Homo Interpretans: Towards a Transformation of Hermeneutics 1786608847, 9781786608840

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Homo Interpretans

Homo Interpretans Towards a Transformation of Hermeneutics Johann Michel Translated by David Pellauer Preface by Hans Joas

London • New York

Published by Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd. 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL www.rowmaninternational.com Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd. is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and London (UK) www.rowman.com This translation copyright © 2019 by Rowman & Littlefield International Originally published in French as Homo interpretans Copyright © Éditions Hermann All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: HB 978-1-7866-0882-6 ISBN: PB 978-1-7866-0883-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Michel, Johann, 1972- author. | Pellauer, David, translator. | Joas, Hans, 1948- writer of preface. Title: Homo interpretans : towards a transformation of hermeneutics / Johann Michel ; translated by David Pellauer ; preface by Hans Joas. Other titles: Homo interpretans. English Description: London ; New York : Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd, [2019] | In English, translated from the French. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018059066 (print) | LCCN 2019001611 (ebook) | ISBN 9781786608840 (Electronic) | ISBN 9781786608826 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781786608833 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Hermeneutics. | Knowledge, Theory of. Classification: LCC BD241 (ebook) | LCC BD241 .M46313 2019 (print) | DDC 121/.68--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018059066 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

For George Taylor

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Preface Hans Joas

xi

Introduction

xv

Part I: Ordinary Ways of Unveiling the World 1 The Problematicity of Meaning and Openness to the World 2 The Lifeworld and the Mirror of Meaning 3 The Production of Meaning and the Transformation of the World

1 3 33 59

Part II: Scholarly Decifering of Signs 4 The Infinite and the Relative 5 Being and Method 6 Text and Action

105 109 145 179

Epilogue

239

Notes

251

Bibliography

273

Index

285

About the Author

293

vii

Acknowledgments

My sincere thanks go to Michael Foessel, Albert Orien, Louis Quéré, Pascal Engel, Jean Grondin, Denis Thouard, Jean-Philippe Pierron, Jean-Claude Gens, Ernst Wolff, Albert Piette, Déborah Puccio-Den, Christian Berner, Gwenael Gouerou, Scott Davidson, and George Taylor who read and offered their comments on my text, and for their support.

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Preface Hans Joas

This book is the most ambitious and most comprehensive new approach in the area of hermeneutics. The fact that it originates from France may come as a surprise to all those who associate modern “French thinking” mostly or exclusively with structuralism and its aftermath, often called “post-structuralism,” although this term is not really in use in France. While it is true that from the early 1960s until the late 1980s structuralism indeed had a kind of intellectual hegemony in France so that leading antistructuralist thinkers like Cornelius Castoriadis and Paul Ricoeur often found themselves marginalized, the situation has long since changed considerably. When in 1969 Michel Foucault was elected to the Collège de France, it was a victory over Ricoeur, and this victory has often been interpreted as the symbolization of a definitive triumph of structuralism over phenomenology and hermeneutics. But as bitter as the defeat and other humiliations may have been for Ricoeur at the time, there can be no doubt that he regained enormous influence later. It is not coincidental that the historian François Dosse, author of an internationally very influential history of structuralism, later published biographies of both Ricoeur and Castoriadis and dedicated his overview of new (hermeneutical) approaches in the French humanities and social sciences—in his 1995 book Empire of Meaning—to Ricoeur. Johann Michel, author of this highly innovative book, is one of the world’s leading experts on Ricoeur’s thinking. He is deeply influenced by him, but also keeps a critical distance so that it would not be fair to consider his book a mere elaboration of Ricoeurian ideas. There is at least one other source of intellectual inspiration constantly at work here. It is American pragmatism, mostly the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce and the social psychology of George Herbert Mead and John Dewey. (Some readers may miss a closer look at an underestimated figure in this tradition, namely Josiah xi

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Royce, who—in his 1913 book The Problem of Christianity—went farther than his friends Peirce and William James in developing a philosophy of interpretation.) The ambition of the author of this book clearly is to be more comprehensive than all existing approaches, even the most famous ones like those by Friedrich Schleiermacher, Wilhelm Dilthey, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur. I think he is right when he claims that the classics of the hermeneutical tradition always had a rather specific type of subject matter in mind when they elaborated their views about the art of human understanding. In theological hermeneutics, the interpretation of sacred texts, the Holy Scripture, was crucial. In philological hermeneutics, it was the interpretation of classical literary masterpieces. In legal hermeneutics, the application of texts endowed with a binding authority to ever new cases has always been constitutive. All these traditions, as different as they are, share a focus on texts. But there have also always been attempts to go beyond this restriction and to take into consideration the “gradual construction of thoughts during speech,” as the great German writer Heinrich von Kleist put it in 1805, with regard to the dynamics of conversation. The dynamics of conversation can itself be the topic of microsociological research—as in the “conversation analysis” of Harvey Sacks and others—or the guideline for our interaction with texts—as in the philosophy of Gadamer. Another division between hermeneutical traditions is their different emphasis on the methodological side of hermeneutics: Is hermeneutics the way to reach objectively valid knowledge in the humanities, or should this vision be given up and the attention turned to the “ontology” of understanding? Does “ontology” refer in the Heideggerian sense to the existential conditions of the human being, or is it closer in its meaning to an anthropological investigation of the corporeal and evolutionary presuppositions of understanding and interpretation—in the way the pragmatists initiated? In all these respects, Johann Michel has a truly synthetic ambition. The title Homo interpretans already signals the anthropological orientation of the book and marks a difference to the Heidegger-Gadamer tradition. The first main part of the book is accordingly devoted to the biological preconditions of human expression and communication. The author draws on classical biologists like Jacob von Uexküll, but also contemporary biosemiotics and cognitive studies to illuminate the continuity and discontinuity of human and animal communication. He introduces a threefold distinction here that I find very helpful. He calls the evolutionary precursors of human interpretive abilities “proto-interpretations,” the ordinary human practices “interpretations,” and the epistemological reflections on the appropriate ways of understanding “meta-interpretations.” This distinction enables him to open up a highly intriguing field of research, namely the study of “the cultural conditions of possibility of the interpretive act.” If interpretation in the strong sense is not

Hans Joas

xiii

always at work in human sociality, we can ask, on the one hand, when it emerges as a practice of everyday life and what its routinized forms are and, on the other hand, at what point in human history the theoretical reflection on such ordinary practices and their justification sets in. For the first type of questions Michel, deeply influenced by the ethnomethodological school of microsociology, introduces the term “ethnointerpretation” and offers a rich set of categories for their study. For the second type a bridge to the historicosociological literature on the Axial Age in thinkers like Karl Jaspers, Shmuel Eisenstadt, and Robert Bellah could be constructed. Michel himself remains closer to our age and sketches important ideas on the manipulation of interpretive practices and the “interpretive overdose” to be found in conspiracy theories. Even more than Ricoeur, he is willing to integrate the achievements of a critical hermeneutics of suspicion into his approach. The second main part of the book takes up the epistemologically crucial question of the “truth” of interpretations. The way the author tackles this question is deeply influenced by pragmatism. He does not follow the Cartesian “quest for certainty” and end up either in dogmatism or relativism, but makes plausible that the distinction between better and worse in our ordinary interpretive practices can be transferred to the epistemological level. How can we find out what the better scientific interpretations are and in what sense can scientific interpretations claim to be better than those in our everyday life? This part offers highly sophisticated brief interpretations of Nietzsche’s perspectivism and its influence on later thinkers including Gianni Vattimo, Richard Rorty, and Jacques Derrida; of Heidegger and Gadamer—their similarities, but also differences; and of the possibilities to integrate assumptions from a theory of rational-argumentative discourse—as in Karl-Otto Apel, Jürgen Habermas, and Jean-Marc Ferry—into the hermeneutical tradition. The guideline for this impressive synthetic work comes from Ricoeur again, specifically his critique of Heidegger whose going back from epistemological to ontological questions leaves us helpless when we try to return from the latter to the former. As Ricoeur also observed, a philosophy that restricts itself to a “fundamental ontology” and “breaks the dialogue with the sciences is no longer addressed to anything but itself.” Johann Michel takes this injunction upon himself and goes through a long list of disciplines, discussing in each case the relevance of hermeneutics for the field. He has profound and original things to say on the role of hermeneutics in medicine, the complex relationship between hermeneutics and psychoanalysis, the relationship between explanation and understanding in the social sciences, the possibility of “pure” description in ethnography, and even the potential of hermeneutics for the discipline of economics and for the natural sciences. Apart from the fact that more could have been said about academic psychology, there is only one

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conspicuous absence on this list: namely, theology. The author admits a lack of competence in this area, and that is fair enough. Others might take up the project of this book at this point and rethink it along the lines of theological reasoning about hermeneutics (Rudolf Bultmann) and historicism (Ernst Troeltsch). In the epilogue of the book the latent opposition between a Foucauldian and a Ricoeurian research program becomes manifest again. But in Johann Michel’s hands it is not a sterile continuation of an old opposition. He rather makes it possible for us to see how these two great French thinkers of the second half of the twentieth century learned from each other and modified their respective philosophies accordingly. Ricoeur integrated more and more aspects of a Nietzschean hermeneutics of suspicion into his approach—a process that had already begun with his interest in Freud and Marx or Karl Mannheim. Foucault, who had been labeled—by Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow—to be “interpretive but not hermeneutic,” developed in his later work a study of the genealogy of self-examination that can be called a “hermeneutics of the self.” But the image of Christianity that we find in Foucault remains utterly different from that in Ricoeur. Both provide, as Johann Michel writes, an anthropological foundation for the “forms of auto-interpretation when a human agent is confronted with the problematicity regarding himself, when the meaning of his existence no longer makes sense.” Johann Michel seems to search for a third way here, certainly closer to Ricoeur, but independent from the Christian convictions of this thinker. The stakes of this project are very high.

Introduction

Our age is even more hermeneutic than post-modern, and the only meaningful question to be raised at this stage is whether there exists a single moment when we stop interpreting. —Richard Shusterman

Michel Foucault’s prophetic assertion in The Order of Things about the “death of man” as an object of knowledge, if he would embrace the siren song of structuralism, was not able to stand against what are still called the “human sciences” by academics. The opposition between the sciences of language and the anthropological sciences in which, in the 1960s, Foucault saw an irreducible antagonism between epistemes, no longer holds, however much it might have one day taken dramatic form. Through a kind of irony of history, it was from within structuralism itself that there has been a rebirth of anthropology, under the initiative of Claude Lévi-Strauss, following Marcel Mauss and his quest for the “total man.” What must be recognized today is that linguistics coming from Saussure was not so much an epistemological obstacle as it was a privileged instrument for objectifying not just the kinship systems of particular societies but even the universal forms of the human mind. To be sure, structural anthropology no longer has the audience it once did among social scientists, despite its still fecund posterity as found for example in the work of Philippe Descola. But anthropology, in other versions, has for the last thirty years seen a regained interest, whether as biological anthropology or social anthropology. To be sure, the connections have still to be drawn between all these subdisciplines of anthropology, by acknowledging that every new intellectual breakthrough in this area can only be carried out in an interdisciplinary way. It is from such a perspective that the present work is offered. A philoxv

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sophical anthropology would be meaningless today without the aid of social, cultural, and historical anthropology. The development over the last thirty years of the cognitive sciences presents another research program that claims to unify or reunify knowledge about what it means to be human, with the neurosciences at its core. 1 Where structural linguistics could function as the organon of anthropology in the second half of the twentieth century, the cognitive sciences, with the neurosciences leading the way, claim to play a similar role for the twenty-first century. Whoever undertakes anthropological research today cannot ignore, other than through bad faith or obscurantism, the hypotheses, results, and methods of a vast collection of scientific knowledge that has shown its mettle and that continues to do so. Philosophers, sociologists, and psychologists have everything to gain from the progress in the cognitive sciences if they want better to understand what happens in the human brain when we resolve a problem, or interact with others, or when we feel an emotion. But there is no need to subscribe to a radical naturalization of the human mind. Yet if we can affirm that there is a neural basis for all mental activity, without having to assume some “supplementary fact,” research about the human brain does not exhaust the sciences having to do with the human mind. If we stand ready to plead for a fruitful dialogue between the cultural and natural sciences, we also stand prepared firmly to resist any reductive or “eliminationist” (Churchland) temptation coming from the neurosciences when they judge superfluous the existence of every other human science (including those branches associated with the cognitive sciences such as psychology) in order to account for the human fact. Philosophy, history, sociology, and ethnology have their own methods of investigation into the human condition whose richness and aid never will be summed up by what we see as neuronal functioning with the aid of brain scans. The whole problem remains, however, of reaching agreement about the primordial quality held to define the human as human: homo cogitans, homo faber, homo laborans, homo loquax, homo narrans—Latin terms that do not quite say what singularizes human beings as part of nature. No doubt the search for an ultimate ground of humanity is vain in that humanity’s constitutive features all relate to one another, all presuppose one another. While it is important never to lose sight of what makes us human overall, this work will focus on one particular anthropological trait: interpretation. To speak about an anthropology at this level is not meant to burrow down to the underlying layers of human societies, such as its kinship systems (Lévi-Strauss), its political-religious core (Godelier), or its ontologies regarding nature (Descola). Our approach is more modest. It seeks to explore the human condition from one privileged point of view: interpretation. Interpretation has not been overlooked in reflection on the production of knowledge, but it has rarely been considered as reflecting our ordinary human condition. Interpretation

Introduction

xvii

does not have the more fundamental, more encompassing dignity of activities like Arendt’s threefold division into labor, work, and action. Still, it seems to us to be the liminary hypothesis constitutive of the overall manifestation of what it means to be human. This hypothesis must nevertheless undergo a first anthropological test: is interpretation really what is most central to being human? This question might seem incongruous if we did not consider the ethological observations that have been made about the world of animals. At the price of a conceptual expansion, the idea of interpretation, starting at the stage of sensory experience, has to be taken seriously if we understand the interaction of a living organism with its environment, as processes of selection among stimuli necessary to its adaptation to the surrounding world. However, we are hesitant to qualify this activity as interpretation in the strict sense in that it takes place apart from any form of symbolization or reflexivity, basic attributes we only encounter in human interpretation properly speaking, which takes place through the interlacing of signifying intentions. What, then, is interpretation? It assuredly designates a mode of understanding whose intended object is relatively undetermined (an image, a text, a trace, an action, a sign, a situation), an understanding that is nevertheless refractory to any immediate grasp of a meaning or sign. When does one interpret? One interprets when one does not immediately understand. In other words, interpretation is a mediate understanding when the meaning is not immediately given as fully intelligible. Interpretation—this is its reflexive, suspensive dimension—presents itself as a search correlative to a mind that wants to understand a meaning. Interpretation is part of our humanity, even if we are not always interpreting. The same is true for language, even if we are not always speaking. Interpretation is always a possibility, when it is not an act. Homo interpretans becomes manifest when the world of significations has lost its self-evidence. The absence of transparent meaning calls for the correlative conquest of a significant presence. This definition a minima does not remove all the perplexities about the equivocity of the notion of interpretation. Interpretation, it will be said, is subject to interpretations in that its practical uses are multiple. If we go back to the etymology of the Greek word hermēneia (for which the Latin translation is interpretatio), which gives us the word hermeneutics, we find a possible way in. In Greek, hermēneuein means to express, to explain, and to translate from one language to another language. What is common to the ancient meaning used by Plato who uses the verb hermēneuein to designate the poets’ capacity to be the gods’ interpreters and the modern sense established in the Renaissance that defines hermeneutics as the science of interpretation of cultural products? Interpretation seems to stretch between a divinatory art close to the “neighborhood crazy” and a methodic activity meant to be scientific.

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Analogous to imagination, interpretation is equally divided between a reproductive and a properly creative activity. On the one hand, interpretation can present itself as a way of making things explicit (showing what is implied in a text or an image) or as unveiling a latent meaning made manifest through a work of deciphering. In these cases of figures, the actual meaning—which has to be uncovered like a revealed truth (through exegesis), for example, or denounced as an illusion (through suspicion)—is assumed to preexist, even though the meaning is given as implicit, covered over, hidden. On the other hand, interpretation stems from a properly creative and productive activity when it appears as translation (from one language to another), as an artistic activity (in the interpretation in an original way of a play or musical work), as scientific, juridical, or philosophical work when it is a question of constructing the hitherto unseen meanings of a text or phenomenon. All these examples make it easy to think that interpretive activity really only applies to properly intellectual, artistic, philosophical, or scientific activities. The scholarly literature and philosophical textbooks testify abundantly that questions about interpretation are a development of the theory of knowledge. Yet to hypothesize that interpretation is one of the highest activities of human understanding as a process of symbolization implies that it applies as much to everyone as to the scientist. To make explicit, translate, reveal, or unmask are not reserved for the laboratory, or exegetical practice, or the psychoanalyst’s couch. A detailed anthropology of homo interpretans would be rich in information about the many everyday techniques used by men and women faced with the opacity of a meaningful world that call for cultural methods (asking for an explanation, contextualization, emplotment) of dealing with the obscurity. To speak of a reflexive attitude does not come down to invoking a sovereign consciousness that would be free to interpret things as it will, even when it comes to the creative function of interpretation. This is true for everyone, including the philosopher. Not just because the universe of significations already precedes us in the form of interpretive traditions, but also because there are no interpretations without schematizing operations that function as transcendental frameworks which give meaning (frameworks that allow us, for example, to interpret reciprocally the whole and parts of a text or an action). These schematizations mean that, in a given social and cultural universe, a gesture, a text, a speech-act will be interpreted in one sense rather than another. Far from simply being fixed, reified structures, these frameworks for experiencing manifest themselves as conditions of possibility of interpretation, even in the most creative, original cases. These transcendental frameworks of interpretation are themselves capable of historical variations when they turn out to be maladapted to grasp new configurations of meaning.

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That interpretation can be analyzed above all as a kind of knowing, even when incomplete, lacunary, about our relation to the world, is something we have known since antiquity. We shall have to be careful, though, not to too quickly oppose interpretation and action. Not just because interpretation is itself already an activity, but also because it is omnipresent in the manifestations of human action. Deciphering the world, uncovering it in another way, opens possibilities and horizons of meaning leading to possible social and political transformations. We cannot therefore take as our own Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, which dramatizes the opposition between interpretation and transformation. Some later variants of Marxism in fact offer precious resources for thinking about modes of interpretation meant as much to unmask distortions in interhuman communication as to offer horizons of expectation for a more open society. The substance of our inquiry lies in the recognition of the two faces of the act of interpreting, as both an ordinary practice (on the anthropological level) and a scholarly activity (on the epistemological one), without sacrificing one to the profit of the other. Habermas, following Anthony Giddens, calls these two facets the “double hermeneutic task.” 2 Interpretation is not just a mode of rational knowledge, however imperfect it may be, as the epistemological tradition would have it; it is not just a mode of being turned toward the comprehension of the meaning of being as the ontological tradition would have it. It presents itself equally as a mode of ordinary understanding turned toward oneself, others, action as it occurs: “There is already a problem of understanding below the threshold of theory construction, namely in obtaining data and not first in theoretically describing them; for the everyday experience that can be transformed into scientific operations is, for its part, already symbolically structured and inaccessible to mere observation.” 3 Furthermore, in following the indication suggested here by Husserl’s procedure of “questioning back,” we shall seek to show how the activity of scientific interpretation is derived from the lifeworld where ordinary activities of exploring the world take place. This is a way begun by Carlo Ginzburg, when he shows how the modern science of deciphering traces (medical symptoms, pictorial signs) is inherited from a fundamental anthropological activity already met within the formation of the first hunter-gatherer societies who learned to reconstruct the forms and movements of invisible prey starting from tracks left in the mud, broken branches, tufts of hair. Using this paradigm based on clues, there is continuity from the trace to the clue to proof such that scientific interpretation, which culminates as scientific hermeneutics, is just one particular case of an activity already at work in the lifeworld. To follow this trajectory with Ginzburg (from the sciences of interpretation to their anthropological and historical grounds) calls for a return trajectory, following a suggestion of Paul Ricoeur: uncovering how the scientific

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and philosophical activities of interpretation detach themselves from what we find in the ordinary activities of ordinary people. This properly epistemological trajectory is indispensable for dealing with the conflict of interpretations with rival interpretations, that is, for dealing with the problem of the relativity of interpretations. What is anthropologically at issue is no longer knowing whether interpretation is part of what makes us human but knowing whether, epistemologically, all interpretations are equal. This is the question of perspectivism and that “great shudder” Nietzsche speaks of in The Gay Science when, challenging the existence of facts, he gives back to the world its infinite promise of being open to a multitude of interpretations. Several challenges thus are posed if we wish to conjure away not only our anxiety before the world’s infinity but the stumbling block of the relativity of its interpretations. The first challenge is to know if interpretation is sufficient for assuring the validity of a hypothesis or if it is not worth enriching it through complementary methods, namely, description and explanation. As soon as it is a question of “understanding the meaning” of psychic states and social and cultural institutions, the second challenge is to know whether interpretation is only valid for the human sciences, as an epistemological tradition inherited from Dilthey suggests. This question is all the more worth posing in that the contemporary development of the natural sciences more and more tends to assimilate the “question of meaning” and of interpretive activity to the core of their methodological requirements. The ontological boundary between mind and nature seems to have lost the rigidity it once had and as a result obliges us to rethink the specificity of the human sciences. The third challenge is clearly posed by an epistemological line coming from German philology (Ast, Schlegel, Schleiermacher) and the so-called Lille school, which tends to reduce hermeneutics to the problems posed by the misunderstanding of texts. While acknowledging the importance of this tendency, this study will try to extend the epistemological stakes of interpretation to other sciences dealing with being human following a movement of “deregionalization” initially formulated by Ricoeur. It will be a question at the same time of pursuing this movement of expansion and applying it to other fields of knowledge less explored by Ricoeur (sociology, ethnology, economics). In other words, it will be a question of coming to terms with the text-centered model of hermeneutics by moving beyond it to make interpretation the entryway to every form of expression of human reality, whether fixed or indexicalized. If our study does not renounce the methodological and epistemological dimension of hermeneutics (because there is a question of truth), if it leaves a place for its ontological variant (because there is a question of pre-understanding), the high road of this work will lead to an interpretive (in the ordinary sense of the word) and hermeneutic (in the technical sense) anthropology at the confluence of philosophy and the positive sciences. The more

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fundamental question of the universality of hermeneutics will undoubtedly be at issue here, but in a different sense than Gadamer formulates it. Interpretive anthropology aspires not to suppress methodological and ontological hermeneutics, but to depict it in a different way. In his time, Blumenberg tried to lift phenomenology’s prohibition against anthropology. 4 Following in his path, our effort will be to apply this shift to hermeneutics through a more radical systematic interpretation of homo interpretans.

Part I

Ordinary Ways of Unveiling the World

1

2

Part I

The question of what it is to be human literally haunts the history of philosophy like an anthropocentric mirror in which something particularly properly human is superimposed in order better to wipe away our animal condition. Philosophical demystifications along with the scientific discoveries that contribute to our “narcissistic” wounds have never been found to hold against our endlessly renewed efforts to bring back to center stage a human image that raises the question of its singularity. That the narcissistic impulse behind this attempt should be conjured away does not prevent our preserving the question. It will be at the core of our reflections. We will not decide here whether language, reason, our moral sense, technology, or labor, to cite just a few examples, constitutes the final ground in the analysis of the human condition. The question is no doubt badly put if in every anthropological inquiry we must look for a first foundation or pose a radical discontinuity between human beings and the rest of life. It will be better formulated if we ask about the correspondence and collaboration between faculties and activities that reciprocally condition what happens in each domain. Introducing interpretation into this back and forth movement may seem foolhardy if we take into account the dominant versions of philosophical and scientific anthropology. Our ambition, however, is to underscore the contribution of interpretation to reflection on what counts as human. Asking whether interpretation is indeed central to being human first requires asking about the existence of such a factor in the animal world. Philosophy must therefore listen to what science has to say, without renouncing its critical mission, in order to know exactly what interpreting may mean in the animal universe. In that the metaphysical variant of philosophical anthropology seems out of bounds to us, our preference throughout this investigation will be for a philosophical anthropology in constant dialogue with known scientific results. This is the kind of approach we find in German anthropology from Scheler to Gehlen. The object of anthropology “allows us to draw upon what science, psychology, and philosophy not only come up against, but necessarily must develop symbiotically, with the result that the biological theory of evolution, morphology and anatomy, psychology, sociology, the theory of language, etc. meet through their partial results.” 1 Thanks to our integrating scientific results it will be possible to lay out a range of operative concepts based on the increasing complexity of interpretation (sensory, reflexive, self-reflexive) based on their practical forms (translation, explanation, revealing), and their social conditions and cultural variations (totemic, analogical, naturalistic). Thus it will not be human interpretation set over against animal existence that will draw our attention so much as the “human” (understood in a plurality of senses) in comparison with the human other.

Chapter One

The Problematicity of Meaning and Openness to the World

The idea of granting interpretation a place in the animal world was developed principally in the life sciences at the end of the nineteenth century, even though it is distantly related to Aristotelean philosophy and there is an echo of Nietzsche’s thesis about the interpretive character of life. Pioneering workers in ethology, biosemiotics, and biology drawing on work initiated by Jakob von Uexküll and Frederik Buytendijk introduced the notions of meaning and interpretation to make sense of animal behavior. 1 What was at stake as regards interpretation was not just about the epistemological order and meant to extend hermeneutics to the life sciences. It was as much an ethological question about how the living organism related to its surrounding world. What comes through an interpretation (Deutung) was not just knowledge about forms of life but also knowledge about the perception and activity of these forms. In the former case, interpretation implies a methodology meant to discover an objective meaning, in the latter, it stems from a “seeing as” and belongs to a type of living being that perceives these concrete or vital meanings, which constitute the animal’s Umwelt. 2

It is this notion of an Umwelt, introduced by von Uexküll, that permits a break with explanation in terms of the animal as a machine and a way of understanding how the living creature constitutes itself through a reciprocal relation to its surrounding world. Rather than being a machine, the animal itself becomes a mechanic. It is difficult to render in French or English the richness of this notion of an Umwelt, 3 which refers to “the universe of each living organism,” its “concrete life-world,” which has to be distinguished from the Umgebung, which we may define as a “background” world, an 3

4

Chapter 1

already given “geographical space.” Every living being draws what becomes its Umwelt from this background world: “everything that takes on the value of being a signal for it, one whose existence is difficult for us to conceive of (polarized light, magnetism, pheromones, etc.).” 4 It is not a question here of a simple sensory perception, but of a system combining perception and action between a living organism and its Umwelt which Jacob von Uexküll calls a “functional circle.” The perceptual organs and the active organs of a living organism form a functional circle with an “object” in its environment that itself carries meanings for perception and actions. Von Uexküll does not deny the existence of observable physical-chemical phenomena in the responses of the living organism to the excitations coming from the external setting. But we would entirely miss the relations between a being and its Umwelt if we did not comprehend that, among the many effects and signs that the external world is capable of producing, an organism uniquely selects those meanings that are pertinent to its nourishment, its reproduction. That perception and action are indissociable, even for the smallest organisms, is illustrated perfectly by the example of the female tick analyzed in detail by the ethologist. Three functional circles define its Umwelt. After mating, the female tick remains motionless on a branch or leaf on a bush for what can be a long time, with no need of food, until an olfactive sign (the odor of butyric acid from a mammal’s sebaceous glands) sets it in motion (the tick drops on to the mammal). Having plunged its head into the mammal’s skin, the tick can drink the animal’s blood and fertilize its eggs. The Umwelt of the adult female tick is both limited and impressively efficacious: just a few signs (odor, the mammal’s body heat) captured from the background world set in play specific actions (the movement of falling on to the animal, penetrating its skin, fertilization) that assure its vital and reproductive functions: “The whole rich world surrounding the tick is constricted and transformed to an impoverished structure that, most importantly of all, consists of only three features and three affect marks—the tick’s environment [Umwelt]. However the poverty of this environment is needful for the certainty of action, and certainty is more important than riches.” 5 In a general manner, if we follow this model of a functional circle, every living organism, as a function of the constant interaction of perceptive and active organs, selects from the indeterminate background world the pertinent signs for its “life plan” that only become “teleological” for higher mammals. This is particularly the case for the human Umwelt for which the functional circle is not reducible to the functions of self-production and reproduction. If the principle of the functional circle, which appears in its elementary form in the tick, is a distinctive feature of every living organism, it gains increasing complexity in those living beings whose perceptual and action system is capable of integrating an infinitely sophisticated set of signs and quite varied temporalities.

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In what way does such an ethological schema have something to do with interpretation? Pierre Clement, Ruth Sheps, and John Stewart, drawing on von Uexküll’s work, go so far as to consider interpretation as the interaction of every living organism with its Umwelt. 6 In other words, there is no functional circle without some corresponding interpretive activity. This thesis is central to biosemiotics. There is interpretation, from this perspective, whenever an organism perceives and selects among signs—von Uexküll calls them “bearers of meaning”—as a function of its internal structure and the state of the world that confronts it (with its constraints, resources, and opportunities). Interpretation is thus justified once there is not just raw or neutral sensory perception. The experimental sciences corroborate phenomenology here, notably that of Merleau-Ponty who speaks of an inspired exegesis when it comes to perception. For example, with visual perception, there is not a linear transmission from the eyes to the visual cortex, but rather a functional system that draws on other cerebral regions, notably those connected with memory. Numerous experiments (Singer, Varela) testify in this way to “our ability to see what we know how to interpret, and not to see what we do not know how to interpret.” 7 Of course, these various interpretations depend on the dispositions belonging to each living species. For example, a flower stem, to cite another of von Uexküll’s examples, is not defined by the same Umwelt for a young girl picking the flower to make a bouquet as for an ant who uses the surface texture of the plant as an ideal pathway to get to its food source, or for a cow who eats the plant. Starting from the same Umgebung, each species using its own dispositions interprets signs that are impenetrable to other species. The well-known fact that each species has its typical forms of Umwelt does not prevent there being different forms of interaction among species (rivalry, hunting, cooperation, parasitism), far from it. This dimension is so vital that von Uexküll speaks of an “inter-animal” character to each living organism’s Umwelt. For instance, a spider’s web is meaningful only in terms of the prey it is meant to capture, even before catching a fly, the threads of the spider’s web being so fine they escape the fly’s eye. Spinning the web is directly connected with the signification “fly-like.” The spider’s web “is configured in a fly-like way, because the spider is also fly-like. To be fly-like means the spider has taken up certain elements of the fly in its constitution; not from a particular fly bur from the primal image of the fly.” 8 We need to think of Umwelts then as both specific and interdependent. Their specificity does not just depend on the structures belonging to each species. It is also necessary to take into account the “subject” of each living organism, as a function of its memory, experience, and particular history that teach it to interpret signs in a certain way, that is, to see them as being as. Even if von Uexküll does sometimes allude to Kant to better distance himself from the mechanistic model then dominant in the life sciences, the “subject”

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in question is always tied to an Umwelt and to those of other living organisms. Ethology and biosemiotics do not hesitate to take into account the inner sensory states of organisms, comparable for von Uexküll to variations in musical tone (this musical metaphor is constant in the way the ethologist envisages the relation of an organism to its milieu). Hence a meaning is not determined in a univocal manner by an object like an unconditioned meaning but varies as a function of what Buytendijk calls its Stimmung, that is, the affective tonality of these meanings depending on whether the animal is in danger, hungry, threatened, and so on. These inner affective tonalities, although always connected at the same time to a surrounding world, determine how the organism sees a sign “as” and acts as a result of this “seeing as.” The example of the functional circle of the hermit crab in its inter-animal relation with the anemone offers an elementary situation for the variation in “seeing as” as a function of Stimmung. Feeling hunger (an internal sensation), the hermit crab will perceive the anemone as a prey (interpretation) and devour it (action); feeling threatened (an internal sensation), the hermit crab will perceive the anemone as protection (interpretation) and set it on its shell (action). In each case, this Stimmung will generate what von Uexküll calls “different search patterns.” “What we called different moods of the crab . . . we can now label much more precisely as the different search tones with which the crab approached the same perception image and conferred upon it a protective tone, or a dwelling tone, or a feeling tone.” 9 It is easy to see that one and the same “object” is not just interpreted by a “subject” as a function of its perceptual structures, or as a function of memory and the experience of one member of a species in relation to another, but equally depends on the affective tonalities of the organism and the available forms found in a background world. The interpretation in question, as Clément, Scheps, and Stewart emphasize, is not purely arbitrary nor entirely pre-determined. For one thing, the interpretation is constrained as much by the dispositions of the background worlds as by the structures belonging to each species. For another, it is not entirely pre-determined, for the animal liberates itself in two ways from the stereotype that can result from these constraints: “through mutations that create new species, or varieties within the same species, and through the structuring of its nervous system over the course of its ontogenesis, leading to freer and more creative interpretations and behavior as the species evolves.” 10 Work in “biosemantics” leads to the similar conclusions. 11 The central concept that interests us is that of an intentional icon (analyzed by Ruth Garrett Millikan), which is supposed to characterize the cooperative mechanisms between members of the same species both with regard to relating to a state of affairs (an indicative mechanism) and in producing a state of affairs (an imperative mechanism). The intentional icon relates at least two different

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organisms, the one that produces the signs, the other that Millikan says interprets them. The intentional structure of the icon allows the interpreter to adapt to its environment as a function of its needs and states. The interest, but also limit, of biosemantics is that it situates interpretation at not just a presymbolic level but also a pre-representational one: A number of organisms make use of intentional icons, which allow them to exploit the correspondences to adaptive ends: bees dance to direct other workers; sticklebacks spot other males and defend their territory against them; baby seagulls open their beak on seeing that of adults moving up and down vertically. These icons do not reach the status of representations in that what they refer to is not properly speaking “identified” by the animal. The value of an icon as corresponding to something or to one of its parts is identified only when the animal makes conjoint use of at least two icons having the same value. 12

The hypothesis of the interpreting animal has the double virtue of getting us beyond a narrow anthropocentricism to take into consideration a specific mode of human understanding rarely taken seriously. We can follow Joëlle Proust, in his discussion of contemporary ethology, in agreeing that forms of intentionality and therefore of thought apply to “animals.” However, the issue is still whether we should speak of interpretation to characterize this animal thought. Biosemiotics was developed initially within the framework of an epistemological conflict internal to the life sciences then dominated by mechanistic models. It too gives food for thought to philosophy, just as today biosemantics does, in suggesting a considerable extension to interpretation. We are far here from being locked into the canons of exegesis or philology, even if Clément, Scheps, and Stewart do not hesitate to draw a heuristic parallel, however problematic it may be, between the ethological concept of an Umwelt for a living creature and the hermeneutic concept of the world of a text for a reader. Do not texts that have been forgotten and fallen into a background world become an Umwelt when they are read, appropriated, propagated, and discussed by individual readers and communities of readers? Just as the construction of an Umwelt by an animal is neither pre-determined nor arbitrary, the interpretation of a text is constrained by earlier readings, by an interpretive tradition that always leaves open the possibility of creative interpretations as a function of eras, social contexts, and the reader’s experience. How far, however, can we push this analogy between the world of meaning of a text and the world of signs of living organisms? Can we say that the world of a text finally is only a particular case of an Umwelt belonging to the human species, albeit one limited to literate societies? Biosemiotics and biosemantics allow us to acknowledge the selection of signs that are indispensable to a living organism for the construction of its Umwelt. But just as certainly, according to Thomas Nagel’s well-known

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warning, we can never place ourselves in the place of a bat (from its subjective point of view) and there will always be a limit to every investigation into what is happening objectively in the bat’s head (where the same thing may also be said about our access to other people’s mental states). 13 External observation of animal behavior, however, is not doomed to radical failure even when it does not make use of the finesse found in biosemiotics or biosemantics. Still, can we really speak, as von Uexküll does, of meaning (Bedeutung) and interpretation (Deutung) to qualify the functional circle or of an interpreter as Millikan does in talking about the intentional icon? There seems to be a confusion here between biosemiotics (or biosemantics) and hermeneutics. To perceive signs as a function of an affective tone, and to act in consequence of this, is still not to interpret a meaning that involves a difficulty when it comes to understanding. But this is how Millikan writes about the bee’s dance: its meaning is the set of rules that points to the location of nectar. 14 Can we really talk about meaning apart from some symbolic activity, some reflexive activity, some conscious activity? Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations can serve as a good guide— even if his problem was not directly knowing how to distinguish human beings from other animals—in understanding why all seeing as does not immediately imply an interpretation. In chapter 11 of the second part of the Investigations, Wittgenstein proposes a very interesting distinction between simple seeing and seeing as. The mere fact of seeing, of immediately perceiving an object, does not presuppose any interpretive activity. Here is Wittgenstein’s example: “I look at an animal and am asked: ‘What do you see?’ I answer: ‘A rabbit.’” 15 It would be absurd in this case to respond I see the rabbit as a rabbit. The situation is quite different if one now shows me a figure (Wittgenstein uses Jastrow’s famous example he calls the duck/rabbit) and asks what do I see? In this case, I can see the figure either as a duck’s head or as a rabbit’s head. Now we are dealing with the form “seeing as” which, unlike simple seeing, implies an internal relation between an object (in our example, the figure) and other objects (a rabbit or a duck). As a first approximation, we might be tempted to say, if we follow von Uxeküll, Scheps, and Gens—a hypothesis Wittgenstein starts by taking seriously—that the configuration of “seeing as” necessarily requires an interpretation. We can interpret Jastrow’s figure either as a rabbit’s head or as a duck’s head. Wittgenstein readily admits that “seeing as” does not come from simple perception, but paradoxically, a paradox that Jocelyn Benoist refers to quite often in her commentary, he refuses to make it an interpretation. What then counts as an interpretation for Wittgenstein? He gives us an indication in this passage, even if it is marked by a certain hesitation: “Do I really see something different each time, or do I only interpret what I see in a different way? I am inclined to say the former. But why?—to interpret is to think to do

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something, seeing is a state.” 16 In the next paragraph, he makes more precise what he means by interpretation: “Now it is easy to recognize cases in which we are interpreting. When we interpret we form hypotheses, which may prove false—‘I am seeing this figure as a . . .’ can be verified as little as (or in the same sense as) ‘I am seeing bright red.’” 17 In other words, for Wittgenstein, interpretation is an intellectual operation of a hypothetical, inferential propositional nature. This is why seeing as, not to speak of mere seeing, cannot be considered an interpretation. We can agree that every form of seeing as (still less of simple perceiving) does not necessarily imply an interpretation and can therefore refer to an immediate perceptual comprehension. 18 But whoever speaks of immediate comprehension, and the point should be emphasized, does not for all that speak of a passive, mechanistic understanding. As Kant and Husserl have showed, all immediate understanding assumes a construction of a world that operates through classification, categorization, and through a synthesis of identification and recognition of objects. All these mental operations occur generally in a pre-reflective and ante-predicative way like in the perceptual experience of simple seeing. In this sense, Richard Shusterman is correct in affirming against Gadamer that all understanding is not necessarily interpretive. 19 In many situations in everyday life, we are content to immediately understand without having to go any further: we spontaneously obey an order, act out of habit, read a text, take someone as meaning what they say, follow a rule. We only interpret in the final analysis to resolve a problem, to clear up an obscurity, remove a contradiction: “a clarification of something obscure or ambiguous, a deciphering of a symbol, an unraveling of a paradox, an articulation of previously unstated formal or semantic relations between elements.” 20 These are all situations that assume conscious activity, reflection, deliberation. The paradox Shusterman holds up so well is that immediate understanding, even though being unreflective and not interpretive, nonetheless does testify to a form of intelligence. In ordinary life there is a whole palette of “intelligent habits” that allow agents to orient themselves and to act in the world, without having to deliberate or interpret. This is true for our understanding of statements in a language that is familiar to us. The situation is different when we find ourselves having to deal with a specialized language or a totally foreign one where we hear the sounds without understanding the meaning of what is said. It is also true for acquired corporeal habits, for what Bourdieu calls “embodied knowledge,” or for the “immediate experience” so dear to Dewey. Without having to consider those virtuosos who use their body like a star dancer or a Tai Chi master, an ordinary practice like walking down stairs presupposes an embodied habit (which may not yet have been acquired by an infant), a bodily schematism in space and constrained by it, a precise sequence of steps. Apart from special

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situations (a handicap, wound, vertigo, darkness), this embodied intelligence habitually works without any hesitation, question, or interpretation. The back and forth movement of hermeneutics, coming from Gadamer, assimilates all understanding to an interpretation, and reduces all interpretation to language in the linguistic sense of the term. But this is not to say that immediate understanding is free of perspectives, prejudices, or partiality about the grasped meaning any more than of interpretation, which is always selective, is. Shusterman does not sufficiently consider how interpretation is in fact a mode of understanding, because it is a question of meaning, but of a mediate, reflected upon understanding unlike spontaneous or immediate understanding. What pragmatism does bring is a rehabilitation of the spheres of the immediate experience of understanding and of non-linguistic forms of understanding and of “embodied” understanding. Nor does this prevent, something that ought not to be overlooked: taking into consideration the public and social dimension of bodily “grammars” (walking, dancing, running, sleeping, lying down) as Mauss so well demonstrated in his essay on “bodily techniques.” 21 If we take these remarks seriously, it is possible to reconsider the perceptual experience of the duck/rabbit figure. “Seeing,” when it is a question of something well-known, however complex, stems from an immediate experience of understanding and therefore does not require interpretation. But there are situations where seeing as does demand an interpretation. Pragmatically, everything depends on context and usage. If I am presented for the first time with the duck/rabbit figure (without being forewarned that I may be able to see two different representations), and I spontaneously respond that I see a rabbit’s head, then, in this case, there is not an interpretation (but rather spontaneous understanding of a perceptual kind). On the other hand, if I am told that I may see two different representations, but I am unable, for example, to spontaneously recognize the head of the other animal (or having done so, I am not able to identify it with that of the first head I perceived), then, in this case, I turn to interpretation. The reason why is precisely that my immediate perception/understanding is disturbed, troubled. Consequently, I must undertake an inquiry and try to grasp a meaning. When we run into a difficulty, we undertake an interpretive process, without prejudging whether the meaning we end up attributing (through a proposition or assertion) is correct, true, mistaken. In this case of seeing as, we formulate hypotheses about we are perceiving. Therefore, it is a particular form of seeing as that requires an interpretation, a problematic seeing as. In the same chapter, Wittgenstein indicates how we should proceed, but without drawing the same consequences. It consists in saying that seeing as takes on an interpretive dimension as a function of language games and particular forms of life (which perturb our seeing as). In other words, the modes of meaning (as understandable and interpretive) are always indexed to

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their contextual uses. Wittgenstein at several places speaks of “surprise”; surprise, for example, when we no longer spontaneously recognize a person whom we have not seen for a long while and whose features we need to consider in order to recognize them. He speaks of surprise in the case of a change of aspect, as with the duck/rabbit figure, but without drawing on the idea that we have to do there with an interpretation. 22 But these are typically cases of interpretation. The best way of expressing this is the assertion, “something seems strange to me.” 23 It is precisely when some things we see seem strange that we have need for interpretation. Drawing on Jocelyn Benoist’s commentary, but taking it in a different direction, these things that seem strange to us have to with a dimension that has to be discovered, having to do with the structure of seeing as, in opposition to the dimension of achievement that goes with the structure of simply seeing. We will say therefore that seeing as, when it runs into a problematic perception (surprise, a bump in the road, having our attention drawn to something, confusion, irregularity) requires a dimension of reflexivity and discovery that is coextensive with every interpretive activity: Interpretation therefore is always reflexive, it is a conscious reflection on the movement of understanding once this has been interrupted, because what is indicated is not clear, or because it is not determined. When the direction, indicated by the meaning, is indeterminate in some way, or when this direction which does seem determined, leads nowhere, and the circulation of meaning is interrupted, we have to interpret. 24

This is what happens when I no longer see the figure as a rabbit’s head (the circulation of meaning is interrupted): it is the unclear meaning of the given perception that calls for an interpretation. Saying this is not to affirm that interpretation in its reflexive dimension would be free of every constraint or background. We can also follow Wittgenstein as having shown that all seeing as presupposes learning, rules, and forms of life. It is as a function of a certain number of experiences, uses, sedimented practices, habits that I am going to tend to see this as that in some context. Let us consider another example. Where I see a white spot against a black background on an x-ray, the radiologist, owing to his experience, can see this white area as a lesion on one of my organs, knowing, for there to be seeing as, that he could have interpreted the same white area as another sign. The experiential background of seeing as can be enriched, as we shall see in the next chapter, by sociological or anthropological analyses of the social and cultural schemes at work in all interpretive activity. This long detour through Philosophical Investigations allows us to throw new light on contemporary ethological and anthropological debates. The concept of interpretation we are seeking to delimit is situated finally between the overly narrow sense proposed by Wittgenstein and the overly broad sense

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found in biosemiotics and biosemantics. To designate seeing and non-problematic seeing as, we may speak like Charles Taylor does of a proto-interpretation that overlaps the sensory-motor, preconscious, and pre-reflexive selection among the “sign bearers” defining a specific Umwelt. Just as it seems essential to show, returning to the example of the hermit crab, that its sensory-motor system is capable of perceiving the anemone differently as a function of its Stimmung, it also seems mistaken to affirm that the crab understands a meaning and is involved in an interpretive activity. The hermit crab does have access to a world of signs, but never to a world of meaning that biologically presupposes the cortical structures belonging to higher mammals. To be sure, like other living beings, a substantial part of our sensorymotor life operates in the mode of proto-interpretations. What Jacques Bouveresse calls “pre-reflexive and infra-hermeneutic understanding” can refer equally to “embodied knowledge” or to what Pierre Bourdieu calls “practical meaning.” 25 Scientific knowledge about living beings, including human beings as living organisms, is valuable here for analyzing the pre-conscious layers of proto-interpretations through which Umwelts get constructed. If we can say there are increasing degrees of complexity from one species to another with regard to proto-interpretations, in return there is a relative discontinuity when it comes to interpretations properly speaking: “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 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 action.” 26 Access to meaning and interpretive activity—the second and third levels in the model proposed by Taylor—assumes the development, through phylogenesis, of cortical features (in particular the associative neocortex) only found in the human species (notably, the frontal orbital lobes). These are biological structures that materially make possible what Henri Laborit, drawing on Frans de Waal’s “three brains” theory, calls the “imaginative, creative structures” (meaning thereby, abstraction, language, and symbolization), which are distinguished both from the sensory-motor structures (the energetic segment) and the memory structures (the segment for learning). 27 Another way of making more complex this fitting together of levels of interpretation is proposed by Hans Lenk. 28 The first level in this model with several layers corresponds to the interpretive elaboration of sensory impressions by the living organism. This is the sensory-motor stage from which arise what Taylor calls proto-interpretations. The second level corresponds to the interpretive schemes constructed thanks to acquired experience and habits (the “learning segment” in Laborit’s model). If we look closely at this level at the forms of categorizations of the world, like what we find among

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most mammals and birds, these are still pre-linguistic. It is only at the third level that interpretive activity is fully accomplished through language and at the fourth level that it is divided into the possibility of classifying beings and things. Levels five and six “bring interpretation to the most theoretical level: on the one hand, methodologically governed interpretation based on argumentation and, on the other, the meta-interpretive, that is gnosiological and epistemological questioning.” 29 Recent progress in cognitive science offers several valuable resources regarding what happens biologically when we interpret. Without being able here to discuss in detail the program for naturalizing the human mind, 30 two branches of the cognitive sciences seem particularly useful for our inquiry. The first one, the one with the most scientific standing to include the others, surely comes from the neurosciences and its subspecialties (neuroimaging, neuroanatomy, neuropsychology). It comes down, following in the wake of Broca’s work, to mapping the brain by associating mental faculties (language, emotion) with the activation of certain regions of the brain. Technological developments, in particular magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), have allowed refining the “correspondence” program: measuring the activity of cortical regions judged to be responsible for a mental activity. For example, when we read a text, the occipital-temporal ventral region “lights up” in an MRI scan. It follows that we can take this region as the neural cause of the activity of reading. But have we made enough progress to know what reading and understanding a text means? We can certainly take for granted that all reading activity, and in a general way, all activity of understanding and interpretation rests on a neural basis. But what exactly do we measure with the help of MRI scans? Daniel Andler, without denying the neural basis of thinking and the importance of the invention of MRI, has shown the limits of making such an inference: what is captured by the machine is a signal called BOLD (a blood oxygenation level dependent response) tied to the variation in the amount of oxygen in the blood flow in the observed region. If it has long been known that a correlation exists between neuronal activity and the BOLD signal, this correlation is complex and far from being perfectly understood. Moreover, the absence of this signal cannot be interpreted a contrario as the absence of the region’s intervening in the execution of the task in question. In reality, all the brain regions are constantly active, and it is only through a difference that one can presume that a role is played by some region for a given process. 31

This point is important for us in understanding what the “correspondence” program of the neurosciences can contribute and its limits. The act of interpreting cannot be reduced to the activation of a specific cortical region in that it engages multiple functions (language, memory, emotion) and is

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susceptible of branching out as a function of what is being interpreted (a text, a situation, an intention). Thus, to return to our previous example, it would be an error to affirm that only the occipital-temporal region is activated when we understand a text—this act presupposes the mastery of language, makes use of memory, and gives rise to emotions. A second branch of the cognitive sciences is of particular interest, the socalled evolutionary approaches (notably the Santa Barbara program) based on Darwinism. Arguments persist between specialists who are partisans of continuity and the defenders of discontinuity in the descent of human beings from earlier animals. Essentially it comes down to saying that evolution, notably starting from the Pleistocene, allowed the human species to be endowed with algorithms (called Darwinian algorithms), that is, with typical ways of resolving problems (defending oneself from predators, the use of fire, cooking). The Pleistocene knew frequent and extreme climate changes, radically modifying the environment and posing new problems for humans. In a general way, the conditions of life, particularly food sources, changed, there were frequent large and small shifts, and the best solution biological evolution could find to allow the species to adapt to new conditions was a capacity for cumulative and collective learning, in short, collective learning. 32

The important fact here has to do with intersection between a natural and a cultural anthropology. If we inherit typical ways of resolving problems from our species’ evolution, it is in large part thanks to a collective transmission—even if there is a co-evolution of our genetic nature and culture. The demographic impact seems equally decisive: the more numerous a population (like the sapiens compared to the Neanderthals), the more capable it is of giving rise to specializations (and hence of experts) for resolving new problems and in the face of new challenges posed to it. How does this theory, which we are broadly summarizing, help us better to understand interpretive activity? As we have seen, in every interpretation there is a mediate understanding of signs when a human being is confronted with unclear, perturbed, or problematic situations or interactions. In other words, interpretation presupposes an effort to adapt to the environment and clarify meaning. What the evolutionary approach teaches is that these techniques, far from resting solely on an individual, directly derive from the evolution of the species and from its collective organization. Neo-Darwinism equally teaches that if modern human beings are the last survivor of the genus Homo, they have shared common dispositions—with a symbolic function—with other species, like the Neanderthals. Other kinds of the genus Homo have made use of interpretive techniques similar to those we still use today. Undeniably, the recognition of a proto-culture among mammals is well-attested today, the use of tools by certain species of primates (notably

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chimpanzees’ use of a stone to crack open nuts) is confirmed by ethological observation. 33 Yet the whole problem remains of knowing whether interpretation is indeed what defines Homo sapiens—and if so, in what sense. THE SUSPENSION OF MEANING AND TROUBLE OF THE WORLD The flaw with the five-level model proposed by Lenk is that it dilutes interpretation into too many activities, no longer allowing us to recognize its specificity. It is too easy to think of a broad conception of interpretation that tends to assimilate it to every form of providing meaning or selecting among signs and a too narrow conception which tends to limit it to text interpretation. The more reduced model, with three levels, proposed by Günter Abel may better answer our expectations, to a certain degree. 34 The first level of interpretation corresponds to the principles of spatial-temporal localization of things, sensory activities, and conceptual schematizations. The second level corresponds to acquired social and cultural practices, and to habitual and established social categorizations. The third level, the most reflexive level, corresponds to principles of explanation, of rendering explicit, of justifying a proposition, an assertion, a text, an action. The muddled inter-connection among these levels is supposed to hold for aesthetic, logical, and ethical perspectives. Although his intention is not directly to elaborate an interpretive anthropology, Abel does give us some valuable keys for envisaging a global theory of interpretation inserted into ordinary human praxis, without reducing it to the hermeneutic field of an ars interpretandi. Interpretation operates on every level of our ordinary human condition: perceiving, speaking, knowing, thinking, acting, feeling. This philosophy of interpretation also has an inverse version in that it tends to be confused with a general theory of meaning, signs, and symbols. For Abel, as an heir of Nietzsche, everything is an interpretation, at least every human relation to the world is interpretive in nature. There is no organization of experience, no relation to the world without interpretation. Interpretation in Abel’s conceptual architecture plays the role as does the symbolic for Cassirer. In fact, there is a constant tension, even a contradiction in his approach. On the one hand, he acknowledges that “habitually, we understand without any problem our linguistic and nonlinguistic signs, for example, in daily life. . . . We do not concern ourselves with the question where a sign gets its meaning or how this meaning came to be associated with this sign, so long as understanding works. It seems simply to be that way.” 35 On the other hand, he affirms what we are already interpreting as soon as we are in some relation to the world, others, or ourselves. In fact, the first two

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levels of his model correspond more to an immediate comprehension or a proto-interpretive scale, while only the third level is assimilated to a mediate understanding and is interpretive properly speaking. This is why, risking confusion, it is not possible to affirm with Abel that “we cannot feel, perceive, speak, think, and act without interpretation” or that “the world that is familiar to us, our world, must in this sense be a world of interpretation.” 36 In the world most familiar to us, when we interact in it without snags, we are not interpreting it, we are simply understanding it. A three-level model, but one founded on a different basis, may be able to remove these persistent confusions. We shall thus speak of meta-interpretation, in an epistemological sense, to characterize the deliberate activity of interpretation, as well as hermeneutic reflection on questions about interpretation that the sciences, beyond those that study texts, draw on. We shall reserve the notion of proto-interpretation, in an ethological, psycho-biological sense, to designate the pre-reflexive operations, valid for every living organism, including human beings, of selecting among the signs that constitute an Umwelt. We shall consider interpretation, in the strict sense, the anthropological sense, as qualifying the ordinary activity produced by human agents when they experience a breakdown in immediate understanding and bring into play reflexive procedures meant to remove the problem. The metainterpretive and interpretive registers presuppose particular conditions that are lacking in the proto-interpretive register: the symbolic condition, the reflexive suspension of immediate meaning and self-discernibility. Let us look more closely at each of these conditions. The symbolic condition of humanity means more than having language in the ordinary sense, it includes every expression of what Dilthey calls the life of the mind such as myths, narratives, symbols, and institutions, and it does not really matter whether these expressions are “durably fixed.” With Cassirer, we can call symbolic all those functions that allow us to give meaning to reality. 37 Cassirer, starting from a cultural and linguistic regrounding of Kantian transcendentalism, allows us to give a breadth to the symbolic that allows it to cover all the operations that enable mediating our relation to reality. We may of course analyze these expressions with the help of a general semiology as linguists and structuralists have proposed for myths and narratives. At this level of analysis, if the degree of complexity is not at issue, the biosemiotics of the tick is not fundamentally different from the semiology of the linguistic systems of human societies. It is just that the expressions of human life do not reduce to signs that refer to one another in a closed system, they aim at saying something about the world, oneself, others. There is an ontological vehemence to human language that justifies the passage from a semiotics to a philosophy of symbolic forms.

