, I argue that philosophical hermeneutics provides a valuable way out of the impasses of the poststructuralist paradigm without reinserting a meaning-matter binary that we should have left behind by now. It acknowledges that we are culturally, historically, and socially conditioned while at the same time theorizes the way in which we are always fundamentally interpretative agents. It thereby provides a solution to three key theoretical dilemmas we were left with after poststructuralism: how to make room for agency, for a joint pursuit of truth, and for the possibility of ethical understanding of the other. I will discuss, in turn, each of these three aspects, which concern respectively the ontological, epistemological, and ethical significance of hermeneutics for our current understanding of human existence in cultural webs of meaning, of the possibility of shared knowledge, and of the ways we can encounter others in a nonviolent manner.

A hermeneutic ontology of human reality: addressing the problem of agency A central ontological question for humanities and social sciences is the question concerning the nature of human reality and of our existence as cultural and social beings. From the 1960s onwards, the “death of the subject” debate has had a strong effect on how this question has been perceived in these fields. The poststructuralist paradigm questioned the idea of the subject as a source of meaning. While phenomenology was interested in the constituting powers of the subject, poststructuralists saw the

A Hermeneutics of Dialogical Understanding 55 subject as constituted. Jacques Derrida (1973, 84) encapsulates this shift polemically by stating: “The concept of subjectivity belongs a priori and in general to the order of the constituted. […] There is no constituting subjectivity.” Similarly, Michel Foucault (1980/1969, 138) argues that “the subject (and its substitutes) must be stripped of its creative role and analyzed as a complex and variable function of discourse.” The shift towards emphasizing the constituted character of the subject radicalized those traditions of thought that had, since Marxism, foregrounded the social, historical, and cultural conditionedness of agency, presenting the subject less as an active center of meaning-giving and self-fashioning than as a product, effect, or function of social systems and discourses. The poststructuralist paradigm thereby radically decentered the subject and questioned the view of the subject as a self-reflective agent who can practice creative and subversive powers as it takes part in the making of society and history. This, however, led to the problem of how to account for the agency that subjects nevertheless seem to have: we are not entirely determined by the power structures in which we find ourselves but can also resist and challenge them. Such possibility of resistance is arguably implicit in the poststructuralist critique. Foucault, for example, suggests that the historical “ontology of the present” (2001, 1506–1507) allows seeing the historical processes that have constituted the current social structures, which, in turn, allows seeing how things could be otherwise. Poststructuralists, however, did not explicitly theorize or conceptualize the possibility of agency and subversive interpretation. An important challenge for post-poststructuralist critical debate is hence how to acknowledge both how the subject is constituted in and through socio-historically formed symbolic structures and practices of power and how the subject is capable of agency, active sense-making, and ethical self-reflection. The strength of a hermeneutic approach to subjectivity is precisely that it allows for agency and processuality – seeing the subject’s being in terms of a constantly revised process of interpretation – while at the same time envisaging the subject as fundamentally relational, as simultaneously constituted by a complex network of socio-historical forces and intersubjective frameworks, and as an agent who participates in constituting them. It is one of the central tenets of contemporary hermeneutics that systems of meaning and cultural models of sense-making are actualized only when they are interpreted in concrete situations. In other words, hermeneutics emphasizes that symbolic systems only exist through being used and interpreted in particular sociocultural situations. These interpretative acts are never simply mechanical; hence, all understanding is characterized by the structure of “always-understandingdifferently [Immer-anders-Verstehen]” (Gadamer 1993a/1985, 8). This insight allows us to acknowledge both the dependency of the individual subject on social structures and the dialectical dependency of the social structures on the continuous interpretative process in which individual

56  Hanna Meretoja subjects are engaged. Hence, according to the hermeneutic ontology of human reality, agents and symbolic systems are mutually dependent. This ontology avoids the reification of symbolic systems (which is a risk in poststructuralism) and anthropomorphization of non-human material reality (which is a risk in new materialist approaches). That symbolic systems only exist through processes of interpretation is an insight that has strong emancipatory potential because it means that agents of interpretation have power to change social systems. As Manfred Frank (1989/1984, 6) writes, “precisely this is the fundamental idea of hermeneutics, namely, that symbolic orders, as opposed to natural laws, are founded in interpretations; hence […] they can be transformed and transgressed by new projections of meaning.” Interpretation can perpetuate dominant practices of sense-making but it also involves the possibility of interpreting otherwise – the possibility of critical, creative, and subversive interpretations. From the perspective of hermeneutics, our relationship to cultural models of sense-making is fundamentally dialogical because it involves a process of interpreting them in certain situations, and these processes of interpretation, in turn, participate in shaping the cultural models of sense-making. This is a reciprocal process: symbolic systems affect us, but we also affect them through the ways in which we actualize them in our everyday lives. There are, of course, important differences in whether our reinterpretations of dominant models perpetuate the models or challenge them. Sometimes the application of a general model of sense-making can be more or less an act of subsumption, that is, of subsuming a particular situation under the general model, but often our engagement with such general models also involves processes of non-subsumptive interpretation whereby acts of interpretation can show the inadequacy of culturally available models and participate in transforming them. For example, if our loved ones fall ill with Covid-19 and are hospitalized, we may apply the dominant cultural model of battling illness, saying something like “Now you just have to fight hard,” but then we may realize that it is not up to their fighting spirit whether they will survive, and the battle narrative unfairly positions them as winners or losers. Such critical awareness renders the narrative visible and makes it possible to tell counter-narratives that problematize the dominant narrative (see Meretoja 2021). Poststructuralistically oriented theorists often prefer the notion of repetition to that of interpretation when they refer to the mechanism through which social practices and structures are perpetuated, but this notion – by avoiding any reference to human subjectivity or agency – fails to explain why repetition is “never merely mechanical” (Butler 1997, 16). The advantage of hermeneutic terminology is that it makes explicit, through the key notions of (re)interpretation and dialogue, the subject’s role as an agent of (re)interpretation, and it therefore captures how, in speech acts, we not only reiterate but also (potentially creatively)

A Hermeneutics of Dialogical Understanding 57 reinterpret linguistic and social practices. Therefore, it allows us to conceptualize the relationship between individual subjects and sociocultural structures without reifying them. Because sociocultural systems of meaning cannot determine how they will be interpreted, and all interpretation takes place in different socio-historical situations, ultimately all understanding entails understanding differently. Hermeneutics has a similarly performative conception of the relation of symbolic systems to human reality in that such systems do not merely represent social reality, as if reflecting a pre-given order, but participate in shaping and constructing it through an interpretative process of “world-making.” Public discourse on the pandemic, for example, creates the pandemic reality in which we live: our sense of crisis, and, over time, a sense of getting used to the new situation, to the restrictions that come and go, and to the ongoing uncertainty. We can embrace the dominant way of narrating the pandemic in terms of war and battle or question it and see the pandemic, for example, as an opportunity of embracing our shared interdependency (see Meretoja 2022). According to hermeneutics, interpretation always takes part, through a dialogue of interpretations, in shaping reality. Hans-Georg Gadamer refers to this by saying that interpretation is never merely “reproductive,” but always also a “productive activity” (1997, 296/1990, 301). Meaning emerges through a dialogical process of interaction – it is not something that the interpreter simply finds in the world or in a text. For example, when we talk about the pandemic, we participate in such a dialogue of interpretations and reinforce or question dominant ways of talking about it. It is important to acknowledge that this hermeneutic conception of meaning and interpretation was generally not acknowledged in poststructuralist circles. Poststructuralists rejected the whole notion of interpretation on the grounds that it allegedly implies the idea of a “hidden meaning” to be unveiled by interpretation. Rita Felski links “the neglect of the hermeneutic tradition” in Anglo-American academia to this common misunderstanding that interpretation would entail a commitment to the idea of seeking an “ultimate meaning” that waits to be discovered in the depths of the object of interpretation (2015, 32–33). This idea has been inherited from French poststructuralism to AngloAmerican critical theory ever since Susan Sontag’s influential attack “Against Interpretation” (1966). Felski (2015, 33) proposes a rebranding of hermeneutics, starting with the recognition that hermeneutics does not imply a commitment to any particular conception of interpretation; rather, it is simply the pursuit of theorizing interpretation, within which many rival understandings of interpretation can flourish and debate, and hence should be seen as a “resource to be reimagined rather than an idol to be destroyed” (34). Since Paul Ricoeur’s (1983–1985, 1992) work on narrative, an important strand of hermeneutics has been one that gives a central place to

58  Hanna Meretoja narrative as crucial to the human mode of making sense of experiences in time. Drawing on Ricoeur’s work, I have developed, in collaboration with the narrative psychologists Jens Brockmeier and Mark Freeman, the approach we call narrative hermeneutics, which argues that our interpretative relationship to the world is fundamentally mediated by narratives (see Meretoja 2014, 2018; Brockmeier and Meretoja, 2014; Brockmeier 2015, [ed] 2016; Freeman 2015). Narrative is not merely an object of interpretation (as it is perceived in most strands of narratology) but also a mode of interpretation. I have defined narrative as “an interpretative activity of cultural sense-making in which experiences are presented to someone from a certain perspective (or perspectives) as part of a meaningful, connected account; it has a dialogical and a performative dimension and is relevant for our understanding of human possibilities” (Meretoja 2018, 48). In other words, narrative is not a mere sequence of events or experiences but forges meaningful connections between them. The connected account can be fragmented and can foreground disconnection, but even so, it places experiences in a certain relation to one another. That narratives have a dialogical dimension means that they take shape in relation to culturally mediated narrative models of sense-making, which they implicitly or explicitly draw and comment on, modify, and challenge. They are performative in their ability to create and shape intersubjective reality. Finally and importantly, the definition draws attention to the ontological and existential significance of narratives: narratives are crucial to how we become who we are and how we understand our possibilities in the world. It is hence integral to our narrative agency, which we practice by navigating the narrative environments that shape how we perceive our possibilities – by following or challenging narrative models that are culturally available to us (Meretoja 2022). For example, for a long time narratives of what it means to be a man or a woman meant that there were less culturally available options for women on how to imagine different life courses. While both Gadamerian and Ricoeurean hermeneutics have been criticized for having too little to say about the coercive aspects of the power structures that are integral to the constitution of subjectivity, I have proposed a narrative hermeneutics that explicitly draws attention to the entanglement of narrative in relations of power: In articulating the performative dimension of narrative interpretations and their intertwinement with relations of power, I propose a narrative hermeneutics that synthesizes aspects of philosophical hermeneutics, on one hand, and of Nietzschean-Bakhtinian-Foucauldian hermeneutics, on the other. […] This framework invites reflection on who gets to decide which stories get told and how, and what worldly effects these ethically charged storytelling practices have. (Meretoja 2018, 11)

A Hermeneutics of Dialogical Understanding 59 This is in line with the attempt of various strands of critical hermeneutics to extend the hermeneutic analysis of the situatedness of human existence to questions of power and embodiment (see e.g. Thompson 1995; Kögler 1999; Pappas and Cowling 2003; Vasterling 2003; Mootz & Taylor 2011; Meretoja 2014). Narratives are always embedded in social contexts and relations of power, and individuals are usually largely unaware of the power structures they perpetuate by their narrative interpretations (see e.g. Benhabib 1992, 1999; Cavarero 2000; Butler 2005; Allen 2008). Colin Davis (2004, 150) sums up the attractiveness of the narrative model as follows: The narrative pre-disposition is at the same time an aspect of the decentring of the subject (the stories we tell about ourselves are never entirely our own) and what makes it possible to present ourselves as agents, not just victims, of our desires and anxieties. The narrative model makes it possible to acknowledge the fundamental role played by power in the constitution of identity, while also recognizing the subject’s ability to resist and transform the prevailing narratives and power relations in which they are embedded (Meretoja 2014, 21). This insight is implicit in certain strands of poststructuralism, but hermeneutics has conceptual resources to articulate it in a way that makes explicit the agency of subjects entangled in narrative webs. I have suggested a model of narrative agency which acknowledges that the narrative dimension of our subjectivity is a constitutive aspect of the ways in which we participate, through our actions and inactions, in narrative practices that perpetuate and challenge social structures (Meretoja 2018, 11–12). I refer with narrative agency to our ability to navigate our narrative environments: to use, interpret, reinterpret, and engage with narratives that are culturally available to us, to analyze and challenge them, and to practice agential choice over which narratives we use and how we narrate our lives, relationships, and the world around us (Meretoja 2022). Enhanced narrative agency can manifest itself, for example, as a stronger awareness of one’s possibilities of action in relation to one’s narrative environments or as the ability to construct counter-narratives that challenge culturally dominant narrative models. The concept of narrative agency is linked to an ontology of agency that foregrounds our fundamental relationality. Ontology studies different modes of existence, and different ontologies of agency understand differently the mode of existence of agents. Relational ontologies acknowledge that we become who we are in a fundamentally relational way and relationships are primary in relation to individuals (see e.g. Murphy 2012; Benjamin 2015; Oliver 2018; Butler 2020). Narrative hermeneutics embraces a relational

60  Hanna Meretoja ontology of agency that suggests that we become who we are through processes of dialogically interpreting cultural narrative models of sense-making (Meretoja 2018, 2022). Strong narrative agency involves the ability to critically and creatively engage with the culturally available narrative models. The concept of narrative agency is also meant to provide an analytic tool for evaluating different narrative practices in terms of their potential to enhance narrative agency. An important aspect of our agency is our ability not merely to follow cultural models of sense-making but also to challenge and transform them.

Hermeneutic epistemology: from relativism to a joint pursuit of truth The second impasse of poststructuralism from which hermeneutics provides a way out is relativism and the idea that we are all trapped in a prison-house of language – or, rather, in mutually incommensurable prison-houses of language. This has become a topic that has been much debated in the media, over the past few years, particularly in the context of so-called post-truth politics. In order to see how hermeneutics avoids relativism, it is important to pay close attention to the way in which much of the controversy between poststructuralism and hermeneutics revolves around their different conceptions of language (in doing this, in this section, I draw on and revisit Meretoja 2007). In the so-called Gadamer-Derrida encounter that took place in Paris in 1981, Hans-Georg Gadamer posed the following question: “What, in the final analysis, is linguisticality? Is it a bridge or a barrier?” (1989a, 27). Much of the controversy between Gadamer and Jacques Derrida pertains to their different views on the nature of language and its implications for the possibility of a joint, dialogical pursuit of truth. Let us first have a look at the hermeneutic conception of language. Linguisticality (Sprachlichkeit) is one of the key notions in Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. Following Martin Heidegger (1927, 1996), Gadamer sees understanding as the basic human mode of being in the world and, for him, “language is the universal medium in which understanding occurs” (1997, 389/1990, 392). Thus Gadamer holds that “man’s being-in-theworld is primordially linguistic” (1997, 443/1990, 447). Here we can see that ontology and epistemology are inextricably intertwined in philosophical hermeneutics: understanding, mediated by language, is both the way we exist in the world and the way we pursue knowledge about the world. Gadamer further develops the Humboldtian and Herderian tradition in which language is intimately entwined with a certain way of seeing the world. The hermeneutic conception of language differs fundamentally from instrumentalist theories of language, which see words as mere tools or instruments that we use to designate things that already exist in the

A Hermeneutics of Dialogical Understanding 61 world, allegedly arranged in a certain order. In contrast, the hermeneutic view accentuates the world-disclosive power of language. Language is the universal medium through which we shape reality and orient ourselves to the world. In other words, it articulates and organizes reality in a certain way: due to language, we see a tree as a tree, and so on. Edmund Husserl (2006, 250) already asserted that “something as something” is the basic structure of sense perception, and phenomenological and philosophical hermeneutics acknowledges how this basic interpretative structure of experience is mediated by language. Heidegger formulates this primordiality of meaning-giving to our perception of the world as follows: “‘Initially’ we never hear noises and complexes of sound, but the creaking wagon, the motorcycle” (Heidegger 1996, 153). Thus, words are not mere signs or name tags that refer to an order of things that pre-exists language; in contrast, the system of language produces and articulates this order in the first place: Language and thinking about things are so bound together that it is an abstraction to conceive of the system of truths as a pregiven system of possibilities of being for which the signifying subject selects corresponding signs. (Gadamer 1997, 417/1990, 421) From this perspective, language is not a mere means of communicating pre-existing ideas; rather, it is part and parcel of the process in which our views are formed – it has always already “pre-formed our thinking” (Gadamer 1989b, 99) – and this process takes place in intersubjective communicative interaction: All kinds of human community are kinds of linguistic community: even more, they form language. For language is by nature the language of conversation; it fully realizes itself only in the process of coming to an understanding. That is why it is not a mere means in that process. (Gadamer 1997, 446/1990, 450) “Coming to an understanding” does not mean here that members of a language community would agree on everything; instead, it points to the way in which language exists through a process of dialogical interaction. Our understanding of the world, mediated by language, is not a solipsistic project but a fundamentally intersubjective process. Often the dialogue takes the form of a dispute or conflict. Language worlds are not monolithic, and conversation between individuals always involves a struggle to find a common language, but Gadamer holds that having language implies a basic ability to comprehend the viewpoint of the other (at least partly); on the basis of this, a shared understanding is

62  Hanna Meretoja established which is presupposed by any meaningful disagreement or misunderstanding (Gadamer 1977a/1966, 7). Gadamer argues that linguistic competence involves the ability to take distance; it enables us to take distance from our immediate environment and from that which is actually present, that is, to have a world which we can view from different perspectives (1997, 444–445/1990, 448; Gadamer 1977b/1966, 59). According to him, as linguistic beings we can always enlarge our world-views, in principle limitlessly: “As verbally constituted, every such world is of itself always open to every possible insight and hence to every expansion of its own world picture, and is accordingly available to others” (Gadamer 1997, 447/1990, 451). From this hermeneutic perspective, linguisticality does not entail relativism in the sense that we would be entrapped in a prison-house of language. According to Gadamer, “there is absolutely no captivity within a language” (1977a/1966, 15–16). For him, linguisticality is rather something that enables mutual understanding and rational agreement between people, no matter how different their cultural backgrounds (1993b/1966, 230; 1997, 401–402/1990, 405–406). Gadamer holds that reason does not disintegrate due to the multiplicity of languages; by contrast, the fundamental linguisticality of all human beings involves a universal ability to take into consideration different perspectives and to widen one’s horizon of understanding; that is, it implies universal rationality that manifests itself in the power of reason to “rise above the limitations of any given language” (1997, 402/1990, 406). Gadamer argues that as we become linguistic beings, that is, as we learn our mother tongue, by the same token we learn the competence to learn any number of languages. As languages are bound to the lives of historically formed communities (which in themselves are usually not closed or homogeneous but in the process of being constantly reinterpreted and renegotiated), learning new languages means, at the same time, learning new ways of seeing the world. This learning always takes place in relation to our own world-view. This, in turn, enables us to take distance from our original views: It is not learning a foreign language as such but its use, whether in conversation with its speakers or in the study of its literature, that gives us a new standpoint “on one’s previous worldview.” However thoroughly one may adopt a foreign frame of mind, one still does not forget one’s worldview and language-view. Rather, the other world we encounter is not only foreign but is also related to us. (Gadamer 1997, 441–442/1990, 445) Thus, we understand other forms of life from within our own horizon. There is always transmission and mediation between different forms of life and different languages. If I encounter, for example, a Russian prisoner of war in Ukraine, I inevitably try to understand him from

A Hermeneutics of Dialogical Understanding 63 the horizon of understanding shaped by my own cultural world, and acknowledging this (rather than trying to jump in the others’ shoes as if it were possible to erase my own background) creates conditions for genuine understanding. I should acknowledge that I have only a partial understanding of the cultural world and media environment in which the Russian soldier has been raised, and I should take into consideration the war propaganda that he has been fed throughout his training. Step by step, drawing on empirical evidence on what has happened in Ukraine, it might be possible to start establishing a dialogue on the situation. This model of communication, based on the mediation between what is foreign and what is familiar, has been of crucial importance for Jürgen Habermas. Although he is famous for his critique of Gadamer’s Truth and Method, it has been generally overlooked that he in fact argues that Gadamer’s model of communication enables us – better than, for example, a Wittgensteinian model – to account for the mediation and translation between different language worlds. He sums up Gadamer’s central insight as follows: Languages themselves possess the potential of a reason that, while expressing itself in the particularity of a specific grammar, simultaneously reflects on its limits and negates them as particular. Although always bound up in language, reason always transcends particular languages. (Habermas 1986/1967, 244) Decades later, in the interviews conducted by Giovanna Borradori, in which Habermas and Derrida discuss 9/11, Habermas (2003, 37) notes in a similar vein: “One can show with Gadamerian arguments that the idea of a self-contained universe of meanings, which is incommensurable with other universes of this type, is an inconsistent concept.” According to Gadamer (1997/1990), genuine conversation or encounter with the other is characterized by mutual mediation that he describes by his model of “fusion of horizons.” In such encounter, both partners in a dialogue take the other’s views seriously in their otherness and thereby gain distance from their own original views. As a result of this dialectic process, there develops a third horizon that preserves the valid insights of both of the two original horizons. If genuine dialogue results in such a third horizon, it makes the partners of dialogue better equipped to articulate their original positions and see their limits. A dialogue with the Russian prisoner of war, for example, could make me see some of the limits and blind spots of my own thinking and open new possibilities for both partners of dialogue. Such articulation, in turn, is central to rationality, as Charles Taylor (1985/1982, 137) argues: “[W]e have a rational grasp of something when we can articulate it, that means, distinguish and lay out the different features of the matter in perspicuous

64  Hanna Meretoja order.” Habermas embraces Gadamer’s model of rational dialogue in the Borradori interview: [Partners in dialogue] can succeed in a “fusion of horizons” by virtue of their peculiar capacity to take up the role of a “speaker” and “hearer.” Taking up these roles in a dialogue, they engage in a fundamental symmetry, which, at bottom, all speech situations require. When a native speaker has learned how to use the system of personal pronouns, she has acquired competence in exchanging the perspectives between first and second person. And in the course of mutual perspective-taking there can develop a common horizon of background assumptions in which both sides accomplish an interpretation that is not ethnocentrically adopted or converted but, rather, intersubjectively shared. This model explains why attempts at understanding have a chance only under symmetrical conditions of mutual perspective-taking. (Habermas 2003, 37) This conception of language provides a philosophical grounding for the view that we can reach understanding and meaningfully discuss and evaluate truth-claims. Debates on truth are historically situated but this does not entail relativism; rather, acknowledging that we cannot escape history and a human perspective on the world allows us to critically reflect on the particular historical perspective from which we approach things, even when acknowledging that such self-reflection can never make us fully transparent to ourselves; as Gadamer (1997, 302/1990, 307) puts it, “To be historically means that knowledge of oneself can never be complete.” In all pursuit of truth, the partners in dialogue have some perspective on the matter at hand. There is no perspectiveless truth, but that does not mean that it would not be legitimate to talk about truth. In contrast, if we believe we can grasp the world unmediated, we risk becoming blind to our own perspective. This is also a relevant insight in relation to the posthuman and new materialist approaches that have become popular in efforts to leave behind the poststructuralist legacy in such a way that entails a rejection of the notion of interpretation. It is a legitimate aspiration to criticize the anthropocentrism of the tradition of European humanism, but is it really productive to abandon the notion of interpretation? If we do not address the ways in which we humans interpret the world, those patterns of interpretation are likely to affect us “behind our backs” (Gadamer 1993c/1967, 247). To understand the limits of the human-centered perspective, we first need to understand that we always necessarily have a certain interpretative perspective on the world. Hence, hermeneutics provides valuable critical perspectives on the current attempt to

A Hermeneutics of Dialogical Understanding 65 acknowledge the problems in the anthropocentrism that we have for so long taken for granted. It is also important to recognize that acknowledging the mediated nature of our relationship with the world does not entail relativism. In the context of Russia’s attack in Ukraine, for example, it is an undeniable truth that Russia is committing war crimes and human rights violations in Ukraine. But understanding how it is possible that so many Russians nevertheless believe what Putin calls a “special military operation” to be justified, we need to understand the culturally and narratively mediated horizon of interpretation from which they see the situation. It is not helpful to think that Putin is simply crazy or Evil. The Russian state-owned media has for years contributed to world-making that has created the reality in which most Russians live. We need to ask how is the world mediated for them and how is it mediated for us. This does not entail relativism because there is still a world out there which we cannot interpret in just any way: our interpretations need to be judged against evidence and weighed in intersubjective dialogue. There are internationally agreed rules and procedures to judge what is a war crime and what is not, and drawing on these international agreements, the International Criminal Court is currently investigating war crimes that Russia has committed in Ukraine. But getting the truth across to ordinary Russians requires taking into account the narratives they have been raised by and the interpretations of history they have been fed for years during the Putin administration.

Hermeneutic ethics: the possibility of nonviolent understanding The idea of a violent moment inherent in all linguistic, cognitive, and symbolic orders is central to the poststructuralist tradition of thought. This tradition follows the legacy of Friedrich Nietzsche, who declared that “knowledge works as an instrument of power” (1999c, 302) and that “in every will-to-know there is a drop of cruelty” (1999a, 167). Poststructuralists build not only on his ideas on knowledge as a form of power – as when Foucault (1995/1975, 27) argues that there is no “knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations” – but also on his view that the processes of defining, conceptualizing, and giving meaning to things always entail the use of power. According to Nietzsche (2001, 145), concepts, by their very nature, imply “equalization,” or what he calls “forgetting differences”: “Every concept comes into being by making equivalent that which is non-equivalent.” As an example, Nietzsche uses the concept of “leaf”: no leaf is exactly the same as any other leaf, but the concept “leaf” is formed by forgetting these differences. Reality consists of singular phenomena that differ from each other, and by concepts we violently lump them together without doing justice to the uniqueness of each individual

66  Hanna Meretoja and each situation. On the basis of this line of thought, Nietzsche (1999b/1885–1887, 51) sees understanding and knowledge as conceptual appropriation: “There is something insulting in being understood.” This Nietzschean mode of thinking has had a crucial impact on the poststructuralist conception of language. Derrida, for example, sees language and understanding as inherently violent: in understanding, the singularity and otherness of the other are allegedly disregarded, and the other is turned into the Same, appropriated in terms of general concepts. In De la grammatologie, Derrida differentiates between three levels of violence: first, “the originary violence of language,” “arche-violence” that consists in classifying and naming, in inscribing “the unique within the system”; second, the institutionalized concealment of this originary violence; and third, violence as “what is commonly called evil, war, indiscretion, rape” (Derrida 1997/1967, 112). Derrida’s ethics is largely based on the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas who is an important mediating figure between Nietzsche and the poststructuralists. Levinas, too, conceives of knowledge as a practice of power: “To possess, to know, to grasp are all synonyms of power.” (Cit. Derrida 1978, 91). For him, knowledge is inherently violent because it always entails “suppression of alterity” (Levinas 1982, 58). Following Levinas, Derrida believes we can encounter others ethically only insofar as we encounter them in their singularity and uniqueness, that is, without reducing their otherness with general concepts and categories. On the other hand, he is aware of the fact that as linguistic beings we have to give up our singularity and enter the sphere of the universal, the sphere of concepts and categories. The other cannot be encountered as singular in any absolute sense because we necessarily relate the other to general conceptual frameworks through which we experience the world. Derrida (1978, 151–152) blames Levinas for resigning to empiricism, that is, for believing in an immediate experience that is purified of all frameworks of language and knowledge. Nevertheless, when Derrida discusses the possibility of ethics, he consistently draws on the opposition between the universal and the singular, the former being the violent sphere of knowledge and understanding that operate with general concepts, whereas the latter is the sphere of the undecidable, freedom, and responsibility. Encountering the other nonviolently would, allegedly, require that one “does not pass through the neutral element of the universal” but, instead, encounters the other without the violence of concepts (Derrida 1978, 96). He suggests that language, due to its universality, strips us of our freedom and responsibility: “By suspending my absolute singularity in speaking, I renounce at the same time my liberty and my responsibility. Once I speak I am never and no longer myself, alone and unique.” (Derrida 1995/1992, 60). In the Borradori interview, Derrida (2003, 133) states: “[A]n action that simply obeys knowledge is but a calculable consequence, the deployment of a norm or program. It does not

A Hermeneutics of Dialogical Understanding 67 engage any decision or any responsibility worthy of these names.” Thus Derrida’s idea of freedom seems to depend on a certain kind of utopia of liberation from the violent chains of language and knowledge, although he is well aware of the impossibility of such a utopia. In contrast to the Derridean aporia, the hermeneutic conception of language is based on the view that the universal and the singular are always already intertwined in all language usage. The other, too, with whom we are trying to communicate, is already constituted through language. The other is not a self-identical singular other outside the “violent” realms of language and symbolic systems, whom our attempts to understand could capture in some kind of “purity.” Self-understanding is also linguistically mediated, and we are not transparent to ourselves: we have to struggle to understand ourselves, and the situation does not fundamentally differ from our struggle to understand others. This is something that Derrida, too, is undoubtedly aware of but does not seem to take into full consideration in his ethics of encountering the other. There is no pure singularity anywhere; instead, being human is being entangled in messy processes of understanding ourselves and others with interpretative resources that involve a general dimension but are also in a constant process of change. The hermeneutic conception stresses that language exists only through its concrete applications, not as abstract, universal, and immutable rules or closed concepts, which entails that “everywhere that communication happens, language not only is used but is shaped as well” (Gadamer 2001/1976, 4; cf. Gadamer 1989a, 23–24). Gadamer emphasizes the dialectic of the singular and the general in the continuous formation of concepts: [I]t is obvious that speaking cannot be thought of as the combination of acts of subsumption, through which something particular is subordinated to a general concept. A person who speaks – who, that is to say, uses the general meanings of words – is so oriented toward the particularity of what he is perceiving that everything he says acquires a share in the particularity of the circumstances he is considering. But that means, on the other hand, that the general concept meant by the word is enriched by any given perception of a thing so that what emerges is a new, more specific word formation which does more justice to the particularity of that act of perception. However certainly speaking implies using pre-established words with general meanings, at the same time, a constant process of concept formation is going on, by means of which the life of a language develops. (Gadamer 1997, 428–429/1990, 432–433) This hermeneutic conception questions the subsumption model of understanding, which has dominated the Western history of philosophy and sees understanding in terms of conceptual appropriation; from the

68  Hanna Meretoja Cartesian tradition to Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781, Critique of Pure Reason), the process of perception is not considered to alter the basic concepts, the innate ideas of the mind, that regulate understanding (Meretoja 2018, 107–108). By acknowledging the non-subsumptive dimension of understanding – linked to the way in which conceptual systems change as they are used, interpreted, and applied in the temporal process of understanding, the hermeneutic approach articulates how language enables an ethical encounter with the other. Both Gadamer and Habermas direct our attention to the conditions that make possible rational and ethical communication. They agree that such communication must take place under the conditions of a certain symmetry to which I alluded above. This symmetry, in turn, presupposes a certain kind of universalism, that is, the idea that the discussion is open to all, everyone has an equal right to participate, and all are respected in their otherness. As Habermas (2003, 42) puts it, In the strict sense, “universalism” amounts to the egalitarian individualism of a morality that demands mutual recognition, in the sense of equal respect and reciprocal consideration for everybody. […] Any deconstructive unmasking of the ideologically concealing use of universalistic discourses actually presupposes the critical viewpoints advanced by these same discourses. Moral and legal universalism is, thus, self-reflexively closed in the sense that its imperfect practices can only be criticised on the basis of its own standards. Thus, Derrida and Habermas seem to agree on the fact that the otherness of the other should be taken into consideration, but they have a different view on the possibility of accomplishing this in linguistic communication. Whereas Derrida has deep distrust in the ethical potential of language, Habermas – following Gadamer – believes that the best way to promote genuine dialogue is to create conditions that encourage mutual perspective-taking. In Habermas’ discussion of 9/11, this perspective takes form in the view that the West should learn to see itself from the perspective of the other, for example, from the perspectives of Muslim countries. Derrida, too, signed Habermas’ plea published in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in May 2003, in which this idea of seeing oneself from the perspective of the other plays a central role, and in the Borradori interview he speaks about the importance of making a distinction between understanding and justifying. More specifically, he calls for comprehension of the conditions that produced the attacks of September 11: “One can describe, comprehend, and explain a certain chain of events or series of association that lead to ‘war’ or to ‘terrorism’ without justifying them in the least, while in fact condemning them and attempting to invent other associations.” (Derrida 2003, 106–107). Similarly, we arguably now need a language that could create conditions

A Hermeneutics of Dialogical Understanding 69 for understanding how Putin’s administration is trying to legitimize his war in Ukraine for the ordinary Russians. It is not enough to simply subsume him under the rubric of some kind of mythical Evil; instead, we need to understand (but not accept or justify) the specificity of the narratives through which he presents the events to his people. However, while Derrida’s deconstruction aims at unmasking the ideological assumptions underlying conceptual violence, he has little to say about the possibility of reaching mutual understanding. No doubt, the deconstructive approach has certain legitimacy, for example, as Derrida uses it to unmask the presuppositions underlying the use of concepts such as “terrorism.” However, to my mind, deconstruction loses much of its power in being too general. Derrida claims that “deconstruction is justice” because in principle any conceptual system can be deconstructed by showing that it has no natural or necessary basis and that the world and people could be categorized and conceptualized differently (Derrida 1992, 15). But if everything can be deconstructed, what is the power of deconstruction in creating conditions for productive dialogue in a specific historical situation? A similar problem is linked to the totalizing view according to which everything is power or all symbolic systems are violent. Foucault’s analyses on the relations between language and power are productive in bringing forth how specific power constellations are intertwined with certain discursive formations and in making us sensitive to the exercise of power in communicative situations, but we should not let the view that everything is power hinder our ability to differentiate, for example, between oppressive discourse and genuinely dialogical discussion. Philosophical hermeneutics provides a philosophical grounding for the possibility of ethical understanding by showing how language is not inherently violent and how the possibility of nonviolence resides in the way language does not function automatically subsumptively but is open to change in the process of being used. From the hermeneutic perspective, understanding is a fundamentally temporal process, which follows the structure of the hermeneutic circle: when we encounter something new in the world, we draw on our preunderstanding shaped by our earlier experiences and on the culturally available conceptual resources, but instead of simply subsuming the unfamiliar under the familiar, the new experience can shape, modify, and transform our preconceptions and conceptual resources. The temporality of the use of language and of processes of understanding entails that they are always already infused with the unfamiliar, strange, and other: instead of being vehicles of appropriation, they are in a process of becoming (Meretoja 2018, 110). There are, however, ethically crucial differences in how concepts are transformed in the process of understanding. Understanding in the strong hermeneutic sense is successful only when it has what Gadamer calls an event-character and the structure of negativity: we properly understand

70  Hanna Meretoja only when we realize that things are not what we thought they were (1997, 353–361). Instead of subsuming the singular under general concepts, in such genuine understanding the singular has the power to transform the general. Gadamer does not adequately acknowledge, however, that often – in the absence of a non-subsumptive ethos – lack of openness to otherness leads to violent appropriation. I have argued that there is a continuum from subsumptive to non-subsumptive practices of understanding. For example, in the ethical evaluation of narratives, we can distinguish between subsumptive narrative practices that reinforce cultural stereotypes by subsuming singular experiences under culturally dominant narrative scripts and non-subsumptive narrative practices that challenge such categories of appropriation (Meretoja 2018, 110, 112). This is not meant as a clear-cut dichotomy, however, as there can be no purely subsumptive or non-subsumptive acts of understanding. In all understanding, there is an element of the general and the particular, but their dialectical relationship can be closer to the subsumptive or non-subsumptive end of the continuum. The expressions “subsumptive” and “non-subsumptive” understanding are meant as a shorthand for cases that are close to those ends of the continuum. These concepts are hence heuristic tools for the ethical evaluation of different processes of understanding others.

Conclusion I hope this chapter has demonstrated the ability of the hermeneutic approach to address the central challenges of our times by making room for agency and ethical/dialogical understanding and addressing the problem of relativism. Much of research in the humanities and social sciences is about understanding the webs of meaning in which we are entangled and which shape us, and hence the dialogical conception of a constant interplay between symbolic systems and agents who interpret them is of utmost importance for all human sciences. The dominance of the poststructuralist model of symbolic systems has been so strong in these fields that much of the potential of philosophical and narrative hermeneutics is yet to be realized. This chapter has argued that a key aspect of such potential is understanding how a hermeneutic conception of symbolic systems allows us to see that such systems, such as language and narrative, are not necessarily violent ways of imposing order on human reality but also allow dialogical, non-subsumptive ways of understanding the experience of others. Hermeneutics has much potential in addressing our cultural challenges – from “post-truth” politics and Russia’s war in Ukraine to the age of the Anthropocene that require thinking beyond the human perspective. Hermeneutics is a fundamentally worldly approach. It acknowledges that meanings are always part of material, historical worlds, and they are interpreted from certain worldly situations. Meanings are never independent of material processes, and they shape

A Hermeneutics of Dialogical Understanding 71 our relationship to the world in ways that we need to reflect on if we want to be able to change our relationship to the world, including the non-human world on which we are fundamentally dependent. To answer Gadamer’s question: Should we perceive language as a bridge or a barrier? If our existence is so fundamentally mediated by language as both poststructuralism and hermeneutics claim, perhaps it does not make sense to blame language itself for the violence we commit against each other. It makes more sense to pay attention to the ways in which language is used in specific situations: Do we use it to reach towards the unique other, conscious of the fact that the other will always exceed our conceptualizations and narrativizations, or do we use it to violently categorize the other? The perspectives I have discussed here remind us that in language there lies the potential for both violent and ethical encounters. In my view, the hermeneutic arguments succeed in showing that there are no philosophical reasons why communication should always be violent. What counts is how we – as individuals and communities – encounter or fail to encounter each other in our communicative practices, and crucial to that is whether we acknowledge that we perceive the world from a certain limited perspective that can be enriched by other perspectives. I hope the discussion has provided insights into the ontological, epistemological, and ethical relevance of hermeneutics in the current scholarly and political situation, particularly by showing how hermeneutics provides a way out of reification, relativism, and pessimism that are key challenges we have been left with after poststructuralism. If we neglect the role of interpretation in the way symbolic systems are actualized in social processes, these systems are easily reified, seen as independent of agents who partly constitute, shape, use, and apply them in concrete social situations. Taking seriously our ability to engage in dialogue with others also provides a way out of the problem of relativism and places the focus on our universal ability to expand our horizons and learn from others. Finally, hermeneutics elicits hope by drawing attention to our ability to engage in genuine dialogue in which we expose ourselves to views different from our own and reach a more complex and nuanced understanding through listening to other perspectives. Acknowledging that we always encounter others from our own interpretative horizon makes it possible for us to reflect on that horizon and to expand it by exposing it to other ways of seeing the world.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2008. “Imaginary prohibitions: Some preliminary remarks on the founding gestures of the ‘new materialism’.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 15(1): 23–30.

72  Hanna Meretoja Allen, Amy. 2008. The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. Benhabib, Seyla. 1992. Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics. Cambridge: Polity Press. Benhabib, Seyla. 1999. “Sexual difference and collective identities: The new global constellation.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 24(2): 335–361. Benjamin, Andrew. 2015. Towards a Relational Ontology: Philosophy’s Other Possibility. New York: SUNY Press. Berger, Peter and Thomas Luckmann. 1987. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (1966). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Brockmeier, Jens (ed.). 2016. “Narrative hermeneutics.” Special issue, Storyworlds 8(1). Brockmeier, Jens. 2015. Beyond the Archive: Memory, Narrative, and the Autobiographical Process. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press. Brockmeier, Jens and Hanna Meretoja. 2014. “Understanding narrative hermeneutics.” Storyworlds 6(2): 1–27. Butler, Judith. 2020. The Force of Nonviolence: The Ethical in the Political. New York: Verso. Butler, Judith. 1997. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Butler, Judith. 2005. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press. Cavarero, Adriana. 2000. Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood (1997). Trans. Paul Kottman. London: Routledge. D’Ancona, Matthew. 2017. Post-truth: The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back. London: Ebury Press. Davis, Colin. 2004. After Poststructuralism: Reading, Stories, Theory. London: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques. 1973. Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Trans. David Allison. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1978. Violence and Metaphysics. An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas. In Writing and Difference (1967). Trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques. 1992. Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority”. In Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. Eds. Drucilla Cornell et al., New York: Routledge, 3–67. Derrida, Jacques. 1995. The Gift of Death (Donner la mort, 1992). Trans. David Wills. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1997. Of Grammatology (De la Grammatologie, 1967). Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2003. Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides. A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida. In Philosophy in a Time of Terror. Dialogues with Habermas and Derrida. Ed. Giovanna Borradori. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 85–136. Felski, Rita. 2015. Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

A Hermeneutics of Dialogical Understanding 73 Foucault, Michel. 1980. What Is an Author? (1969). In Language, Countermemory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ed. Donald Bouchard, trans. Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon. New York: Cornell University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975). Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage. Foucault, Michel. 2001. Dits et écrits II, 1976–1988. Paris: Gallimard. Frank, Manfred. 1989. What Is Neostructuralism? (1984). Trans. S. Wilke and R. Grey. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Freeman, Mark. 2015. Narrative Hermeneutics. In The Wiley Handbook of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology. Eds. Jack Martin, Jeff Sugarman, and Kathleen L. Slaney, Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 234–247. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1977a. Universality of the Hermeneutical Problem (1966). In Philosophical Hermeneutics. Trans. and ed. David E. Linge. Berkeley, L. and London: University of California Press, 3–17. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1977b. Man and Language (1966). In Philosophical Hermeneutics. Trans. and ed. David E. Linge. Berkeley, LA and London: University of California Press, 59–68. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1989a. Text and Interpretation (1981). In Dialogue and Deconstruction. The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter. Eds. Diane P. Michelfelder and Richard E. Palmer. New York: State University of New York Press, 21–51. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1989b. Letter to Dallmayr (1985). In Dialogue and Deconstruction. The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter. Trans. and eds Richard Palemer and Diane Michelfelder. New York: State University of New York Press, 93–101. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1990. Gesammelte Werke. Band 1: Hermeneutik I. Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik (1960). Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck). Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1993a. Zwischen Phänomenologie und Dialektik: Versuch einer Selbstkritik (1985). Gesammelte Werke. Band 2: Hermeneutik II. Wahrheit und Methode. Ergänzungen, Register. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 3–23. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1993b. Die Universalität des hermeneutischen Problems (1966). Gesammelte Werke. Band 2: Hermeneutik II. Wahrheit und Methode. Ergänzungen, Register. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 219–231. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1993c. Rhetorik, Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik: Metakritisiche Erörterungen zu Wahrheit und Methode (1967). Gesammelte Werke. Band 2: Hermeneutik II. Wahrheit und Methode. Ergänzungen, Register. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 232–250. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1997. Truth and Method (Wahrheit und Methode, 1960). Second, revised edition. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Continuum. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 2001. Reason in the Age of Science (Vernunft im Zeitalter der Wissenschaft, 1976). Trans. Frederick G. Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1986. A Review of Gadamer’s Truth and Method (1967). In Hermeneutics and Modern Philosophy. Ed. Brice R. Wachterhauser. New York: State University of New York Press, 243–276.

74  Hanna Meretoja Habermas, Jürgen. 1987. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Trans. Frederick G. Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 2003. Fundamentalism and Terror. A Dialogue with Jürgen Habermas. Ed. Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Habermas and Derrida. The University of Chicago Press, 25–43. Hacking, Ian. 1999. The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1927. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Heidegger, Martin. 1996. Being and Time. A Translation of ‘Sein und Zeit’. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. New York: SUNY Press. Husserl, Edmund. 2006. Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution (1929–1934). Die CManuskripte. Dordrecht: Springer. Jameson, Fredric. 1972. The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kakutani, Michiko. 2018. The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump. New York: Penguin Books. Kant, Immanuel. 1781. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Trans. and eds. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. 1999. Critique of Pure Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kögler, Hans Herbert. 1999. The Power of Dialogue: Critical Hermeneutics after Gadamer and Foucault (1992). Trans. Paul Hendrickson. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1982. Éthique et infini. Dialogues avec Philippe Nemo. Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard et Radio-France. MacIntyre, Lee. 2018. Post-truth. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Meretoja, Hanna. 2007. Language—A Bridge or a Barrier? Hermeneutic and PostStructuralist Views on the Possibility of Rational and Ethical Communication. In Rationality in Global and Local Contexts. Eds. Jón Ólafsson and Juha Räikkä, Turku: University of Turku, Reports from the Department of Philosophy, 105–120. Meretoja, Hanna. 2014. The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory: The Crisis and Return of Storytelling from Robbe-Grillet to Tournier. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Meretoja, Hanna. 2018. The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Meretoja, Hanna. 2021. “A Dialogics of Counter-narratives.” In The Routledge Handbook of Counter-narratives, Eds. Marianne Wolff Lundholt and Klarissa Lueg, London: Routledge, 30–42. Meretoja, Hanna. 2022. “Implicit Narrative and Narrative Agency: Evaluating Pandemic Storytelling.” Narrative Inquiry (Online First, 19 April 2022, https:// doi.org/10.1075/ni.21076.mer). Mootz, Francis and George Taylor (eds). 2011. Gadamer and Ricoeur: Critical Horizons for Contemporary Hermeneutics. London: Continuum. Murphy, Ann. 2012. Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary. New York: The SUNY Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1999a. Jenseits von Gut und Böse (1885). In Kritische Studienausgabe. Band 5. Eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Berlin: De Gruyter, 9–243.

A Hermeneutics of Dialogical Understanding 75 Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1999b. Nachlaß 1885–1887. Kritische Studienausgabe. Band 12. Eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Berlin: De Gruyter. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1999c. Nachlaß 1887–1889. Kritische Studienausgabe. Band 13. Eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Berlin: De Gruyter. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2001. On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense. In The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Trans. Ronald Speirs, eds. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 139–153. Oliver, Kelly. 2018. Response Ethics. Rowman & Littlefield. Pappas, Robin and William Cowling. 2003. Toward a Critical Hermeneutics. In Feminist Interpretations of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Ed. Lorraine Code. State College: Pennsylvania State University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1983–1985. Temps et récit. Paris: Seuil, 1–3. Ricoeur, Paul. 1992. Oneself as Another. Trans. Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sontag, Susan. 1966. Against Interpretation. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Taylor, Charles. 1985. Rationality (1982). Philosophical Papers vol. 2: Philosophy and the Human Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thompson, John. 1995. Critical Hermeneutics: A Study in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur and Jürgen Habermas (1981). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vasterling, Veronica. 2003. Postmodern Hermeneutics? Toward a Critical Hermeneutics. In Feminist Interpretations of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Ed. Lorraine Code. State College: Pennsylvania State University Press.

4

What Is Interpretive Metaethics and Why Do We Need It? Michiel Meijer

Introduction The Russian invasion of Ukraine has set a spotlight on an important intuition at the center of moral thought and discourse across the globe: the intuition of objective right and wrong. This intuition tells us that the warmongering intentions of Putin’s repressive regime are not just violating our Western moral code but that his views and policies are simply wrong. More broadly, when reflecting on practices such as genocide or gender discrimination, it simply seems that at least some actions are really wrong. Can we imagine a situation in which the systematic and deliberate killing of an ethnic or religious group is acceptable? Conversely and yet similarly, do we not consider it to be really better when girls receive education and women are allowed to vote and work, even though such practices are forbidden in some parts of the world? In such cases, moral experience suggests that ethics involves a range of values that are not rendered valid by our own culture, but rather offer standards by which different cultures can be judged. This attitude toward moral truth is very common. It is a familiar, perfectly ordinary idea that some acts are wrong in themselves, not just because people think them wrong. Over the past century, however, it has seemed to many philosophers that ethical theory cannot bear the kind of weight required to satisfy such moral realist urges. Ordinary moral experience indicates that an ideological movement such as the Taliban (who make civil rights contingent on gender on religious grounds) is lacking in knowledge and that we, modern Westerners, have deeper knowledge at least about the moral status of women. Faced with the far-reaching implications of such claims – not only for philosophy but also for global society and politics – skepticism about moral experience has become much more extensive. Feeding such skepticism, progress in formulating scientific explanations of moral behavior (neurobiological, chemophysiological, sociological, psychological) also seems to imply that our moral experience should not be taken at face value. These developments have led to the predicament that it is not clear whether Western societies should be DOI: 10.4324/9781003251354-7

What Is Interpretive Metaethics and Why Do We Need It? 77 characterized as accepting or rejecting the possibility of objective moral claims. Paradoxically, our moral predicament seems characterized not only by the belief in right and wrong but also by a strong sense of suspicion regarding that very belief. Can we still believe in right and wrong? It is worth emphasizing that this is a question about moral selfunderstanding. At stake is not just the familiar metaethical question about the status of moral judgment but how we understand ourselves as moral subjects, our moral self-interpretation or moral identity. The aim of this chapter is to argue that a philosophical understanding of this topic requires a hermeneutic rehabilitation of moral experience by developing a theory called “interpretive metaethics.” This theory takes distance from the current debate on moral realism, first, by foregrounding the notion of moral self-understanding; second, by understanding moral judgments as interpretations of meaning; and third, by building on a hermeneutic conception of language to defend moral realism.1 Yet while interpretive approaches have received increasing philosophical attention in a wide range of fields (ranging from literary criticism, cultural anthropology, jurisprudence, historiography, and feminist theory to social science), they have not, so far, explicitly been used to debate metaethical questions. Against this background, my attempt is to clarify what interpretive metaethics is by first explaining why we need it: because this theory is best equipped to explain the experience of objective right and wrong at the center of moral self-understanding, beyond the terms of the prevailing, and perhaps deadlocked, metaethical dialectic between cognitivist moral realism and noncognitivist antirealism. The argument starts by explaining why questions about moral self-understanding cannot be addressed within the framework of the current realist/antirealist debate (section “Metaethics, normative ethics, and metaphysical skepticism”). After highlighting the necessity of taking an interpretive turn in metaethics (section “From metaethics to hermeneutics”), I continue to elaborate on what is involved in interpretive metaethics by drawing out the relevant implications for understanding moral judgment (section “Moral judgments as interpretations of meaning”) and moral realism (section “Interpretive moral realism”) based on the philosophy of Charles Taylor. I conclude by summarizing the main claims of the argument (section “Conclusion”). WHY DO WE NEED INTERPRETIVE METAETHICS?

Metaethics, normative ethics, and metaphysical skepticism2 Many ethical theorists agree that value experience suggests moral realism. That is, they tend to agree that moral values seem to make a kind of normative “call” or “demand” on human beings, as they are essentially

78  Michiel Meijer experienced as being more important than our own desires and inclinations. In addition to their having this seemingly intrinsic normative force, it is commonplace that moral values appear to involve objective properties: they seem to hold independently of what we think or feel about them, charging us with a duty to respond and act in a certain way.3 This distinctively “realist” character of moral experience has been well described by Maurice Mandelbaum, who was one of the first to engage systematically in the phenomenology of value experience: My contention is that the demands which appear to an agent to be “moral demands” are seen by him to be objective and independent of his desires. […] It is not what I prefer, what I wish, or what I want, which appears as my duty; duty appears as objective, as independent of preference, inclination, or desire. (Mandelbaum 1955, 57) In reflecting on the source of this experience, Mandelbaum stresses that moral demands are “always experienced as emanating from ‘outside’ us” and thus “seem to be independent of us” (1955, 54). Today, the mainstream debate on this issue takes place in metaethics, where the realist/antirealist dispute is about the question of whether there is a moral reality that our moral judgments seek to represent. Moral realists typically commit themselves to the idea of “moral facts,” that is, they commit themselves to claims about the way the world works that have moral significance. Moral facts are seen as the most compelling reasons to act in some ways rather than others, as they provide a kind of bedrock evidence akin to the apparently more natural, non-moral facts that the sciences study. While not all realists straightforwardly accept moral facts (as some see such facts as unknowable, unreliably accessible, or only intuitively perceptible), there is consensus that the very idea of moral facts gives moral realists a considerable leverage for maintaining their position. David Enoch makes this point when he says that much of the game for antirealist views is to “cleverly” accommodate what moral realism (the view that there are moral facts) “straightforwardly” accommodates (2018, 33). Similarly, antirealist Simon Blackburn admits that moral discourse has a “realist-seeming grammar (1993, 152, original emphasis), while realist David Brink states that “moral realism should be our metaethical starting point, and we should give it up only if it does involve unacceptable metaphysical and epistemological commitments” (1989, 24). To see why hermeneutic notions such as interpretation, meaning, and self-understanding do not fit well in this debate, we should consider what metaethics is. The nature of metaethics is often explained by separating it from normative ethics. On this conception, “firstorder” or normative questions within morality are to be clearly distinguished from metaethical or “second-order” questions about morality.

What Is Interpretive Metaethics and Why Do We Need It? 79 The claim that telling a lie is wrong is a normative claim; the claim that this belief cannot be true is a metaethical claim. Metaethics is said to involve a step back from normative debates and to offer a crucial neutral background against which normative issues need to be understood. As metaethics studies what morality itself is, its goal is to describe, not prescribe. The divide between normative ethics and metaethics usually comes with a rather specific understanding of what “description” in ethics means. It means to describe the semantic, epistemological, and metaphysical presuppositions and commitments of moral thought and discourse. As this indicates, the standard view of metaethics as the study of the nature of moral judgments is that it covers three central domains: semantics, epistemology, and metaphysics. The major question that most metaethical theories seek to answer is whether moral beliefs (epistemology) involve moral facts (metaphysics) which our moral judgments seek to represent (semantics). Realists argue that moral judgments can be true or false because there are objective facts about value. The metaethical debate on this issue is polarized between two main approaches: “naturalistic” doctrines that aim to understand our judgments in terms of scientific or evolutionary facts of the natural world (cf. Brink 1989; Railton 2003; Copp 2007a) and “non-naturalistic” views that invoke moral facts to explain the nature of value (cf. Shafer-Landau 2003; FitzPatrick 2008; Enoch 2011). According to antirealists, however, there are no objective facts about value. Although our strong sense of disgust about (say) Putin’s war crimes seems to suggest a kind of objectivity and facticity, antirealists argue that we cannot take this “realist-seeming” experience at face value. Despite obvious differences, though, realists and antirealists tend to agree on what taking moral experience “at face value” means: it means to posit moral facts. While realists think there are moral facts of some sort, the opposing view is that it is absurd to suppose that there are moral entities “in” the world, awaiting discovery by human beings. We must, therefore, understand moral judgments in some different way: we must understand our deep beliefs as an expression of emotions or attitudes (Gibbard 1990; Timmons 1999), as a fundamental error or illusion (Mackie 1977), as a projection (Blackburn 1993), or as part of our nature as rational agents (Rawls 1985; Korsgaard 1996).4 Insofar as these positions deny that moral judgments can be objectively true because there are no independent moral facts for them to match, such views can be called “skeptical.” It is important to see, though, that this skepticism is metaphysical rather than moral. In line with the habit of distinguishing normative ethics from metaethics, most of the above authors argue that their views are not about the normative substance but the philosophical status of moral knowledge. Adapting a turn of phrase from John Rawls, their skepticism is “metaphysical, not moral.”5

80  Michiel Meijer It denies that there is any distinct state of the world that can “make” moral judgments true. Although such metaphysical skepticism makes good sense when working within the distinction between normative ethics and metaethics, one major disadvantage of antirealism is that it reflects poorly on our self-understanding. This sense of unease is captured well in Blackburn’s observation that “there is still that nagging feeling that on [expressivist] metaphysic there are no obligations, and so on, really (otherwise, why call the position anti-realist?)” (1993, 157, original emphasis). According to the common consensus, however, any attempt to take ourselves seriously should start with taking the metaphysics seriously, that is, to give up the myth of independent moral facts. The problem with this strategy is that rejecting the realist experience of value does not make this experience go away. Giving up moral facts does nothing to diminish our belief that Putin’s warmongering crosses a boundary no one should ever cross. Therefore, the aim of antirealist views such as Mackie’s error theory and Blackburn’s quasi-realism is to make sense of this experience without invoking moral facts. Ronald Dworkin aptly describes the seductive appeal of this strategy: It allows its partisans to be as metaphysically and culturally modest as anyone might wish, to abandon all claims as to their own morality’s ultimate truth or even superiority to other moralities. But it allows them to do this while still embracing their convictions as enthusiastically as ever, denouncing genocide or abortion or slavery or gender discrimination or welfare cheats with all their former vigor. (Dworkin 2011, 36) This approach eventually results in a kind of schizophrenic approach to moral agency. On the one hand, it urges us, for metaphysical reasons, to be skeptical about our deep moral beliefs. On the other, it promises that we can still hold our moral convictions with the same intensity. The discomfort of this position emerges clearly in the recent discussion among error theorists on the so-called “Now What Problem,” that is, the problem of how to live with the insight that there are no moral facts. According to Matt Lutz (who invented the phrase), one of the reasons this problem is worth considering is that a good solution will serve as “a bit of practical advice for error theorists who still have to navigate the world, thinking about what to do, acting, and interacting with others” (Lutz 2014, 351). However, the fact that we need a guide to make sense of this theory in practice indicates that the hoped-for-reconciliation between antirealism and ordinary self-understanding is somewhat premature. The real issue, however, is not these separate theories but the methodological framework in which such views make sense: one that presents

What Is Interpretive Metaethics and Why Do We Need It? 81 metaethics as a neutral discipline.6 By relying on claims about what there is (not) in the universe, most metaethical theories purport to rely on value-neutral metaphysics in adopting a metaperspective – hence the name “meta-ethics” – which stands above morality and judges it from outside. From this perspective, the question of how we understand ourselves as moral subjects cannot be raised, let alone addressed. As a result, moral self-understanding either remains an anomaly or can only be addressed schizophrenically.

From metaethics to hermeneutics For the reasons set out above, “interpretive metaethics” starts from the claim that the current realist/antirealist debate has largely reached an impasse. It is unable to explain how and why moral values strike us as real without either dissolving them into subjective projections/ evolutionary by-products or positing reifying moral facts. This impasse can only be resolved by liberating ourselves from the influence of a widely accepted methodological distinction underlying the current options: the distinction between normative ethics and metaethics. While the normative ethics/metaethics distinction has certain pedagogical merits, it seems rather unhelpful or even distorting when debating questions about moral self-understanding, in which normative issues (How should I live?) are deeply connected with metaethical ones (Are my moral views true?). In this respect, many have expressed doubts about the supposedly neutral status of metaethics. David Brink, for example, argues that “metaethical claims can and do affect the moral theories and substantive moral arguments one is entitled to accept” (1989, 5), while Michael Smith sees normative ethics as “crucial for the final resolution of metaethical questions” (1994, 3). More recently, it has been argued that “despite the abstract and deeply controversial nature of metaethics, its central concerns arise naturally – perhaps even inevitably – as one reflects critically on one’s own moral convictions” (Sayre-McCord 2014). This means that (even) metaethics, as a branch of moral philosophy, invokes our own self-understanding in a way that is very different from sociological, anthropological, or biological approaches to morality. That is, in moral philosophy “we do not distance ourselves from our own moral views in the way we would if we were engaged in a study of one of these other [scientific] kinds” (Copp 2007b, 5). Another way of putting this point is to say that metaethical questions just are normative questions, to the extent that they are “still moral questions [which] must be answered out of moral conscience and conviction, just like more ordinary questions about right and wrong” (Dworkin 2011, 28). Interpretive metaethics is inspired by the core claim behind these views: there is no Archimedean viewpoint for philosophical ethics. Surely, we can stand above morality to observe it from outside. Many sciences do.

82  Michiel Meijer But what we are then doing is a moral science, not moral philosophy. This means that as long as the standard picture continues as plausible – by which metaethics is descriptive and thus neutral regarding the normativity it seeks to theorize – our moral self-understanding will remain obscured. The problem is not just that our sense of self cannot be captured by a mere descriptive analysis of the status of moral judgments, but that the very issue of moral identity cannot be coherently formulated within a terminology aimed at neutral, non-normative description. The main point, then, is not that the topic of moral selfunderstanding is rarely discussed in metaethics but that its claim to neutrality precludes it from the very beginning. This is the confusion in which quasi-realist “nagging feelings” and error-theoretic “Now What” problems take root. The view that even metaethical theorizing requires normative engagement with substantive moral judgments because even abstract metaethical questions arise from more specific concerns for one’s own moral beliefs deeply resonates with philosophical hermeneutics. A programmatic concern of hermeneutics has been an emphasis on the irreducible normativity of human thought and action – a topic not unfamiliar to metaethicists. According to moral realists, we need moral facts to make sense of such normativity. As noted, the “naturalist/non-naturalist” divide on this issue is about the nature of these facts: Are moral facts to be understood as a subspecies of the “natural” facts that the natural sciences study or are they metaphysically independent of the natural world and thus “non-natural”? Within this debate, non-naturalistic conceptions of normativity typically invoke moral properties (such as goodness and rightness) to mark the contrast with non-moral, supposedly more “natural” properties in arguing for the autonomy of ethics as being outside the scope of science. Against this background, hermeneutics emerges as a radicalized form of non-naturalism in claiming that not just moral agency but also the human agency as such is subject to meanings that have a different kind of intelligibility from the objects of natural science. Unlike “natural” phenomena that are intelligible in a causally determined way, human thought and action can be right or wrong, correct or incorrect, and true or false. Yet unlike non-naturalist realists (who posit irreducibly normative facts to make this point), the hermeneutic attempt is to rehabilitate meaning as an indispensable category – and this not just for moral understanding but all human understanding. In this way, foregrounding meanings rather than facts in stressing the irreducibly normative character of human life, hermeneutic philosophers generally focus on the structure of human consciousness as the locus of meaning and normativity – and so implicitly turn away from the foundationalism behind “robust realist” notions of some human-independent moral reality (cf. ShaferLandau 2003; FitzPatrick 2008; Enoch 2011).

What Is Interpretive Metaethics and Why Do We Need It? 83 Along these lines, Heidegger famously argued that the normativity of human being has its basis in our “being-in-the-world.” In so arguing, he aimed to show that, since human existence is the source of meaning and thus of the understanding of reality, the intelligibility of each kind of thing is grounded in the concrete concerns of human existence. Given this view, the first step towards what I call “interpretive metaethics” is to see that this more radical, post-Heideggerian notion of normativity not just clarifies but justifies the view that even abstract metaethical questions – like all questions – involve our own self-understanding in being guided by our motives as purposive agents. For Heidegger and his followers, the crucial point is that these motives and purposes must be interpreted in a way that defines what we ultimately are. “Interpretation” here indicates less a reflective act than a way of orienting ourselves in the world; indeed, a way of “being” in a world which is expressive of and constituted by meanings shaped by self-interpretations. To conclude, the turn from metaethics to hermeneutics which inspires the idea of interpretive metaethics is based on a radicalized conception of irreducible normativity as being at the root of the whole enterprise of human understanding, the articulation of which discloses meanings rather than facts. In the remainder of this essay, I aim to show how the themes of normativity and meaning in relation to moral selfunderstanding run like a red thread through interpretive conceptions of moral semantics, moral epistemology, moral metaphysics, and, in the background of all of these, philosophy of language.

WHAT IS INTERPRETIVE METAETHICS?