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Furthermore, the symbolic condition of humanity implies the possibility of constructing horizons of meaning and existence that exceed the limits of their ambient world (in the sense of an Umwelt). This excess of meaning does not have to do with the physical extent of the surrounding world. Without speaking of migratory species, large felines like lions have hunting territories that can extend over wide areas, often larger than those of human huntergatherer societies. The horizons of meaning of the human condition are posited at another level. Like every living organism, human beings always build on the basis of their everyday Umwelt, yet as Heidegger has shown, 38 they also have the possibility of projecting meaningful worlds of existence that are irreducible to their ordinary world. With Heidegger, we can distinguish more precisely three worlds or three facets of the worldly character of human life. First of all, the ambient world is constituted by a structured set of pre-theoretical, immediately given meanings through which lived experience takes place and in which it is always situated. Next, the shared world (which is thematized as Mitsein in Being and Time) attests to the non-solipsistic character of the ambient world and consequently presents the constitutive presence of the other, of others, close by or far away, in all lived experience. This shared world is not peopled solely by others who are present in flesh and blood (parents, colleagues, friends), but equally by absent others (remembered or imaginatively projected) who are just as constitutive of the ambient world. (Schutz will speak of a sequence of predecessors and successors intended by contemporaries.) The shared world is not just inhabited through interpersonal, intimate, singular relations, but equally through distant ones, through impersonal and institutional figures. Schutz will ultimately speak of types in order to qualify these relations. We see how this shared world, as different from the animal Umwelt, opens the human lifeworld to horizons of meaning that, although always proceeding from a situated being, surpass its bounds. The horizon of predecessors, successors, and large-scale institutions transcends the limits of the surrounding world. Finally, the world of the self, far from reestablishing positing the “ego” of idealism, of intentional consciousness, or manifesting a turning in on oneself, testifies to the appropriating dimension of the signifying dynamic of the lifeworld as affecting what is always a singular being: “the lifeworld and the shared world meet me in precisely this or that way.” 39 The importance we are granting to the world’s openness does not come down to embracing all the presuppositions, or even all the anthropocentric prejudices of Heidegger’s ontology, who did read von Uexküll. If we can say that the “stone has no world,” that “man configures the world,” must we also say that “the animal lives in an impoverished world”? To say, as Heidegger does, that the animal lives in an impoverished world assumes that animal life is always submitted to biological cycles, considered as immanent to its lifeworld, and is always preoccupied with basic needs. The empirical bias of this

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analysis, as Florence Burgat rightly points out, is that it generalizes as applicable to the whole of the animal kingdom an example that Heidegger draws from insect behavior, particularly that of bees. 40 The same judgment is applied to insects and to higher vertebrates: the animal’s world is an impoverished world. More detailed phenomenological and ethological research teaches us on the contrary about the “curiosity” of animal behavior, the modes of exploring for the pleasure of doing so of many animal species, not tied to vital dispositions. 41 Marc Richir goes so far as to talk of the animal’s “phenomenological epoché” as a way of placing the elements necessary for organic life in parentheses. Florence Burgat, in the same spirit, speaks of the freedom and restlessness of the animal’s condition in order the better to oppose the anthropozoological difference that dominates Western philosophy: To the closed character of animality, expressed by detachment (in the literal sense of the term) as regards its home ground and through spontaneous movement, belong a diversity of relations to the external universe. It follows that the animal is inhabited by a sense of restlessness. The greater the closure, the broader the field of possibilities, the greater the restlessness. It really is freedom the opens itself to animals, indetermination, immense possibilities, always new beginnings, the necessity to choose one direction or another. 42

However, Burgat falls into the same epistemological mistake as does Heidegger, even though she does so in order to draw the opposite consequences: essentializing the animal. The pertinent shared characteristic, for Burgat, is not between human beings and animals, but between animals (and hence humans), on the one side, and the vegetal, on the other (lack of mobility, perception, suffering). For all that it seems essential for us to recognize in certain animal species behavior that expresses curiosity, emotions, detachment, it seems problematic to generalize this to the whole animal kingdom (to insects, for example). From this point of view, there is greater proximity between a human and a mammal than between a mammal and a crustacean. So as essential as it may seem for us to take into account the phenomenon of restlessness in certain animal species, it seems difficult to correlate this with freedom and what phenomenologists call an epoché, which presupposes more complex capacities of reflexivity and self-determination. The human lifeworld is already more than the surrounding world taken by itself. Human beings, as living beings like every animal, have an Umwelt, but it is, moreover, one open to a virtual infinity of Worlds in terms of meaning, worlds sometimes quite distant (geographically, historically, culturally) from their surrounding world, worlds that are sometimes nonexistent, fictitious, or imaginary. An Umwelt, if it is rich in signs, is always related to a situation. The human Welt always is characterized by horizons of meaning that are in part

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undetermined. This is one of the lines of demarcation between the human and the animal kingdom, even that of our closest cousins, the chimpanzees. One of the lessons of German anthropology from Scheler to Gehlen is its having granted a salient place to our “openness to the world” as defining what it means to be human. The contents of our perception do not reduce to immediate givens, they refer to much broader symbolic universes. There is always something more, a surplus of meaning to the immediate meaning. To put it as Gehlen does, using an accent that sounds like Merleau-Ponty, humans “pierce” the perceivable world and “and everywhere interpolate the non-perceivable, whether it be as demons, as atoms like those of Democritus, gods, or anything of that sort. They interpolate the perceptible into the perceived, therefore, and the non-perceptible into the perceptible.” 43 We can adopt a continuist or gradualist approach between the human and animal kingdoms when it comes to a number of activities (tools, social forms), but openness to the world marks a radical discontinuity between them. This does not mean returning to the older Cartesian dualism between “mind” and “body” in order to indicate the radical ontological break the human species represents in the order of nature. Instead, it has to do with an orientation of natural evolution, one that is not teleologically oriented, which has fashioned certain human faculties. From this point of view, humanity does not escape its natural condition. If we may speak of an “end to the human exception,” this must be in a radical, absolute, and in fact problematic sense. 44 But it is not illegitimate to speak paradoxically of a relative exception to the human condition that is evident on the level of certain activities and faculties, such as reflexivity and symbolic openness to the world, necessary dispositions for interpretation in the strong sense of this term. Talk about a relative exception signifies as a counterpart to this, that, on other levels, other species possess faculties which the human species no longer possesses or simply lacks: Once we abandon a dualist presupposition, the existence of living beings capable of having conscious states is no longer “extraordinary” any more than that some animals have wings which allow them to fly or that microorganisms reproduce through spores capable of surviving for decades and reactivating themselves when external conditions become favorable. 45

It is not a contradiction therefore to affirm that there exist things proper to human beings, just as there exists things proper to other species, without thereby embracing an ontological dualism, if we consider that these faculties are the product of a both natural and social evolution. What is more, it is difficult to imagine those signs of animal and plant Umwelts that remain inaccessible to our human sensory-perceptual organs. We have little idea of the variety of Umwelts of the living beings that circu-

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late beneath our feet or of those that circle above our heads. Many functional circles, even though they are present in the same setting, remain inaudible, imperceptible, odorless to us. The ethnologist can thus give a decentering lesson to the anthropologist: “The meaning of the forest is multiplied a thousand fold if one does not limit myself to its solicitations to human subjects, but also includes animals.” 46 To be sure, the “share” belonging to different species in the same setting is not as harmonious as von Uexküll sometimes suggests, a fortiori in the Anthropocene era, when he presents the interactions between species metaphorically as like orchestral music, “a symphony of meaning.” 47 This ethological decentering as regards the recognition of different universes of meanings for non-human Umwelts, and the human impossibility of entering into interaction with the many kingdoms of signs in nature, takes nothing away from the fact that the concern for human existence is not limited by the space and time of our immediate environment but can extend to include improbable realms of meaning, past and gone worlds, and fictitious worlds. The human world is no more limited when it comes to the question of the meaning of being than it is regarding its finitude. Remi Brague, in commenting on Aristotle’s metaphysics starting from Heidegger’s Sorge, speaks of a total concern. 48 The central category of care (Sorge), as a temporal and existential structure of being-as-a-project, considerably enlarges the ambient space of everyday preoccupations. Our Umwelt neither limits nor simply absorbs us. Our imaginative faculty of course places a considerable role in this possibility of transcending the world that is given to us as ready to hand. It intervenes to better allow us to project other possible worlds and to enlarge our horizons of expectation. Interpretation occurs, however, only when the human agent is confronted with a misunderstanding, a breakdown in intelligibility (of an action, a message, a situation, a text, and so on). Every meaningful activity is therefore not immediately subject to interpretation. When we talk of a shared lifeworld in Heidegger’s sense, we are not also talking about interpretation but about an immediate understanding of something meaningful that occurs in the course of our experience of life. When we talk about symbolic activity in Cassirer’s broad sense, we are not necessarily talking about interpretive activity. This is because symbolism as Cassirer understands it is too broad and does not allow us to distinguish between plurivocal and univocal expressions, which Ricoeur sees as granting more restrained meaning. Rather than every activity mediating some given meaning, symbolism is limited to those with a double meaning: “If we use the term symbolic for the signifying function in its entirety, we no longer have a word to designate the group of signs whose intentional texture calls for a reading of another meaning in the first, literal, and immediate meaning. . . . To mean something other than what is said— this is the symbolic function.” 49

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We believe, however, and we shall come back to this, that Ricoeur’s concept of interpretation is too restrictive in that it applies only to deciphering (revealing, uncovering) signs with a double meaning. Interpretive activity does not only follow from plurivocal or equivocal expressions whose model is religious symbols with their many meanings. It also proceeds from confused, obscure, and incorrect expressions, from problematic situations that are not fixed as texts are, waiting to be deciphered. The domain of symbols Ricoeur considers only convers one particular region of signs, situations, and actions that need to be interpreted. We may therefore preserve from Cassirer the general notion of symbolism as designating every matrix of meaning. In such activity we can distinguish an immediate, routine understanding of meaning and a properly interpretive understanding of signs, expressions, actions, and situations that have lost their self-evidence and familiarity. In other words, interpretation bears witness to the properly speaking reflective aspect of symbolism. In the ordinary course of existence, the lifeworld contains stable realms of meaning that allow agents to move about and orient themselves without difficulty. In this case, as Josef Simon writes, “we ‘immediately’ understand the meaningful signs, that is, without having to pose a supplementary question about their meaning. They are understood without questions and, in this sense, ‘without out any interpretation.’” 50 Encountering a universe of foreign meanings, a disturbing event, an obscure text, a contrario obliges us to assume a suspended attitude as regards our spontaneous understanding. In this case, and only in this case, an interpretive activity is required in order to construct a new intelligibility. Such an attitude also shows, as Josef Simon demonstrates, the role of effort, of a willingness on the part of the one who wants better to understand a sign or set of signs by replacing them with other signs (for example, replacing a word one does not spontaneously understand by another word, or a paraphrase, an explication). It is always as a function of a certain context, a certain intention, a certain attention, a certain “circumspection” (Unsicht) writes Heidegger, that we interpret an undetermined or problematic sign, one that does not fit into its usual framework of meaning. It is difficult to fully imagine the profusion of signs sprinkled through our natural and social environment. Only some of them are capable of drawing our attention, of provoking a reflective suspending of our plan of action, of our intention at that moment, in a context where a sign not only refers to something (smoke means fire) but as well to a complex of other signs (one word in relation to other words, one road sign in relation to other road signs). When the tick selects among signs appropriate to its Umwelt, when a human agent immediately understands the meaning of a situation, we cannot say stricto sensu that they perform an interpretation. Even if there is no absolute break between (immediate) understanding and interpretation, to speak, as Joëlle Proust does, of “an immediate interpretation” seems to us

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close to an oxymoron. We do agree with his plea for granting forms of intentionality to the animal world and forms of pre-linguistic thought to the human one: In human beings, numerous results show that, in various circumstances, subjects treat information in a strictly implicit way, ignorant of the procedures that are actually implied, and without any possible access to the phases through which the signal is analyzed: think for example of the immediate and automatic interpretation of a sentence, even an ambiguous or complicated one, or the organization of the perceptive field—the countryside viewed from a train—on the basis of visual and proprioceptive information. Even the “final” result—a percept, the meaning of the sentence—with no qualitative counterpart. Among animals, consciousness takes generally non-reflexive forms. States of consciousness, like other mental states, purely and simply are “lived.” 51

The immediate interpretation Joëlle Proust speaks of, even when the organism has to deal with complex information, stems in fact from an immediate understanding or the level of the proto-interpretive if we consider there to be no active reflexive act properly speaking, any awareness of the meaning as suspended or “given.” We would rather follow Buytendijk here who reserves the notion of an ambiguous world for the human realm (even if he does wonder about a possible extension to domestic animals and primates), that is, a properly interpretive capacity—which presupposes distanciation and reflexivity—of giving different meanings to the same thing, of seeing things under different aspects, of distinguishing several possible meanings. Interpretation alone presents itself as a mediate, suspended, reflexive understanding of a meaning that is not simply self-evident. Misunderstanding, which hermeneutic thinkers like Schleiermacher make the driving force behind the interpretation of texts, can be extended to other segments and forms of signification (actions, speech acts, situations). It is the passage through the “detour leading to meaning,” to recall an expression from Christian Berner, that leads to interpretive activity. There is mediate understanding: when we are confronted with a strange, disorienting phenomenon, that is, one whose character regarding its truth and meaning is problematic. This problematic character does not come down to a lack of meaning: questions about meaning can also arise conversely from there being a variety of possible meanings or a plethora of presented meanings which, by provoking confusion, also call for an effort of interpretation in order to understand them. In this context, understanding is anchored to an experience of being displaced, of being out of place, of lacking a standpoint, in the problematic relation of one part to the whole. 52

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This experience is not just applicable at a meta-interpretive level, in the scholarly interpretation of texts, as a whole hermeneutic tradition would have it. It is found in all the ordinary experience of an agent confronted with odd or problematic meanings. The question remains open whether, as JeanClaude Gens, following Jean-Christophe Bailly, 53 emphasizes, higher animals, even those lacking a Welt in the strict sense, are not themselves subjects, in certain situations, of forms of broken signs in their ambient environment, which affect every symbiotic relation to their Umwelt. Here we come back to the central notion of worry discussed by Florence Burgat: “we can ask if this question is not is not hinted at in the sleepwalking of animal life, for example when a dog regards its master, its head tipped to the side, without apparently wanting anything from him—even if the dog’s status is not just that of a domestic animal but of a companion, which is no longer that of an animal in general.” 54 We can extend this hypothesis to undomesticated higher animals who follow trails that are not marked out in advance, for example, when hunting. The animal then has to decipher clues: “The animal, intelligent in its own way, explores new terrain with infinite precautions, before setting out. It does move forward blindly, but only the basis of many olfactory and other clues, which it will have had to gather and integrate in order to sufficiently estimate the immediate surroundings with confidence.” 55 This likely hypothesis, which confirms the gradualism between immediate and mediate understanding, takes nothing away from the fact that suspending a sign for higher mammals remains indexed to their Umwelt, even in the case of attitudes of detachment, curiosity, or exploration. What remains properly human is the possibility of reflexively calling into question every given meaning that outruns their spatial environment, the suspending of immediate understanding and the collapse of current significations concerning every possible or imaginable world. This posture of suspending meaning may be akin, given certain reservations, to an epoché, not so much in the skeptical sense of Pyrrhonians who flaunt their indifference to opinions and judgments as that of Husserlian phenomenology that works through suspending—placing in parentheses—the thesis of the natural world. It is not a question, Husserl makes clear, of doubting the world’s existence but our suspending our judgments about the world in order to allow us to bring out an initial, wholly self-evident knowledge on which we can build to justify our assertions. Given the reflexive conditions that this attitude requires, it cannot be assimilated to animal behavior that simply explores the world, uninterested in any vital preoccupations. The phenomenological epoché (along with its many reductions) is situated in a meta-interpretive realm and, owing to its radicality, attacks the root of all meaning and belief. However, we can speak of an ordinary epoché when agents suspend judgment about the naturalness of the meaning of some behavior, or situation, or speech act

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because it has lost its self-evident character. There can be an interpretation only when meaning has been denaturalized. Despite their tendency toward behaviorism, the American pragmatists, Dewey and Mead in particular, grasped this kind of ordinary epoché when the habitual course of interactions between an organism and its environment went off track. George Herbert Mead talks of an immediate experience to designate that the relation to the world works smoothly, without problems or stumbling blocks, when agents’ responses are adapted to their situations in their environments. 56 When, on the contrary, unexpected events occur in the “world that is there,” when the environment undergoes alterations, when elements of doubt or indetermination occur, immediate behavior turns out to be insufficient. An attitude Mead calls “cognition” becomes necessary when the human agent wants to readjust their responses to a new environment, to reassure themselves of the existence of objects, values, and the meaning of things. Then problems arise “about transforming the connections of immediate experience into isolatable relations, problems of defining appropriate behavior, above all in the case of blockage or failure or problems with what others perceive, in cases of dispute about the definition of a situation.” 57 We can, to a certain degree, superimpose the categories of an immediate experience/cognitive attitude on those of Dewey, 58 in particular when he applies his theory of inquiry to the domain of value formation. 59 The equivalent of an immediate experience will be the fact of “prizing,” of evaluating positively or detesting something or someone in a spontaneous, direct way. In this case, our vital impulses and habits govern the process or evaluation without any hang-ups: “A man who has started walking may continue walking from force an acquired habit without continually interrupting his course of action to inquire what object is to be obtained at the next step. These rudimentary examples are typical of much of human activity.” 60 Valuing in the strong sense—which requires the intervention of our intellectual, cognitive, and predicative faculties—intervenes therefore when our desire is blocked, when “there is something the matter,” 61 when an individual or group experiences a lack and is unable to forecast some end, when routine habits and evaluations are contradicted. In this case, an inquiry, akin to what Mead calls cognition, is required. What is the relation here between a cognitive attitude, inquiry, and valuing on the one hand, and interpretation on the other? In fact, pragmatism in general, with the exception of Peirce whom we shall speak of in the following chapter, hardly ever invokes the concept of interpretation and remains largely alien to the hermeneutic tradition. Yet it is easy to show that an interpretation, in the sense of a mediate understanding, of a reconfiguring of the meaning of a situation, is in fact required for there to be an investigation or evaluation. Not every inquiry reduces to an interpretive activity, but there cannot be an investigation or evaluation apart from a suspending of meaning

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and some corresponding interpretive activity once familiar situations, routine evaluations get called into question. Here it is necessary to take into consideration two faces of this interpretive process: on the one hand, undergoing or being subjected to something when the agent experiences some “difficulty” in their immediate understanding of the meaning of such a denaturalized situation—what we have called the suspensive, reflexive attitude; on the other, an active response when the agent seeks a new meaning better adapted to understanding the situation, when he seeks to establish new intelligible relations among unknown or strange phenomena, when he removes the equivocations found in a text or dialogue. Nothing, however, says that this detour must have an endpoint if we consider that a new odd, discordant situation may relaunch the process of inquiring and the interpretative process in order to adjust to changes in the natural or social environment. SELF-INTERPRETATION AND BEING AT ODDS WITH ONESELF Despite the close kinship to a social behaviorism in which the stimulusresponse scheme is predominant, and despite the absence of a central concept of interpretation, even that of a biosemiotics, Mead’s pragmatism offers a heuristic model for thinking about problematic meaning in ordinary contexts of our relation to the world. Mead points us to a third condition of interpretive practice (beyond an openness to the world and the suspending of an immediate understanding of meaning) through the place he grants to reflexivity. Reflexivity is directly connected to the cognitive attitude, not to “selves,” that is, to social individuals. Whereas immediate experience is related to biological individuality (and can be precisely described as the response of an organism to stimuli coming from its environment), the reflexive attitude refers to a socialized individual capable of calling into question its relation to its environment, of taking it for an object to be analyzed, of reorienting his behavior, and giving it a new meaning—a new reference and a new sense. The importance Mead grants to reflexivity and to the “self” resonates nicely with the proposal, which we owe to Charles Taylor, that human beings are self-interpreting animals. This capacity for self-interpretation, according to our hypothesis, is one of the marks that allow us to distinguish sensorymotor proto-interpretation from interpretation properly speaking. It follows that it is our sense of our self, of our existence, our actions, our identity that is suspended. The one exception is that the “self” as envisaged by Mead, although it does imply a form of reflexivity, is foreign to the way one ordinarily imagines the reflexive function of consciousness: “it is not a psychological object shaped by its representations, mental images, or

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ideal conceptions of the ‘self,’ or identified by objectifying experience. It is not a subject, endowed with reflexive awareness, to which behavior or experience could be attach like a kind of private property.” 62 The self’s reflexivity is only put to work in adjusting—as a cognitive attitude—to the conditions of a foreign, or unknown, or new, or discordant environment. It essentially only intervenes to resolve problematic situations. This is not nothing, but it is insufficient. It is important to take seriously the way in which reflexivity can work directly on the self (reflexivity not conceivable at the sensory-motor level of proto-interpretations). When Charles Taylor states that “we have to think of man as a self-interpreting animal,” his meaning is close to what Mead calls the self’s reflexivity, especially when he adds that “what is interpreted is itself an interpretation; a self-interpretation incorporated in a stream of action.” 63 The concept of self-interpretation is always capable of receiving a plurality of meanings that do not come down to a process of adjusting to a problematic situation. Without falling into psychologism, although psychology may have something to say here, self-interpretation can reach as far as the meaning of one’s own existence, even before situating this personal experience in some existential philosophy. There is self-interpretation as soon as the sense of self has lost its evident meaning, beyond the first, formal truth of cogito, ergo sum. The fact of being in a non-problematic relation to oneself does not call for an interpretive effort. Even when it is not expressed as the limit case of mental illness, the problematic aspect of selfhood is always close to what Freud calls “the uncanny” (the Unheimliche) to designate the state of unease or anxiety that can upset the reassuring rationality of everyday life. The paradox of the uncanny is that it is born at the heart of what is closest to us, within us, like a “familiar demon,” as if a stranger stared back at us from the mirror. But self-interpretation need not necessarily take such a dramatic turn when it is a question of simply suspending the sense of a partial, momentary segment of our existence when it has lost its ability to be easily read. This is always accompanied, however, by a certain state of feeling disoriented. Thus, it is helpful, with Bernhard Waldenfels, to distinguish among the varieties of uncanniness: from the “everyday” varieties found in the normal order of life to the “radical” varieties that place us outside every familiar setting. 64 That self-interpretation, because it presupposes a higher degree of reflexivity, is what characterizes human beings takes nothing away from the possibility of recognizing, as do Burgat and Jonas, a “feeling of selfhood” among primates capable of recognizing themselves in a mirror. This primitive form of a sense of self, without reflexive awareness, proceeds most notably from the animal experience of a form of there being something strange about a potentially hostile surrounding environment, which is disturbing and generates a sense of unease: “That an animal’s life, in Jonas’ terms, should be ‘disturbed, anxious’ comes from a feeling state that accom-

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panies an always uncertain life in its undertakings, a life condemned to feel separated from itself owing to the fact of having to defer the satisfaction of the animal’s desires.” 65 The evidence of a feeling of self, at least in some species, must be distinguished, however, from a self-interpretation that implies a kind of external regard that a subject turns on itself, a kind of reflexive self-doubling, a set of discursive techniques that allow the human subject to take a distance on itself. One current technique of selfhood for human beings when it comes to self-interpretation when confronted with breaks in meaning is emplotting the self. 66 Homo interpretans is here close to Homo narrans. The operation of emplotment is taken here, following the Aristotelian model discussed by Ricoeur, 67 as a synthesizing operation of heterogeneous events into an intelligible unity. The operation of emplotment is made necessary by the discordant character of events. What is applicable at the level of historical or fictional narratives also is applicable, mutatis mutandis, at that of the story of our lives. Because the discordant event is one of a reversal, even of a collapse of our habitual universe of meaning, it requires an interpretive effort on the agent’s part to restore a new meaningful account. To speak of this category of events, we will call them biographical events. An occurrence, in the sense of something happening, becomes a biographical event when it fundamentally and ongoingly affects the meaning some individual gives to his existence, when that individual modifies the overall plot of his past experience, his present experience, and his projected future life. Unlike something that simply happens, a biographical event “can only make sense after the fact, in relation to a course of events or a subsequent event.” 68 Whence the importance of distinguishing, as Claude Romano proposes, facts from events. 69 Whereas a fact is characterized by its reproducibility and predictability, an event inaugurates a break in the meaningful order of our expectations. It is also necessary to distinguish those events that are relatively easy to predict and only relatively irreversible (like students entering the work world after their graduation) from events that are relatively unpredictable and strongly irreversible (as, for example, with someone suddenly struck with an incurable disease). Michel Grossetti uses the term bifurcation—that is, the strongest possible meaning that we can give to the notion of a biological event—for this latter category of events. 70 The criterion of unpredictability itself is worth further comment. A subject may expect with a relative predictability that a future series of events will occur within a relatively determined lapse of time (the birth of a child, entering the job market). But even when this predictability of an event is confirmed by the facts, this does not mean the subject will not be profoundly affected by its occurrence. The birth of a child (a fortiori a first child) for its parents, although relatively predictable once they know the mother is pregnant, generally remains a biographical event that changes their habitual uni-

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verse of meaning, the relation among generations, their own relation. An event, even if strongly predictable, may generate a real crisis of intelligibility. Therefore, it is less the criterion of irreproducibility and unpredictability that permits distinguishing the fact from an event as it is the existence or nonexistence of a radical calling into question of already existing meaning. To be sure, an event can be described as a physical occurrence, as something that happens in the world. 71 In other words, an event is also a fact, but an event is always more than a fact once it is not explainable solely in terms of its antecedents, once it upsets the meaning of the world and of one’s sense of self. The occurrence of such an event is prior to the effort of self-interpretation. It is first of all from the perspective of a disturbance, of undergoing something that an event affects a “subject.” Reference to a “subject” does not signify that a pre-existing identity of the subject to itself must be postulated in each instance as a substance that the event happens to affect like a simple accident. There is a biographical event only if we set aside the substantial principle for which, in spite of the event, being remains identical to itself. The event generates a process of subjectivization. When it occurs, the event “makes me no longer the same.” 72 Subjectivization by an event is not simply reflexive. What allows us to correctly distinguish between a simple accident and a genuine biographical event also has to do with emotions and affections. The “subjective experience” of an event cannot avoid a disturbed felt senses (at the level of emotions and passions) always correlated to an upset meaning (at the level of the reflexive meaning). 73 Without a being who profoundly experiences some form of “changed meaning” as an embodied experience, there cannot be a biographical event. The effort at self-interpretation can only intervene, when it intervenes, in a second time, that is, when the event is capable of being taken up reflexively in a meaning indissociable from an operation of emplotment. Romano already points us in the direction of this linkage when he shows that an event only “happens” in a retrospective manner. Paradoxically, the meaning of an event is never entirely accomplished in the present. 74 It modifies our sense of different times and tenses and our relation to them. Its tense is the future perfect of something that will have occurred. Because events only acquire their meaning retrospectively, fabricating this meaning requires a plot. To talk about a biographical event as significant, as a bifurcation of existence, a “change of fortune” in Aristotle’s sense, an overturning of expectations presupposes, on the one hand, the ability to compare it to other events and the regular, usual course of things that occur in someone’s life and, on the other hand, being able to situate it in a plot of that lifetime. By definition, a biographical event cannot be meaningful only in relation to itself. There must be at least “two points in time” for an event, a bifurcation, a turning point. 75 A biographical event can itself be made up of a

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complex set of events (which is already a potential plot) of an undetermined duration. The lived experience of a war, a job change, a romantic break-up, to cite just these examples, is not experienced as a biographical event in the instant that these events affect a subject for the first time. Most often, it is over time that these events acquire a biographical thickness. But this passage of time would be nothing without the subject’s capacity to weave them into a plot, that is, to arrange and rearrange them as meaningful; in short, to tell a story about them. When a biographical event can be given a meaning through a self-interpretation, it belongs to a biographical work (to a “putting life back together”), as Anselm Strauss puts it, 76 that is, to a re-negotiation of the meaning of one’s past experience by a new way of telling one’s life story. Biographical work is therefore indissociable from a narrative about the self. Where a biographical event creates discontinuity, sometimes radical discontinuity (as in the case of subjects struck by chronic illness analyzed by Strauss), between a prior and a subsequent sense of self, this narrative, as a particular technique, when it can be used, contributes to recreating biographical continuity. Such biographical work, say in the case of a work of mourning, is never definitely completed just like those narrative identities that continue to be made and remade. Upset by a biographical breakdown, a subject can try to incorporate the occurrence of an event into a new plot in which the event modifies the previous life story, especially when this is experienced naturalistically: “Identity only becomes a preoccupation and, indirectly, an object of analysis when things do not go as expected, when their usual meaning is no longer simply given, and when the actors are unable to agree about the meaning of the situation or the roles they are supposed to play in it.” 77 Whence the existence of disjoint, incomplete, deconstructed narrative configurations in which the event fits with difficulty in the life narrative taken as a well-ordered whole, as a “synthesis of the heterogeneous” (goals, motives, accidents). This is why we should not pre-judge the “wellconstructed” character of plots of the self following the rules for narrative inherited from the Aristotelian tradition. This is no doubt the weakness of Ricoeur’s conceptualization of narrative identity, which refers all these fragments of stories, of disjoint, nonchronological stories, lacking an ending or even a dated beginning to a “prenarrative experience.” 78 Everyday life is made up of micro-plots that never add up to what “well-made” narratives require. The model of emplotment (muthos) privileged by Ricoeur is finally just one particular form of narrativity. 79 Incomplete narrations allow us to think about biographical events whose affective and traumatic charge prevents the subject from speaking about the event in question. These limit-experiences block the process of self-interpretation as a biographical undertaking and emplotting of one’s self. If there is no interpretation of the self apart from a prior experience of an upset meaning (as some-

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how undergone), every crisis or break in meaning does not necessarily lead to a reflexive appropriation of meaning through a new plot (as something done). Narrative self-interpretation is the optimistic version of what follows from the test of a habitual universe of meaning being upset. But this version does not allow us to account for the impossibility or difficulty of carrying out such an interpretation, of inscribing oneself in a new plot, even of refusing any narrative self-interpretation in the favor of individual episodes as discussed by Galen Strawson. 80 Ordinary subjects as well as specialists may find themselves impotent in the face of images, signs, and words that do not go together to make up any apparent meaning, much less a profound one. The limits of interpretation are the limits of all discourse in the face of nonsense or too much meaning that cannot be “sublated” (in the sense of an Aufhebung) into meaningful language, be it profane or professional. They are also the limits of hermeneutics as a scientific means of interpretation, when it wagers, as does Gadamer, on appropriating what is foreign (as, for example, with an ancient text), on making it familiar, contemporary; when it wagers, as in Ricoeur, on converting the intensity of forces (drives, anxieties, symptoms) to the sphere of meaning. Admitting this gives legitimacy to the hypothesis of the uninterpretable, for which the unnarratable is just one particular form. Apart from assuming a space empty of every sign, we can always bet that if there are signs present that we can grasp through our natural organs or technical instruments, then there will be the possibility of some interpretation. But this possibility must always confront the possibility of a radically foreign non-meaning in the facts that will lead to an at least provisional failure of interpretation, or to the possibility of an infinite regress. It is also necessary to distinguish, on the one hand, an apparent non-meaning that would be a result of a lack of competence, of knowledge, of experience on the part of the interpreter, even while supposing, as the principle of charity requires, that the universe of signs in question is in fact endowed a priori with significance. On the other hand, there may be non-meaning, produced voluntarily or involuntarily, that sets a limit to every unavailing interpretation. In this latter case, the limit does not depend on interpretive competence but on the object to be interpreted, even if the boundary between them may be open to dispute. Beyond this particular case, a whole palette of states, of experiences, have to be admitted that directly challenge the most optimistic versions of pragmatism and hermeneutics, which presuppose that the uncanny, the disturbing, the shocking, and traumas are always susceptible of being appropriated, surpassed as the promise of new possibilities of meaning and action. The same may be said for those experiences that break the circle the subject forms with himself:

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The disturbing is rapidly dispossessed of its initial negative tone. As soon as the “first,” “paralyzing” effect is rapidly surpassed, Dewey attaches a “stimulating,” enchanting “opposite effect” to it. This is one feature of the orientation of pragmatist philosophy. The shock finds itself immediately given a positive value in that it supports and signals problems that provide “ideals” to be worked on. 81

Pragmatism remains largely unaware of negative events, of “difficult to cash in” events that do find consecration in a reflexive taking up of them: “Before being a ‘stimulus’ which ‘awakens curiosity,’ shock remains a collision that suspends action and cripples the one who undergoes it, by abruptly calling into question what is important to him or to what he is doing. Its first mode of occurring is as an accident, an experienced difficulty, even as a commotion, if not yet a traumatism.” 82 This is the case with trauma as an event that we are unable to make our own and which manifests itself as the experience of terror: “a traumatic event . . . in breaking into a human adventure and resisting an advenant’s assimilation, is rather that which thwarts any transformation from self to self, any experience, freezing an advenant’s very adventure and preventing him from advening.” 83 Even more troubling and radical is the experience of despair in that it renders difficult the possibility of being affected by an event. Mere mention of the event—when it is not, in certain cases, purely and simply repressed of displaced—produces a crack in subject’s awareness such that they are placed in a sort of fragmented narrative and interpretive state. These limit-experiences (ecstasy, anxiety, traumatism, despair) are rich in lessons for understanding the limits and failures of self-interpretation. Without some experience of a problematic break in the order of meaning, there is no need to turn to a biographical work of self-interpretation. The agent lives in a mode of immediate self-understanding requiring no reflexive and interpretive detour. The subject is not incited to engage in an interpretive round regarding themselves without the prior overturning of the meaning already there. The intensity of the shock undergone as well as the weaknesses of subject’s resources and disposition to confront it may always generate an incapacity to setting in motion any self-interpretation. Then the collapse of meaning that is undergone coincides with the shaking, even the nihilation of any subjective appropriation. Of course, there is an intermediate range of affective variations in self-interpretation between these limit-experiences and microdistortions in the meaningfulness of everyday life that do not necessitate a global reworking of the “true novel” we weave for ourselves. At the end of this first stage in our anthropological overview of interpretation, centered on the comparison between human beings and animals, let us recall the three conditions that allow us to identify the proto-interpretations that are at work at the sensory-motor of life and interpretations stricto sensu

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(without having to say anything here about meta-interpretations): first, the symbolic institution of humanity and the openness of human concerns to horizons of meaning that exceed the surrounding world; second, the reflexive suspending of the understanding of meaning that is not self-evidently given; and third, the capacity for self-interpretation whose mediate reflexivity about problematic meaning gets turned directly on the subject who has become a stranger to himself.

Chapter Two

The Lifeworld and the Mirror of Meaning

The previous chapter dealt with the properly human conditions of interpretation; the present one will pursue this inquiry in terms of the historical, cultural, and social conditions of interpretive activity. It not so much the contrast between human beings (as a species) and other animals that will interest us as it will be the comparison of humans with other humans (as historical, social, and cultural beings). The hypothesis of the universality of human interpretive activity—without which the very idea of homo interpretans would lose its pertinence—requires, however, that we consider the conditions and variations in interpretation across history, cultures, and societies. A look at Jan Patočka’s Heretical Essays invites us to reflect on the historical conditions of interpretation. 1 The short, dense essays of this Czech phenomenologist provide a useful framework for thinking about “meaning as problematic,” one of his key concepts. The heart of his approach lies in an inflection given to the Husserlian thesis that the natural world should not simply be assimilated to the pre-scientific world (as in the Crisis) but to a pre-historic world in a specific sense, quite distant from the historiographical notion of prehistory. Paradoxically, the pre-historic world, as Patočka envisages it, is not empty of stories, myths, and annals. On the contrary, these narrative forms serve to maintain human beings in pre-history, that is, in a social, vital circle of the transmission and reception of a universe of unquestioned meanings. The pre-historic world, like the natural world, is fundamentally a “non-problematic” world: “life simply as it is [is] contained in the self-evidence of received meaning, in the traditional way of life, in its forms and modes. This life is accepted in its finitude and toil, approved as what is appropriate and destined for humans.” 2 33

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If this description illuminates the process of naturalizing meaning, it errs, however, through its underlying historicism that intervenes to define the properly historical world. Coherent with this, the historic world is characterized by the “problematicity of meaning.” History begins when human beings no longer accept the meaning transmitted by tradition; history begins when, meaning having been denaturalized, humans become interpreters. In other words, interpretation, in the strong sense, is not an anthropological disposition, but a contingent historical possibility. Proof of this, for Patočka, is that history is really born with Greek civilization, which calls into question the political, cosmological, and natural order. The great denaturalization of meaning is born with the Greeks. It is the heritage of the problematicity of meaning that lies at the basis of European civilization. And Patočka takes up the intention behind Husserl’s Crisis: “From that it appears to follow that history as an unfolding and gradual realization of this teleological idea is essentially the history of Europe, and of the rest of the world only insofar as it enters the field of European culture. Another consequence appears to be that the beginning of history must coincide with the beginning of European culture.” 3 As a counterpart to this, other civilizations, if we may still call them that, that preceded the “Greek miracle” or that have not yet been directly affected by its aura are confined to the pre-historic world. This applies to the annals of the Near East, Egypt, and China whose narratives preserve the “life style of humans” in a given sense and prescribe that they confine themselves to accepting and preserving life as it is. Without contesting the existence of a “Greek miracle,” we can wager, however, that Patočka’s eurocentrism will not long hold out against more detailed research in the historical anthropology of non-European civilization. The confusion comes from the status of reality granted to the “problematicity of meaning” correlative with the historic world. When Patočka speaks of a problematic world, he has in mind a more philosophical than anthropological meaning, one that is more meta-interpretive than interpretive. The problematicity of meaning, from this perspective, has more to do with the totality of existing beings, “the whole of existence”: “nothing of the earlier life of acceptance remains in peace; all the pillars of the community, traditions, and myths, are equally shaken, as are all the answers that once preceded questions.” 4 Without a doubt, to Patočka’s eyes this uprooting and emancipation from transmitted meaning culminates in philosophical activity akin to an epoché and now set within historical conditions of possibility, that is, in its cradle in ancient Greece. Yet we can give a broader conceptual status to the notion of the problematicity of meaning, one that is anthropological and social. Within this framework, the problematicity of meaning as Patočka expresses it is only one radicalized variant of interpretation, not only in that it has to do with the

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totality of things, but also in that it is given philosophically, that is, as metainterpretive. The problematicity of meaning acquires a much broader meaning, however, if we consider it as an ordinary human activity confronted with some rupture in the immediate comprehension of meaning, without pre-judging where it is questioned. We can then decontextualize the problematicity of meaning from its framework of the philosophy of history it still has for Patočka to recontextualize it within a pragmatist analysis of ordinary activities, as Quéré and Terzi propose. 5 And it is then possible to substitute the expression “pre-historic world” for “immediate experience” (in Mead’s sense). In dehistoricizing the experience of the problematicity of meaning, we give it anthropological sense, properly speaking. On this condition, we can maintain the hypothesis of the universality of homo interpretans. In other words, whatever culture or civilization they may belong to, humans can experience the strangeness of a given meaning (of an action, a speech act, a text), without necessarily having to question (scientifically or philosophically) the totality of existing things or the encompassing order of the world. Even in pre-historic societies in Patočka’s sense, traditions are never passively received. They are the object of interpretations meant to reinscribe them in the present generation, or to confront them with other traditions, or to make sense of disturbances in the cycles of life. The symbolic universe of human societies is never entirely fixed and atemporal, even in those most foreign to our own. The anthropological take on interpretation does not prevent our taking account of historical and cultural variations in how odd meanings occur or are received. In this regard, Greek civilization did invent an entirely new way of asking questions in that it involved a reflexive suspending of the totality of meaningful orders. We can confirm the universal condition of homo interpretans thanks to work in historical anthropology. Carlo Ginzburg offers a striking synthesis in his essay titled “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm.” 6 There is no need to wait for the emergence of the so-called historic world to see that the first hunter and gatherer societies already practiced interpretive activities that were primitive but primordial. As necessary to the group’s survival, hunting mobilized a whole palette of know-how and knowing where and when to look, of knowing how to see as; that is, a practice and learned skill in deciphering the tracks and other traces left by animals. We are far here from questions about social, political, or natural order, but close to an interpretive activity directed to tracking prey. Why is there a testing of meaning in hunting? Because one does not spontaneously see the tracks an animal has left in the mud, or the traces indicated by broken branches, excrement, or lost feathers. The clues to be deciphered are more important than the meaning intended by the human mind. Yet these natural phenomena are no less subject to a kind of epoché than are cultural symbols. When a clue is not immediately readable, the

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hunter must learn to see how it takes the place of the animal having passed by this way. We can say that the hunter, before the historian, constructs “place takers” or représentances (things that “stand for” other things—in Ricoeur’s sense of this term) once the interpreted trace or track takes the place of the presence of some past thing. Even if non-philosophical, the interpretation used in hunting is not wholly ordinary in that it presupposes specialized forms of know-how as a function of the properties of animals (analyses, comparisons, classifications), their habits, their Umwelt. Deciphering these traces while hunting may be based moreover on a kind of experimental knowledge or interpretive technique (the relation between whole and parts, between cause and effect), or forms of divination like the interpretation of dreams that may play a crucial part in the path taken the day of the hunt. Ginzburg hypothesizes that the first forms of narration were born from the experience of deciphering the tracks left by prey: “the hunter would have been the first one to ‘tell a story’ because he alone was able to read, in the silent, nearly imperceptible tracks left by his prey, a coherent series of events.” 7 But it would be wrong to reduce these deciphering techniques to a purely utilitarian activity: by attributing to the gods the capacity to communicate with their subjects through written messages—in the stars, bodies, everywhere—which the diviners had the task of deciphering. . . . The identification of soothsaying with the deciphering of the divine characters inscribed in reality was reinforced by the pictorial features of cuneiform writing: like divination, it too designated one thing through another. Even a footprint indicates an animal’s passing. 8

MAKING SENSE AND CULTURAL FORMS The technique of decipherment, whether that of a hunter or a soothsayer, applies not only to material tracks or natural signs, but equally to the interrelated meanings of social reality, to myths, stories, kinship systems. What still needs to be considered is whether, at the scale of such a symbolic grammar, there are societies that are less “interpretive” than others. Here the opposition between a pre-historic and a historic world reappears but enriched by work done in ethnology and social anthropology. The debate between Ricoeur and Lévi-Strauss offers interesting suggestions about not confining the initial antagonism to a philosophy of history limited by its ethnocentrism. A hint is given by the transition from the texts in Structural Anthropology to those in The Savage Mind. A qualitative leap occurs with the generalization of structuralism, which starting with the analysis of social systems of totemic societies, was extended to include the universal structures of human thought. “Savage thought” is not just the thought of “savages,” to be assimilated as in Lévy-Bruhl to a “pre-logic” opposed to real “logic” among civil-

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ized peoples. Paradoxically, savage thought is thought working at the level of the classifications and nomenclatures in the unconscious. Structural anthropology, based on a linguistic model, allows objectifying structure as a system of differences. Ricoeur draws our attention to the fact that Lévi-Strauss always draws his examples of savage thought from the geographical and cultural world of totemism, never from Semitic, pre-Hellenic, or Indo-European thought. Here is where the problem of generalizing from a so-called savage thought to every culture arises. The problem arises in that, within the setting of totemism as Lévi-Strauss presents it, understanding does not consist in taking up intended meanings, understanding does not consist in taking up anew signifying intentions, reviving them through a historical act of interpretation which would itself be inscribed within a continuous tradition. Intelligibility is attributed to the code of transformations which assure correspondences and homology between arrangements belonging to different levels of social reality (clan organization, nomenclatures and classifications of animals and plants, myths and arts, etc.). 9

In fact, there is a double correlated problem that needs to be considered: on the one hand, whether only the so-called totemic societies are unaware of operations of taking up meaning in terms of a tradition; on the other, whether we can generalize from this model of “savage thought” to other cultures. Let us note, however, in order better to understand what is at stake in this debate, that Ricoeur sees interpretation as a particular kind of hermeneutic orientation that proceeds from deciphering symbols as signs with a double meaning, a semantic structure through which a first, literal, physical sense refers to a figured, spiritual one that is not given apart from this indirect designation. The interpretation at stake here is far removed from inquiries about meaning in ordinary contexts where meaning has become problematic. But the interest of Ricoeur’s perspective is that it considers this suspension of meaning not as a fault but as a surplus of meaning. A surplus of meaning that is valid, however, only for symbolic systems which are durably fixed, which can be sedimented precisely as a tradition. But as we shall see in part II, interpretation is not reducible to fixed documents analogous to texts; it extends to the whole sequence of ordinary interactions that may be submitted to distortions of their meanings. Let us return to the discussion between Ricoeur and Lévi-Strauss. A first way of responding to the previous problems consists in opposing cultures. Totemic cultures are easily analyzed by a structural method in which synchrony is more important than diachrony. This is why these cultures are so sensitive to events: “As in linguistics, the event is threatening or at least upsetting, and in any case is a purely contingent interference (demographic upheavals—wars, epidemics—which alter the established order).” 10 By seek-

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ing to annul the impact of the event, totemic systems at the same time limit the possibility of inscribing it in a history and a tradition of meaning, in the inter-play of interpretations and reinterpretations: “classificatory systems thus allow the incorporation of history history; even and particularly, that which might be thought to defy the system.” 11 The way history and events present themselves is different in cultures stemming from the Judeo-Christian traditions Ricoeur calls “kerygmatic,” for which the first model is found in the biblical “kerygma”: the announcement of Yahweh’s great deeds, which constitute a series of events (the deliverance from Egypt, crossing the Red Sea, the revelation at Sinai, the wandering in the dessert). Here the diachronic predominates over synchrony, history over system, creative interpretation over classification. These events, which constitute the kerygma, continue to be reinterpreted each generation on the basis of traditions that confer a historical character on that understanding: Thus the structural regulation is much closer to the phenomenon of inertia than to the living reinterpretation which seems to us to characterize true tradition. It is because semantic regulation proceeds from the excess of potential meaning over its use and function inside the given synchronic system that the hidden time of symbols can carry the twofold historicity—of tradition, which transmits and sediments the interpretation, of interpretation, which maintains and renews the tradition. 12

Does this antagonism between totemic cultures and kerygmatic ones not lead finally to the opposition between a historic world and a pre-historic one? Yes and no. Yes, in that we have something like a meta-interpretive concept in Ricoeur as well as in Patočka. Yes, in that totemic cultures can be assimilated to pre-historic worlds. No, in that the problematicity of meaning for Patočka is seen as a radical suspension of the totality of beings, whereas the questioning of meaning for Ricoeur is inscribed in a tradition that sediments interpretations and an interpretation that renews the tradition. For Patočka, interpretation is drawn to the side of a radical break with received traditions, whereas for Ricoeur it is drawn to the side of a renewing of traditions of meaning. No, in that, even though applying to the same “historic” cultures, Patočka privileges the radical epoché coming from the Greeks, whereas Ricoeur privileges the recovery and renewal of meaning coming from the Judeo-Christian tradition. To privilege a strict antagonism between totemic and kerygmatic cultures would risk ending up with the same aporias as with the opposition between a historic and a pre-historic world. But Ricoeur’s argument is important in that it lends itself to a closer reading. Certainly, he readily acknowledges that some (kerygmatic) cultures are better understood with the help of a hermeneutic understanding. But he also admits that these cultures, for which the

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Judeo-Christian scriptures are just one component, are not lacking in systems of nomenclatures and classifications for which structural analysis can provide an account. Therefore, it is necessary to admit a certain universality to “savage thought,” even if it expresses itself in different cultural forms. Reciprocally, other (totemic) cultures, where synchrony predominates over diachrony, better lend themselves to structural analysis. Nevertheless, Ricoeur shows that, based on the evidence Lévi-Strauss provides, totemic cultures are not deprived of “recoveries of meaning”: “A good example to consider is the homology between marriage rules and food prohibitions; the analogy between eating and marrying, between fasting and chastity, constitutes a metaphorical relation anterior to the operation of transformation.” 13 We can go further than this example, on the condition of moving beyond the narrow hermeneutic concept of interpretation proposed by Ricoeur. When societies of a totemic type are confronted by upsetting events (epidemics, natural catastrophes, war), they have no other choice, if they are not to put themselves at risk, than to produce techniques of interpretation to deal with the distortions introduced into the meaning and coherence of their symbolic system, without pre-judging whether they will succeed or not. If mythical thought, “that ‘bricoleur,’ builds up structures by fitting together events, or rather the remains of events,” 14 it is because it can pragmatically, if fragilely, suspend the meaning of immediate experience and inscribe it in its symbolic order. It is not just the surplus of meaning that generates the interpretive process within the framework of a sedimented tradition, but equally the disturbing upsetting of meaning by some event that shakes up systems of classification. The double antagonism—between a pre-historic and a historic world; between totemic and kerygmatic cultures—is unsatisfying in that it does not allow us to account for the way in which interpretation operates in cultures refractory to it. Recent work in ethnology and anthropology, including by post-structuralists, testifies to this when one pays closer attention, as Philippe Descola proposes, to a broader typology of cultures: totemism, animism, analogism, naturalism. 15 The detour through structural anthropology is not just necessary to reveal the cultural diversity of symbolic systems—against the backdrop of the universality of homo interpretans. It is also required if we are to disclose the cultural conditions of possibility of the interpretive act. Nothing could be more mistaken, despite individual variations, than to consider interpretation as free of any constraint and any predisposition. Cultural anthropology teaches us the importance of frameworks, forms, and symbolic structures starting from which we make sense of the world, others, and ourselves. Whence the opportunity of returning to the Kantian heritage of the schematism, taken up by the philosophy of symbolic forms initiated by Cassirer as well as in the

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line of anthropology that runs from Lévi-Strauss to Descola, passing through Bourdieu. Kant defines the schematism as the operation that makes possible the application of the categories of the understanding to experienced phenomena. What is significant about the use of this idea in structural anthropology is the extending of it to include the representation of a class of situations that allow a subject to act in a meaningful manner to instances where they are confronted by analogous situations. Like Durkheim before him, Lévi-Strauss aspires to “sociologize” the Kantian schematism, while conserving the idea that this operation remains “an art concealed in the depths of the human soul.” Lévi-Strauss pushes this perspective to its limit in lodging the schematism at the stage of the structural unconscious, as with the three elementary structures of kinship (bilateral, matrilateral, and patrilateral), which cannot be actualized as a system of signs apart from relations of opposition among them. We come to the limits of “savage thought” and the hypothesis of its university. Taking into account the cultural diversity of symbolic systems is not incompatible for Lévi-Strauss with the existence of a basic structure of the human mind: Every newborn child comes equipped, in the form of adumbrated mental structures, with all the means ever available to mankind to define its relations to the world in general and to others. But these structures are exclusive. Each of them can integrate only certain elements out of all that are offered. Consequently, each type of social organization represents a choice, which the group imposes and perpetuates. 16

These partly innate dispositions must be assimilated to “welcoming structures” (in the sense proposed by the biologist François Jacob) that allow the child to react to the stimuli in their environment. These structures, as potential practical schemes, can only be actualized, given content, and direction in contact with the symbolic systems in place in each society. Which is why the means of education and socialization are so important. Some practical schemes require a time of apprenticeship owing to the quantity of information to be taken in and given an order. The practice of hunting among the Achuar Indians offers a good example in that it is men older than forty who statistically return with the most catch. Descola notes that the adolescent, however, possesses a quite admirable know-how and tracking ability (the ability to identify several hundred animals, to imitate their calls, to describe their habits). Still, it is necessary for them to wait for another twenty years in order to be able to bring back a catch every time they go hunting:

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What does he really learn during this time that makes a difference? No doubt, he completes his ethological learning and his knowledge of the interdependence of ecosystems, but the essential thing is probably that he gains a much better ability to interconnect a mass of heterogeneous information in a way that allows an efficacious and immediate response to any type of situation encountered. 17

With Descola, we may distinguish between cognitive schemes held to be natural and universal, and those acquired through some cultural system. Among the former, even if the debate continues among biologists and psychologists, we can count those schemes having to do with the expectations behind human actions (imputing intentions to others), those concerning the mode of being of physical objects, and those concerning the nature of non-human organisms. However, anthropology privileges those collective schemes that allow constructing culturally shared meanings: First of all, by structuring in a selective way the flow of perception by granting a significant preeminence to certain features and processes observable in the environment. Next, by organizing the expression of thought and emotions as a practice according to relatively standardized scenarios. Finally, by providing a framework of typical interpretations of behavior and events, of admissible and communicable interpretations within the community where the habitual ways of life these translate are accepted as normal. 18

What does this taking up of the idea of the schematism by anthropology teach us about understanding interpretive activity? First, that the cultural schematism intervenes in every form of immediate understanding of symbolic and natural worlds. Cultural schemes set the framework through which we identify, relate, categorize, classify, and signify natural things, artificial objects, and social beings. With Descola, we can take ontological classification systems as a function of different cultures: animism understands the relation between humans and non-humans in terms of inner resemblances and physical differences 19; totemism in terms of inner resemblances and physical resemblances; naturalism in terms of inner and physical differences; and analogism in terms of inner differences and physical differences. For example, in Achuar totemism, concerning which Descola is an expert, animals are classified as a function of human attributes and their degree of proximity with their mode of life. The cultural schematism intervenes, for example, in the fact that Achuar women see the plants in their gardens as children that they are supposed to bring to maturity, whereas the men see their prey as a brother-in-law, “an unstable, difficult relation that demands mutual respect and circumspection.” 20 When a cultural schematism intervenes in ordinary non-problematic situations, we have to do with an activity of meaning-giving, but one we can

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qualify as proto- or pre-interpretive. This is the case with those collective schemes Descola calls non-reflexive that belong as much to the sensorymotor scale of what Charles Taylor calls proto-interpretations as to the preinterpretive, pre-propositional level of systems of classification of what LéviStrauss calls “savage thought” or even knowledge based on the use of things, practical meanings, or what Bourdieu calls habitus, that is, embodied knowhow and the ability to see things. On the other hand, when individuals and groups are confronted with distortions of meaning, bumps in their typical responses to the social or natural environment, a properly interpretive activity is required to reestablish a continuity of meaning, to remove equivocations, to include an event in a symbolic order. Cultural schemes do intervene at this reflexive level of interpretation. That is, there are culturally schematic ways of responding to the problematicity of meaning. When we are confronted with micro-distortions of meaning, already existing interpretive schemes—typical ways of responding to problematic situations—are sufficient to reestablish the continuity of meaningfulness of a system. In this case, the schematic operation is akin to the determinative judgment (in the Kantian sense) of subsuming the disturbing event under a preexisting scheme: for example, the tracks left by an animal that do not have the habitual outlines of those left by the same category of animal, or a painting attributed to a well-known artist that breaks with his habitual style. These micro-distortions of ordinary meaning do not make a real impact on the relative homology between existing schemes and mental structures, on the one hand, and the cultural systems and natural orders, on the other. An interpretive “bricolage” suffices for integrating and recombining events into the coherence of symbolic systems that only undergo minor modifications. The configuration is wholly different when societies are faced with a problematicity of meaning sufficient to totally overturn preexisting cultural schemes and show them to be inadequate. This is the case, for example, with major disturbances of ecosystems; ongoing wars; political, cultural, and economic revolutions; colonial invasions; cultural shocks. People then experience a substantial gap between existing schemes and the new world order, a gap that bears witness to the impotency of determinative judgment and habitual procedures of interpretation. In the most unfavorable situations, the hiatus between schemes and worlds can persist, grow, and signal the failure of an interpretive process, even the progressive destruction of cultural universals, as shown by the number of animist or totemic societies that have been unable to generate a hold on or recovery of meaning in the face of disturbances affecting them. This is true a fortiori for societies where synchronic structures predominate, and which are most sensitive to events, as Lévi-Strauss has shown.