Moral judgments as interpretations of meaning If philosophical hermeneutics starts with seeing human existence as structured by meaning and interpretation in a way that shapes our identities, then taking an interpretive turn in metaethics must mean seeing moral judgments as interpretations of meaning. The implications of this view cannot be overstated. Semantically, it means that moral judgments involve not just fact-stating claims about the world but also identityconstituting claims about ourselves. Epistemologically, this implies that moral understanding follows not just a representational logic but a constitutive one. Metaphysically, the result is that moral judgments, in constituting human identity, invoke a radically different kind of objectivity from the kind of objectivity attained in the natural sciences. Before considering these implications separately, it is worth noting that they only make full sense together, that is, as parts of which human self-understanding is the whole. Just as semantics is of concern to the

84  Michiel Meijer interpretive metaethicist because of what this topic has to say (if often only implicitly) about what it is like to be a speaking subject, so an interpretive take on epistemology is directed at the issue of what it is to be a knowing agent. The same holds for metaphysics, which the hermeneutic philosopher treats first and foremost in terms of the human capacity for interpretation, which is developed in the plural and contingent ways across history and between cultures, and needs to be examined as such through hermeneutic reflection. By foregrounding issues of normativity, meaning, and interpretation in relation to human self-understanding, interpretive metaethics can be seen as adding a new dimension to the standard domains of metaethics. In this respect, interpretive metaethics emerges not as just another metaethical theory (about semantics, epistemology, and metaphysics) but as bringing with it a distinctive conception of philosophical ethics as fundamentally concerned with the nature of the human. The novelty of this approach for metaethics is that the metaethical tradition, which is largely the preserve of English-speaking analytic philosophy, has tended not to give the same priority to philosophical anthropology as the European philosophical traditions (most notably hermeneutics, phenomenology, and neo-Kantianism) nor to treat interpretive philosophy as having any distinctive status in relation to ethical questions. No thinker today has done more to argue for the link between ethics, hermeneutics, and philosophical anthropology than Charles Taylor. In his view, “selfhood and morality turn out to be inextricably intertwined themes” because “our notion of the self is inextricably connected with our understanding of our moral predicament and moral agency” (Taylor 1989, 3; 1988, 298). At the same time, Taylor’s thinking is at the heart of the realist/antirealist debate in stressing that “our moral reactions suppose that they are responses to some reality,” that underlying them “there is supposed to be a truth of the matter,” and that it lies in the nature of moral judgments “to claim truth, reality, or objective rightness” (2011, 298). Yet for Taylor, understanding moral judgments involves more than just reflecting on semantic, epistemological, and metaphysical issues. This is because he sees moral judgments not merely as tracking some reality but as expressive of our nature as “self-interpreting animals” (Taylor 1985a, 45–76). To clarify this point, Taylor marks a distinction between what he calls “immediate feelings,” such as physical pain, and “import emotions,” which differ from brute feeling because they involve “a sense of our situation” (1985a, 48). His examples of import emotions are fear, shame, indignation, and admiration, emotions through which we experience our situation as bearing a certain “import” or meaning – it is being frightening, shameful, insulting, or admirable. Whereas a situation is painful “just because we feel pain in it,” the feeling of fear (etc.) is a response to what has happened, which makes explicit some judgment

What Is Interpretive Metaethics and Why Do We Need It? 85 about the situation that gives the emotion its character (1985a, 48–49). In this respect, Taylor argues, there is a qualitative difference between human sensibility and nonhuman emotion: Not only is there a great range of human emotions like indignation or admiration which are “thought-dependent” in the sense that they can only be attributed to language users; but it also seems plausible to say that even the common core which animals also feel, like fear and anger, are qualitatively different with man in that they are linked with an awareness of their objects which is open only to beings with language. (Taylor 1985a, 158) While we only speak of an animal’s fear or anger to speak about a quality of the animal in question, namely, its behavior or “response,” we can think of human feeling as making a further claim, one about the “object” of our awareness and response. In this sense, then, import emotions are expressive of our nature as uniquely linguistic animals. While the distinction between brute, immediate feelings, and import emotions can be seen as Taylor’s approach to what metaethicists call “moral semantics,” it is quite hard to locate his view in the metaethical landscape. This is because Taylor’s thinking on this topic crosses the boundary between “cognitivism” and “noncognitivism” against which metaethical theories are generally defined. In metaethics, cognitivism is the view that moral judgments express beliefs about certain states of affairs, which means they describe features of the world, whereas noncognitivism states that moral judgments express noncognitive states, such as emotions or desires. However, Taylor’s understanding of moral judgments as interpretations of the meaning (import) of a given situation involves both elements at once: to feel admiration for someone’s behavior involves having both an emotion (admiration) and a belief (that their behavior is really admirable). As this suggests, moral judgments in Taylor’s sense are partly expressive of our emotions and partly descriptive of (a feature of) reality. They are “subject-referring” because they express our emotions as well as “object-referring” because they aim to describe the object of such emotions. More broadly – and this is where philosophical anthropology comes into play – the articulation of import emotions opens us on to “the domain of what it is to be human,” to the extent that the import or meaning they incorporate becomes explicit only by articulating “a picture of our moral predicament, according to which some goods are higher than others, while still others are false or illusory” (Taylor 1985a, 63). This means that in Taylor’s view, some normative understanding of right and wrong is inherent in being able to express import emotions. For example, a feeling cannot be one of pride or shame unless there is a sense of my having done

86  Michiel Meijer well or wrong. But, Taylor argues, from the very fact of our feelings being articulated, the question cannot but arise “whether this characterization is adequate, whether it is not incomplete or distortive […] whether we have properly articulated our feelings, that is, whether we have properly explicated what the feeling gives us a sense of” (1985a, 64, my emphasis). This issue of self-clarification involves a kind of “self-semantics” precisely because our subject-referring feelings are ultimately constituted by the articulations we come to accept as valid descriptions of our situation.7 The further “epistemological” point being: we can only “know” that certain emotions (e.g., shame) incorporate a deeper insight into our situation than others (e.g., pride) insofar as these feelings are articulated and critically reflected upon against the background of our moral self-image. At this level of understanding – the level of human identity – feeling, articulation, and knowledge are jointly constitutive; making it hard, if not impossible, to accord one or the other clear primacy – say, in terms of either “semantic” or “epistemological” implications. Elaborating on this characteristically human type of feeling and articulation, Taylor introduces his concept of “strong evaluation” (1985a, 15–44). With this key concept, he seeks to capture the sense that human beings understand themselves not by simply having certain desires but by evaluating their desires in terms of their worth. Indeed, his claim is that it is central to “full, normal human agency” or “undamaged human personhood” that we experience some of our desires and goals as inherently more worthy than others, such that “we are not taking our de facto desires as the ultimate in justification but are going beyond that to their worth” (1989, 27; 1985a, 3, 66). For example, acting out of spite or wrath is generally seen as intrinsically unworthy and bad, while we judge motivations like compassion and generosity as worthy and good. To gain more clarity on Taylor’s interpretive take on moral semantics and moral epistemology, it is worth noting that the concept of strong evaluation brings out something crucial about import emotions. What distinguishes strong evaluations from mere import emotions is that they involve not just explicating the meaning of some situation, but also referring (back) to the life of the subject: Strong evaluations involve subject-referring imports because they involve discriminating our motivations as higher or lower, or intrinsically good or bad. They are thus, one might say, inherently reflexive, and explicating the imports concerned involves referring to the life of the subject. It involves, one might say, attributing to different motivations their place in the life of the subject. (Taylor 1985a, 67) In this way, Taylor underlines the central role of human self-understanding for understanding value more generally. Shame and pride are

What Is Interpretive Metaethics and Why Do We Need It? 87 strongly evaluative emotions because they need a crucial reference to one’s self-understanding. For example, I might be proud of my success as a banker in selling usurious insurance policies, while you are ashamed of me. Shame and pride refer to activities and ends that are worthy or unworthy. As import emotions, they involve a response to and make explicit some judgment about my situation as a banker. But as strong evaluations, they further reflect how this response/judgment relates to my moral identity. Should I be proud of my achievements as a banker? Is it an emotion I ought to have? The crucial point, however, is that such articulation is not just descriptive of some situation or even of ourselves, but, in fact, an attempt to “give shape to our experience” (Taylor 1985a, 67). For the understanding behind strong evaluation is that there is a “higher” way of being, that is, “there is a higher way of seeing our relations to others, which is higher not just in producing happier consequences – less strife, pain, bad blood – but also in that it enables us to see ourselves and others more broadly, more objectively, more truly” (1985a, 67). As Taylor concludes this point (which, metaethically speaking, is semantic as well as epistemological): Implicit in this strong evaluation is thus a placing of our different motivations relative to each other, the drawing, as it were, of a moral map of ourselves; we contrast a higher motivation with a baser, more self-enclosed and troubled one, which we can see ourselves as potentially growing beyond, if and when we can come to experience things from the higher standpoint. (Taylor 1985a, 67) But perhaps this is still too quick as an explanation of what I called the hermeneutic “radicalized” notion of normativity. For the radicalization was that not just moral agency but human existence as such is shaped by meanings that our self-interpretations seek to define. Obviously, import emotions and strong evaluations are like interpretations in that they are attempts to make clearer the meaning things have for us. However, as Taylor emphasizes by clearly separating immediate feelings from import emotions, it is not as though we started off with a kind of brute or raw feeling, which was then interpreted as higher and lower, noble or base, and so on. On the contrary, the point is the (radical) one that human life – in being saturated with imports or meanings – is “never without interpreted feeling” (1985a, 63). As Taylor explains elsewhere, this view supposes the following anthropology: Already to be a living agent is to experience one’s situation in terms of certain meanings; and this in a sense can be thought of as a sort of proto-“interpretation.” This is in turn interpreted and shaped by

88  Michiel Meijer the language in which the agent lives these meanings. This whole is then at a third level interpreted by the explanation we proffer of his actions. (Taylor 1985b, 27) In conclusion, Taylor’s interpretivism argues 1 that moral judgment involves import-ascriptions or judgments about meaning; 2 that these judgments involve interpretations, which are 3 subject-referring and object-referring, while also 4 standing at the basis of our understanding of what it is to be human; and 5 bringing into play normative issues of higher and lower value. Perhaps the most significant implication of this view is that we need language, words, to describe how things matter to us, that is, show up in a normative way. Again, it is hard to make sense of this point within the confines of traditional metaethical theorizing. This can be clarified by returning to the classical distinction between normative ethics and metaethics. This distinction marks a boundary between two different approaches to ethical theorizing: descriptive and normative. In metaethics, moral realists assert, and antirealists deny, that moral claims purport to state facts, which means that our judgments are “straightforwardly true or false in the way other purportedly fact-stating claims are, by accurately representing the facts or not” (FitzPatrick 2008, 161). On this conception, moral judgments aim to describe the world (falsely or not). Let us call this the “metaethical approach.” By contrast, a normative approach to ethics sees our judgments not as claims about what the world is like but what it should be, involving substantive proposals on how to act, how to live, or what kind of person to be. In this sense, normative ethics involves prescribing, not describing. To point up the contrast in the terms used earlier (in the section “Metaethics, normative ethics, and metaphysical skepticism”), whereas the realist/antirealist debate is seen as a non-normative discussion about the metaphysical status of our judgments (“metaphysical, not moral”), the normative debate is seen as explicitly non-metaphysical in its reflections on ethico-political substance (cf. Rawls’ phrase “political, not metaphysical”). With these points in place, the aim of interpretive metaethics is to add a third and novel approach which seeks to capture the truth in both metaethical and normative approaches by arguing that the descriptive and normative features of our judgments converge in our moral selfunderstanding. Metaethically speaking, a hermeneutic conception of moral judgments as interpretations of meaning takes due account of the realist experience of value at the center of our self-understanding

What Is Interpretive Metaethics and Why Do We Need It? 89 by allowing that our judgments are partly descriptive: they involve a response to and a judgment about the situation that describes its normative significance. Yet – and herein lies the metaethical innovation – interpretive metaethics is based on a rather divergent view of what is being described here. As interpretations of meanings rather than facts, moral judgments are not attempts to describe the world as it is in itself, but rather attempted articulations of our human experience of that world. Herein lies the essence of interpretive metaethics: moral judgments express emotions that express beliefs, and since such beliefs describe meanings, they allow no neutral description in the way that facts do. This means that moral beliefs, hermeneutically understood, are always already fully normative because there is no non-normative access to human meaning. In this respect, interpretive metaethics lies not only beyond the metaethical boundary between belief and emotion (which in turn separates cognitivist views from noncognitive ones) but also beyond the normative ethics/metaethics distinction underlying the realist/antirealist dispute. Or, perhaps better put, the point of the view is that such distinctions have no place in our self-understanding.

Interpretive moral realism But what are the deeper metaphysical implications of this account? What about the “object-referring” aspect of interpretation? If interpretive metaethics starts with rejecting the distinction between normative ethics and metaethics, then this theory cannot stop at a Rawlsian boundary of the “strictly normative” and strategically ignore metaphysical questions. Yet because of the prioritizing of meanings over facts, it cannot accept a reifying notion of moral facts either. In other words, where is the realism in interpretive metaethics? In asking these questions, we might recall that in metaethics, moral realism is the view according to which moral judgments can be objectively true or false because there are independent moral facts. Seeing moral judgments as interpretations of meaning has altered all this. To be sure, the meanings that our moral judgments aim to express depend on us in the sense that they require language to exist. But precisely this feature of our experience – that the meanings to which our judgments respond can only exist for us through articulation – gives our moral statements a distinctively metaphysical character. Again, Taylor’s terminology helps to clarify what is at stake here. Unlike the expression of brute immediate feelings (such as physical pain), strong evaluations are such that articulating something with the term “shameful” inflects our sense of meaning in a new direction. The “metaphysics” involved here is that new expressions “open up new ways of being in the world” (Taylor 2016, 189). What Taylor calls the “constitutive power of language,” then, puts us squarely in the metaphysical domain because it creates new realities, and, beyond that, a new sense

90  Michiel Meijer of self as part of that reality. Strong evaluations not only make explicit some judgment about the world (actions, persons, policies) but further reflect the significance of one’s own desires, actions, and identity as part of that world. As Taylor puts this point: Prior to the articulation, the as yet unnamed import may be felt in a diffuse, unfocused way, a pressure that we can’t yet respond to. After articulation, it becomes part of the explicit shape of meaning for us. As a result it is felt differently; our experience is changed; it has a more direct bearing on our lives. […] Articulation here alters the shape of what matters to us. It changes us. (Taylor 2016, 189, my emphasis) On this account, the constitutive power of moral judgment is that it reflects on us as self-interpreting animals seeking moral orientation through articulation. For example, when I come to understand my initial agitated state as “envy” or “jealousy,” I am already living it differently. I have taken the first step out of confusion; my situation already has a shape for me. In this way, new articulations allow the world to move us in new ways. That is why Taylor calls them “constitutive.” But again, this kind of articulation requires words. An initially vague “unpleasant” feeling emerges as a recognizably distinct experience of envy, jealousy, vanity, indignation, remorse, or whatever, when we find the right words. The strongly evaluative descriptions carry the constitutive force. In this regard, such descriptions are not just “object-referring.” They are object-shaping: as strongly evaluative descriptions, they constitute and color the meanings in a way that helps to define what these meanings are. Consequently, any change of description affects a change in the reality, that is, “the pattern of meanings we live by, the ‘landscape’ as we live it and feel it” (Taylor 2016, 197). To bring out the nature of what we might call Taylor’s “interpretive moral realism,” it is helpful to stress the difference with the standard view on moral realism, that is, the position that there are moral facts. As noted (in the section “From metaethics to hermeneutics”), given the available options, the view that bears at least a superficial similarity to interpretive metaethics is non-naturalist robust realism because of its antinaturalist commitment to irreducible normativity. Metaphysically speaking, however, the contrast with interpretive theory could not be greater. For the robust realist, moral facts are “brute” facts about value that are not further explicable. In this respect, Shafer-Landau makes it clear that being a moral realist just is to be committed to a set of brute facts for which no further explanation is available, as a basic metaphysical reality: values just are “a brute fact about the way the world works” and there may not be much more to say (Shafer-Landau 2003, 48). To give another formulation of this point, while FitzPatrick sees moral

What Is Interpretive Metaethics and Why Do We Need It? 91 facts not as brute but as expressive of the “inherent value laden-ness” of human life, he loses no time in stressing that “there may not be anything more for philosophy to say here” (FitzPatrick 2008, 196–197). The implication is that values must be understood either as purely abstract objects, perhaps like mathematical entities such as prime numbers (Enoch 2011, 203), or as properties that “inhabit” the world as entities that are there anyway – on a par with “geological or biological properties” (Shafer-Landau 2003, 63). From a hermeneutical perspective, this kind of inarticulateness is deeply confused. In fact, it is rooted in a form of self-delusion which completely ignores the constitutive power of language on which hermeneutic philosophers insist. Describing moral experience in terms of facts that are there anyway (on a par with mathematical, biological, or geological properties) may bring clarity to the world but it does not alter it. By contrast, when I see that the issue which really concerns me is envy or jealousy, I am clear about something which is not independent of my clarified vision. I have clarified my sense of what matters to me, which changes the shape of what matters to me. In Taylor’s terms, the discovery has “motivational force” (2016, 191). Evidently, the experience of discovery alluded to here is emphatically not like discovering a mathematical theorem, a new animal species, or how heat flows from the earth. And yet, when Taylor states that strong evaluations involve ends or goods that “stand independent of our own desires, inclinations, or choices” (1989, 20), it seems clear that these judgments refer beyond themselves to orders of reality that we could be getting wrong. While this point appears to commit Taylor to the representational logic of robust realism, a crucial difference remains. The disanalogy is that the epistemic gain in the realm of strong evaluation comes through “the change in felt intuitions which the words bring about in us” (Taylor 2016, 193, my emphasis), not through a changed understanding of “the way the world works” in a quasi-scientific sense, which can be observed in a disengaged mode. There is no doubt that the independence and objectivity involved here are utterly different from the self-standing objectivity of moral and natural facts alike. The meanings involved in interpretation are deeply dependent on our modes of articulating them. But this does not mean that issues of truth cannot arise in relation to these meanings: whereas we cannot feel pain mistakenly, we can be wrong about our interpretations of meaning and value. That is, as self-interpreting beings, we could always be deceiving ourselves. We can become aware of such misinterpretations because (1) we feel the demand to be consistent in our self-understanding and (2) we have the capacity to examine and criticize our judgments for their lack of consistency. To return to the earlier example, where I am proud of my success at selling bad insurances, your being ashamed of me may begin to work on me to the point that I come to see that this is not a worthy

92  Michiel Meijer achievement at all. I may initially pride myself for acting out of generosity and helping people, but I can always ask: Is selling usurious insurance policies really consistent with that? Asking such questions is by no means random or optional. As self-interpreting beings, we are looking for the right words to describe our situation. We want to know, in other words, what the world is really like. This is where the “object-referring” aspect of interpretation emerges in full force, for the very issue of rightness and consistency can arise only when our judgments are related to some independent property as their fit object. For the interpretive moral realist, then, there is a getting it right and getting it wrong in this domain. Moral judgments are interpretations of meaning in that they are attempts to make clearer the meaning things have for us, but such clarity cannot be achieved at will by simply articulating our experience. The point being: there is a moral reality here – not a reality of facts but one of meanings – to which our judgments are answerable. As potentially object-shaping statements, interpretations of meaning allow that our experience can be faulty, which in turn implies the deeply realist view that some modes of self-understanding were wrong and inconsistent (witch hunters, slave traders), while others are so today (war criminals, racists), reminding us never to take our existing experience for granted in search of the human good. As this indicates, moral judgments as interpretations of meaning are not just descriptive statements. As they involve the attribution of meaning and value in relation to our self-image, getting it right in moral issues is more than a matter of having true moral beliefs by getting the facts right. It also requires being able to grasp how such beliefs relate to our sense of our life as a whole and the direction it is taking as we lead it. Intriguingly, robust realists explicitly refuse to allow such deeper articulation by insisting on brute facts. However, if there really is “nothing that makes” moral judgments true beyond the “inherent value laden-ness” of reality (Shafer-Landau 2003, 15, 48; FitzPatrick 2008, 196), then the sense of identity that our articulations seek to express seems to evaporate altogether. Taking this position is annihilating our self-understanding in its very meaning, closing off the entire space within which our moral judgments as self-defining orientations can be articulated and discussed. The imagined agent behind robust realism is revealing in this respect. While robust realists tend not to emphasize agency as such, Enoch explicates the implicit anthropology: Objective facts are those we seek to discover, not those we make true. And in this respect too, when it comes to moral truths, we are in a position more like that of the scientist who tries to discover the laws of nature (which exist independently of her investigations) than that of the legislator (who creates laws). (Enoch 2015, 199)8

What Is Interpretive Metaethics and Why Do We Need It? 93 This picture of moral agents as disengaged observers runs directly against the object-shaping capacity of moral judgment. Perhaps robust realists would agree that we can try to deepen our understanding and gain more articulacy about moral facts. However, these articulations are seen as an epistemic issue about our views about these facts, which means that the facts themselves remain the same when our understanding about them deepens or alters. Articulacy about meanings, however, changes not just us but the reality in which we live, that is, “the pattern of meanings we live by, the ‘landscape’ as we live it and feel it” (Taylor 2016, 197). A final example may clarify this constitutive force. If it is a moral fact that rape is always wrong, then this should lead us (and in some parts of the world has led us) to alter current human realities, such as in debates about criminalizing marital rape in India. But the statement in itself, “rape is always wrong,” does nothing to explain why we should be so moved. Indeed, what is needed is precisely an account of what it is that “makes” this judgment true. What is needed, then, is an account of the relevant historical and social contexts that shows this judgment to be founded; of what it is, in all its contingent historical details, that has made rape become wrong – things like the rise of the women’s right movement in the 19th century and the feminist movements during the 20th and 21st centuries in the West. More specifically, this might mean relating the claim “rape is always wrong” to any number of related beliefs and sensibilities that were part of these social movements – beliefs captured in such terms as bodily integrity, dignity, autonomy, equal rights in family law, work, voting, and so on.9 Indeed, if brute moral facts were all we have to offer here, there would be no self but for what Taylor has described as a “punctual” self, that is, taking “a stance to ourselves which takes us out of our normal way of experiencing the world and ourselves” (1989, 162) – indeed, on a par with the scientist who aims to discover facts about the natural world. Yet the main obstacle in acknowledging the constitutive dimension of language is less about robust realism than about the widely shared idea that these topics can be explored from a neutral viewpoint. The metaethical attempt to take us outside morality into value-neutral metaphysics is, both literally and metaphorically, a way out of the ordinary. The problem with this move is not that it involves stepping back from our own identities. Rather, the issue is that the insights this strategy (realist or antirealist) ultimately yields cannot be brought back to ordinary life without falling into serious confusion and incoherence that does damage to our self-understanding.

Conclusion The philosophical weight of interpretive metaethics depends in part on being able to make the benefits of this view visible to those currently committed to the dominant metaethical framework. In this essay, I have

94  Michiel Meijer proposed two ways of meeting this challenge. The first is to show why the appeal of metaethics as a neutral discipline is far outweighed by its costs – the primary cost being a failure to come to grips with ordinary moral self-understanding. The second is to demonstrate that the normative ethics/metaethics distinction serves as a distortion insofar as it hinders understanding of the radical normativity of human life and the constitutive force of human language. But perhaps the most significant reason for putting interpretation on the metaethical agenda is that metaethical reflection cannot be neutral about human nature. Indeed, if metaethics is the attempt to understand the semantic, epistemological, and metaphysical presuppositions and commitments of morality, it is unclear how turning away from issues of self-understanding and interpretation would serve this goal. Rather, it seems that contemporary metaethics – the dominant approach in Western philosophical approaches to questions about the status of moral beliefs – would benefit precisely from a critical analysis of our interpretative practices, including our moral interpretations and their historical background. Therefore, what the interpretive philosopher ultimately has to offer metaethics is not a replacement of its central questions, but rather an articulation of an essential component of such questions. Interpretive metaethics is not a rejection of metaethics. It is simply an argument that metaethics will be better, in its reflections on morality, if it consciously includes the hermeneutics of value. Significant though these points may be within a metaethical climate that takes for granted the anthropological implications of ethics, the most important contribution of interpretive metaethics is that it shifts the terms of the realist/antirealist debate. In this respect, the relative neglect of anthropological issues and metaphysical skepticism are connected tendencies. It is because we are too skeptical about metaphysics, because we see moral facts as the only viable means of conceptualizing the experience of objective value that we tend to be indifferent about how this experience relates to our self-understanding. Becoming less skeptical about metaphysics and less indifferent about ourselves are likewise connected.10

Notes 1 In so arguing, the idea of interpretive metaethics can be seen as drawing the implications of adopting a hermeneutic model of philosophy for ethical theory. That is, to draw the ethical implications of the view that interpretation is “a universal and ubiquitous feature of all human activity” which “always takes place within some context or background” (Hiley, Bohman, and Shusterman 1991, 7). 2 The sections “Metaethics, normative ethics, and metaphysical skepticism” and “Interpretive moral realism” of this chapter are based on the relevant parts of Meijer (2021).

What Is Interpretive Metaethics and Why Do We Need It? 95 3 While refuting intrinsic normativity and moral objectivity, antirealists agree with realists that moral experience supports realism and still aim to account for this (allegedly false) experience. Cf. Mackie (1977, 15), Dancy (1986, 172), Blackburn (1993, 152), Smith (1993, 248), and Brink (1989, 23–24). 4 Although these works were written decades ago, new and more sophisticated metaethical views, such as fictionalism and quietism, are mostly species of one of these. 5 This is a reversal of Rawls’ well-known expression of a theory of justice that is strictly “political, not metaphysical.” 6 This means that my criticism is not just directed at antirealist views. Indeed, later in this chapter (section “Interpretive moral realism”), I argue that robust realist non-naturalism – the view that champions moral facts – reflects equally badly on moral self-understanding. 7 Note that the central hermeneutic idea of the human being as a textanalogue makes sense of this notion of a “semantics of the self.” 8 As I have argued in detail in Compaijen and Meijer (2021), the price of this kind of realism is a reification of both the world and ourselves to the extent that it simultaneously conceives of moral experience in terms of brute, objective facts and regards moral agents as disengaged observers of those facts. 9 As this suggests, my focus on the first-person perspective throughout this chapter does not deny that human self-understanding is always embedded in wider social-historical intersubjective frameworks without which moral identity would not be possible. Also, the aspiration to moral selfunderstanding and self-realization can be individual (involving personal ends and constraints) as well as collective (involving social and political goals and obstacles). 10 I thank Georgia Warnke and Hanna Meretoja for their helpful comments and suggestions regarding an earlier draft of this chapter.

References Blackburn, Simon. 1993. Essays in Quasi-Realism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brink, David. 1989. Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Compaijen, Rob and Michiel Meijer. 2021. “The Reification of Value: Robust Realism and Alienation,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 29 (3): 275–294. Copp, David. 2007a. Morality in a Natural World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Copp, David, ed. 2007b. The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dancy, Jonathan. 1986. Two Conceptions of Moral Realism. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (Supplementary Volume) 60 (1): 167–206. Dworkin, Ronald. 2011. Justice for Hedgehogs. Harvard: Belknap. Enoch, David. 2011. Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Enoch, David. 2015. “Why I Am an Objectivist about Ethics (and Why You Are, Too).” In The Ethical Life, edited by Russ Shafer-Landau, 192–205. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

96  Michiel Meijer Enoch, David. 2018. “Non-Naturalistic Realism in Metaethics.” In The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics, edited by Tristram McPherson and David Plunkett, 29–42. New York: Routledge. FitzPatrick, William. 2008. “Robust Ethical Realism, Non-Naturalism, and Normativity.” In Oxford Studies in Metaethics, edited by Russ Shafer-Landau, 159–205. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gibbard, Allan. 1990. Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgment. Oxford: Clarendon. Hiley, David, James Bohman, and Richard Shusterman. 1991. The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science, Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Korsgaard, Christine. 1996. The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lutz, Matt. 2014. “The ‘Now What’ Problem for Error Theory.” Philosophical Studies 171: 351–371. Mackie, John. 1977. Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Mandelbaum, Maurice. 1955 [1969]. The Phenomenology of Moral Experience. Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press. Meijer, Michiel. 2021. “Clarifying Moral Clarification: On Taylor’s Contribution to Metaethics.” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 29 (5): 705–722. Railton, Peter. 2003. Facts, Values, and Norms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rawls, John. 1985. “Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 14: 223–251. Sayre-McCord, Geoff. 2014. “Metaethics.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by EN Zalta (ed.). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ sum2014/entries/metaethics/ Shafer-Landau, Russ. 2003. Moral Realism: A Defence. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Smith, Michael. 1993. “Objectivity and Moral Realism: On the Significance of the Phenomenology of Moral Experience.” In Reality, Representation, and Projection, edited by John Haldane and Crispin Wright, 234–258. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, Michael. 1994. The Moral Problem. Oxford: Blackwell. Taylor, Charles. 1985a. Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, Charles. 1985b. Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, Charles. 1988. “The Moral Topography of the Self.” In Hermeneutics and Psychological Theory, edited by Stanly Messer, Louis Sass, and Robert Woolfolk. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Taylor, Charles. 2011. Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays. Cambridge: Belknap. Taylor, Charles. 2016. The Language Animal. The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Timmons, Mark. 1999. Morality without Foundations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

5

“How Other Kinds of Beings See Us Matters” On the Scope of Interpretation Arne Johan Vetlesen

Introduction At the start of his book How Forests Think, anthropologist Eduardo Kohn writes: How other kinds of beings see us matters. That other kinds of beings see us changes things. If jaguars also represent us – in ways that can matter vitally to us – then anthropology cannot limit itself just to exploring how people from different societies might happen to represent them as doing so. Such encounters with other kinds of beings force us to recognize the fact that seeing, representing, and perhaps knowing, even thinking, are not exclusively human affairs. (Kohn 2013: 1) I suggest that what Kohn is up to when taking the proposition “how other kinds of beings see us matters” as his point of departure amounts to an interpretive turn that differs from the one discussed in philosophy of science and in hermeneutics the last couple of decades. Kohn, like many of his colleagues in social anthropology, expands the notion of interpretation, of its subjects as well as of its objects, by freeing it from its traditional anthropocentric framework, showing up its workings in the natural world and so as something not restricted to human agents. To pursue the perspective proposed by Kohn, then, means to challenge a key assumption in modern Western thought: that whenever we talk about interpretation, the subjects are human beings, so that interpretation is a feature of practices within a social world, a characteristic of culture as distinct from nature. This being so, it is not only that those engaging in interpretation are human agents; the objects (phenomena) interpreted are likewise human agents and their doings. As for the natural world, regarded as a separate domain from the social one made up of humans, explanation rather than interpretation is called for. To be sure, we can interpret natural phenomena like a flood or a hurricane as a “threat” to us humans. But the work of interpretation in such DOI: 10.4324/9781003251354-8

98  Arne Johan Vetlesen cases remains thoroughly human-centered in that we are the only agents involved in this interpretation in the sense of performing it, engaging in it. This being so, we do not ask what the flood and the hurricane mean (intend) by occurring the way they do, affecting us the way they do. Instead, we take the flood and the hurricane to be devoid of intentional agency, reserving it for us humans. The contrast at work is aptly illuminated by the different ways in which the question “Why did that happen?” is answered: whereas social phenomena have causes that involve the intentions and motivations of the involved agents, referring to what they set out to accomplish (see Schutz 1967 [1932]); Berger and Luckmann 1966), natural phenomena occur the way they do according to a causality that yields the explanation – the answer to “why?” – without having to invoke the perspective – the intentions and motivations – of the natural entities involved: there is no such interior or subjective perspective to recognize since the capacities that go with it are simply lacking. In this sense, the natural world is considered mute, devoid of expressivity and communicative exchange, devoid, that is, of the features taken to characterize interpretation. Put in the terms pioneered by Anthony Giddens (1977: 12), the social sciences differ from the natural sciences in involving a “double hermeneutic” such that the theories concern a “pre-interpreted” world of lay meanings: what is interpreted by the scholar are phenomena always already interpreted by the agents themselves, showing up interpretation as part and parcel of the object domain of the social sciences. Again, this is precisely what is denied the entities that constitute the object domain of the natural sciences. To be sure, humans are “self-interpreting animals,” to allude to Charles Taylor (1985: 45ff.). But the question raised here is this: Are we the only such? If not, what are the implications? In what follows, I shall pursue the question about interpretation in a wider and more cosmological sense than the one commonly found in the philosophy of science, with its focus on issues of methodology and epistemology. Doing so will not only help us reconsider the issues of agency that interpretation throws up, but also serve to highlight the mechanisms of being excluded from the status that such agency provides – to be sure, something that may target humans as well as nonhumans. I begin my discussion by elaborating on the anthropological approach advanced by Kohn and then turn to a classic in modern philosophy, Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, a work that I consider to be exemplary in the way it is committed to the very framework Kohn takes us beyond.

“How other kinds of beings see us matters” When Eduardo Kohn states that “how other kinds of beings see us matters,” the example he gives is that of jaguars. Animals such as jaguars, he asserts, “represent us,” testifying to the fact that “seeing, and perhaps

“How Other Kinds of Beings See Us Matters” 99 knowing, even thinking, are not exclusively human affairs” (2013: 1). To be sure, that Kohn’s claim points to a fact will be widely contested. Why? Because the traditional Western view holds that representation requires cognitive capacities of a sort possessed by humans only. Disputing this, Kohn’s contention is that “non-human life-forms also represent the world. This more expansive understanding of representation is hard to appreciate because our social theory […] conflates representation with language” (2013: 8). This conflation, Kohn explains, rests upon the assumption that “all representational phenomena have symbolic properties” (2013: 40). On his view, domains such as human-animal relations “are not completely circumscribed by the symbolic but are nevertheless semiotic” (2013: 39). Kohn describes a number of situations where members of the Runa of Ecuador’s Upper Amazon are engaged in interpreting their dogs’ barks. In doing so, they acknowledge that the dogs’ barks are “manifestations of their interpretation of the world around them,” whereby how those dogs interpret the world around them matters vitally – not only to the dogs themselves, but also to the Runa inasmuch as a dog’s barking is taken as a meaningful action, something the dog does in a particular situation and for a reason – barking so as to communicate that danger is imminent, say, in the form of an approaching jaguar. If the human individuals, no less than the other animals, involved in this situation should fail to interpret the barking as a sign of danger, and to act accordingly, that failure may prove fatal. Kohn’s larger claim is that “the world beyond the human is not a meaningless one made meaningful by humans.” Rather, he continues, “mean-ings – means-ends relations, strivings, purposes, telos, intentions, functions, and significance – emerge in a world of living thoughts beyond the human in ways that are not fully exhausted by our all-toohuman attempts to define and control these” (2013: 72). This is the sense in which Kohn contends that “the forests around Avila [where the Runa live] are animate”; that is to say, “these forests house other emergent loci of mean-ings, ones that do not necessarily revolve around, or originate from, humans” (ibid.). In other words, we humans are not the only ones who actively interpret the world, helping bring about what happens in that world precisely by way of doing so, whereby not interpreting what comes to pass, and what other agents of various kinds are up to, is not an option. The philosophical case for Kohn’s rejection of the conventional view that representation necessarily involves language, and hence the possession of linguistic competence so as to meaningfully articulate and share representational content with others, relies on the semiotics developed by Charles S. Peirce. Kohn credits Peirce with going beyond the classical dyadic understanding of signs as “something that stands for something else,” namely by insisting that we recognize a third variable: signs stand for something in relation to a “somebody.” As we have seen,

100  Arne Johan Vetlesen for Kohn this “somebody” is not necessarily human: animals are selves, as are plants. Indeed, in his view, a forest such as that of which the Runa are members is to be understood as a “multispecies ecology of selves,” one that – crucially, and nowadays increasingly precariously – “depends for its existence on the continuous flourishing of dense nonhuman ecologies just as it does on the humans who live by tapping into those ecologies” (2013: 227). Since so many of these nonhuman elements – be they animals or plants, trees or rivers – are under enormous pressure from human activities that, instead of sustaining these ecologies and recognizing the richness of selves making them up, deny and degrade them, the particular kind of life that such a forest is may come to an end. This is what happens in a situation where “the world beyond the human is being increasingly made over by the all-too-human” (ibid.). Many a reader will probably balk at Kohn’s attempt to employ Peirce’s semiotics so far “beyond the human” as to include not only animals as participants in practices of representation and interpretation of what comes to pass in a shared world, but also plants and trees – a whole forest, even – as well. What, more precisely, does Kohn mean by a “self” when he uses the term for animals, even plants? Turning to Charles Taylor’s account in his seminal Sources of the Self is instructive here. “We are selves,” says Taylor, “only in that certain issues matter for us. What I am as a self, my identity, is essentially defined by the way things have significance for me. […] We are only selves insofar as we move in a certain space of questions, as we seek and find an orientation to the good” (1989: 34). To speak of people as selves, then, is to imply that “they are beings of the requisite depth and complexity to have an identity” (1989: 32). That we “cannot do without some orientation to the good,” asserts Taylor, speaks to a fact about us on the level of “transcendental conditions” (1989: 33, 32); that is to say, a fact about what kind of beings we are that is inescapable and ineluctable. Taylor proceeds to explain how we as selves are engaged in “strong evaluation”: not only do we have desires, and not only do we regard something as important or worthy; crucially, we also evaluate how worthy of being pursued a given desire is, asking ourselves whether I really want to identify myself as a person having, and striving to satisfy, that sort of desire. And what is more, I don’t engage in asking and answering that question purely by myself, as it were; I do so as a member of a society, and by way of referring to a “defining community,” one I wish to be seen by others as worthy of belonging to (1989: 36). Taylor’s ambition is to give an account of the inescapable sense in which being a self, and having (forming, communicating, maintaining) an identity, belongs to human agency, capturing its very core. Philosophically, his account is part of a lifelong polemic against utilitarianism and “the imagined agent of naturalist theory,” which he calls “a monster” (1989: 32).