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In the most favorable cases, on the contrary, we can observe the invention of new schemes meant to surmount the hitherto unknown problematicity of meaning, an operation akin to the role the imagination plays in reflective judgment. Here invention can take the path of a previously unknown combination of already existing schemes, of translation and importation of existing schemes from other cultural universes to fabricate new schemes likely to adapt to new configurations of the world and of nature. The scale of these reversals of meaning is such that an individual is incapable of producing a new cultural scheme on their own, for these are by nature collective schemes. The upset in meaning may be so large that it is not just one cultural scheme that turns out to be inapplicable, but the whole set of a culture’s schemes. For example, the imposition and penetration of naturalism, through colonialization, in totemic cultures may no longer allow seeing the non-human as being in psychic and social continuity with the human. Here we are not far from Patočka’s understanding of the problematicity of meaning when whole political, social, and natural orders are called into question, even if this is owing to a Eurocentric prejudice on his part. In these rare historical cases, interpretation most clearly reveals its reflective function. When it does not fail owing to the scale of the collapse of meaning, when it is able to invent new schemes and to reconfigure in a new way the cultural universe of meanings, at the same time interpretation contributes to giving them a history. A history is not just the history of ordinary accidents through which the diachronic only affects the synchronic in a minor way, it is another history in which the destabilizing power of the diachronic completely shifts the coherence of the synchronic by reconfiguring it into a new symbolic structure. SOCIAL SCHEMES AND THE BIOGRAPHICAL SITUATION Cultural schemes, because they are “so thematic” and endowed with a “high level of abstraction,” because they apply to a broad range of situations, can be assimilated to what Philippe Descola calls “integrative schemes.” “Integrative schemes are highly complex, but ones whose understanding is crucial for anthropology since everything suggests that it is their mediating function which, in large part, contributes the feeling we all have of having a same culture and cosmology in common with other individuals.” 21 It is at this high level of generality that the lines of demarcation between cultures play out following, for example, the ontological continuity or discontinuity between the human and non-human. Also, because these integrative schemes are deeply sedimented and socially integrated historically, they are the ones most resistant to disturbing events—apart from the large-scale

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shocks to meaning mentioned previously—and the ones most likely to reproduce themselves over time. In contrast to these integrative schemes are specialized ones, which apply narrower rules for particular situations, for particular groups or subgroups (families, clans, and so on): “they shape our everyday existence in that they organize most of our actions, from those applying to our bodies or ways of expressing emotions to our use of cultural stereotypes and forms of classifications.” 22 It will be convenient to call these specialized schemes “social schemes” akin to what Pierre Bourdieu theorizes as kinds of habitus. Produced by the practice of successive generations, in determined types of conditions of existence, “these schemes of perception, appreciation and action, which are acquired through practice and implemented in the practical state without attaining explicit representation, function as practical operators through which the objective structures of which they are the product tend to be reproduced in practices.” 23 In Bourdieu we find the same operation of “sociologizing” the Kantian schema we find in Lévi-Strauss or Descola. The schematism by which a habitus functions again takes place at the state of unconscious or pre-conscious thought, without coming to explicit representation. Defined as structured and structuring practices, habitus easily lends itself to a structuralist reading. But Bourdieu’s structuralism remains fundamentally heterodox or genetic in that he sets the schematism in a basic historicity, which allows rejecting the excessive emphasis on objectivity in Lévi-Strauss. The constructive dimension of Bourdieu’s structuralism is meant precisely to do away with the structuralist reification that makes “structures” ahistorical systems of relations. Bourdieu’s hetero-structuralism reintroduces the force of the diachronic to “structures.” Field and habitus are concepts intended to account both for resistances to change and potentials of transformation and transposition (the transposition of schemes of ways of seeing and the divisions of social worlds into other forms). The historicity of habitus is held to apply both to the point of view of the historical “origin” of dispositions and to the point of view on their process of continual adaptation and transformation, however slowly it may occur, in different contexts. Although deeply sedimented as structured dispositions in bodies and minds, these practical schemes do have a history whose genesis the sociologist can trace. If forms of habitus have a history, they also allow for the possibility of a rule-governed invention of practices within the bounds of acquired dispositions, a fortiori when groups are confronted with major distortions in their environment (as with the transformation of traditional Algerian agriculture following French colonization), with gaps between mental and social structures:

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Because the habitus is an infinite capacity for generating products—thoughts, perceptions, expressions and actions—whose limits are set by the historically and socially situated conditions of its production, the conditioned and conditional freedom it provides is as remote from creation of unpredictable novelty as it is from simple mechanical reproduction of the original conditioning. 24

To be sure, there is more openness to the “play” of possibilities in the mechanism of habitus than we may ordinarily grant to them. Nonetheless, because it remains an art concealed in the depths of what it is to be human, habitus stems more, as “practical reason,” from the pre-interpretive, the proto-interpretive, and the pre-reflexive than it makes room for interpretive and reflexive schemes or takes sufficiently into account the singularity of situations or biographical experience. Cultural and social schemes, integrative and specialized ones, whether they work at the surface or in the depths of the mind and human embodiment, have nothing “personal” about them. They have to do with an impersonal transcendental field as conditions of possibility of meaningful activities shared by the members of cultures and related social groups. It is on this basis that there can be a collective experience of learned shared understanding through the institutions of socialization and education. Even those instances placed under the heading of self-interpretation are constantly mediated by these social and cultural schemes. It is just that each person’s history and experience, the diversity (or narrowness) of groups with which they are in contact, the singular manner in which they acquire cultural and social schemes over the course of successive socializations, the particular manner in which they respond to environmental shocks, mean that self-understandings and interpretations or the world and of others have an irreducible idiosyncrasy. The typical, generalized, and impersonal structure of integrative and specialized schemes is constantly altered, in varying degrees based on lived experience, by what we may call with Alfred Schutz biographical situations and experience. The phenomenology of the social world presented by Alfred Schutz also takes up the tradition of the Kantian and Husserlian schematism in order to discover the schemes of experience at work in all intentional activity by which the syntheses of identification and recognition of subjects and objects in the world take place. Lived experience of situations is not singular in every case but includes degrees of typicality and reproducibility acquired over the course of each person’s socio-biographical experience (in the mode of “and if so . . . I can”). Thus lived experience constitutes “stores of experience” that directly structure the “schemes of experience” which intervene in perceptive and evaluative activity as well as in a subject’s expressive and representative activity. Among these schemes of experience, Schutz distinguishes the “interpretive schemes” that subsume the meaning of current experience

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grasped through the pertinence of its context as a function of the store of meanings already acquired through prior experience. To the degree that these interpretive schemes present themselves as “passive syntheses” and as pre-reflexive, it would be preferable to speak of them as pre-interpretive, a fortiori when the schematization occurs without any particular bumps, when the operations of identification and recognition intend relatively stable, similar, and determined objects, subjects, situations, and interactions. The work of interpretive schematization really intervenes when the given meaning of an event, situation, text, or interaction no longer can be subsumed under acquired schemes of experience, when the activity of comprehension, perception, or action butts up against new, incongruous situations irreducible to routine answers, to typification, to institutionalization. Typical interpretations are no longer adapted to atypical situations. It is no longer a question of drawing on (acquired) experience, but of making a (new) experience by constructing new interpretive schemes capable of better responding to the challenge of what seems foreign, indeterminate, novel when it comes to its meaning. These new interpretive schemes may themselves be sedimented as stores and schemes of experience until challenged by a new problematicity of meaning. This interpretive activity, in the strong sense of the term, that is as suspensive, reflexive, and creative allows correct and meaningful expression in language or ways of acting, and the invention of appropriate solutions and viable responses to the problems that spring up from contexts whose meaning is unclear. To this “active structuring” of the store of experience must be added the “character of attainable rationality” of interpretive schemes: it comes down to a patchwork of recipes and instructions, procedures and indications. 25

The experience of a foreigner so well described by Schutz in his essay on social psychology allows us to gain a more precise idea of the process the problematicity of meaning leads to following the shock of encountering a new cultural environment. The foreigner’s first attitude is to translate this new world in terms familiar to them, that is, by using the store and schemes of experience acquired in their original social and cultural universe. But these schemes rapidly turn out to be inadequate for grasping the pertinence of these new social configurations, so that the stranger’s cultural world no longer functions as a system of tested scripts. The traveler thus has to call into question and suspend almost everything that had been able to be taken for granted, redefine the pertinence of situations, rearrange the cultural order of significance, and relearn what others’ intentions mean. Errors in evaluation, misunderstandings, and equivocation will be legion and testify to a trial and error process of interpretation that will often be marked by rejection, mockery, and stigmatization on the part of the new social group belonged to: “In

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other words, the cultural pattern of the approached group is to the stranger not a shelter but a field of adventure, not a matter of course but a questionable topic of investigation, not an instrument for disentangling problematic situations but a problematic situation in itself and one hard to master.” 26 The stranger’s adventure is therefore a personal emotional test, in which the clash of cultural worlds may end up as a collapse of meaning, with no possibility of regaining it, no possibility of inventing new interpretive schemes, no possibility of integrating the new cultural environment. In return, the presence of a stranger can allow for re-interrogating “what is practically self-evident,” the “world given in advance,” the “cultural basis” pre-understood by the participants in habitual processes of mutual understanding. Consider the brief sketch Habermas offers and analyzes in a quite Schutzean way 27: At a worksite an older worker asks a younger one to go buy beer for their “second breakfast” break. This interaction in the lifeworld of the professional sector of the building trades in Germany, because it is typical and routine, does not usually call for interpretation, nor does it require defining the situation (the interaction between the older and the younger worker), the “theme” second breakfast), the “plan” (go buy some beer), or any regression (if so . . .) to practical, linguistic, or cultural assumptions about the objective cultural world (what is beer? a worksite? Second breakfast?) and the social world (the hierarchical relation between workers, the tradition of taking a break). Nor is it necessary to reflexively pick out the pertinence of the situation from the broader background of significant horizons and meanings. The lived world familiar to these workers is not questioned and is marked by continuing forms of mutual understanding and structured interactions established by habits, traditions, and routines. The same may be said for every everyday world with its “naïve familiarity,” as Schutz puts it, which is there “without causing any problem,” as the “unquestioned ground of certain doxic attitudes.” There is no need for a more explicit understanding. This common lived world given in advance, and culturally transmitted, is the indispensable basis for spontaneous intersubjective understanding. It constitutes the store of meaning from which a cooperative process of interpretation may occur: “Every new situation appears in a lifeworld composed of a cultural stock of knowledge that is ‘always already’ familiar.” 28 But it is just this cultural knowledge that is not familiar to the foreigner. Habermas does not pursue this example as far as he might. For it turns out that the request by the “old worker” to the young one is to an emigrant who promptly replies that “he isn’t thirsty.” It is also easy to imagine that he is not used to drinking beer in the morning or that his health or religion forbids drinking alcohol. What we have here is what Cyril Lemieux calls a “grammatical error,” not in the linguistic sense, but in the moral and social one: the adoption of an attitude that runs head on against the normative grammars of a social institu-

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tion. We can imagine that the immigrant worker is neither aware of or intending to attack a tradition or violate an existing hierarchical relation (if he is unaware of beer drinking and “second breakfasts” in the German building trades or that the older worker can tell a younger one to do something). What may be perceived as an affront (from the point of view of the older worker), as both a grammatical error and a loss of “face” (in Goffman’s sense), on the part of the older worker can be analyzed at the same time as a lack of a store of meaning, of familiarity on the immigrant worker’s part about the German lifeworld and its professional traditions. What he does have is stored meanings from his original lifeworld, but which turn out to be wrong, different traditions for spontaneously understanding the older worker’s request and the reasons why his response (“I’m not thirsty”) is inappropriate in this context. It is at this moment that an inter-interpretive, cooperative, or conflictual process becomes necessary. It is this situation—the absence of or a weak store of common meanings, starting with a common language between partners—that Habermas does not really consider, unlike Schutz in his discussion about the foreigner. Thus we can give several continuations to the “sketch.” The older worker, who interprets the younger one’s response as an affront (in assuming that the immigrant should know the background cultural knowledge of the country he is working in), replies with silence, silence meant to be a reprove. We can then imagine that in the future the young immigrant worker, through trial and error and paying attention, through reciprocal typifications of more and more familiar interpretations, will integrate into his store of doxic meanings the tradition of a second breakfast, with beer drinking, and the hierarchical relation between the “oldster” and the “youngster.” Or we can imagine that the older worker, or another worker, realizing the possibility that the young immigrant does not understand this tradition (because it is foreign to him), takes the initiative to “explain” to him the situation, the theme, the plan, and the “world given in advance” of workers used to this institution. In return, the foreigner, a fortiori if he can merge this explanation with his original lifeworld, may come to question the practices and implicit norms of the native workers, in short, to question a world habitually assumed to be non-problematic. 29 It is with these latter conditions that we come truly to a process that can be called an interpretive understanding. We can give another illustration of this phenomenon on the basis of analyses that do not come directly from Schutz but which do reflect his inspiration. 30 It is no longer about a foreigner but rather about a person with an illness, in its pathological dimension, which at the same time that it weakens his body introduces the loss of a “common world,” causing a difficulty with the referential framework which the individual usually draws on in his daily life. Depending on how serious an illness is, a feeling of distance from oneself gets substituted for that of feeling oneself to be whole; a feeling

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of being foreign to others tends to take over from a feeling of immediately belonging to a community; a feeling of discontinuous, disordered time replaces that of linear, shared time; a preoccupation with suffering and care distances one from more familiar activities, a fortiori when the patient is hospitalized. Quite clearly, the experience of being ill upsets the self-evidence of the ordinary world. If illness is destructuring, it belongs to a narrative, according to Byron Good who in this way goes beyond Schutz, which if it does not restore the previously held common world, at least proposes a reflexive and retrospective interweaving of the meaning of one’s experience and, if addressed to someone else, or even put together along with someone else, leads to a shared experience: uprooting the alternation brought about by the illness in this way, he becomes the reader in the present of his own differentness following the rhythm of its narrative time. And it is through this narrative inversion, this form of exotopy which introduces something foreign into his own story, that the reader can take repossession of his identity, by becoming an actor and by projecting himself into a more coherent world. 31

Here we rediscover the virtues of emplotment as a synthesis of the heterogeneous as a specific mode of interpretation and self-interpretation when the subject is confronted with a set of dissonances that affect their existence. The virtues of narrative as a way of restructuring meaning also have, as already stated, their limits in the kind of injunction made to the patient to “tell his story” and “to talk about himself” while undergoing the destabilizing power of his pathology, pain, and suffering, which some patients find it difficult to make sense of. This is how Jerôme Porée analyzes the story of Fritz Zorn who had cancer and felt the world was absurd: “It would be a mistake to take literally, as though successful, the efforts he made to interpret his disease and to integrate it into a meaningful order. For his efforts remained in vain and led to an increase in his feeling of absurdity. In his story, his cancer remains an event rebellious to every plot.” 32 The last assertion is no doubt paradoxical because it is in a narrative that the difficulty or impossibility of emplotting the rebel event is told. This paradox does not apply, however, when in fact the patient is cut off from their ability to narrate, and even more from their capacity to signify and verbalize. In this case, an extreme case of illness is a sign of the failure of the interpretive process. Taking these limit-situations into account does not invalidate the great interest of a socio-phenomenological approach to disturbances and what is foreign if equal consideration is given to the force of cultural and social schemes as preexistent, impersonal, pre-interpretive, and typical and to the particularity of a biographical situation as the source of transformations, of

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increases in the store of experience through the acquiring of new interpretive schemes to make sense of new events or unfamiliar social or cultural configurations, or upsetting interactions where how to understand others no longer makes sense. If the figure of the foreigner or the person with a disease presents the most symptomatic features, it also allows us to understand, in more usual situations, a process that is at work each time we are affected by a social universe endowed with a degree of strangeness. Taking “biographical situations” into account also has the great heuristic virtue of emphasizing the process of interpretation. A socio-phenomenological or micro-sociological model is better prepared than a structuralist and even a hermeneutic model based on the paradigm of the text to fully grasp interpretation as happening in the course of actions and interactions. At this pragmatic level, we can more closely analyze distortions of meaning and the ways ordinary agents who have their doxic certainties shaken interpret things. We are far here from the solitary exegete struggling with the obscurity of a text, and closer to those ordinary interactions in which the understanding of a shared meaning is no longer evident. The pragmatic dimension of interpretation is directly indicated by what Schutz calls changes in the pertinent topic imposed on every situation in which ordinary action is interrupted or when we have atypical interaction occasioned by an unforeseen event: confronting a strange event that monopolizes our attention leads to perplexity, awakens our interest, and mobilizes our curiosity owing to its unfamiliarity, through “a modification of our conscious awareness” following a “jump” from one province of meaning to another, or through completely upsetting our internal sense of a meaningful context; or through any rearrangement of the hierarchy of interests through some event taken as important by the partners or contemporaries in a social world. 33

INTERPRETING TOGETHER AND FRAMING EXPERIENCE Modifications of the pertinence of meanings do not necessarily happen as a solitary interpretive act. They can occur in the face-to-face interaction of agents who do not understand one another, who seek to remove a misunderstanding of their assumed intentions, who try to overcome conflicts of interpretation about an event, or who remain trapped by the narrowness of their interpretation. Beyond the face-to-face situation, beyond the limits of a biographical situation, the interactive process of interpretation plays out in the way collectivities are handed over to the ordinary ways of uncovering the world and to reconstructing the intelligibility of social orders. The social and cultural character of interpretation and pre-interpretation intervenes not only in the schematism that pre-forms how meanings are given, but equally in the

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process of co-constructing orders of meaning on the basis of what we can call collective interpretations. This refers to “the auto-interpretive character of the social world, incorporated into spoken language by those who belong to it and into the symbolic mediations constitutive of their culture.” 34 This phenomenon is particularly visible in the case of communicative activity when the actors, in order to coordinate their actions, undertake “interpretive performances” that constitute the framework for these cooperative processes. 35 Those involved in the interaction must agree about how to define the situation, as a function of their pre-interpreted lifeworld, if they are to be able to state valid propositions about the objective world or agree about its social norms. We do not speak of interpreters as “interpreting together” when the understanding members share occurs in an immediate way, when mutual experience of an experience serves simply to maintain typified and routine frameworks of the symbolic order and social interactions. This is the generally privileged perspective of ethnomethodology. Groups become properly interpreting when together they undergo a disturbance in meaning, when together they experience a strange or irregular situation, and when they jointly put to work procedures meant to give a more appropriate meaning to the event, to reconfigure the plot incorporating an initially confused or disconnected experience, or procedures meant to resolve situations judged to be problematic. We can consider this group of interpreters to be public of inquirers in the sense Dewey proposes, who mobilize themselves to reconfigure institutions, who engage in redefinitions and reevaluations of situations that no longer make sense. However, every procedure of inquiry in this sense does not amount to an interpretive activity, but there is no constituting of a public made up of inquirers apart from the collective experience of an epoché of doxic certainties and some work intended to reconfigure the meaning of situations: The unfolding of any inquiry is inseparable from a situation that is “directly and immediately qualitative.” It is when a situation is grasped as “problematic in its immediate quality,” that is, as confused, conflictual, relative, disordered, etc., that it leads to an inquiry. The inquiry ends when the situation is ordered and unified—which is also a qualitative state as was the starting point—and hence that allows for a practical judgment, that is, for knowing what to do. 36

Interpreting together is never an arbitrary act free of every predisposition, framework, or institution. The so-called positive institutions (families, states, international institutions, educational institutions) form and pre-form, figure and reconfigure, produce and reproduce broad universes of meaning that first appear in some constraining and objectified form (“meaningful institutions,” we could say, following Descombes). Produced over a long history of meaning and sedimented practices, these meta-institutions, even when we refuse

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them any transcendental status, fix the framework through which the world is readable and ordered, but equally those starting from which it is collectively interpreted when its members are disturbed by irregularities, perturbations, bumps in how things are supposed to be or go. Families, states, and enterprises, to cite just these institutions, dispose and impose standard models, typified frameworks, interpretive instructions for natural environments, practical situations, interactions, texts, and theoretical problems for which the members must progressively learn the rules and the ends. Each member of an interpreting collective also brings with him reserves of meaning and experience, social and cultural schemes, integrative and specialized ones that he does not necessarily share with the other members of the collective. From this come differences, conflicts in the way the same problematic situation may be evaluated, judged, or interpreted; conflicts that may end, for a lack of convergence in some minimal sense, in the dissolution of the collective. The objective of producing more or less unified and coherent meanings within the collective—a fortiori when it is a question of problematizing and making public configurations of meaning—assumes both a work of inter-comprehension and inter-interpretation of the biographical situation of the members among themselves and a work of definition and putting into play horizons pertinence for actions and situations. This process is at work in every communicative action when the actors do not agree among themselves a priori about the meaning of a situation or a problem, about the validity of a norm, or the identification of a segment of reality, a fortiori in the setting of a cooperative process for which no one has the monopoly on interpretation. A definition of the situation by another party that prima facie diverges from one’s own presents a problem of a peculiar sort; for in the cooperative process of interpretation no participant has a monopoly on correct interpretation. For both parties the interpretive task consists in incorporating the other’s interpretation of the situation into one’s own in such a way that in the revised version “his” external world and “my” external world can—against the background of “our” lifeworld—be relativized in relation to “the” world, and the divergent situation definitions can be brought to coincide sufficiently. 37

Habermas rightly emphasizes that such a process, even if it is guided by a search for agreement, does not necessarily end with success or an agreement. The possible failure of the collective means of interpretation is an integral part of communicative action, agreement or a shared understanding being more the exception than the rule. Whence the recurrent conflicts, the demand for starting over, for explanation, justification, offers the image of “a diffuse, continuously revised and only momentarily successful communication in which participants rely on problematic and unclarified presuppositions and feel their way from one occasional commonality to the next.” 38

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With the sociologist David Snow, we may speak of the work leading to meaning that occurs within social movements when they reconfigure the meaning of social actions, define problematic situations, produce new ways of seeing and understanding a public problem, or construct alternative narratives for existing or official ones, as a “framing operation.” This framing operation should be distinguished, without necessarily being opposed, to the notion of a framework of experienced, as theorized by Goffman. 39 These frameworks of experience refer both to those social and culture schemes that predispose individuals and groups and to social and cultural institutions themselves. These “schemes of available comprehension” in a society are not wholly reinvented each time one moves from one situation to another: they already include pertinent meanings for every situation. They may be assimilated to the typical and reproducible character of schemes of experience in the vein of Schutz’s social phenomenology. It is necessary to take into account the instituted force of social configurations of meaning, over against an emphasis on an emerging purely new social meaning in the process of interactions. However, a purely structural, mechanistic reading of frameworks of experience does not permit attending to the process dimension of the framing operating, that is, to the collective work of signifying and interpretation at work in problematic situations. In these situations, the frameworks of experience cannot function as tested or typical rules for every equivalent situation. On the one hand, there is no framing operation apart from some preexisting framework for experience. On the other, these frameworks require operations of translation, interpretation, or deciphering when they turn out to be inadequate or maladapted to understanding an unfamiliar, confused, or problematic experience. The framing perspective initiated by the work of Benford and Snow allows us to account, from a sociological perspective, for the work of collective interpretation done together by the adherents and leaders of social movements, particularly when they are engaged in protests in which the members of a collective “attribute meaning or interpret events and pertinent conditions in such a way as to mobilize adherents and potential participants, obtain support from their audience, and favor shutting down their adversaries.” 40 The idea of aligning frames allows taking measure of the work of intersignification and inter-comprehension, of harmonizing meaning collectives carry out when their members have different biographical histories, different, even contradictory schemes of experience. This alignment, which does not happen without discussion, without resistance, permits configuring the members’ biographical interpretations in terms of the internal perspective of the movement and in contrast to the framing operations of other collectives and other actors (media, public powers, and so on) engaged in a conflictual or problematic situation. Which is why the framing operations of one collective

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may provoke in return counter framing operations, with no possibility of bringing all the frames into alignment: productive work when it comes to social problems is the occasion for a public drama between the defenders and adversaries of a cause who seek to make their vision of things prevail, to reject and discredit their opponents’ claims, to push their hearers to engage in collective action or not take part, and not to act on the basis of opposing or alternative definitions or ways of dealing with situations. 41

The dialectic between instituted meanings (through frames and schemes of experience) and instituting meaning (through framing operations and signifying work) has a knock-on effect at the horizon of the theatrical metaphor of staging social roles. It is Goffman, in the pragmatist heritage of Mead, who invites us to read the interactions of everyday life as scenic representations. 42 Using this metaphor, the interpretation of a social role using the image of an actor in a play takes on a paradigmatic value in the framework that Habermas calls “dramaturgical qualities of action” when the actor gives birth to a certain impression in his audience. 43 A first, false reading of the notion of a role might lead us to think that individuals are free to interpret their behavior in ordinary interactions as they will, notably by using the strategies for “saving face”: “The way in which the individual in ordinary situations presents himself and present his activity to others, the way in which he guides an controls the impression they form of him, and by the kind of things he may or may not do while sustaining his performance before them.” 44 The importance granted to strategies, to ruses in “controlling the impression” takes nothing away from the fact that a social role, analogously to the theatrical one, is already pre-established as a way to act and to do so in some situation. The social role comes down, as an instituted meaning, to typical forms of behavior, impersonal ways of being and presenting oneself in some social interaction. This is why we can assimilate them to schemes for behavior or frames of action that preexist and precede those who will “inhabit” and “incarnate” them in the course of some given social interaction over a given period of time. Roles are indeed social institutions. The same individual does not always play the same role (the framework of the interaction defines the role) and is capable of adopting different roles (client, user, father, professor) on the same day, a fortiori over the course of a lifetime. And it is always in a relational manner that roles play off one another in social interaction on the basis of schemes that correlate with the relative values of a social system (judge, defendant, lawyer; wife, woman; consumer, producer, distributor). On this level of analysis, call it structural, 45 a social role is characterized by its anonymity, its relational import, and its typical form or pattern. On a different level, a social role is always instantiated in a particular situation by a flesh-and-blood individual who brings

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schemes and stores of experience, which give a particular texture to how they play this or that role in some social interaction. As long as individuals adhere to the role they are supposed to play in a social interaction, as long as they conform to the type of behavior expected from them, as long as they immediately understand the meaning of their role and of those which they are confronted, there is not, properly speaking, an interpretation but rather a pre-interpretation of a pre-established form of actual behavior as taken for granted. On the other hand, there is interpretation of a social role in many cases: for instance, when an individual is learning a role (always in correlation with other roles) whose rules have not yet been applied; or when he is affected by a crisis regarding his role, following a historical transformation in its characteristics or a loss in belief in its mission; finally, when he is unable to align his social roles when their plurality threatens the unity of his personality. In other words, one is led to interpret a role when it is experienced as problematic, when the given meaning of preformed expectations about how to behave no longer makes sense. Finding oneself distanced from a role can then lead either to “exiting” the role and hence exiting the related institution, or to properly interpretive attempts to redefine, to reconfigure its meaning, by reframing the role as a mode of inquiry (meant to restore its meaning) or of belief. A good illustration of the problematicity of social roles is given by the experimental attitudes assumed by groups of physicians or social scientists in their training. 46 Close to the attitudes assumed in ethnomethodology, but without explicitly referring to them, the protocol asks students, medical interns, to act out the typical scenes between a doctor and a patient, the objective being to learn a role for a given situation (including playing that of the patient). After having played the scene and its roles, the students are invited to say what they have learned and felt in this reciprocal task of making sense of roles, through being placed in a proxy situation, in the mode of “as if” being in a situation which is already “as if,” a simulation. These games of role playing are quite valuable. In a few hours they bring intense learning—things upon which the student can later reflect upon regarding his practices or those he observes, without any risk since they are only simulations. Sometimes the actors ask for advice or to replay the scene to try something different, based on their first experience. 47

We can learn something from this game of role-playing in problematic situations in which typical expectations are contradicted by an atypical situation. For example, a patient, who comes for a consultation and fears he has the tuberculosis that affected his grandfather, utters a sigh of relief when the doctor (the student playing the role of doctor) tells him he has no symptoms. The atypical situation for the doctor is that he has to tell his patient, after this

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good news, that he has been struck by cancer. How does one offer such a serious diagnosis to a patient who was just relieved by the prior one? Interpretation comes into play precisely in that the conveying of this diagnosis does not follow self-evident rules: For example, there is a difference between play-acting in the theater where the staggering effect is presented by an actor when given this unexpected news and role-playing in which one does not know how the scene is going to unfold. We see in this how the roles may change in profoundly different ways. One talks, regarding the patient, about possible denial, about his being knocked off his feet, aggression, bargaining, refusal, but one can also discuss the caregiver. In the case referred to here, the medical student was himself staggered, disconcerted, as were those watching the scene. . . . More precisely, what made such an impact here was the interpretation/understanding on the medical student’s part that what the student playing the patient could feel turned out to be completely different than what one had intended: a progressive approach leading up to the seriousness of the illness and anxiety over it and the possibility of dying. 48

This experiment can be made even more precise through making the roles, notably that of the patient, more detailed by having him belong to different categories (age, social status, cultural origin, and so on). The objective being, within the setting of a medical hermeneutics, to lead to a technique of attentive understanding of the singularity of each case (the patient’s life story, his pathology, his home environment). For example, students are asked to play the role of older patients in order to learn how to decode expressions (including non-linguistic ones) that go with their particular condition, their different relationship to time, to their body, to their generation. In his noteworthy contribution, Jérôme Goffette refers not to role-playing but to the real story of a ninety-four-year-old woman who replied, half-smiling, “What is life good for anyway, eh doctor?” 49 Without considering that halfsmile, the woman’s experience, and her age, a literal understanding of her question might sound like an implicit request for euthanasia. But when set in the context of her role, her facial expression (that half-smile), and her experience, this question could be interpreted by the doctor as a “request for understanding her situation.” In this way medical hermeneutics translates into a kind of phronesis. To give some further perspective to our analysis of the great individual and collective disturbances that require an interpretive process, we can turn to Habermas’s model of communicative action, which makes sense of three components that structure the lifeworld as capable of being affected by a crisis in meaning: culture as a reservoir of knowledge from which participants in communication draw interpretations when they agree about some reality in the world; society as legitimate orders through which the partici-

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pants in communication govern their belonging to social groups and thereby assure solidarity; and personality as the set of competencies that make a subject capable of speech and action, therefore that make them capable of participating in processes of mutual understanding and through them of affirming their self-identity. 50 If there is a “crisis of meaning” about the components making up culture, this signifies that the stores of knowledge, the doxic certainties about the lifeworld, no longer make for consensus, that collective identities are thrown into doubt, are made to feel, because they have been called into question, that traditions no longer are transmitted in a continuous and familiar manner. If there is a “crisis of meaning” about the structural components of society, this signifies that the great orders of recognition (states, families, educational institutions) come to know a deficit in belief and legitimacy, that solidarities and social bonds come to lack integration, which can lead to phenomena of anomie, that social motivations bear witness to signs of their fragility. If there is a “crisis of meaning” about the structural components of personality, this signifies a disturbance in individuals’ education and orientation, a growth in alienation and feeling disconnected to oneself, which may lead to psychopathologies (“fatigue,” depression, anxiety). Of course, each of these structural components of the lifeworld is permanently related to the others, with each one being able to negatively affect the others (the fragility of family solidarity may affect the rate of suicides), or to reinforce them (the expectation of a stronger, more interventionist state in the case of a growth in collective insecurity). However, it is rare historically that a society should be durably and integrally affected by each of the components that structure the lifeworld. Furthermore, their intensity varies as a function of sub-groups and social classes, some being able to profit from the crisis that strikes the others. What is essential for our thesis is that the individual and collective process of interpretation, of self-interpretation, of inter-interpretation will be all the more important when the structural components of culture, society, and personality are submitted to increasing trials regarding the problematicity of meaning. Nothing says, however, that this often-conflictual interpretive process will be crowned with success, that it will permit reestablishing interunderstanding, or restore social consensus, or renew confidence in institutions or a belief in oneself. It is always at the boundary of a sharp crisis in social, political, and cultural meaning that homo interpretans becomes most visible but also when interpretations may become the most crazed, sometimes even terrifying: when the common stores of meaning and registers of belief about the lifeworld are emptied of their substance, interpretation transgresses the outer limits of meaning, feeds on itself, closes in on itself. Our detour through cultural anthropology and social phenomenology has allowed us to confirm and enrich in other ways what our confrontation with

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ethology already amply suggested. The great historical and cultural diversity of ways of interpreting takes nothing away from the universality of homo interpretans. If, with ethnology, it is necessary to recognize that some cultural settings are more sensitive than others to disturbances of meaning and upsetting events, this does not say that the problematicity and restoration of meaning remain the sole prerogative of “historical worlds” inherited from Greek civilization or from kerygmatic ones stemming from the Jewish and Christian traditions. We must distinguish the scales of gradation and intensity that characterize the range between the micro-distortions of meaning found in everyday interactions that only require minor procedures of interpretation and those major upsets of meaning which require, as far as possible, a complete rearrangement of the universes of meaning of large-scale social and cultural arrangements. Our look at social and cultural anthropology also permits us to acknowledge the weight of social and cultural frameworks and orders (against the subjectivist illusion of a pure self-determination of interpretation), which intervene in the way we make sense of the world, others, and ourselves. Cultural and social schemes intervene first of all and above all on the preinterpretive scale of immediate understanding (seeing something as, understanding a meaning as) thanks to which we signify, categorize, relate, and classify subjects, objects, and states of the world. Interpretation in the full sense is required when these habitual schemes of typification and signification show themselves to be maladapted to understanding the meaning of what happens and necessitate a reflexive and creative suspension of our attitude in order to overcome the problematicity and oddness of atypical situations and upsetting events. Making sense of things then is accompanied by a hitherto unknown combination of preexisting cultural and social schemes, the translation and transposition of allogeneic schemes, and the invention of new schemes of interpretation capable of figuring in a new way a meaningfulness that has lost its familiarity. The social dimension of understanding and interpreting applies not just to the order of schematisms, but equally intervenes in the interactional, processual, and situational composition of shared meanings that no longer are self-evident and in the management of collective interpretation which is mobilized to order a world that has become puzzling in a different way.

Chapter Three

The Production of Meaning and the Transformation of the World

Interpretation and action are commonly opposed. It is easy to associate interpretation with a stepping back that is suspensive, perceptive, and speculative, whereas action is supposed to be directed toward the transformation of some state of the world. If every interpretation, a fortiori when it is philological or exegetic, is not necessarily oriented toward action, the preceding analyses have already confirmed the close relation there can be, starting from the sensory-motor level, between proto-interpretation and action. The functional circle between perception and action that defines the Umwelt of every living organism provides a good illustration. More fundamentally, interpretation appears as a condition of human action in that the transformation of a state of the world assumes a prior decipherment of problematicity. Whether it be a hunter studying the tracks left by their quarry in view of capturing it, of a sailor who decrypts the signs in the sky before setting out to sea, or a collective that aligns its frameworks of experience in order to protest a political decision, in each case we have to do with interpretive means that directly guide the action to be undertaken. Even when interpretation is not directly related to action, it remains nonetheless an activity, even in the most solitary, most “inward,” and most intellectual cases. Marielle Macé has demonstrated this in admirable fashion in her book on reading practices. 1 Reading is not simply deciphering, it involves a whole set of ways of being and doing: changing one’s perception, finding a rhythm, providing oneself with models. The interpretive character of action can intervene on three levels. First of all, before the action, in the best of cases, agents have the possibility of evaluating and hierarchizing the means and ends of the act to be done. Second, on the prospective scale of action being done when agents question 59

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themselves about the meaning of their action as it happens or is about to happen, about the meaning of others’ behavior, about the meaning of propositional attitudes (desires, beliefs, expectations, fears), about the meaning of an interactive context. Finally, on the retrospective scale when agents return to a past action, when they question the causes and motives that presided over a series of actions, when they inscribe an action in a broader context, when they evaluate some behavior normatively. This threefold interpretive scale may operate in the first person, from the actor’s own perspective, and in the third person, from the perspective of an observer. If we follow Abel, the following aspects can be characterized as interpretive: “a) the setting of the conditions for beginning an action; b) the goal of the action; c) the choice of means in view of attaining the goal of the action; d) the carrying out of the action; e) the determination of the results of the action; and f) the consequences of the action.” 2 If each of these segments can correspond to an interpretive move, the underlying model of a rational action, beyond the fact that it simplifies and idealizes actual actions, implies that every action requires an interpretation, in the first or third person, from the prospective or retrospective perspective. This is the angle of this model of interpretation. Without referring to those actions in which we more undergo than do something, this deliberative and strategic model rarely corresponds to the most common actions in which actors are literally caught up in the course of action and have neither the resources nor the time nor the information to interpret its means, its relation of means to end, or its obstacles. This is particularly true for the prospective dimension, the retrospective one leaving greater room for the possibility of reflective and patient reconstructions. What is underestimated in this strategic model of interpretation is the understanding that occurs in the course of an action happens in substantial part without any interpretation. In the routine, established course of everyday life, agents do not constantly interpret the meaning of their behavior, the means most adequate to the intended ends, or others’ propositional attitudes. It is only when the action undergoes disturbances, when others’ desires or beliefs appear to be unfamiliar, when social institutions experience mutations that interpretation, in the first or third person, has its raison d’être. Interpretive activity varies as a function of the ends in view. It may be speculative in nature when it oriented toward pure knowledge (overcoming the misunderstanding of texts, the polysemy of symbols) as with exegesis or philology. It can be instrumental in nature (“teleological action” in Habermas’s sense) when it is oriented to a mastery over nature or control of some situation, toward the satisfaction of a need, as with a hunter in search of prey, or a hiker looking for their path who deciphers the position of the stars above, or when an ideologist deforms the meaning of history. It can be of an intercomprehensive and critical nature when it is oriented toward distortions in

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communication and interaction, toward protest against or challenging a state of affairs (what Habermas calls “communicative action”). 3 These orientations rarely exist in a pure state when it comes to the facts that are therefore capable of multiple hybridizations. For example, the speculative interpretation of texts is generally not separable, in the case of theological or legal hermeneutics, from some application to concrete situations (for instance, how a law ought to be interpreted in order to render a just verdict). Or, another example, the utilitarian orientation of interpretation can be associated with magical, religious, or fortune telling practices (for instance, in the case of the Calvinist capitalist who wishes to see his wealth as a sign of divine favor). So the inter-comprehensive orientation of interpretation can be deformed by relations of domination, of control, or expertise (for instance in deciphering another’s intentions in order to exercise power over him). This is typically the case with dramatic action when the actor’s self-presentation to his “public” is not an expression of sincerity but rather of “a cynical management of impressions” (for instance, when simulating compassion publicly while only feeling contempt for someone). 4 All action, whether instrumental or not, is not immediately interpretive. When the means agents make use of are articulated in a fitting way between them and the given ends are part of everyday routines, there is no need for interpretation. Human action becomes interpretive properly speaking when, as William James puts it, there is a “real doubt” about the procedures for what we know (which can be invalidated, for example, by experience) and when it is necessary to formulate new hypotheses, when the typical means turn out to be maladapted for dealing with a modification in the natural or social environment, when the habitual course of action is interrupted. Here interpretation is not first or second (retrospectively) in relation to the action in question but consubstantial with it in its actualization. This is the case when a scientist in his laboratory is confronted with a negative result, when a judge has to pronounce sentence although there remains some doubt about the defendant’s guilt, when an ordinary agent proceeds by interpretive trial and error to resolve a practical problem in his life. It is a fortiori the case for the model of communicative action theorized by Habermas when the interactions among speakers are oriented toward mutual understanding. They must be able to interpret each other’s experience, to define or redefine situations when they are uncertain or confused. This process of interpretation cannot ever be wholly uprooted from some pre-understanding, to focus on the objective world (in order to state true propositions), or on the social world (starting from which we establish just norms), or on the subjective world (starting from which we can express our authenticity):

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The problem such a model poses is that it correctly presupposes “a stabilized preunderstanding” or “background knowledge” (something Habermas owes to Gadamer) in its participants. In other words, there is no interpretation between actors without a prior mutual understanding that is not itself questioned, but which serves as a ground for questions about meaning. But what then about the case where there are two speakers who have background knowledge that is resolutely different from the other’s, starting with their respective native languages? Must we say that any inter-interpretation would be impossible in this case? Can they not proceed by progressive interpretive trial and error, by reciprocal typifications of what is meant, by which they try to construct, on the basis of their own experience, some common understanding regarding the objective social or subjective world? Interpretation intervenes generally in order to reestablish a broken continuity or in order to overcome something strange, and it bears witness to the creative force of action: Our perception must come to terms with new or different aspects of reality; action must be applied to different points of the world, or must restructure itself. This reconstruction is a creative achievement on the part of the actor. If he succeeds in reorienting the action on the basis of his changed perception and thus continuing with it, then something new enters the world: a new mode of acting, which can gradually take root and thus itself become an unreflected routine. 6

The conditional proposition “if he succeeds” is of capital importance as it allows inflecting pragmatist optimism by leaving an open place for the failure of the interpretive process, for a passivity or vulnerability, as the inverse side of action that does not allow for or no longer can create something new, no longer can surmount problematic situations. On the other hand, the failure of interpretation can retrospectively make room for an interrogation not only about the problematicity of meaning that could not be “sublated” but equally for a reflexive meta-interpretation of the inaptness of an interpretive technique for a given situation (why was I unable to reach an understanding? Was my translation, my contextualization, my explanation wrong?). In this sense, failure of the interpretive process is not necessarily definitive. It may certainly end by establishing the great vulnerability of the interpreting subject, owing to a lack or exhaustion of interpretive resources, or laziness on

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the part of someone who does not want to understand more. In any case, in the most favorable cases, the initial failure of the interpretive process can be the occasion for a new try at interpretation, for a new adjustment, for a new search for an interpretive technique more appropriate to the situation, for a change in one’s point of view. Interpretation is a process that proceeds by trial and error, by keeping trying. Furthermore, the problematicity of a sign oriented toward action is far from being reducible to a utilitarian purpose. Interpretive questioning about means and ends, when they no longer can be taken for granted, can suspend the processes of evaluating, of placing values into a hierarchy, of grounding norms. This is equally true, to return to the Weberian typology, when it comes to orienting feelings when the relation to things and beings provokes contrary feelings, intense variations, changed emotions. Each of these interpretive orientations is instantiated every time in the “grammars” of specific signs to which we may apply Charles Sanders Peirce’s threefold typology. 7 If Peirce’s pragmatist paradigm and Cassirer’s neo-Kantian paradigm belong to quite distinct philosophical horizons, despite possible intersections regarding the centrality of language, the advantage of the former is that it proposes an important conceptual expansion to those “grammars” in which interpretations are given, particularly regarding indexical grammars (Peirce’s iconographic grammars can be included within Cassirer’s model of the symbol). Assuming this, and for the sake of rigor, it would be better to speak of registers of the problematicity of the sign and not just about the problematicity of meaning, at least if we restrict meaning to symbolic grammars. For Peirce, an index applies when any object is linked to its sign designation by a direct action or reaction. The index is a sign immediately affected by a thing (the tracks left by an animal, the symptoms provoked by an illness). If signs are an integral part of the natural world, they are equally present as indexical in our ordinary intentions (intonation, mimicry, facial expressions). In distinction to such indexical signs, Peirce speaks of iconic signs when the quality of an object is tied to its descriptive sign by a relation of resemblance (portraits, pictures, dreams, memories). It does not really matter, he adds, “even though its object had no existence” 8 (for example, a line drawn with a pencil representing a geometrical line). Unlike an index, an icon represents an object. Finally, there are symbols in the case of those syntactic structures of natural languages when the relation between a sign and what it designates is arbitrary or conventional (linguistic signs structured by their oppositions to other given signs): “a symbol is a sign which would lose the character which renders it a sign if there were no interpretant. Such is any utterance of speech which signifies what it does only by virtue of its being understood to have that signification.” 9 Furthermore, the symbolic grammar works pragmatical-

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ly following a discursive threefold model: to say something to someone about something in a given situation. Symbolic grammar can extend to include configurations of fixed, stable, and decontextualized meanings. Later comments on Peirce’s semiotics, like those of Jean-Marc Ferry, have sometimes made this typology of three types of signs more rigid. 10 Peirce does speak about trichotomies as qualifying each series of signs, but at the same time he also considers how they are related in complex ways. This is the case, for example, with the relation between an icon and an index: “An index is a sign which would, at once, lose the character which makes it a sign if its object were removed, but would not lose that character if there were no interpretant.” 11 Peirce’s three grammars define the general—semiotic—framework within which every act of signification takes place. This activity is comprehensive when grasping an index, an image, a linguistic sign, a gesture in sign language, a text occurs immediately. To talk about a sign is not necessarily to talk about an interpretation. This is the case as well in our relation to particular rules, as Wittgenstein has shown, when they are not themselves subjected to interpretation: We follow the rules, and know that we are following them, and as a result we are able to understand others without having to pass through an infinite process of interpretation. Therefore it is possible to understand without having to interpret. Wittgenstein clearly show what makes this possible: that, as we have seen, there exists a natural grasp of signs, which means that we are able to agree with others about these signs. Usage, according to Wittgenstein, is based on “forms of life,” an “agreement in judgment.” 12

We have already noted the importance of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations for delimiting the contours of a concept of interpretation as a “seeing as” (considered in chapter 6 of the second part of the Investigations). Paragraphs 219 to 244 of the first part of the Investigations give us another opening that can be useful in delimiting the contours of interpretation. 13 The key question is: What does it mean to “obey a rule?” Without going into all the details of Wittgenstein’s analysis, let us already note that “obeying a rule” assumes a social and institutional dimension related to the rule. What is important, for our proposal, lies in the fact that Wittgenstein drastically limits the possibility of interpreting a rule, to avoid contradictions. If everyone, for example, could interpret the rules for chess in his own way, there would be no game of chess: “there is a way of a rule which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call ‘obeying a rule’ and ‘going against it’ in actual cases.” 14 This warning allows us to challenge a radical concept of interpretation like that of Donald Davidson. 15 The main interest of this analytic philosopher’s approach is that it shows how understanding a simple sentence by an

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interpreter presupposes a whole background of beliefs (which is not far from what Schutz called background knowledge, without necessarily situating this just on the plane of language), 16 which they take as true and which they are supposed to share with the one being interpreted (the one who states a proposition). If Peter says to Paul that he is professor mathematics in a technical lycée, he assumes that Paul knows, for example, what it is to teach, what mathematics is, how the school system is arranged (general versus technical education, secondary versus higher education). Radical interpretation allows connecting what Davidson calls a principle of charity (the belief that the interpreter takes as true a background of sentences beyond what the speaker says) and a holistic, inferential principle like that we find in Quine (the truth conditions of a proposition cannot be based on a single proposition but only on the basis of a web of propositions and beliefs that refer to each other). Does this theory of radical interpretation fully meet our expectations? Despite the acknowledgment of background beliefs, it is too radical, even if Davidson does recognize difficult cases of understanding and odd or crazy beliefs. 17 That there is no interpretation apart from a prior background of beliefs, assumptions, implicit presuppositions, and schemes is something we have known from the start of our inquiry, but this does not entail that this store of meaning itself should be the object of an interpretation in the active, reflexive sense we are attributing to interpretation. When beliefs are in fact shared between speakers, there is no need to appeal to an interpretive process. They are in fact taken to be true or self-evident by the interlocuters. To return to the earlier example, if Paul has been educated in the French school system, and thus had classes in mathematics, he will have no difficulty in spontaneously understanding what Peter says when he states that he is a mathematics teacher in a technical lycée. The inter-play of inferences, implications, and references to beliefs for Paul takes place without any hindrance, and he does not have to suspend the immediate meaning of what Peter says to take a “detour” before understanding it. One can formulate a more radical critique of the narrowness of radical interpretation, as does Pascal Engel, by showing that the underlying holism leads to an infinite regression. As a result, understanding a sign or a rule is not to interpret it: “to follow a rule, or understand a sign, Wittgenstein tells us, cannot be an interpretation, precisely because if this were the case, we fall into circularity or the regression in question.” 18 However, if language is always presupposed, if we always already belong to a linguistic community (as regards pre-understanding), we can then ask when there is interpretation in these conditions. Let us return for a moment to the Investigations. In paragraph 201, Wittgenstein grants that there can be an “inclination” to say that every action that follows a rule is an interpretation. But strictly speaking, there is an interpreta-

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tion, he holds, only when we have “the substitution of one expression of the rule for another.” 19 Here again this seems too narrow: just as we have sought to show that we can see that there can be a form of seeing as that requires an interpretive effort when seeing as does not happen normally, so too can we say that there is an interpretive relation that applies to the rule when our relation to it becomes problematic regarding its use (in the case of learning a rule of behavior, when the rule does not correctly fit a situation for which it was supposed to be prescribed). Everything depends, in other words, on circumstances, on the experience of speakers and actors, on whether beliefs are shared, even on whether there is a common language. Let us look again at our example. If Paul is a foreigner (if he has to translate what Pierre says into his own language), if he has never been to school, if he has little knowledge of mathematics, in this case what Peter says needs to be interpreted (to be explained, contextualized). And, we may add, a proposition or rule demands more or less interpretation depending on the degree of the interlocuters’ and actors’ shared experience and beliefs, their social, cultural, and linguistic capital, on the circumstances in which they are speaking, on indexicality, and performativity—for example, if Peter says something while playing a role, with an ironic accent, whereas Paul knows that Peter is not a mathematics high school teacher but an aeronautical engineer. If certain rules or propositions can be the object of spontaneous understanding, with no need to turn to interpretation (the holistic play of accepted true beliefs amounting to a kind of proto-interpretation), others allow for a whole palette and degrees of interpretive depth depending on the unfamiliarity of what is said or the rule and its use. Therefore, the situation is different when the habitual use of signs is confronted with configurations of problematic actions, when use runs up against counter uses and there is no “natural grasp of signs,” when we do not understand our fellow human beings and the world surrounding us, when we become strangers to ourselves and to others. Here we can return to the situation imagined by Wittgenstein: “But now imagine a game of chess translated according to certain rules into a series of actions which we do not originarily associate with a game—say into yells and stamping of feet. And now suppose those two people to yell and stamp instead of playing the form of chess that we are used to. . . . Should we still be inclined to say they were playing a game? What right would one have to say so?” 20 This configuration is symptomatic of a someone used to playing chess seeking to interpret this quite singular way of playing the game (but, for Wittgenstein, the two players are not playing chess because they are not following the established rules). And no doubt it is one of the biases of the Investigations that at this point it assumes that “when I obey a rule, I do not choose. I obey the rule blindly.” 21 This is certainly true for a substantial part of our ordinary lives, without which there would be no games, no language games, or instituted forms of