“How Other Kinds of Beings See Us Matters” 101 Since rival conceptions about what human agency essentially consists in provide the context for his account, Taylor does not address the question whether nonhumans can be selves. This does not prevent us from asking: What happens if we try to apply Taylor’s account to nonhuman creatures like animals, or plants? Can we say about a dog, or a jaguar, that it is a self inasmuch as it has “certain issues matter” for it, to allude to Taylor’s formulation? I think so, as does Kohn. Can we go further and say that such animals engage in “seek[ing] and find[ing] an orientation to the good.” Again, my answer is yes. Can we go even further and say that they engage in “strong evaluation” as well? Probably not. So I grant that here are limits to the similarities to be found between human agents and nonhuman ones such as dogs and jaguars. At a certain point of reflexivity, cognitive and intellectual abilities are so advanced, so sophisticated, as to be found only in humans. But that this is so does not contradict Darwin’s conclusion in The Descent of Man that “the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, is certainly one of degree and not of kind” (Darwin 1871; see Midgley 2010: 81). At the most basic level, to have things matter to oneself takes the form of irritability, as explained by Hans Jonas: “Openness toward the world is basic to life. Its elementary evidence is the mere irritability, the sensitiveness to stimuli, which the simple cell displays as an integral aspect of its aliveness. Irritability is the germ of having a world” (1966: 99). This holds for plants as well as for animals: the plant is actively oriented to the good (Taylor) in the form of the difference it makes to it whether or not it has access to light and water; enjoying such access is a matter of non-indifference to the plant, access being the desired (positive) state striven for, non-access being the negative one sought avoided. Even if this is granted, the question is: How do such creatures as a rose and a birch tree articulate – communicate – the fact of having things (changes in their environment impacting on their state) matter to them in the sense of making the positive versus negative difference I spoke about? Must we not say that we find these nonhuman creatures lacking in such abilities? Indeed, we are inclined to say so. But what we need to ask then is whether our coming up short in finding such abilities in so many of our “others” is testimony to a lack in them or to a lack in us. As is well known, in recent years Nature has reported on research that goes to show that there is such a thing as “the intelligence of plants.” Likewise, Peter Wohlleben, in his book The Secret Lives of Trees, presented to the wider public research to show that trees engage in complex ways of communication with each other, joining the company in defending their access to the basic conditions of life and staving off what threatens it – collaborating in safeguarding the conatus exhibited in each individual tree, to employ the term for each living creature’s “striving to

102  Arne Johan Vetlesen persist in its being” that goes back to Spinoza. That such intelligence and such communication may not be meaningful to us, or even graspable for us, does not mean that they do not exist and do not thrive in the nonhuman creatures we are talking about. It means that there are more to these abilities and practices, more variations of them, than the peculiarly human ones that we as a culture and per tradition have been accustomed to regard as unique in the sense of human exceptionalism. I cannot go into the comprehensive issue about what (or who) should be regarded as being above or below the threshold of qualifying as a “self,” understood as a question all across the board of various species. What are the correct criteria for such a threshold? Irritability in Jonas’ sense? Susceptibility to feel pain in Peter Singer’s sense? Notice that Jonas’ threshold is lower than Singer’s, allowing for plants in addition to animals. For my purposes in what follows, the takeaway from this discussion consists of two points. The first is to do with Jonas’ implicit critique of Heidegger: it is not only humans who “have a world” and actively relate to it; so do plants and animals as well, each in their species-specific, distinct ways. This clearly connects with Kohn’s view as set out above. The second point is about analytic focus: the single individual versus the species, the part versus the whole. Recall that Kohn’s ambition is to give an account of a “multispecies ecology of selves” (2013: 227). Even though he acknowledges the importance of describing what it means to be a self in the case of the individual (say, dog or jaguar), as an anthropologist his main interest is in the ways in which different selves, meaning of different species, across the human/nonhuman differentiation, impact on each other, engaging in complex ways of communication in doing so, as illustrated in the examples given above. Whereas philosophers tend to concentrate on the individual, asking what each individual requires in terms of abilities in order to be a self, Kohn explores the multi-species exchanges occurring within a particular place (say, a forest) involving so many individuals from so many species, each contributing to the sustenance of the “biotic community” they help make up. Regardless of their specific species identity, the selves Kohn speaks about are always ecologically situated selves, met upon and described within the multi-species whole that transcends each member yet facilitates its very existence in time and space.

Agency across the nature/culture divide: the case of Amerindian cosmologies I return to the point with which I began: that how other kinds of beings see us matters. As we saw in the example from Kohn’s book, the context in which such “being seen” is actualized can be that of life and death: survival

“How Other Kinds of Beings See Us Matters” 103 may depend on interpreting the sign of one kind of other – a dog – with respect to still another kind – the approaching jaguar – correctly, so as to respond appropriately in that very instant, with no time to lose, no mistake to make as to how to interpret the dog’s bark. Note that the dog’s bark is just as crucial to get right for the approaching jaguar as for the human individuals under threat, and ditto with respect to other animals on the scene, such as monkeys. Indeed, getting it right about the bark is equally important for all involved, regardless of their particular identity and their particular capacities qua species and kind. If anything, the animals involved in the situation may be more adept, and quicker at the work of interpretation than the humans, making us realize that, for all its comparative assets, linguistic competence as possessed – presumably exclusively – by humans is not always what matters most. Even if this is granted, a question arises: Isn’t the example given the exception rather than the rule in the kind of world in which most of us live today? When was the last time I needed to heed, at a moment’s notice, the sign represented by the sound made by an animal – any sort of animal, at that? Like it or not, we don’t live in a forest, we live in cities. Hence, the sort of “others” from whom we take our cues about how to act are not typically animals, or some other sort of nonhuman creatures, but fellow humans – if not exclusively so, then clearly predominantly so. And should an animal act in a way that proves important to me, and so commands my full attention, it will typically be a pet – say, my dog or my cat – rather than a wild animal such as Kohn’s jaguar. Pet owners aside, animals simply play no role in the everyday practices of the average member of present-day society. Moreover, since owning a pet that “makes a difference” in my life will depend on my decision to own such an animal, forming a relationship with an animal – and we are literally talking here about one animal, my dog or my cat – will be a matter of choice: the animal’s presence will be something optional, not a given in my existence (Vetlesen 2022). As Paul Shepard shows in his seminal books Nature and Madness (1982) and The Others (1996), that the “others” we need to engage with in practices of interpretation are human others may strike us as perfectly natural. Historically, however, this situation is not only highly unusual, but unprecedented in the history of humans’ existence on planet Earth. Future historians may find that the most remarkable thing about contemporary society is how profoundly it came to change its substantial “other,” the natural world. Only now do we fully, if reluctantly and belatedly, realize that anthropocentrism as acted upon and helping sustain the entire series of practices devoted to humankind’s exploitation of nature has had the effect of giving the lie to the notion from which it started out: that culture and nature, in a timeless, static, and onceand-for-all manner, constitute two perfectly separate and so autonomous domains of reality, each internally homogeneous: domains that

104  Arne Johan Vetlesen in terms of properties show up a relationship of mutual exclusiveness so that whereas culture connotes subjectivity, activity, signification, meaning, identity, and purpose, nature connotes object, passivity, body, instinct, and animality. As every student of the social sciences knows, Max Weber put it unequivocally: “Culture is a finite segment of the meaningless infinity of the world process, a segment on which human beings confer meaning and significance” (1949: 81). Weber is echoed in anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s oft-cited statement that “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun” (1973: 5), inspiring his colleague Fredrik Barth’s assertion that in dealing with a (any) group’s cosmology, “we are dealing with meaning which is conferred on a sector of the world” (1987: 69; italics in original), a sector held to be void of meaning prior to and independently of humans actively conferring it. Importantly, the alleged matters of fact as presented by the modern social sciences hardly conceal a highly charged normativity: everything to do with agency – what it requires and how it unfolds in the world – and the full-fledged moral standing that goes with it is reserved to the humans constituting culture, whereas everything to do with being acted upon and so standing at the receiving end is reserved to its proclaimed “other” nature, in toto at that. Based on Kohn’s anthropological approach, I have argued that there is more to selfhood than human selfhood and that there is more to articulation and expression than linguisticality. However, what it means to be a self in a more-than-human sense is not my main topic – interpretation is, whereby of course we need to be clear about what kinds of agents, and so selves, take part in practices of interpretation, doing so in so many species-specific ways. Crucial to interpretation, then, is the capacity to recognize the selfhood of other beings, across the board. There is a rich ethnographic literature that tells a different story about the distinction between culture and nature as set out by Weber, cited above, a story that drives home just how historically recent, and aberrant, is the now dominant shrinking of the universe of agents recognized as engaged in practices of interpreting each other. To appreciate the contrast involved, consider Amerindian cosmologies. They do not conceive nature as a domain defined by animality in contrast with culture as the domain – exclusively so – of humanity. Whereas animals also have (or are in) culture, there is no unified nonhuman domain; rather, “each nonhuman species is as different from all the others as it is from humans,” to quote the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2015: 226). Animism, on this view, is an ontology which postulates the social character of relations between humans and nonhumans, which is to say that “the space between nature and society is itself social” (2015: 232). Animals have souls, and they have personhood like humans have, though allowing for species-specific differences as to how such personhood is exhibited in interactions with

“How Other Kinds of Beings See Us Matters” 105 so many others. Indeed, in animist cosmologies not the soul but the body is the site of difference, what allows for and requires the making of distinctions among all the selves involved. Contrary to the naturalistic world view of Western modernity, positing culture and nature as mutually exclusive domains, the soul idiom cannot be used in Amazonia to express differences or recognize contrasts (see Descola 2013). “The world,” de Castro explains, “is peopled by diverse types of subjective agencies, human and non-human, all endowed with the same general type of soul, i.e., the same set of cognitive and volitional capacities. The possession of a similar soul implies similar concepts (that is, a similar culture), and this makes all subjects see things in the same way, that is, experience the same basic percepts.” This means that what changes is the “objective correlative,” the reference of these concepts for each species of the subject. De Castro elaborates: What jaguars see as “manioc beer” (the proper drink of people, jaguar-kind or otherwise), humans see as “blood”; where we see a muddy salt-lick in the forest, tapirs see their big ceremonial house, and so on. Such differences of perspective – not a plurality of views of a single world, mind you, but a single view of different worlds – cannot derive from the soul, since the latter is the common original ground of being; the difference is located in the body, for the body is the site and instrument of ontological differentiation. […] The soul is the universal condition against which humans must work in order to produce both their own species identity and their intraspecies kinship identities. A person’s body indexes her constitutive relation to bodies similar to hers and different from other kinds of bodies, while her soul is a token of the ultimate commonality of all beings, human and non-human alike: the primal analogical flow of relatedness. (de Castro 2015: 145) The so-called “multinaturalism” de Castro advocates holds that “a perspective is not a representation because representations are a property of the mind or spirit, whereas the point of view is located in the body” (1998: 478). In contrast to the epistemology of Western modernity that is premised on the category of the object, of what the object at hand is, Amerindian cosmologies are based on the inverse ideal: to know is to personify, to take the point of view of what should be known, or more precisely: the one whom should be known. What matters is to know “the who of things,” without which “there would be no way to respond intelligently to the question of ‘why’. The form of the Other is the person” (de Castro 2014: 61). This casts the objectification characteristic of Western ontology and epistemology as a process of desubjectification – robbing the entities of their subjectivity – so as to not only know them,

106  Arne Johan Vetlesen but to control them as well; Descartes’ classification of animals as “mere automata” is a case in point. De Castro and Kohn agree that transspecies interactions depend on the capacity to recognize the selfhood of other beings so that, in Kohn’s words, “losing this capacity can be disastrous”; hence, “we are all forced to recognize the other kinds of minds, persons, or selves that inhabit the cosmos” (2013: 116f.). The literature in anthropology is rich in case studies to drive home the overall point: animals and humans are all persons granted subject status, and treated accordingly. Indigenous people have survived, writes James W. Gibson, “because their cultures were still firmly tied to the land and sea, and they conceived of the land and sea as enchanted – as constantly communicating with them. Modern people, living at a remove from nature, could not understand the signs of impending catastrophe; cultural and emotional distance from the Earth have left them vulnerable to an ‘angry’ ocean” (2009: 122). In this sense, the Anthropocene is very much about the consequences of denying expressivity to nonhuman creatures and their plight, denouncing as superstitious and primitive the cultures that refuse to adopt such denial.

Arendt’s The Human Condition Having presented in broad outlines the contrast between what Max Weber called the “mythical” and the modern world view, I now proceed to look at Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, published in 1958. Why do I turn to that particular book? I do so because I regard it as exemplifying an emphatically “Western” perspective, yet at the same time containing elements of criticism, articulated in Arendt’s hard-hitting objections to seminal figures such as Descartes and Marx. We shall see that Arendt’s book helps highlight the selectivity that I consider to be at work in the still dominant understanding of interpretation, its subjects as well as its objects. The Human Condition is a philosophical work not shy about its ambition to be comprehensive: in distinguishing between the basic three activities in which humans in Arendt’s view are engaged – that is, action, work, and labor – she offers an exhaustive framework meant to identify the major changes, and dangers, that face “the modern world.” In a characteristic formulation, Arendt criticizes “the extent of society’s victory in the modern age,” by which she means the ongoing “substitution of behavior for action” (1958: 45). Depicting this tendency, Arendt talks about “the all-comprehensive pretension of the social sciences which, as ‘behavioral sciences’, aim to reduce man as a whole, in all his activities, to the level of a conditioned and behaving animal” (ibid.). The implication is clear: only humans – not animals – are capable of action, of bringing something new into the world (“natality” in Arendt’s parlance); accordingly, to substitute behavior for action is tantamount to reducing

“How Other Kinds of Beings See Us Matters” 107 humans to animals, that is to say, to passivity, to being conditioned and controlled, understood as the very negation of the capacities for the distinctive kind of agency that only humans possess. There is nothing new under the sun about this view. In a manner meant to be purely matter of fact, Arendt states that for the Greeks “what men shared with all other forms of animals was not considered to be human”; to be an animal, that is, is to be subject to necessity, as were the slaves in ancient Greece, who for that very reason – being subjected to necessity, being excluded from the sphere of action – could not be regarded as fully human (1958: 84). She goes on to note that only with Hume, and later Marx, did the notion prevail in Western thought that labor, not reason, is what distinguishes man from animal (86). However, and this will prove important for Arendt’s analysis, it is “the mark of all labor that it leaves nothing behind, that the result of its effort is almost as quickly consumed as the effort is spent” (ibid.). For that very reason, the tendency Arendt identifies in Marx and more generally in the modern mindset, namely to conflate labor with work, to look upon all labor as work, is fatal: it means to lose sight of what is of paramount importance and value in humans, namely their being fundamentally different from animals. On Arendt’s view, work is genuinely productive in that it adds new objects to the human artifice, objects that help constitute a common world, a world brought forth by humans and for humans, and allowing for some permanence and continuity through time in that several generations may both benefit from and actively contribute to it. By contrast, labor is concerned with the means of its own reproduction, with sustaining the life process of birth and death, with the necessities dictated by the interest in survival, that is, the dictate of sheer survival, common to humans and animals. Accordingly, labor remains tied to what is transitory, yet for all that absolutely indispensable for life to go on, to reproduce itself qua life, cyclically at that and so bringing nothing new into the world qualitatively speaking. Crucially, only the work flowing from human’s capacity for making things (homo faber) can author the creation of something novel in the sense Arendt is after. True, words and deeds can aspire to leave something lasting, something of enduring significance in its wake, something that survives the individual speaker and actor. But whether the words and deeds will actually do so, in the way intended and hoped for by the individual agent, can never be guaranteed because it is beyond human powers. Subjective intentions and factual consequences are simply not of the same cloth and do not enjoy a shared trajectory in time and space. To act is to always risk being alienated from what comes to pass, frustrating the sense of ownership of what one set out to bring about. And as for thinking, the paramount activity, besides speech and action, of which only humans are capable according to Arendt, it leaves no permanent trace, nothing tangible at all, failing

108  Arne Johan Vetlesen to materialize in any objects, by stark contrast with work and certain forms of art. Hence, thought and work never coincide (1958: 167ff.). In my perspective, Arendt’s account testifies to a double narrowing of the scope of interpretation, double in that it comprises both the subject and the object. The point is not that Arendt by way of argument denies nonhumans such as animals a role as active interpreters (subjects) of what goes on in the world: rather, their exclusion as agents in this kind of practice is taken for granted, as a matter of fact, demanding no philosophical justification. More important to my discussion, however, is the way in which Arendt, wholly in keeping with modern Western thought, also takes for granted the exclusion of nonhumans from the domain of objects of interpretation. In saying this, I do not mean to claim that for Arendt it is impossible for humans to engage in interpreting animals; rather, what she takes for granted is that it will not be necessary to do so: it will not be an essential part of the practices of modern life. But again, the condition that it is unnecessary for humans to interpret the behavior of animals is an unprecedented situation, one deserving critical interrogation rather than simply being assumed, thereby naturalizing what is a very specific and consequential instance of historic and cultural change. The double exclusion of animals – as appropriate objects and as active subjects – from practices of interpretation may seem completely “natural” to the majority of people in contemporary Western societies. Yet it is the exception not the rule when we look at the history of humankind’s existence on Earth. This being so, my take on an influential book like Arendt’s The Human Condition helps us see its account of the prehistory of modernity as symptomatic of a sort of selectivity she shares with authors she says she disagrees with (e.g., Marx) as well as those she agrees with. This selectivity means that something falls by the wayside, an entire dimension at that, crucial to what practices of interpretation have been like through history. How then, more precisely, is the selectivity I refer to articulated in her book? Arendt writes that “the contempt for labor in ancient theory and its glorification in modern theory both take their bearing from the subjective attitude or activity of the laborer, mistrusting his painful effort or praising his productivity” (1958: 93); recall that the role played by Marx in “glorifying” labor is one of Arendt’s chief criticisms of him. She goes on to say that “unlike working, whose end has come when the object is finished, ready to be added to the common world of things, laboring always moves in the same circle, which is prescribed by the biological process of the living organism.” This being so, what Arendt calls “the biological process in man,” taken as the process that labor, out of sheer necessity, the dictate of survival, is devoted to, is “part of the cyclical movement of nature and therefore endlessly repetitive” (98). What complicates this crude distinction between labor, seen as geared

“How Other Kinds of Beings See Us Matters” 109 to the simple, cyclical, and repetitive sustenance of the life process, and work, seen as the artificial (since not natural) creation by humans only of a world of objects, is that “the productivity of labor, properly speaking, begins only with reification (Vergegenständlichung), with the erection of an objective world of things” (102). When Arendt comments that this complicates Marx’s view of labor, it is tempting to say that it complicates her own distinction between labor and work even more. However, this complication does not detract from Arendt’s position being very conventional. This is borne out in statements such as “Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity” (121). In light of what we have come to know about Arendt’s approach, there can be no doubt that she subscribes to the well-known framework where “man’s freedom” is attained precisely to the extent that he (sic) liberates himself from necessity. In other words, man’s capacity for freedom becomes synonymous with his capacity to create a world of culture, of artifacts, and objects that are artificial, unnatural, and proof of breaking free from nature. We may put this in the terminology famously employed by Simone de Beauvoir (1956) in The Second Sex, namely in terms of a distinction between nature as the realm of “immanence” and culture as the realm of “transcendence.” As is well known, de Beauvoir intends this distinction to imply a double contrast: not only that between necessity and freedom, but that between women and men as well. This being so, the project of philosophical criticism and political emancipation is all about seeing to it that, at long last, women be granted the same opportunity as men to break free from nature and to take part in culture, that is, to transcend the dead weight of biology-cum-necessity in their lives so as to dedicate themselves fully to the activities that manifest their freedom, their essence qua human beings, namely action and speech (to invoke Arendt’s terms). In the case of both de Beauvoir and Arendt, then, the normativity at work implies the ranking of intellect over the body, the capacities for thinking and willing over those of sentience and affect, and so, as part and parcel of the same framework, the ranking of humans over animals.

Arendt’s account of limits There is a concern of Arendt’s that I haven’t mentioned so far, yet one highly relevant to my discussion: limits. In the book’s important Prologue, Arendt writes that in 1957, a man-made satellite, “an earthborn object made by man was launched into the universe, where for weeks it circled the earth.” The reaction to this event, the first of its kind at the time, that particularly interests Arendt, is the publicly expressed relief about the first “step toward escape from men’s imprisonment to

110  Arne Johan Vetlesen the earth” (1958: 1). “Mankind,” a Russian scientist proclaimed in a manner Arendt takes to be representative of scientists everywhere, articulating the Zeitgeist, “will not remain bound to the Earth forever” (ibid.). Arendt comments by raising the following far-reaching question: “Should the emancipation and secularization of the modern age…end with a fateful repudiation of an Earth who was the Mother of all living creatures under the sky?” (3). Elaborating on this perspective, Arendt observes that “the human artifice of the world separates human existence from all mere animal environment, but life itself is outside this artificial world, and through life man remains related to all other living organisms” (ibid.). The desire to escape from imprisonment to the earth attests to “a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking),” which contemporary man “wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself” (2; see Vetlesen 2009). Arendt is in no doubt that the capacities, scientifically and technologically, to accomplish such an exchange – from the given (Aristotle would say grown) to the made – now exist (as of 1957, that is); indeed, nuclear weapons are able to destroy all life on earth many times over should they be unleashed to their maximum capacity. The philosophical question Arendt raises here is whether we – humanity – really want to realize this possibility. As we would expect, her answer is no. But already in the Prologue Arendt pursues her original question about limits in a way that seriously limits its profundity and scope. What happens is that Arendt connects the “rebellion” against given limits to human existence on earth that she witnesses in her time, with her account of labor, or more precisely the tendency she sees in Marx, presumably resonating deeply in contemporary society – the tendency to strive for a situation where humankind, at long last, will free itself from labor, understood as its liberation from necessity, the necessity that goes with being one earth-bound creature among many. In choosing to concentrate on this particular trajectory of the “rebellion” she talks about, Arendt is led to the following conclusion: “What we are confronted with is the prospect of a society of laborers without labor, that is, without the only activity left to them. Surely, nothing could be worse” (5). And yet there is a lingering sense of a road not taken in Arendt’s book, a road that sheds light on what I find to be symptomatic about it. When she ends the Prologue by describing “modern world alienation” as a “twofold flight from the earth into the universe and from the world into the self” (6), we are again reminded that one of the tasks she posits for her inquiry is to address the “flight from the earth,” a flight that today may assume the form of wanting to leave planet Earth behind so as to get to the moon, or to Mars, as do billionaires like Bezos and Musk. But Arendt herself would probably agree that this variant, though spectacular, is ill-suited to capture the way in which the alienation she speaks about most typically plays out, namely as a turning away from the earth in the sense alluded to when, as we saw,

“How Other Kinds of Beings See Us Matters” 111 she observes that “life itself is outside this artificial world [brought about by humans and constituting the realm of culture], and through life man remains related to all other living organisms” (2). Why is it that Arendt, after making this important observation at the start, fails to elaborate on its consequences as her inquiry gets under way, never to return to it? What becomes of the existential fact that humans, as far as we know and as far as our experience informs us, remain related to all other living organisms? Much like Heidegger, Arendt was deeply concerned about what she perceived, in contemporary society, as a collective revolt against the limits of the human condition, limits posed by such conditions as dependence, vulnerability, and mortality. Whereas Heidegger concentrated on the role of modern technology, seeing the goals ascribed to its innovations – including such feats as helping land people on the moon – as a combination of hubris and nihilism, Arendt’s focus is on the obsession with “improvement,” with ever-increasing efficiency and productivity taken as ends in themselves, with homo faber’s quest to make everything that can be made, to do everything doable, simply because it has become doable – a mentality where the new is always superior to the old and change is synonymous with progress and so irresistible, hence a trajectory no sane person would want to resist. The cultural critic Christopher Lasch puts this view well when he states that Everything conspires to encourage escapist solutions to the psychological problems of dependence, separation, and individuation, and to discourage the moral realism that makes it possible for human beings to come to terms with existential constraints on their power and freedom. (Lasch 1991: 249) However, in pointing to the widespread mentality of revolt against limits, we must distinguish between the two distinct forms that such revolt may take, springing from two different sources. In one case, the source is cultural, racism being a case in point. Racism in its organized form is about positing, and policing, limits on what a certain group of people – say, blacks – have the right to do as compared with other people; limits typically conceived and justified with reference to “given” (i.e., ostensibly “natural,” “biological”) differences between the groups in question, casting the one as somehow “lower,” and so unworthy to enjoy rights and freedoms, than the other. Since Marx, if not before, to expose this form of discrimination is the task of ideology critique, seeking to disclose that arrangements of discrimination that refer to “given” traits are in fact so many attempts to “naturalize” the sort of inequalities that a particular society sustains, be they differences that translate into inequality between men or women, or between whites and blacks, or between different social classes. The point is that limits that are created and sought

112  Arne Johan Vetlesen upheld by humans must be recognized as such – and so as limits that can in principle be suspended, inasmuch as everything that goes to constitute culture can in principle be changed by human effort, being their collective construct. In short, limits in this domain can be undone and can be robbed of their social significance by way of human decision-making, say, in perceiving slavery as not natural but political. In the other case, by contrast, the source of limits that humans confront resides in nature, not in culture. These are limits to the ways in which nature can be altered, limits that if not respected may be transgressed to the peril of all affected, either other-than-human or human; if not in the short run, then in the long run. These limits originate from something generic not artificial, from the makeup of physical nature as distinct from the workings of culture, taken as the workings of human agency, that is, of “man” as engaged in labor, work, and speech and action as set out in Arendt’s The Human Condition. Equipped with this distinction, we see that the reference to limits is not always to do with practices of discrimination or exclusion where a barrier is erected so as to limit what some may do – in terms of freedoms and rights – so as to sustain a social order pervaded by the inequalities that follow. As we saw, it is the task of ideology critique to expose how a given culture may seek to naturalize such an order, seeking to prevent attempts to overthrow it, indeed even to perceive it as something that can be changed by human effort. By contrast, in nature there are limits, whether we humans like it or not, that is to say, limits that we encounter rather than construct and project. As distinct from the case of society and culture, these are non-negotiable limits in that they reside in the very conditions of life, not only of human life but of the manifold of species-specific life forms on whose flourishing human existence depends. Today, in the Anthropocene, human activities cumulatively possess the power to transgress such limits, by way of overshoot and overexploitation, degrading and depleting the capacity of ecosystems to sustain themselves over time. To transgress the limits involved – called “tipping points” in the parlance of science and ecology today – is something humans now can do, but should not do. The question this raises with respect to Arendt is: Did she see this situation coming? Is it something she acknowledges when she reminds her readers that, notwithstanding such spectacular proofs of “progress” as the launching of man-made satellites into the universe, “through life man remains related to all other living organisms” (1958: 2)? I think the answer is no: Arendt did not see the situation I describe coming. Since her work predated this development, she should not be faulted for not being aware of it. While true, this is not the whole story, philosophically speaking. Arendt’s philosophical priorities, her keen attention to some dangers facing modern society rather than others, are not simply a matter of her not

“How Other Kinds of Beings See Us Matters” 113 living to experience the Anthropocene. Hers was a lifelong concern about the threats against public life, against the common world constituted by man-made artifacts, and against the autonomy of politics, the sphere of speech and action, brought by the rise and expansion of “the social,” coming to dominate all areas and activities of society, leaving little or no room for human excellence, for individuality and plurality. Since her conception of “the political,” as starkly opposed to “the social” as freedom is to necessity, was one that she took over from Ancient Greece, her approach to the dangers facing modern society prevented her from appreciating the importance of nonhuman limits, that is, of necessity in the form of ecological limits, limits residing in the natural world, limits not of human making and so, for Arendt, per definition un- or apolitical limits, and therefore of inferior merit and salience. Arendt took over the Ancients’ Plato-infused inclination to look down on those aspects of our human existence that attest to its nature-determined, and in that sense given, non-negotiable features, combining the denigration of our naturalness, or animality, with the valorization of those powers that allow us humans, and us alone, to transcend that lower standing dimension of our being (note the strong continuity here from Plato to Kant). In other words, and to make the point in terms of my overall argument, Arendt was deaf to the limits, and hence to the perils, residing in the domain she denied agency and expressivity and so placed beyond the reach of interpretation, the scope of what she deemed worthy of her attention as a philosopher.

Conclusion To draw this conclusion about Arendt’s approach in The Human Condition is to connect with the statement by Kohn with which I started: “How other kinds of beings see us matters” (2013: 1). It clearly also matters to other-than-human kinds of beings how we see them, just as it matters to them how they see each other. All of these relationships, multi- and cross-species ones, are shot through with interpretation, with each participant’s never-ending, species-specific effort to figure out what the others are up to, so as to be able to respond appropriately. To argue that interpretation is an inter-species affair is to direct us to the “webs of significance” not spun by us, but by other communicatively active members of the natural world. What if, as a result of humancaused degradation and destruction, those webs are in danger of no longer being spun? What if they fall silent? In that case, the implication of Weber’s assertion that only human beings confer meaning on the otherwise “meaningless infinity of the world process” (1949: 81), namely, that the natural world is mute as far as everything to do with interpretation and meaning is concerned, will have become true the way a self-fulfilling prophesy becomes true.

114  Arne Johan Vetlesen

References Arendt, Hannah, 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Barth, Fredrik, 1987. Cosmologies in the Making. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Berger, Peter L. and Thomas Luckmann, 1966. The Social Construction of Reality. New York: Harper & Row. Darwin, Charles, 1981 [1871]. The Descent of Man. Princeton: Princeton University Press. De Beauvoir, Simone, 1956. The Second Sex. New York: Penguin. De Castro, Eduardo Viveiros, 2014. Cannibal Metaphysics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———, 2015. The Relative Native. Essays on Indigenous Conceptual Worlds. Chicago: Hau Books. Descola, Philippe, 2013. Beyond Culture and Nature. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Geertz, Clifford, 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Gibson, James W., 2009. A Reenchanted World. New York: Henry Holt. Giddens, Anthony, 1977. Studies in Social and Political Theory. London: Hutchinson. Heidegger, Martin, 2013 [1953]. The Question Concerning Technology. New York: Harper. Jonas, Hans, 1966. The Phenomenon of Life. Toward a Philosophical Biology. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Kohn, Eduardo, 2013. How Forests Think. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Lasch, Christopher, 1991. The Culture of Narcissism. New York: Norton. Midgley, Mary, 2010. The Solitary Self: Darwin and the Selfish Gene. New York: Routledge. Schutz, Alfred, 1967 [1932]. The Phenomenology of the Social World. London: Heinemann. Shepard, Paul, 1982. Nature and Madness. Athens, GE: The University of Georgia Press. ———, 1996. The Others: How Animals Made Us Human. Washington, DC: Island Press. Taylor, Charles, 1985. Human Agency and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———, 1989. Sources of the Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———, 2004. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press. Vetlesen, Arne Johan, 2009. A Philosophy of Pain. London: Reaktion Books. ———, 2015. The Denial of Nature. London: Routledge. ———, 2019. Cosmologies of the Anthropocene. Panpsychism, Animism, and the Limits of Posthumanism. London: Routledge. ———, 2022 (in press). Animal Lives and Why They Matter. London: Routledge. Weber, Max, 1949 [1904]. The Methodology of the Social Sciences. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press.