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life. In these cases we have no need to interpret. It is not that Wittgenstein is uninterested in situations that require an interpretation, but he does privilege those situations in which understanding functions without a hitch, those situations in which the language games are immediately understandable for those using them. What is surprising for Wittgenstein about ordinary exchanges is not misunderstanding but the fact that in them we are not interpreting. This means that every relation to signs does not imply an interpretive act: “Of course sometimes I do interpret signs, give signs an interpretation; but that does not happen very time I understand a sign. (If someone ask me ‘what time is it?’ there is no inner process of laborious interpretation; I simply reach to what I see and hear. If someone whips out a knife at me, I do not say ‘I interpret that as a threat.’)” 22 In fact, to use the same example, it is not the simple question “what time is it” that determines whether there must be an interpretation. Again, pragmatically, it is the context, the anticipations, the shared experiences that determine the degree of interpretation called for by this speech act. In the most typical situations (those Wittgenstein aims at in this quotation), there is nothing to interpret when someone asks what time it is. However, if the person, at the moment, for example, when he asks the question, is looking at this wristwatch or the village clock, and gives me an ironic wink, or asks the question in a foreign language, an immediate suspension of meaning occurs which requires an interpretive act: why is he asking for the time if he is looking at his watch? Is he mocking me? Does he mean something else with this question? Does he think time does not pass as quickly when he is with me, that I am boring him and he wants to end out conversation? All these questions are possible when a simple thing like asking the time does not happen as usual. Only indexicality and shared experience delimits the interpretive range of a situation or speech act in the final analysis. If, despite his insightful intuitions, Wittgenstein does not pay full attention to problematic situations in order better to focus on language games where understanding takes place, Jacques Bouveresse, following him, draws more from them, by enriching the pragmatics of ordinary language using the hermeneutic tradition, not so much in its post-Heideggerian form (owing to the confusion between interpretation and spontaneous understanding) as its original form in Schleiermacher (thanks to a clear demarcation between immediate understanding and interpretation). The first significant lesson from Bouveresse’s approach is that he proposes a dividing line between, on one side, linguistics, which is occupied with immediate understanding as a “natural” primary process, where explanation must be given through the description of an appropriate hypothetical psychological mechanism, and on the other, hermeneutics, which has the task of analyzing those situations where “meaning is more or less uncertain, faroff or foreign, and can only be obtained by a deliberate conscious process of

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deciphering or interpretation.” 23 The second lesson of Bouveresse’s approach is that we should avoid reducing Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics to only those methodological problems that come with philology, but grant a proper place to the problems of misunderstanding that occur in ordinary human interactions when they are confronted with odd meanings. Beyond a scientific hermeneutic, Schleiermacher leaves room for what he himself calls a “natural hermeneutics,” notably in the process of learning a foreign language or a child’s learning its maternal language. The double significance of Bouveresse’s approach has its cost as well. For one thing, it tends to privilege situations of misunderstanding mediated by (written or spoken) ordinary or technical discourse. If these discursive configurations occupy a central place in every interpretive process, they are just one particular case, at least if we extend language (as we shall see Peirce does) to include grammars that escape these discursive forms. If we find ourselves in an automobile faced with a stoplight that turns suddenly black, we are not in this case in a situation of ordinary discourse, but one where an iconic grammar departs from the usual code for stop lights and necessitates an interpretive process in order to know what attitude to adopt. 24 Another example could be a hunter confronted with a quarry’s tracks, using a grammar based on clues, which does not have the same properties usually associated with it. In other words, Bouveresse tends to privilege realms where meaning is problematic (forms of discourse), without extending the possible problematicity of signs to its full extent (in Peirce’s sense). What is more, if we admit, as Bouveresse seems to do along with Schleiermacher, that there are degrees, scales of “overall strangeness” of a meaning and a “total absence of strangeness,” 25 the division between linguistics and hermeneutics tends to be relative. Is it with linguistics or hermeneutics that we consider the more or less obscure, or clear, or familiar? No doubt it is a bit of both, and collaboration between these two disciplines is more the rule. No doubt, as well, the phenomenological tradition (when it is not idealist and subjective as with Schutz), the pragmatic tradition (especially with Mead and Dewey), not to say the social sciences in general, will be enriched when they take interest in situations (and not just linguistic ones) that escape typical behavior, disturbing experiences, ones that rupture intelligibility. Pragmatism, whether phenomenological, philosophical or sociological, seems more appropriate to us in that, from the perspective of our inquiry, interpretation is always relative to its indexical character. Peirce’s semiotics can be useful here not just in understanding the distinction between immediate and mediate understanding but also in extending the registers of the problematicity of the sign to grammars that surpass the framework of ordinary discourse (symbolic grammars for making sense). The cardinal concept that is directly of interest is that of an interpretant in a quite specific sense. An interpretant is not exactly the signification of a sign

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but more a sign-effect, a sign determined by an (iconic, indexical, or symbolic) sign: “Anything which determines something else (its interpretant) to refer to an object to which itself refers (its object) in the same way, the interpretant becoming in turn a sign and so on ad infinitum.” 26 In other words, the signification of a sign can only be grasped through its interpretants, that is, by other signs (we rediscover here the holistic structure of interpretation for Davidson). Paradoxically, the interpretant in Peirce’s sense does not necessarily imply an interpretation in the strong sense of the word as we understand it. When there is nothing problematic about the interpretant of a sign, there is no interpretation properly speaking, but immediate understanding. Peirce offers the example of a command given to soldiers to lower their guns (Wittgenstein gives a similar example in his Investigations). Generally speaking, the interpretants Peirce calls “logical” 27 —that is, the signs that lead to actions (which are other signs . . .) which follow rules or habits—do not call for interpretations in the strict sense. The chain of interpretants comes together in a spontaneous way without any particular hitches. On the other hand, problematic situations, equivocal words or propositions, changes in what is habitually the case, require a work of interpretation, experiments, questions. Dewey, drawing on Peirce, shows, for example, how new interpretants are grafted to the sign “wood” once we have understood that one can make paper from wood pulp. When new interpretants become fixed and stabilized for a given grammar, they become logical interpretants. This does not prevent a sign from changing its interpretant depending on the situation or context. Special mention must be made for indexical signs in that their interpretants do not follow as easily as do those of other categories of signs. An “index” is the sign par excellence that gives rise to an interpretive inquiry: “everything that draws our attention is an indication. Everything that surprises us is an indication, insofar as it marks the junction between two experiences. For example, a loud sound indicates that something important has happened, even though we do not know exactly what.” 28 Taking non-linguistic signs into account allows us to distinguish in the interpretive process the kind of showing that “goes beyond the discursive character of the propositional space of sentences.” 29 Saying and showing can always mutually reinforce one another in an immediate occasion where a sign is problematic: showing where one cannot say, cannot say everything, everything about something. The ineffable leaves room for what is showable. Every act of voluntary (like pointing a finger) or involuntary (like blushing) showing does not of itself require interpretation, at least if the understanding of the sign occurs without a hitch. Showing something or someone can, on the other hand, be a response to an initial non-understanding, for example, when it comes to the universe of linguistic signs. The technique is particularly used when learning language or a foreign language. Instead of

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using other linguistic signs to remove the problematicity of a sign, one directly shows the sign’s referent in the world. But it is always in a particular context and within an overall complex of signs that the meaning of a sign, even when direct, takes place, that is, within the framework of some interpretive practice. Showing, when it is not yet sufficient to lead to understanding, can draw on other sensory interpretive practices. This is true, for example, for touching when simply looking or pointing to an object does not suffice to identify it: the hand enriches the eye. This is also true for feeling, for example when we bring a piece of fruit close to our nostrils to evaluate its ripeness or flavor. Showing, in its dimension regarding understanding and interpretation, is omnipresent in daily life, and particularly in the most obvious dimensions of human existence (for example, a hand on the shoulder to testify to affection or friendship). It is equally true for the arts that draw on non-linguistic grammars to show something using images or sounds: We think, for instance, of the specific capacity of an image, for example, a work of figurative art, to make visible, audible, to show, express, through its figurative character (and analogically, for example, a work of music through its sounds) aspects that cannot be attained through the use of linguistic expressions and the grammar of judgment, which cannot be individuated and completely grasped through language. 30

On the other hand, it is not true that signs used in showing immediately call for an active interpretation: when the showing is sufficiently broken in, typical (start and stop lights, arrival and departure boards) for the user, there is no need for interpretation. It is moreover one of the most common situations in daily life that that such signs offer an immediate grasp (just as an arrow can indicate a direction) without requiring a reflexive attitude regarding the sign’s meaning. Ordinary social life would even be impossible without the support of spontaneous shared understanding of such signs. Imagine for a moment the conditions of traffic flow in an airport or a downtown if everyone had always to think about the meaning of the signs. We cannot say therefore, as Abel does, that every sign immediately has an interpretive character. Art allows for exceptions even when the art lover or specialist holds keys that permit a more immediate grasp of what a work of art is saying. Art allows for such exceptions because, unlike stereotypical, functional, univocal signs, it is meant to be metaphoric, a way of playing with meaning, with equivocation, with implicit obvious and hidden signs. Whereas symbolic grammar is solely human, iconic and indexical grammars along with showing, which are also found in the animal world, bear witness to a certain intelligence, a fortiori when they come close to a properly interpretive state. Indexical grammar is moreover indexed to “sensory signs” of the natural world, and while less speculative than symbolic gram-

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mar, it is more closely tied to practical activities. 31 It assumes a remarkable know-how, knowing how to look and how to use techniques, when it comes to deciphering clues: Independent of its mystical orientations, it initially presents itself as competence to reconstitute scenes on the basis of their tracks. This is what the first hunters did, the ancestors of those who colonial police used to track escaped prisoners; who armies enlisted as scouts, who safari travelers hire has guides. Their ability to makes sense of clues is stupefying. These men do not just say an animal passed this spot. When, before some dramatic scene, we ask them to tell us what the tracks mean, they enter an almost hallucinatory state, something like a trance, and recount what happened while miming the actors. 32

Westerners, without returning here to the debate about cultural schemes, have lost a whole heritage of knowing-how-to-see, of experience in interpreting natural signs. It would be a mistake, however, to reduce this indexical and iconic grammar as applying only to the animal world, or to the prehistorical world of so-called primitive societies. The activities of everyday life, the role-playing of theatrical representations like every ordinary interaction, are always mediated by indexical grammars that can accompany symbolic grammars or that can be instituted autonomously (miming, playing charades). To call them grammars means that indexes obey a public order of meanings understandable by everyone in a given social and cultural universe. These indications shape facial expressions, tones of voice, gestures as much as a means of accentuating, deforming, or expressing irony about what is said using language in ordinary interactions—and about what cannot be said as well (a passerby’s smile) using a purely indexical grammar; what sometimes gets expressed despite what we mean to say (a blush indicating shyness or anger). Whence the possibility equally of translating or converting the elements of one grammar into another (a nod to indicate agreement, a wink to indicate complicity). In routine situations of interaction with the natural or social environment, indexical grammars are understood almost instantaneously, as “the natural meaning of signs”: “in the case of some reciprocal reactions, where the interaction unfolds against the background of an ascriptive grammar, information may be transmitted with enough intensity for the partners to know, within a second, what they mean to convey to each other.” 33 This is not the case, however, over a variable range, when there is not an immediate grasp of what is indicated, when the tracks left do not correspond to the schemes acquired through experience, when one and the same indication is capable of divergent interpretations (a friendly smile, an ironic one). Such distortions in the semiosis of indications then requires a mediate understanding, a specific method of deciphering them, and a revision in one’s knowing-how-to-see.

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The circulation and conversion among grammars applies as well to iconic grammar. For instance, the dream image of a crow might be taken as the sign of some tragic event. The fact that mental images exist—beyond physical ones like photographs or drawings—which appear to us, for example, in the form of memories or dreams, the fact that they are produced inwardly in a unique way does not mean that these images make up a “strictly private language.” To consider, as Jean-Marc Ferry does, iconic grammar as a purely idiosyncratic language is antithetical to the very idea of a grammar that rests on the public character of its meanings. The mental images experienced by a single subject are always impregnated with social and cultural meanings understandable by everyone. Dreams are a good example. One can consider, as does Freudian psychoanalysis, the elaboration of dreams as occurring at an unconscious state for associating images following psychic laws. But hypothesizing a universal structure for the human unconscious containing different cultural forms of myths and dreams (say as Jungian archetypes) invalidates the thesis of a strictly private language of dream images. The case of dreams is particularly significant in that memories preserved following sleep often appear to us as often enigmatic—allowing for the exception perhaps of young children, for whom, according to Freud, their desires cannot be directly expressed. The Freudian explanation is that for adults the realization of certain desires, owing to censorship, takes on a kind of iconic disguise. Bits and pieces of dreams thus are presented as something like a deformed text that requires interpretation. The psychoanalytic approach thus consists in reconstructing the latent content of a dream—and other symbolic productions as well (myths, pictures, slips of the tongue)—made up of a whole complex of repressed desires, starting from some manifest meaning (the slightly confused scenario of remembered dreams). The validity of the explanatory hypotheses of psychoanalysis is not at issue here; what is essential is that the iconic grammar of dreams is rarely immediately understood. The problematicity of the meaning of dreams requires an interpretive approach that demands conversion into another grammar (putting words to the images, substituting a symbolic grammar for an iconic sign). Before becoming a scientific technique as with psychoanalysis, where even its claim to be a science is subject to debate, the interpretation of dreams mobilizes various methods of ordinary interpretation depending on the culture in question (say, with the practice of divination) through which the unveiling of the latent content of a dream takes on highly different forms of expression. ETHNOINTERPRETATIONS AND ORDINARY SYMBOLIZATION To designate more generally the ordinary methods that agents make use of when faced with a loss of meaning in a given situation and using particular

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(indexical, iconic, symbolic) grammars, we shall speak of ethnomethods (with Garfinkel), without for all that assuming all the assumptions of ethnomethodology. Within a framework directly inspired by Schutz, Garfinkel first privileges the way in which typical situations are themselves routinized. He refers to Schutz’s notion of schemes of interpretation in his Studies in Ethnomethodology, but does so in order to bring to light “the socially standardized and standardizing, ‘seen but unnoticed,’ expected, background features of everyday scenes.” 34 In other words, it is less a question of interpretation schemes in the strong sense where we understand them as immediate schemes of interpretation of a routine world, without having to pay attention to them. 35 The significance of Garfinkel’s approach lies always in how it makes apparent the habitual character of scenes from day-to-day life along with their implicit backgrounds, by introducing an experimental (therefore artificial) element in order to make things strange, unfamiliar. One way of doing this, well known to ethnomethodologists, consists in asking students to engage in a conversation with someone they know well (without mentioning the fact that the experimenter is looking for the person to clarify their implicit expectations). 36 The experiment incites the “subject” to have to make use of an interpretive process by questioning what they take as commonly known and not requiring a priori any need for explanation or clarification. In this way, this method of analyzing a conversation is valuable in helping us to understand ordinary activities. But what basically interests Garfinkel here about this experiment does not have to do directly with really unhabitual situations, incongruous, problematic ones. The experiment—through which the experimenter deliberately constructs something strange (questioning what is taken as well-known, producing anxiety, perplexity)—has precisely the objective of making explicit ordinary common understanding, through analyzing everyday activities “carried out in similarly conventional ways.” 37 It is not, in other words, so much interpretive activity in the strong sense (as mediate and reflexive) as understanding (as immediate and spontaneous) that is privileged by ethnomethodology, the former being only a means of revealing the latter. To be sure, as Habermas correctly points out, ethnomethodology does not ignore interpretation as “an ongoing accomplishment of participants in interaction,” but it is more about the “microprocesses of interpreting situations and securing consensus,” 38 closer to what with Taylor we have called “protointerpretations” inasmuch as the shared understanding of situations is largely due to typifications of meaning and routinized forms of action. It is interesting, at first glance, as Habermas also notes, to oppose on this point ethnomethodology and hermeneutics,

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Yet between the microscopic (ethnomethodologic) level of microdistortions of meaning and the macroscopic level of major disturbances of meaning (the hermeneutic level according to Habermas), there is a whole range of disturbances of meaning in ordinary life that make room for a pragmatic hermeneutics (or a hermeneutic pragmatism). This is what is at issue for an interpretive and pragmatic anthropology that extends, beyond the original target of hermeneutics, to the analysis of different registers of the problematicity of signs in the confused or irregular situations of ordinary interactions. Habermas’s judgment regarding ethnomethodology can be further nuanced if we recall the well-known “Case of Agnes” from chapter 5 of Studies. Without going into the details here of an analysis well-known to sociologists, what interests us is how in his study Garfinkel has privileged a life story (restored on the basis of dozens of hours of interviews) of a person whose sexual identity is problematic. Let us recall, for those who may not be familiar with this case, that Agnes was born anatomically with masculine organs, and declared to be male, and raised as a male by her family. But even before puberty signs of a female anatomy (like breasts) began to appear and Agnes felt like a girl. The problem was not so much whether Agnes knew what sex to choose (she felt like a woman) as what techniques, ways of doing things (what Garfinkel calls “procedures”) needed to be followed for her to correspond socially (even before having her masculine organs removed) with the status of a “normal, natural woman” given the circumstances of life today, in her life as a couple (with a man), her professional life, even though her past, her education, her anatomy had placed her socially on the masculine side. What we have here, therefore, is not a situation artificially constructed by the ethnomethodologist that leads to having to confront a disturbance or something strange, but a real social situation of a real person: “Her situations of activity—a very large number of them—were chronically ones of ‘structured strain.’ We may think of them as socially structured situations of potential and actual crisis. Sociologically speaking, the stress is a ‘normal stress’ in the sense that the stress occurred precisely because of her active attempts to comply with a legitimate order of sex roles.” 40 In his analysis, Garfinkel tends to privilege her competence, her ways of presenting herself, strategies, tricks (drawing on Goffman, whom he explicitly refers to) that Agnes made use of when she found herself in problematic social situations (questions

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about her sexual relation to her companion, her medical history) in order to avoid any sociological determinism and talk of cultural incompetence. But what most is of interest to our inquiry are precisely the techniques of interpretation required by these procedures (telling one’s biography, dissimulating, unveiling) when a person (or a collective) finds herself (or itself) confronted not only by an unhabitual world of meaning (as in the case of the foreigner studied by Schutz) but equally familiar social situations where adjustment or correspondence is problematic (conforming to the status of a “normal, natural” woman, for example, when the social world at any moment risks uncovering signs of masculinity). 41 In both cases, we find the possibility of distinguishing a more general series of realms of problematicity of meaning that call for interpretation. We propose the following typology. Strangeness occurs in relation to meaning that had not previous been encountered, where incongruity indicates a break with previously acquired meanings. This can be the case with a word from a foreign language, an ancient text, an exotic cultural practice, an unexpected social universe. The strange meaning is close to other forms of irregularity in some meaningful order in that it shatters the habitual conventions among meanings, the routine forms of behavior, the typical ways of understanding the world. Confusion is the result of meaning being caught up in such indistinguishable networks, rendering understanding difficult and uncertain. This problematicity of meaning may take the form of a mistake when one confuses two terms, two persons, two situations. The one is taken for the other in an erroneous, unexpected, unjustified way. Confusion can also lead to disorder, when a proposal obviously makes no sense, when in some situation one is unable to know what to do or what exactly is happening, or how these things came about. Confusion can also arise in a more psychological sense when contradictory emotions (joy and pain, pleasure and suffering) invade a subject and upset them. Obscurity proceeds from a relation to meaning characterized by what literally cannot be seen, read, immediately make any sense. The visual metaphor may apply to someone who is not well-known, like an “obscure poet” who has never been recognized. It may also have to do with a deliberately unclear or jargon-filled statement or even a whole work of literature or esoteric cultural practices. Obscurity is generally caused not by a lack of competence on the part of the interpreter as by a lack of clarity on the part of what is shown to him. Deliberate or not deliberate, complete nonsense is the extreme or limit case of obscurity. Obscurity may finally indicate a background meaning, but one still in the shadows, which needs some light thrown on it if it is to cross the threshold leading to intelligibility, like a rising sun that suddenly illumines what had previously been in the dark. In this latter case, the problematicity of meaning can be assimilated to a figured or latent meaning. There is figured meaning when one can detect at

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least two levels of meaning, a manifest surface literal level that stands out against a background of latent meaning which is not immediately visible or intelligible. Such latent or figurative meaning is not always limited to language or works of art. It can occur with medical symptoms, psychic pathologies, ideologies, and social artifacts that conceal an underlying reality taken to be “true” or “genuine.” Figured language may even convey language that is still richer in figures, metaphors that stimulate our imagination. In this case, the figurative is close to equivocity, which comes from a relation to terms, statements, texts, or situations that can be understood in more than one way. Consequently, there is uncertainty about the true meaning to attribute to whatever is in question. In a negative sense, equivocity is therefore a synonym for ambiguity: one meaning has to be cast aside to the profit of another. At least this is how things work in the case of rationality in everyday life and a fortiori in science, which aims at univocity and clarity. More positively, we can speak of plurivocity when different, even contrary meanings can both be attributed to something, a phrase, a text, an action when the goal is to add to its iconic meaning. In this case, univocity will be taken as an impoverished meaning. Here, once again, we can refer to art and literature as places where a plurality of meanings is not a lack but a surplus, a way of playing with words and meanings, a way of disorienting and reorienting the reader or audience or spectator regarding the supposed univocity of the everyday lifeworld. The ideal of univocity found in the scientific world and the legal world is not what is at stake in the art world. These realms of problematicity of meaning call for one or more of the ordinary interpretive techniques—what we are calling ethnointerpretations— by which we seek to overcome the problematic character of unfamiliar situations (acculturation, unforeseen events, disturbances) or a problematic adjustment (tensions, uncertainties, risks) to familiar situations. This notion of an ethnointerpretation preserves the idea of “ordinary techniques” from ethnomethodology but changes the sense of finality that goes with it. Ethnointerpretations no longer simply designate spontaneous techniques of adjustment to typical interactions, but also, a contrario, techniques for adjusting to unfamiliar situations (or where the adjustment to familiar situations is problematic). We may also consider these ethnointerpretations as interpretationals, halfway between Kantian transcendentals and Heideggerian existentials. On one side, these interpretationals, as we propose to name them, belong to modes of being in a situation or interaction where understanding is originary, but where this opening is not reducible to the meaning of being, or facticity, or the finitude of Dasein. On the other, they belong to conditions of possibility of knowledge, to the a priori conditions of a mediate understanding of any problematic sign, but ones whose constitution is irreducible to scientific knowledge (which is only a derived, more sophisticated form). In other

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words, interpretationals are modes of being and forms of ordinary knowledge constitutive of any mediate grasping of a set of problematic signs. The categories of ethnointerpretations of interpretationals can be inscribed in the specific register of symbolic grammars in Peirce’s sense of the term: clarification, whose technique consists in clarifying an initially confused, disturbed, mixed up meaning. If a philosophy, like Wittgenstein’s, can profess that the goal of philosophy is clarifying thinking or language, we can wager that clarification, whose success is never guaranteed, equally constitutes an ethnomethod when we seek to reestablish the syntax of a manifestly incorrect sentence; one therefore that does not make sense, when we try to reconstruct the meaning of an incoherent proposal, when we undertake to redefine a situation of initially confused interaction (Who does what? Why? When?). 42 Simplification, in an ameliorative sense, aims at decomposing a set of propositions, a theoretical or practical problem, a plot or overly complex situation that makes spontaneous understanding difficult into meaningful elements. The problematicity is not due to a lack of meaning but to a profusion of relations among such meaningful elements. The same may be said for a scene in life affected by a multiplicity of events that one finds it difficult to assemble into a meaningful whole or for a wave of propositions or concepts that spill from a text. Explication is an ethnointerpretation that also operates in this symbolic grammar. It aims at disengaging and amplifying a meaning already contained in an expression or a proposition. Explication, as extending a meaningful intention, may stem from a scientific method of interpretation (for example, in the pragmatic sociology of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot) when it is a question of relating statements of justification to principles of standing (reputation, opinion, efficacity, the general will). Explication is omnipresent in ordinary practices when it is a question of elucidating what is implicit in a proposition, an intention, a situation whose meaning may give rise to equivocations or misunderstandings. Explication is distinguished from explanation, which has to do with establishing cause and effect relations between phenomena. Explanation finds its model in the epistemology of the natural sciences. In part II, we shall consider the epistemological issues posed by the opposition between explanation (by causes), on the one hand, and understanding based on interpretation (or meanings or reasons), on the other. But, at this stage, we can consider explanation as an ethnointerpretation, an indigenous method of interpretation required every time the appearance of an indication, an image, or a symbol does not spontaneously covey its meaning. Given the weight of habits and routines, the causal scheme (in the sense that something is followed by something else following a rule or necessary relation), as Kant puts it, works without any particular interpretation (like when turning the key to start a car’s motor). Interpretive inquiry about our usual operations consists in re-

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turning from the effect to the cause, or reciprocally in anticipating an effect as a function of one or several presumed causes when the reality we are confronted with manifests a degree of indetermination or irregularity. The reconfiguration of the meaning of a phenomenon, an event, a situation is indexed to the search for the cause or the anticipation of an effect. Exemplification is the converse operation to explanation when this takes place in the mode of subsumption (covering a case under a law, something particular under something general): when a concept, an idea, a proposition is not immediately understandable owing, for example, to its being overly abstract or general, one can turn to modes of exemplification or illustration. Ethnointerpretation, which is particularly useful in science, is equally strongly present in ordinary life, notably in learning situations. As Nelson Goodman shows, with exemplification, the symbolizing sign functions like a sample, exemplifying properties that it possesses. Goodman cites as an example a tailor’s cloth sample that exemplifies certain properties of the cloth (color, pattern). 43 Exemplification and explanation presuppose still more elementary forms of interpretationals like identification. Identification and reidentification of a thing, a person, or a situation can occur without a hitch, therefore without interpretation, when one can spontaneously recognize specific features, despite the changes that affect them, when one can continue to gather them under the same name or existing category. In this case, the schematism operates in a pre-reflexive manner depending on the “scheme of substance” for the persistence of the real in time. 44 Identification becomes an ethnointerpretation and the schematism is interpretive when a thing or person have changed sufficiently to no longer be recognizable, when the “basic particulars” (Strawson) have in fact lost a substantial part of their unity and continuity. Identification then becomes fully active and requires use of a method and its application in order to “pick up the pieces” of something, to indirectly reconstruct a person using his characteristic features, or to rearrange the parts of an object to make its original unity reappear. The interpretive procedure of identification is always correlated with operations of categorization and classification: identifying a situation, a thing, someone in particular presupposes in every case that one can relate him or it to more general categories or classes of things and persons (ontologically, anthropologically, socially, culturally). One can elevate the particular to the more general through a progressive movement of “generalization” (what Kant calls specification) by comparing several things each of which “stands under a given concept.” 45 Or one can proceed in the opposite direction from the most general class (species, genus) to “descend” to lower ones (a subspecies, a sub-genus) up to particulars (what Kant calls specification). Here again, as we have indicated with Lévi-Strauss, Descola, and Bourdieu, these procedures operate like “a hidden art” without there being any real need for

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interpretation. As soon as we name, perceive, act, we spontaneously relate to a set of categories and implicit classifications (kinship, social class, type, nature), without this usually requiring any attention on our part. Things go differently when we no longer are able to attribute the same predicates to a subject, to identify a situation that has become strange or person who is perceived as a stranger, once the appearance or discovery of a new situation or phenomenon does not fall under preexisting categories or classifications. Categorizing then comes down, in the final case, to inventing new concepts, theories, names. This is how science proceeds when it is confronted with a new experimental result or when it discovers something new, when it elaborates new classifications (for example, Mendeleev’s periodic table of the elements in chemistry, which replaced that of Lavoisier and his successors), new nomenclatures (like those of the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies in France), new ways of accounting for changes in reality (for example, the appearance of new social classes or new species), or to better describe already existing elements of reality. Ordinary collectives of agents proceed in the same way, as Harvey Sacks, for example, has demonstrated through his study of categorization by groups of adolescents. 46 The category “hotrodder” is a mode of self-identification elaborated by American adolescents who drive fast in modified automobiles. This particular relation to cars at the same time leads to forms of sociability, ways of relating to the world, meant to oppose those adults use to categorize adolescents. The technique of unveiling consists in uncovering, in the background of a literal or manifest meaning, one that is voluntarily or involuntarily concealed, latent, figurative. Having become an actual method under the impulse of masters of suspicion as a kind of depth hermeneutics, interpretation is justified to the degree that the manifest meaning is perceived as illusory, with its true meaning needing to be uncovered. We find similar procedures with no claim to being scientific or philosophical in ordinary interpretations: uncovering the phoniness of an apparently sincere appearance, hidden intentions, the hypocrisy of a decision that calls itself just, the generosity of a political speech that conceals electoral aims. Ordinary unveiling can be the occasion for new misunderstandings, a fortiori when it sets off crazy interpretations, when the interpretation of a hidden thought manifestly misses the real intention. Symbolization proceeds in an opposite way to unveiling, even though the approach is much the same (to free up a latent meaning starting from the manifest one). It is no longer a question of deconstructing a meaning held to be illusory or a mystification in order to oppose the true meaning to it, but unfolding the surplus of meaning contained in the literal sense of an expression, a symbol, a myth, a work. This interpretive technique has demonstrated its heuristic virtues most notably in religious hermeneutics, in the exegesis of sacred texts like those Ricoeur places under the hermeneutics of reconstruction (in opposition to the hermeneutics of suspicion). We also find forms of

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ethnointerpretations or interpretationals through symbolization in most societies through the popular exegesis of stories, songs, legends, and myths addressed to adults or to children, on the occasion of religious rituals, wakes, or seances. Contextualization is one of the most frequently utilized ethnointerpretations or interpretationals in both the scholarly and the everyday world. Characteristically, it applies in all three grammars. It is justified as a way of responding to a partial lack of meaning, a gap in meaning, a shortened meaning. The operation consists in replacing the meaning of a proposition, the indication of a natural sign, the grammar of a pictorial work in an appropriate context, that is, in broarder or more pertinent configurations of significance. The basis for and methods of contextualization may vary greatly. A text may be the sole basis of support: faced with not understanding a proposition, a scene, an event, we seek to place it in a more general context. Another procedure in the case of iconic grammar consists in identifying the problematic signature of a painting in listing the characteristic traits of a period of the history of art or, on the contrary, the specific traits supposed to testify to the genius of a specific artist. Another procedure aims at re-inscribing the problematic identification of a track in the context of a series of similar tracks, in the context of a broader social or natural environment. Finally, there is the procedure of replacing the equivocal meaning of a word or phrase within the context of a more general assertion, with regard to particular forms of life, or singular situations. Narration can be taken as a particular case of or as an extending of contextualization. Narration is not limited to well-formed narratives whose models we find in historians or novelists. We have already emphasized the importance of emplotment in the process of auto-interpretation affected by biographical shocks. Narrations, as uses of emplotment, intervene equally in the structuring of ordinary experience when the occurrence of an event generates a problem when it comes to its immediate understanding. Narrative ethnointerpretation consists in this case in constructing a new intelligibility by placing the event in the context of a plot that relates parts and wholes. Deciphering as an integral part of symbolic grammar follows from the usual technique of learning to read texts (thanks to the distinctions among the letters). This operation is similar in both reading and musical performances. Deciphering, however, goes beyond symbolic grammars alone. It could be called the dominant technique for indexical grammars: as interpreting a set of signs that first appear obscure or mysterious. An index does not immediately reveal its signification. Thus it is necessary first to uncover the underlying laws or relations between signs in order to uncover their meaning. This is how a physician, for example, proceeds when confronted with symptoms that do not correspond to known diseases. And this is how a foreigner approaches a language, use, or custom in order to decipher its meaning. Decoding and

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deciphering techniques also apply to deciphering artificial languages (such as computer languages or Morris code). Translation is similar to a professional technique through which one transfers the meaning of words, sentences, and expressions in a source language to a target language, translation being faced with a choice of methods (literal versus figurative meanings, fidelity versus paraphrase). Translation also occurs in ethnointerpretation each time we face a (dead or living) foreign language in which the conversion of its meaning into our language causes a problem. In the case of oral communication, one usually reserves the term “interpreter” for someone who translates one language into another language. The test of a foreign language for someone who does not speak it well is closely tied to the foreign culture it comes from: not feeling at home there in knowing how to signify things or reach mutual understanding. A trial and error approach, approximations, misunderstandings—in the back and forth working out of the play between one’s own language and the foreign one, between decentering and recentering—are common to the operation that transfers the meaning of a foreign language into one’s own language. The technique of translation moreover goes beyond the register of symbolic language to include iconic and indexical grammars, notably regarding the material signs, which vary so widely among different cultural schemes. Yet the possibility in principle of translating any language into another language must presuppose the existence of schemes of schemes, of schemes capable precisely of converting one cultural scheme into another such scheme. We may go so far as Quine does and envisage translation as working within one language (being “at home” there, as Quine puts it) in relation to what other members of that community say. This is all the more true when we are confronted with literary or poetic texts whose understanding assumes precise techniques for deciphering them. The indeterminate, potentially ineliminable character of translation (as Quine demonstrates) 47 does not matter here when we really do not know if we have made an error in the choice of a term or expression. What is essential, anthropologically speaking, is the possibility of legitimately and practically making use of an interpretive technique when we ask about the meaning of a word or expression in a foreign or unknown language. This typology or ordinary techniques of interpretation is far from exhaustive and deserves a more extensive treatment of each of them. It does tell us something, however, about the diversity of ethnointerpretive techniques and how they vary as a function of the grammars to which they are applied, and about the possibility, both in everyday and scientific practice, of combining them. Every ethnointerpretation can contribute to reinforcing the meaning produced by another interpretive technique. For example, translation of a foreign language rarely occurs without some reference to context or some added clarification. The same thing applies to deciphering. Günter Figal

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points out, in the case of what he calls “reflective interpretation” of a text, that two techniques are always assumed: explanation and clarification. 48 In fact, explanation, which focuses on singular elements of a text, happens as explication (unpacking the meaning of a sentence, a peripeteia) and contextualization (referring to a biographical, social, or historical context), even as translation (if it is a foreign text or from a distant past). As things unfold, the set of techniques used reinforce one another, allowing the meaning of a text to be clarified, at least if it was originally the object of an undetermined or obscure initial meaning. Clarification can even occur as a kind of unveiling when one seeks to uncover a meaning hidden beneath the literal sense of a narrative. To render more clearly a passage of a text then comes down to making a deeper meaning come to light. Without going as far as Dilthey does when he says that interpretation would not be possible “if the externalizations of life were entirely foreign,” it is at least necessary here to repeat what has already been said about the possibility of a failure in interpretation when the techniques used do not permit removing the problematicity of its meaning. What is essential is that if there were nothing foreign, interpretation would be useless: interpretation is “required where there is something foreign that the art of understanding allows to be appropriated.” 49 We can wager that ethnointerpretations are universally applicable (hence the correlative term interpretationals) among members of the genus Homo sapiens, and even among other species (such as the Neanderthals), which have today disappeared. It is true that there are many forms in which they are expressed, as we have seen, depending on social and cultural schemes that exist or once existed. The concrete modes of translation, contextualization, explanation, and symbolization do not constitute a monolithic block over the course of history, societies, and cultures, without even mentioning individual variations based on lived experience, age, or sex. The question remains how are we to know, on the ontogenetic plane, when homo became interpretans? A first way of looking at things would consist in saying that humans became properly interpretive with the appearance of language and self-consciousness. Work in child psychology shows that this thesis is false, even at the state of infancy. Before learning a language, an infant is immersed in a sea of signs whose significations the child has to understand. Unlike the mode of relatively stabilized significations for adults, the infant lives in an external world defined by the unfamiliar: disturbances, surprises, bumps, even anxiety make up a substantial part of its day. The young child, a fortiori before the period of acquiring a language, certainly does not have at its disposal the whole palette of ethnointerpretations available to the adolescent or the adult, and has not yet mastered the supports (like texts) for interpretation that fill the adult world. The infant’s reflexive capacity (not to speak of self-interpretation using narrative) remains quite limited, at least during the first months of life. But this does not mean, far

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from it, that infants have no competencies, no interpretive techniques for translating into their world the universe of signs that is imposed on them. The whole interpretive effort of a young infant consists in making familiar an external world first defined by its obscurity and strangeness. Winnicott has demonstrated the central function of transitional objects (like the famous “teddy bear”) in the progressive passage from a relatively undifferentiated self and world to the recognition of his own reality. 50 These transitional objects are no longer part of the infant’s body but not yet part of an external world. They allow the infant to explore new worlds, to make sense of disturbing, confused, or anxious situations. They constitute a kind of inter-world that contributes to interpreting and acting in the external world by making it familiar. The continuous process of familiarization of childhood, even though marked by many bumps in the road, does not prevent a hiatus from enduring between the world of infancy and that of adulthood. Misunderstandings between the two worlds do take place. This is especially true regarding the dominance of the parent’s linguistic world and the young child’s babbling (or where interpretation is largely depending on showing things), even if such babbling is already an experience of wanting to mean something, to refer, before having the words to do so. Even starting with the so-called lexical explosion (between eighteen and twenty months), the infant’s first articulated language is not yet that of adults and leads to all sorts of misunderstanding. Interpretation is thus all the more necessary. This applies to the phenomena called lexical over-extension when a child attributes too many adult references to a word (for example, “mama” for any “woman”) or to the opposite phenomenon of lexical under-extension when the infant assigns a word to only part of what it refers to. Another particularity of early childhood language has to with the constraint known as mutual exclusivity: a young child here tends to refuse to use a new word given to designate a known referent when the child has already learned another word for it (for example, “animal” for “dog”). The fact, therefore, that an adult and a child share the same lexical universe does not imply immediate and mutual understanding between them. A common language does not signify a spontaneously shared understanding: the adult has to learn to interpret the child’s mode of understanding and the child has to progressively come to learn what adults typically mean. This is all the more true, as the experiments conducted by Jean Piaget show, 51 in that children live in what the psychologist calls an “animistic universe.” Rather than attributing natural causes to natural phenomena, young children have a tendency to attribute intentions, or reasons, or ways of acting to them. For example, to the question why a ball rolls down an incline toward the observer, a young child may reply that it intends to do so, that it wants to move toward the observer. Younger children in general tend to assimilate life and

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movement, to see the movement of a thing as intended by a living organism. The effort to translate the meaningful world of children into that of adults is akin to that required between members of different cultural groups (for example, between naturalists and totemists). The child must nevertheless learn to leave behind, at least in part, the world shared with other children, as a function of the stages of cognitive and emotional development. It is from parents and generally other “significant others” (Mead) that the child, over the course of primary socialization, will be able to appropriate the meaningful universe of adults by learning to identify with it, even before having mastered the use of language. The parent as the bearer of significance par excellence plays the role of a kind of filter through which the world takes on another meaning than that held originally by the child. For example, in a dominant naturalistic world, the child progressively learns to abandon their animist representations of the natural world to themselves to become a naturalist, even if portions of the animist perspective may persist. It is more precisely at the state that Mead calls that of the “generalized other” that the child becomes capable of abstraction, of typifying roles, behavior, and other stable meanings. The increasing mastery of language over the course of socialization permits a growing human being to progressively reinforce familiarity with the world of adults, in short, no longer having to interpret what they now understand spontaneously regarding what surrounds them and even their self through a form of self-interpretation. PRODUCTIVE INTERPRETATION AND AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE Progressively becoming familiar with the world over the course of ontogenesis, even if it does imply an increasing degree of immediate understanding, does not, of course, imply that interpretation purely and simply disappears. There will always be something strange about the natural and social world, some confusion or disturbance over the course the stages and trials of human life. Even as an adult, homo remains interpretans. We must still distinguish, in terms of varying degrees of innovation, between productive and reproductive interpretation. The kinship with the distinction inherited from Kant between the productive imagination (the faculty of producing new syntheses) and the reproductive imagination (the faculty of representing an absent object to oneself) is not trivial owing to the role played by imagination and what is imagined in interpretive activity. Faced with a problematic situation, a breakdown in intelligibility, interpretation will be reproductive when it seeks to tie what is strange to a familiar, already known, or learned meaning, to already existing schemes. Reproductive interpretation proceeds on the basis of familiarization: to go from the unknown to the known, from the strange to the familiar.

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Interpretation will be called productive when the experience of the problematicity of meaning leads, on the contrary, to producing new meaningful configurations. Imagination intervenes here precisely as a generative faculty of semantic innovation. Confronted with something that no longer makes sense, an indeterminate, obscure, or confused meaning, one that is not immediately self-evident, the imagination serves to re-schematize experience, it proposes new frameworks for interpretation, invents hitherto unknown significations. The imagination is not limited to its transcendental function as a faculty for providing images to concepts by schematizing them. As an iconic, semantic power, the imagination allows enlarging, augmenting the human power to perceive and signify, as an extension of saying and seeing. When related to interpretation, the imagination is force of innovation and creation because it contributes to grasping resemblances and differences between things in order better to characterize them, or to establish analogous relations when the relation between two terms or two situations is not immediately intelligible, to invent impertinent semantic relations (in comparison to usual usage) between things in order to bring out new meanings of reality. This is why there are truly original translations that generate a transformation in the target language, innovative symbolizations, and contextualizations and recontextualizations that allow shifting and enriching the meaning of an expression, a story, a picture, why there are artistic performances that interpret a role, a play, a musical piece in an original way. The habitual use of interpretation in the artistic world (in the sense of the performing arts: music, singing, dance) conserves a specific meaning that does not necessarily imply the idea of a problematicity of meaning, even if all training for a role in theater or film assumes a reflexive relation to what has to be interpreted. Interpreting simply signifies that the work has to be played, performed by those who are rightly called its “interpreters.” An interpretation in this specific sense can be more or less original. The paradox about the actor spoken of by Diderot (who expresses the emotion of a character without actually feeling it, who identifies himself as a character without actually being that person) is about interpretation only in two specific cases. 52 In the first case, when the actor finds it difficult to play a role, to express an emotion, play a scene or a character other than himself; in the second case, when the actor proposes an original refiguration of a wellknown scene or familiar character. The question of interpretation of works of art does not depend solely on the artist’s or the musician’s or the performer’s point of view or the question of originality, that is, on the question of the production of a work of art. It also applies to aesthetic experience whether or not the work produces a plurality of meanings, or immediately conveys its depth or profuse meaning. Where scientific rationality and everyday life conveniently seek to reduce meaning to univocity and clarity, art is meant to be tensive and plurivocal. If

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ambiguity generally constitutes an obstacle for everyday communication and experience, plurivocity is a key part of aesthetic experience. The more a work of art merits aesthetic interest, we may say, the more it is likely to deploy many different registers of meaning (intellectual, emotional, and so on). Whether it be figurative, abstract, or conceptual, a work of art, through its very existence, provokes a defamiliarization when it comes to meaning and makes aesthetic experience an interpretive experience par excellence. Because it suspends the literal reference to the common world, because it gives a shove to acquired certainties, because it disconcerts habitually typified meanings, a work of art, even the most realist or figurative such work, demands interpretation. Interpretation is required not only when the manifest meaning of the work—for example, in Christian or Byzantine art—may appeal to an allegorical meaning, a biblical scene, or a myth, but for modern works of art as well. Even everyday objects reconfigured into “ready-mades” displace the meaning of what is viewed to reveal something strange about their very proximity. When their habitual use is defunctionalized, they provoke a defigured meaning as well. Nor does figurative art, even when it represents familiar scenes, escape this sort of defiguration. Because all mimesis in art is creative, even in the visual arts, the meaning configured by a work acquires a density and its own world. Once it is represented on a canvas, or in a photo, or a movie scene, the familiar is already transfigured into a problematic meaning, a fortiori if the familiar is situated in a different age or culture. Consider, for example, Vermeer’s Woman Holding a Balance from the seventeenth century. At first glance, this painting represents a familiar scene from seventeenth-century Flemish society and belongs to what we can call a “genre scene,” an anecdotal picture. Why then is our immediate understanding of this painting troubling? Why is an interpretation required? Because the picture scene (through its décor, its furnishings, the woman’s clothing) is not familiar culturally to us in the way it would have been for those contemporary with its creation. Historical distance, as we shall see with Gadamer, thus calls for another understanding of this painting: a familiarizing of what is historically and culturally foreign to us. However, it needs to be added, this familiar scene from its day, as configured by Vermeer’s genius, was equally foreign for his contemporaries (a fortiori more than for today’s viewer). In other words, what is it about this apparently common scene for its day that carries a plurivocal power calling for interpretation? It has to do with its allegorical potential, beyond the “ordinary” picture scene. In the upper right corner of the painting appears, as a mise en abyme, another painting representing The Last Judgment, perhaps inspired by Jacob de Backe. 53 At the top of this second painting we find the heavenly world, with, at its center, Christ with a halo; at its bottom, the terrestrial world (with naked people turned heavenward awaiting election, while others, the damned, are thrown down).

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The unease is provoked by the fact that the position of the woman weighing gold makes her almost part of the second picture in the background, as though the last judgment weighed directly on her shoulders. Above her head, we have Christ the savior on his throne, between her shoulder blades, on one side, the elect, on the other, the damned. And if we now look at the lighting, the light, reinforced by Christ’s halo, which is projected from the window, partly concealed by a yellow curtain, illumines the women’s face while her hands and the table on which there are jewels and the balance (both of whose pans are empty) are obscured. Her face oscillates between concentration on the task at hand (her right hand holds the balance) and a contemplative attitude beneath Christ’s halo and the redemptive light coming from the outside. The viewer must hesitate when it comes to the meaning of this allegory. A first interpretation: is the woman damned by her vanity and taste for earthly pleasures and wealth? 54 Is she unaware of the last judgment that awaits her and Christ’s injunction in Matthew 6:19, “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth”? A second interpretation: her almost pious facial expression, the still empty pans (almost perfectly in balance), the hand at the edge of the tables as a possible sign of rejecting the jewels, do these not testify, on the contrary, to an attitude of renouncing wealth and withdrawal (a choice of heaven over earth)? A third, more Protestant, possible interpretation: the possession of jewels, of material wealth are signs to be deciphered, given the uncertainty that comes with pre-destination, as is election at the last judgment. In this sense, the painting would be the symptom of a Calvinist spirit typical of the new capitalism that had arisen in the United Provinces. The light shines as much on the woman’s pious face as on the enthroned Christ, are these not then both signs of election? We will not decide here on the correct meaning that must be given this allegory, leaving aesthetic experience its interpretive pluralism. What is essential is our restoring to the work its equivocal power and to the viewer his interpretive capacity. Someone may object, this work demands interpretation precisely because it presents an allegory: the familiar generic scene is transfigured into a representation that takes on a moral and religious dimension. This objection makes sense in that allegory multiplies the meaning of the work, reinforcing our uncertainty and the problematicity of its meaning. But ought we then to say that another painting, one that represents a “pure” generic scene, should one exist, would not need to be interpreted (because there was nothing allegorical about it)? Consider, for example, Interior with a Woman Weighing a Gold Coin by Pieter de Hooch, from the same period as Vermeer’s Woman Holding a Balance (which may be been inspired by it). This is clearly a genre scene (a woman weighing coins), with no religious or allegorical connation. Why then do we have to interpret it? Not just because what is represented (an interior room, clothes, a picture of daily life) is partly

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foreign to us historically and culturally. But equally because of the particular way the artist suspends the literal reference to the everyday world of his day by refiguring it through his picture’s composition. This is how the art invents its own world. It does not really matter whether the artist is inspired by his daily reality, the one most familiar to him. The simple fact of making a work provokes a problematicity of meaning and calls for interpretation, even in the case of failure. This is why it is necessary to say with Paul Klee that art does not reproduce the visible, it makes it visible, it makes visible a visible that does not previously exist. Some currents of contemporary art (Morris, Stella, Judd) are limit cases that fabricate “simple” three-dimensional volumes with no particular aesthetic supplement, which are “minimal” in this sense. The idea clearly is to eradicate any form of latency, any mirroring some meaning, any equivocity. What you see is what you see is the watchword of such minimalism. There is nothing to see beyond what there is simply there to be seen. In this way, the work is stripped of any background world of meaning. As Georges DidiHuberman demonstrates, in a magisterial analysis, minimalist artists dream of a “pure eye,” a gaze almost without a subject, one that would no longer be interpretive, that would only see what it sees through an immediate perception, that is, simply empty cubes made of transparent glass. 55 This simply seeing is the precept of what Didi-Huberman calls “tautologous man.” Faced with a work, one with no layers of meaning, tautologous man is supposed to see the same thing, always the same thing, objects reduced to the pure materiality of their form, presented without any hint of a mystery. The observing subject and the observed object are governed by the same principle of stability and substance. Tautologous man, stripped of temporality, will always view the same object just as it is. Minimalist art wants to remove from the world of art its power of equivocation, its refigurative capacity, its interpretive potential, even its emotive aspect. But it is starting from such works that Didi-Huberman is able to point to a whole latent palette of meanings. The art critic gives them both temporality and an aura, a density of meaning and a wealth of plurivocity. In a vein that owes much to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception and even more to his The Visible and the Invisible, 56 Didi-Huberman attributes to our gaze, in general, and to our aesthetic perceiving, in particular, an active power of seeing that always goes beyond what is simply visible, its form and matter given in our impressions: “What is given to be seen always disturbs seeing, the act of seeing, the subject of seeing. Seeing, is always the operation of a subject, therefore one that is divided, uneasy, agitated, open-ended.” 57 It is through this uneasiness that seeing renews its interpretive vigor. Someone who seeks to see beyond what is seen is well named by Didi-Huberman, “believing man,” in a sense of believing that no longer necessarily has need of the idea of religious salvation. Echoing Kafka’s parable of the law, believ-

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ing man is brought to the threshold of what is beyond what is immediately seeable, even if it is forbidden to cross this threshold or ever to reach it. Tautologous man turns his back on it, deciding that there is nothing more to see. Only believing man is a true homo aestheticus, an offshoot of homo interpretans, before the doors of art. Still, how can a simple cube of transparent glass disturb our vision? It is easier to imagine this with Picasso’s Guernica or, as we have seen, with The Woman with a Balance. A particular way of seeing, a disposition to see in another way, no doubt is required to see what is given as a simple cube as something more than a simple cube. What is required no doubt is the experience and finesse of an art critic like Didi-Huberman who can expand the contours and limits of invisibility. Here is what he writes, for example, about sculptures by Tony Smith seen at the Cooper Gallery in New York in 1967 (Maze, constructed of painted wood): Tony Smith’s sculptures are disturbing in their formal clarity—their essentially geometrical and non-expressive nature—their insistence on presenting themselves as obscure. They are visually compact and intensive, even when articulated. They are painted black, that is, external to the image of what they are internally. They thus constantly make us hesitate between the act of seeing their somber exterior form and the act of foreseeing their open, empty, invisible interior species. They represent an order of visible evidence, a certain geometrical clarity, they quickly become non-evidential objects, objects capable of presenting their convexity as the hint of an active emptiness, a concavity. 58

So there is something more to see than what may (re)present itself as a simple black volume. Or at least the art critic, so to speak, lends us the expansiveness of his seeing to help us see something other than what we may have seen, something lacking depth and any latency of meaning. Playing with words, the critic leads us to see-together, to “see in seeing,” to recall the title of a book by John Berger. 59 To see in seeing here is not to postulate an inaccessible or meta-physical invisible, 60 but like Husserl a “transcendence in immanence” in perception, 61 an expanded gaze always open to further meaning, that always exceeds the most immediate data of sensory perception, an unfolding of potential invisibilities and potentialities that become visible through an effort of attention, a play of imagination, and acquired experience. The horizons of meaning of a plane, a scene, a landscape that at first are not realized, inchoative, owing to a lack of attention paid to them, progressively unfold to become real for a gaze that changes its focal point: the background comes to the fore, while retaining what first appeared. In the aesthetic experience of Maze, the “transcendence in immanence” goes from the black outside volume to its depth as an empty disturbing inside, only to return from there to the beginning.

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If Didi-Huberman’s interpretation of Tony Smith sculptures is really only a possible interpreting-together, it does contribute to again giving aesthetic experience its plurivocal valence and depth of meaning. The just one interpretation would have the value of impoverishing art. The faith profession of the “minimalists” butts up against the sense that their works are capable of connoting and denoting, at least for those who know how to look. Tony Smith himself does not hesitate to refer to Egyptian temples, not to claim he has reproduced something equivalent to them, but something different (for example, a black steel object) that will have a new aura. The artist’s metadiscourse regarding his works, like what we find in much contemporary art, goes against the demultiplication of meanings of a work, contrary to the principle of what you see is what you see. The depth of the visual field is augmented through the historicity of art and its traces in his works. Another limit case is found in the refusal to interpret an experience, rightly or wrongly, judged to transcend meaning. The risk here will not be a minimal meaning but too much meaning, a maximal meaning, we could say, that overflows any interpretive capacity. Good illustrations are found in some mystical or meta-physical experiences, that of a relation to the Whole, to God, or to an Other that one says exceeds every meaning and therefore every interpretation. There is something like this injunction not to interpret in Levinas’s hyperbole about the epiphany of the face of the other: to interpret this other would be to reduce it to the same and do violence to it. In this postphenomenological current the invisible becomes lost in the meta-physical. Like the ways of God or of the Other, the ways of Art will be impenetrable, uninterpretable. We also find this injunction, although purged of its meta-physical underpinning, in some celebrated literary and aesthetic experiments like those from Blanchot and Bataille, as well as in Derrida and Deleuze, using an antiHegelian strategy in which meaning cannot be recovered, absorbed, or tamed. Everything converges on a “Hegelianism without reserves,” as Derrida writes regarding Bataille, which comes down to the impossibility of holding onto or surpassing a meaning that always flees, leaving the strange and suspended meaning suspended—that is, ecstasy. The initial loosening is not “sublated” into a new grasp of meaning or a reflexive return to self. To begin to interpret will already mean leaving ecstasy behind. This is how Susan Sontag rebelled against interpretation in art. 62 Interpreting in the sense of decoding or deciphering a work would be a way to corrupt it and betray it. Not that Sontag thought we could get to the work itself, apart from every perspective, beyond Nietzsche’s warning. What was at issue was the intellectual desire to uncover a meaning hidden behind the work’s manifest presence, at the risk of losing the authenticity of immediate sense experience, assimilated to a kind of erotic experience. An erotic better than an intellectual hermeneutic would be the best way to free art’s liberating

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and subversive forces. Like with Deleuze, a surface, literal aesthetics is to be preferred to a depth hermeneutic assimilated to a technique for deciphering a hidden meaning. Without denying the sensory, pre-linguistic, pre-interpretive experiences of works of art, we can contest this assimilation of interpretation to a practice of uncovering something, which is really only another manifestation. For Deleuze, if interpretation has a polemic value, it has to do with his fight with Freudian psychanalysis, which ties the meaning of every unconscious production to archaic family scenes. To the unconscious as an “ancient theater,” Deleuze (with Guattari) prefers thinking of it as a “factory,” a force field, desiring machines. 63 But does Deleuze really do away with the concept of interpretation? Yes, certainly, in its psychoanalytic sense of a depth hermeneutics. No, in that he proposes another interpretation of the productions of the unconscious. It is above all in his book on Proust that Deleuze talks about a “sign-producing machine”: sensory signs, ordinary signs, love signs, art signs. 64 Whereas ordinary signs are discernible through their vacuity, love signs refer to multiple worlds: The beloved appears as a sign, a “soul”; the beloved expresses a possible world unknown to us, implying, enveloping, imprisoning a world that must be deciphered, that is, interpreted. What is involved, here, is a plurality of worlds; the pluralism of love does not concern only the multiplicity of loved beings, but the multiplicity of souls or worlds in each of them. To love is to try to explicate, to develop these unknown worlds that remain enveloped within the beloved. 65

This is the meaning of In Search of Lost Time, which is suspended for the author, as for the principal character, for an indeterminable “apprenticeship to signs.” Deleuze would undoubtedly grant, even at the price of a rehabilitation of interpretation, that the same may be said about the reader, that is, about aesthetic experience in how it is refigured through this apprenticeship to signs. In this case, must we not make every work of art a “machine for producing signs” and every aesthetic experience an interpretive experience? A similar conclusion may be applied to the more radical thesis of Susan Sontag. Shusterman sees this when he writes that “interpretation is also practiced and theorized in terms of formal structure with the aim not so much of exposing hidden meanings but of connecting unconcealed features and surfaces so as to see and present the work as a well-related whole.” 66 To be sure, this interpretive labor of finding cohesion, context, and the meaning of a work culminates in the work of professionals like historians, critics, and art lovers when it comes to aesthetic judgment. It also happens for the rest of us, if only partially, owing to our lack of specialized knowledge, when we are confronted with enigmas about a work of art; otherwise, we remain at risk of being unable to grasp any of its meaning or even its nonsense.

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What is essential here has to do with the connection we can construct between productive interpretation, aesthetic experience, and artistic creation. The process of semantic innovation in the arts, as an unexpected predication, an impertinent utterance, which Ricoeur analyzes in the case of poetic metaphor, can be extended to other bases than the spoken phrase or told story, to ordinary procedures of expanding meanings. We may, for example, speak of a metaphorizing power of productive interpretation whenever it suspends the meaning of a typical reference to the world to produce an innovative seconddegree reference. Metaphor “captures its sense as metaphorical midst the ruins of the literal sense, it also achieves its reference upon the ruins of what might be called (in symmetrical fashion) its literal reference.” 67 To say that “nature is a temple where living pillars” comes down to suspending the usual predicates attributed to nature in order to enrich its meaning through a new semantic pertinence. Metaphorization allows it to be redescribed in a different way, to seeing nature as it had not previously been seen. Every use of metaphor, however, does not necessarily call for an interpretation or only a minima. Worn out or dead metaphors become part of ordinary language and generate few problems when it comes to their meanings. For example, the French expression “ténors du barreau” applied to wellknown figures does not require comparison to opera singers whose voices carry well. Only live, creative, impertinent metaphors require a real work of interpretation, a suspending of the immediate meaning, and a symbolic refiguring of the world. The calculated categorical mistake (the predicate “temple where living pillars” attributed to “nature”) belonging to the poet’s art of metaphor is at work as well in certain approaches to productive interpretation in the everyday world. It may be found in the creolization of languages, catchy slogans, dances, and popular music, in the creative interpretation of social roles, and the reframing of well-known experiences. There is a power of metaphorization of the everyday social world, akin to the creativity of action, 68 worthy of the ethnographer’s attention as much as that of the philosopher interested in the power of metaphorization in the arts and literature. Without overshadowing the force of instituted meanings and existing schemes, social anthropology needs to take into account the productive ethnointerpretations that contribute to the symbolic constitution of the social world and of collective identities. The problem remains, however, of whether it is possible to produce radically new significations. Hence the distinction between productive interpretation/imagination and creative interpretation/imagination. The debate between Ricoeur and Castoriadis is quite illuminating on this point. 69 Castoriadis in his work always defends the possibility of a historical creation of meaning, that is, the possibility of creating radically new (institutional, artistic, political, scientific) “forms” not pre-figured in the existing order, which are not a simple effect of already existing forms, not contained in some pre-

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established plan. This thesis is simply unacceptable to Ricoeur, who prefers to talk of production rather than creation, not to say that everything is already pre-figured but to attest that every new production of meaning proceeds from what does not yet exist. If there is discontinuity or innovation on certain planes of human existence (in science or technology, for example), it does not necessarily affect all the others as well. It is the hermeneutic primacy of “pre-” that prevents Ricoeur from crossing the Rubicon of historical creation. Notably that language already exists, and therefore rules that prevent his subscribing to the idea that a new form might appear on the basis of something like an unformed chaos. His favorite model is drawn from the hermeneutic theory of text interpretation in virtue of which we proceed by successive interpretations and reinterpretations starting from an already existing configuration: We can only produce according to rules; we do not produce everything we produce, if only because we already have a language before we can talk. Others have spoken and have established the rules of the game. What we can do is to put them back into what Malraux called “coherent deformations.” We can proceed by coherent deformations, but this always takes place with a prestructure, within something already structured that we restructure. That is why we are never in a situation that you would call creation, as if it could be derived from the absolutely formless. 70

From this follows the central concept of retroaction, which contributes to bringing to life stores of already existing meanings: our new creations go back to older moments from which we draw possibilities that have been prevented from being expressed. Other readings, influences, and historical experience largely explain Castoriadis’s deep attachment to the thesis of historical creation. These historical experiences reappear regularly in his works and in his discussion with Ricoeur concerning the birth of mathematics in ancient Greece and the appearance of new political forms with the Greek polis and the Paris commune. This is not to say that these “new forms” fall from the sky or come from some genius, but rather that we do not understand their hitherto unknown, radically new character if we must deduce them from already existing forms: “It is impossible for me to think of the polis, the Greek city, for example, or the philosophy which emerges in the sixth century BCE as mere recombinations of elements that were already there. What institutes the polis as polis, is a meaning that it creates and through which creates itself as a polis.” 71 For all that Ricoeur, as a prisoner of the model of the text, tends to downplay the radical novelty of certain productive interpretations, we cannot subscribe to the idea of a creation of meaning that does not proceed in one way or another from an already instituted meaning, even when it radically transgresses or subverts it. Every interpretation, of course, is not already encased in some

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pre-established plan, but not every new production of meaning is equally possible, if we take into account given circumstances, preexisting schemes, and social and cultural constraints. THE POLITICS AND CULTURE OF INTERPRETATION The debate between Ricoeur and Castoriadis has the advantage of shifting the question of interpretation, imagination, and the imaginary to the social and political plane. What particularly interests us is the political use or function of interpretation clearly oriented toward action. Interpretation will be dissimulating or mystifying if it seeks to conceal real social and political relations in order to reproduce systems of domination. Conversely, interpretation will be called demystifying or critical if it is aimed at removing the masks used by power to assure its domination. It will be called reconstructive when it aspires to project other horizons of meaning with the objective of transforming existing social-political orders. These three political functions have the particularity of being inscribed in a meta-pragmatic register rather than in a practical one, if we retain the distinction here proposed by Luc Boltanski. The practical register, in contexts of ordinary action and interaction, carries a weak degree of reflexivity on the part of the agents engaged in some task, who do not have to question or set at a distance what they are saying or doing. This practical register corresponds closely to the socio-phenomenological description of the routine order of the world where things work well. At the same time that it is weakly reflexive, it is weakly interpretive, at best being pre-interpretive and protointerpretive. Things are different with the meta-pragmatic register, which refers to situations that are called into question, moments of uncertainty or strange meaning that call for reflexivity as well as interpretation: In a metapragmatic register, by contrast, it is the relationship been symbolic forms and states of affairs and, as a result, the space that separates them (or can), their possible gaps, their potential distance, which is placed at the center of common preoccupations. Uncertainty, which is at the heart of social life is transferred from an unease about the possibility of a failure of the beings who make up the environment (is the motor going to work? will the horse obey? etc.) and focused primarily on the question of qualification. 72

Mystifying or dissimulating interpretation is meta-pragmatic in that it does not seek simply to qualify a fact but to throw a veil over it to deform it. This enterprise is particularly visible in the exercise of political power confronted with a reality highly prejudicial to its interests. A bad international scene, alarming economic results, falling popularity in poll results, and all such indications and events, to cite just a few examples, can become the

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object of a slight of hand move or a deformation calculated to assure the hold on power of those who execute it. Interpretation then rhymes with manipulation, the use of euphemisms, misinformation whose intensity varies as a function of political regimes, the existence of counter centers of power, the autonomy of organs of production (ministries, think tanks). The phenomena of manipulation and instrumentalization stem from pathologies of interpretation in general. Interpretation can suffer a failure when individuals and collectives do not possess the resources and methods need to overcome the problematicity of signs. We have seen this regarding the failure of interpretive processes when faced with “difficult to classify events,” with the exhaustion of narrative and other interpretive forms: meaning no longer comes from an interpretive act. Interpretation can suffer the opposite pathology when it is manifestly overdone, when we have to deal with an over-interpretation of phenomena, with incongruous interpretive wild ideas regarding facts: too much meaning ends up as nonsense. Instead of removing the problematicity of a sign, too much interpretation only adds to the confusion. If everyone does their best to make sense of a difficult interpretation, the interpretation need not become pathological, in the medical sense, unless people no longer think clearly, if they no longer are able to step back enough to see that their interpretations do not make sense. Paranoia is a good illustration in that a subject over-interprets every external sign in terms of their fear of persecution, misunderstanding what is really going on. Others challenging this pathological process may even reinforce the vicious circle of feeling persecuted. The paranoiac is incapable of stepping away from what is felt to be the implacable coherence of his universe of meaning. Pathological interpretation gets going when the subject is incapable of stepping back from his world of meaning and refuses to recognize the pluralism and critical role of interpretation. In this sense, as we shall see in the next chapter, not every false or erroneous interpretation is pathological, only those where one does not know that their interpretations are interpretations; someone who is unable to step back from their interpretive framework to acknowledge other possible frameworks is caught up in a pathogenic process. It is not, of course, a question of purely and simply transposing the idea of medical pathology to over-interpretation of the political and collective universe, even if history has known many paranoid tyrants. Nothing prevents us though, with Habermas, from thinking about the metaphorical pathologies of public space using a Freudian psychoanalytic model of a “pathological compulsion of deformed communication.” 73 Political interpretation becomes highly pathological when the flow of words and acts leads to fanaticism, when reality is systematically deformed by an ideology turned into a dogma, when interpretive pluralism no longer has any right to exist. Outside these extreme cases, which are found throughout the history of human societies, a

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structural pathogenic function of political interpretation persists: the mystifying function of interpretation. The mystifying function of interpretation, in its political use, can be explained by the fact that authority rarely exercises “naked” power (in the sense of what Max Weber calls Macht). All political domination (Herrschaft) requires different forms of belief in the legitimacy of the power exercised over them on the part of those dominated by it. These beliefs can become stable and relatively routine, even strongly internalized, incorporated, and naturalized under the form of what Pierre Bourdieu calls symbolic violence. We can then say that a part of the structural mystification of reality stems from the political authority that seeks to preserve itself. The mystifying tendency is accentuated in situations where the gap grows between the claim (to domination) on the part of some authority and the belief in its legitimacy. Legitimacy no longer is taken for granted, beliefs can erode, confidence fall. Interpretation accentuates its mystifying dimension when political power seeks to fill the gap between what is claimed and what is believed, when institutions seek to increase the belief in their legitimacy. Weber gives a clear analysis of this phenomena: “Experience shows that in no instance does domination voluntarily limit itself to the appeal to material or affectual or ideal motives as a basis for its continuance. In addition every such system attempts to establish and to cultivate the belief in its legitimacy.” 74 Paul Ricoeur draws all the consequences to rethink the pathological function of this supplement to belief which he identifies as ideology: can we not say that the problem of ideology concerns precisely this supplement, this gap between claim and belief, the fact that there must be something more in the belief than can be rationally understood in terms of interests, whether emotional, customary, or rational? Second, is it not the function of ideology to fill in this credibility gap? If this is the case, then third do we not need to elaborate a concept of surplus-value, now linked not so much to work as to power? 75

The importance of what Ricoeur says lies in how it captures the mystifying character of interpretation in its political use in terms of a conceptual framework inspired by interpretive sociology drawn from Weber, without having to draw on the mechanistic scheme found in Marxism (the causal determination of economic substructures on the ideological superstructures), yet in fine rediscovering the dissimulative function of ideology inherited from Marx. This is what is at stake in the analogy between, on the one hand, economic surplus value understood as the difference between a worker’s salary and the exchange value of a product when it is sold, and, on the other hand, political surplus-value understood as the status granted to a claim to legitimacy and belief in it. In the first case, we end up with what Marx called “the fetishism of merchandise,” in the second case what Ricoeur calls the

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supplement of belief in any political ideology. This supplement of belief corresponds typically on the meta-pragmatic level to what Boltanski places under the aegis of confirmation. This institutional operation bears the seed of interpretive reflexivity to the degree that the relation of symbolic forms to states of things has lost its routine, normal character and led to uneasiness on the part of the rulers who have to try to conjure away the risks that may pose a challenge to their authority. The problematicity of meaning then gets expressed in terms of a shortage of belief and/or trust. Mystifying interpretation, in its political use, can generate an opposite effect: a demystifying and critical interpretation, which in return can reinforce the former through new confirmations, and new supplements to beliefs. The operation is contrary in that it comes down to unveiling what had been veiled, to unmasking what was masked, to deconstructing what had been constructed as a legitimation. Unveiling may also concern the structural mystification of the reality of relations of domination similar to what Bourdieu calls symbolic violence as well as the supplementary belief claimed by authority in a situation where its legitimacy is in question. The critique of mystification may also translate into what Boltanski calls the “hermeneutic contradiction” of institutions, that is, the contradiction between “the overarching position, superior to points of view associated with interests, occupied by the bodiless being and the self-interested character of the corporeal beings who occupy it and speak for it; or, if you like particularly in democratic-capitalist societies whose principle of legitimacy is the Rechtsstaat, between the legal order and the social order.” 76 It is up to social and political institutions, using their authorized spokespersons, to resolve this hermeneutic contradiction using the rhetoric, visual aids (costumes, hexis, symbols, ceremonies, appeals to the sacred) and appeals to meanings (the divine will, the general will, public interest) through which flesh-and-blood governments are converted into disembodied, disinterested higher-order quasi-persons on high. Reciprocally, it is up to critique, as a demystifying interpretation, to denounce these simulacra, to unveil the “hermeneutic contradiction,” to unmask the theatrical side of lofty claims to disinterest always connected to real beings, their interests, and their desires. This critique of masks and power runs from Plato to Marx and Bourdieu, passing through Pascal and Montaigne. A good part of philosophical and sociological literature is devoted to the critique of sophism, ideology, and false claims to power. The hermeneutics of suspicion does not start with Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud. But the interest of an approach using social anthropology does not come down to this exercise of suspicion by professional unmaskers like philosophers and sociologists. This is why we have counted unveiling as one ethnointerpretation or interpretational, that is, as among the techniques used by ordinary agents who are not dupes of mystify-

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ing claims to power and who in some circumstances do not hesitate to deconstruct these claims. We shall not pre-judge here the pertinence, the veracity of such ordinary unveilings of the world, some of which may come close to coffee break talk, if not to dubious conspiracy theories. What is essential, at this stage of our inquiry, is that neither the philosopher, nor the sociologist, nor the political theorist have the monopoly on critique and suspicion. What is significant about Boltanski and Thévenot’s approach, without denying the validity of a critical sociology, is that it takes seriously the denunciations of ordinary agents confronted by disputed or unjust situations. The project of a critical sociology of society is meant, without making it the only goal, to rehabilitate the specific competences of actors who are not simply counted as the game pieces of symbolic violence. When Boltanski speaks of critical societies to designate the critical (albeit not equally shared) capacities of actors, he does not have in mind just those great causes made public by the (dominant or alternative) media, but as well, the countless accusations of wrongdoing that are conveyed from person to person, in public places, workshops and offices, corridors and dining rooms. It suffices to pay attention to the incessant murmur attesting to the indignation, pain, and anxiety triggered by the feeling of injustice, a murmur that manifests the capacity of persons to their sense of fairness to work. The social world is riddled with such challenges in the most ordinary situations; on a daily basis, denunciations point out injustices and call for reparation. 77

This ordinary work of unveiling, particularly visible in disputed or unjust situations, may be accompanied by one of justification through relating such protests to principles of justice. To unveil what is unjust as a work of interpretation is realized as a “gain in generality” when the actors are able to convert the meaning of their complaint using orders of greater importance (the general interest, economic efficiency, creativity). This capacity to convert a feeling of injustice to principles with a more general or universal claim allows giving greater weight to the critique and denunciation of such situations when arguments have to be acceptable to others. The sociologist’s objective critique of a social world in which critique is already happening may denounce certain illusions (as the [scientific] unveiling of [ordinary] unveilings) in the interpretive work of its inhabitants. But the sociologist must first make these ordinary competences explicit as well as the underlying principles of justice which serve to support their justifications, including when the social actors make use of scientific critique “which has fallen into the public domain” (denunciation of petty bourgeois thinking, of capitalist exploitation). Reconstructive interpretation consists, in is political use, in proposing new horizons of meaning to societies whose structures and class, gender, and racial relations are judged to be unjust, unsatisfactory, problematic. Recon-

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structive interpretation can follow from demystifying interpretation. There must be, however, a necessary meeting point between these two meta-pragmatic orders: an interpretation may remain just one of contestation, of protest without explicitly proposing a new order of meaning or of social and political existence. On the other hand, one may find orders of value implicitly present in every demystifying interpretation, without their serving as a basis for proposing some social or political reconstruction. Reconstructive interpretation is more directly connected to the requirement for a transformation of how things stand and seems directly to contradict Marx’s famous thesis about Feuerbach: “philosophers have interpreted the world in different ways, but what in important is to change the world.” This sententious assertion, which seems to disqualify every philosophy in the name of the primacy of transformation, including Feuerbach’s own materialist philosophy, makes sense only if we do not reduce philosophy to merely a theoretical, speculative activity in opposition to the practical, concrete activities of those engaged in productive labor. Marx’s theses on Feuerbach, for which transformation is directly linked to revolutionary action, testify to a voluntarism through which human beings, if they are the product of a social reality and circumstances they have not themselves produced, can transform these circumstances and transform themselves. But Marx leaves unstated whether interpretation (whether philosophical or not) constitutes a pre-condition for any transformation (whether revolutionary or not) as both a practice of unveiling for which Marx himself pointed a way and a practice of reconstruction of the horizon of expectation (a communist society). Transformation would be blind without this projecting the way to another society; in the case in question, the classless state of the Marxist project. No doubt Marx would not have qualified his approach as interpretive if we consider that his materialism was not linked to an interpretation—which might be contested by other interpretations—but to an irrefutable explanation of reality. It was at the price of this presupposition that Marx could see a problematic antagonism between interpretation and transformation, obfuscating in this way a dimension of interpretation directly connected to individual and collective self-transformation. What we are calling reconstructive interpretation for the Marxist vulgate would be relegated to the penumbra of ideology, like the anathemas that Marx himself, in The German Ideology, could pronounce on “utopian socialists” in contrast to “scientific” ones. The second objection that can be brought against Marx has to do with his conception of the relations between reality and meaning correlative to the antagonisms between superstructures and sub-structures. This opposition, as Castoriadis has shown, does not work on the socio-anthropological level because it is incapable of making sense of institutions and particularly of what Castoriadis calls imaginary social significations. The symbolic institution works on the level of relations of production, but these cannot be made

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sense of without its mediation. The relations between master and slave or bourgeois and proletarian stem directly from such imaginary social significations. They are not secondary expressions. Marx’s mistake was in granting a kind of ontological primacy to labor over language. It was this primacy, reinforced by the scientism of his mature work, that did not allow him to recognize a positive function for interpretation in its function of integrating the members of a society, its demystifying function, and its reconstructive function in the service of social and political transformation. Reconstructive interpretation, in a Habermasian vein, can weave tight connections to what is commonly called utopia as a social and political imaginary, if we exclude its pathological use as a “flight from time,” as a merely unreal projection. Ricoeur’s analysis of utopia permits giving this concept a positive value. Whereas ideologies, a fortiori as mystifying interpretations and make-believe, aim at preserving the existing order, the positive function of utopia aims at subverting it. We have to hold on to the idea of “no place,” which is not an empty idea, but a laboratory in which imaginary variations and interpretations about what does not exist can be used to set what does exist at a reflexive distance in order to propose new possibilities. The imagining of a society situated nowhere permits radically challenging the one that does exist, from its family relations to its political power. It is thanks to this subversive force of utopia that we can affirm that an ideology is mystifying. For Ricoeur, it is less up to the sciences, in the Marxist sense of this term, than to utopias to deconstruct such mystifying interpretations. Utopias as Ricoeur understands them do not necessarily mean to be realized. They serve as regulative horizons of existing practices. It is in this sense that Ricoeur takes up, for example, Habermas’s ideal of an “ideally unlimited communicative community.” The solution Ricoeur proposes does, however, suffer from two major faults. First, the primacy granted to utopia over science does not allow doing justice to the work provided by the social sciences regarding unveiling, even when it comes to ordinary practices of demystification. The social sciences, of course, are not a “view from nowhere” and consequently are governed by practical interests. But we would deprive ourselves of a useful tool for critical unveiling were we to make the work of deconstructing mystifying and dissimulating interpretations rest only on the utopian imagination. Second, by drawing utopia to the side of a regulative ideal, that of a critical distance, we risk limiting reconstructive interpretation to being only a challenge, without taking the step to actual transformation, if in the end utopias are not meant to be realized. It is this objection that we share with Castoriadis which can nourish mistrust in the notion of utopia, even from a neo-Kantian orientation:

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Habermas took the term up again more recently, because after the total ruin of Marxism and Marxism-Leninism, it seems to legitimate some vague criticism of the current regime by talking about a utopian socialist transformation, with a whiff of “pre-Marxism.” Actually, it’s quite the opposite. No-one (except a neo-Kantian philosopher) can understand how it is possible to criticize what is on the basis of what cannot be. 78

In other words, rather than demystifying things, utopia would itself be a mystification! Utopias as regulative ideas are a bit like pole stars that allow us to orient ourselves in reality, to think differently, but without ever allowing us to reach them. On the other hand, the project of autonomy, as Castoriadis envisages it, is not a pole star but rather a social historical project already begun through the course of privileged historical experiences that needs still to be fully accomplished hic et nunc. It is in this sense that Castoriadis defines himself as a revolutionary and not as a utopian. These real experiences are those of a society that thinks of itself as instituting itself, which never stops questioning its law, its institutions, a society that breaks with the closure of meaning found in heteronomous societies. Autonomy thus is realized when citizens govern themselves and workers control the economy. In this case, reconstructive interpretation, as the project of new socially and politically oriented significations, is clearly direct toward the real transformation of existing orders. This is one of the political responses, among others, to “the increasing insignificance” (Castoriadis) and “crises of meaning” that affect the structural components of culture, society, and personality in the contemporary world. This situation has less to do with a loss of meaning—for which the disenchantment of the world (Weber), the destruction of organic ties (Durkheim), and the erosion of meta-narratives (Lyotard) are a few symptoms— than with interpretive incapacities to renew meaning and the effects of belief. The social and political issue, therefore, is how to give strength and life to collective capacities for interpretation. When meaning atrophies, petrifies, becomes mystified, when spaces of experience and horizons of expectation narrow, interpretation in this collective dimension constitutes a useful laboratory to produce, through use of the imagination, new social significations and retroactively to free up long blocked possibilities. In this sense, we may indeed aspire to a “society or interpreters” or a “culture of interpretation,” in opposition to a “society of information,” similar to a “cognitive capitalism.” 79 This is the stronger, more positive meaning we can give to a politics of interpretation. Whereas the society of information, beyond its enterprise of the private appropriation of knowledge, seeks to diffuse into “passive heads” an uncritical, unlimited accumulation of knowledge for consumption, a society of interpreters is distinguished, on the contrary, by putting in place conditions that allow for original creations of

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meaning, time for reflection, and collective processes of problematization and making meaning public. A society of interpreters of course is a critical one when meaning is mystified. But it is also and correlatively a society that leaves room for a suspension of meaning, for meaning that is not immediately consumable. Whence the importance of making room for an interval between the excitement of the given sign and the reactions and understanding it leads to. It is precisely because “something doesn’t hold together” that an invention of meaning may occur, that clichés may be broken, that one may see things differently than one habitually sees them. Drawing heuristically on Deleuze’s courses on cinema, Yves Citton draws on them to open a path toward inventive interpretation when a new sensibility, a renewed way of attending to things creates a creative interval for seeing what one had never seen before: And you suddenly understand something you had not seen in a hundred similar cases. You see something, you have become a seer, and you have grasped in a second much more than you had grasped in twenty years. You see a workshop in a factory and you slide to “men have to work,” but that seems little, laughable: you have caught sight of something you do not have to return to. A middle-class woman sees the factory and burbles, “I thought I was looking at condemned men.” But she has seen factories a thousand times. That will turn out bad for her—she has seen something! 80

Even though, like Foucault or Sontag, Deleuze resists interpretation, taken as a depth hermeneutic (to uncover a hidden meaning), despite himself, he offers a fruitful framework for rethinking the distinction between immediate understanding (akin to quasi-automatic sensory motor reactions) and interpretive or mediate understanding (akin to a delayed response, a suspending of the sign, a “rest stop,” slowing down and relaxing a bit). What is true for vision is equally true for all the other forms of sensory perception of signs. Hearing can become plainly interpretive, in the creative sense, only if it is preceded by an interval of silence, a short pause, in what one is listening to. Do not answer right away, do so differently, break the circle of automatic responses are almost a challenge in a society built on the over-production and consumption of signs. What then would a society of interpreters, a culture of interpretation look like? Citton does not mean just scholarly or scientific societies, made up of researchers, when he claims the right to make mistakes, to take a break, to suspend an inquiry and look back at things when doing scientific research, contrary to the neoliberal demand for immediate productivity and measurable gains. He also means pedagogical practices, the pace of work, the way everyday life is divided up. Faced with a society based on an unlimited accumulation of data and communication, a society that intends to be made up of interpreters has to come up with “protected spaces.” Creative interpretation

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can only take place within such spaces protected against the pressures of dayto-day information and communication, where there is time to short-circuit or to extend the circuit between a sign and its expected response. In a society of interpreters, it is not just a question of communicating results, but of having something to say (something new, creative). There will be nothing to say without some prior free time, some time to slow down, to pause, a time not already fixed for some specific purpose. But this does not say that this society of interpreters (which it must be said appeals to us) simply depends on demarcating interpretations. The criterion most important to Citton is principally based on the creative, innovative character of his post-Kantian productive imaginative perspective. But another criterion needs to be introduced, one that will occupy us in the next part of our inquiry: truth. What place is there for truth in a society of interpreters? We may draw a series of lessons from this anthropological review of human interpreting within nature, culture, and politics. The interpretive faculty, unlike proto-interpretations, is indeed human, but human beings do not interpret every time they are caught up in a universe of (indexical, iconic, and symbolic) signs. To the extent their existence is governed by familiar situations, ordinary exchanges, understanding has no need of interpretation. Interpretation is required only when humans are confronted with a sign that has become problematic. If they can recognize the problematicity of (grammatical or symbolic) meaning, they can also find themselves confronted with other registers of problematic signs (indexical and iconic grammars). Still, the boundary between immediate and interpretive understanding is not impenetrable: between sense and nonsense, the strange and the familiar, clarity and confusion, lies a whole range of intermediate situations where we more or less understand (a proposition, a text, an intention, an event). What is more, the work of interpretation is not always the same depending on a scale that runs from microdissonances of meaning (which only affect our habitual universe of meanings at its edge) to major disturbances of meaning at the level of social and cultural systems. Whether an interpretation works following a change in meaning, it is never the product of some sovereign act. Human understanding is always pre-figured by social and cultural schemes as typical ways of grasping the world, oneself, or others. Similarly, there are typical, reproducible ways of interpreting for given situations. These interpretive schemes can turn out, however, to be inadequate for understanding a radically new event or situation, and necessitate a recomposition, an invention of new interpretive schemes better able to reconfigure their meaning. Our inquiry has shown there is a multitude of techniques at work in the day-to-day world, those of ethnointerpretations (or of interpretationals appli-

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cable to ordinary ways of being and acting), both for individuals and collectives when it comes to overcoming the problematicity of a sign. A microsociological approach has allowed us to recognize interpretation as it happens, even if it never happens without some preexisting scheme or framework. This approach has also allowed us to distinguish, on the one hand, forms of reproductive interpretation meant to tie a strange (experienced) sign to a (known) familiar one. On the other hand, that there are forms of productive interpretation that aspire to find other ways of meaning in order to deal with what was initially problematic. It is also undeniable that interpretation can be oriented in terms of a speculative end (which does not prevent it from remaining an activity). It can equally be oriented toward action when the meaning of what should be done is not clear. This orientation is most clear when it comes to politics, where interpretation can be mystifying, critical, or reconstructive. Ordinary ways of making sense of the world all then point to the possibility of its being transformed within the horizons of a “society of interpreters.”

Part II

Scholarly Decifering of Signs

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The first stage of our investigation was meant to circumscribe the scope of human interpretation within its setting within ordinary social activities. This second stage will seek to inscribe the course of interpretation on the trajectory of scientific controversies. In doing so, it will remove the brackets from around what to this point has remained a tacit question: truth. It is one thing to ask, anthropologically, about the conditions of possibility of human interpretation; it is another to ask epistemologically whether every interpretation counts equally. The question about the truth of interpretations arises already in the everyday world once we begin to question whether we really know that our interpretations are adequate to reality, once we confront our interpretations with those of others, once others try to impose their interpretations on us. The conflict of interpretations and the conditions of a correct interpretation are interwoven, as are today’s scientific and philosophical debates. If some everyday controversies may end up considered to be failures, without any possibility of overcoming the disagreements about interpretation, in that they remain stuck in their narrow perspectives, scholarly ones may accentuate those features if we consider everything to be a question of interpretation. No doubt, knowledge does not necessarily imply interpretation. When one knows something, there is no need to interpret: “It is necessary to interpret, to form hypotheses when knowledge is not possible or certain in the case in question.” 1 But the question remains, and this is the real challenge, whether we can add other modes of investigating reality and other criteria that will allow us to discriminate between “good” and “bad” interpretations. What is at issue is the tension between interpretation as it occurs in the world of everyday life and the modes of interpreting we encounter in science and philosophy. Do the scientific orders of interpretation derive wholly from the ordinary ones? This will be one of the questions at the heart of our discussion. The passage to the epistemological level of deciphering signs does not entail renouncing the anthropological substratum of our initial inquiry. The scientist or scholar—whether he calls himself a philologist, a philosopher, a historian, a physician, a sociologist, or a physicist; whether he deals with texts, relics, symptoms, institutions, or particle fields; whether he works at a desk, in a laboratory, in an archive, at a patient’s bedside, or at a street demonstration—has all the general properties of homo interpretans. From this point of view, nothing distinguishes the hunter seeking to decipher their prey’s tracks, a historian reconstructing social life in ancient Athens, and an astrophysicist observing the movement of the planets. A sociology of science, one like Bruno Latour’s, 2 or an ethnographical account of scientific practice as it is actually carried out can teach us much about how to understand more precisely the scientific way of being a homo interpretans. But it is necessary to add an epistemological level if we are to discriminate and separate between rival interpretations, without renouncing the question of truth. In

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this regard, a scientist is and is not a homo interpretans like others are, at least in terms of the claims they make, the hypotheses they forge, the procedures they follow. From traces and clues to proofs, there is a path and tests that scientists are required to follow in carrying out their activity, without their demanding that others also follow them. The epistemological problems of a correct interpretation can be placed in disciplines akin to hermeneutics. Hermeneutics was born from the problem of misunderstanding texts, which required particular techniques of interpretation. Three considerations from this development need to be examined. The first is whether we can reduce hermeneutics to the methodological problems and techniques for understanding an obscure text or whether we can enlarge the scope of hermeneutics to an ontology of understanding. The second epistemological problem is whether we can expand hermeneutics and apply it to other human sciences (other than those of exegesis and philology) and whether correlatively the theory of the text, as a fixed configuration, an archive of meaning, can serve as a workable model for interpreting the world of action as it occurs day to day. The third epistemological issue is to know whether objectifying nature demands a method of inquiry similar to that used in the human sciences. A substantial part of the positive knowledge examined in this part of our inquiry, from the point of view of interpretation, will lead us to the question finally whether we can consider every science as an interpretive science. Despite our ongoing interest in the formation of scientific knowledge, our reading of the best specialists, and our own work in the social sciences, it will be impossible to claim that we have considered the whole field of existing forms of knowledge. For example, even though it is one of the oldest hermeneutic traditions, religious or theological hermeneutics, even though it will be frequently referred to in what follows, will not be the object of separate treatment, owing to the limits of our knowledge regarding this material. The limits of our investigation will be further sharpened by the fact that the scientific traditions dealt with in this part of our study come largely, if not exclusively, from the Western world. This is not meant to be an arrogant assertion of the sufficiency of European science whereby homo interpretans, by way of homo scientificus, becomes simply homo occidentalis. On the contrary, we have sought, in the first part of our inquiry, to counter eurocentrism by taking into account ordinary modes of interpreting that are irreducible to Western naturalism. Yes, hermeneutics as a critical, exegetical, philological, and juridical discipline did first develop in the historical world of Europe, while enriching itself through drawing on other traditions, those of Judaism and Islam, for example. But it is beyond our competence to add to this study all the diversity and richness of, say, the non-Western, Islamic, Chinese, and Japanese hermeneutical traditions in all their religious, philosophical, and scientific dimensions. 3 To do so

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would be too much for any one scholar. Yet the fact of taking up the hermeneutical traditions of the West does not imply postulating that they have said all that there is to say or that will be said about interpretation. 4 This effort to prevent an overly narrow scientific eurocentrism requires more future collaboration and inquiry into non-Western hermeneutics.

Chapter Four

The Infinite and the Relative

The idea that scientific or philosophical interpretations are superior to those produced spontaneously in the world of everyday life does not hold. The epistemological demarcation between an ordinary unveiling of the world and the scientific deciphering of signs falls directly under a Nietzschean suspicion. In asserting that there are no facts, but only interpretations, Nietzsche openly attacks the philosophical claim in virtue of which it would be possible to accede to a reality in itself, independently of any perspective. In saying this, Nietzsche radicalizes Kant’s critique. It is not just things in themselves that are declared to be illusory, but even knowledge about any phenomena. 1 In refusing any epistemological break between scientific and ordinary interpretations, broadening considerably the scope of understanding far beyond the science of textual interpretation, Nietzsche makes interpretation a central notion for grasping every form of existence. If interpretation has a paradigmatic value in the moral sphere for which interpreting always comes down to evaluating, Nietzsche expands its field of application to every human intention and all human behavior—including scientific theories—which is to say that all allegedly scientific data is always the product of some constructive interpretation. With Nietzsche, everything comes down to interpretation. Always relative to a “subject” (without a transcendental or egological foundation), interpretation is also applicable to the animal world and for the organic dimension of human existence (our body, desires, passions). Interpretation is never identical with itself, never relative to an unchanging subject and a fixed object. Its category is not being but becoming. Thus the “scientific vision” of the world is just a useful tool for exploiting nature “the will to power interprets (—it is a question of interpretation when an organ is constructed): it defines limits, determines degrees, variations of power. . . . In fact, interpretation is itself a means of 109

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becoming master of something. (The organic process constantly presupposes interpretations).” 2 Thus the “scientific vision” of the world is just nature’s useful, exploitable tool. There is a form of relativism in the fact of relating every reality to an interpretation, with no possibility of reaching an objective reality. But Nietzsche’s perspectivism, for all that, does not consist in saying that all interpretations are equally valid. The criteria that allow discriminating among interpretations are not fixed by an epistemological dividing line between true and false (as the adequation or inadequation of discourse to reality). Rather than talking about true and false interpretations, it would be better to speak with Nietzsche of active and reactive interpretations. It comes down to relating interpretation to the will-to-power that, as such, affects every living being, including humans. This is the reason why interpretation is not “subjective” in the current sense of this term. The interpreter is a direct expression of a process of this (active or reactive) will to power that runs through every form of existence: The reactive force is the one that creates values by opposing itself to a preexisting given, such that it determines an interpretation starting from this given, that is, a second interpretation. On the contrary, the active force is itself creative of values: its from this that we draw what will become norms. Thus interpretation becomes first, an active evaluation of a given ground that, in this way, is given an orientation. Active and reactive force are therefore two ways of relating to the Will-to-power. 3

Nietzsche’s perspectivism radicalizes Leibniz’s monadology starting from a vitalist ontology inherited from Schopenhauer. It is a perspectivism that has lost God’s absolute point of view. It is a perspectivism that makes human interpretation all too human, one among other forms of interpretations on the scale of living things. If the experience of perspectivism resonates as experience of dread, the world turned over to infinity (that of its perspectives) is also the occasion to propose new values and new interpretations. Thus Nietzschean perspectivism is relativist only in one sense (there are no true facts), but not in others (not all interpretations are equally valid). Like a physician, Nietzsche wants to diagnose life’s active, powerful, and creative interpretations, which does not necessarily mean the “dominant” ones, as Deleuze has shown, 4 even if some of Nietzsche’s biological and radical assertions clearly point in this direction. This is the reason why Nietzsche directly assimilates interpretations to symptoms of our physiological states and our judgments. Interpretations arise from a vital or morbid state of our organism. Nothing could be more erroneous than to say that for Nietzsche all interpretations fall on the same plane. It is always a question of perspective, but there are better perspectives, those that explore new geographical spaces,

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new continents of art, new perspectives which enhance the will to power rather than take something away from it: “every elevation of man brings with it the overcoming of narrower interpretations; that every strengthening and increase of power opens up new perspectives and means believing in new horizons—this idea permeates my writings.” 5 The transvaluation of values is therefore strictly contemporaneous with the transvaluation of interpretations in which we can see the figure of the overman, not as a state of being, but as an endless process of enhancement of our active interpretations of the world. Nietzsche’s perspectivism is the exact opposite of the relativist belief: “I have my interpretation, you have yours.” His perspectivism is strongly aristocratic, critical, and always denounces “weak” interpretations and “weak” people, that is, interpretations that remain caught in their narrow perspective. Nietzsche’s philosophy of interpretation has many lessons to teach us. For one thing, it offers a heuristic extension of interpretation beyond its original home in philology, beyond even its theoretical matrix to apply to the whole domain of existence (interpretation is never just the projection of meanings, but always correlative to values and life). For another, it offers a fruitful way of thinking about productive and active interpretations, over against mystifying and reactive ones. On the other hand, the Nietzschean expansion of the concept of interpretation does have a flaw owing to its radical all-encompassing character: For example, Nietzsche’s critique, or rather radical redetermination of the concept of interpretation takes place largely through a modification of the nature of signs. Everything becomes a sign, not in the sense that everything has a predetermined signification (that is the reactive version), but in the sense that everything happens under the influence of the will to power which takes hold of very thing, to evaluate and interpret it, that is, to orient it in terms of its own ontological demands. Interpretation is an “interpretation toward” and no longer an “interpretation of . . . starting from.” 6

The problem comes not just from relating every production of a sign to a unique source, the will to power, at the risk of removing every scientific controversy over “better” interpretations. It comes equally from the fact that such a conceptual expansion no longer allows us to distinguish between immediate and mediate or interpretive understanding. What Nietzsche calls interpretation covers (sensory-motor, organic) proto-interpretations, preinterpretations of signs, interpretive understandings, and meta-interpretations. This confusion is deliberate because the determining criterion is not the suspension of meaning or reflexivity, but the form will to power takes (as active or reactive). This confusion does not allow us to pick out a specific understanding confronted with the problematicity of the sign or an autonomous domain of reflection on the methods used in scientific interpretation.

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For all that Nietzsche’s perspectivism does not lead to a relativism of interpretations, the hermeneutics proposed by some of his heirs clearly takes this road. The Heideggerian reappropriation of Nietzsche, the linguistic turn that characterizes contemporary philosophy, and Gadamer’s post-modern readings are all factors here, among others, that explain the relativist turn which causes a problem for contemporary hermeneutics. Among its more emblematic representatives are Vattimo, Rorty, and Derrida. The first two share Nietzsche’s nominalism (there are no facts, just interpretations) but accentuate the idea of relativism (all interpretations are equal). Their nominalism is based on an interpretation of Gadamer’s well-known assertion that “being that can be understood is language.” Not only is it impossible to reach a being in itself, it is also impossible to construct a theory of knowledge that can be about an objective reality. In reorienting pragmatism in the direct of hermeneutics, Rorty wishes to give up the very idea of truth, the idea of a scientific arbitrating of the conflict of interpretations for the profit simply of a “humanistic” exchange of different interpretations under the aegis of what he calls “conversation”: 7 Hermeneutics sees the relation between various discourses as those of strands in a possible conversation, a conversation which presupposes no disciplinary matrix which unites the speakers, but where the hope of agreement is never lost so long as the conversation lasts. This hope is not a hope for the discovery of antecedently existing common ground, but simply hope for agreement, or, at least, exciting and fruitful disagreement. 8

It is especially in the last two chapters of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature that Rorty emphasizes the opposition between hermeneutics and the theory of knowledge, the vocation of the former being to supplant the latter. The theory of knowledge assumes the power to agree rationally about an objective reality and to “end the debate,” whereas hermeneutics, at least as Rorty envisages it, is less aimed at agreement than at “exciting and fruitful disagreement.” Rorty’s pragmatism finally—for all that it pleads so strongly for a non-dogmatic openness to meaning and the exchange of opinions, for a permanent return to the “conversation”—comes down to saying that no interpretation, whether scientific or philosophical, is truer or more in conformity with reality than any other. Even if Rorty defends himself against the charge of justifying relativism, his position, which is quite the opposite of Nietzsche’s aristocratic one, does come down to espousing its contours, in the form of a cultural theory and historicism: the relativity of every interpretation is not tied to the sovereignty of some unworldly subject, but to eras, traditions, and communities of interpretation. This is the meaning of the reappropriation he proposes of the “hermeneutic circle” following Gadamer. It comes down to saying that “we cannot understand the parts of a strange culture, practice, theory, language, or whatever, until we know something about how the

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whole things works, whereas we cannot get a grasp on how the whole works until we have some understanding of its parts.” 9 Gianni Vattimo shares the same nominalistic premises—in a direct line leading back to Nietzsche—as does Rorty, but further emphasizes Nietzsche’s relativism as a “hermeneutic nihilism.” 10 This radicalization proceeds from an anti-ontological reading of Gadamer: to say that the being that can be understood is language for Vattimo does not simply mean that the object of understanding is the kind of being we call language but that there is nothing beyond language, that there is a pure and simple identity of being and language. This nominalism leads directly to a nihilism in that it is impossible to affirm that there are interpretations that are more correct, more true, or values that are more authentic than others (which would presuppose the power to get to being itself). There are as many interpretations as there are interpretive traditions, without our being able to discriminate among them. This is the koine, as he calls it, of our time. Our time—Vattimo refers particularly to the rupture that occurred in the 1980s, first in philosophy, then in our culture as a whole: the beginning not so much of an age of reason as of hermeneutics, historicity, and post-modernity. 11 For Vattimo, hermeneutics is the new “common tongue,” which has supplanted the Marxism and structuralism dominant in Europe from 1950 through the 1970s. First limited to specific domains, hermeneutics has become a rallying cry that affects every philosophical discipline (to the point, he says, of becoming identical with what is called continental philosophy) and the human sciences that draw on them. One may certainly question the scope Vattimo gives to this new koine, not only because it barely has touched the so-called analytic schools, but equally because it is far from covering all the continental variants (phenomenological, metaphysical, and so on) of philosophy, much less of the human and social sciences that do not all share its language. Vattimo can take pleasure in this new koine in that it permits getting beyond the structuralist vulgate, with its rigid schemes of classification, its descriptions in terms of binary oppositions, and its ideal of neutrality and disengagement. Leaving behind the “hegemony of structuralism” therefore has as its hermeneutic corollary the discovery or rediscovery of historicity, of the historical character of meaning and understanding as well as of the implication in all this of the interpreter. Within this new koine there is also matter, according to Vattimo, that must be looked at askance as soon as it takes on tendencies which do not have his sympathy. Clearly rejected are the methodological and epistemological variants on hermeneutics that remain trapped in the impasse of a disengaged philosophy held to be based on “neutral observation.” No less subject to suspicion is the post-Kantian variant of hermeneutics (with Apel or Habermas) that renews metaphysics in postulating a new foundation in an “ideal community of communication.”