Part III

Interpretation as Practice

6

Hermeneutics as a Metaphilosophy and a Philosophy of Work Nicholas H. Smith

Introduction: hermeneutic metaphilosophy At the core of philosophical hermeneutics is a distinctive metaphilosophy. By metaphilosophy, I mean a conception of the basic motivations that drive philosophical enquiry, the fundamental purposes that philosophy serves, the tasks it must address to meet those purposes, the methods most suited to those tasks, and so on. A metaphilosophy lays out an understanding of the fundamental circumstances of philosophical reflection: under one conception of those circumstances, certain purposes come to the fore and certain tasks take priority; under another conception, a different set of tasks and methods will be appropriate. Those who are drawn to philosophical hermeneutics generally feel discomfort or dissatisfaction with the starting point of much modern philosophy, that is, with the understanding of the circumstances of philosophy more or less explicitly presupposed there. In particular, they feel cramped by the idea that philosophy’s first duty is to ground objective knowledge, meaning knowledge of the kind secured by the modern natural sciences. They need not (and typically do not) doubt that objective knowledge exists, and they do not deny the importance of being able to distinguish genuine knowledge claims from imposters. Epistemic gatekeeping has its place. The concern of those drawn to philosophical hermeneutics is rather that much of what intuitively calls for philosophical reflection will be missed or misleadingly conceived from this epistemologically centered standpoint. Part of the motivation behind the original “interpretive” or “hermeneutic” turn in philosophy – by which I mean the development of a self-consciously interpretive or hermeneutic way of doing philosophy in the mid-twentieth century – was a sense that the dominant schools of modern philosophy (Cartesianism, Empiricism, Kantianism, and their offshoots) had a weaker grip on the fundamental circumstances of philosophy than the ancients had.1 Heidegger and Gadamer in particular saw philosophical hermeneutics as reconnecting with the classical conception of philosophy, to the extent that their hermeneutics partly DOI: 10.4324/9781003251354-10

118  Nicholas H. Smith consisted in the reinterpretation of classical philosophical texts. But the continuity hermeneutics seeks to re-establish with philosophy as practiced by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle is not primarily a matter of textual revival. It is a matter of reviving a certain understanding of the impulse to philosophize. Like Socratic and Aristotelian philosophy, hermeneutics takes its departure from puzzlement about what it means to be human and to exist in the world. The main task of philosophy is to find things out about that meaning: to arrive at some insight into, or deeper understanding of, what it means to be human or to exist as a human being. Through rational reflection, we can come to understand ourselves better, and this gain in “theory” also serves the practical goal of realizing the human good. The main task of philosophy, on the hermeneutic conception, is understanding of and insight into the human condition, just as it was on the classical conception; and as in the classical conception, the insight and understanding achieved through hermeneutic reflection has practical significance in contributing in some measure to the human good. But the interpretive turn in philosophy could not simply be a return to the metaphilosophy of the ancients. While the classical conception of philosophy retained validity and was more attuned to the philosophical impulse than the modern epistemologically centered one, it lacked the kind of historical awareness that was indispensable for a modern metaphilosophy. The philosophical impulse had not survived the break between “antiquity” and “modernity” unchanged; it could not be satisfied in quite the same manner as it was in the classical conception of philosophy. One way of characterizing this break in the circumstances of philosophy is to say that on the one side they are “enchanted” and on the other “disenchanted.” Hermeneutic metaphilosophy broadly adopts this characterization and modifies the classical conception of philosophy accordingly. On the hermeneutic conception, then, philosophical reflection aims at insight into the human condition in a way that contributes to the human good through rational reflection under conditions of disenchantment. “Conditions of disenchantment” are conditions in which key sources of meaning (“enchantment”) are no longer available. In particular, nature (or the ontic order) no longer has the significance it had for the ancients; and activities that were once considered essential to the human condition, or vital for the realization of the human good, came to seem remote, marginal, superfluous, or perhaps even illusory. As examples of these, we could mention certain forms of contemplation (such as those directed at perfection in being) and certain forms of social interaction (such as gift-giving and collective deliberation over the common good – politics in its classical sense). Under conditions of disenchantment, as conceived by hermeneutics, philosophy is faced with a twofold task. First, there is the task of reconnecting with lost or forgotten or inaccessible sources of meaning. The challenge is to make these sources available to reflection once more.

Hermeneutics as a Metaphilosophy and a Philosophy of Work 119 Gadamer’s hermeneutics is mainly focused on recovering a connection with tradition and re-establishing a live connection with the past (“effective historical consciousness”) (Gadamer 1993, 301). Ricoeur describes the aim of hermeneutic reflection more generally as “the appropriation of our effort to exist and our desire to be by means of works which testify to this effort and desire” (Ricoeur 1974, 329). Charles Taylor invokes a similar conception of the tasks of philosophy when he describes his own inquiries as a “work of retrieval,” the aim of which is the recovery of “buried goods” (Taylor 1989, 520). Gadamer’s rehabilitation of the concept of tradition, Ricoeur’s call for a reflective appropriation of the effort and desire for a meaningful existence, and Taylor’s attempt at a recovery of buried goods are paradigm cases of the hermeneutics of retrieval. Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Taylor all accept the condition of disenchantment as a starting point. But they argue that the logic of disenchantment, so to speak, has overreached itself, extending beyond its proper limits. 2 The hermeneutics of retrieval can thus be understood as a correction of false or hasty disenchantment. That is one task. The second is to disclose the pseudo-meaning or the false enchantment that persists in the modern world. The need for demystification did not disappear with the Enlightenment, and there are forms of mystification, idolatry, and deception that Enlightenment thought is ill-equipped to identify and correct. The “unmasking” of fake meaning – such as the illusory compensations of rationalized religion or the undeliverable promises of secular bourgeois ideology – that hides an underlying meaning-shorn reality is thus another key task of hermeneutic reflection. This is what the “hermeneutics of suspicion” is about (Ricoeur 1970, 32). If, by the expression “interpretive turn,” we mean a turn to a conception of philosophy whose main task it is to recover lost meanings or criticize the sham meanings that pervade the modern world, it is something I think we would wholeheartedly endorse. Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Taylor each in their own way provide us with models for how this kind of philosophy can be done. They each in their own way practice hermeneutic reflection, the ultimate aim of which is to recover or reappropriate that which bestows meaning on existence. This is not to the exclusion of a hermeneutics of suspicion, since recovery often requires the exposure of counterfeit meanings and critique of the ideologies that support them. In the remainder of this chapter, I will put my commendation of hermeneutic metaphilosophy to the test by drawing out some of its implications for the philosophy of work. The question that drives the discussion is this: What would a philosophy of work look like that took seriously the interpretive turn in metaphilosophy in the sense just sketched? This isn’t a question that is directly answered or even explicitly formulated by the champions of the interpretive turn themselves. However, these thinkers do provide resources from which to reconstruct an answer. I will offer such a reconstruction of the philosophy of work informing

120  Nicholas H. Smith Gadamer’s and Ricoeur’s philosophical hermeneutics below. But before attending to the details, let me make a few preliminary remarks about the hermeneutic provenance of work and the overall stakes of the argument concerning the hermeneutics of work.

Work as a hermeneutic problem At first glance, Ricoeur’s formulation of the tasks of hermeneutic reflection cited above – “(T)he appropriation of our effort to exist and our desire to be by means of works which testify to this effort and desire” – looks well suited as a starting point for a philosophy work. On the face of it, “our effort to exist and our desire to be” is as manifest in a work activity as it is in any other sphere of life, however the contrast between work and nonwork is specified. Similarly, the products of work would seem to “testify to this effort and desire” as much as anything else. “Appropriation” also suggests itself as a suitable goal of philosophical reflection on work, insofar as work stands as a source of meaning to be recovered or reappropriated. Turning next to Taylor’s call for inquiry aimed at “retrieval” and “recovery of buried goods,” again it would seem to be applicable to the realm of work. The idea here would be that hidden beneath the obvious goods at stake in work, and dominant interpretations of them, there might be others that different interpretations can help bring back to life or realize more fully. Even the rehabilitation of tradition and “effective historical consciousness” of Gadamer’s hermeneutics suggests itself as a promising point of departure for a philosophy of work if work can plausibly be considered to involve connections to the past and traditions that dominant interpretations of work serve to make marginal or superfluous. Furthermore, insofar as work offers false or undeliverable promises of fulfillment, illusory compensations, and perhaps even functions as an idol (the religion of work), it would appear to be an apt object for the hermeneutics of suspicion. If we were just to go on such metaphilosophical considerations, we would expect work to be a key theme of hermeneutic reflection and to have a major place in philosophy after the interpretive turn. But this isn’t how things actually happened: Gadamer and Ricoeur (and though I can’t argue it here, Taylor too) gesture towards a hermeneutics of work, and offer clues to how it might proceed, without really carrying it through. I will contend later that this is due to a certain ambivalence they have toward work as a locus of meaning in need of retrieval or reappropriation. To put it slightly differently, each of these hermeneutic thinkers wobble on the question of whether work contributes to a meaningful existence in the sense relevant for hermeneutic reflection. And this hesitancy in the hermeneutic provenance of work is linked to their conception of the circumstances of philosophy, and in particular their understanding of what is entailed by accepting the conditions of

Hermeneutics as a Metaphilosophy and a Philosophy of Work 121 disenchantment. For Gadamer and Ricoeur are both drawn to the idea that work properly belongs to the disenchanted sphere and so is not an apt object of hermeneutic retrieval. At the same time – and truer to their hermeneutic impulses – they see work as a genuine but concealed or inaccessible site of meanings, the retrieval or reappropriation of which is a proper task of hermeneutic reflection. To clarify the philosophical stakes of the discussion, I am taking hermeneutics to rest on an ontological, not an epistemological claim. The relevant claim does not concern the epistemic status of interpretation, though of course the “interpretive turn” taken by hermeneutics does involve a rejection of foundationalist naturalist epistemology (the theory that only the modern natural sciences deliver genuine knowledge). Hermeneutics does offer accounts of the kind of validity interpretations can have, but this account is tied to the role of interpretation in constituting human being, that is, in its ontological dimension. The core claim of the interpretive turn in this sense is, to use Taylor’s famous formulation, that human beings are at bottom “self-interpreting animals” (Taylor 1985). It is a claim that needs to be made and defended because, under conditions of modernity, rival views come to prominence that make the self-interpreting activities of human beings merely epiphenomenal or superstructural or derivative on something more fundamental, such that self-interpretation no longer features in our conception of what it really means to be human. This rival conception of the human is reflected in the disenchanted conditions of modern life, where spheres of human thought and action actually present themselves as if they had nothing to do with the interpretation of meanings; as intelligible, that is, independently of any putative interpretative activity going on. Work or productive action is one such sphere, arguably the dominant one. It appears as if this sphere belongs on the other side of self-interpretation, as manifesting a logic of more or less complete disenchantment. Hermeneutic philosophers thus need to consider whether work or productive action is exempt from hermeneutic reflection, making it an exception to the general hermeneutic thesis, or whether it is encompassed by hermeneutics, making retrieval an apt strategy. And my claim will be that Gadamer and Ricoeur vacillate on this issue, considering work sometimes as if it were of hermeneutical provenance, perhaps even paradigmatically so, and sometimes as if it were not. I would need more space than is available here to provide the exegetical detail required to fully back up this claim. So I shall confine myself to enhancing the claim’s plausibility by 1) drawing attention to the places where Gadamer and Ricoeur either present work as fit for hermeneutic reflection or actually engage in such reflection and 2) pointing to aspects of their thought that obstruct that engagement or that make work appear unsuited to hermeneutic reflection. I will consider Gadamer and Ricoeur separately, before concluding with some comments on

122  Nicholas H. Smith how a hermeneutic philosophy of work can move forward from their contributions.

Gadamer, work and the scope of hermeneutics It is worth noting that the very idea of hermeneutics having a certain scope, or being bound by a subject matter or function, first became explicit in the course of Gadamer’s debate with Habermas, a debate that was itself central to the “interpretive turn” in the late 1960s and 1970s (Gadamer 1977, 1990; Habermas 1980, 1983, 1988; Hiley, Bohman, and Shusterman 1991). By this time, the limits of positivism in the social sciences, especially the applicability of the deductive-nomological model of explanation, were generally recognized and alternative models were being explored. Amongst these, conceptions of the social sciences as based on understanding as distinct from deductive-nomological explanation, often inspired by Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, had gained prominence (Wittgenstein 1958; Winch 1958). From Habermas’s point of view, Gadamer’s Truth and Method, though inspired more by Dilthey and Heidegger than Wittgenstein, was of a piece with this movement away from an explanation-based to an understanding-based conception of the human sciences. In laying out the structure of “reaching understanding,” Gadamer made a decisive contribution to the case for “interpretive” social science. But in doing so Gadamer also screened out, in Habermas’s view, another possibility for social-theoretic inquiry: synthesis of explanation and understanding in the way of “critical” social theory. A genuinely critical social science, Habermas (following Marx) proposed, is reflectively aware of the limits of positivism, but is also capable of grasping social reality in its material aspect, which is what it is independently of the meaning it can be interpreted to possess. Habermas calls the activity in which the forces that shape the material dimension of society are manifest – the activity through which human beings engage in the material reproduction of society – “social labour” (Habermas 1988, 173). Social labor, understood as the means by which human beings reproduce the material basis of their existence, thus escapes the reach of hermeneutic reflection, Habermas argued, as do struggles for power and resistance to domination. Habermas concluded that the hermeneutic turn in social science, left to itself, lacks resources for “critique” and is doomed to “linguistic idealism” (Habermas 1988, 174). In reply to Habermas’s objection, Gadamer stated bluntly that “[f]rom the hermeneutical standpoint, rightly understood, it is absolutely absurd to regard the concrete factors of work and politics as outside the scope of hermeneutics” (Gadamer, 1977, 31). One could not ask for a clearer statement than this of Gadamer’s view: work is encompassed by hermeneutics and is an apt object of hermeneutic reflection. But we can still ask: Is Gadamer entitled to this view? Besides the mere assertion that “the concrete factors of work”

Hermeneutics as a Metaphilosophy and a Philosophy of Work 123 fall within the scope of hermeneutics, what does Gadamer offer by way of actual hermeneutic reflection on work? While, to my knowledge, there is no extended discussion of the “concrete factors of work” in Gadamer’s oeuvre, there are three contexts in which reflection on work has a small but significant place in the elaboration of his philosophical hermeneutics. One is the interpretation of Hegel’s “dialectic of self-consciousness” that informs Gadamer’s conception of Bildung (Gadamer 1976, 1993). Bildung is the process of cultural formation that occurs as the human being is raised out of an exclusive concern with instinctual gratification. Through Bildung, the human being becomes aware of standards that apply independently of subjective instincts and desires, standards that represent the “universal” point of view relative to the standpoint of desire-satisfaction. This process necessarily involves “sacrificing particularity for the sake of the universal” (Gadamer 1993, 12), and following Hegel, Gadamer takes work to be the first decisive step. Work, for Gadamer as for Hegel, is in the first instance “restrained desire” (Gadamer 1993, 12). Working consciousness, unlike consciousness seeking to gratify itself or to satisfy a desire by consuming something, is directed outwards at the thing to be formed through work: “In forming the object – that is, in being selflessly active and becoming concerned with the universal – working consciousness raises itself above the immediacy of its existence to universality” (Gadamer 1993, 12). Gadamer emphatically endorses Hegel’s view that work is formative of “spirit”: “the self-awareness of working consciousness contains all the elements that make up practical Bildung: the distancing from desire, of personal need and private interest, and the exacting demand of the universal” (Gadamer 1993, 13). Elsewhere, Gadamer describes labor as one of two “essential traits of specifically human practice” (Gadamer 1981, 75). Like language, the second of these traits, labor distances the subject from what is immediately present to it and points forward to a fuller satisfaction of consciousness. Gadamer also occasionally invokes the Hegelian concept of work in his social criticism. In “Isolation as a Symptom of Self-Alienation,” for example, Gadamer draws attention to the simultaneously socializing and individuating function of participation in the division of labor (Gadamer 1998).3 He points out that, in the modern world, it is above all by taking part in the division of labor that an individual at once contributes something useful to society and develops individuating, selfdefining capacities. It is primarily by work that one’s abilities, and so one’s defining characteristics as a particular human being, are expressed and revealed to oneself. It is therefore imperative that one be able to “identify with the universal” in one’s working activity: not to be able to do so is to be split off from “spirit” in the very activity that makes one who one is, and thus to be self-alienated. In Gadamer’s view, the “selfalienation of man in society” is first and foremost the result of social

124  Nicholas H. Smith conditions in which individuals are prevented from identifying with the universal in their work (Gadamer 1998, 106). Gadamer attributes this to a “rationalization” of the division of labor which renders individuals substitutable in their work. He thus places responsibility for the “self-alienation of man” in the modern age on “the social system of production and labour in which we live” (Gadamer 1998, 107). Within this system, many individuals are unable to see their labor as making a meaningful difference. Gadamer is convinced that the loss suffered by the lack of meaningful work cannot be adequately compensated for by the pleasures of consumption. On the contrary, he thinks that the pleasures of consumption, because they can be artificially managed and made to seem unlimited, increase the vulnerability of individuals to compulsive patterns of behavior, and so a lack of freedom. The availability of meaningful work, work that manifests a meaningful ability and so one that the individual can identify with, is crucial for retrieving a sense of freedom, in Gadamer’s view (Gadamer 1998, 112). Of course, meaningful abilities are not conjured by individual acts of will: they depend on social structures of recognition. And it is through the shared recognition of the worth of abilities, embodied paradigmatically in the professions, that Gadamer sees a possible way out of modern self-alienation (Gadamer 1998, 113). The impersonal “solidarity in ability” and sense of self-responsibility fostered by the membership of a profession suggest to Gadamer a way of “realigning ourselves with the universal” in the context of an irreversibly specialized division of labor (Gadamer 1998, 113). Hegel’s influence is less evident in the third context in which Gadamer discusses work: the phenomenological characterization of Aristotle’s distinction between techne (technical skill) and phronesis (moral knowledge) in Truth and Method (Gadamer 1993, 312–324). In this context, it is the discontinuity between the act of making and the act of doing that Gadamer wants to emphasize, rather than the continuity between the hands-on practical consciousness of the artisan and higher forms of conceptual understanding schematized in the dialectic of selfconsciousness. The point of the discussion here is to highlight the contrast between the kind of excellence possessed by the skilled craftsman and the kind shown by a person with practical wisdom. Three key points of contrast are identified. The first bears on the relationship of the activity to the self: in the case of craftsmanship, the excellence is manifest in the quality of the object made, in something external to the self, whereas practical wisdom is expressive or revelatory of the self. The second bears on the relationship between means and ends: the ends of technical activity are fixed in advance and the activity is just a means to those ends, whereas in the case of moral action ends are open to deliberation and have a meaning that must be judged anew according to the particular set of circumstances. Gadamer takes this to imply that moral knowledge, unlike technical skill, cannot be taught or learnt (Gadamer 1993, 317).

Hermeneutics as a Metaphilosophy and a Philosophy of Work 125 The third point of contrast bears on the relation between the knowing subject and other subjects. Whereas technical skill is concerned solely with the production of some object and is focused exclusively on the excellence of the object produced, moral knowledge draws in other subjects by taking into account their point of view and in doing so constitutes a social relation. One form of knowledge is monological, the other dialogical. I will not delve here into the controversies surrounding Gadamer’s discussion of the techne/phronesis distinction.4 The point I want to make is that if one is persuaded by Gadamer’s account, and if one also takes techne to be the excellence apt for and cultivated in work, then it starts to make sense why work should appear marginal to, or perhaps even outside the reach of, hermeneutics. For if we take work to be the realm of productive action regulated exclusively by the norm of technique (namely, means-ends efficiency or instrumental rationality), then work will rightly appear as external to the self, as something that can be accepted or rejected, affirmed or repudiated, without consequence for the realization of the self. If work is merely a matter of mechanically applying technical rules, the space available for interpretation and deliberation, which is essential to the hermeneutic situation as Gadamer understands it, seems to vanish. Work then rightly appears as an interpretation-free zone. And if work is in essence monological in form, there is no place there for genuine social relationships, never mind the art of conversation. This is all to say that the construal of work as productive as distinct from moral action makes it difficult to see how the hermeneutic standpoint bears on work at all. Where now are the sources of meaning it is the task of hermeneutics to recover? What Gadamer described in his reply to Habermas as an absurdity – the exclusion of the “concrete factors of work” from the scope of hermeneutic reflection – is actually but the logical consequence of a conception of work and the norms that apply to it as being in fundamental opposition to moral action and the norms that apply to it. So long as work is understood as poiesis as distinct from praxis, it is bound to seem (at best) secondary or marginal from a hermeneutic point of view, as impoverished by its nature as a locus of meaning. Such a conception of work inevitably pushes work to the borders of the hermeneutic field, if not beyond them altogether. And it is not just the discussion of techne and phronesis in Truth and Method that threatens to leave work unfit for hermeneutic reflection and recovery. I have already mentioned Gadamer’s observation that work and language are the two characteristics of distinctive human practice. But on other occasions, and more typically, Gadamer proclaims the allegiance of hermeneutics to language and the conversational model of knowledge as opposed to work and the technical model (Gadamer 1992, 1998). He goes as far as to say that “the idea of making and craftsmanship, as it has been passed down the ages, represents a false

126  Nicholas H. Smith model of cognition” (Gadamer 1992, 173), the correction of which is a central task of philosophical hermeneutics. And it is one of Gadamer’s most characteristic and insisted upon claims that “the art of conversation” that philosophical hermeneutics aims to articulate and recover is not to be conflated with a teachable and learnable technique or craft. 5 Retrieval of a conception of the human being as formed in language through dialogue matters, in Gadamer’s view, precisely because of the predominance of the rival conception of the human being as formed in work or making things. The hermeneutic standpoint, so understood, hardly looks well-suited for a retrieval of goods or meanings arising from work, which is to say work appears unsuited to hermeneutic reflection. Gadamer’s hermeneutics thus sends mixed messages in regard to the prospects for hermeneutics as a philosophy of work. On the one hand, he takes it as obvious that the “concrete factors of work” do fall within the scope of hermeneutic reflection, he links work to the crucial hermeneutic concept of Bildung, and he offers hints of how a retrieval of lost meanings of work might proceed. On the other hand, he construes productive action (the making of things) as the polar opposite of the kind of activity through which meanings authentically become available to human beings, he presents hermeneutics as the antithesis of the art of “making,” and he implies that hermeneutic inquiry has ends or purposes that are not only distinct from but diametrically opposed to those of work. When speaking like this, Gadamer makes it appear as if, on entering the space of hermeneutic reflection, we do indeed leave the world of work behind.

Ricoeur’s philosophy of work Ricoeur’s sketches for a hermeneutic philosophy of work are also laced with ambivalence. When, as in his early “eidetics of the will,” Ricoeur writes as a phenomenologist, he attempts to describe essential structures of lived experience or the world as it reveals itself prior to reflection (Ricoeur 1966). Phenomenology provides Ricoeur with one standpoint from which to undertake a hermeneutics of work, though we only get glimpses of such a hermeneutics from his phenomenological writings. When Ricoeur does write explicitly about work, it is usually from the standpoint of philosophical anthropology (Ricoeur 1965, 1973, 2003). Here his concern is with the contribution of work to human civilization and the development of the human species. As we shall see shortly, from this anthropological standpoint Ricoeur feels compelled to contain or “de-limit” the contribution of work, which he does by way of a contrast, similar to the one invoked by Gadamer, between work and language. Ricoeur contrasts the semantic dimension opened up by language with the material basis of human existence that brings forth work. On this understanding, work is the human response to material need and gives rise to a planetary technological “adventure” (Ricoeur 2003). But this

Hermeneutics as a Metaphilosophy and a Philosophy of Work 127 conception of work as separated from the realm of linguistically disclosed meaning, as apt for some non-interpretative mode of presentation (paradigmatically the causal explanations of modern physics and their application in technology), is hard to reconcile with the conception of work as a realm of lived, pre-reflective meanings apt for phenomenological or hermeneutical inquiry. As a result, Ricoeur leaves it unclear how the “appropriation of our effort to exist and our desire to be” – the task of hermeneutic reflection – is to proceed in the case of work. Let us consider first how work features in Ricoeur’s phenomenological writings. In The Voluntary and the Involuntary, Ricoeur attempts to show that voluntary action, the key feature of which is that it is reflectively endorsed, presupposes an unreflectively or spontaneously reproduced background pattern of activity. This background is prior to reflection, and to self-interpretive activity insofar as that involves the adoption of a reflective stance, but it is nonetheless a field of signification in which items refer to each other and relate to the concerns of the agent. There are meanings at the involuntary level (not just material causes and forces); it is just that they are not usually noticed as such, and they are not mediated by reflection (Ricoeur 1966, 9ff). Furthermore, human action is, firstly and for the most part, meaningful at this background level. It is against this background, and only against it, that the higher level meanings of voluntary action appear. The basic form of higher level voluntary actions is already to be found at the level of the involuntary. This includes a coping capacity, which brings with it a capacity for dealing with contingency, the unexpected, and the new; and an expressive capacity, which requires the individual subject to respond to the affordances and solicitations provided by the environment as the subject sees fit. The whole thrust of Ricoeur’s “eidetics of the will” (the grand project of which The Voluntary and the Involuntary represented the first stage) is to show how the higher order phenomena of voluntary willing emerge from the lower order phenomena, and by establishing this, to show how intellectualist descriptions of human action, which falsely reverse the ordering, go astray. It is worth stressing that the “the choice in favour of meaning” that Ricoeur elsewhere describes as “the most general presupposition of any hermeneutics” (Ricoeur 1991, 38) (Ricoeur’s emphasis) by no means contradicts the phenomenological primacy of the pre-reflective lived situation. The hermeneutic thesis that human beings are at bottom “self-interpreting animals” should not be confused with the claim that human beings are at bottom “reflective,” in the sense that they are somehow always engaged in intellectual or deliberative activity. The most general presupposition of any hermeneutics is that there is a meaning summoning an interpretation, not that a reflective standpoint is generative or responsible for that meaning. When it comes to the hermeneutics of action, the meaning to be interpreted arises in the first instance

128  Nicholas H. Smith from the “situation” or “milieu” in the midst of which the agent acts. An agent seeks to realize certain ends through the action but does not originally stand apart from the means of realizing those ends – doubting, imagining, weighing up the options, and so on. Rather there is a continuity between the “willing” I and the world. At this phenomenologically primitive level, action is “an aspect of the world itself,” Ricoeur writes, rather than an intervention on the part of an agent contingently or externally related to the world (Ricoeur 1966, 212). The world in which the action takes place is “interpreted,” but the interpretation is implicit rather than reflective. The interpretation has practical purport, presenting possibilities of action that engage the agent immediately, for “there is something to be done.” Interpretation is necessary because the situation “poses a question for my activity” which has to be answered one way or another (Ricoeur 1966, 212). The demands of the situation must be responded to, which is to say that its meaning must be understood. But the understanding called for by the situation is not just a matter of representing the situation correctly or reaching accurate intellectual awareness of it; it is also one that engages the body, preparing the agent for a “corporeal” task. Since action is called for, since something needs to be done, the situation itself is “unresolved” in some way: but it is up to the subject to do something, to interpret the situation in terms of the affordances and obstacles to action the situation offers. The situation has meaning on account of a problem to be “resolved” by action. The world of the embodied agent thus presents itself as a “matter to be worked over,” and it is by working on a matter that the embodied agent reaches the required understanding (Ricoeur 1966, 212). The milieu of action thus typically has a “technical” character: “to act is in great part to work with instruments,” Ricoeur writes (Ricoeur 1966, 213). He describes how, from the point of view of the agent “tool in hand, action passes through the organ extended by the tool as through a single organic mediator” (Ricoeur 1966, 213). But he qualifies this by noting that the “relation tool-work…is a physical relation,” subject to “a natural force known according to the laws of physics” (Ricoeur 1966, 213). In the case of modern industrial work, Ricoeur suggests, the “toolwork” relation is reflectively or deliberately determined in accordance with those scientifically discovered laws. The organic tool-work relation is displaced or “absorbed” by “industrial technique which is a simple application of science by transformation of relations of cause and effect into relations of means to an end” (Ricoeur 1966, 213). The series “willorgan-tool-work” can then be described starting from the will, which Ricoeur takes to be the starting point of phenomenology, or starting from the work, which he takes to be “the point of view of physics” (Ricoeur 1966, 213). This amounts to saying that a description of the activity of working (the series “will-organ-tool-work”) that starts with the “work” is not a matter of phenomenology or hermeneutics at all,

Hermeneutics as a Metaphilosophy and a Philosophy of Work 129 but physics – at least as far as the work characteristic of modern industrial societies is concerned. Since, on this view, the sole point of working activity in these societies is the production of an object, that is, since it is the product or “the work” rather than “the will” that determines and justifies modern working activity, it seems to follow that working activity belongs to the realm of natural law rather than the realm of human meanings and is thus properly an object of natural-scientific explanation rather than phenomenological description. The idea that the reality of work comes to view from the standpoint of physics rather than phenomenology or hermeneutics resurfaces in Ricoeur’s writings on the anthropological significance of work. The most important of these is his 1953 essay “Travail et parole,” translated into English as “Work and the Word” (Ricoeur 1965). Ricoeur begins the essay by endorsing what he calls the “presuppositions of the philosophy of work” and the “socio-economic aspirations” informing the movement to establish a “civilization of work” (Ricoeur 1965, 198). These aspirations centered on improving the conditions of workers (the degraded state of which had been described by influential figures such as Simone Weil and Simone de Beauvoir) and affirming the value of work.6 If the value of work was properly recognized, then it would no longer be tolerable to subject workers to such degradation. One way of providing that recognition would be to acknowledge the human achievements secured through work and the role of work in distinguishing the human species from others. Ricoeur goes along with this, but he warns of an “overzealousness” amongst promoters of the civilization of work, which he attributes to a tendency to exaggerate the reach of the concept of work (Ricoeur 1965, 199). To correct this tendency, Ricoeur proposes that we understand work in conjunction with a “counter-concept,” one that brings into view the limits as well as the reach of the achievements gained through work and the human self-image based on work. The counter-concept Ricoeur proposes is “parole,” or language. Language is the “other” of work which “justifies and challenges the glory of work” (Ricoeur 1966, 199–200).7 Conceptualized contrariwise to language, work refers to the struggle for mastery over nature by intervening in causal processes for the sake of preserving, ameliorating, and reproducing life.8 Like Gadamer, Ricoeur takes work and language to be the two distinct human powers or capacities. Work enables humans to take charge of nature. It produces useful effects by way of toilsome, technologically mediated interventions in the causal processes that constitute nature. Language, by contrast, realizes the power to signify: “the essence of language falls outside of the scope of work: the word signifies and does not produce… the end of production is a real effect, that of the word an understood meaning” (Ricoeur 1965, 210). Ricoeur lists the multiple ways in which language signifies – description, solicitation, and invocation chief amongst them – and these in turn are linked to specific aspects of the human

130  Nicholas H. Smith condition, such as singularity, plurality, and sociality. It is by exercising their linguistic capacity that human beings individuate themselves, exist in irreducibly multiple ways, and engage in genuine social relations. The multiple, differentiated powers of “parole” all stand contrasted with one and the same power of “travail” – mastery over nature to maintain and reproduce life in conformity with the human will. This conception of work is to be found throughout Ricoeur’s writings in the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1958 essay “L’aventure technique et son horizon planetaire,” for instance, he follows Eric Weil in proposing that while the struggle with nature is an anthropological constant, contemporary civilization is the first to “understand and organize itself in view of a progressive struggle with external nature” (Ricoeur 2003, 68). This, in Ricoeur’s view, is what makes it a civilization of work. Ricoeur shares the confidence of many of his contemporaries that progress through this struggle will continue indefinitely, that nature will increasingly yield to the organized human will, to the edification and benefit of “man the worker.” But now Ricoeur warns more explicitly of the spiritual dangers of this development, of the loss of meaning associated with the triumph of homo faber, as human beings lose contact with things as loci of intrinsic or noninstrumental significance. Paradoxically, the price of the civilization of work, which Ricoeur understands first and foremost as progressive control over nature for the purpose of maintaining and reproducing life, may be a decline in civilization in a broader, more comprehensive sense. Ricoeur attempts to resolve this apparent paradox in “Tâches de l’educateur politique” (“The Tasks of the Political Educator”) (Ricoeur 1973). Here, following Weber, he distinguishes three levels of civilization. At one level, there is civilization qua the “accumulation of experience,” which he also calls “industry.” At the level of the industry, which is to say of the means and products of work or production, civilization is universal and singular. It is universal in the sense that its benefits accumulate and are in principle available to everybody, irrespective of national or cultural boundaries; it is singular in the sense that there is only one of them. This is why it is legitimate, indeed necessary, to speak of human civilization as distinct from human civilizations. “The technological history of the human race is that of humanity considered as a single man,” Ricoeur writes, and it is only once we leave the level of industry or work that “man” in the plural appears (Ricoeur 1973, 143). This happens first at the level of “institutions” (the second level of civilization), and more fully at the level of cultural “values” and the languages that express them (the third level). Linguistic and cultural multiplicity contrasts sharply with the singular and universal technical civilization, or civilization of work: “Whereas on the technical level men can become identical with one another, on the deeper level of historical creation, diverse civilizations can only communicate with each other according to the model of the translation of one language into another” (Ricoeur 1973, 147). It is

Hermeneutics as a Metaphilosophy and a Philosophy of Work 131 only when we get to the level of culture and language that we reach the “concrete heart of civilization” and “the human phenomenon historically realizes itself” (Ricoeur 1973, 147). This glance at Ricoeur’s discussions of work from an anthropological standpoint shows the extent to which he came to take on board the disenchantment of work. There is no place here for work as an expression of subjectivity, for work as situated action, and for work as a place of sociality. There can be no subjectivity if the doers of work are effectively “identical”; there is no situated action where agents are equivalent and replaceable by others (or a machine); and there is no sociality where communication through language (as distinct from incentivization or steering) is redundant. The hallmarks of meaning are all missing. In its pure form, work is intelligible as a causal process (as the production of effects); it can be done by anyone (collectively, by humanity considered in the “singular”); and it is bereft of intrinsic cultural value. If the presupposition of any hermeneutics is a “choice in favour of meaning,” hermeneutics of work would appear to be a nonstarter. But Ricoeur’s phenomenology of action presented a different picture. We saw that the “will-organ-tool-work” series is a totality involving an embodied, situated subject. The fact that in the case of industrial work the end point of the series is a physical product, and that the productive process is guided by knowledge of physical laws, does not alter the meaning-structure of the working subject’s situation. Developing Ricoeur’s phenomenology in a direction he did not himself take, we could say that when a subject is at work, there is something “unresolved” in its milieu that calls for action, whether the milieu is a farm, a factory, an office, a hospital, or whatever. The milieu of the worker presents the working subject with “a problem and a task,” with “matter to be worked over,” just as the milieu of any agent does. Again, this structure isn’t changed by the fact that the agent is engaged in productive action – on the contrary, this aspect of the milieu is even more prominent in the case of such action. If work retains its character as situated action even when situated in a modern factory, there is all the more reason to consider it as situated in other contexts. And as Ricoeur himself saw even in the 1950s, much working nowadays is indeed performed in such contexts. Although many people are still occupied by productive action that involves machinery and issues in a “product” or a “work” on the model of industrial production, there are also many whose product is not a discrete entity, that is, an entity or product distinct from the working activity itself. It is hard to see how the working activity of a clerk or a nurse or a teacher can be “absorbed into physics.” It should also be obvious that the work of many people does not involve a struggle with nature – or at least does not involve it any more than other forms of action – and that descriptions of much working activity in terms of norm-free interventions in causal processes would be barely comprehensible.

132  Nicholas H. Smith

Updating the hermeneutics of work Let me conclude with some programmatic remarks on how contemporary hermeneutics might build on Gadamer’s and Ricoeur’s attempts at framing a philosophy of work. The hermeneutics of work should hold fast to Ricoeur’s formulation of the task of hermeneutics as “the appropriation of our effort to exist and our desire to be by means of works which testify to this effort and desire” and to his assertion that “the choice in favour of meaning” is “the most general presupposition of any hermeneutics.” It should also remain faithful to Gadamer’s insistence that the “concrete factors of work” fall squarely within the scope of hermeneutic reflection. So, the central questions to be addressed by the hermeneutics of work have to do with work as a locus of meaning both real and illusory. In its “retrieval” or “recovery” mode, such hermeneutics is directed at real but concealed meanings, in particular meanings concealed by dominant forms of reflection or theoretical discourse. In its “suspicion” mode, it is directed at fake or illusory meanings and the ideologies that shore up those illusions. What then do we learn from our discussion of Gadamer’s and Ricoeur’s reflections on work about how to tackle the central questions of the hermeneutics of work today? On the negative side, we must be careful not to be misled by the distinction between productive and moral action (making and doing, poiesis and praxis). Both Gadamer and Ricoeur (and besides them Arendt and Habermas) use a version of this distinction to frame their philosophies of work.9 While the distinction may be useful for some purposes, it is completely inadequate for the purpose of demarcating the lived experience of work from other kinds of experience. It is very poorly suited, in other words, for the purpose of describing the meaning-structure of work-activity and thus for the purpose of both hermeneutic retrieval and critique. It encourages a view of work as, in its pure or ideal form, having no meaning-structure at all, as governed solely by the laws of nature, and as being oriented to ever greater control of nature for utilitarian purposes. It makes it appear as if all work has the character of industrial work, though even as a model of the experiential structure of industrial work it is inadequate. An updated hermeneutics of work must of course be responsive to the kinds of work performed in postindustrial societies, in particular to the predominance of service work and the rise of emotional labor, which is even further removed from the idea of work as making or poiesis. In being so responsive, it may be more inclined to challenge the logic of disenchantment that the dominant discourses of work, from neoclassical economics to human resource management, take for granted. On the positive side, the hermeneutics of work can build on Gadamer’s and Ricoeur’s phenomenological insights. Its point of departure must be the lived situation of the working subject, a situation which the subject

Hermeneutics as a Metaphilosophy and a Philosophy of Work 133 always occupies as an embodied being faced with a task that at some level brings them in relation to other embodied beings like them. Situated tasks cannot be dealt with by mechanically applying rules or blindly following instructions. At some level, they require responsiveness to the demands and challenges of this situation, in its material and social complexity, and hence an exercise of embodied judgment. Situations are only understood from the inside, and the practical intelligence needed to cope within them is irreducibly subjectively indexed. The standardization of tasks that is an increasingly prominent feature of contemporary work conceals rather than eliminates this subjective moment. It can also conceal the social relations that structure the work-situation. All working, even of the most solitary type, is “working-with-others” at some level. As such, it is fit for hermeneutic investigation along lines opened up by Gadamer and Ricoeur. The “with-other” and “for-other” structure of work also makes it an important locus of recognition relationships, not just in the work-situation but also in society at large. The hermeneutics of work can build on Gadamer’s diagnosis of self-alienation in terms of recognition (or lack thereof) of abilities, as well as Ricoeur’s account of the recognition orders of modern societies (Ricoeur 2005). Last but not least, the choice in favor of meaning urged by the hermeneutics of work refers not just to the adoption of a theoretical standpoint, but also to a practical orientation in regard to the organization of work. It serves as a reminder that the organization of work is not fixed by laws of nature but is a matter of political decisions. At its best, the hermeneutic recovery of meaning in work would inform a political practice oriented to the abolition of degraded work and the availability of meaningful work for all.10

Notes 1 The two mid-twentieth-century thinkers most responsible for the development of hermeneutics as a distinct philosophical stance are Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur, and the discussion of hermeneutics as a philosophy of work that follows will focus mainly on their writings. I will not be discussing the philosophies of work elaborated by other thinkers who could also be said to have taken the “interpretive/hermeneutic turn,” such as Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, and Jürgen Habermas. I have discussed Arendt’s influential account of work and its place in the human condition elsewhere (Smith 2019). 2 It is not just hermeneutics that attempts to call out the limits of disenchantment: the same motivation can be seen in Critical Theory, strands of post-structuralism, and some “post-analytic” philosophy. See Dews 1995. 3 It is the concept of work that features in the account of objective spirit in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right rather than the dialectic of self-consciousness in Phenomenology of Spirit that is at play here. The concept has affinities with Durkheim’s theory of social solidarity and the division of labor, as Axel Honneth has shown (Honneth 2012).

134  Nicholas H. Smith 4 For further discussion, see Warnke (1987), Dunne (1997), and Smith (2011). 5 In addition to Truth and Method, see the essays “Hermeneutics as Practical Philosophy” and “Hermeneutics as a Theoretical and Practical Task,” where Gadamer repeatedly insists that “hermeneutics is not a mere teaching concerning a skill” and that it is “more than a mere teaching of a technique” (Gadamer 1981, 97, 105, 129). 6 See Weil 1951 (originally published in 1937) and de Beauvoir (1949). 7 “Parole” justifies the “glory of work” by providing the basis for an affirmation of work, while challenging work by showing the limits of this affirmation in the context of other affirmable aspects of the human condition. For further discussion, see Smith 2016. 8 This concept of work is thus similar to the concept of labor (as distinct from “work”) elaborated by Hannah Arendt (1958), which is itself derived from her reading of Marx. Ricoeur was a great admirer of Arendt (Ricoeur 1983), but the extent to which his concept of work is influenced by her account of work (if it was influenced by Arendt’s account at all – “Work and the Word” appeared in the same year as Arendt’s The Human Condition) is unclear. 9 A similar observation has been made by James Bernard Murphy (Murphy 1993: 13–14). 10 I warmly thank Guido Vanheeswijck, Herbert de Vriese, and Michiel Meyer for inviting me to present the paper on which this chapter is based at an online conference hosted by the University of Antwerp in November 2020. I am also very grateful to Michiel Meijer for some excellent suggestions regarding the final organization of the text.

References Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. de Beauvoir, Simone. 1949. Le deuxième sexe. Paris: Gallimard. Dews, Peter. 1995. The Limits of Disenchantment. Essays on Contemporary European Philosophy. London: Verso. Dunne, Joseph. 1997. Back to the Rough Ground. Practical Judgment and the Lure of Technique. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1976. Hegel’s Dialectic. Five Hermeneutical Studies. Translated by P. Christopher Smith. New Haven: Yale University Press. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1977. Philosophical Hermeneutics. Edited and translated by David E. Linge. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1981. Reason in the Age of Science. Translated by Frederick G. Lawrence. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1990. “Reply to My Critics.” In The Hermeneutic Tradition. From Ast to Ricoeur. Edited by Dayle L. Ormiston and Alan D. Schrift, 273–297. Albany NY: SUNY Press. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1992. “Notes on Planning the Future.” In Hans-Georg Gadamer on Education, Poetry and History. Edited by Dieter Misgeld and Graeme Nicholson and translated by Lawrence Schmidt and Monica Reuss. Albany: SUNY Press. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1993. Truth and Method. Second revised edition. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. London: Sheed and Ward.

Hermeneutics as a Metaphilosophy and a Philosophy of Work 135 Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1998. Praise of Theory. Translated by Chris Dawson. New Haven: Yale University Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1980. “The Hermeneutic Claim to Universality.” In Contemporary Hermeneutics. Edited by Josef Bleicher, 181–211. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Habermas, Jürgen. 1983. “Interpretive Social Science vs Hermeneuticism.” In Social Science as Moral Inquiry. Edited by Norma Haan, Robert N. Bellah, Paul Rabinow, and William M. Sullivan, 250–269. New York: Columbia University Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1988. On the Logic of the Social Sciences. Cambridge: Polity. Hiley, David, James Bohman, and Richard Shusterman, eds. 1991. The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science, Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Honneth, Axel, ed. 2012. “Labour and Recognition: A Redefinition.” In The I in We: Studies in the Theory of Recognition. Cambridge: Polity Press. Murphy, James Bernard. 1993. The Moral Economy of Labor. New Haven: Yale University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1965. “Work and the Word.” In History and Truth. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1966. Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary. Translated by E. Kohák. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1970. Freud and Philosophy. An Essay on Interpretation. Translated by Denis Savage. New Haven: Yale University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1973. “The Tasks of the Political Educator.” Philosophy Today 17 (2): 142–152. Ricoeur, Paul. 1974. The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1983. “Préface.” In Arendt, Condition de l’homme moderne. The Human Condition. Translated into French by Georges Fradier. Paris: Calmann-Lévy. Ricoeur, Paul. 1991. From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 2003. “L’aventure technique et son horizon planetaire,” Autres Temps. Cahiers d’éthique sociale et politique 76–77: 67–78. Ricoeur, Paul. 2005. The Course of Recognition. Translated by David Pellauer. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Smith, Nicholas H. 2011. “Language, Work and Hermeneutics.” In Gadamer’s Hermeneutics and the Art of Conversation. Edited by Andrzej Wiercinski, 201– 220. Berlin: LIT Verlag. Smith, Nicholas H. 2016. “Between Philosophical Anthropology and Phenomenology: On Paul Ricoeur’s Philosophy of Work.” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 278: 513–534. Smith, Nicholas H. 2019. “Arendt’s Anti-humanism of Labour.” European Journal of Social Theory 22 (2): 175–190. Taylor, Charles. 1985. “Self-interpreting Animals.” In Human Agency and Language. Philosophical Papers 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Warnke, Georgia. 1987. Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition and Reason. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

136  Nicholas H. Smith Weil, Simone. 1951. La condition ouvrière. Paris: Gallimard. Winch, Peter. 1958. The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1958. Philosophical Investigations. Second edition. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell.

7

Hermeneutics and Testimony On Selfhood and the Constitution of the Social Bond Gert-Jan van der Heiden

Introduction: Testimony as a Philosophical Problem A philosophical understanding of the human practice of testimony has much to gain from an interpretive turn, such is the claim of this chapter. In particular, a hermeneutic-phenomenological approach to testimony offers the means to problematize, first, the idea of the witness as a neutral observer and, second, the idea that testimony is a factual report. The two main sections of this chapter offer a hermeneutic alternative to these two ideas by exploring a specific hermeneutic sense of selfhood needed to understand what a witness is and examining how testimony is engaged in the creation of a social bond. The importance of testimony for our everyday social life can hardly be overstated. In almost every aspect of our lives, we depend on what others tell us about the world, about other humans, and about ourselves. As a topic for philosophical reflection, testimony has become a rather prominent theme in the last decades. As Krämer, Schmidt, and Schülein (2017, 13–17) suggest, two distinct lines of inquiry in the contemporary philosophy of testimony may be distinguished. The first line of inquiry approaches testimony as a topic in social epistemology. This epistemological approach of testimony is not only characteristic of contemporary approaches, but is found throughout Anglo-Saxon modern thought. This approach goes back to discussions between the empiricist account of David Hume and the common-sense account of Thomas Reid on the question of whether testimony is a basic source of knowledge or whether it is justified by “subjective” cognitive capacities such as reason, memory, and perception. While the Humean emphasis on the cognitive capacities of the subject may have set the agenda for much of modern thought, the recent (re)turn to a common-sense approach, initiated by Coady (1992), has given rise to an ever-growing body of work devoted to social epistemology departing from the insight that forms of (social) knowledge exist of which the “subject” is not an individual but rather a social group. DOI: 10.4324/9781003251354-11

138  Gert-Jan van der Heiden The second line of inquiry concerns the specific ethical and political questions that are raised in relation to the testimonies of the victims of atrocities, violence, or other forms of injustice. These questions relate especially to the obstructions that specific groups of victims encounter in their attempts to make their experiences heard. In these attempts, they experience either that they lack the proper vocabulary to address the injustices they suffer or that they are not considered reliable or relevant sources of knowledge. These forms of obstructions obviously raise important ethical issues that have been addressed since the 1980s up to today, from Lyotard’s (1983) reflections on the différend to the questions of epistemic injustice by Fricker (2007), which inspires many reflections today. It goes without saying that these two lines of inquiry have led to many new insights into the epistemological and ethical questions related to the question of social knowledge. Yet, it remains to be seen whether we have genuinely captured the human practice of testimony if we represent testimony as the practice of people sharing their beliefs with other people and if we limit our philosophical interrogation of this practice to posing either epistemological questions concerning the proper justification of the acceptance of someone else’s testimony or ethical questions concerning the social constraints people may experience when witnessing. The idea that the approach developed in the epistemological and ethical line of inquiry may be rather limited in scope also comes to mind when considering these two lines of inquiry within a wider historical horizon and comparing them to other accounts in the history of philosophy. In this wider horizon, both the epistemological focus on testimony and the specifically contemporary ethical focus on the testimony of victims are much less central than they might appear to our present-day minds. In ancient philosophy, for instance, testimony is rather part of a reflection on (legal) rhetoric. That is to say, the question of testimony is not taken up in an examination of the conditions of possibility of human knowledge, but rather in the context of the question of persuasion and in relation to the question of what is true and what is likely or probable (Van der Heiden 2020b, 677–681). Another important approach, from the Middle Ages onward up to today, treats the philosophical question of testimony in relation to religion. Here, several lines of thought come together. There is an important epistemological concern running from Augustine to Arnauld arguing why testimony is a trustworthy source of knowledge. Yet, the testimonies at stake here concern first and foremost the basic truths of Christianity, such as those on the resurrection.1 For Kierkegaard, the question of testimony is no longer part of an epistemological examination. In fact, his approach of the witness to the truth resonates strongly with another central element in the examination of testimony in the philosophy of religion, namely martyrdom. The martyr, from the Greek martus or witness, is emblematic of a particular way of

Hermeneutics and Testimony 139 being a witness. While the category of the martyr might be considered as a subcategory of that of victims, the martyrs’ testimony does not concern the experience of their suffering as such. Rather, martyrs are those who live their lives in full fidelity to their convictions up to the point of being willing to die for them. With martyrdom, the philosophical interrogation of the practice of testimony shifts toward an examination of the particular forms of selfhood or subjectivity of the witness. 2 This wider historical range suggests that another conception of testimony might be necessary to do justice to the more diverse and rich conception of testimony that speaks from other historical and thematic contexts than the ones that are emphasized today (Van der Heiden 2021). In line with the work of authors such as Heidegger, Arendt, Ricoeur, Derrida, and Agamben, a hermeneutic-phenomenological approach might be the way to move forward to arrive at such a notion. To indicate why a hermeneutic approach might be fruitful, let me first explicate in two steps from which conception of testimony it wants to move away. First, following concerns expressed by Dulong (1998, 23–33), one may wonder whether the epistemological emphasis on testimony as a report truly captures the nature of the human practice of testimony. This account of testimony seems to privilege a particular ideal of what a reliable witness is: reports are especially trustworthy when the reporters are disengaged, neutral, and objective observers. However, does the model of a disengaged observer—even if used only as an ideal—not abstract from the actual human practice of testimony? Such an abstraction might very well serve particular epistemic goals or needs. For instance, an eyewitness is interrogated by a legal tribunal to establish the facts of the matter under consideration. Yet, is it accurate to understand the human practice of testimony as a description of or report on established facts? In fact, the idea of the witness as a neutral observer has arisen in the context of the modern natural sciences (Latour 1993, 22–24). Yet, it is not clear how this idea relates to the social practice of witnessing outside of the laboratory. Second, the very real and urgent ethical and political issues that are raised under the heading of epistemic injustice may strongly benefit from a more elementary approach to the social role of human witnessing and testimony. Underlying these ethical concerns, a more primordial hermeneutic-phenomenological understanding of testimony is at stake, namely of testimony as a practice by which humans establish a social bond (Ricoeur 2000, 206–208; 2004, 165–166) and a shared world or “common and factual reality” (Arendt 2006, 232). That is, from a phenomenological point of view, the first philosophical question is not one of epistemic justice, but rather of how to constitute a social bond between humans with different experiences of the world and of perhaps mutually exclusive experiences of what it means to live in a social world. As noted above, the two main sections in this chapter offer the hermeneutic alternatives to the idea of the witness as a neutral observer and

140  Gert-Jan van der Heiden of testimony as a factual report. The focus on regional forms of testimony or on technical accounts of testimony in the service of a social-institutional goal or epistemic norm external to this practice may easily obscure that witnessing is a fundamental characteristic of what it means to be human. For humans, to encounter or to experience reality does not simply mean to undergo it on an affectual level, or to be merely taken up in a network of causal relations. Rather, for humans, to encounter reality also always means to witness that which one encounters and to grasp and share its significance and meaning. The encounter with something real is the very cause—in the sense of the German Ur-Sache, the primordial thing, affair, event, or matter met in this encounter—that elicits the attempts to understand both the encounter, which is the event that turns one into a witness in the first place, and that which is encountered; this is the passive sense of “to witness.” The effort to understand this encounter with reality includes the attempts to share it with others by articulating this encounter in a spoken or written testimony or by expressing it in a particular form of life; this is the active sense of “to witness” by which one actively affirms and adopts being a witness. In what follows, I want to elucidate this passive and active sense of witnessing by firstly focusing on the specific form of selfhood at stake in the practice of testimony and, secondly, addressing some of the issues related to testimony as the practice that aims to constitute a social bond and a shared world. To this end, I briefly introduce the systematic distinction between the four elements of testimony that I have developed elsewhere (Van der Heiden 2020a, 130–137; 2021, 28–38). First, a testimony is always about something, namely about that which the witness encountered in reality. Testimony finds its origin in or springs from—Ur-sprung—this encounter with reality. To emphasize this specific relation to reality, one might use the Latin term res and speak of “the res of testimony” to capture this first element of testimony, that is, the matter, thing, or affair—in German, res is translated as Sache— about which a testimony speaks as long as one is aware that the very encounter with this matter is itself part of this reality. Differently put, the res of testimony does not concern an object existing apart from the encounter with it. What constitutes the res of testimony includes the specific impact this res has on the one experiencing or witnessing it. Hence, one may speak of a res of testimony as long as one includes in this term the self-involvement of the witness. An alternative term to express this first element of testimony might be “the thing in question” to emphasize that the thing, matter, or affair we encounter as a witness is not simply an object, but a thing that is in question or at stake for us. The Latin term expressing something similar is causa—German: Ursache, related to Sache—which in a legal context would be the case at hand and under scrutiny. It is the unity of that which is encountered and the very encounter that is the very cause of witnessing and the basic trigger to witness:

Hermeneutics and Testimony 141 What did I experience and how did experiencing this affect me in what I am? Second, there is someone who witnesses. Someone becomes a witness because of the particular encounter with something. One is, therefore, passively constituted as a witness in and by this encounter; this encounter engages witnesses in and relates them to what they encountered. Yet, to become a witness involves a second moment as well, namely actively assuming the role of a witness by what can be considered to be the very opening statement of every testimony: the self-authentication in the form of “I was there” or “I experienced this.” Third, we can distinguish the act of testifying. Witnessing is not only the passive encounter with something, but also the active bearing witness to it. The speech act of testimony is a complicated one. It is a narrative description of what one encountered, of how one encountered it, and of how one is affected by it. It is also an ascription. By bearing witness, one attests that one is capable of testimony and that one is a witness; one ascribes the capacity to oneself to be able to speak truthfully and to speak the truth about the res of testimony. It is by this act that a private encounter is made publicly available so that, when accepted, it can become part of the shared world in which we live with others. For this latter purpose of testimony, the act of testifying is a prescription to the addressee. By implicitly or explicitly promising to speak the truth and claiming to be (able to be) truthful, witnesses demand addressees to believe them. Fourth, a testimony has addressees, for whom the testimony itself is the very event that introduces the subject matter of testimony on their horizon. Because addressees do not have a direct experience of the subject matter themselves, their relation to testimony is fundamentally different from that of the witness.

Experience and Selfhood of the Witness What does it mean to become a witness? The Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) root *weid, from which “witness” is said to derive, means “to see” and “to know.” In a rough way, these etymological considerations may help us to get a first sense of the practice of witnessing. For instance, the eyewitness saw and therefore knows something that others did not see and do not know as long as they are not informed about it. This basic asymmetry between the witness and the addressee can never be overcome. Hence, the subjective positions of the witness and the addressee with respect to what is witnessed are different and imply that to be a witness involves a particular sense of selfhood. Yet, if we relate the verbs “to see” and “to know” to witnessing, which semantic inflections of these terms are and which are not appropriate to use for testimony?

142  Gert-Jan van der Heiden Following Aristotle’s suggestion in the Metaphysics (I.908a22–28), the human interest in seeing transgresses the usefulness of the sense of sight and its serviceability to our actions. For humans, seeing and knowing whatever one encounters in the world can have significance transcending the particular use of what one encounters. In addition to the uses made of whatever they encounter in the world humans are witnesses to it. For Aristotle, as is well-known, these considerations are a prelude to an account of the theoretical life as the highest possibility of human existence. One of the questions that hermeneutic phenomenology has always raised with respect to this ideal is whether the Aristotelian emphasis on theōria does not ultimately introduce the idea of a neutral, disengaged observer that takes the world into view from a safe distance as the ideal of human understanding. At the same time, hermeneutic phenomenology has always recognized that the Greek emphasis on the basic affect or pathos of wonder, thaumazein, as the initiation of this particular human attitude to the world, might allow for a more subtle understanding of the opening lines of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Rather than pointing to a sheer disengagement of the human from the world, one should note that the disengagement alluded to in the opening lines concerns a determinate disengagement. The detachment from the different, everyday practices of use rather manifests another human form of being engaged in the world. This other form is not without human affect, as it includes wonder. Wonder is the particular attunement that allows humans to relate to the world in another way and with another significance. This pathos of wonder is initiated by a particular encounter with the world that requires us to acknowledge that the world is not simply the world with which we are familiar to such an extent that we know how to use or deal with whatever we encounter in it. Rather, this encounter elicits the experience that the world is not exactly how we thought it was, is more unfamiliar, not simply ready to be used, and perhaps even more uninhabitable than we thought it was. In Greek thought, the pathos of thaumazein can therefore never be separated from an experience of aporia, of being incapable of immediately familiarizing ourselves with what we encountered thusly, obstructing any use of it and rather demanding an interpretation of the new significance and unfamiliarity with which reality confronts us (Gadamer 1990, 358–362). Such a hermeneutic reinterpretation of the ancient philosophical motifs of seeing and knowing beyond mere use of or dealings with (things in) the world guides us to a better understanding of what is at stake in witnessing in its passive sense. To become a witness means to encounter the world in a way that one did not expect or anticipate—even if one might have been, in an abstract sense, aware of the possibility of this encounter. Consider the following simple example. We are aware that the possibility of traffic accidents exists. However, when we witness

Hermeneutics and Testimony 143 or are part of an actual, severe traffic accident, we are all of sudden confronted with the reality of it, which is different from our anticipations of its possibility. The encounter with the reality of something of which we knew only the possibility compels us to change our understanding of this possibility and include in our understanding our specific experience. This confrontation with the reality of such an incident also supports the idea that eyewitnesses have a better access to the true reality and nature of this incident than those who never witnessed it themselves: the former have experienced the impact of the reality of the incident on several affectual and perceptual levels and were therefore compelled to reinterpret what a traffic accident is and means. This example allows us to clarify more. The affects and experiences of witnesses are essential ingredients of what makes someone a witness. Let me recall that in an institutional—for instance, legal—setting, the witness is called on so that a tribunal may establish what exactly happened in the accident. In this setting, the aim might be to establish the exact chain of events. In this setting, it might therefore seem that ideal witnesses are camera-like observers, who merely register and record the sequence of events in the accident and subsequently play this recording in court. However, this ideal of a purely disengaged, neutral observer is an abstract and impoverished version of the real eyewitness. The witnesses do not arrive at the sense of what they witnessed by abstracting from the different affects at play in their encounter with it, but rather by allowing these affects to co-determine this sense and to help unfold the story they can narrate about it. In a Nietzschean turn of phrase, we might perhaps say that these affects are like additional senses with which witnesses perceive and interpret this event. There is a particular price to pay for this positioning of the witness. It means that the meaning and the truth of the res presented in testimony necessarily are perspectival or horizontal. This is not to say that the event, thing, matter, or affair encountered does not have its own say in this perspective: the perspective is a result of the interaction of witness and res—it can be explained neither in terms of the witness and their horizon of understanding alone nor in terms of an objective, realist feature of the event, thing, matter, or affair encountered alone. Rather, it is the encounter itself that co-determines this perspective. Since the witness and the incident collide, affect, and meet in this encounter, they both contribute to the horizontal interpretation that thus arises. The encounter itself, in which the res experienced and the one who experiences are both at stake, is the real of the perspective thus opened up. In the wake of these considerations, two particular problems impose themselves. First, if the encounter with the res of testimony implies a perspectival or horizontal grasp of what is encountered, the twofold question of how to share this perspective and how to share in it needs to be addressed. This question guides us in the next section. Second, what does the nature

144  Gert-Jan van der Heiden of this encounter exactly imply for the type of selfhood we encounter in a witness? This question is addressed in this section by highlighting two elements: (1) the individualizing dimension of witnessing and (2) the role of attestation in the self-understanding of the witness. (1) One of the basic ideas Heidegger develops in Sein und Zeit is that Dasein’s own being is not given as an object of thought or knowledge for Dasein, but always in the mode of Jemeinigkeit (1977, § 9). Dasein’s being is a self-relation to its own being. In his analysis of being-towardsdeath, Heidegger (1977, 319–320) furthers this idea by arguing that the experience of one’s own death as one’s ultimate possibility allows one to genuinely understand one’s own being in its individuality: not only is it impossible for others to take over or take away my mortality, it is also a privileged phenomenon confronting Dasein with the mineness of its being. Derrida (1998, 47–49) argues that it remains to be seen whether the phenomenon of death deserves the privileged place Heidegger awards to it with respect to this discovery of individuality. In fact, he suggests that witnessing plays a similar role. Following and extending Derrida, we may explicate this as follows. The experience of mineness or individuality is born from the encounter with something in the world—an event, an experience, an accident, or a thing. This very encounter individualizes who one is. Selfhood is not simply constituted in and by an immediate self-experience or self-understanding of one’s own being or existence, as Heidegger’s analyses of being-towards-death and the subsequent analyses of attestation seem to suggest; rather, it is the discovery of oneself as someone who is capable of encountering something in reality and who is affected by it. The individuality thus discovered has (at least) three dimensions. First, in its most elementary sense, the witness is the one who is singled out among many others to have had this particular encounter. Others do not share immediately in this encounter. In this sense, the witness has a genuinely private experience when witnessing. “Private” is used here in its etymological sense, that is, as a privation from the public realm, from the realm of what is openly available to all. In this sense, the witness is individualized among others. Second, the encounter at stake in witnessing is an event in the existence of the witness and is thus inscribed in the life-nexus— Lebenszusammenhang—of the witness, co-determining the existence and life-nexus of the witness into the individual existence that it is. In this sense, it forms the very perspective or horizon of understanding of the witness. The encounter confronts witnesses with the task to interpret and understand what it is exactly was they encountered; yet, in their selfunderstanding, witnesses are also confronted with the task to understand how this encounter first co-engenders the horizon within which this understanding takes place. The encounter, thus, itself co-generates

Hermeneutics and Testimony 145 the possibilities of understanding that which is encountered—in German: zeugen ist auch erzeugen. Third, to capture the individualizing nature of witnessing, it is important to add that whatever is encountered is not only of significance to witnesses, but also to others. The social significance of what is witnessed is a crucial aspect of testimony. If one would experience something without any social significance—if it is possible to conceive of something like this—this experience would purely belong to a solipsistic sphere, devoid of any relation to others.3 Such an experience, however, does not individualize the one who experienced it, but rather merely separates oneself from others. The social significance of what is witnessed, however, adds an additional layer to the individualizing dimension of witnessing. It is the very reason why the witness has something to share with others in the first place. It is the reason why witnesses may even experience a demand to testify or, by contrast, why witnesses are forced to silence.4 It is the reason why the initial statement of testimony is a self-authentication: for instance, the statement “I was there” is nothing less than the very articulation of the individualizing nature of witnessing. (2) Psychological studies seem unanimous in their conclusion that eyewitnesses are unreliable sources of objective knowledge (Dulong 1998, 23–28; Loftus 1979, 21–22). It remains to be seen what to conclude from this psychologically proven fallibility. Does it mean that eyewitnesses are poor witnesses? Or does it rather mean that the human practice of “witnessing is not a form of objective or neutral observation” (Van der Heiden 2021: 28–29)? Rather than repeating the arguments put forward elsewhere, I want to argue that this particular fallibility of the human psyche can be incorporated into a hermeneutic phenomenology of the self, especially in the form suggested by Ricoeur in the introductory and concluding chapters of Soi-même comme un autre (1990, 1992). What these psychological studies demonstrate is that the Cartesian dream of an ego or a soul that is certain of itself and can arrive, by methodological means, to certain knowledge, is disproven in the study of this soul or psyche itself. If indeed the human self cannot be thought along the lines of the Cartesian self-certainty of the ego, does this mean that we are handed over to Nietzsche’s idea of a “shattered cogito” (Ricoeur 1992, 11–16)? Are eyewitnesses pretending to be able to say something objectively about what they witnessed, victims to a form of self-delusion? Is their self-understanding fraught with self-illusions? Ricoeur suggests that a hermeneutics of the self provides a conception of the self that avoids the Charybdis of the Nietzschean self as a mere illusion and delusion as well as the Scylla of the Cartesian self as a self-certain cogito. The notion that Ricoeur introduces to articulate this intermediate sense of the self that incorporates both the phenomenological givenness and the fragility of the self is that of attestation. With this term, he captures the hermeneutic sense of self-understanding: attestation articulates how

146  Gert-Jan van der Heiden the self has itself according to this hermeneutic conception. The self neither has itself as a certainty or a solid, indisputable ground nor as a sheer illusion or self-deception, but only as an attested self. Ricoeur’s attestation translates Heidegger’s Bezeugung, which is the testimony—Zeugnis—of Dasein to itself of its own most potentialityof-being (1977, 355). (The close connection between attestation and testimony is also typical to the French and English language, and may help us to understand Ricoeur’s account of attestation.) Let us once more invoke the figure of the eyewitness to offer us some clues as to what is at stake in the notion of attestation. The self-authentication of an eyewitness—“I was there!”—expresses a self-involvement in witnessing that can neither be reduced to a form of sheer self-delusion nor to a form of absolute self-certainty. An example may clarify this. On the one hand, the imperative that witnesses may experience to speak about the circumstances of the accident they witnessed depends on this experienced self-involvement: because they themselves rather than others are involved, they (may) sense the imperative to testify about what they witnessed to people who were not involved. To argue that this self-authentication is merely delusional because there is no such thing as a human self or identity does not take the self-experience of the witness seriously. On the other hand, an imperative to speak about what one witnessed only makes sense if witnesses understand themselves as capable humans, that is, in this case, capable of telling the truth of what they saw or experienced. 5 The self, however, cannot have such an ability with Cartesian-like certainty. The aforementioned psychological experiments on eyewitnesses concerning the reliability of memory, the impressionability of witness, and the possibly distorting impact of trauma demonstrate this. However, these experiments do not demonstrate that testimony cannot be of crucial importance for the social or public understanding of what was witnessed. The idea or claim that one is—or is not—able to bear witness remains abstract and ill-founded if it is not enacted by actually bearing witness. The enactment of bearing witness is, therefore, itself an attestation of the capacity of the witness to have something significant to say about what they witnessed and to make it publicly available. Attestation is thus ultimately the modality in which witnesses have their capacity of bearing witness. In Soi-même comme un autre, Ricoeur’s concept of attestation is in the first place a notion introduced to qualify the hermeneutic sense of selfunderstanding in general. It is for this reason that I introduced the eyewitness to illustrate Ricoeur’s account of attestation. However, it seems to me that the importance of witnessing goes far beyond being a mere figure. There is an intrinsic reason why attestation, used in its technical sense, is so close to that of testimony. Self-understanding has the form of attestation because the human is, first and foremost, a witness of reality: it is in the encounter with various aspects of reality—including the