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Paradoxically, it is with two of the great representatives of the methodological tradition of hermeneutics (Schleiermacher and Dilthey) that Vattimo first seeks rethinking the contours of such an ideal community, in contrast to Habermas’s model. At the price of an original reading of Schleiermacher, Vattimo draws the author of the lectures on Hermeneutik in a direction that is not purely methodological but already ethical and political. Schleiermacher’s objective was not to get to an exegesis based on the scientific techniques of interpretation so much as to construct an ideal community between the reader and the author, a community that does not initially exist. If misunderstanding is the starting point, the reader’s identification with the author is the horizon of interpretation thanks to a “divinatory certainty.” It is a question of an internal reconstitution of the texts to be interpreted, by intuitively grasping the center of inspiration through a kind of sympathetic identification with the author. And all of this does not constitute a means of reaching an “exact” reading. It is valuable in itself in that it reestablishes, or establishes the ideal spiritual community, the community described in the third lecture. 12

The same principle of reading holds for Dilthey’s hermeneutics: the goal of hermeneutics is less the constitution of an autonomous science for the human sciences than to produce an intensification of life, through penetrating the other’s experience. The goal of hermeneutics is not so much cognitive or scientific as it is aesthetic, ethical, and vitalist. Whence the importance Dilthey grants to art, which presents a field for the exploration of possible existence at the limits of real life. If Vattimo’s hermeneutics aspires to construct an ideal community based on love and a common destiny, it does not follow through to the end the attempts undertaken by its predecessors. The reason is that once again the metaphysics continues to haunt “romantic” hermeneutics that, in Vattimo’s terms, is profoundly founded on an ideal of transparency of the subject to its own self, in the fantasy of identity and fusion: “The ideal of understanding as an identifying transposition, einfühlende, is based on an onto-theological conception of individuality.” 13 It should be clear, therefore, that Vattimo’s preference is more clearly for the ontological version of hermeneutics of Heidegger and Gadamer. From Heidegger, he retains in particular the deconstruction of metaphysics, of all foundational thought, of every philosophy of presence (a deconstruction that can also be found in Derrida) to the profit of a hermeneutics of the event and remembering: “If therefore we see a post-metaphysical essence of thinking, if we seek thinking that does not assign itself a foundational task, we must direct ourselves toward the horizon of the Sage, story-telling, remembering. These are the ways in which one can respond to being as an event and sending off, as Ereignis and Ge-Schick.” 14

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It is under this Heideggerian, and equally Nietzschean, heading that Vattimo takes up and makes his own the level of hermeneutics or nihilistic ontology that leads to the renouncing of every stable structure, every immutable ground to the benefit of attending to being as becoming inscribed in the plurality of epochs, cultures, and languages. The originality of Vattimo’s hermeneutics is that it leads to a social and political ethics paradoxically far removed from Heidegger (and closer on this point, if not to Gadamer, at least to some communitarian thinkers). Thinking being means listening to the messages that come from these epochs as come from others, those contemporary to us—the cultures of different groups, of specialized languages, of those “others” the West encounters in its enterprise to dominate and unify the planet, the subcultures that develop even within the West and begin to speak out. 15

His opening to the other is valuable, but it also clearly assumes the form of a relativism, even if Vattimo defends himself against this charge on several occasions. Nothing allows discriminating among “cultures,” except at the price of reestablishing a meta-physical violence as its principle: to understand a culture comes down simply to understanding it in a different way. Whence the opposition between an ethics of interpretation that listens to the other without a discriminating criterion and an ethics of communication (like that of Apel and Habermas) which, by reestablishing a principled point of view, falls back into the metaphysical shadows, by refusing to recognize the historicity and culturalism of all understanding. So we may ask whether the legitimate attention Vattimo gives to so-called minority cultures does not in fact presuppose a moral principle (beyond an ethics of listening to them), contrary to the relativism that the radicality of his position leads to. Furthermore, is not an ethics of communication better placed to defend such dominated cultures? These post-modern versions of hermeneutics seem regressive to us in more than one way. For one thing, they draw Nietzsche’s nominalism in a relativist direction—at the risk of a performative contradiction—which does not allow us to discriminate between active and reactive interpretations. For another, they draw Gadamer’s hermeneutics in an anti-ontological direction that is contrary to it, despite the equivocations of some of the assertions of the author of Truth and Method. “The adage, ‘being that can be understood is language’ is not to be taken for Gadamer in a nominalist sense, whereby being is reduced to the description we give of it, but in an ontological sense: it is being itself that speaks in language and it is its language that allows us to correct our inadequate descriptions.” 16 If being does not reveal itself in language, nothing permits us to correct our interpretations apart from language itself. Moreover, in affirming that there is no progress in understanding, that

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we simply understand a text, for example, from another age, another tradition differently, Gadamer clearly leaves the door open to a relativist appropriation of his hermeneutics. Finally, post-modern hermeneutics, in remaining faithful on this point to Nietzsche as much as to Heidegger, renders useless any epistemological reflection on the sciences of interpretation, making vain any discussion on methods of interpretation meant to make more explicit, to unveil, to contextualize meaning not given as fully intelligible. Derrida’s deconstruction is no better armed than are pragmatist (Rorty) or nihilist (Vattimo) hermeneutics to answer the preceding ontological and methodological objections, even if Derrida’s works have a better and fuller philosophical framing than do so-called post-modern hermeneutics. Gadamer’s influence is not apparent (the meeting held in April 1981 between Gadamer and Derrida at the Goethe Institute in Paris ended on a philosophical impasse). Derrida directly draws on sources close to Heidegger and Nietzsche, even if his philosophy of language owes more to structuralism than to the hermeneutic tradition. His deconstructive move is directly borrowed from Heidegger. It comes down to a critique of metaphysical concepts aimed at their source, namely, “onto-theological thinking” that bears witness to the “wandering of being.” Heidegger’s deconstruction, however, has a positive and revelatory ambition: to bring to light the meaning of being in the history of Western metaphysics and at the same time to reveal the existential origin concealed therein. With Derrida, the concept of deconstruction is certainly drawn from Heidegger, but it is enriched by being considered by way of structuralism: to make evident, as structures of meaning, the activity of “traces,” to inscribe the “gaps” (spacing and temporalization) to produce differance. In this way, Derrida indicates the impure unity of a “differing/deferring” (a detour, a delay) whose economy exceeds the resources of a classical logos. And through this deconstruction, Derrida rediscovers Nietzschean nominalism. Differance entails both an irreducible difference between a sign and its meaning and an infinite deferring of the meaning of being. The importance granted to language is more radical for Derrida than for Gadamer; at least, it does not have the same ontological consequences: being, things, referents are never accessible apart from the signs that express them. Our human, all too human condition is such that we can never get out of the universe of signs that always refer to other signs through the relations of differences, distinctions, and oppositions among them. Any interpretation is about signs. The debate between Ricoeur and Derrida over the status of metaphor is telling on this point. 17 Ricoeur does not contest the pertinence of the concept of differance, on the condition that such a semiology leaves room for a semantics and an ontology. Meaning is not trapped in the play of signs: it aims at something like being, allows us to see, to understand differently

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thanks to an impertinent predication as in the case of poetic metaphor. Derrida’s radical posture leads to a loss of reference, whereas the ontological project presented in The Rule of Metaphor aspires to get beyond the closure of signs to open on the world. To the play of differance, Ricoeur prefers the ontological vehemence of speech though which it makes the world readable. 18 From his side, Derrida does not hesitate to disqualify any ontological hermeneutics, from Gadamer to Ricoeur, when it seeks to grasp the fullness of a meaning, the presence of a thing, the lost origin of being behind signs. In contrast to this nostalgic hermeneutic, still impregnated with metaphysics, Derrida prefers, without sorrow or nihilism, an active interpretation that affirms the play of signs as signs of play. This is why Derrida’s nominalism, unlike that of Rorty or Vattimo, does not translate into a banal relativism. There is no “hors-texte,” but not every interpretation is of equal merit. It is not their adequation to things that allows distinguishing among them, but an ethical manner of relating to the world of signs. Derrida is never closer to Nietzsche, beyond even Heidegger, than when he recalls “the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation.” 19 If there is something seductive about this ethics of interpretation, it is not likely, owing to its radical nominalism, to give a satisfying solution to epistemological quarrels over interpretation. The visceral contesting of the methodological and objective claims of the sciences of interpretation that Derrida directly inherits from Nietzsche and Heidegger can take a particularly problematic turn when applied to historiography. What can be said about our historical relation to reality when it gets transposed into such a nominalistic hermeneutics? This is the question to be found in the writings of the historian Hayden White: how to seat historical reality on an onto-poetics or more precisely on a theory of tropes? 20 The typology White elaborates is peculiar in that it permits going beyond the trope of metaphor, correcting its apparent naivety, supposed to present a resemblance as adequate. The recourse White makes to other tropes—other than metaphor—multiplies and refines the types of analogical relations between historical reconstructions and the being-as of what has been. For example, metonymy, in reducing the part and whole to one another, tends to make a historical factor the mere manifestation of some other factor. The importance of this theory of tropes at the heart of the work of historical configuration attests to the constitutive role played by the imagination in the quest for what has been, owing to the historian’s not being able to directly observe being that no longer is. It is this very status of being as having-been, as being-as, that epistemologically requires a place for the historical imagination and correlatively for tropological figures (from metaphor to irony). It

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is this sense that Ricoeur takes from White that “a history book can be read as a novel.” 21 But does this not weaken the boundary between history and fiction? Does the tropological basis of historical ontology not run the risk of leading to de-realizing the historical past, that is, to the impossibility of reaching being that has been without the mediation of tropes? It was for this reason, undoubtedly, that a philosopher like Ricoeur took a greater distance on White’s tropology in Memory, History, Forgetting than he did in Time and Narrative: “the impasse Hayden White gets caught up in dealing with the operations of emplotment as explanatory models, held to be at best indifferent as regards the scientific procedures of historical knowledge, at worst as substitutable for them.” 22 The difficulties posed by a historical poetics take a particularly dramatic turn in the case of the representation of events like crimes against humanity and genocide. Is a historical tropology equipped to respond to the negationist trends of contemporary pseudo-historiography intended to support anti-Semitism? This question directly affects the debate that unfolded in Germany from 1986 to 1988, better known as the “historian’s quarrel” (Historikerstreit), a debate that then moved to the United States—see the report of the conference held at the University of California in Los Angeles in April 1990: The Extermination of the Jews and the Limits of Representation. 23 During this meeting, Hayden White’s onto-poetics and narrative theory was reproached (notably by Carlos Ginzburg) 24 for not being able to move beyond language and tropes (with the risk of missing the reality of the Holocaust) and for defending an inherent relativity to every historical phenomenon. White was criticized, in short, not for subscribing to negationist theses, but for promoting a historiography that did not allow “denying” the negation of the final solution. Here is where the negative effects of post-modern, nominalist, and relativistic hermeneutics as in the historiography of Hayden White are most visible: there are no facts, only interpretations, no describable historical reality but only discourses, figures, tropes. INTERPRETATION AND ARGUMENTATION The anti-realist effects of post-modern hermeneutics on historiography can be extended to other human and social sciences each time it is a question of representing a past or present reality. The specter of relativism resurfaces each time Nietzsche’s “stage fright” perspective reappears. Gadamer’s hermeneutics, despite its ontological vehemence, seems to succumb to this once the philosopher no longer thinks, in the case for example of overcoming the misunderstanding of texts, there cannot be any progress in interpretation. This is a way for him to battle against romanticist hermeneutics and the aesthetics of genius inherited from Schleiermacher for

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which it is a question of understanding “the utterance at first just as well and then better than its author.” 25 Having unmasked this illusion as idealistic and psychological, Gadamer holds that to understand is not to understand better. It suffices to say that we understand differently—on the basis of the traditions that shape our pre-understanding—when we understand. Understanding differently marks no progress toward the truth of what is to be interpreted. The temporal distance that separates us from a text only implies that we understand it differently than it was understood in the past. A contemporary interpreter, who can stand back to regard a text as coming from the past, enjoys no privilege over his predecessors—even when he makes use of a palette of initially alienating scientific methods. The conditions of understanding are already given in our pre-understanding, that is, in those prejudices we have despite ourselves. The problem in Truth and Method is therefore less knowing whether there are some interpretations that are more adequate than others than knowing how understanding and interpretation are possible. Is truth then finally wholly lost from sight even though it is announced as the central theme of Gadamer’s work, as its title indicates? It is lost from sight in the sense of a traditional concept of absolute truth, owing to the finitude of every interpretation. It is equally lost from sight in the sense of the traditional concept of truth (as the adequation of discourse to what it is about). If there is a concept of truth in Truth and Method, it owes more to the Heideggerian idea of aletheia as an openness to meaning that is given to us— while withdrawing—in the language and traditions that surround and overflow us. Derrida says there is no hors-texte, Gadamer that there is no horstradition. The event of meaning, if we can still call this truth, occurs through the encounter—in something like a “fusion of horizons”—between the meaning projected in today’s language that we are and what tradition transmits to us. We cannot be satisfied with this hermeneutic solution, which, rather than resolving the problem of the relativism of interpretations, tends on the contrary to accentuate it in the name of a principled critique of method that does not permit discriminating between crazy interpretations and intelligible ones (even if Gadamer does take care to distinguish rash prejudices from significant ones), 26 preventing us from getting beyond the conflict of interpretations. The epistemological problem of the possible relativism of interpretations has ethical and political consequences. One of the first implications is recognizing that everyone is equal when it comes to interpreting their world is a condition for a liberal and pluralist democracy. A democratic ethics of interpretation, in other words, would be characterized by the fact that it allows others to have their interpretations, and me to have my interpretations of these interpretations. Insofar as interpreters mutually agree on this and recognize one another in their differences, their particularities,

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Thus the recognition of a pluralism of interpretation mutually implies the principle of individual liberty and that of equality. Everyone is granted the same right to interpret the world in terms of their own horizon. In this case, and this is the path followed by post-modern theories of interpretation (Rorty, Vattimo), pluralism clearly comes close to a form of relativism in which democracy has no place. The political, legal, and social recognition of a pluralism in interpretation is assuredly an essential guard rail against the specter of political regimes that proclaim an ultimate, infallible, absolute interpretation, as Arendt has demonstrated when it comes to totalitarian regimes that claim to govern people on the basis of indisputable scientific laws (based on race or class). An interpretation that becomes a dogma or untouchable principle is no longer an interpretation and violates the pluralistic substratum of democratic societies. But is such a relativism when it comes to interpretation sufficient to assure the endurance and legitimacy of democracies? The risk of a rigid correlation between pluralism and relativism when it comes to interpretations is that it opens the way to a contradiction or a negation of democracy when it tolerates interpretations, forms of life, and judgments that themselves do not accept this pluralism. This paradox or contradiction in radical toleration (tolerating the intolerable) can be found clearly in the apology for no limitation when it comes to interpretations, for crazy, misleading interpretations. Here is where the epistemological problem of relativism gets repeated on the political level. But the aporia is difficult to remove. How can we conjure away the relativism of interpretations without succumbing to the dogmatism of an absolute truth? How can we think of a better interpretation on the basis of the finitude of all understanding? Here is where we can make some progress with the critical, post-Kantian versions of contemporary hermeneutics (Apel, Habermas, Ricoeur, Ferry, Berner) that seek to free the theory of interpretation from its claim to be correct, without sacrificing the principle of the finitude of all understanding. The way indicated by Karl-Otto Apel is worth paying particular attention to, notably in his discussion with Gadamer, in that he proposes a shift in hermeneutics—starting from yet moving beyond its post-Heideggerian setting—in a direction that is both methodological and normative. 28 It is this second dimension—the normative one—that interests us here. The ambition of a transcendental pragmatism or a “reflexive transcendental hermeneutics” is born precisely from the aporia, even the performative contradiction of an interpretation that affirms its relativity and ends up at the assertion that we

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can only interpret differently. 29 In short, Apel criticizes Gadamer for taking up with the factual question (how do we understand?) while leaving aside that of what legitimates an interpretation (what are the conditions of possibility of a better understanding?). Apel acknowledges the contribution of a hermeneutics of pre-understanding (from Dilthey to Gadamer, passing through Heidegger) as well as that of a pragmatics of ordinary language coming from the later Wittgenstein when it comes to understanding how meaning is constituted. Beyond the usual opposition between continental and analytical philosophy, he proposes a possible convergence—based on the linguistic mediation of our understanding the world—between the “world of spirit” (the later Dilthey) in which all understanding is inscribed, the model of language games and of forms of life (from the later Wittgenstein), and the model of a structure of pre-understanding of public and historical significations at work in all understanding (Heidegger and Gadamer): “The proximity between a pragmatism open to ‘forms of life’ and a hermeneutics of being-in-the-world seems even clearer if we consider that, in the fundamental conventions of language games which correspond, according to Wittgenstein, to a ‘deep need,’ are in each instance implied a mutual understanding among men regarding the ‘in view of what’ of their being-in-the-world.” 30 The inscription of the understanding of meaning in language games, in ethical worlds, or in traditions certainly allows us to surpass the aporias of the methodological solipsism of a hermeneutics that would emphasize self-understanding through empathy as the way to understand others. On the other hand, it does not permit us to bring out the conditions of validity of claims to meaning as they are unfolded in real communities and concrete forms of life. The difficulty Apel runs up against is that he also accepts the principle of the finitude of all understanding. But how then are we to preserve the question of the legitimacy of any interpretation? The solution lies in drawing out what is a priori governing interpretation (in the sense of its transcendental conditions and not as prejudices): the fact that with our interpretations, we seek to understand better. Hence the presupposition of an ideal “unlimited community of interpretation based on argumentation.” This assumes conditions that allow improving our interpretations (for example, more distinct concepts or making clear what was not in a text). And thus, the importance of distinguishing conditions for the constitution of meaning from (de facto) conditions for its validity (de jure). It is the de jure question of hermeneutics that is ignored as much by Gadamer and Heidegger as by Wittgenstein. What is left out are the presuppositions that are at work in every speech act and in every action coordinated by language. What is presupposed is that in every speech act is that there is, first, a claim to be intelligible; second, a claim to state the truth and to be sincere in doing so; and third, a normative claim (each speaker warrants what

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he says). It is these conditions and these claims that define the ideal, unlimited community of communication starting from which Apel translates the pragmatism of Peirce and Mead. In doing so, he sets himself in opposition both to Heidegger and Gadamer (for whom the justification of validity is always historically situated) and to Wittgenstein (for whom all claims to meaning are relative to some particular language game). What has to be assumed is a specific language game, that of the ideal communication community: Consideration of the linguistic opening to meaning and the world does not come down just to the uncontestable historicity of the constitution of meaning, but also to the fact that already at the level of mutual understanding, as regards our linguistic expressions, we have to presuppose a claim to meaning and to validity. This claim, which is so obviously present, can only definitively be satisfied by the possible consensus of an ideal and unlimited community of communication and its interpretations. 31

The finitude of human understanding prohibits any hope of reaching fixed, immutable truths, but this does not prevent progress in our interpretations if they meet methodological conditions and are submitted to discursive principles of argumentation that conform to an ethics of discussion. This better interpretive understanding effects not just the way we understand a text, but equally the way in which we understand our history, our society, ourselves, and, in fine, humanity itself. Here we can better grasp the ethical and political stakes of such a reflexive-pragmatic hermeneutics that shifts the question of truth to the Kantian side of a regulative idea. Between absolute knowledge beyond our human, all too human understanding and a pure and simple relativism is the regulative idea aimed not so much at infinity as at an ideal truth intended by an unlimited community of interpretation based on argumentation. The political implications of such an epistemology contribute to acknowledging the fact of interpretive pluralism without falling into a self-contradictory relativism, which would undercut the foundations of a pluralist liberal democracy. Interpretations that do not tolerate rival competitive interpretations are what cannot be tolerated. If the recognition of an interpretive pluralism leads to renouncing the idea of the obvious best interpretation, might it not in return accept the possibility of submitting every interpretation to criticism? Might democracy not extend beyond the coexistence of different or rival interpretations that are accepted to positively promote the idea of a search not for the best interpretation—not to speak of an ultimate interpretation, which would contradict the principle of pluralism—but for the better interpretation? Such a regulative idea would permit not only recognizing the peaceful cohabitation of contradictory interpretations but equally require the right and possibility of going beyond the boundaries of the individual and

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collective praxis of interpretation in view of collaborating in the construction of a better interpretation. The truth of any interpretation would no longer be considered as a fixed, infallible given but as a process open to ongoing rectification, critique, and discussion whenever a new interpretation enters the game between contradictory interpretations. This principle would apply at the level of science as well as the broader one of democratic debate. It would mean saying that a better understanding—insofar as it may be attained, the essential thing being to look for it—is never a definitive understanding. Unlike with scientific communities, in a liberal, pluralistic democratic society, no one can claim to be able to get beyond the framework of their interpretive praxis, from having to justify their interpretations and from participating in the debate. Everyone is free to rest with their narrow point of view if they tolerate the possibility of others interpreting things differently. But if the idea of democratic progress still makes sense, its institutions, notably its school system, have an interest in promoting, as a regulative idea, the requirement for a critical confrontation of rival interpretations and collaboration in constructing a better interpretation, even while acknowledging its revisable, provisory, and fallible character. The model of interpretive rationality proposed by Günter Abel using the framework of an ethics of communication offers helpful suggestions for thinking about such democratic progress. This model is inscribed in what he calls the equilibrium of understanding demanded by speakers and interpreters ready to expand, change, and improve their interpretive hypotheses. The equilibrium of understanding is distinct from the fusion of horizons dear to Gadamer: “The equilibrium of understanding integrates continuity and difference. It does not belong to the conditions of understanding signs where horizons fuse. What is more, it is necessary to recognize the other people’s horizons may be irreducibly different than our own.” 32 This recognition of difference does not, however, lead to an apology for difference, but rather invites each person to expand their interpretive horizon. The equilibrium of understanding, when it meets the conditions for its success, assumes the passage from a disturbing, bothered, confused understanding of others (which requires an interpretation of the others’ interpretive horizon) to a direct understanding (without our interpretation) inscribed in a particular praxis and sign-community. From this follows a whole series of prudential precepts meant better to satisfy the conditions for interpretive communication. Here are a few from the long list proposed by Abel: Giving priority to the interpretation that is likely to enhance communication, to maintain and prolong it; avoiding those interpretations that lead to inconsistency and incoherence; choosing the interpretation that leads to accepting as true what is said by to be true and held to be true by most of the speakers of a language; giving preference to the interpretation that offers the greatest plausibility and the greatest

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All these recommendations are useful in limiting the interpretations of interpretations to those that can facilitate understanding interpretations. Despite Abel’s opposition to Apel’s version of an ethics of discussion, taken as reestablishing a dogmatism, may we not say that these precepts presuppose an ideal community of communication and correlatively the regulative idea of a better interpretation? Does not the invitation to broaden interpretive hypotheses, to prefer interpretations that privilege coherence or predictions play the function of what is a priori in an interpretive ethics? This ethical and political shift of hermeneutics toward an ideal community of communication does, however, run up against the question of the normative basis that allows fixing the outlines of the horizon of truth. Gadamer had already formulated this objection, which is taken up by Christian Berner when he says: how are we to say that we approach understanding, even asymptotically, if we do not have some fixed point by which to measure this approximation? In mathematics, there can be an asymptote only in relation to some given line or curve. In interpretation, we cannot measure the approach to a “true” or “proper” meaning unless we know it. 34

This is a strong, if not radical objection to the regulative ideal: following a more vicious than a virtuous circle always presupposes an idea of truth (equivalent to a straight line in mathematics). Ought we then to say like Gadamer that understanding is achieved when we no longer feel the need to go on interpreting, that is, when the problematicity is removed, at least provisionally? How are we to assure that it really is a better interpretation? How are we to arbitrate between conflicting interpretations? This aporia leads back to a performative contradiction and the hermeneutic circle: it cannot be resolved using the idea that all interpretations are equally valid. It cannot be resolved using the idea that there must be an absolute truth to interpretation. If we stay with the framework of a normative perspective, the path proposed by Jean-Marc Ferry, which is closer to Habermas than to Apel, offers new suggestions for trying, if not to overcome, at least to make this persistent aporia a fruitful one. 35 His approach consists in unpacking and articulating the discursive strata (narration, interpretation, argumentation, reconstruction) thanks to which we make sense of the world and of ourselves. Narration constitutes the most “primary” performance of identity (personal or collective) in that it brings about a transformation of lived experience into recounted experience communicable to others. Following a line that runs from Dilthey to Ricoeur through Taylor and Arendt, Ferry makes narration the topos of personal identities inscribed in their historicity. An event be-

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comes a meaningful event when it is taken up in a plot. Narration plays a notable central role, on the scale individual and collective psychology, when the subject or group is confronted with a shock or trauma. Narrating it fills the vital quasi-need to talk about what has been experienced and to communicate it to others. If there is a claim to authenticity in the story we tell others, there can equally be a claim to truth in how the facts are narrated, narrative identity representing, for Ferry, the discursive mode that most bends the rules when it comes to factual accuracy (as can be seen in mythological accounts of the world). The reason for this is closely tied to the fact that a fictional narration can be one that is made up, a fortiori, when fiction presents itself as “a discourse meant to compensate for anxiety or a failure. Its freedom in relation to the event consists precisely in figuring what might have been, if reality conflicted with what was desired.” 36 The interpretive register adds a higher degree of reflexivity and truth about identity beyond the narrative one. The boundary between the two registers is not completely impermeable owing to the fact that the function played by the transmission of a narrative once constituted as a tradition demands that it be interpreted. Interpretation intervenes in the play of contextualization and decontextualization of the initial meaning of the narrative when it is addressed to subsequent interpretive communities: the narrative becomes “true” paradoxically to the degree that the tradition finds applications which are not directly related to the original context, with the result that its pertinence is virtually universal, at least at the level of what it claims. By assigning a historical truth to the narrative distanciated from its philological truth in this way, tradition proposes a general model of interpretation for all those events whose signification is going to corroborate and enrich its inaugural story. 37

Thus there is interpretation (in contrast to simply narration) when the meaning drawn becomes autonomous in relation to the related facts, when the meaning becomes exemplary or emblematic (as with epic), when it becomes lawful or quasi-lawful (knowledge about what will follow every time one acts in a certain way) but whose discursive forms may vary (a saying, proverb, moral tale, etc.). Argumentation increases the reflexivity inherent to interpretation in that it assumes the proposed meanings borne by traditions are subjected to both criticism and discussion. Interpretations reach a higher degree of truth not only when it is a question of justifying (by giving “good reasons”) the proposed meanings autonomized in this way, when they are submitted, as in Habermas’s model, to criteria of universalization (moving in this way beyond the narrowness and particularity of traditional meanings). According to Jean-Marc Ferry, this is the typical kind of identity sought by Enlightenment thinkers when traditions were submitted to the tribunal of reason. But the

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post-Kantian development of the ethics of communication requires further submitting these proposed meanings to a real discussion in which the claims to validity of proposed interpretations are examined by everyone involved: argumentation then unfolds in the direction of “a critical-discursive foundation. The argumentative mode is made manifest as the exclusive organon for the truth to be demonstrated, in particular when it attacks dogmatism in all its forms.” 38 What is surprising, in this kind of discursive archeology of identities proposed by Jean-Marc-Ferry, is the introduction of a fourth—higher—moment of reflexivity that he calls “reconstruction.” Reconstruction is aimed at something like a reflexive reprise of the preceding discursive paths (wherein lies the reconstruction) to recognize and identify where and by whom meaning and good reasons are produced. The mission of reconstruction, in other words, is to reflect on the contexts in which arguments are born, and clash, in which contexts they can gain validity or lose it. The critical hermeneutic theory proposed by Jean-Marc Ferry, which draws on a dialectic inspired by the Hegelian idea of Aufhebung (a reflexive progression through which each discursive register preserves and yet surpasses the preceding ones), is of particular interest to us because of the place it assigns to argumentation and reconstruction. In this, it clearly links up with the project of refounding hermeneutics found in Apel and Habermas. The public, critical argumentative test certainly does not claim to reach a “true” interpretation, not even the best interpretation (of a text, situation, intention), but at least a better interpretation. What is essential in our eyes is the idea of being able to justify publicly the reasons why one judges one interpretation to be better than another interpretation, by submitting it to the critical judgment of a large or best-equipped audience, one that will take into account rival or contradictory interpretations. This kind of critical and discursive model, beyond the fact that it permits removing some of the claims of relativism, contributes to cutting off, at least provisionally, an infinite regression when it comes to interpretation. Both in the sense that it is always possible to add a new interpretation to an already existing one, and in the sense that an interpretation can return to the deeper buried, older, more taken for granted layers of pre-understanding in the way Paolo Virno speaks of as asking “one more time” or saying that “thus it follows that.” 39 A critical, fallible hermeneutic does forbid us from assuming certain foundational modes, which cut off an infinite regression through an appeal to a first principle (God, Reason, Axioms). But it does not renounce transitory interruptions in the mode of what Virno calls “that’s enough,” referring to the popular saying. Not, of course, as an order given to those carried away by interpretations, but as a way of putting a transitory halt to the “and so on” that interpretations may lead to.

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The regrounding of hermeneutics as critical and argumentative will not assure the apodictic, definitive certainty of any interpretation, even as a regulative horizon. It does contribute though to cutting off a regression to infinity for a time (until a better interpretation replaces an existing one, an interpretation better adapted to the facts, a situation, a text), and it does add to the reflexive character of interpretation by expanding the frameworks for interpretation (as personal, social, cultural) just as we can change our point of view, or transfer the here and now of our situation to elsewhere and another time. This brings up again, beyond the importance of critical discussion capable of changing our interpretive position, the importance of the imagination. Not just the productive imagination, but equally what with Husserl we can call “imaginary variations” of an object. These imaginary variations, which allow us to represent the hidden sides, the possible sides of an object, are akin to what we may call the interpretive variations one reflexively applies to oneself and along with others in public spaces of discussion. By definition, these interpretative variations, in that they broaden our perspectives, have no absolute end. Always provisional, we cannot be assured they are the best ones, but we can wager they are not simply other ones. We may wager that such decentering, uprooting, critical argumentation, and imaginative variations that expand our thinking will be better than our first interpretations. Is this not the other sense we can give to regulative ideals, following the example of the line an asymptote approaches in mathematics? The argumentative model constitutes progress in the battle against relativism, without completely overcoming it. Still, the reflexive, discursive route Jean-Marc Ferry proposes does call for further comment. For one thing, the discursive registers he brings to light are tied to questions about personal and collective identity. But narratives are not only about the formation of such identities. As we have seen, they can be about the shape of social, public, and historical experience without being directly tied to questions of identity. This is all the truer in that any interpretation draws on an extraordinarily wide range of support when it comes to understanding (situations, texts, intentions, speech acts). For another, it seems inexact to consider narration and interpretation only from the angle of the transmission and reprise of meaning. The mere fact of inscribing the problematic meaning of an event in a plot is already an interpretive act, both as regards the meaning given the event and that given it in the story told. In other words, interpretation is already constitutive of narration before it is transmitted. Narration is a particular case of the kind of interpretation we have placed under the heading of ethnointerpretations. Finally, the hermeneutic model privileged by Jean-Marc Ferry, which clearly draws on Dilthey and Ricoeur, is particularly concerned with autonomized, lasting fixed meanings as a kind of objective spirit that can constitute an interpretative tradition. But this model drawn from the theory of text

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interpretation is just one particular instance of the way interpretation is likely to be carried out. We need also to consider the more fleeting sense of events, of situations, in their kairos, which does not have the possibility of constituting itself as a fixed trace by means of a text or archive. LEGAL HERMENEUTICS AND THE PROBLEM OF APPLICATION The dialectic between interpretation and argumentation finds a particular field of experimentation in the domain of legal hermeneutics. Legal hermeneutics, along with philological and theological hermeneutics, constitutes one of the oldest traditions of interpretation and rests on the acknowledgment of application as an inherent process of all understanding. First, from the pietist tradition, the subtilitas applicandi was added to the subtilitas intelligendi (understanding properly speaking) and the subtilitas explicanda (interpretation) of a text. In fact, if we follow Gadamer, application is not added as a second process to a first process of understanding. To understand a text from the past in the present is immediately to apply it. In both legal and theological hermeneutics there is an essential tension between the fixed text—the law or the gospel—on the one hand and, on the other, the sense arrived at by applying it at the concrete moment of interpretation, either in judgment or in preaching. A law does not exist in order to be understood historically, but to be concretized in its legal validity by being interpreted. Similarly, the gospel does not exist in order to be understood as a merely historical document, but to be taken in such a way that it exercises its saving effect. This implies that the text, whether law or gospel, if it is to be understood properly—i.e., according to the claim it makes—must be understood every moment, in every concrete situation, in a new and different way. Understanding here is always application. 40

Gadamer’s thesis, far from being self-evident, poses three problems, which are all the more pressing in that legal hermeneutics is supposed to serve in the argumentative structure of Truth and Method as the epistemological matrix for the human sciences in general and for the science of history in particular. In the first place, we can ask about Gadamer’s refusal to dissociate the interpretation of a legal text from its application. We can ask whether a lawyer’s function, a fortiori a judge’s, in understanding a legal text is really inseparable from its application to a case, to a present case. The lawyer grasps the meaning of the law as a function of a given case. But can the same be said, taking up an argument from Emilio Betti, when it comes to the legal historian? Like every historian, he considers the text of a law, the conditions in which it was produced, and the institutions that presided over its gestation on the basis of his present situation and always on the basis of some pre-

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understanding. But the legal historian does not need to find the legal text most applicable to a present case. His problem is how to place a law in a broader historical context, even to consider it as merely a historical document that says something about something else (a transformation in ideology, political forces). Using Koselleck’s terms, we could say that the law is a document like any other document for the historian and, as such, it has to be submitted to historical critique. 41 Second, Gadamer’s thesis and legal hermeneutics in general assume that every law requires an interpretation, with application being precisely one of its paradigmatic forms. But there exist a range of situations, as we see in greater detail when it comes to “hard cases,” that necessitate interpretations in a stronger sense. But legal practice, especially judicial practice, attests to many different scales of understanding and judgments that go together. In some configurations, interpretation is hardly called for. As a result, legal systems can be analyzed in these cases as functioning automatically based on the information at hand. 42 This is the case, for example, in calculating taxes for which administrations and jurisdictions use specific programs. Without subscribing to a purely functionalist theory of law, which turns into a legal system that automatically adapts itself to the general societal context almost quasi-mechanically, 43 we must, on the contrary, depend on typical patterns of understanding legal texts and cases, on how routine judicial matters and interactions are dealt with. When a law benefits from a relative univocity, when a case is relatively familiar, when the possible controversial issues are small, any interpretation will be minimal. The judgment made on the basis of an immediate understanding will suffice. The routine subsuming of a case under a law will take place without any particular difficulty. We must not say, therefore, that every application of a law is in itself interpretive in the strong sense of this term. Third, Gadamer’s thesis does not allow us to discriminate among applications. When the philosopher asserts that a law can be interpreted differently as a function of each concrete situation, he gives no criterion for distinguishing which applications are more just, more appropriate, which applications to a case permit assuring an equal distance between the parties involved, separating what is “mine” from what is “yours.” Application becomes simply understanding each situation differently. This hermeneutic relativism on the epistemological level has clear effects on the ethical one, when through the interpretation of a law or case, a person’s freedom or guilt is at stake, when a victim is to be recognized. It is easy to imagine that if we stick only to philological or theological hermeneutics the practical consequences will be derisory. On the level of legal hermeneutics, the consequences of a misinterpretation of a law or of testimony can be dramatic and affect someone’s life, freedom, and human dignity. The relativism of legal hermeneutics thus runs up against the scandal of injustice.

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From the point of view of its ethical effects, Jean-Philippe Pierron is right to compare legal to medical hermeneutics: Like in medicine—the art of interpreting the equivocal signs of someone who is ill—the legal system works to interpret the signs (evidence or testimony) of inherent conflict in a social body. It follows that what makes medical and juridical interpretation dramatic, and in so doing singularizes it, is that both find themselves, owing to the contexts in which they take place—the patient’s distress, the social violence of wrong committed—marked by a coefficient (this is a euphemism) of existential “concerns.” Interpretation, in this sense, is faced with the ghosts that haunt the law and to which it replies, the execution of justice adding suffering to suffering or sometimes leading to the violence brought about by a judicial error. More precisely, there is no legal system without a thought of misfortune. 44

The ethical drama of legal hermeneutics obliges us to rethink the dialectic of interpretation and argumentation. Whereas some routine juridical situations only require a weak interpretation, others necessitate appropriate techniques to lift the problematicity of a law as written to state the law. The problem of interpretation can arise in a general way on several levels: of course at the level of the text of a law when it is equivocal or confused in some way (translation of a written law into a foreign language only reinforces the problematic aspect); at the level of the relations between the text of the law and other such texts, including the question of basic principles or higher norms (determining, for example, whether an article of law contradicts a constitutional rule or fundamental principle recognized by the laws indicated in the constitution); at the level of the interpretation of the case in question, if this itself includes a degree of difficulty, of problematicity (in a trial process, there must be a place for a plurality of accounts, testimony, material evidence, expert testimony to establish the truth of the facts in the case); at the level of the interpretation of the relation between a written law and a contentious case, for example when several laws are capable of applying to the same case. The interpretations in question are not free of every constraint or framework. Beyond social and cultural ones, legal settings are defined by rules, instituted meanings, and informal grammars that vary as a function of national and international legal traditions, and different court systems. This means that not every interpretation is applicable; for example, during a trial, some interpretations have prevalence over others (the judge has more to say here than does a defendant). The limitation on juridical interpretation is reinforced by technical categories established in practice to overcome the problematicity of meaning. Heirs in some cases of religious hermeneutics, there are many such techniques that, in cases, are heirs of religious hermeneutics. The “grammatical”

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interpretation found in every textual hermeneutic is the oldest: when the meaning of the words, of the propositions of a written law are not immediately graspable, the jurist will apply a semantic, or lexicographic, or even etymological approach to which may be added a look at context to determine the meaning (for example, how a law fits in a larger corpus of laws). This work of interpretation is often accompanied by techniques drawn from formal logic. This is the case, for example, with the legal syllogism that, through a series of premises, allows applying a law to the judging of a contentious case. The major premise, which is abstract and general, is the one that states the rule; the minor premise is the one that characterizes the particular fact to be judged; the conclusion is the proposition that permits relating the general text of a law to the facts in question. For example: Major premise: In virtue of article 1401 of the Civil Code, community property consists of the goods acquired by the spouses during their marriage. Minor premise: In the case in question, the house in Brittany was acquired by the Durands during the first year of their marriage. Conclusion: Therefore, the house in Brittany is community property. Without any other details, the interpretation in question is minimal: a determinative judgment and a relatively immediate understanding. The conclusion is imposed in a perfectly deductive manner. On the other hand, interpretations and controversies may intervene if article 1401 of the Civil Code is found to contradict a new European rule regarding community property or if a third party challenges the validity of the Durands’s marriage. More interpretation will equally be required if two legal depositions or two contradictory juridical principles can apply to the same case. For example, the noncontractual occupation of a building left vacant by a family. With reference to the principle of the right to private property, this occupation is clearly illegal, and justice requires the occupants be expelled. On the other hand, if the reference is to the right to housing (a principle recognized in the preamble to the French Constitution from 1946), this occupation may be legally justified. When a case does not seem to fall under the usual categories for the affair to be dealt with, one interpretive technique is reasoning by analogy: establishing a resemblance or kinship between the present case and past such cases. Such reasoning a fortiori will make use of this method when there is a close resemblance to past cases. On the other hand, it may rest on the lack of analogy (when the dissimilarities exclude treating cases as identical). 45 Even

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when overly formalized, the three modes of reasoning by analogy all assume interpretation in the strong sense in establishing the resemblances and differences pertinent to the case at hand. It is undeniably with the occurrence of “hard cases” that interpretation has the most to say, at the same time that it is most subject to controversy. One speaks of “hard cases” when none of the existing legal or constitutional means allow a case to be resolved a priori. For example, in French law, the jurisdictional status of the president of the Republic, laid out in articles 67 and 68 of the 1958 constitution, stipulates that the Head of State is not legally responsible for those acts he carries out in this role. But this lack of responsibility is limited by the crimes covered by the International Criminal Court (genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes), and by the possibility of impeachment if voted by parliament meeting as a High Court (“in the case of a failure to do his duties manifestly incompatible with the exercise of his office”). On the other hand, the constitution does not say anything about whether the president, during his term of office, can be a party in a civil suite (at the risk of breaking with the principle of the equality between citizens, the head of state himself cannot be charged with a crime), or whether he can give testimony in a case that directly involves him. The problem arose during the term of Jacques Chirac. We were confronted with a “hard case” in this instance that required complex procedures of interpretation. How are we to deal with a case when it cannot be subsumed under an already existing norm? The answer of legal positivism is to leave the decision to the discretionary power of the judge, knowing that laws are supposed to be univocal, and passed by a legitimate legislature. This “discretionary” solution is counter to what Ronald Dworkin proposes in his legal hermeneutics. 46 If hard cases clearly call into question the idea of a determinant judgment, what is required is a reflective judgment that does not rest solely on the judge’s power. The way Dworkin takes does not borrow from a hermeneutic that privileges the letter of the law as written. It is not a question, in other words, of interpreting a text in function of the supposed intention of the legislature (for example, through referring to the reports of hearings and parliamentary debates to discover the motivations of those who wrote, discussed, and voted on the law). This is how constitutionalists justify, for example, the principle of “cohabitation” (when the president of the republic and the prime minister do not belong to the same majority). The “presidential” intention of the writers of the 1958 constitution (Michel Debré and General de Gaulle) stated that the president need not resign—because he is above political parties—when a parliamentary majority disagrees with him. But this recourse to the presumed intention of the legislature turned out to be unclear, mysterious, and was the source of unbearable conflicting interpretations. Using the same example, one could say, for instance, in the name of this same presidential emphasis, that the head of state will resign in the case

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of a change in the majority in parliament—a legislative reversal signifying in this case a rejection of the previous political program of the previous parliamentary majority and of the head of state. The problem of hard cases is reinforced in that one cannot appeal to the legislature’s intention when a legal norm is clearly lacking. It is from the literary, but not romantic, not psychological, hermeneutic model that Dworkin hopes to find a solution appropriate to such difficult cases. The legal hermeneutic to which he refers assumes an autonomy of the text of the law that may go against the subjective intentions of the legislature: analogous to the fixing of the saying in the said of what is written—for which an internal analysis is possible—the initial meaning of a law is found in an objective corpus (a civil code, a criminal code) but like a work open to decontextualization and recontextualization through the act of reading, interpreting, and judging. In this way, the law is “deobjectified” and “considered as an event” when it is applied to a situation, as for example in a trial process. The fixed “said” of the law is reconfigured through the actual interactions that occur in the courts. These reconfigurations by the actors in the case (judges, lawyers, and so on) in turn contribute to giving a historicity to the texts of the law, by unfolding meanings that were not originally seen in them, by modifying the internal relations of legal systems, and by making literal interpretations of the law become obsolete. In the words of Francesco Viola, the law is governed both by a structure of internal closure (the actual order of things, made objective through the relations between norms) and an open structure (a potential order having unforeseen meanings and answers). 47 For Dworkin, imagining a rule when it is first lacking, an operation akin to a reflective judgment, must therefore be elaborated on the basis of the “judicial system” in constructing relations that fit, and that are just from the texts in relation to other texts, following the hermeneutic principle of reciprocal interpretation of the whole and the parts. When a written law fails to cover a case, it is necessary therefore to construct one as a function of the narrative coherence of the judicial system. It is not a particular legislation that must be the referent in what Dworkin calls the “chain of narrators” each contributing a chapter to the elaboration of a judicial enterprise metaphorized into a narrative written by many hands, between what has already been judged and the future. It is from this back and forth movement between historicity and anticipation that we can disengage principles that are distinguished from the rules of positive law by their ethical-political nature. It is these principles that permit in the final analysis giving a solution to the hard cases, without having to turn to the discretionary power of the judge. Does the solution Dworkin proposes allow us to resolve our initial problem of juridical relativism? His model of a legal hermeneutics does allow conjuring away the specter of decisionism and judicial arbitrariness. But, as Ricoeur rightly points out, the problem is merely shifted to the side of the

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principles supposed to cover hard cases. 48 Dworkin acknowledges the profound equivocity of ethical-political principles, without taking up their application to particular cases. We can think, for example, of the variations in the interpretation of the principle of public security by political administrators who appeal to alleged circumstances, to public opinion. To this is added, as we have already seen, the possibility of justifying two contradictory principles (like the respect of private property and the right to housing). How is one to decide in this case if one can legitimately construct two contradictory principles starting from the same “judicial system” or invoke them to determine the same case? The risk, as Ricoeur notes, is the interminable character of interpretation, without which justice cannot reach its ideal: to decide a conflict based on the law. It is at this stage that argumentation may permit not substituting but rather enriching interpretation in the mode we have qualified as amplifying interpretation. The normative framework offered by Habermas and his followers constitutes a valuable tool for giving consistency to amplifying interpretation when in legal matters juridical argumentation is considered as a special domain for the general principles that govern the ethics of discussion. 49 We recall that this general normative framework presupposes an ideal communication situation (unlimited and unconstrained communication) as soon as in any human interaction there is a claim to correctness, to a search for potentially universalizable arguments (unlike with strategic interaction, which does not aim at correctness but at success in some situation, for example, that of negotiation). To satisfy this requirement, the rules governing discussion must be assumed in each case, such as the equality of all the members involved (no one can be prohibited from speaking) or the obligation to publicly justify one’s arguments. The project then consists in transposing this general ethical model to the particular legal domain, in particular that of the trial court. In other words, the rule of law is not founded solely on the criterion of coherence (on the model, for example, of the judicial syllogism) and the hierarchy of norms (what Habermas calls “legal security”) but equally on a demand for legitimacy: On the one hand, the principle of legal certainty demands decisions that can be consistently rendered within the framework of the existing legal order. . . . On the other hand, the claim to legitimacy requires decisions that are not only consistent with the treatment of similar cases in the past and in accord with the existing legal system. They are also supposed to be rationally grounded in the matter at issue so that all participants can accept them as rational decisions. 50

Transferring the general model of the ethics of discussion presents major trump cards for getting beyond the impasses of relative, unbounded legal interpretation. It permits, first of all, doing away with the specter of a judge’s discretionary power in hard cases, as the elaboration of a judi-

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cial norm rests on discussion and collective, rational deliberation. Next, if the model of argumentation does not allow completely eradicating interpretive pluralism, it does contribute to rationalizing the process. This is the case when those involved are asked to justify why they lean toward one interpretation rather than another by giving reasons (this applies to witnesses, the parties involved, expert witnesses, the judges, and the lawyers). In most democratic legal systems, it is also expected that a judicial authority or legislature will give motives for its decision (for example, “the reasons” for this law). A judge, at the risk of a performative contradiction, cannot pronounce a verdict and at the same time state that it is unjust. Argued through real discussion, an interpretation gains in depth, veracity, and authenticity. It can thus be said to be amplified. But can legal interactions always be placed under the general model of an ethics of discussion? Beyond the fact there is still an interpretation, the particularities of the legal system, and notably the courts, prohibit a pure and simple transposition. In a trial, beyond the fact that all the interpretations and all the allegations are not allowable owing to the rules that govern trials and the courtroom (that can lead to “objections”), all the protagonists do not have the same access to speaking, the interpretations of some do not have the same a priori authority as do those of others (the judge is supposed to be impartial in dealing with the defendant and witnesses whose testimony has been challenged). So it is necessary to recognize a dissymmetry in the relations among the protagonists when it comes to what they can say, breaking, we can say, one of the basic rules of the ethics of discussion. On the other hand, as Ricoeur says, “the discussion in the judicial instance does end with an agreement and does not even aim at one, at least as a first approximation. Judging means a decision and therefore a separation of the parties, instituting . . . a just distance between them.” 51 It is difficult to imagine a requirement that the interests and interpretations put forth by the parties in a trial, without speaking of full agreement on the verdict, can be universalized. Despite these limits, the model of ethical argumentation does allow us to reach, if not the best or most fair, a better or fairer legal interpretation (of a law, a case, a hard case). The possibility of subsequently challenging a verdict, in a court of appeals, of starting a new process testifies precisely to the fallible, provisional character of legal interpretation. Still, when framed by rules for discussion, by the obligation to motivate an interpretation, we may legitimately hope for something better than a spontaneous, arbitrary, solitary, or simply subjective interpretation. Argumentation thus offers a kind of test process, a rational purgation of first interpretations in a collective undertaking, under the heading of open debate, aimed at a better regulative interpretation, when even stating the law never fully exhausts the horizon of justice.

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THE EVIDENTIAL PARADIGM AND QUESTIONING BACK Amplifying interpretation may be at work in the world of everyday life when we seek to get beyond the narrowness of our perspective on the world, or to corroborate broader verifications, or in mobilizing ethnointerpretations, or in ordinary discussion with other people. Amplifying interpretation, moreover, is a systematic requirement when it comes to understanding in the scientific, philosophical, or scholarly world; for example, in universities where the evaluation of interpretations through peer evaluation is a regular part of the language game and laboratory life. We have also seen how it works in the particular case of the legal world. This remark invites us to rethink the relation between interpretations produced in the Lebenswelt as an ordinary unveiling of the world and those interpretations that operate as a scientific deciphering of signs. A purely nominalistic and relativistic hermeneutic sees no difference between the two worlds when it comes to claims about the validity of interpretations. The sciences of interpretation simply do so differently than do those current in the lifeworld. This assertion is what we must examine next. If this is not exactly the thesis argued for by the anthropologist and historian Carlo Ginzburg—already mentioned for his fight against Hayden White’s post-modern historiography—his magisterial article “Clues” may in any case lead to a kind of derivation of what he calls the “evidential paradigm” for activities found in the lifeworld like divination or hunting. 52 He uncovers a new configuration of knowledge, a new episteme—the evidential paradigm, which applies to many different ways of knowing. This is the case notably with art criticism under the impulse of Giovanni Morelli. When it is difficult to attribute a painting to an artist, the “Morelli method” consists of looking at the smallest details, those least influenced by the characteristics of the age. This is also the case for medicine and notably its psychoanalytic version (Freud knew Morelli’s work) when it looks at symptoms often considered not to be important (slips of the tongue, unfinished acts). What Ginzburg calls the evidential paradigm groups together all the disciplines (for which philology is just one element) that deal with the deciphering of traces, signs, and clues. Talking about an evidential paradigm permits situating the human sciences in the opposition inherited from Windelband between the “ideographic” and “nomological” sciences. The evidential paradigm designates that in fact, they are highly qualitative disciplines, in which the object is the study of individual cases, situations, and documents, precisely because they are individual, and for this reason get results that have an unsuppressible speculative margin: just think of the importance of conjecture (the term itself originates in divination) in medicine or in philology, and in divining. Galileian science, which could have taken as its own the Scholastic motto Individuum

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est inefabile (“We cannot speak about what is individual”), is endowed with totally different characteristics. Mathematics and the empirical method implied, respectively, quantification and the repetition of phenomena, while the individualizing perspective by definition excluded the latter and admitted the former only as mere instrument. 53

The opposition between two scientific paradigms as reformulated here is not new since the nineteenth century, even if it does not always seem selfevident, both because some sciences based on clues like history may make use of what may not quite be laws but are rules regarding experience as Weber has demonstrated, and because some disciplines like medicine may ride both horses at the same time. From this point of view, Louis Liebenberg goes beyond Ginzburg. He makes the ancestral art of “tracking” the origin of every science, both those of the natural and the human sciences. 54 The art of tracking utilized in hunting and gathering societies requires practically the same skills and the same intellectual procedures (induction, hypothetical-deductive thinking) as used in modern physics. It is not a mere metaphor when one says that physics study the “tracks” of particles. This holds, says Liebenberg, as an analogy, through which we can consider the tracker as a kind of physicist and the physicist as a kind of tracker. Both proceed on the basis of similar ways of reasoning, such as induction. The analogy between tracking and physics also holds in the sense that “the observable properties of the visible world may be regarded as signs of invisible structures or processes. The force of gravity cannot actually be seen. . . . Physicists can only see the signs such as ‘particle tracks.’” 55 Liebenberg acknowledges that “tracking” presents a more basic, less sophisticated form of science, endowed with a more rudimentary form of technology, one essentially based on oral transmission. Yet continuity reigns between, on the one hand, the hunter who tracks an animal, who classifies animals, who observes nature with its regularities and discontinuities, and, on the other, the physicist who deciphers nature’s language. Thanks to a knowledge of models (“patterns”) of tracks, that is, of the characteristics of animal behavior, the “tracker” is able to make predictive hypotheses, to confirm or falsify their models of anticipated results on the basis of experience. This is the case, for example, when using traces of urine or excrement left by animals that allow deducing the type of animal, its sex (the position of the urine in relation to the tracks is not the same for a male and a female), its age (based on the size of the footprints), the time that has passed since it came this way (as a function of the change in the excrement left behind), and its diet (the excrement of herbivores being small and round, as opposed to long and cylindrical for carnivores).

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Trackers thus make use of a “science” of animal signs (vocal, territorial signs), a technique in the sense of know-how that rests on a theoretical knowledge about tracks, allowing them to distinguish among species (invertebrates, amphibians, mammals, reptiles) and individuals in the same species. Close to the approach taken by Cuvier, the tracker in a traditional hunting society is able to reconstruct an animal’s identity starting from a close interpretation of one of its parts (a piece of fur caught on a branch, a hoof mark left in the mud in the reconstruction of a young female, antelope who passed this way last night). The tracker’s rigorous interpretation of the categories of tracks makes the tracker a true researcher when it comes to determining what the animal was doing at the moment when it left these traces (sleeping, eating, running, walking, trotting), what its state of mind was (calm, anxious), and whether it was alone or with a group. 56 Those who follow tracks make collective use of what Liebenberg calls “systematic tracking,” that is general models for analyzing tracks (akin to what we find in modern science), which expand on the basis of experience. “Speculative tracking involves a continuous process of conjecture and refutation to deal with complex, dynamic, everchanging variables. Modern tracking not only requires inductive-deductive reasoning, but also creative hypothetico-deductive reasoning.” 57 Like a scientific community, trackers share their hypotheses, and discuss and test them out collectively. There can, of course, be relatively routine ways of understanding, based on familiar tracks that easily fit the general models (for example, the imprint of a mammal’s body when it lies on the grass to sleep). On the other hand, interpretation is called for when the observed track cannot be easily subsumed under a predetermined model. An interpretation that Liebenberg calls indirect is called for when an animal’s track (for example, one covered by sediment, if it is an old one) does not spontaneously correspond to the model for an already known and inventoried animal. An indirect interpretation can then consist in the contextualizing of a track (like what an archeologist or historian does) by inferring a category of tracks as a function of the kind of natural setting in which the track was discovered (near a lake, a river, under a tree), knowing that one will have a greater chance of finding this animal in proximity to this setting, in this season, alone or in a pack, etc. Trackers as a group thus start from an enigmatic track to recontextualize it using possible tracks in order to infer the probable animal in question. Whatever the line between the human and natural sciences, Liebenberg and Ginzburg defend the same principle of continuity between the art of following tracks and a scientific approach: “behind this presumptive or divinatory paradigm we perceive what may be the oldest act in the intellectual history of the human race: the hunter squatting on the ground, studying the tracks of his quarry.” 58 There is undoubtedly an interpretive intelligence,

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know-how, knowing how to interpret at work in hunting, tracking, and divining. The question remains, however, whether philology, history, art criticism, medicine, not to speak of physics are really akin to derivative forms of one another. Ginzburg does distinguish different registers of signs (the tracks left by an animal, pictorial signs, corporeal symptoms), but without placing them in a hierarchy on the grounds of the specific methods used for deciphering them. The temporal orientation of the kind of decipherment in question seems to prevail: for example, the future for divination, the present for medicine (equally the future when it comes to a prognosis), the past for history or philology. Ginzburg’s epistemological emphasis, even more so that of Liebenberg, seems close to that inaugurated by Husserl in his Krisis when he invokes Rückfrage, that is, a method that consists in deriving the physical-mathematical sciences from an “originary ground” thematized as a lifeworld (Lebenswelt), “the spatiotemporal world of things as we experience them in our preand extrascientific life and as we know them to be experienceable beyond what is [actually] experienced.” 59 Without explicitly referring to it, Ginzburg’s method is close to the derivation Husserl offers for the Galilean paradigm. Liebenberg’s approach is even closer to that of Husserl without referring to it. This method of derivation has two heuristic virtues. On the one hand, it allows us to rehabilitate interpretive intelligence as applying to the ordinary activities we have placed under the heading of ethnointerpretations. On the other, it contributes to challenging the claim that the evidential paradigm or physical-mathematical sciences are self-grounding. There is a counterpart to this gain in conceptual scope. If we proceed to a direct derivation of the natural and critical sciences from the Lebenswelt, we risk falling into a form of relativism, historicism, culturalism. The epistemological risk is largely connected to the Husserlian use of the term “foundation” to qualify the dependence of physical-mathematical propositions on the Lebenswelt. “Foundation” refers to an “originary ground” in an ontological sense, or to a principle of legitimation and validation of scientific propositions in an epistemological sense. If we preserve just the second sense, it is the very idea of universality that risks collapsing. This difficulty seems to arise in a similar way for the evidential paradigm if we directly derive the sciences of interpretation such as history or philology from the art of hunting or of divination. There is finally no difference between the rule-guided interpretation of texts and occult practices like divination or astrology, between the use of philological or historiographical techniques and what we can qualify as irrational ones (analogy, magic, metaphysical intuition). The figure of the hunter or diviner hides behind that of the historian, the physician, or exegete, even behind that of the physicist (for Liebenberg).