Hermeneutics and Testimony 147 reality humans themselves are—and the integration of these encounters in the self’s life-nexus that the self discovers capacities that prove—or disprove—themselves in their enactment. At this point, Ricoeur’s and Heidegger’s considerations resonate. The self-attestation Heidegger addresses concerns the discovery of Dasein’s very own possibilities of being. These possibilities are not given objectively, because they are no objects. Neither are they mere illusions; they are rather genuine possibilities of Dasein, which are, however, only disclosed in and by the enactment of attestation. In a concrete sense, this means that from the encounter with something unique and contingent in reality, the possibility may be born for the one encountering it to become a witness. I write “may be born” because encounters with reality can also kill, traumatize, render one mute, rob one temporarily of one’s memory, confront one with something for which one cannot find the words, make one experience something that one refuses to or simply cannot tell, and so on. In these cases, the passive and active dimensions of witnessing, which we usually think of as belonging together, are split up: the one who witnesses in a passive sense is not the one who can witness in an active sense.6

Articulating Experiences and Creating Commonality To bear witness is never simply to convey or transmit certain (factual) information. The act of testifying includes the witness’s self-authentication: “I was there” (Ricoeur 2000, 204–205; 2004, 163). Based on this self-authentication, to testify is also to make a claim on or appeal to the addressee: “Because I was there, you have to believe me” (Derrida 1998, 45–50). Moreover, this claim is accompanied by another guarantee, also given implicitly or explicitly by the witness when testifying: “I promise to tell you the truth about what I witnessed.”7 These three elements—self-authentication, appeal, and promise—indicate the witnesses’ involvement in their testimony. Witnesses are not neutral vehicles passing on information; rather, they are engaged interpreters of the perspective on the subject matter of testimony (Ricoeur 1994, 117; 1980, 130). By bearing witness, witnesses aim to share their perspectives with the addressees. At this point, another hermeneutic dimension of the question of testimony comes into view. The common-sense approach to testimony (Reid 1823, 232–233) argues that the human practice of testimony is regulated by two principles. The principle of charity states that our default attitude to testimony is one of trust and belief. We only deviate from it if we have good reasons not to believe it. The principle of veracity states that the default attitude when testifying is one of truthfulness; we tend to tell the truth unless we have good reasons not to. Whether or not these principles are true,8 they are not enough to account for the addressee’s understanding of a testimony. To comprehend a testimony,

148  Gert-Jan van der Heiden it is not always enough to treat it charitably. Rather, the possibility to comprehend presupposes that the experiences of the witness are marked by a form of commonality: they should resemble the experiences the addressees are familiar with so that they can indeed become part of the addressee’s horizon of understanding. Explicating how comprehension comes about in understanding the testimonies of other people’s experiences, Ricoeur writes: “This comprehension is built on the basis of a sense of human resemblance at the level of situations, feelings, thoughts, and actions” (2000, 223; 2004, 175). Departing from the idea that witnesses have their own perspective on what they witnessed, and adding that addressees have their perspective as well due to their own life-nexus, Gadamer’s (1990, 383–384) idea of the fusion of horizons seems indispensable to account for the possibility of mutual understanding between witness and addressee. Indeed, as Ricoeur (2000, 205; 2004, 164) emphasizes, testimony is a particular dialogical situation that requires a process of mutual understanding that marks any genuine dialogue. Yet, at the same, Ricoeur’s emphasis on the necessity of commonality conditions the possibility of mutual, dialogical understanding. Only if a testimony describes situations, feelings, thoughts, and actions that resemble those the addressees are familiar with, it can be understood. The initial trust of a testimony is thus not unconditional; rather, it depends on our basic trust in the truth of our own experience of the world and on the extension of this trust by a principle of commonality. However, if the given testimony is beyond our expectations and common sense, the tribunal’s initial response to the testimony will not be one of belief but rather one of disbelief, expressed, for instance, by the exclamation: “This is impossible!” or: “This cannot have happened!” In his reflections on the contemporary historiography of Auschwitz, Ricoeur emphasizes that commonality is a condition of dialogical understanding. This confronts us with the difficult question of what happens when we hear testimonies in which “the experience to be transmitted is that of an inhumanity with no common measure with the experience of the average person” (Ricoeur 2000, 223; 2004, 175). Do they go beyond our capacity to comprehend? Before answering this question, let us note that in the confrontation with these marginal or limit-cases of human testimony, the stakes and the limits of dialogical understanding become manifest. The Gadamerian idea of the fusion of horizons seems to suggest that the encounter with another horizon or perspective always leads to an event of meaning—at least, as long as we are charitable enough— so that the other perspective does not remain closed in on itself, but becomes meaningful for the other. Yet, Ricoeur comments on commonality, resemblance, and common measure suggest that these condition the possibility of the fusion of horizons. When these conditions are not met, it seems that we are dealing, in a more or less Nietzschean

Hermeneutics and Testimony 149 fashion, with an irreconcilable and mutually inaccessible multitude of perspectives. In a striking phrase, when describing his encounters with the strange creature named Bartleby, the narrator from Melville’s eponymous story says: “So true it is, and so terrible too, that up to a certain point the thought or sight of misery enlists our best affections; but, in certain special cases, beyond that point it does not” (Melville 2002, 19; Van der Heiden 2020a, 104); in the same context, the narrator indicates how, at certain moments, he melancholically experiences a “bond of common humanity” (Melville 2002, 18) with his scrivener, but only up to a certain point. Charity and commonality, as Bartleby, the Scrivener suggests, indeed constitute a social bond, but it is a bond with a limited scope of extension. This example shows that the limitations we confront here are not only limitations of dialogue but might concern human understanding as such. In fact, it is a well-known hermeneutic principle that one’s understanding is not limited to one’s experiences alone. As argued by Dilthey (1927, 215–216), the human faculty of the imagination allows one to vary on one’s own experiences: as long as the experiences of the other resemble our own, we should be able to familiarize ourselves with them. In this sense, the concept of resemblance and the imagination’s capacity to create variations give rise to a particular space of hermeneutic variation of our own experiences of the world. However, as Ricoeur’s concern with the experience of “an inhumanity with no common measure with the experience of the average person” suggests, the experience of the world articulated in testimony may very well transgress this hermeneutic space of what counts as a reliable and credible variation of the addressees’ understanding of the world. In such testimonies, the boundaries of any imaginatively anticipated commonality or resemblance are transgressed. Should we conclude from these considerations on the conditions of (dialogical) understanding that certain testimonies simply cannot be understood? This seems to be the implication of the previous considerations. However, one might also use these considerations to elicit the question of whether the hermeneutic categories of testimony and dialogue—in light of the latter’s dependence on charity and commonality—can be distinguished more clearly and whether the relation between testimony and understanding can be marked by different limits than the ones imposed by the variation of the imagination or the concept of resemblance. To address this question, it is important to recall that testimony is marked by a specific asymmetry: the witness claims to have witnessed some aspect of reality to which the addressee has no immediate access. This means that, considered from the point of view of the addressee, no testimony can be certain and can therefore be met with suspicion. With respect to this “possibility of suspicion,” Ricoeur notes that it “opens a space of controversy with which several testimonies and several

150  Gert-Jan van der Heiden witnesses find themselves confronted with each other” (2000, 205–206; 2004, 164–165). Because the addressee is called to believe the witness, as Ricoeur argues, the possibility of suspicion is always already given. This possibility becomes an actual exercise of doubt as soon as the addressees are confronted with several testimonies that contradict each other at certain points: they cannot all be true in all respects and, hence, the addressees are compelled to actualize the possibility to doubt these testimonies and critically assess them. Ricoeur’s description of this space of controversy makes much sense. However, our previous description of the limit-case of testimony suggests that there might also be another, more deeply rooted space of controversy at stake in testimony, owing to the asymmetry between witness and addressee: not so much the controversy of partially or wholly contradicting testimonies, but rather the controversy between witness and addressee. The latter controversy concerns the contradiction between the witness’s appeal to the addressee to be believed and the addressee’s (possible) initial disbelief. This shift in the understanding of the genuine space of controversy is important for the question we raised because it shows that the space of solutions to the contradiction is two-dimensional rather than one-dimensional. Ricoeur suggests that critique and critical assessment are the proper work of suspicion and provide the only way forward to unravel and disentangle the different claims to truth in (partially) contradicting testimonies. It is by this work of suspicion that a social bond is taking shape. For instance, those testimonies that can be upheld when assessed critically become part of a shared, social sense of historical, social reality. However, in this one-dimensional account of solving contradictions, the specific poetic nature of the act of testifying is underestimated. What is meant by “poetic” in this context might best be clarified by repeating that in German, zeugen, to testify, also means erzeugen, to generate, to engender, or to create. In his analysis of Zeugnis and Bezeugung in Sein und Zeit, Heidegger refers to this generative dimension of testimony and attestation when he notes that “the possibility of another kind of hearing […] must be given”; moreover, he connects the engendering of this other kind of hearing to the dimension of testimony as a call: the ordinary, average or everyday way of “listening gets broken by the call if that call, in accordance with its character as call, arouses another kind of hearing” (1977, 360; 1996, 250; see also Van der Heiden 2020a, 162–164). When invoking Heidegger’s analysis at this point, one should obviously take into account its specific context. However, despite all the differences between the analysis of Dasein at stake in this context and the more general reflections on testimony that we are pursuing here, there is one important similarity. Heidegger’s distinction between an everyday hearing and another type of hearing elicited by a call is mirrored in the distinction between, on the one hand, the type of understanding or

Hermeneutics and Testimony 151 hearing that the addressees base on their average and everyday experience—and which may lead to disbelief and suspicion when the experience borne witness to lies beyond the boundaries of commonality—and, on the other hand, the type of understanding to which the witness calls them. The poetic dimension of testimony concerns testimony’s capacity to create and engender new ways of understanding the world for the addressees. This poetic dimension of testimony, which encompasses both the witness’s call on the addressee and the articulation of what is witnessed, may thus transform the space of what addressees deem to be a real and credible variation of their own experience of the world. It is in this sense that testimony is engaged in the genuine constitution of a social bond between what the witness witnessed and what for the addressee is real, leading up to a shared world of witness and addressee. By bringing out this second axis of the two-dimensional space of solutions to the controversy between the call of the witness and the suspicion of the addressee, I do not aim to eliminate the first one. Therefore, it is important to stress one crucial difference between the understanding of testimony put forward here and Heidegger’s staging of testimony and attestation in Sein und Zeit. Heidegger’s account of the call remarkably lacks any reflection on the categories of trust and belief.9 However, as soon as the call is understood as a call to trust and believe, the situation becomes more complex. As soon as trust is brought into play, the possibility of suspicion enters the scene as an equal and necessarily co-existing possibility. The dialectic of trust and distrust implies that the controversy between witness and addressee is insoluble; it is a genuine controversy from which, for the addressee, two opposed possible ways of moving forward are born: the possibility of a new way of interpreting and understanding the world through the eyes of the witness and the possibility of critically assessing of whether the testimony speaks of a credible experience of the world. Consequently, the addressees’ response to a testimony is necessarily marked by both possibilities, interpretation and critique, as the modes in and through which a social bond is constituted and a shared world can take shape. The important questions addressed in the analytic epistemology of testimony are part of the indispensable attitude of critique: rather than affirming belief and interpreting a testimony in light of this belief, this attitude guides the addressee to address the question of the justification of (dis)belief. By contrast, the attitude of a primordial affirmation of the truth of testimony leads to a set of different questions that strongly resonate with, for instance, Arendt’s considerations: For, seen from the viewpoint of the truthteller, the tendency to transform fact into opinion, to blur the dividing line between them, is no less perplexing than the truthteller’s old predicament, so vividly expressed in the cave allegory, in which the philosopher […]

152  Gert-Jan van der Heiden tries to communicate his truth to the multitude, with the result that it disappears in the diversity of views. (Arendt 2006, 232–233) Because testimony necessarily includes the call to trust and believe, the blurring of the dividing line between truth and opinion seems inescapable. What, for the witness, can only be true appears for the addressee as an opinion about or a perspective on (certain aspects of) reality. The basic example of the eyewitness is helpful here. The self-authentication of the eyewitness in the form of the statement “I was there, and therefore you have to believe me because I am engaged in telling the truth about the accident to you” is a call to trust and a claim to truth. Yet, at the same time, the addressee cannot simply and without any hesitation affirm this call and this claim; the very fragility of the phenomenon of witnessing—distorted memory, the impact of trauma, impressionability of the witness, and so on—requires that the affirmation of the call and claim is accompanied by a critical sense and attitude. Therefore, to prevent this blurring of the dividing line between truth and opinion, without sacrificing either interpretation or critique, trust or suspicion, it might be necessary to distinguish and cultivate, at the same time, two different attitudes to the dividing line between truth and opinion. The first one departs from the affirmation that the witness tells the truth and interprets what is said in testimony in light of this truth, explicating the sense of reality at stake in it. The second one departs from the affirmation that what is claimed to be true might be mere opinion, only one perspective among others. In line with this point of departure, the second attitude develops a critique, by treating what may be true as mere opinion. By cultivating these two opposing attitudes, keeping open their tension, addressees impose on themselves the task of developing a prudence to ward off falling prey to either extreme and to confront the always open question of how to reconcile them.

Concluding Remarks: Risk and Chance of Testimony An examination of the nature of the human practice of testimony has much to gain from “the interpretive turn,” as this chapter has argued. A hermeneutic approach to testimony helps to understand in which way humans are affected by their encounters with reality, how their selfhood is at stake in this witnessing of something that is of significance to both themselves and others, and how the act of bearing witness, of finding the words in the language to convey what was witnessed to others, participates in constituting both a social bond and a shared world with other. To say that the human is a witness of reality—or a Zeuge des Seyns as Heidegger (1999, 62) cites Hölderlin—includes these three aspects: the encounter with reality, the way in which the human is at stake in this

Hermeneutics and Testimony 153 encounter, and the way in which language allows the human to articulate the meaning and significance of both this encounter and what is encountered. In the course of this chapter, I have shown how a hermeneutic approach to the witness along the lines of an inquiry into the form of selfhood of the witness allows us to capture the individualizing nature of witnessing and the importance of self-authentication for the witness. It is in and by the act of testifying that witnesses affirm and adopt this selfhood: by enacting their testimony, they attest to their capacity to be a witness and make the demand on the addressee to trust them that they are telling the truth about what they witnessed. To speak here of attestation, in line with Ricoeur, emphasizes that one does not have this capacity as a certainty: witnesses are not self-certain in this way because they know themselves not to be detached, neutral observers; witnessing is an encounter and experience of reality inscribing itself in the witness’s horizon of understanding, co-constituting the perspective on reality that witnesses are. At the same time, the term “attestation” emphasizes that despite this perspectival and horizontal notion, the self-attestation and self-authentication that one is a witness is not a mere illusion: witnesses have something meaningful and substantial to say about what they witnessed because they are engaged in it and therefore speak from a full experience of the reality they encountered. At this point, it might be worthwhile to retrieve Derrida’s often-repeated insistence that chance and risk cannot be separated from each other. Attestation, it seems to me, captures exactly this inseparability of chance and risk. The chance to have something meaningful to say—that is, to genuinely disclose what one has witnessed to others—cannot be separated from the risk that what one ultimately says is distorted by the perspectival access one has to it. It goes without saying that one cannot leave it at this irreparable and unsolvable dialectic tension between the chance and the risk of testimony. This is why the second hermeneutic dimension concerning the social dimension of testimony was brought into play. Whether and to which extent a testimony discloses what is witnessed are questions that are at stake in the constitution of the social bond by the act of testifying. The double orientation—the double axis—of this constitution reflects the risk and the chance of testimony: the critical attitude of the addressee corresponds to the risk of distortion, whereas the affirmative attitude of the addressee and the poetic capacity of testimony to generate new ways of hearing and new perspectives of seeing the world correspond to the chance of disclosure. In this dialectic of chance and risk, trust and distrust, critique and interpretation, the act of testifying attests—without ever being certain of itself—to the witnesses’ capacity to find the appropriate words to disclose rather than distort what they witnessed so that their words may enrich the world of all.

154  Gert-Jan van der Heiden It is not by chance that, in Soi-même comme un autre, Ricoeur embraces the notion of attestation as the basic concept to account for selfhood, for how one has oneself and one’s capacities. This type of selfhood portrays and understands the human at its most basic level as a witness of reality, as itself being born from the encounter with reality in which it discovers itself as having the capacity to attest to this encounter. This basic claim or suggestion, to which I can here only hint, is cause for further reflection.

Notes 1 Hume’s (2007, chapter 11) critical assessment of testimony, for example, can only be properly understood when read as a response to the Jansenists. 2 Contemporary continental philosophy displays particular attention to secular versions of this practice of witnessing. For example, Foucault’s appreciation of parrhēsia emphasizes that the ancient Cynical form of speaking truth to power turns the parrhesiastic mode of life into a genuine “witness to the truth” (2009, 160, 200). Similarly, Badiou’s (1988) account of the fidelity of the subject is a form of bearing witness in this sense. In the analytic epistemology of testimony, Coady (1992) explicitly brackets the form of testimony at stake in religion and heavily relies on legal testimony for his definitions. 3 This evokes several questions concerning the difference between shareable and non-shareable experiences; see, for example, my interpretation of the witness in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (Van der Heiden 2020a, 69–85) and Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener (2002, 87–105). 4 The separation resulting from the refusal of the addressees to listen to testimonies is studied under the heading of “epistemic injustice” and rather depends on the social significance of what is witnessed. 5 One could, of course, invoke here the famous formula by Sartre and developed by Derrida: tu dois, donc tu ne peux pas; “You have to, hence you cannot.” But even in this formula lurks a specific understanding of the self as capable, namely as capable of understanding and experiencing this impossibility and of attesting to it. 6 Under this heading, a whole range of problems is hidden. Blanchot’s L’instant de ma mort (1994) discussed by Derrida (1998) offers one intriguing example: it is a literary testimony of how a traumatic event leads to a split sense of self; the witness wavers between the certainty of having witnessed—“I know”—and the fragility of memory and self-identity—“Do I know it?” 7 Van der Heiden (2021, 35–37) discusses both promise and appeal. 8 According to Hume (2007, ch. 11), these are not principles because they are grounded in experience. Based on our experiences, we conclude, a posteriori, that people tend to tell the truth, thus establishing a rule. Our acceptance of testimony is only rational if proportionate to the probability of this rule. 9 In Sein und Zeit, this results in a unidirectional understanding of the call: the call itself cannot distort; if it is not heard properly or not accepted, it is distorted by the hearer (Van der Heiden 2020a, 165).

References Arendt, Hannah. 2006. “Truth and Politics.” In Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, 223–59. London: Penguin Books. Badiou, Alain. 1988. L’être et l’événement. Paris: Seuil.

Hermeneutics and Testimony 155 Blanchot, Maurice. 1994. L’instant de ma mort. Paris: Fata Morgana. Coady, C.A.J. 1992. Testimony: A Philosophical Study. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1998. Demeure: Maurice Blanchot. Paris: Galilée. Dilthey, Wilhelm. 1927. Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften. Gesammelte Schriften 7. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Dulong, Renaud. 1998. Le témoin oculaire: Les conditions sociales de l’attestation personnelle. Paris: Editions de l’EHESS. Foucault, Michel. 2009. Le courage de la vérité (le Gouvernement de soi et des autres II): Cours au Collège de France, 1983–1984. Edited by Frédéric Gros. Paris: Seuil. Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1990. Wahrheit und Methode. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Heidegger, Martin. 1977. Sein und Zeit. Gesamtausgabe Band 2. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. Heidegger, Martin. 1996. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1999. Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein.” Gesamtausgabe Band 39. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. Hume, David. 2007. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by Peter Millican. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Krämer, Sybille, Sibylle Schmidt, and Johannes-Georg Schülein, eds. 2017. Philosophie der Zeugenschaft. Eine Anthologie. Münster: Mentis. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Loftus, Elisabeth F. 1979. Eyewitness Testimony. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1983. Le différend. Paris: Minuit. Melville, Herman. 2002. “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” In Melville’s Short Novels. Edited by Dan McCall, 3–34. New York: Norton. Reid, Thomas. 1823. An Inquiry into the Human Mind: On the Principles of Common Sense. London: Thomas Tegg. Ricoeur, Paul. 1980. “The Hermeneutics of Testimony.” In Essays on Biblical Hermeneutics. Edited by Lewis S. Mudge, 119–54. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1990. Soi-même comme un autre. Paris: Seuil. Ricoeur, Paul. 1992. Oneself as Another. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1994. “L’herméneutique du témoignage.” In Lectures 3: Aux frontières de la philosophie, 107–39. Paris: Seuil. Ricoeur, Paul. 2000. La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli. Paris: Seuil. Ricoeur, Paul. 2004. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Van der Heiden, Gert-Jan. 2020a. The Voice of Misery: A Continental Philosophy of Testimony. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

156  Gert-Jan van der Heiden Van der Heiden, Gert-Jan. 2020b. “‘The One Who Must Bear Witness to What He Is.’ Heidegger on Attestation and Testimony.” Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 82, no. 4: 675–98. Van der Heiden, Gert-Jan. 2021. “Testimony and Engagement: On the Four Elements of Witnessing.” Studia Phaenomenologica 21: 21–39.

8

Measurement, Hermeneutics, and Standardization Why Gadamerian Hermeneutics is Necessary to Contemporary Philosophy of Science Leah McClimans

In contemporary philosophy of measurement, prominent philosophers (Hasok 2004; van Fraassen 2008; Tal 2011) have explicitly or implicitly recognized the role the hermeneutic circle plays in measurement. Specifically, they have recognized its role in what is sometimes referred to as the “coordination problem.” Yet in these accounts the hermeneutic aspect of measurement is often minimized, giving way to standardization. In this chapter, I discuss the tension between hermeneutics and standardization of measurement and offer an alternative account of measurement. In my account, the hermeneutic circle is the constant companion of measurement with standardization making time-limited appearances. The coordination problem asks how we imbue our measuring instruments with empirical significance. In other words, how do we coordinate our measuring instruments with the phenomena we want them to assess? In the empirical literature on measurement, the coordination problem is sometimes discussed in terms of validity, that is, ensuring a measuring instrument measures what it intends to measure. The problem associated with coordination (or validity) is that it confronts a circle: If I want to know if my measuring instrument does a good job of capturing the phenomena of interest—say temperature or humidity or quality of life— then it seems that I need to know already a great deal about temperature, humidity or quality of life. I need to know, for instance, how the temperature fluctuates across locations or people at a single point in time, or how quality of life changes with disease trajectory. Yet, this information is precisely what the measuring instrument is designed to provide. So, how can we ever coordinate our instruments? To answer this question, I examine Hasok Chang’s discussion of coherentism in measurement. As I will illustrate, his proposal has much in common with philosophical hermeneutics (Gadamer 2004); nonetheless, it emphasizes the stabilization of the hermeneutic circle over time. DOI: 10.4324/9781003251354-12

158  Leah McClimans We might think of this stabilization as a point in time when we know enough about the phenomena of interest such that all the questions we want to ask (for a particular purpose) are answered by the measuring instrument. Once we reach stabilization, if the measuring instrument gives us an answer we don’t expect, we tend to call it error or bias. Achieving stability usually means that the phenomena of interest can be standardized, and at least for some metrologists, measurement has been achieved. Yet when we look closer, as I do in this chapter, standards get revised, some phenomena are never standardized, some measures are never stabilized, and questions of coordination continue to haunt measurement well beyond their sell-by date. What is going on? I suggest that the quintessence of measurement is not standardization, but rather hermeneutic dialogue. Sometimes this dialogue becomes stagnant, and stability and standardization ensue. But this is the exception and not the rule. Indeed, scientific progress relies on it.

Coherentism and Philosophical Hermeneutics In his discussion of the coordination problem, van Fraassen (2008, 116) argues that coordination has the structure of a circle—a hermeneutic circle. In considering coordination from the point of view of physics, he argues, that answers to the questions “What counts as a measurement of X?” and “What is X?” presuppose one another. The problem, as Eran Tal (2013) explains, is that answering the question “What is X?” requires developing a theory of the quantity one wishes to measure, say, duration. We determine the adequacy of this theory by testing its predictions with a reliable measure of duration. But determining the reliability of the measuring instrument requires background theoretical knowledge about duration and other related physical properties. The basic idea of the hermeneutic circle is that there is no understanding—no knowledge—without presuppositions (Grondin 1997). We can conceptualize the hermeneutic circle in terms of a relationship of parts to a whole. We understand parts of a text only in light of a previously acquired general understanding of the entire text. At the same time, we only come to have knowledge of the whole text in virtue of already understanding something of its parts. For me, nothing illustrates the hermeneutic circle better than my first reading of Being and Time. I couldn’t get beyond the first page (it had one paragraph). I had no idea what to make of the sentences. How could I? I had no previous experience with this kind of philosophy and no general understanding of what the text could possibly be about. In sum, I had no “whole” from which to make sense of the parts. I spent a long time in the dark, but as others explained bits and pieces to me, and I continued to muddle through that first page, I finally got a better sense of what the first few paragraphs might be about. This understanding of the parts of the text allowed me

Measurement, Hermeneutics, and Standardization 159 to project a more general understanding of the whole, which in turn helped me to understand further sections of the text. Applied to measurement, we might say that we understand a particular construct when we know how to anticipate its behavior through measurement. Yet we only understand how to anticipate a construct’s behavior when we understand the construct. Consider an example. Imagine I’m a PhD student studying the quality of life of people with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). To further my research, I decide to use a quality of life measure in my study—this measure will help me to understand better what is quality of life with IBS. I apply this measure to a sample of people who have IBS. I get the scores back, but I find myself asking, “Is this a good measure of quality of life for people with IBS? Does it accurately reflect their quality of life?” It might be a good measure, but I’m not sure because I don’t (yet) know enough about quality of life with IBS to anticipate how the construct should behave when measured. But now we are back to where I started before I applied the measure: “What does quality of life with IBS look like?” To be sure, quality of life research is no more doomed than I was when reading Being and Time, what is required is some understanding of what quality of life with IBS might look like; an understanding that I can then use to project onto the scores from the measure and begin to ask further questions. In the social sciences, this understanding can be gleaned from qualitative research. If you hold the view that scientific knowledge should be objective in virtue of being assumption or value free, then van Fraassen’s (2008) claim that coordination in measurement is circular will seem problematic. Hermeneutics, as I describe above, only gets started once we can muster some coherent assumptions. Indeed, as Jean Grondin (2013) writes, classic hermeneuticists strove to avoid the hermeneutic circle and the presuppositions that, in their view, tainted objective knowledge. Nonetheless, 20th century hermeneuticists such as Heidegger, Ricœur, and Gadamer have viewed the circle as productive of knowledge, and in any case inescapable. Contemporary philosophers of measurement seem to concur. In addition to van Fraassen (2008), Hasok Chang (2004) also discusses the circularity involved in justifying measurement in Inventing Temperature Measurement and Scientific Progress. Over the course of four case studies, Chang (2004) argues, in a fashion surprisingly similar to Gadamer (2004), that empirical science cannot escape circularity. Chang’s (2004) solution to the coordination problem is what he refers to as coherentism. The similarity between Chang (2004) and Gadamer (2004) is perhaps partly explained by the parallels found in their philosophical antagonists. In Truth and Method, Gadamer (2004) is reacting to an account of hermeneutics that relativizes the meaning of a text to the historical or biological conditions under which the text is written. The idea here is that we often misunderstand texts, as well as one another, because we

160  Leah McClimans interpret them from a particular vantage point, one that is historically conditioned by presuppositions and values. Behind this idea is a worry. If we can only understand a text or one another through historical presuppositions and values, then how do we prevent the hermeneutic circle from simply repeating the mistakes of history? For example, how do we forestall sexist or ableist interpretations from reinforcing sexist and ableist presuppositions and values? Put otherwise, how can we use our understanding of empirical studies or human action to change or enrich our presuppositions and values? How, in other words, does our understanding progress? One answer to this question is to sanitize understanding and interpretation from presuppositions and values. To this end, classical hermeneuticists argued for a rigorous methodology focused on the motivations under which texts and actions originate. The aim of this approach is to secure our hermeneutic foundations against what Gadamer (2004) calls “effective history.” If we can have done with historically conditioned presuppositions and values, then understanding no longer progresses in a circle, and the threat of it turning vicious is neutralized. In Inventing Temperature, Chang (2004, 221) reacts to an account of justification in the natural sciences that seeks a self-justifying foundation as the evidence base for empirical sciences. The primary benefit of such an evidence base is that it appears to safeguard scientific knowledge from presuppositions and values. He refers to this position as empiricist foundationalism. Similar to the methodological hermeneutics, empiricist foundationalism seeks to secure scientific knowledge from presuppositions and values. The worry behind this solution is also similar. If scientific knowledge claims are not insulated from presuppositions and values, then how do we know if our knowledge claims are scientific or pseudoscientific? Put otherwise, how can we justify our belief in certain claims when we know that the presuppositions and values affecting them are fallible? Moreover, what stops pseudoscientific claims from reinforcing a pseudoscientific worldview? How do we know if scientific knowledge is progressing or digressing? As with methodological hermeneutics, empiricist foundationalism’s answer is to purify scientific knowledge from presuppositions and values, thus denying the relevance of these questions. We can all agree that knowledge and understanding are threatened by a vicious circle of part and whole, measurement no less than anything else. The solution put forward by classical hermeneutists and empiricist foundationalists, however, is not realistic. We cannot anesthetize assumptions and values. They are as much responsible for knowledge and understanding as they are a cause of concern (Gadamer 2004). Consider again the examples I gave of reading Being and Time and interpreting IBS quality of life scores. There is no meaningful way forward with these texts unless we have some idea of what they might be

Measurement, Hermeneutics, and Standardization 161 about—epistemically, normatively, aesthetically. Without these kinds of assumptions and values, the opening paragraphs of Being and Time and the scores from quality of life measures are simply words and numbers on a page. They have no meaning. Meaningfulness requires that we fit these words and numbers into a larger whole in which we already know our place. Yet the necessity of assumptions and values for understanding doesn’t mean we can simply ignore the demands of justification (see Chang 2004, 222–223). If we cannot escape the hermeneutic circle, then we should turn our energies to ensuring that the circle is productive, not vicious. Chang (2004) shares this ambition with Gadamer (2004). In contrast to empiricist foundationalism, Chang (2004) argues that his case studies in the development of thermometry offer historical evidence for a coherentist approach to the justification and progress of scientific knowledge. Rather than a self-justifying evidence base, early temperature metrologists made do with the (admittedly) fallible knowledge they had at the time, in order to ask questions and develop strategies to drive thermometry forward. But how did they do it? How does Chang’s coherentist approach avoid vicious circularity? Two features characterize Chang’s coherentist framework. It is conservative and it is pluralistic. These characteristics are not unique to accounts aiming to work within the hermeneutic circle. Gadamer’s (2004) hermeneutics shares Chang’s (2004) conservativism, and Gadamer’s most careful interpreter, Georgia Warnke (1999), extends his work to embody a similar pluralism. The plural aspect of these accounts stems from the recognition that with different theoretical and practical commitments, as well as different historical and cultural standpoints, we can learn different, yet equally legitimate, lessons from the same topic. The conservative aspect of these accounts is the consequence of rejecting attempts to sanitize knowledge. If we cannot break free from the part-whole relationship through self-justifying beliefs or rule-bound methodologies, then we have no choice but to embrace the standpoint and knowledge we begin with. This means embracing a position that is full of imperfections handed down to us through history. Chang (2004) refers to this embrace as the principle of respect. Chang is not particularly clear why respect is the attitude we should cultivate. Given what we know about the history of science, and the sexist, racist, ableist, and other values that have enabled at least some of it, one might wonder if skepticism might be a better attitude. Gadamer (2004), in his discussion of the rehabilitation of authority and tradition, however, provides an explanation for Chang’s choice. In this section of Truth and Method, Gadamer is reacting to the Enlightenment’s antithesis of reason versus authority and tradition. He argues that this is a false dichotomy. Tradition does not proceed without reason, nor is reason free of tradition. To be sure, we are born into a historical tradition, and this tradition exerts an authority over us insofar as it orients us into the world.

162  Leah McClimans We are, as Heidegger (1996) puts it, thrown beings. But, as Gadamer (2004) and Heidegger contend, our “thrownness” does not mean that we cannot use reason to question our tradition and change its course. Nor does tradition “persist because of the inertia of what once existed” (Gadamer 2004, 281). Rather traditions need to be “affirmed, embraced, cultivated” through reasoning about them (Gadamer 2004, 281). Chang’s use of respect in relation to the affirmation of a knowledge system seems to refer to the space wherein we reason about a tradition and find it useful. Respect, then, denotes the proper attitude toward an existing knowledge system that one deems imperfect, but still beneficial. Indeed Chang (2004, 231) emphasizes that scientists can choose the knowledge system they affirm and chaffs against Thomas Kuhn’s (1977, 293–319) suggestion that such systems are inherited within particular scientific disciplines. I want to leave to one side the question of how many degrees of freedom scientists have in making such choices and instead assume minimally that Gadamer and Chang are correct at least to this degree: there exists some space between the tradition we are born or educated into and our ability to critically reflect on it. Although coherentism begins with respect, the “driving force” of its progress, as Chang (2004, 44) refers to it, is epistemic iteration. Put otherwise, epistemic iteration is Chang’s rebuttal to those who worry about vicious circular reasoning. Chang (2004, 226) defines epistemic iteration as A process in which successive stages of knowledge, each building on the preceding one, are created in order to enhance the achievement of certain epistemic goals. In each step, the later stage is based on the earlier stage, but cannot be deduced from it in any straightforward sense. One example Chang uses to illustrate this process is the development of temperature standards. Early metrologists, working within the principle of respect, affirmed bodily sensations of hot and cold as a necessary starting point for standardizing temperature. But their understanding of temperature did not remain limited to what the body can detect. Their understanding was not viciously circular. Instead using bodily sensations as a reference point, they noticed that fluids change their volume when heated and cooled. Investigation into these volume changes led to the development of thermoscopes, a tube through which one can view the rise and fall of a liquid with changes in temperature. Thermoscopes afforded metrologists a standard more accurate than bodily sensation by which to observe temperature changes, and with them they were able to observe a larger range of phenomena. By refining thermoscopes and their use of them, metrologists were eventually able to judge which fluids were sufficiently constant when heated and cooled to function as fixed points. Once metrologists were able to fix two points, it became possible to develop a numerical scale, which made way for

Measurement, Hermeneutics, and Standardization 163 the next evolution: the quantification of temperature. Quantification allowed for mathematical calculations about temperature, which, Chang (2004, 48) explains, paved the way for theorizing about thermometric observations. When it became clear that the fixed points first employed were not as fixed as metrologists had believed, they advanced their understanding of temperature through strategies to fix existing points, and through the use of new fixed points. This very brief discussion is meant to illustrate the progressive advances of successive iterations of temperature standards. The lesson Chang (2004) intends to convey is that beginning with imperfect assumptions does not doom us to repeat them. Yet, we are left with questions. Even if the circle is not vicious, how do we know it is progressive? How do we know our knowledge about a topic is better, more illuminating, or less reliant on invalid assumptions? How, in other words, can we be sure that we haven’t simply discarded one set of invalid assumptions and replaced them with another invalid set? Chang’s (2004) response is twofold. First, knowledge claims are valid, or we might say justified, when they belong to a system of mutually supportive beliefs—when they are coherent with other beliefs. Second, our progress should be measured in terms of whether a system of knowledge has furthered any of its epistemic virtues. Philosophers have long noted multiple epistemic virtues such as simplicity, fertility, and testability. For Chang, knowledge is justified and progressive when it is coherent with other beliefs and furthers epistemic virtues. This means that scientific progress embodies a certain amount of pluralism. As he (2004, 232–233) puts it, The methodology of epistemic iteration allows the flourishing of competing traditions, each of which can progress on its own basis without always needing to be judged in relation to others. Epistemic iteration is different from relativism because the coherentism Chang (2004) advocates is evaluated in terms of progress toward epistemic virtues. Our scientific beliefs must be coherent with respect to our other beliefs, but they are also tested in terms of their simplicity, fertility, testability, and so on. As I discussed earlier, Chang’s (2004) arguments on scientific justification and progress in the natural sciences echo Gadamer’s (2004) discussion of interpretation and understanding in the social sciences. But Gadamer (2004) and his contemporary interpreters1 seem to take more seriously the question of misunderstanding. At any rate, they give a more thorough account of it. I asked how we know that the epistemic iterations are progressive? How do we know that our knowledge in a successive iteration is better and less reliant on invalid assumptions? Chang’s (2004) response is that iterations must be coherent and enhance a range

164  Leah McClimans of epistemic values. Gadamer (2004), on the other hand, focuses on one particular epistemic virtue that Chang eschews: possible truth. By “possible truth,” Gadamer argues that we should assume in advance that a text or its analogue is valid. Or put differently, that it has something to teach us. To put a contemporary spin on it, we must practice epistemic humility (Ho 2011). We might read Gadamer as saying that one condition of understanding is recognizing that we have much to learn while accepting the possibility that we can be wrong. Possible truth requires us to take a text seriously. For Gadamer, possible truth is an important counterweight to the assumptions and values we bring to any text. Gadamerian hermeneutics is a back and forth between the assumptions and values we bring to understanding—our tradition—and the possible truth that an encounter with a new text or its analogue may bring to our understanding. We might think of back and forth as hermeneutic reasoning between the past (our tradition) and the future (new ways of understanding). For Gadamer, it is because we assume a new text or its analogue that we can gain access to assumptions and values we did not know we had. For instance, in quality of life research, one surprising finding is that physical health can get worse while quality of life self-reports indicate improvement. If I treat the improvement in quality of life as possibly true, then a space opens for me to reflect on how they might be true and why I find these outcomes surprising. This helps me to detect and crucially evaluate an assumption that I may not have known I held, namely, quality of life is indexed to physical health. Once this assumption is laid bare, I can ask whether it is reasonable given outcomes from quality of life studies, but also other things I know about the world. One thing I know about the world is that humans are marvelously adaptable. This adaptation, however, may give me pause in detaching quality of life from physical health. There are some situations to which humans should not have to adapt; where adaptation suggests false consciousness. At the same time, there are contexts in which claims to false consciousness are thinly veiled paternalisms. This back and forth of hermeneutic reasoning allows me to test and revise my assumptions— to earn respect for the tradition—while also investigating new understandings and their place in the whole. Chang and Gadamer, two philosophers from two very different philosophical traditions, nonetheless come to similar conclusions: the hermeneutic circle need not be vicious. On the contrary, it can be productive. What’s more, it cannot be avoided if we wish to justify knowledge claims and to return to the point of this chapter, if we wish to validate our measuring instruments. Yet Chang’s treatment of temperature measurement validity aims toward convergence—toward a gradual agreement between different levels of abstraction involved in operationalizing concepts. In emphasizing convergence, Chang wants to forestall notions of a match between “theory” and “reality.” In the place of this analogy, he

Measurement, Hermeneutics, and Standardization 165 wants to insert a picture of iteration. But his picture of iteration is one in which the adjustments become smaller, and the agreement between abstract concept, model, and measuring instrument becomes stronger. To be sure, this will never be an exact agreement (Chang 2004, 216–217), but as convergence gets better and more stable, we have what Chang describes as a “workable notion of accuracy.” Convergence of measurement concepts, models, and instruments means we have achieved an accurate method of measurement. From the perspective of hermeneutics, convergence is perhaps best understood as the place where questioning becomes but a whisper. This whisper is the aim of measurement as it is understood by philosophers of measurement such as Chang, and Eran Tal whose work on the measurement of time I discuss in the next section. Convergence is a significant scientific achievement, but Tal’s work illustrates how this achievement must be maintained. If we look closely, this maintenance is a site for further iterations, adjustments, and questions.

Standardization as Hermeneutic Maintenance Similar to Chang’s discussion of temperature, Tal (2011, 2013) has argued for the importance of convergence among abstract concepts, concrete models, and instruments when coordinating measures of duration. Like temperature as well as psychological constructs such as intelligence and physical functioning, duration is not observable. When we conceptualize duration, these concepts are necessarily abstract and ideal. For instance, the ‘second’ is defined by taking the fixed numerical value of cesium frequency ΔνCs, the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of the cesium-133 atom, to be 1,192,631,770 when expressed in the unit Hz (BIPM (Bureau International des Poids et Measures), 2019). But no actual cesium atom ever satisfies this definition, nor do we have a complete understanding of what it would take to satisfy it. What we do have are atomic clocks or more accurately cesium fountains known as “primary standards” that serve as a concrete model for the abstract and ideal definition of a second. There are 15 primary standards around the world used as primary realizations of the second. In these standards, cesium atoms are funneled down a tube where they pass through radio waves. During this process, the atoms’ electrons move between two specific energy levels. The frequency of the radiation released when the electrons transition can be used as the basis of duration (similar to the swinging of a pendulum). But unlike the ideal definition, these atoms are subject to forms of uncertainty and bias. To “realize” the referent of the second, metrologists must model these clocks according to the individual uncertainty and bias that they take to affect them. In discrete steps, metrologists identify ways that the cesium fountains diverge from the theoretical ideal. The example that Tal (2011, 1090)

166  Leah McClimans provides is gravitational redshift. The definition of the standard second assumes that cesium is in a flat space-time, that is, gravitational potential of zero. Cesium fountains, however, exist on earth where the gravitational potential is greater than zero. General relativity theory predicts that the cesium frequency will be redshifted depending on the altitude of the laboratory where the particular primary standard is located. Redshifts thus indicate measurement bias. The de-idealization process provides a magnitude for the predicted redshift, and this correction plus an estimate of uncertainty is added to the cesium fountain’s outcome. This de-idealization process is considered adequate when two conditions of what Tal (2011, 1091) refers to as the “Robustness Condition” are met: 1) the outcomes of a cesium clock converge on the outcomes from the other cesium clocks within the uncertainties ascribed to each clock and 2) the ascribed uncertainties are derived from appropriate theoretical and statistical models of each realization. This example from physics illustrates how concrete models by way of cesium fountains and statistical models of uncertainty and bias contribute to the coordination of the abstract formalism of the second as a unit of time with its related empirical content. In linking physical theory to atomic clocks, these models tell an important part of a story of the calibration functions of primary standards. These functions serve to calibrate secondary standards, which in turn help to standardize Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) (Tal 2013). But Tal’s work also illustrates how the standardization of time is an ongoing project. Coordination is not once and done. On the contrary, metrologists work daily to maintain the coordination of their primary standards with the unit definition. This work is an ongoing dialogue between the unit definition and cesium clocks, and their statistical models as described by Tal’s robustness condition (above). It is an ongoing project of fitting part to whole. Yet, as with Gadamerian hermeneutics, the metrological project is not only a matter of fitting part to whole, that is, coordinating primary standards with the unit definition. Rather as metrologists strive to improve the convergence of cesium clock outcomes, technological challenges (Tal 2011)—which we might hermeneutically interpret as questions—associated with attempts to improve the fit between definition, clocks, and statistical models are expected to lead to the replacement of cesium clocks with optical clocks. And with these new clocks, a new unit definition of the second emerges. We might usefully think of redefinition and instrumentation as an example of how metrological coordination leads to changes in our epistemic assumptions about time. Metrologists are tasked with performing the coordination and recoordination of abstract unit definitions, and concrete and statistical models, and sometimes this hermeneutic work leads to changes in unit definition. Nonetheless, despite the ongoing, indeed, living nature

Measurement, Hermeneutics, and Standardization 167 of standardization, for our everyday purposes the second appears unchanged. We shouldn’t be fooled, however, into thinking that standardization projects such as the second, on which we depend to coordinate our own lives, is a fixed phenomenon. Indeed, the very appearance of stasis depends on careful, continuous adjustments toward ever greater convergence. Adjustments that model hermeneutic dialogue. This hermeneutic aspect of measurement has been underexplored both in the philosophy of measurement and in psychological measurement. In terms of philosophy, the work of Chang and Tal tends to be understood as illustrating, on the one hand, the lack of mature theory or ontological commitment involved in measurement coordination (or validity) and, on the other hand, the important role that models play in coordination (or validity). In psychological measurement, psychometricians and others involved in measure development tend to make assumptions about the convergence between their abstract concepts, models, and instruments without the hermeneutic dialogue we see in Tal’s discussion of duration. In the last section of this chapter, I discuss psychological measures in more detail.

Psychological Measures Psychometricians and others involved in the development of psychological measures model their constructs, for example, intelligence or quality of life (the abstract conception) as latent variables. These latent variables are typically modeled as reflexive or formative models. In a reflexive model the latent variable, such as intelligence or quality of life, is understood to be the common cause of the indicators, that is, answers on a test or questionnaire. In a formative model, the indicators together construct the latent variable; for example, socioeconomic status (the latent variable) is constructed by income, education, and occupation (the indicators). The underlying assumption in both cases is that the latent variable has the same meaning across groups of people and over time. Indeed, this assumption is nearly axiomatic in psychological measurement; if a latent variable does not have the same meaning across groups of people and over time, then it isn’t an appropriate candidate for measurement. Nonetheless, in practice, measures very often display noninvariance. Indeed, it is common for measures of, say, quality of life, to assess quality of life differently across groups of people and time. An analogy with my discussion of duration above may be helpful here. Psychometricians like metrologists have abstract conceptions of what they want to measure (a second, quality of life) and they define these conceptions in terms of abstract cesium atom frequencies or reflexive models. But when these concepts and definitions are channeled into instruments such as cesium clocks or questionnaires, there is, necessarily, going to be uncertainty and bias. Noninvariance is typically treated as measurement bias in

168  Leah McClimans questionnaires, just as the gravitational redshift is treated in the case of cesium clocks. Unlike the comparisons of uncertainty and bias that constitute claims of robustness in standardizing the second, in psychological measurement the solution for noninvariance is typically to remove from the questionnaire the question(s) that are causing the noninvariance. Alternatively, researchers might limit certain groups from using the measure or identifying subgroups. Here is an example of cross-sectional noninvariance. Curt Hagquist and David Andrich (2017) used Swedish data from the Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children Psychosomatic Checklist (HBSC-SCL) to evaluate noninvariance. The checklist asks: In the last 6 months, how often have you had the following complaints: headache, stomachache, backache, feeling low, irritability or bad- tempered, feeling nervous, difficulties in getting to sleep, feeling dizzy? They found gender differences for stomachache in grade 9, with girls reporting problems to a higher extent than expected by the measurement model. In another study, Hagquist (2019) defends the hypothesis that these gender differences for stomachache is due to girls’ menstruation. Sometimes noninvariance occurs across time. One form of longitudinal noninvariance is called response shift. Response shift is defined as a change in the self-evaluation of a target construct over time (Sprangers and Schwartz 1999). It has been used to explain supposedly counterintuitive findings, such as when respondents’ health deteriorates, but their self-reported quality of life improves. Traditionally, response shift has been overlooked or treated as a source of bias (Schwartz and Rapkin 2004). Here is an example of response shift. Westerman et al. (2008) asked small lung cancer patients to “think aloud” as they filled in the EORTC-QLQ-30 over the course of between two and four interviews. They found that some patients interpreted the same questions differently over time. For instance, one question on the EORTC-QLQ-30 asks, Were you limited in pursuing your hobbies or other leisure time activities? Not at all A little Quite a bit Very much One patient’s answers indicated improvement, yet his explanations suggested the opposite to researchers. During the first interview, he said, “My hobby is working in the garden, that’s very difficult, quite a bit.” During the second interview, he said, “I’m reading at the moment. Gardening is not possible anymore, a little.” In the first interview the patient interpreted the question with respect to gardening, but in the second interview he interpreted the question with respect to reading. While

Measurement, Hermeneutics, and Standardization 169 the patient’s answers taken on their own suggest the improved quality of life, researchers thought that his answers suggested the opposite. As I said above, in psychological measurement noninvariance is often understood as something that needs to be eliminated. Removing the offending questions is a common practice (McClimans, Cano, and Browne 2017) as is identifying subgroups for whom the instrument is invariant. These solutions are understood as preserving the validity of the measuring instrument, that is, ensuring it measures the construct it is intended to measure across groups and time, while preserving comparability of outcomes across groups and time. Yet simply removing questions and identifying subgroups for whom the instrument is invariant is not an example of coordination; that is, it is not an example of imbuing measuring instruments with empirical significance. Coordination is a dialogue in which researchers attempt to fit the whole of the theoretical concept and definition to the parts of their concrete models, for example, cesium clocks. Coordination means that the modeling of the clocks can alter, but so also can the theoretical definitions. Psychometricians too often cut this dialogue short. They uphold statistical validity in lieu of coordination. By assuming that measurement is nearly synonymous with invariance, they force their measuring instruments to fit the assumption. In doing so, they cut off hermeneutic dialogue between their concepts, models, and instruments and not surprisingly take an epistemic loss. The main problem with eliminating noninvariant questions or identifying subgroups is that we fail to learn more about the construct we hope to measure. Take the example of gender noninvariance above. In this example, girls and boys answer the question about stomachache differently in 9th grade compared to the gender frequencies found in 7th grade. Yet before we eliminate the question or only apply the measure to boys, we ought to ask whether the gender difference found in the stomachache question is part of the concept “psychosomatic.” The answer to this question, Hagquist (2019) argues, depends on whether we think complaints caused by “gender specific biological conditions should be a part of the measure of psychosomatic problems.” 2 In other words, are complaints caused by menstruation relevant or irrelevant to the HBSC-SCL? There may be no ready answer to this question. And certainly, as Hagquist concludes, answering it will require additional information beyond statistical inference. Certainly, it will require dialogue among abstract concepts, models, and instruments as well as dialogue between school-age children, psychiatrists, and measurement developers. This dialogue is important. As we have seen with measures of temperature and time, it is necessary to the coordination and thus the empirical significance of our measures. If the stomachache question turns out to be part of “psychosomatic,” then keeping the question in the scale enhances

170  Leah McClimans validity and fairness, while maintaining invariance among the items (with some loss of model fit). If the question is not part of “psychosomatic,” then deleting it or identifying subgroups will enhance validity and fairness, but it will destroy the invariance of the items among groups (Hagquist 2019). If we make the wrong assignment, we risk the validity of the instrument and the fairness of its application.

Conclusion The hermeneutic circle plays an important role in the ongoing coordination of measuring instruments with the abstract concepts they seek to measure. Although prominent philosophers of science have tacitly recognized this role, for the most part hermeneutics has been overlooked in favor of the scientific theory, models, and the achievement of standardization. In psychological measurement, the role of hermeneutics has been stifled and the cost is epistemic loss. The solution goes beyond the constraints of this chapter, but it involves a reconceptualization of psychological measurement from a once-and-done-off-the-shelf questionnaire to an ongoing, critically reflective measurement project. As a critically reflective project, quality of life measures sit between respondents’ understandings of quality of life and the purposes to which these measures are intended to serve. Psychologists and health researchers should be prepared to use the back and forth of hermeneutic reasoning as respondents indicate new understandings of quality of life through their participation in quality of life measurement, just as they already adjust these measures for the demands of, for example, industry and regulation. Psychologists and philosophers of measurement alike (Hunt 1997; Alexandrova and Haybron 2016) decry the lack of theoretical development in psychological measurement. Some have argued (Boyer et al. 2014) that this is due to social scientists’ unease with the normativity inherent in the constructs they wish to measure. Others have argued that the problem resides in the relatively separate spheres in which psychologists (who develop theories) and psychometricians (who develop measuring instruments) work (Borsboom 2006; Wilson 2013). Alexandrova (2017, 146) suggests it harkens back to psychologists’ operationalist heritage. I suggest the problem is not simply a lack of theory, but a refusal to accept the hermeneutic structure within which these instruments must function if they are to mature.

Notes 1 For instance, Grondin (1997, 2003) and Warnke (2013). 2 “Gender specific biological conditions” is Hagquist’s phrase, not mine (see, for example, Hagquist 2019, 6).

Measurement, Hermeneutics, and Standardization 171

References Alexandrova, A. 2017. A Philosophy for the Science of Well-Being. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Alexandrova, A. and Haybron, D.M. 2016. “Is construct validation valid?”, Philosophy of Science, 83: 1098–1109. doi: 10.1086/687941 BIPM (Bureau International des Poids et Measures). 2019. The International System of Units (SI). 9th edition. Se`vres: BIPM. Retrieved from https://www. bipm.org/en/publications/si-brochure Borsboom, D. 2006. “Attack of the psychometricians”, Psychometrika, 71(3): 425–40. doi: 10.1007/s11336-006-1447-6 Boyer, L., Baumstarck, K., Guedj, E. and Auquier, P. 2014, “What’s wrong with quality-of-life measures? A philosophical reflection and insights from neuroimaging”, Expert Review of Pharmacoeconomics & Outcomes Research, 14(6): 767–9. doi: 10.1586/14737167.2014.950236 Chang, H. 2004. Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gadamer, H-G. 2004. Truth and Method. New York: Continuum Press. Grondin, J. 1997. Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics. New Haven: Yale University Press. Grondin, J. 2003. The Philosophy of Gadamer. Oxford: Routledge Press. Grondin, J. 2013. Du sens des choses. L’idée de la métaphysique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Hagquist, C. 2019. “Explaining differential item functioning focusing on the crucial role of external information—an example from the measurement of adolescent mental health”, BMC Medical Research Methodology, 19(1): 185. doi: 10.1186/s12874-019-0828-3 Hagquist, C. and Andrich, D. 2017. “Recent advances in analysis of differential item functioning in health research using the Rasch model”, Health and Quality of Life Outcomes, 15(1): 181. doi: 10.1186/s12955-017-0755-0 Heidegger, M. 1996. Being and Time, trans. By Joan Stambaugh. 7th ed. Albany, New York: SUNY Press. Ho, A. 2011. “Trusting experts and epistemic humility”, International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, 4: 102–1123. Hunt, S. 1997. “The problem of quality of life”, Quality of Life Research, 6(3): 205–12. doi: 10.1023/a:1026402519847 Kuhn, T. 1977. The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McClimans, L., Cano, S. and Browne, J. 2017. “Clinical outcomes measurement: Models, theory, psychometrics and practice”, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 65–66(3): 67–73. doi: 10.1016/j.shpsa.2017.06.004 Schwartz, C.E. and Rapkin, B.D. 2004. “Reconsidering the psychometrics of quality of life assessment in light of response shift and appraisal”, Health and Quality of Life Outcomes, 23(2): 16. doi: 10.1186/1477-7525-2-16 Sprangers, M.A. and Schwartz, C.E. 1999. “Integrating response shift into health-related quality of life research: A theoretical model”, Social Science & Medicine, 48(11): 1507–15. doi: 10.1016/s0277-9536(99)00045-3 Tal, E. 2011. “How accurate is the standard second?”, Philosophy of Science, 78(5): 1082–96. doi:10.1086/662268

172  Leah McClimans Tal, E. 2013. “Old and new problems in the philosophy of measurement”, Philosophy Compass, 8(12): 1159–73. doi:10.1111/phc3.12089 Van Fraassen, B. 2008. Scientific Representations: Paradoxes of Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Warnke, G. 1999. Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition and Reason. Oxford: Polity Press. Warnke, G. 2013. “Deliberation and interpretation”, Philosophy & Social Criticism, 39(8): 755–70. doi: 10.1177/0191453713494971 Westerman, M., Hak, T., Sprangers, M.A.G., Groen, H.J.M., van der Wal, G. and The, A-M. 2008. “Listen to their answers! Response behaviour in the measurement of physical and role functioning”, Quality of Life Research, 17(4): 549–58. doi: 10.1007/s11136-008-9333-6 Wilson, M. 2013. “Using the concept of a measurement system to characterize measurement models used in psychometrics,” Measurement, 46(9): 3766–74. doi: 10.1016/j.measurement.2013.04.005

Index

Abeni, Gleis 36, 47 Accetti, Invernizzi Carlo 19, 28 Ahmed, Sara 54, 71 Alexandrova, Anna 170–171 Allen, Amy 59, 72 anthropocentrism 3–5, 7, 54, 64–65, 70, 97, 103, 106, 112–114 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 5, 31, 33–37, 41, 43, 46–47 Arendt, Hannah 7, 98, 106–114, 132–135, 139, 151–152 Badiou, Alain 154 Baldwin, James 45, 47 Bankert, Alexa 32, 47 Barad, Karen 3, 8 Barth, Fredrik 104, 114 Bartlett, Tom 37–38, 40, 47 Baum, Bruce 21, 28 Becker, Gary S. 23, 28 Bellah, Robert 22–24, 28 Bellot, Gabrielle 38, 47 Benhabib, Seyla 59, 72 Benjamin, Andrew 59, 72 Berger, Peter 53, 72, 98, 114 Berman, Elizabeth Popp 19, 28 Bernstein, Richard 8, 13, 28 Bevir, Mark 8, 14–15 Bickerton, Christopher 19, 28 Blackburn, Simon 78–80, 95 Blakely, Jason 5, 8, 13, 14–16, 27–28 Blanchot, Maurice 154–155 Bohman, James 1–2, 4, 9, 94, 96, 122, 135 Borsboom, Denny 170–171 Braidotti, Rosi 2, 8 Brink, David 78–79, 81, 95 Brockmeier, Jens 58, 72 Bryant, Levi 2–4, 8

Burchell, Graham 19, 28 Bush, George 17–18, 28 Butler, Judith 56, 59, 72 Carothers, Thomas 31, 47 Cavarero, Adriana 59, 72 Chang, Hasok 8, 157, 159–165, 167, 171 Collingwood, R.G. 13, 28 Compaijen, Rob 95 Copp, David, 79, 81, 95 Cowling, William 59, 75 Cushman, Philip 22–24, 28 D’Ancona, Matthew 53, 72 Dancy, Jonathan 95 Darwin, Charles 22, 101, 114 Davis, Colin 59, 72 De Beauvoir, Simone 109, 114, 129, 134 De Castro, Eduardo Viveiros 104–106, 114 Derrida, Jacques 55, 60, 63, 66–69, 72–74, 139, 144, 147, 153–155 Descola, Philippe 105, 114 Dews, Peter 133–134 Dilthey, Wilhelm 122, 149, 155 double-H effects 14–22, 24, 26–27 double-hermeneutic effects see double-H effects Doyle, Michael W. 17, 28 Dubner, Stephen J. 23, 29 Dulong, Renaud 139, 145, 155 Dunne, Joseph 134 Dworkin, Ronald 80–81, 95 Ehrenreich, Barbara 33, 47 Enoch, David 78–79, 82, 91–92, 95–96

174  Index Farr, James 26, 28 Felski, Rita 57, 72 Fisher, Mark 20, 28 FitzPatrick, William 79, 82, 88, 90, 92, 96 Foucault, Michel 19, 28–29, 55, 65, 73–74, 155 Frank, Manfred 56, 73 Freeman, Mark 58, 73 Fricker, Miranda 138, 155 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 2, 7–8, 13, 31, 41, 47, 55, 57–58, 60–64, 67–71, 73, 117, 119–126, 129, 132–135, 142, 148, 155, 157, 159–164, 166, 171–172 Geertz, Clifford 104, 114 Gibbard, Allan 79, 96 Gibson, James W. 106, 114 Giddens, Anthony 98, 114 Glenn, Barbara 41, 47 Gooding-Williams, Robert 44, 47 Gordon, Colin 28 Greer, Germain 35–36, 47 Griffiths, Paul 41–42, 47 Grondin, Jean 158–159, 170–171 Grusin, Richard 2, 8 Habermas, Jürgen 53, 63–64, 68, 72–75, 122, 125, 132–133, 135 Habits of the Heart 22, 28 Hacking, Ian 53, 74 Hagquist, Curt 168–171 Harcourt, Bernard 17, 28 Harman, Graham 2–4, 8 Haybron, Dan 170–171 Heidegger, Martin 2, 7, 13, 28, 60–61, 74, 83, 102, 111, 114, 117, 122, 133, 139, 144, 146–147, 150–152, 155–156, 159, 162, 171 hermeneutic circle 1, 69, 157–161, 164, 170 hermeneutics: American studies of 11–49; and double-H effects 14–22, 24, 26–27; and identity 5, 24–26, 28, 30–47, 59, 77, 82–83, 86–87, 90, 92, 95, 100, 102–105, 135, 146, 154; and interpretive metaethics 76–96; and the hermeneutic circle 1, 69, 157–161, 164, 170; as a metaphilosophy 1, 4, 7, 117–120; and narrative causality 4,

13, 15; and narrative hermeneutics 58–59, 70, 72; and the nonhuman 2–3, 4, 6, 9, 85, 98, 100–104, 106, 108, 113; and the philosophy of measurement 157–170; and the philosophy of work 117–136; and the posthuman 2, 6, 8, 54, 64, 114; and poststructuralism 3, 5–6, 53–57, 59–60, 64–66, 70–72; recent critiques of 2–3; and testimony 137–156 Hiley, David 1–2, 4, 9, 94, 96, 122, 135 Hirschman, Daniel 19, 28 Ho, Anita 165, 171 Honneth, Axel 133, 135 Howard, Bill 33, 47 Huddy, Leonie 32, 47 Hume, David 107, 137, 154–155 Hunt, Sonia 170–171 Huntington, Samuel 24–26, 29 Husserl, Edmund 61, 72, 74 identity 5, 24–26, 28, 30–47, 59, 77, 82–83, 86–87, 90, 92, 95, 100, 102–105, 135, 146, 154 interpretation: and anthropocentrism 97–114; and double-H effects 14–22, 24, 26–27; and the hermeneutic circle 1, 69, 157–161, 164, 170; and metaethics 76–96; and moral judgment 83–89; and moral realism 89–94; and narrative 13–27, 53–71; and narrative causality 4, 13, 15; and narrative hermeneutics 58–59, 70, 72; and the philosophy of measurement 157–170; and the philosophy of work 117–136; and the posthuman 2, 6, 8, 54, 64, 114; and relativism 3, 53–54, 60, 62, 64–65, 70–71, 163; and selfhood 7, 23, 72, 84, 104, 106, 137, 139–141, 144, 152–154; and testimony 137–156 interpretive metaethics 76–96 interpretivism, interpretive philosophy see hermeneutics Iyengar, Shanto 32–33, 48 Jameson, Fredric 53, 74 Jeffreys, Sheila 35, 48 Johnson, David 32, 49 Jonas, Hans 101–102, 114

Index 175 Kakutani, Michiko 53, 74 Kant, Immanuel 17, 21, 28, 40, 68, 74, 84, 113, 117 Karkazis, Katrina 36, 49 Kelling, George 17, 29 Kim, Seong-kon 41, 48 King, Martin Luther Jr. 45, 48 Kögler, Hans Herbert 59, 74 Kohn, Eduardo 6, 97–102, 106, 113–114 Korsgaard, Christine 79, 96 Krämer, Sybille 137, 155 Krupenkin, Masha 33, 48 Kuhn, Thomas 162 Lance, Mark 36, 48 Lasch, Christopher 111, 114 Latour, Bruno 139, 155 Lelkes, Yphtach 33, 48 Levinas, Emmanuel 66, 74 Levitt, Steven D. 23, 29 Loftus, Elisabeth 145, 155 Luckmann, Thomasberger 53, 72, 98, 114 Lutz, Matt 80, 96 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 138, 155 MacIntyre, Alasdair 15, 29, 74 Macintyre, Lee 53, 74 Mackie, John 79–80, 95–96 Madison, James 33, 48 Mandelbaum, Maurice 78, 96 Maoz, Zeev 18, 29 Mason, Lilliana 32–33, 48 McClimans, Leah 169, 171 Meijer, Michiel 94–96 Melville, Herman 38, 47–48, 149, 154–155 Meretoja, Hanna 56–60, 68, 70, 72, 74 Merrick, Jeffrey 43, 48 Merritt, Jonathan 34, 48 metaethics 76–96 Midgley, Mary 101, 114 Miller, Peter 28 Mootz, Francis 59, 74 Murphy, Ann 59, 74 Murphy, James Bernard 134–135 narrative causality 4, 13, 15 narrative hermeneutics 58–59, 70, 72

Nietzsche, Friedrich 58, 65–66, 74–75, 143, 145, 148 nonhuman 2–3, 4, 6, 9, 85, 98, 100–104, 106, 108, 113 O’Donohue, Andrew 31, 47 Orwell, George 36, 48 Panofsky, Aaron 21, 29 Pappas, Robin 59, 75 philosophy of measurement 157–170 philosophy of work 117–136 Pildes, Richard H. 32, 48 posthuman 2, 6, 8, 54, 64, 114 poststructuralism 3, 5–6, 53–57, 59–60, 64–66, 70–72 Rabinow, Paul 8–9, 135 Railton, Peter 79, 96 Rawls, John 79, 88, 95 Rebala, Pratheek 32, 49 Reid, Thomas 137, 147, 155 relativism 3, 53–54, 60, 62, 64–65, 70–71, 163 Rhodes, Rod 8–9 Ricoeur, Paul 7, 57–58, 74–75, 119–121, 126–135, 139, 145–150, 153–155, 159 Russett, Bruce 18, 29 Sayre-McCord, Geoff 81, 96 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 37–38, 48 Schmidt, Sybille 137, 155 Schülein Johannes-Georg 137, 155 Schutz, Alfred 98, 114 Schwartz, Carolyn 168, 171 self-identity see identity self-knowledge see self-understanding self-understanding 5–7, 14, 67, 77–78, 80–84, 86, 88–89, 91–95, 144–146 selfhood 7, 23, 72, 84, 104, 106, 137, 139–141, 144, 152–154 Sen, Amartya 5, 30–31, 33–34, 36–37, 41, 46, 48 Shafer-Landau, Russ 79, 82, 90–92, 95 Shelby, Tommie 34, 48 Shepard, Paul 103, 114 Shusterman, Richard 1–2, 4, 9, 94, 96, 122, 135 Smith, Michael 81, 95–96 Smith, Nicholas H. 133–135

176  Index Sontag, Susan 57, 75 Sood, Gaurav 33, 48 speculative turn 2, 8 Srnicek, Nick 2–4, 8 Stegenga, Jacob 41, 48 Stock, Kathleen 35, 49 Sullivan, William M. 8–9, 28, 135 Tal, Eran 157–158, 165–167, 171 Taylor, Charles 2, 6, 9, 14, 19, 28–29, 63, 75, 77, 84–91, 93, 96, 98, 100–101, 114, 119–121, 135 Taylor, George 59, 74 technocracy, technocratic 5, 14–18, 20–21, 23, 27, 28 technopopulism 15, 19, 28 testimony 137–156 The Human Condition 98, 106–113, 134 Thompson, John 59, 75 Timmons, Mark 79, 96

Van der Heiden, Gert-Jan 138–140, 145, 149–150, 154–156 Vasterling, Veronica 59, 75 Vetlesen, Arne Johan 103, 110, 114 violence 18, 30–31, 36, 46–48, 53, 66, 69, 71, 72, 74, 138 Walzer, Michael 39, 49 Warnke, Georgia 134–135, 161, 170, 172 Weber, Max 16, 26, 29, 104, 106, 113–114, 130 Weil, Simone 129, 134, 136 Westerman, Marjan J. 168, 171 Westwood, Sean J. 32, 48 Wilson, Chris 32, 49 Wilson, James Q. 17, 29 Wilson, Mark 170, 172 Winch, Peter 13, 29, 122, 136 witnessing see testimony Wittgenstein, Ludwig 122, 136