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The problems posed by the mode of derivation of the evidential paradigm on the basis of guessing have been the object of controversy among specialists. 60 Denis Thouard clearly questions the ambition to ground the interpretive sciences on an epistemology based on guessing whose rationality is open to question, without denying the heuristic value of Ginzburg’s article: Even when a conjecture stems from hermeneutic activity, it must be ruleguided. Guessing alone can only be arbitrary. It can be rule-guided in relation to comparison to the overall context, to probabilistic calculation, as is the case for hermeneutics inspired by Leibniz, philological work, or every procedure stemming from an objective, intersubjectively falsifiable approach, proper to the “explanatory” paradigm. Immediate passage from the clue to extrapolating the “cause” or its meaning offers no guarantee of success. 61

In other words, the claim of interpretive disciplines to be constituted as sciences, not as arts of divination, presupposes a protocol for carrying out and verifying an investigation, a critical, argumentative requirement, peer evaluation. On this basis, the epistemological break between the sciences of interpretation and ethnointerpretation has the upper hand over that between hermeneutics and mere guessing. Jean-Marc Ferry invokes this same break in adding to the debate a need to mark out the three grammars of signs (indexical, iconographic, symbolic) inherited from Peirce. To ground the human sciences (in opposition to the Galilean ones) on the evidential paradigm, as Ginzburg wants to do, comes down to denying the epistemological singularity of the symbolic grammar in which disciplines like history and philology work by preference. To derive the evidential paradigm from guessing or from “hunting” comes down to privileging the deciphering of natural signs (or supernatural ones in the case of divine, heavenly signs), whose model is difficult to transpose to the interpretation of cultural signs properly speaking whose grammars are symbolic. The paradox in Ginzburg’s approach is wanting to construct an epistemology of the human sciences (in opposition to the natural sciences) on the basis of a grammar of natural signs: So long as we consider clues as primitively and fundamentally natural signs, even when they lead to a “spiritual” universe, it seems that an inquiry strictly guided by an grammar based on clues largely leaves out of its cognitive field not only the element of literary hermeneutics, devoted to the interpretation of canonical texts, but also that of a social hermeneutics devoted to the understanding of the meaning of norms, institutions, and public cultures. 62

It is necessary, therefore, to distinguish at least two registers of arguments that justify the hypothesis of a break or cut between scholarly and ordinary interpretations (on the basis of the evidential paradigm). For one thing, a direct derivation of the hermeneutic sciences from guessing will not guaran-

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tee any kind of control procedure for interpretations, permitting no way of discriminating between crazy interpretations (founded, for example, on supernatural causes) and amplifying ones (based on critical argumentation), and inevitably leads to relativism. The guesser thus understands in another way than does the physicist, otherwise we will be unable to say that the latter’s interpretation will be better than the former’s. For another, a direct derivation of the human sciences from the evidential paradigm comes down to deriving the deciphering of symbolic signs from the model for deciphering natural signs (as though we interpreted a text as we do the tracks left by an animal), at the risk, therefore, of losing the autonomy of the cultural sciences. If the approach of a direct derivation seems to lead to these dead ends, a model of indirect derivation may remove them, at least to some degree. We owe this model to Paul Ricoeur from the way he takes up the Husserlian idea of questioning back in a critical manner. Well aware of Ginzburg’s work as a historian, Ricoeur did not completely get caught up in the epistemological debate over the evidential paradigm. Nonetheless, his reflections on one interpretive science in particular—history—can provide suggestions for rethinking the articulation between the uncovering of the ordinary lifeworld and the scholarly deciphering of signs. What is first of all original about his approach lies in his critical reading of Husserl’s questioning back: The real world has priority in the ontological order. But the ideal science has priority in the epistemological one. We can therefore “derive” idealities, in the sense that they refer to the real world. But we cannot derive the requirement that they must be valid. This requirement leads back to the idea of science, which is originary in another sense than coming from the lifeworld. In other words, we live in a world that precedes every question of validity. But the question of validity precedes all our efforts at giving meaning to the situations in which we find ourselves. 63

The very method of questioning back, in its Husserlian version, confirms for Ricoeur, on the one hand, calling into question the claim that science like consciousness founds itself. Meaning deposited in the form of tradition has already preceded us in the lifeworld. This is equally true for the everyday person as for the scientist. But, on the other hand, by insisting on the epistemological primacy of the requirement of validity, Ricoeur saves the world of science from the throes of relativism. This is why in the method of questioning back he draws from Husserl, there is something “underivable”—the epistemological requirement for validity—which is what precisely preserves the phenomenological reduction from reductionism. The second original thing about Ricoeur’s approach has to do with the kind of epistemological transfer of Rückfrage to the domain of history. Before the appearance of the three volumes of Time and Narrative, it was in the

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article titled “History and Hermeneutics” that we discover this transfer at the price of some reworking. 64 What it seeks to show, in other words, is how the historical research carried out by historians refers back to “the historicity of human experience in general.” In speaking of a historical condition, Ricoeur means those things already said to which we belong, sediments of meaning deposited as tradition, the real effects of history. In this regard, the quite Schutzian use of the phenomenology of generations is telling in how it inscribes the ego in a chain of meaning that outruns it: “temporality must be designated as englobing my personal history in its threefold relatedness to my contemporaries, my predecessors, and my successors.” 65 The second way in which this article from 1976 is important lies in the fact that Ricoeur does not stop with the question of how historical inquiry is derived from our historical condition, but undertakes to move in the reverse direction, like a reversed Rückfrage, which he calls with Plato a “descending” dialectic (from hermeneutics toward scientific history). Without this return trajectory, the status of history as a discipline would not be wellfounded. Thus it is a question of showing how history makes use of methodological distanciation and externalization through writing as regards the temporal condition constitutive of the lifeworld. It is because contemporaries are separated from their predecessors by an irreducible temporal distance that the historian has to reconstruct the past through the traces it has left in the present. This reconstruction calls for vigilance on the historian’s part and suspicion concerning what meaning has been transmitted. Temporal distance therefore demands a methodological distanciation different from the mere historicity of the human condition. Putting this double—ascending and descending—approach to work, which is still found in embryo in the 1976 article, is the object of an unprecedented development in Time and Narrative. This great trilogy adds to what was just implicit in the article “History and Hermeneutics”: the idea that there can only be an indirect derivation of history from our historical condition. It is within the epistemological context of the debate over the narrative status of history that Ricoeur takes up the transfer of the operation of Rückfrage to history. 66 Without presenting all the details of that controversy here, we can point out that the problem is whether the operation of emplotment alone can suffice to define historical explanation or whether historical explanation escapes the narrative “genre” and borrows its sense of explanation from other social sciences (at the risk, however, of losing its specificity). It was to surpass this alternative, which he judged to be ruinous, that Ricoeur took up the question of Husserlian questioning back in order to rethink what he calls “historical intentionality” or the meaning of the noetic intention that accounts for the scientific quality of history. This method allows him to show how, in a dialectical manner, historical explanation inclines toward structures of em-

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plotment and how these narrative structures themselves point toward historical explanation. In other words, it is a question, on the one hand, of refusing to say that history founds itself by attesting that it draws on narrative configurations and, through them, the pre-narrative structures of ordinary experience in the world. On the other hand, it is a question of assuring an autonomy to the procedures of historical explanation that preserves the discipline of history from simply turning into story-telling and thereby guaranteeing its scientific status. As a result, in remaining faithful to his critical reading of Husserl’s Rückfrage, the derivation of history is not radical; it leaves an “underivable” residue that Ricoeur calls the “epistemological requirement of validity” in his original article and which now gets translated into the relative autonomy of the explanatory procedures used by historians. The gain from this indirect method of derivation, making use of both an ascending and descending dialectic, is considerable and can be extended, with a few reservations, to all those disciplines that claim scientific status when it comes to interpretation. The philosophical gain of this indirect derivation consists, on the one hand, in showing that every interpretive science does refer to an everyday lifeworld that is already structured in an interpretive way by its current methods of interpretive inquiry (its ethnointerpretations). On the other hand, interpretive disciplines, like history and philology, do make use of procedures, tests, controversies, and critical arguments as well as breaking with ordinary interpretations. If there are assuredly claims to validity for interpretations in the everyday world, we can surely wager that the amplifying interpretations of scientific work, without being the best of all interpretations, surely are likely to be better ones. What the physician says in his prognostication is not understood in a different way than what the soothsayer says, but in a better way. The historian does not just understand the past differently than does the one who witnessed it, he interprets it better, even though he still has need of the witness to attest to what he says, but this is testimony that has passed through the filter of critique, of being checked against other sources.

Chapter Five

Being and Method

We ended the previous chapter with the question of method in the hope of getting out of the dead end of relativism and converging on the horizon of a better interpretation. If we merely referred to the most general conditions of what we have called an amplifying interpretation without stopping to look at the particular methods of the social sciences, with the exception of history, it remains the case that the question of method is the object of lively controversy in contemporary philosophy, especially when it comes to the opposition between a methodological and an ontological hermeneutics. The publication of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s major work in which truth seems to be more important than method certainly has served to crystalize this debate. The ontological dispute about truth has indirect consequences for the epistemological controversy about the foundation of the human sciences. In rejecting the interpretive methods current in the human sciences, Gadamer seems to follow what Karl-Otto Apel calls “the radicalization of hermeneutic philosophy” brought about by Heidegger and prepared, in certain aspects, by Nietzsche. 1 Therefore it will be necessary to linger awhile to consider the status of hermeneutics for the author of Sein und Zeit the better to understand what is at stake in the controversies that oppose methodological and ontological hermeneutics. There is a reversal or radicalization in that hermeneutics was historically constituted around problems connected with the interpretation of texts. It may seem incongruous, therefore, that Heidegger chose this term and gave it an ontological connotation that is far removed from questions having to do with exegesis, philology, or legal theory. Heidegger, of course, was not unaware of this connection, which is why he sought to remove hermeneutics from its original setting. The difficulty is reinforced by the fact that the very idea of hermeneutics is not always clear and varies in his work. 145

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We can distinguish three principle orientations for the concept of hermeneutics in Heidegger. 2 The first one precedes the publication of Being and Time and was developed in Heidegger’s courses during 1923. 3 There Heidegger talks about a “hermeneutic intuition” to designate the fact that our experience of the human world occurs through signification and never as a direct relationship to existence. This intuition expressly recalls Nietzsche’s saying, against positivism, that there are no facts in themselves and that meaning is what constitutes our existence. But, no doubt, it was Dilthey’s influence that was more important in the transformation of a transcendental phenomenology into a hermeneutic of factical life: It was within the horizon of this substitution of understanding for intuition that he henceforth understood the descriptive character of phenomenology now become hermeneutic. And this can be made explicit through its situated character no longer on the basis of a correlation between intuition and lived experience, but through a correlation between understanding and life, where this latter, escapes objectification or the status of being a thing. 4

There is thus a family resemblance between the Husserlian attempt to derive the natural sciences from the Lebenswelt and Heidegger’s project of constituting an originary science of pre-theoretical life. However, in this latter case, it was clearly a question breaking with all “objectifying” technology that sets aside the flow of lived experience. Only a hermeneutic phenomenology allows grasping this originary understanding of factical life characterized by its self-sufficiency, its meaningfulness, and its expressive moments. Interpretation, therefore, combines two points. On the one hand, it is manifest as a hermeneutic circle. The self-explication of life always proceeds from a structure of pre-understanding given as an anticipated meaning. This is not a projection of an empty form of meaning as with Husserlian intuition, for the possibilities projected in interpretation, even creative ones, are always included in the circle of originary understanding. On the other hand, the question of facticity applies equally to a being whose own being is in question. This is the dominant perspective found in Heidegger’s courses from the summer term of 1923 when he introduces the notions of “falling away” and “fall” on the basis of a rereading of the Augustinian experience of temptation. The problematicity of meaning is shifted from the strangeness or obscurity of a text toward my uneasiness regarding the meaning my own existence and its self-alienation. In this way, hermeneutic phenomenology already takes an “existentialist” turn even though the question of authenticity regarding our relation to the world and to ourselves is barely discussed yet. It is not a matter of simply describing the originary understanding of factical life but about worry over the fall of factical life into everydayness, which both reassures and alienates it. Life shies away from

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its ownmost possibilities. “This proclivity impels life into its world, rigifies it, and brings to maturation a petrification of the directionality of life.” 5 Why, though, is interpretation then required? Certainly, because human being is situated in a universe of meaning, but above all because the meaning of Dasein as being-there is not self-evident. Facticity is about our forgetting that our being is destined for a self-interpretation. Hermeneutics thus has the task of rendering each Dasein attentive to its being and to a radical awakening of itself. “But to talk about an ‘awakening’ suggests that facticity must leave behind a certain state of drowsiness, which Heidegger knows is characteristic of really existing facticity.” 6 Heidegger’s courses (particularly those from the summer term of 1923 in Freiburg) offer interesting suggestions for the constitution of an interpretative anthropology, even if he held that anthropology was already prohibited in that it draws on either a Christian theology or a modern humanism (that of Kant in particular). If the young Heidegger’s ontology makes room for an interpretive anthropology, it was despite itself. Paragraphs 25 and 26 devoted to familiarity and Dasein’s surrounding world enrich the analysis of an immediate mode of understanding found in everyday life when the meaning of things refers straightforwardly and unquestioningly to other meanings. This is true for spatiality when we orient ourselves in this world: fixed things have their place, alongside one another, with their everyday usefulness in a familiar setting. It is equally true for ordinary temporality. The play of retentions and protentions of meanings occurs in the continuous flow through which the future is almost already present: in the now the practical continuity of one thing after another passes without any problem when the habitual past is reproduced as the foreseeable future through the resemblance of our days to one another. The character of this non-problematic world, in which Heidegger sees an ethical source of alienation, is a basically non-interpretive world. On the contrary, human beings become interpreters when something strange happens on the ground of this familiarity with the world. Preoccupation goes on high alert: temporality comes off its hinges; space is no longer the place where things habitually are—something is unfamiliar here, it crosses our path, upsets things, it is bothersome, disagreeable, does not fit, is disturbing. As such, it possesses, in its thereness, a particularly opportune aspect, being there becomes more intense. 7 This direct interpretive character of ways of being does not interest Heidegger. It is rather a question of showing how this lived strangeness allows reinforcement of the tacit evidence of the familiarity of the everyday in which Dasein loses itself. But, if we put this ethical and already existentialist accent of the analysis of Dasein in parentheses, they can be quite useful for bringing out a mode of noninterpretive being as unquestioning familiarity and a mode of properly interpretive being in relation to the appearance of what is troubling and strange

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about the surrounding world. It is when his “there” becomes more intense that homo interpretans finds himself as on guard in the world. The orientation of hermeneutics in Being and Time both adds to the framework of facticity and expands its scope. If the word is used more rarely in this work, hermeneutics does have the vocation of grounding phenomenology and ontology. The development of facticity remains centered on the individual Dasein of each and every one. A hermeneutics is required because Dasein remains hidden from itself in the surrounding world, because it gets lost in the anonymity of the “they,” of diversions, of the “idle chatter” of everyday life, because it flees being open to the project of existing, because it refuses to assume its finitude and its being-toward-death. The analytic of Dasein radicalizes the young Heidegger’s themes of “falling away” and “fallenness.” Here we can see how hermeneutics entirely refigures the phenomenology inherited from Husserl: The phenomenon which has to preoccupy phenomenology, if it is not to talk about everything and nothing, is a phenomenon that is initially dissimulated (Verborgen) as regards what shows itself, but which it is urgent to draw into the light since it lies secretly at the root of every phenomenon that comes to the fore. The function of a hermeneutic of Dasein will henceforth be to make explicit Dasein. 8

This expanding of the scope of hermeneutics, as presented in Being and Time, is tied to the fact that it is not just individual Dasein that must be the object of such a making explicit. Dasein is characterized at the same time as a mode of being open to the question of the meaning of being in general, itself occulted, dissimulated, covered over. In other words, it is not just the sense of its own being that must be the object of Dasein’s care, but equally the meaning of being, in an ontological tradition that goes back to Aristotle. We can distinguish a third hermeneutic configuration in the work of the later Heidegger, when the use of the term becomes rarer still under his pen. This orientation can be seen in the way Heidegger appropriates the history of metaphysics. It is necessary reconstruct this history (and at the same time to interpret it) in that it contributes to concealing being. The forgetting of being goes hand in hand with metaphysics. It is this hermeneutic filiation of Heidegger’s that will be taken up by Derrida. We can draw several lessons from this threefold displacement, which has profoundly reconfigured contemporary thinking about hermeneutics. In making understanding and interpreting modes of being (rather than conditions of knowledge for the human sciences), Heidegger was able to open the way to an ontological basis for what we ordinarily place under the sign of the appearing of the world. And was not the first step in our anthropological inquiry to seek to show that interpretation before being a set of scientific techniques takes place in the everyday world? Was this not the intent of our

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attempt to unfold the auto-interpretive dimension of the lifeworld, even before there is a science of interpretation? Heidegger’s reversal of hermeneutics, however, is far from having handed us all its fruits. Such a shift can be further useful to us for rethinking the mechanisms of auto-interpretation when confronted with uneasiness about the meaning of our existence and with strange things that happen in our surrounding world. But this extension of hermeneutics, as ontological, is still too narrow to become the ground of a phenomenological anthropology as an anthropology of homo interpretans, owing to the fact that the problematicity of Dasein is always indexed to the registers of authentic and inauthentic existence, which comes down to denying any significance to interpretation unless it is pointed toward the meaning of my existence, of my death, or of the forgetting of being. The anathema Heidegger pronounces against the ordinary registers of the problematicity of meaning for a being caught up in everydayness and diversions makes improper any taking up of a hermeneutic of Dasein in order to think more broadly about how the world ordinarily appears to us. For Heidegger, uncovering how the world appears is guided by the ethical demand to leave behind our self-alienation, through a radical awakening to our being as a being that has to unfold its ownmost possibilities, in the place where the question of being arises. In other words, reducing explication and interpretation to facticity or to the meaning of being, instead of opening toward an interpretive anthropology, closes off this opening in the name of the ethical primacy granted to authenticity. More troubling is the fact that the Heideggerian radicalization of hermeneutics at the same time is accompanied by a movement of delegitimating methodological and epistemological hermeneutics. Of course, in Being and Time there is an enterprise of derivation, one worthy of consideration, which recalls the derivation practiced by Husserl in his Crisis under the heading of Rückfrage. This is the case at least for historiography, for which Heidegger seeks to trace its foundations in the ontological ground of the historicity of a being who only exists in temporalizing itself: “the world-historical is, in every case, already ‘Objectively’ there in the historizing of existing Beingin-the-world, without being grasped historiologically.” 9 What is at stake hermeneutically is not the formation of historiographical concepts as in Dilthey, the way one can interpret traces of the past, how the historian can transfer himself into another time, what is essential is “the Interpretation of authentically historical entities as regards their historicality.” 10 Heidegger’s strategy is clear: to give primacy to ontology over epistemology, which, because it is derived from the former, becomes secondary. It is not that Heidegger is uninterested in the historical sciences, but that he seeks to ground them on non-methodological principles. This can be clearly seen in §76 of Being and Time. The trajectory starts from the historicality of Dasein, as care, as being-ahead-of-itself, to project historiography as onto-

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logical (without taking the inverse trajectory). 11 The result is to make the object of history not “past facts,” not an event that happened just one time, not the establishing of historical laws, but grasping “its character of ‘havingbeen.’” 12 It comes down, in other words, to the historian having to restore the having-been of possible structures of existence, that is, to giving the past a future. The historian himself does not escape the condition of historicality in that “historiological disclosure temporalizes itself in terms of the future.” 13 The influence of Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations on history and life is decisive for the way in which Heidegger makes the “to-come” the master temporal category on which a science of having-been is possible. His rejection of a purely positive science of history, a pure knowledge of the past that is not clouded and burdened by the present, has as its correlate the affirmation of a historiography directly in service of an increase in an individual’s, a people’s, a civilization’s life force, in service of the “force of the present,” open to what has not yet occurred. Doing history, be it monumental, antiquarian, or critical history, makes sense and is pertinent only for “the benefit of a future time.” 14 With this, the question of the conditions of possibility of a better interpretation within the framework of the historical sciences no longer has a place, any more than does the question of what method to choose. Insofar as it does arise for Nietzsche and Heidegger, questioning the past gets posed in nonmethodological terms: not in order to restore the facts about what happened, but in order to enhance vital possibilities in the present and the future. The trajectory of derivation from epistemology to ontology is promising, as is the attempt to derive history as a science from our being in the world, but what is missing is the reverse trajectory, which would allow us to arbitrate conflicts of interpretation and to pose the problem of truth on the level of the interpretive sciences. In other words, the Heideggerian ontological way is too “short,” to use a well-known expression of Ricoeur’s. With Heidegger’s philosophy, we are always engaged in going back to the foundations, but we are left incapable of beginning the movement of return that would lead from the fundamental ontology to the properly epistemological question of the status of the human sciences. Now a philosophy that breaks the dialogue with the sciences is no longer addressed to anything but itself. Moreover, it is only along the return route that we could substantiate the claim that questions of exegesis and, in general, of historical critique are derivative. 15

Which is to say that the “long” route of hermeneutics, for which Ricoeur is one of the proponents, is more capable of assuring an equal distance to the two trajectories (from epistemology toward ontology and from ontology toward epistemology). The “long way” recalls the possibility of an indirect derivation we have suggested, with Ricoeur, at the end of the previous chap-

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ter, which might better be called, thinking of Plato, an “ascending and descending” dialectic. This long route of hermeneutics was suggested, before Ricoeur, by Rudolf Bultmann, who exercised some influence on Ricoeur. 16 What was new in this German theologian’s work was that he began with Heidegger’s hermeneutics (at least as regards the hermeneutics of pre-understanding, which is also found in Gadamer), but proceeded in the opposite direction to reconsider the traditional questions associated with the interpretation of texts. Bultmann was undoubtedly critical about Dilthey’s psychological version of hermeneutic method in virtue of which the interpreter must reconstruct an author’s intentions, but he did not renounce the idea that a text could be understood. Rather than looking for the author’s intentions, understanding depends on the text itself (on the “issue” of the text that Ricoeur calls the “world of the text”), on its internal configuration and the possibilities regarding existence it offered its reader. Turning to the issue of the text does not imply objectifying it but rather contributes to disengaging the pre-understanding at work in all interpretive efforts. It does not mean abandoning understanding but rather, as with Gadamer, making it conscious of itself as “participation in what is understood.” Understanding never exists without a presupposition or, more exactly, “understanding is a preunderstanding of the subject matter.” 17 With Bultmann, we have all the ingredients for thinking through the hermeneutic circle and even the central concept of a “fusion of horizons” so dear to Gadamer: understanding that participates in what is understood occurs as an event that takes place between the world of the reader (with its prejudices and possibilities of existence) and the world of the text (with its proposed meanings and possible existence). But even if Bultmann’s philosophy can serve as a touchstone for contemporary hermeneutics in that it proposes a synthesis of ontological and textual hermeneutics, it does suffer from certain limitations. For one thing, reflection on the sciences of interpretation, if we may still speak of them, is limited to religious texts and inscribed within the framework of a theology. For another, the call to “participation through understanding” excludes every form of distanciation, of the scientific objectifying method, an exclusion that risks turning understanding into a pack of prejudices, incompatible with the very idea of a science of interpretation. It was for this reason that Emilio Betti vigorously attacked this “existential hermeneutics” from Heidegger to Gadamer passing through Bultmann, which makes the understanding of texts regress to a praise of prejudices and which brings no guarantee of scientific objectivity. 18 This Italian philosopher’s project, contrary to inverting Heideggerian hermeneutics, consists instead in renewing methodological and epistemological hermeneutics as it comes from Schleiermacher and Dilthey: privileging the meaning of a text

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(through reconstructing its author’s intentions) rather than its “significance” (that is, the interpreter’s prejudices). The risk in such a unilateral return to the sources of a science of text interpretation; however, is that it leads back to the same aporias found in psychological hermeneutics: besides the idealist dimension of reconstructing the author’s intentions, this hermeneutics does not offer any guarantee against misleading subjectivism on the part of the one who claims to be the interpreter who can understand an author better than the author understood himself. The problem thus remains: how are we to justify a properly methodological hermeneutics that can honor the project of constructing a science of interpretation, without falling into the dead end of a psychological hermeneutics and sacrificing the support offered by a hermeneutics of pre-understanding? How are we to assure the prerequisite of a hermeneutics that takes the long route, that it takes both the trajectory toward ontology and the trajectory toward methodology? How can hermeneutics look both toward the sciences of interpretation and toward the ontology of understanding? THE LONG AND THE SHORT ROUTES TO HERMENEUTICS We need also to consider whether the route practiced by Gadamer is as “short” as that practiced by Heidegger, as Betti assumes, or whether it may announce new possibilities when it comes to articulating the interpretive activity of constituting the lifeworld and the sciences of interpretation. That Heidegger’s influence on a disciple who was taught by him is a well-known fact but does not mean that Gadamer simply takes up his teacher’s hermeneutics. Jean Grondin’s comments are helpful at this point. If we take literally the three Heideggerian orientations, we are forced to acknowledge that they are partly foreign to the philosophical framework found in Truth and Method. For one thing, the hermeneutics of facticity along with that of Dasein are not the object appropriated by Gadamer. The idea of a self-alienation of our being-there, the quasi-Stoic vocation of “resolute” acceptance of being-toward-death are absent from his project of refounding hermeneutics. For another, the deconstructive approach to the history of metaphysics, along with the forgetting of being as its motive, is the exact opposite of a hermeneutics that, on the contrary, makes traditions of meaning the condition of all understanding. If Gadamer is largely inspired by the later Heidegger, in thinking about history, language, and art, we cannot identify his project with a hermeneutics of the history of metaphysics, which is supposed to prepare a new beginning to thinking. In fact, nothing is perhaps less “metaphysical” than the idea of a new or “another beginning.” For Gadamer, as we know, one always starts from

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somewhere, by entering into dialogue, which is in principle always openended since the boundaries of language can expand. 19

The impact of Heidegger’s ontology on Gadamer is at another level and directly affects the project of Truth and Method: determining the conditions of the event of understanding. It is not the explication of a being turned toward its dereliction in Heidegger’s philosophy that interests Gadamer, but the structures of pre-understanding of all understanding which precede the objectifying mode of modern science. The analyses of Dasein’s historiality as the ontological ground of historical science are the best illustration of this. Heidegger’s most essential lesson is his placing understanding in existence (before making it a condition of knowledge in the human sciences), and this is what leads Gadamer to rehabilitate the role of “prejudice.” “The accent falls less on existence itself and its possibility to understand (and interpret) itself in an authentic way, starting from its being-toward-death, than on understanding as it occurs in fact, in art and in the human sciences, which serve as a model for Gadamer.” 20 In the final analysis, it is the problem of the foundation of the human sciences that sets Gadamer apart from Heidegger. Gadamer no doubt inherits his teacher’s distrust of every form of objectivism practiced by the social sciences and shares the same approach to the question of derivation. The question remains, however, whether Gadamer really envisages the inverse trajectory that leads to the ontological ground of the human sciences. Everything seems to suggest that, in Truth and Method, it is the central place occupied by Dilthey that led to reflection on their foundations. The most important developments Gadamer devotes to Dilthey in Truth and Method come in the second part, more precisely in the section devoted to the problem of the foundation of the Geisteswissenschaften. If he gets the problem from Dilthey, Gadamer does present a critique of Dilthey’s emphasis on method, which comes directly from the Romantic underpinning of Schleiermacher’s psychological hermeneutics. It is worth emphasizing that, to Gadamer’s eyes, neither the neo-Kantian nor the Romantic ground of hermeneutics allows us to fully grasp the act of understanding and of interpreting. The former because it does not get beyond the objectifying subjectobject relation, owing to its not recognizing the dimension of participation in the act of interpreting (which Gadamer calls a prejudice, a pre-judgment, recalling the Heideggerian notion of pre-understanding). The latter is too intuitive, because access to an author’s mind does not allow us to grasp the tenor of the work itself, which is what must be interpreted. Gadamer has excellent knowledge of Dilthey’s work overall, having helped edit it and having taught it. Nonetheless, he does tend, as do other commentators (Ricoeur, for example, who follows him on this point), 21 to minimize the break with psychologism that came about following the publi-

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cation of Dilthey’s The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences. 22 From this perspective, defended by Sylvie Mesure, 23 Dilthey left behind a Romantic hermeneutic for one that made the work itself, independent of the author’s intention, the basis for interpretation. In the passage from a psychological to a hermeneutic foundation for the human sciences, Gadamer holds that Dilthey never got beyond the stage of “mere sketches”: So it is the two completed parts of the Aufbau, autobiography and biography, which are both special cases of historical experience and knowledge that retain an undue preponderance. For the real historical problem, as we have seen, is less how coherence is generally experienced and known than how a coherence that no one has experienced can be known. 24

Without a doubt, the early Dilthey, particularly the author of the drafts for volume two of the Introduction to the Human Sciences, did seek to ground the human sciences on a psychological base. 25 Understanding assumes that the historian discovers their state of mind and in a way relives what they had experienced, by putting themselves in the place of historical actors through “re-feeling” (Nachfühlung). But the publication of The Foundation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences in 1895, contrary to Gadamer’s too hasty affirmation, does mark more than the sketch of a change of perspective; it demonstrates rather a complete reworking of Dilthey’s hermeneutics, to the point where he does not hesitate qualifying “the psychic course of life . . . to account for our knowledge of this inner aspect” as an “error.” 26 As Gadamer emphasizes, we do still find the biographical and autobiographical model in the Foundation of the Historical World, which may lead us to think it is still a question of getting back to the lived intentions of individual actors. But the biographical model clearly has moved beyond individual experience, as Dilthey states in the “Plan for the Continuation of the Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences.” On the one hand, it is always starting from objectified externalizations of life that are formed the historical effects that the historian can reconstruct as part of the narrative sequence of a life. On the other, it is always as included within large-scale social-historical configurations (a state, community, nation), which Dilthey sometimes calls “structures,” that biography takes on its full signification. Here is where we find the originary connection between life and history. The biographer’s task is “to understand the productive nexus through which an individual is determined by his milieu and reacts to it. All history is about comprehending productive systems.” 27 In fact, the Foundation of the Historical World and subsequent manuscripts indicate a deep change that is not far from the Hegelian way of envisaging the world of Spirit, that is, as meaningful institutions. And here is where the hermeneutics of whole and parts (their reciprocal understanding),

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which proceeds initially from the understanding of texts, assumes a central place. For example, in the example of law given by Dilthey, it is not a question of starting from already existing legal systems in order to get back to the legislator’s mysterious intention, but rather of reconstructing the overall structure of these systems in which spirit is expressed. The transformation of hermeneutics Gadamer calls for is already prefigured in the later Dilthey “since we are now concerned not with individuality and what it thinks but with the truth of what is said, a text is not understood as a mere expression of life but is taken seriously in its claim to truth.” 28 However, this claim to truth is far removed from the emphasis on method found in Dilthey. And this is where the two German philosophers radically disagree—not in their rejection of psychologism. We can thus say that Gadamer’s critique of psychologism addressed to the later Dilthey misses its target (the anti-Romantic aspect of this critique); on the other hand, it is worth considering the pertinence of his critique of the emphasis on methodology (the anti-Kantian side of this critique). This runs throughout his book and appears already in the opening pages. If we can qualify Dilthey’s epistemology as a critique of historical reason that finds its inspiration in the Kantian critique of pure reason applied to the natural sciences, this analogy, unlike in Mill’s and Comte’s positivism, for Dilthey does not come down to applying to historical and social phenomena the same methodological principles then current in the natural sciences (induction, experimentation, mathematization). Whence the celebrated distinction between understanding, which singularizes the method of the human sciences, and explanation, which is held to apply in the natural sciences. Dilthey’s whole attention consists in giving the human sciences their own methodology by founding this either on a psychological model (the early Dilthey) or a holistic model (the later Dilthey). Gadamer does not hesitate in drawing the reader’s attention to this way of demarcating the human sciences. Yet, it is worth noting, he tends to minimize the emphasis on the autonomy of the human sciences proposed by Dilthey. What is surprising is that Gadamer reproaches Dilthey for remaining too close to the natural sciences. It is true, even if not what Gadamer intends by his critique, that there is often a tendency to dramatize the dichotomy between understanding and explanation. In fact, Dilthey does show that, for one point of view, historical phenomena can be validated using explanation based on the model used in the natural sciences because human beings too are natural beings submitted to the universal determinism of nature. A causal method finds its whole justification here. Except for the fact that a human being is not just a natural being, but one characterized by values and intentions. And it is in this sense, in order to account for this dimension, that another methodology is required falling precisely under the heading of Verstehen. In other words, Dilthey is not opposed to the model of explanation as

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such but to positivistic reductionism, which holds that only the explanatory methods coming from the natural sciences can serve to found the human sciences. At the limit, this distinction and demarcation are inessential from the point of view of the radical hermeneutics Gadamer envisages. They are inessential in that the problem is not that of a choice between two methods, but of the justification of any method as the way to make sense of the ground of the human sciences. That there must be a justification of some method, that is, of an objectifying relation between the interpreter and what is interpreted, is sufficient to discredit the enterprise in question, in that it masks our participation in what is at issue in a text, an oeuvre, a tradition: “However strongly,” Gadamer objects, “Dilthey defended the epistemological independence of the human sciences, what is called ‘method’ in modern science remains the same everywhere and is only displayed in an especially exemplary form in the natural sciences.” 29 Here is where we must make room for Gadamer’s own approach to giving a basis for the human sciences, one not resting on a positivistic model, or on a Romantic hermeneutic model, or on a neo-Kantian methodological model. This anti-methodological ground owes much to a Heideggerian reinterpretation of hermeneutics, in the sense of participatory understanding, in the sense of understanding as always rooted in some pre-understanding. But it is a Heideggerian reinterpretation that at the same time takes up Dilthey’s initial problem. This is where its whole originality lies. What is not Heideggerian about this approach appears clearly in the opening pages of Truth and Method devoted to the humanities (literature, philology) and their importance for forming and educating individuals, in the sense of Bildung and a Bildungsroman. More precisely, it is from the experience of a work of art that Gadamer tries to draw resources for thinking the reality of the life of the mind analogically. Not in the sense of an aesthetic judgment, which would make us fall back into an alienating methodological distanciation, but in the sense of a playful experience, which is central to understanding Gadamer’s participatory hermeneutics. To understand a work of art comes down to allowing ourselves to be caught up in play that surpasses us. This means that the play is related to playing like an interpreter is to a work of art. It is in this sense that I participate in a work that summons, transports, and transfigures me. The influence of Heidegger’s poetic hermeneutics is most visible at this level of analysis, even if Gadamer maintains his distrust regarding the sometimes hermetic tendency of a philosophy that sets out to be poetic. It is through the analogy of our experience of the work of art as play that Gadamer hopes to rethink the foundations of the human sciences, no longer as an alienating method, but as an event, a revelation, an encounter. This both anti-methodological and anti-subjectivist posture leads him, provocatively, to rehabilitee prejudices, which were assailed by both Enlightenment rational-

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ism and positivism. Not every prejudice, notably those which pre-judge the answer, but prejudices as categories of all understanding passed on to us by tradition. It is in this sense that Gadamer distinguishes prejudice as Vorurteil—as an unfounded judgment—and as praejudicium, as we find it, for example, in judicial practice in the form of precedent, in jurisprudence, whereby an earlier decision authorizes a definitive judgment. More generally, there is a “influence of history” at work in all understanding. This is not an epistemological obstacle, but a condition of all understanding. Guy Deniau is correct to connect this positive function of prejudice as praejudicium in Gadamer to the positive function of the lived body (Leib) in opposition to the body as a thing in the world (Körper) in Husserl. In both cases, it is a question of “something ultimate”—an indelible indication of our spatial and historical finitude—starting from which any orientation takes on meaning (another body over there, being next to something, the distance of a literary work, the future of a projection). 30 Paradoxically, this centrality of the lived body and of prejudice most often is overlooked, like a silent force on whose basis the world takes on meaning: As a principle of orientation, that by which the world opens up, the lived body and prejudice have a tendency to be forgotten, they pass unperceived, and it is on this basis that everything else gets evaluated: just as the body is not hot or cold, except in the case of illness, prejudice apprehends its world as immediately meaningful since in a word this world is for it as prejudged and has inculcated, through educating it, all its orientations. 31

Nothing in the lived body or in prejudice attests to an interpretive process. It is rather a question of a pre-understanding, without leading, at the risk of an endless regression, to a self-reflexive process applied to ever more archaic meaningful givens that constitute our perceptions, judgments, and values. But, according to Gadamer, it is on this basis of unavoidable pre-understanding that interpretation in an active and reflexive sense can take place; for instance, with the hermeneutic circle, which can occur without an interpretation. When we read a story without any difficulty, for example, we spontaneously anticipate the thread of the story in terms of its “parts” from page to page, without having to interpret every word, sentence, or peripeteia in the story being told. Our pre-understanding of a language, of cultural meanings, of literary traditions suffices for understanding the sentences, the structure of the argumentation (in the case of an essay), a plot line (in the case of fiction) that unfolds without any hitches. It is only based on traditions, culture, and social capital, when a text is abstruse, a word not known, a sentence unclear, a passage obscure, a plot confused that the hermeneutic circle becomes reflexive and interpretive in the strict sense (explaining one sentence by another, looking back at the beginning, formulating hypotheses in order to untangle the confusion).

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With this appeal to an analysis of pre-understanding, the originality of Gadamer’s project in Truth and Method lies in how it takes up Dilthey’s problem of grounding the human sciences by giving it a solution inspired by Heidegger’s hermeneutics (as regards the structures of pre-understanding and a poetic hermeneutic, not the hermeneutics of facticity, or of Dasein, or the history of metaphysics). The hermeneutic path opened by Gadamer may seem shorter and perhaps not so much directed against method as it is often said to be. Playing with words, we may even say that even for Heidegger a form of method is justified, precisely as making Dasein explicit (Auslegung) or as deconstructing the history of meta-physics. This is even truer for Gadamer, for whom traditions are never passively received, even though they support us on our way. The idea of a work of interpretation is consubstantial with an ontological hermeneutics. Claude Romano has shown that, if Gadamer does oppose the idea of method, sometimes polemically, it is always in its Cartesian sense. What he attacks is the logical-mathematical foundation of such a method (as axiomatic), but also the underlying principle of a mechanical application of a rule to a case (in the sense of a determinative judgment). This critique of reductive method does not amount to the rejection of every method and every use of rules, however. The rules used in hermeneutic practice are more reflective than determinative and assume “a practical capacity” attentive to context, to the singularity of any case. 32 The rules in question are not drawn from an axiomatic model of experience: “their methodological value is not that of laws under which all cases could be clearly subsumed. Rather, the rules of experience require experience in order to use them and are basically what they are only in this use.” 33 This kind of practical judgment in a situation, akin to Aristotelean phronesis, is in fact a form of method better adapted to ethics, law, and more generally the human sciences. This kind of judgment requires experience as well as discernment. On this reading, the opposition between truth and method appears less radical, even if Gadamer, in some other passages, over-dramatizes it. On this reading, the opposition between a methodological hermeneutic and an ontological one seems less sharp, at least if we take care not to reduce, say, Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics to how it makes use of different techniques of interpretation. That hermeneutics does require a Kunstlehre, or more than one of them, and does not tell us how to determine which rules to apply in any given case. In other words (and this is the significance of Romano’s reading), rules alone are not sufficient to ensure a good understanding: Schleiermacher does not deny there should be rules, nor that they can be taught, but he does draw attention to the fact that these rules cannot be “mechanically” applied. Their application requires an “art” or a discernment that cannot be reduced to these rules. All understanding therefore goes beyond the properly methodical element supporting it, and this excess does not point to

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the sign of another method, as will be the case in those passages where Schleiermacher says that “grammatical”—that is, philological—interpretation must be completed by “technical” interpretation with its “divinatory” aspect. What we must deal with, so to speak, is an excess that comes with any method, a non-methodical element (that is, one irreducible to a body of formulated rules) which underlies the application of any method. 34

We shall not follow Romano everywhere in his enterprise of unifying the hermeneutic tradition (Gadamer will criticize the interpretive techniques of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics, especially that of “technical” interpretation, and concedes nothing to them), still less in his radical rejection of nonhermeneutic methods of analysis (like structuralism). What we do accept is his effort to attenuate and give perspective to Gadamer’s critique of overemphasizing methodology. If we turn to less well-known passages than those from Truth and Method, 35 Gadamer’s critique of method deserves to be even further nuanced. 36 These texts show that if Gadamer maintains his emphasis on the primacy of our belonging to language, he also fully justifies the existence of the disciplines that study language, hence, under certain conditions, a place for methodological distance: Gadamer’s thesis, more modestly, is that it is necessary to resist the reductive conceptions of certain linguistic theories, above all certain philosophies of language which would have the effect of denying or concealing our initial and fundamental belonging to language in the name of an ideal of objectivity borrowed from the model of the exact sciences. It is possible to make use of distanciation intended to make possible a kind of objectivity, but only if we keep in mind that this distanciation is always relative, that it flows from a method of abstraction, and necessarily presupposes our belonging to language. 37

In other words, methodical distanciation can be legitimate on the condition that it is not “alienating,” that is, that it does not mask the language we in fact are. Readers of Truth and Method already knew that Gadamer always took care to justify a form of reflexive distance in the art of interpreting things already said. The very idea of a “fusion of horizons” as an event of understanding past things in the lived present of contemporaries fully attests to this. What is new is that—beyond this distance that we find also in the phenomenon of the “consciousness of historical efficacity” (Wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein)—Gadamer acknowledges a form of distanciation that borrows its demand for objectivity from the human and social sciences (where these do not take the natural sciences for their model). Even if this justification is marked by reservations and conditions, it contributes to offering a new look at Gadamer’s version of an ontological hermeneutics, one that is less direct than that presented by his teacher, Heidegger. This is one of the

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reasons why Marc-Antoine Vallée tends to minimize the difference between the supposedly short route of Gadamer and the supposedly long route of Paul Ricoeur (where both of them fight against the relativistic and nominalistic versions of post-modern hermeneutics). Placing Ricoeur too close to Gadamer, however, risks missing the originality of Ricoeur’s methodological and critical hermeneutics. Vallée does not grant enough place in his commentary to the hermeneutics of suspicion in Ricoeur’s work, something that Gadamer highly distrusts. It would surely be an error to reduce Ricoeur’s thought to a pure and simple exercise of suspicion, but a strategy of uncovering what is hidden is indeed required if we are to conjure away illusory meaning, false consciousness, and the idols of religion. Gadamer has more confidence in the meaning already there that comes to us through traditions, which is not to say that reflexivity and appropriation are unnecessary, if only to distinguish good from bad pre-judgments, whereas, for Ricoeur, suspicion is a required path on the way to attestation, as he points out in the preface to Oneself as Another. If this were not the case, we would not understand why Ricoeur devoted a substantial part of his early work on hermeneutics to Freudian psychoanalysis and, to a lesser extent, to the works of Nietzsche and Marx. The strategy of recollecting meaning requires a systematic use of suspicion if we hope to reconquer meaning and gain a more transparent self-consciousness, even if these always remain our “promised land.” What is true about the hermeneutics of suspicion is equally true, to some degree, for the paradigm of “critical” social sciences as defined by the early Habermas. Not that Habermas should be taken as a Nietzschean enthusiast for relativism, but we can at least see him as a disciple of Freud preoccupied by distortions in communication and seeking to transpose the psychoanalytic model to a public sphere oriented toward emancipation. This model of a critique of ideologies was attractive to Ricoeur in his work on hermeneutics during the 1970s. 38 Ricoeur takes some distance on Gadamer in proportion to his drawing near to Habermas and critical theory in general. In this, we can see how hermeneutical debates over language lead directly to political consequences. Not just in opposing Gadamer’s “conservatism” to Habermas’s “progressivism” within the context of post-1968 Germany and Europe, but as showing that Ricoeur, by setting the controversy between the two German thinkers within the political categories of ideology and utopia, found a way of not sacrificing either what already had been said nor our interest in emancipation. To minimize the critical dimension of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics would lead to eliminating the political “progressivism” of a philosopher who was always careful to recall his “sympathy for utopia.” The so-called long route constructed by Ricoeur in the 1960s remains singular in the setting of contemporary hermeneutics, however little it may

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have contributed to opening the way to a critical hermeneutics correlated with an onto-epistemological hermeneutics. The synthesis Ricoeur proposes to make the epistemological hermeneutics inherited notably from Dilthey converge on the ontological hermeneutics coming from Heidegger and Gadamer. We never find in Gadamer the equivalent of Ricoeur’s epistemological reflections, not only regarding the sciences and philosophy of language, but equally the sciences of history and action. The moment of distanciation and objectification brought about in these human and social sciences is entirely absorbed into the architecture of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics. This long way of doing hermeneutics is close to work done in the same period by Karl-Otto Apel. In a series of articles from the same period, Apel clearly defines the conditions for a critical and normative hermeneutics and the conditions for an explanatory hermeneutics on the epistemological level. Unlike Ricoeur, Apel draws, in working out his synthesis, on the heritage of the later Wittgenstein and the pragmatism of C. S. Peirce and Josiah Royce. If Apel is concerned to get rid of a solipsistic and psychological hermeneutics based on empathy, it is not a question of rejecting Gadamer’s and Heidegger’s hermeneutics of pre-understanding. Like Ricoeur, Apel does judge this radicalization of hermeneutics to be insufficient on a normative and descriptive level, and calls for a “dialectical mediation of social scientific ‘explanation’ and historical-hermeneutic ‘understanding’ of traditions of meaning on the basis of the regulative principle of a transcendence of the elements of our historical existence that lack reason.” 39 MEDICAL HERMENEUTICS AND PSYCHOANALYSIS We still need to consider whether the long route of hermeneutics proposed by Apel and Ricoeur offers a satisfactory solution to the problem of a founding the human sciences, in contrast to the natural sciences. The opposition between explanation and understanding, supposed to demarcate between the natural and the human sciences, is “ruinous” according to Ricoeur for several reasons, even if, like Gadamer, he tends to accentuate an antagonism that is far from being radical, as we have seen, in the later Dilthey. Ricoeur, like Apel, refers to Dilthey’s first version of hermeneutics. On the one hand, understanding rests on a psychology of empathy (Nachfühlung)—according to which the hermeneut must grasp “the life of the mind” behind a work, an age, or an institution on the model of understanding another person—but this is too “intuitive,” too “irrational” to ground the episteme of the human and social sciences. On the other, to reject explanation as part of the methodology of the human and social sciences risks undercutting their status as “sciences.” In other words, if Ricoeur and Apel both aspire to construct a hermeneutic epistemology for the human and

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social sciences, it is on the basis of another concept of understanding, one purged of all psychology, and based on a new dialectic of explanation and understanding. For Ricoeur, explanation is integrated into the episteme of the human and social sciences without being the type of explanation borrowed from the model of the natural sciences. Here his approach is distinguished from that of Heidegger, Bultmann, and Gadamer, on the one hand, and Schleiermacher, Dilthey, or Betti, on the other, but also from that of Apel who wants to establish a dialectic between the tradition of positivism and that of hermeneutics. This strategy allows Ricoeur to assure a scientific status to these disciplines, while guaranteeing them an epistemological autonomy once the type of explanation in question is specific to them. To analyze this epistemological enterprise, it is necessary to return to the question of the autonomy of a text (as regards its author’s intentions and the historical context in which it was produced) that calls for an explanatory approach once its meaning is no longer immediately readable: “Understanding calls for explanation when a dialogical situation ceases to exist, when the play of questions and answers no longer permits us to verify our interpretation as the dialogue unfolds.” 40 It is easy to see how, given this perspective, the model of “understanding as participation” in Bultmann or Gadamer does not suffice to ensure a scientific interpretation of a text. It is not a question therefore of opposing truth and method, or understanding and explanation, but rather, as Ricoeur puts is, of explaining more in order to understand better. It is at this level that the structural method has a considerable strategic role in the hermeneutic process of the long route proposed by Ricoeur, whereas structuralism is absent from Apel’s hermeneutic synthesis. Structural analyses are best able to provide a model of explanation for a text that has become autonomous: The sense of the narrative consists in the very arrangement of the elements, in the power of the whole to integrate the subunits; and conversely, the sense of an element is its capacity to enter in relation with other elements and with the whole of the work. These postulates together define the closure of the narrative. The task of structural analysis will be to carry out the segmentation of the work (horizontal aspect), then to establish the various levels of integration of the parts in the whole (hierarchical aspect). 41

Two decisive implications result from this incorporating of structural analyses into the episteme of the hermeneutic sciences as applied to a text. On the one hand, making structural analyses the organon for explanation comes down to assuring a method for text interpretation that does not depend, in principle, on the natural sciences. 42 The rigor of structural linguistics guarantees a scientific autonomy to theories of the text and at the same time surpasses the dichotomy between explanation and understanding. A science

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of the text requires the explanatory model drawn from structural linguistics. On the other hand, explanation is just one “moment” in the hermeneutic process. If explanation removes the psychological substratum of understanding, in return it calls for another concept of understanding and of interpretation. Thus explanation, even when based on the structural model, is not sufficient to ground the episteme of textual sciences. For the blind point of the structural model is precisely that it prevents our getting outside the closure of the text. But a text is meant to be read, to go beyond itself in addressing its reader. With this, interpretation/understanding receives a new conceptual orientation, drawn this time from the side of application, in Gadamer’s sense of this term. If reading is possible, it is indeed because a text is not closed on itself but opens out onto other things. To read, on any hypothesis, is to conjoin a new discourse to the discourse of the text. . . . The interpretation of a text culminates in the self-interpretation of a subject who understands himself better, understands himself differently, or simply begins to understand himself. 43

For this reason, sciences of text interpretation, while incorporating the episteme of structural linguistics, can also be hermeneutic. But does the structural model really exhaust the paradigm of explanation? This model, as we have seen, is privileged by Ricoeur because it permits assuring a scientific base and epistemological autonomy for the human sciences. By reasoning in terms of a holistic, relational, oppositional approach, this model frees itself from the canonical approach to explanation found in the natural sciences. The kind of explanation implied by the structural model appears to be quite different from the classical causal model, especially if causation is interpreted in Humean terms as a regular sequence of antecedents and consequences with no inner logical connection between them. Structural systems imply relations of a quite different kind, correlative rather than sequential or consecutive. 44

If Ricoeur always kept his distance when it came to nomological explanation in the human sciences, it must also be said that in other texts dealing more with history than with the theory of a text in general, he does not hesitate to turn to another model of explanation than the structural one. This is the case in the first volume of Time and Narrative, when, with Max Weber, he appeals to an “explanatory understanding” and does not hesitate to justify explanation on the model of “causal imputation” as deciding the significance of a historical event. In the same way, sociological-historical explanation, in seeking to construct “past unreal conditionals” and in this way determine the adequate causes of an event requires basing the explanation on what Weber qualifies as “rules of experience,” namely, the way in which individuals habitually act in given situations. Because it bases itself on such a causal

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approach and such rules of experience, history is more than an emplotment of the past and has a scientific status. Contrary to the structuralist explanatory model, the epistemology of socio-history envisaged by Ricoeur borrows from what lies in the background of the methods used in the natural sciences. Ought we to consider, therefore, that these conditions of socio-history, as Ricoeur presents them using Weber, lead to an autonomous human science? That history draws on a causal model (inherited from the natural sciences) as well as on positivistic segments in the structuralist paradigm calls into question Ricoeur’s attempt to provide a purely autonomous epistemology for the human sciences. 45 It is as if, when an explanation is required, the human sciences have no other choice than to borrow a part of their model from the natural sciences. This is why Gadamer rejects every form of explanation in grounding the human sciences, owing to the connivance between explanatory distanciation and the epistemology of the natural sciences. The problem to our eyes is not that the human sciences draw a part of their methodology from the natural sciences (where a causal analysis is better adapted, as is the case with history or action than with the theory of a text). Such borrowing can be very useful in gaining objectivity, if we can abandon Ricoeur’s project of endowing the human sciences with a purely autonomous methodology (which in fact is not a part of his epistemology when it comes to history). 46 What is essential to our eyes is that the human sciences should be able to offer a methodology (as a mode of interpretive understanding) that distinguishes them from the natural sciences. If so, we have to turn the long route of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics, so to speak, against itself; that is, to promote a (relative or impure) autonomy for the human sciences, without denying the rooting (itself relative) of all these sciences in the lifeworld. As we have seen, this way leads to Apel’s hermeneutic pragmatism, as when he calls for a graft of the “causal or statistical explanations of the social sciences” on the historical-hermeneutic ones. The relatively rigid boundary Ricoeur sees between the human and the natural sciences does not allow introducing the question of interpretation into the life sciences. The porosity of borders plays out on two levels: on the one hand, the partial importing by some human sciences of proven methods (such as causal explanation) from the natural sciences; on the other, the partial importing into the life sciences of proven methods from the human sciences. What is at issue here is the extending of the hermeneutic sciences to the natural sciences. To what extent can we assimilate the natural sciences to interpretive sciences? This question may seem incongruous if we stick with a rigid opposition between explanation (through causes or laws) and understanding (of motives or intentions). In a broad sense, we can conceive of explanation as a form of interpretation as we have situated it in the first part of our inquiry, as ethnointerpretations or interpretationals. This is the case, for example, when we are

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confronted with an event whose incongruous character upsets our doxic relation to our natural and social environment. Investigating and seeking the cause or causes contributes here, at least provisionally, to removing the problematicity. Because Ricoeur reduces interpretation to undestranding, in opposition to explanation, he gives priority to herméneutics over semiology, meaning over signs, motives over causes. Yet we have seen with Carlo Ginzburg how the evidential paradigm inherited from a method of deciphering grants equal importance to “natural signs” and “cultural signs” at the point precisely of deriving, even though this can be challenged, the evidential paradigm of the human sciences from divination or just guessing. It is precisely because there are natural signs, whose signification is not self-evident, which demand to be interpreted, that we can ask about the methodological extension of hermeneutics to the natural sciences and the life sciences. Medicine, also taken as a target of Ginzburg’s evidential paradigm, offers a telling example that directly challenges the rigid boundary between the human sciences and the life sciences. This was not so much the case before medicine, notably under the impetus of Claude Bernard’s experimental approach, became a Cartesian science of the organism’s mechanisms, with the “appearance of the doctor as engineer.” 47 It was also less so before the hermeneutic sciences in the classical age reduced questions of interpretation to texts, and not to natural signs. The whole significance of Jean-Claude Gens’s approach, in the wake of Ginzburg, is that it returns, beyond these two major changes, to the medical science of Hippocrates and Galen to point to a hermeneutic origin that precedes the division into the study of natural signs and the study of cultural ones. Forgetting this medical hermeneutic was notably due to the primacy granted by modern and contemporary hermeneutics not just to cultural signs, but even more to “enduring fixed” expressions like archives, texts, monuments, and other material remains, at the price of excluding signs as spoken or gestures (both natural and cultural) that have to be interpreted as events. The objective of returning to the pre-modern sources of hermeutica medica, to the Hippocratic-Galenic sciences, is not just to show that a science of interpretation once existed, one that encompassed both mind and body, cultural and natural signs. It is also a way of demonstrating the importance, for the physician, of being able to grasp signs as symptoms in their diachronic and causal dimension (the historicity of a disease), in their present dimension (through the symptoms at the time of the diagnosis), and their future dimension (the prognosis as projecting the patient and the disease’s evolution). The signification of a symptom brought out through its interpretation does not seem to have anything to do with that of a discourse or some objectified mental expression. The former deals with semeia—which include dreams— which are not fixed and hence not lasting, like works of art or monuments, and

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The whole difficulty for the physician, unlike for the philologist, is that they are not dealing with an already written text, or even a fragment or part of one. They must write the text for this disease starting from “evanescent signs,” its symptoms. And these signs interweave nature and culture, body and mind, social and individual—all expressions whose polysemic character demands interpretive tact on the part of the doctor and other medical personnel. But the doctor’s expert interpretation must at the same time take into account that of the patient when the doctor attempts, as best they can, to decipher the patient’s symptoms and pain. This interweaving of heterogeneous signs is the occasion for an epistemological conflict that still haunts medical practice. A conflict, on the one hand, between an explanatory medicine (better known in the English-speaking world as “evidence-based medicine”), a medicine based on facts from the biological revolution that privileges the disease over the person afflicted by it, that values objective, quantifiable, biomedical data, and, on the other hand, an interpretive medicine (“narrative-based” medicine) based on disciplines that privilege the individual patient over the objectivity of the disease, that give greater value to singular expressions (stories, arts, speech acts). It is an error, or only partly one to say, as Jean-Philippe Pierron points out, that explanatory medicine can be assimilated to a hermeneutic. It does deal with signs, but it privileges natural, objectifiable ones. It can be said to be interpretive, but it tends only to recognize univocal signs. It may envisage the body as a text to be deciphered, but it objectifies it into a “set of signs to be unified into a clinical ‘report.’” 49 In other words, evidence-based medicine is less a hermeneutic than a semiology, a semiology whose model is moreover that of the “dictionary” or a “graph” than that of a biographical narrative as in narrative-based medicine. Whereas this latter makes the body a text open to the polyphony and polysemy of symbols, the former seeks to muzzle it to the profit of the univocal quantification of an objective, measurable sign. One of the best illustrations of the dominance of objective medicine is the proliferation of standards and guidelines inspired by economic game theory that seeks, using a logic of success and more and more neo-liberal economics and based on financial accounting, to limit the risks in the practice of medicine and to standardize the rules governing it. 50 It is not the existence of such plans that is a problem; they do permit establishing an ethos that is both technical and deontological when it comes to giving care, but their routine and sometimes mechanical use tends to limit medical judgment as determinative (in the

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Kantian sense), to the detriment of the singularity of every case, of every patient, with their experience, with its particular expression. It was against the rise of such evidence-based medicine that starting in the 1970s in the United States saw the development of narrative medicine (for example, with the creation of a master’s degree in narrative medicine at Columbia University), 51 a model that rapidly spread to Europe. The significance of narrative-based medicine is that it is clearly tied to the older medical hermeneutics going back to Hippocrates, but now enriched by knowledge and practices coming from the human sciences (psychology, anthropology, philosophy, psychology). What is ethically and therapeutically at stake is knowing how a narrative can serve the construction and transformation of medical care in relation to the patient. The originality of this new practice is it emphasizes that “care” can be the object of a competence. This implies that care and this capacity tied to it are not submitted to the variability of feelings (compassion, for example), but that they can be considered, taken into account along with what will serve as a “cure.” It can therefore “improve” and lead to an improvement in the therapeutic process, through the acquisition of what Rita Charon designates as a “narrative competence.” 52

Drawing on the work of Rita Charon, Elodie Crétin lists facets of this narrative competence, such as a capacity of recognition (of what is being told through the patient’s words), of attention (granting the patient time to tell his story), of reflection (taking the patient’s own interpretation into account), and of relation (improving the relation to the patient, giving him confidence). Acquiring these narrative competences assumes that a care giver, a fortiori the doctor, will learn to go beyond using just the logic of evidence-based medicine. That evidence-based and narrative-based medicine belong to irreducible methods of investigating the body and illnesses, that they are the object of a structural epistemological conflict, that they relate in heterogeneous ways to the universe of signs does not prevent the possibility of their being placed in a dialectic (a tensive dialectic) like that imagined by the contributors to the volume edited by Jean-Philippe Pierron, L’herméneutique médicale, a dialectic inspired by Ricoeur’s adage that we seek to explain more in order to understand better. In other words, it is not a question of setting aside the explanatory model proposed for medical science—which has definite virtues when it comes to establishing a diagnosis, a prognosis, and a therapeutic process—but of enriching it with the model at work in narrative medicine. A caregiver can attend both to the objective body based on the test results and lend an eye and ear to the suffering body in what it says. The patient’s two bodies (Leib and Körper), the body as a thing among other things and as lived body can give rise to two points of view (explanation and understanding), to two practices (cure and care) that call for and mutually rectify each

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other, a fortiori when they guide a medical team, when the phronimos is more than a single person. If the proposal for a dialectic of understanding and explanation in medicine is seductive in more than one way, it does have its limits. On the one hand, we can rejoice in the progress being made in training medical personnel to use narrative medicine. But it remains the case, in the division of tasks among caregivers, that it is more up to the nurses to assume this function, while physicians are still often, largely owing to demands on their time, to make use of evidence-based medicine (saying nothing here about the social division between male and female roles in caregiving). On the other hand, Ricoeur’s model—explain more in order to understand better—if it does offer as a philosophical lesson, does require a substantial amendment if it is to be applied to medicine. This is owing, as has already been said, to the too rigid boundary Ricoeur sees between the natural and the human sciences. Proof of this is how he assimilates the paradigm of explanation in the human sciences to structuralism, which it is difficult to see how it applies to the practice of medicine. By opposing any importing of the hypothetical-deductive model of the natural sciences into the domain of the human sciences, Ricoeur’s hermeneutics is difficult to apply in medicine. It can become pertinent if we acknowledge the importance of the methods drawn from the natural sciences used as a basis for evidence-based, quantifiable, objective medicine, if this can be taken as complementary to the model of narrative medicine. In that case, evidence-based medicine can help us better to understand (with the opposite also being true). Finally, a third limit, there is something in the patient’s experience that can escape both evidence-based and narrative medicine. There where hermeneutics itself becomes more or less applicable, as Jérôme Porée has so well put it. 53 The patient, notably in their suffering, does not recognize their self in the objective diagnosis given by the doctor (the doctor with the reports showing that the problem the patient is suffering from is in remission, whereas the patient feels no lessening of pain—the doctor says, “you’re doing better,” the patient replies, “I still feel pain”). The challenge posed to narrative medicine is just as great, even if it does get closer to the patient’s complaints, when we are dealing with extreme pathological cases, those close to what Karl Jaspers called “limit-situations.” This is the case when a patient’s suffering remains rebellious not just to every explanatory semiology but equally to every way of making sense on offer, not necessarily just through a narrative. These experiences, for which a phenomenology of the lived body may have something to say, a phenomenology that cannot simply be grafted to hermeneutics, take an extreme turn in the case of those illnesses that come at the end of life, when words fail, when narratives end.

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Is not there something in human life, events that are refractory to narration? Does not the story of one’s life suffer today from an impoverishment of symbolic resources, even those already present in the pre-narrative structures of experience? Does not life’s end—with old age, its pains, its diseases—call on reserves of courage and confidence that no longer come from language? In posing these questions, we do not mean to minimize the virtues of storytelling—or of any other use of language and communication—but merely to simply to remind ourselves that illness can dampen understanding and any premature invocation of meaning. 54

The approach begun by Freudian psychoanalysis finds several similarities with ancient medical hermeneutics, not to mention with the epistemological conflicts that take place in current medical practice, if we consider that its meta-psychology draws on a mixed discourse: a language of forces (drives, cathexis and anti-cathexis) typical of the natural sciences and a language of meaningfulness (representations, interpretations) like that found in the human sciences. Can we, however, as Ricoeur proposes, integrate psychoanalysis into hermeneutics when this was not Freud’s explicit intent? Certainly, Ricoeur acknowledges that Freud’s work did not always follow this path, notably in his early works centered on a “physical” energetics of the psyche (in terms of the principle of constancy), without any affinity to the work of interpretation. It was necessary to await the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams, with its emblematic title, to find an analysis of the psyche without an anatomical referent. Not that the explanation in terms of an energetic topology was abandoned, but it was made dialectical along with interpretation—Traumdeutung—leading to something like a hermeneutic properly speaking. At least this is how Ricoeur reconstructs the genealogy of Freud’s work when he assimilates the dream to a quasi-text: It sometimes happens that Freud compares, more or less appropriately, this relation of text to text to that of translating from one language to another. . . . Interpretation moves from a less intelligible to a more intelligible meaning. The same may be said of the analogy of the picture puzzle or rebus, which is another example of the relation of obscure text to clear text. 55

If psychoanalysis inherits something from the exegetical practice of deciphering signs that have more than one meaning, it works a change in this method. Rather than being a work intended to recollect or restore the meaning of a religious symbol or myth, it imposes exercising suspicion on the meanings consciousness produces. For example, the fragments of recalled dreams—the ones one becomes aware of (as a manifest content)—conceal a whole palette of repressed infantile desires (as their latent content). The logic of the energetics of desire does not yield an immediate meaning, this appears only as masked, owing to a preconscious censorship. It disguises itself using

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systematically deformed grammars that require a work of interpretation, moving from the latent to the manifest meaning. Have the conditions been fully met for making psychoanalysis, at least in its Freudian version, a “special hermeneutics”? Not if we accept the objections formulated by Jean Laplanche in response to Ricoeur’s reading of Freud. 56 Laplanche recognizes the importance of the work of dream interpretation in the work of the father of psychoanalysis. But he challenges the assimilation of Deutung to what hermenutes call calls Auslegung. Acknowledging the interpretive abuse found among some aficionados for post-Freudian psychoanalysis does not mean reducing the analytic method to a codification of symptoms and stereotyped translations to be applied artificially to what the unconscious throws up. The principal reason, according to Laplanche, has to do with the fact that the structure of the unconscious is rebellious against any type of secondary theorization: “The psychoanalytic method, in its originality, does not provide keys, but screwdrivers. It dismounts locks rather than opening them. As such, as a kind of burglary through breaking and entering, it tries to get close to the frightening, mocking treasure of unconscious signifiers.” 57 Still more basically, making psychoanalysis a kind of hermeneutics, applying it like a ready-to-hand code, comes down to increasing repression. As biased in principle, hermeneutics will be an obstacle to carrying out a cure. We can acknowledge with Laplanche the heterogeneity of the unconscious with its drives prevents a wholly codified translation without having to deny the possibility of an at least partial capture of its force when it comes to meaning, at the price of appropriate interpretation. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud does makes use of numerous “codes” to interpret a dream’s latent content, whether it be the Oedipus complex or fear of castration. The psychoanalyst does therefore make use of “keys” when he is looking for a way to burgle another’s psyche. We can also admit that Freud constructed this codification on the basis of the analytic process, that is, on the basis of a work of interpretation already begun by the analysand himself. Yet thinking of another famous “case” from Freud’s clinic, it was not “little Hans” who himself elaborated the “infantile theory of sexuality.” It was Freud who offered a second-order theorizing or retranslation of the analysand’s original translation. Despite his resistance to the idea of an analytic retranslation and assimilating psychoanalytic method to a hermeneutic, Laplanche’s hardhitting argument, in his rereading of Freud, consists in saying, with a quasi-Heideggerian accent, that the only real hermeneut is the analysand himself—not the analyst. Laplanche reinscribes interpretation in the patient in order better to oppose it to an “external” hermeneutic method. But we then once again are left with an existing being who lacks the reflexive consistency of the cogito, not to say of Dasein: “The one who does the original transla-

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tion, therefore, is the infant, the baby. And, as good measure, we may add: the baby who does not have an unconscious.” 58 At least, the hermeneut is first a baby, then an analysand. The recognition of this original hermeneutic condition is quite valuable even if we may question the hermeneutic status attributed to infants. On the other hand, we must recognize a limit to the anathema directed against the extending of hermeneutic methodology to the psychoanalyst. Laplanche in the end denies to the psychoanalyst what he grants to human beings in general and to the analysand in particular: the faculty of interpretation. It is as though the psychoanalyst wants to escape the genus of being homo interpretans. Without even introducing the question of counter-transference, the process that occurs in the unconscious of the analyst during the process of the cure, it must be recognized that Freudian method does not escape the process of interpretation, with its codifications and secondary theories. It presents itself, at least in Freud’s version, as a retranslation of an original translation, at the risk of “doubling the repression.” The real problem is knowing whether the interpretive operations the analytic method introduces really can be assimilated to a procedure equivalent to exegesis, as Ricoeur thinks, even when suspicion is taken as more important hermeneutically than any recollection of meaning. The problem, in other words, is whether we can assimilate the products of the unconscious, when they take on meaning, to a quasi-text, even a systematically deformed one. We may acknowledge, even if Ricoeur does not always fully consider it, that there is a whole range of unconscious drives which do not get translated into “representations,” which do not come to language, even as disguised. This is the case with “anxiety,” which has no object, with those symptoms and bodily experiences that leave the subject literally speechless, with no possibility of carrying out an original translation, of using the method of free association. In such a case, we are indeed dealing with a pure energetics, drives that are incapable of being taken up into the order of discourse. Even when a word is possible, when the analysand serves as his own hermeneut, what gets said, in the cure, for example, is a “saying” that cannot initially be fixed as a text. What most resists the assimilation of the offshoots of the unconscious to a text, even an obscure one, is the indexical character of the cure is based on “clues.” It occurs here and now through what is said, in restoring the fragments of a possible narrative (as with the remaining fragments of a dream), in those fragments of discourse that do add up to a text. The cure is invented through the lived interaction of the analyst and the analysand, before any writing down of what is said, making it fixed and autonomous. The model of a text seems more pertinent when the Freudian analyst, outside the practice of listening to a patient, undertakes to decipher not just the basic myths, the great texts of our culture, 59 but also those quasi-texts,

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those “fixed, enduring expressions” that are works of art. 60 At the risk of falling into a speculative register, the psychoanalyst makes himself the exegete of our culture, its symptoms, 61 its illusions. 62 All these vital expressions of a people, a culture, a civilization can be deciphered as an open book on the psychoanalyst’s desk. But this is a book without an individual author, a text whose true force (Eros, Thanatos) lies hidden in myths, in the totems and taboos of a civilization. In this case, psychoanalysis undertakes a vast interpretation of culture whose plot is reconstructed as a battle of the titans, whose difficulties, its death drives and sacrificial principles, are tracked. In this sense, we can indeed speak of psychoanalysis as a “special hermeneutics,” with its own methods of interpretation and interpretive codes. Things are quite different when psychoanalysis remains confined to the analytic cure. Neither the analyst nor the analysand deal with “lasting fixed expressions” that can be assimilated to a quasi-text. Any text, if there is one, must be constructed through the interaction of the analytic process, using the method of free association, although pinning down what is said in the saying, the passage from oral discourse to written discourse is not at all the therapeutic objective of the analytic process. Hermeneutics with a textual or exegetical provenance, therefore, seems poorly adapted to interpret the deformed grammar of meanings that occur in the analytic process. Here is where we agree with Laplanche’s criticism of Ricoeur. On the other hand, this restriction takes nothing away from the fact that another type of hermeneutic intelligence is clearly required to interpret the signs and symptoms that emerge in the analytic experience: on the side of the analysand’s original translation, but also on that of the retranslation offered by the analyst drawing on a whole palette of codes. It is this retranslation that, in some ways, makes the work of the analyst akin to that of medical hermeneutics—short of any textual hermeneutic turn. Certainly, the psychoanalyst (who may also be a physician as was Freud himself) uses the signs and symptoms of a case history in proposing the diagnosis (the genealogy of a cure, the evolution of its symptoms, the patient’s life story), and may announce with some reservations regarding what will happen to the patient in the future as a prognosis (despite the interminable character of the psychoanalytic cure). But there is also an indexical and kairotic dimension to both medical judgment and psychoanalytic practice, an event-like character to the facts for both the doctor and the analyst that must be interpreted, in an opportune moment, made up of fragile and evanescent semeia. A different hermeneutic, different from the one that interprets enduring fixed signs, is necessary to make sense of this process-like, interactive dimension with its signs and symptoms that present themselves and that can be heard in the event of a cure. In this sense, we can say that psychoanalysis is triply hermeneutic: in that it acknowledges the analysand’s original translation, in that it acknowl-

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edges the activity of retranslation by the analyst in the kairotic dimension of the cure, and in that it acknowledges a capacity to interpret fixed, enduring works of culture that are assimilable to a quasi-text. THE HERMENEUTICS OF NATURE AND THE SCIENCES OF MATTER Beyond the paradigmatic example of Hippocratic and Galenic medicine and of psychoanalysis with a Freudian origin, we can envisage extending hermeneutics toward the horizon of nature itself. This is the ambition taken up by Jean-Claude Gens. Surprisingly, Gens finds a first ally in Dilthey for drawing the outline of a hermeneutic of nature, an interpretatio naturae. This is surprising in that Dilthey was one of those who contributed to pushing the hermenutica medica outside the hermeneutic field, and who was taken to be responsible for the famous dichotomy between explanation and understanding, who was the origin of the restriction of hermeneutics to enduring fixed expressions of life (even if he did extend the perimeter, following August Boeckh, beyond just texts). Still, it is difficult to see how the psychological foundation of a human, all-too-human hermeneutics can be extended to life in general. Jean-Claude Gens does not deny any of these elements that may make Dilthey the greatest obstacle to any progress to a hermeneutic of nature. This obstacle is notably tied to the fact that Dilthey did not envisage applying understanding to anything other than what had been produced by the human mind, nature itself being fundamentally silent, even though we can force it to speak to us. Nature indeed does produce signs, but does it also produce meaning? How, given these conditions, can Dilthey bring any help to extending hermeneutics to life overall and nature? It is at the price of a detailed and erudite reading of Dilthey’s works that Gens brings out the undeniable contribution of the German philosopher to this discussion. What must first be recalled is that the methodological opposition between explanation and understanding in no way implies a form of ontological dualism. Human beings, for Dilthey, do make up a physical-psychic, a natural/cultural unity. And it is precisely in terms of the concept of life or of an “expression of life” that we can think of a transition toward a hermeneutics of life. In his introduction to Foundations of the Historical World in the Human Sciences, Dilthey had asserted that the processes of psychic life are produced within the framework of a structure “identical in all earth’s animals and that, seen from the inside, animal and human life is always a bundle of drives, feelings of pleasure and displeasure, and volitions.” 63 In the Foundations of the Human, he further conceives organic life as an intermediate stage be-

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tween inorganic nature and the historical world. The surprise comes when Dilthey, in recognizing the foundation of psychology in the life nexus, prolongs psychology by using biology. This extension allowed him not to limit psychic life to humans alone (by including that of animals). However, Dilthey does not go as far as his discovery allows, that is, to an interpretive understanding of life per se. This is even more true, Gens shows, in texts from the end of the 1890s: “The definition given by The Rise of Hermeneutics excludes the possibility of a hermeneutic aimed at understanding psychic life in its widest generality, that is, as including animal life.” 64 The reason again is that the only phenomena capable of being understood are those enduring, fixed expressions of life. If Dilthey does not allow taking a step toward a hermeneutics of nature, despite his attempt to ground psychology on expressions of life, Jean-Claude Gens hopes to find a second wind to cross the frontier to a hermeneutics of living things using biosemiology. At the start of this book, we noted the importance of the work of Von Uexküll and Buytendijk for grasping the dimension of meaning in the animal world. The considerable support these biological approaches bring, in counterpoint to a mechanistic approach, lies in how they renew a tie to the hermeneutic tradition, beyond its emphasis on text interpretation, when it comes to grasping the functional circle that applies to life. Biosemiology crosses the threshold where Dilthey stopped, on the one hand, because it frees us from a model of understanding of a foreign psyche based on empathy, on the other, because it considers the habitual forms of behavior of animals as an enduring fixed form (albeit not a written one) of how life expresses itself. In other words, the natural signs of life are not reducible to their evanescent and fragile character. Therefore, it is possible to think of the “natural” expressions of the life of organisms as analogous to the “cultural” expressions of human societies. On this condition, a hermeneutic of nature is possible. In fact, interpretation is required on two levels, on the one hand, for knowing about living creatures (the methodological level), and, on the other, as a real activity of living organisms (the ethological level), which consists in a seeing as applied their environment, thanks to the selection of the signs that constitute their Umwelt. The question of deregionalizing the hermeneutic paradigm arises not only in the direction of nature as made up of living things, but equally toward nature itself as inert matter. We are unable to consider the details of such an undertaking, but we can recognize those attempts, however isolated they may be, that try to set the physical sciences within the orbit of the hermeneutic paradigm. This is the case, on the one hand, regarding the “object” of the physical sciences, at least if we accept that matter too can produce signs (waves, particles, rays), albeit ones not marked by any kind of intention, but which demand interpretation. It is the case, on the other hand, from the point

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of view of the “subject,” that is, from the point of view of the scientific observer. Interpretation intervenes in the physical sciences, as Pierre Duhem has shown, in every experiment. 65 An experiment is not just the observing of a set of phenomena or collecting raw data, but an observation accompanied with interpretations using symbolic and abstract representations. For a physicist, to do an experiment comes down in every case to transposing the facts into the ideal and abstract world of a theory. Interpretation is always a part of this operation of transposition. The hermeneutic question arises in the physical sciences even more with the advent of the special and general theories of relativity and with the development of quantum physics. Not only are these scientific revolutions that call into question the Newtonian paradigm in which the physicist is disengaged and outside the spatial-temporal coordinates of nature and not assumed to influence what he observes in any way. But, as Gilles Cohen-Tannoudji has stated, “apart from an experiment that would last an infinite time, we cannot observe a microscopic particle without modifying its energy to some extent, however small. And, if reciprocally, we want to observe a microscopic structure with great spatial-temporal precision, we have to interact with that structure by transferring energy to it.” 66 Taking the interaction of the researcher and quantum matter, without necessarily concluding that this leads to relativism, leads quite clearly to a form of nominalism. 67 Ever since the work of Niels Bohr, it is no longer possible to claim to describe reality in itself, but only the moments, the aspects of material reality using the given conditions for any given observation or experiment. Here is where the analogy with textual hermeneutics can be meaningful, at the risk, however, of leaving behind the traditional conception of the interpretation of texts. Quantum physics, unlike Galilean physics, no longer deals with the “text of nature,” written in advance, even when it is written in mathematical language. “The text of this hermeneutics is still being written in an unending process. The hermeneutics to which we may compare quantum physics is an open-ended hermeneutics inasmuch as this exists (otherwise we have to base ourselves on quantum physics to invent this concept of an open-ended hermeneutics).” 68 This open-ended hermeneutics clearly ties up with the epistemological horizon of medical hermeneutics when its deals with sign-symptoms that cannot be fixed in an enduring way like an archived text. This evanescent, process-like dimension of living and material signs is what obliges hermeneutics to move beyond the philological roots from which it first began. There is assuredly a considerable surplus value in this extending of hermeneutics to the physical sciences, and even to the formal ones. 69 For one thing, it allows revisiting the antagonism between the human and the natural sciences, which is still taken for granted by a philosopher like Paul Ricoeur. It is not just the social, historical reality of archived documents that demand

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interpretation, but material reality itself that does so. For another thing, the new physics (quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity) allow revisiting the textual paradigm of hermeneutics and a return to the sources of medical hermeneutics. The reality to be deciphered no longer has the consistency of a frozen, fixed text, but presents itself as matter that is always in process, involving a permanent interaction with the scientist who becomes an exegete implied in nature in its movements. At the risk, however, of a complete diluting of the hermeneutic paradigm, on the pretext that everything becomes a matter of interpretation, we must keep in mind that this extending of hermeneutics to the life sciences and to the natural sciences only makes sense as an analogy to the textual sciences and those of culture in general. The fact is that the biologist and physicist never deal with “meaning” in the sense of a symbolic grammar. Nature may produce signs, but it remains void of intentions. Dilthey’s warning thus seems to us still to be important: we do not understand nature. The “object” of the human sciences remains irreducible to the “object” of the natural sciences. In the former case, their “object” is also a “subject” endowed with intentions and meanings. In other words, only the human sciences deal with a reality that presents itself as auto-interpretive (even if we can envisage life as proto-interpretive). It is only on this condition, which works as a restriction, that we can consider the life sciences and the natural sciences as hermeneutic. There is, however, one version of the hermeneutics of nature (which does not present itself as a life or natural science) that seeks to make nature “speak.” Jean-Claude Gens thinks in particular of those poetic and aesthetic modes that compete in listening to nature in its strangeness, its retreat, its mystery. This is the post-Heideggerian pole of that hermeneutic vocation that proposes thinking the relation between human beings and nature in a new way, under the mode of being addressed: Such an address implies a relation to nature which is of an ethical order for which we find no true equivalent in the requirement of the well-known principle of fairness. From this point of view, it is concepts like reserve, letting things be as regards the uncanny uncanniness of natural marvels, a confident serenity that goes with gratitude or recognition, and hence with the solicitude that gets spoken through this relation. 70

This ambition to reestablish and renew the hermeneutics of living things and of nature is important. This development of hermeneutics, beyond the interpretation of lasting, fixed cultural signs helps enrich the long route of hermeneutics outlined by Ricoeur who, for all that, remains too closely tied to a narrow concept of interpretation (with the theory of text interpretation as its organon) and to too rigid an opposition between the human sciences and the natural sciences.

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Let us recall, however, in ending this chapter that this progression in the methodology and epistemology of hermeneutics toward nature and life is subject to conditions. On the one hand, it does not lead back to the ethological and anthropological debate in which is its preferable to talk of protointerpretation to qualify those forms of meaning in the world of animals and other living creatures. On the other, the counterpart to a poetic hermeneutic of nature may tip toward a kind of anthropomorphism, thanks to which nature can be said to produce meaning. Nature is basically mute, even when it does produce a profusion of signs. It is human beings who make it speak. Jean-Claude Gens himself does not hesitate to draw this difference: “In relation to the mode of interpretation that constitutes the Auslegung of a hermeneutic of texts and social-cultural expressions, the thesis of a hermeneutic of nature has to do with a Deutung, that is, an interpretation or elucidation whose knowledge cannot be intersubjectively, that is, methodically, ‘controlled.’” 71 This does not mean misreading those animistic or totemic cultural forms in which human beings’ relation to nature can be conceived of as an interpersonal one. It is one thing to recognize different cultural forms of the relation between the human and non-human, and another to produce a science of interpreting nature. In the last analysis, if a poetic hermeneutics of nature has its place in the possible development of an interpretation of natural signs, it cannot be substituted for a methodological approach to a scientific hermeneutics of living things. Jean-Claude Gens does not posit a disjunction between a poetic hermeneutics of nature (echoing Gadamer) and a hermeneutic science of living things (echoing biosemiotics). At the end of this discussion, we have a better grasp on how we may enrich the long route of hermeneutics drawing on the synthesis proposed by Karl-Otto Apel and Paul Ricoeur. This long way can be included in the trajectory of the derivation of the hermeneutic sciences starting from the interpretive activity that constitutes the lifeworld (in the mode of ordinary interpretations), without being reduced to what would be a hermeneutics of facticity or of Dasein. In this aspect, it is clearly to be opposed to any reduction to a hermeneutics founded on the question of methodology (as with Betti), a fortiori when this is modeled on philology. This long way equally takes the return route in that it adds to understanding the detour through explanation in view of gaining scientific objectivity. This is the necessary condition for integrating all the interpretive disciplines found in the human sciences. The long way of hermeneutics further gains even more weight if we call into question, without yielding to the sirens of positivism, the overly rigid boundary between the human and the natural sciences. The former can borrow from the methodology of the latter (as with the use of causal analysis in history), and the latter can be inspired by the interpretive methods developed in the former (as with the model of textual analysis applied to natural phe-

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nomena). The (relative) autonomy of the human sciences is preserved if their methods of decipherment are preferentially applied to the sphere of cultural signs while the life sciences will privilege natural signs. This is why we cannot derive the human sciences solely from the evidential paradigm based on “clues.” A further reason for not fixing the border between the two scientific orders lies in the position occupied by some disciplines, like medicine or psychology, that clearly may draw from both sides of the line. More generally, because human beings are a psycho-physical unity, as Dilthey reminds us, this must lead, without becoming mere syncretism, to a broader collaboration among those disciplines that make human beings the object of their investigation (biology, sociology, anthropology), without for all that leading to a program of naturalizing the life of the mind, which would risk missing the specificity of symbolic grammars. The long way when extended passes, finally, through an enlarging of the interpretation of those symbolic grammars that are not like lasting fixed expressions. As we shall see in the following chapter, the necessity to grasp the signs of an event as it occurs arises not just in medicine, but for all the other human and social sciences as well when confronted with the problematicity of meaning in some situation.

Chapter Six

Text and Action

The conditions of possibility of an extension to the hermeneutic paradigm have to do not only with the horizon of an ontology of understanding and that of the natural and life sciences. To determine the possibilities and limits of such an extension is equally required internal to the human sciences. It is not self-evident to affirm that the human sciences in general, and the social sciences in particular, are hermeneutic in nature, on the pretext that they must be characterized by an “empirical-transcendental doubling,” as Foucault would put it, that is, knowledge for which the human “subject” (with its intentions, motives, goals, and so on) is an “object” of inquiry. Every science that draws in one way or another on interpretation is not a hermeneutic science stricto sensu. Everything depends on how the hermeneutic paradigm and its extension are understood. In the previous chapter, we proceeded as though, in speaking of an expansion and deregionalization, the origin of hermeneutics could be taken for granted. Yet the meaning of the history of hermeneutics has itself been the object of intense debate. Therefore, it will be necessary to retrace some of the salient points of these, often erudite, disputes before asking about the conditions of possibility of an eventual extension of the hermeneutic paradigm to the human and social sciences. We can think of the history of hermeneutics in terms of two irreducible modes of temporality. A very long road leading to hermeneutics, that is, one that goes back before hermeneutics, became constituted as an autonomous discipline that goes back to antiquity and runs to the beginning of modernity. For this perspective, one will say that hermeneutics exists once a learned discipline makes use of procedures and specific methods of interpretation to overcome the problematicity of meaning. This long history of hermeneutics passes through a series of ramifications that rarely intersect: an ontological ramification that finds one of its sources in Aristotelian meta-physics (the 179

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taste for which Heidegger reintroduces) when it asks about the plurality of meanings of being 1; a ramification based on clues that finds one of its sources in medical hermeneutics (Hippocrates, Galen); finally, an exegetical and philological ramification whose source lies in the interpretation of sacred texts and the great texts of Greco-Roman antiquity. 2 For this long history of hermeneutics, a few traces of which we have mentioned here, human beings as the object of knowledge and texts as the basis of interpretation have no special privilege. If, on the other hand, we now focus on a narrower history, hermeneutics appears as a specific discipline (even though the origin of the word goes back much further), in a more precise intellectual context and owing to a quite specific confrontation between disciplines beginning at the end of the eighteenth century in the context of the German university (more specifically Göttingen) in theology and philology, with principal representatives like Heyne, Wolf, Schegel, Ast, and Schleiermacher. Before the Reformation, there existed quite specific techniques for interpreting scripture begun by the church fathers, 3 but Protestantism, in opposing the principle that texts might be obscure and Catholic dogma, opened the way to understanding the Old and New Testament as a book like other books through interpretation. Parallel to this, principally in Germany, there developed philological reflection on the appropriate methods for understanding foreign cultures, which could be applied to classical antiquity as well. Hermeneutics, in this narrower sense, thus drew its original source from the problems posed by the interpretation of texts and the necessity to formulate general principles to guarantee objectivity. Before this breakthrough, there existed a whole palette of erudite means applied to language in general (such as grammar and rhetoric), applied to texts in particular (philology, exegesis, jurisprudence), and to very different bodies of texts (law, scripture, philosophy). The hermeneutic problem was born from the desire to gather the act of understanding texts under one kind of reflection, however diverse might be their contents or form. It is in this sense that one version presenting this kind of historiography, which is still dominant (from Dilthey to Ricoeur passing through Gadamer), sees Schleiermacher as the founding father of hermeneutics, even though his work appeared in a much broader intellectual setting (Ast, Wolf, Ernesti). The first person responsible for this way of presenting this history was undoubtedly Dilthey, who saw in Schleiermacher the pioneer of a “general hermeneutics,” 4 that is, a movement toward the methodological unification of the science of interpreting texts until then divided among particular regions and “special” hermeneutics (New Testament exegesis, philology, legal hermeneutics). What came to light was a basic conviction that no fundamental difference exists on the methodological level between an interpretation of secular and sacred texts.

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A general hermeneutics thus demands that one get beyond specific applications and discover the operations found in the general act of understanding any text. This operation is necessary in that misunderstanding is what justifies the existence of hermeneutics. Misunderstanding—as a specific region of the problematicity of meaning, as applicable to texts—was for Schleiermacher not an accident (as when understanding is bothered by an obscurity, something unusual, a contradiction) but the rule: both because language is never transparent (a fortiori when one studies a text written in a foreign or ancient language) and because an author’s or writer’s intention is never given in advance. Two complementary interpretive techniques, even if they cannot be practiced at the same time, are thus justified by Schleiermacher for overcoming misunderstanding—he gives a systematic exposition of them in his lectures from 1819. 5 On the one hand, grammatical interpretation is based on the characteristics of discourse common to a culture. Hence the interpreter has to get back to the rules that presided over the production of the discourse in question. On the other, technical interpretation, which is psychological, consists in reconstructing the meaning of a discourse in order to reach the singularity, even the genius, of its author: “the divinatory method is the one in which one so to speak, transforms oneself into the other person and tries to understand the individual elements directly.” 6 From the perspective of the first technique the singularity of an author is set aside in order to pay attention to the general rules governing the use of language, from that of the second, language is just a medium through which it is possible to reach what is unique to the author. The first technique can also be called “objective” in that it is focused on characteristics not distinct to the author; the second technique can be called “subjective” in that it seeks to reach the subjectivity of a text’s author. Beyond the opposition between these two methods, Schleiermacher brings to light another technique that transcends these two, which turns on the hermeneutic circle. He did not invent this (different versions can be found in the exegetical tradition, notably in Augustine), and he does not hesitate to render homage to his teacher Ast (for example, in the academic discourse from 1829) for having presented one formulation as a principle of any hermeneutics: the reciprocal understanding of whole and parts. This way of looking at things includes the relation between words, between words and a sentence, between one sentence and other sentences, between sentences and a discourse as a whole, between one act of discourse and others, and between one set of works and others. In each case, there is a back and forth movement between an anticipated totality (as when we read through a text) and remembered or selected elements (words, phrases, parts). Later discussions of hermeneutics will retain from Schleiermacher the centrality of technical interpretation and its divinatory aspect, even if it is true that this comes in the later texts of the German theologian. But the

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divinatory component of this psychological interpretation is governed by a comparative approach: creative individuality can be grasped only through its contrast with other individuals. Schleiermacher emphasizes that the two approaches (divinatory and comparative) of technical or psychological interpretation, while distinct, always refer to each other: Both refer back to each other, for the first initially depends on the fact that every person, besides being an individual themself, has a receptivity for all other people. But this itself seems only to rest on the fact that everyone carries a minimum of everyone else within themself, and divination is consequently excited by comparison with oneself. But how does the comparative method come to posit the object under a universal? Obviously either once more by comparison, and then there would be an infinite regress, or by divination. 7

Schleiermacher acknowledges that it is difficult to make use of the divinatory method in the case of myths or sacred texts for which there is no known individual author with whom the interpreter can identify to reconstruct the creative process leading to the text. This fact is already a limit to the model based on empathy. Yet it is this divinatory dimension that subsequently gets associated with Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics as a psychology of interpretation, which can be criticized as being irrational. It is true that the divinatory method is first defined by the immediacy of its grasp of another individual and the supposed capacity of the interpreter to transpose himself into an alien psyche. The omnipotence imputed to the interpreter is such that they should be able to uncover things that the author remained unaware of, except, Schleiermacher adds, when the author “becomes his own reader.” 8 In this latter case, there is a sort of split personality through which the reader is able to objectify the author who is the reader. All these elements confirm the idealist and psychological tilt to Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics, but only on the condition of recognizing its double particularity. On the one hand, the divinatory method does not work directly between one psyche and another, but always through words and discourses. The psychological model of understanding another is always mediated by language. On the other hand, this divinatory method is never a requirement in the sense of being the sole legitimate method. It is always paired with grammatical interpretation that already anticipates the autonomy of a text in relation to its author, when the language of any discourse is taken as the target and through it the culture into which any discourse gets inscribed. Why then make Schleiermacher, despite the innovative character of his hermeneutics, the founding father of modern hermeneutics? Ricoeur’s thesis, which is partly restated by Christian Berner, 9 says that the operation that consists in subordinating the particular rules for the interpretation of a text to general reflection on the act of understanding is akin to what Kant did for the natural sciences. Schleiermacher, in a way, transferred Kant’s “Copernican

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revolution” to the science of textual interpretation: “It is easy to see how, in a Kantian climate, one could form the project of relating the rules for interpretation, not to the diversity of texts and of things said in texts, but to the central operation that unifies the diverse aspects of interpretation.” 10 This thesis, which draws on Dilthey, gives rise to several paradoxes. On the one hand, Kant’s philosophy, while it may offer a general framework for thinking about the act of understanding, is not itself hermeneutic: “When it comes to interpretation, Kant does not propose a hermeneutic model, if we say that any definition of a model of interpretation is about interpreting the discourse of others in order to understand its meaning, that is, grasping a foreign meaning.” 11 On the other hand, Schleiermacher, unlike Wolf, never claimed the Kantian heritage and the Enlightenment as the basis of his enterprise. 12 Finally, if it is necessary to speak of a tradition that played a role in the psychological dimension of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics, this would be Romanticism that emphasizes a kind of unconscious creative spirit that appears in a few individual geniuses. It is easy to see that this type of reading can be both seductive and misleading at the same time. Ricoeur can affirm a double, Romantic, and critical root to Schleiermacher’s hermeneutic program only if we consider that Schleiermacher was ultimately a Kantian. It was Dilthey, in his monumental biography of Schleiermacher, then Ricoeur (and with him Gadamer) who understood Schleiermacher in this way better than he understood himself. All of these expressions go in this sense: “We see that it is in a Kantian climate that the project of . . .”; “We may say that Kantianism constitutes the philosophical horizon closest to hermeneutics . . .”; and “If Schleiermacher was not himself aware of working a kind of Copernican reversal on exegetics and philology. . . .” Ricoeur does not say that Schleiermacher deliberately assumed a Kantian heritage and proposed transposing Kant’s Copernican revolution to text interpretation. But Schleiermacher did do so—and therefore a Kantian atmosphere must have penetrated his thought. It was up to Dilthey and Ricoeur to make this clear to Schleiermacher as, retrospectively, the founding father of modern hermeneutics. We can question whether every expert would accept this sort of reading. Among them, one of the strongest and most original critics is Jean Quillien. 13 He sets out both to deconstruct the traditional history of hermeneutics (with its line from Schleiermacher to Dilthey to Heidegger to Gadamer to Ricoeur), 14 and to propose another history and another line for which paternity is attributed to Wilhelm von Humboldt. Quillien does recognize a brilliant theologian and artisan who formulates a general hermeneutics in Schleiermacher, but he contests his role as founding father of modern hermeneutics. Not just because he did not appropriate the critical heritage, but above all because he was not a philosopher, but rather a philologist and theologian.

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Quillien’s main point is that a hermeneutic revolution could only occur within the setting of a theory of understanding that included philosophy. What Schleiermacher lacks is a synthesis that includes both philosophy and history. This is why, for Quillien, another philosopher, generally overlooked in thinking about the history of hermeneutics, must be considered: von Humboldt. 15 He is the father of modern hermeneutics because his work is built on three pillars that allow a revolution when it comes to understanding meaning. The philosophical pillar is an explicit and proclaimed appropriation of Kantian critique that places human beings at the heart of philosophy. The originality here is that it makes understanding what makes humans human that is the vocation of philosophy “with the twofold reciprocal implication of the assertion: we can only understand that which is human; what is understandable, in getting close to its deep meaning, is reachable only through understanding.” 16 Von Humboldt’s philosophical pillar comes from the Göttingen School (with Heyne and Wolf) and draws on the work of translating and commentary on classic texts (Aeschylus, Pindar). The historical pillar is constructed using German historiography and culminates in The Historian’s Task in 1821, which largely pre-figures the later debates over the foundation of the Geisteswissenschaften. Nothing could be more mistaken, therefore, than to reduce von Humboldt’s work to his erudite knowledge of ancient languages. If we have to evaluate his work as revolutionary, it is because it combines in a new way a properly philosophical question (what is man?) with positive knowledge (about history, philology, language). Through this enterprise, he lays the (psychological) bases for the act of understanding, not only for philology but also for the study of history: “Understanding in its most general definition is the movement directed toward another. It has one basic presupposition: the ability to penetrate another’s psyche, that is, the capacity, based on the external signs this psyche makes manifest, of reaching its inwardness, its deepest nature, what it is at bottom. This is the fundamental condition of all hermeneutic research.” 17 Von Humboldt integrates Schleiermacher’s technical interpretation by giving it a philosophical grounding and largely anticipates the psychological grounding of the Geisteswissenschaften found in Dilthey’s early work. In other words, the movement of deregionalizing the science of text interpretation through tying it to the study of history is already at work in von Humboldt. Quillien’s interpretative strategy becomes obvious: instead of the traditional version of the history of hermeneutics (Schleiermacher, Dilthey, etc.), he prefers Humboldt, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer. This changed paternity is explosive, but it does lead to new perplexities. The first of these is, as Quillien himself agrees, that von Humboldt did not propose a general theory of interpretation (unlike Schleiermacher), but only some attempts at making sense of a few forms of understanding. Only history was the object of a theoretical exposition. If we define the birth of hermeneu-

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tics as the birth of a general theory of interpretive understanding, how, given this fact, can von Humboldt be considered the pioneer? Quillien answers this objection through an about-face that shows that if von Humboldt did not present a general theory of understanding, he did practice one as regards a number of different disciplines: “To understand what one has understood, one must first have simply understood, and for that have plunged into the knowledge that comes from as many different disciplines as possible.” 18 If von Humboldt did not forge a general theory of understanding, Jean Quillien and others have contributed to making it explicit, though a work of philological reconstruction. It is on this condition that von Humboldt can be the father of modern hermeneutics. In the final analysis, Quillien does for von Humboldt what Ricoeur did for Schleiermacher: understood the author better than he understood himself by disengaging a methodological foundation that he was at least partly unaware of. It is in the same way that Quillien can establish a tie between von Humboldt and Dilthey. Dilthey, for reasons we have already discussed, explicitly claims to stand in the heritage of Schleiermacher when it comes to the origin of modern hermeneutics. In fact, Dilthey was unaware that his worthy predecessor was not who he thought it was (Schleiermacher) but rather the person who pre-figures the deregionalizing movement of hermeneutics (von Humboldt). Therefore, it is Quillien who shows Dilthey his actual father when it comes to hermeneutics! It is not a question here of settling this debate. What is important is that the non-specialist reader comes to know at least a few points about it. Leaving open the question of the (narrow) history of the origins of hermeneutics does have the hermeneutic virtue of bringing us back to the necessity for a plurality of interpretations. What is essential, for our approach here, which is quite Kantian, has less to do with the question of the supposed origins of hermeneutics as with the question of the conditions of possibility of a broadening of the hermeneutic paradigm beyond the sciences of text interpretation. That is, we are more interested in the question of the foundation of hermeneutics within the human and social sciences than with the question of its origin. Making sense of the narrower history of hermeneutics also has as its objective underscoring that this question of broadening the hermeneutic paradigm is not a simple one, a fortiori following the ontological reversal brought about by Heidegger and his disciples, a fortiori since the use of the term hermeneutics seems sometimes today to be used in different senses in contemporary debates, often without any attempt at making it precise. Hermeneutics seems to refer to so many things and approaches that it has lost all substance. This is why some specialists argue in favor of a return to a regional use of hermeneutics by locating it in terms of its historical matrix: philology. This demand, for these scholars, is all the more legitimate in that this discipline, which launched hermeneutics, largely has lost influence over the

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last century under the double pressure of philosophical hermeneutics (as ontological, post-modern) and the claims of other approaches for dealing with texts (structuralism, the aesthetics of reception). It is largely in reaction to this tendency that since the 1960–1970 decade we have seen a regain in interest in philological hermeneutics in Germany (notably under the influence of Peter Szondi) and France (through the Lille School: Bollack, Wismann, Thouard, Judet de la Combe). These currents clearly proclaim a desire to get back to the German sources of philology and its founders (Ast, Wolf, Schlegel, Schleiermacher). Their interpretive methods are openly stated as requiring a condition of distanciation and the critique of texts: Critique is the inspection of the nature, form, and genuineness of a text. It asks about the place and function of a text within a genre, an author, an age. It teaches us to discern and banish misinterpretations, mistaken readings. It draws attention to the gaps in transmission. Concerned with the materiality of texts, it is not about their authority in a normative sense. That a text may be true, revealed, sacred, legal has nothing to do with the fact that it is first of all a text and in this sense open to the same treatment as any other text. This is the philological lesson inherited from the Enlightenment and generalized by its practitioners. 19

The recovery of this critical approach and the interpretive methods that go with it has thus been the occasion for a renewal of the study of classical texts from Greek antiquity (Heraclitus and Empedocles, for example, by Jean Bollack; Parmenides and Democritus by Heinz Wismann) or of modern poetry (notably the work of Paul Celan). Contrary to the hermeneutic approach started by Gadamer, the Lille School and Peter Szondi assume no a priori confidence in the traditional meanings and interpretive heritage of great works. These traditions themselves must be submitted to the tribunal of philological argument. A critical and reflexive posture is required as well as regards the transmissions of great works (the commentaries and commentaries on commentaries) if they are not to transmit prejudices and deformations regarding the original meaning of a text. The problem is reinforced when the philologist only has access to second-hand interpretations and lacks the original text. Given these conditions, there can be no question of affirming that understanding of a text, over the course of generations, is simply to understand it differently. If understanding is “an infinite task,” as Schleiermacher recognized in his aphorisms from 1805, some interpretations are assuredly better than others, more faithful to the letter of a text. 20 To better indicate this willingness to return to the original site of hermeneutics and to distinguish it from so-called philosophical hermeneutics (Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur), Peter Szondi proposes the expression “material

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hermeneutics” in the sense that interpretation is based on the materiality of texts instead of on the act of understanding in general (with regard to being, to facticity). Material hermeneutics does not reduce, however, at least for Szondi, to a purely textual positivism. Material hermeneutics is meant to be critical, drawing on a double heritage, one that is both Kantian when it comes to methodological distance and post-Marxist when it comes to critical theory (via the influence of the Frankfurt School for Szondi), notably the critique of ideologies and distortions of communication as discussed by Habermas. Combining these two heritages is not unproblematic, however. We can distinguish a critical hermeneutics that is philosophical (and not connected with philology), inscribed within the horizon of a politics of emancipation, as we have already seen with Apel, Habermas, and Ricoeur, and a purely philological critical hermeneutics anchored in a methodological horizon, without sharing all the presuppositions of critical theory, as with the Lille School, 21 and, finally, a critical hermeneutics that is both philological and philosophical which draws on both sides—a line that runs from Benjamin to Szondi. Yet we should rejoice over this creative return of philology to the galaxy of contemporary hermeneutics. It is not simply a warning against the sometimes unchecked uses of the label hermeneutics; it also adds considerably to our knowledge of classical, sometimes overlooked texts, as well as of ancient languages. 22 It can be erudite, even esoteric, but philology does contribute to renewing our Bildung. But this return ought not, in our opinion, be taken unilaterally. Is there not something regressive, even when it comes to Schleiermacher’s project, not to speak of Humboldt, in returning to special hermeneutics (in this case, philological hermeneutics)? Does this not contradict the birth of hermeneutics that gave rise to the search for general rules of understanding? Does not a pure and simple return to philology amount to a regression to an earlier episteme, one prior to the emergence of modern hermeneutics? Without turning to the radical deconstruction of post-Heideggerian hermeneutics, and without renouncing the need for a method that makes use of distanciation, can the interpretation of texts entirely overlook the pre-understanding at work in all understanding? The long route of hermeneutics, which we are trying to reconfigure, following Ricoeur and Apel, seeks instead to integrate special hermeneutics, like philology, into a broader movement, but also, we hope, a better monitored one. We do not see any contradiction, given certain conditions, in giving legitimacy to the voice of a philological hermeneutics, and in justifying, given certain limits, extending the hermeneutic paradigm to other significant universes than that of texts.

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HISTORY AND EXPLANATORY UNDERSTANDING Two things have guided our approach: considering the conditions that allow, within the human sciences, broadening (or limiting as the case may require) hermeneutics to include grammars of meaning that do not apply to texts and asking what sorts of knowledge hermeneutics is likely to produce if this is done. History is undoubtedly the discipline that has most precociously and successfully benefited from the hermeneutical transfer of the methodological model inherited from the theory of the text. Dilthey shows up most often as having been the artisan par excellence of this epistemological operation. In reality, hermeneutics was already to be found in the German historical schools that developed beginning in the nineteenth century in a neo-Kantian context. A pioneer role can be assigned to von Humboldt for his De l’étude de l’Antiquité (1793). The psychological model that serves as the basis for the philological model was clearly transposed to the interpretation of such non-textual expressions as archeological remains and works of art. And yes, philology, as the study of the great texts of antiquity, included a historical component. What is essential, however, is that the text of an ancient author was no longer the only basis for an interpretation. Every fixed, externalized, stabilized configuration of meaning from the past that persists to the present can benefit, therefore, from a hermeneutical treatment. The art of philology is similar to but different from that of the historian in that it is not the individual author’s inner genius that the historian seeks to reach. The historian, thanks to an effort at transposition, understanding, and empathy, seeks to make familiar to us an age, a society, an art that appears foreign to us. The historian must therefore relive using their imagination what other people in other times experienced, not through a kind of telepathy but through the patient reconstruction of the external signs left that bear witness to it. A supplementary step was taken with August Boeckh, who first was recognized as a brilliant philologist, a specialist when it came to classical antiquity. 23 The scientific vocation attributed to philology was so vast that it came to be identified with the study of history. It was not so much a question of reconstituting an author’s individuality as the life of a people, a culture, or a civilization, 24 that is, history overall. If Boeckh was trained in the German philological school (that of Wolf and Heyne in particular), he refused to confine to study of antiquity to philology alone. Expanding philology arose from within it, in order to move beyond its framework as a special hermeneutic, the objective being to make this discipline one with an autonomy defined through its method and object. The originality of Boeckh’s hermeneutics is that it also extends the act of interpretive understanding to external forms of expression that do not come from oral or written discourse, or even from language, such as archeological

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remains and works of art. Understanding is clearly posited (even if it is not always distinguished from explanation), before Droysen and Dilthey, as the appropriate hermeneutic method. Recognizing what is known as an object of understanding is the key move in Boeckh’s Encyclopedia. What must be noted is that the object of such understanding comes to cover every result of human “spiritual” activity, texts, of course, but also other productive techniques as well. It is in this sense that philology comes to be combined with history. The philological-historical understanding of the “known object” was articulated using two distinct but complementary techniques: hermeneutics and critique. For the former, Boeckh distinguishes four methods, a few of which draw directly on Schleiermacher: Grammatical interpretation constitutes the starting point of any interpretation, its task being to transmit a word’s lexicographical meaning. Following this first step, historical interpretation aims at understanding a word by taking account of the historical context in which it appears. Individual interpretation studies the modifications owing to the individuality of an author. Finally, generic interpretation studies the modifications of language due to its genre. 25

Although distinct, each method presupposes knowledge of the preceding ones, but distributes them in a different way. Critique is justified in that texts undergo alterations over time, whence the importance of verifying the genuine text and eventually its author. For example, grammatical critique has to determine whether a linguistic element conforms to the general laws governing language. The first problem this method poses is that, if it is well adapted to understanding language, and the “linguistic monuments” texts are in conformity with the canons of philology taught at Göttingen, it is difficult to apply in the same way to other intellectual productions like works of art or kinds of technology. A grammatical critique of a Roman vase makes no sense. As Christiane Hackel point out, there is a hiatus between, on one side, Droysen’s ambition to broaden hermeneutics to include history, and on the other, the justification of methods essentially adapted to the strict model of philology. 26 More fundamentally, Reinhard Koselleck has formulated a much more radical objection to historical hermeneutics as based on extending to history the model stemming from the study of ancient texts. Not that the historian ignores those texts that survive to the present. But the historian’s relation to texts is of a different nature than to texts taken as testimony that needs to be checked using other testimonies and their critique. The historian thematizes facts that are extra textual, even when not constituted by means of language. There is something almost ironical about this. In principle, as part of the human sciences, the

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Assimilating philology and history as imagined by Boeckh also leaves interpretive psychology in the shadows. The problem also arises with von Humboldt’s epistemology. How can a psychological model fit understanding the enduring expressions that cannot be reduced to an individual author? This is the thrust of the criticism Axel Horstmann addresses to Boeckh’s epistemological model: When he interprets theoretical activity as knowing that stems from the perspective of a concept of “production,” this may certainly fit well with the type of knowledge coming specifically through philological understanding. There we deal with concrete “works,” and the hope to directly return to the author who “produced” them, to “transport” oneself into his mind and “sympathize” with it seems legitimate in its way. But can such a conception be adapted to history taken in its broadest sense? We cannot say that these individuals “express themselves” only in a solipsistic way through their “productions.” What we see there is that “transobjective” events combine, reinforce, intersect, or contradict one another. It is a question above all of grasping “structural contexts”—in other words, must not a global theory of history surpass one based on a philological orientation? 28

The main question Horstmann poses starting from Boeckh can equally be posed to the third artisan of the deregionalizing movement in hermeneutics that leads toward history: Johann Gustav Droysen. 29 At first sight, Droysen’s ambition to attribute complete autonomy to history—despite the influence of his teacher Boeckh when it comes to the philological critique of sources— seems to distance us from any attempt to assimilate the two hermeneutic disciplines. The critique of sources (which becomes a full-fledged method in the school of Ranke and Müller) remains a fundamental condition of Historik, 30 but Droysen’s question is not how to satisfy it or absolutize it. The interpretation undertaken by the historian remains primordial following the questions that the historian poses regarding the past. It is the historian’s questions that come first and that require the past to speak through its traces which persist in the present. “Historical facts” say nothing without a narrator who makes them speak. Droysen, contrary to the illusion of historical realism defended by Ranke and his school, poses the foundations, following a Kantian line, for historiographical constructivism. Only the investigator’s vision is able to reawaken the past, “to cast light on the desert night that is the past.” 31 “Droysen, along with interpretation, proposes a method meant to produce knowledge of his-

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torical facts in conformity with its determination, through reconstruction, starting from today’s questions using those expressions of past human acts preserved in the documents.” 32 If the historian’s interpretation requires an internal and external critique of the sources available to him, it is still up to their historical interpretation, starting from these preserved expressions, to reconstitute these past human acts and their intentions. This is where the transposition of the hermeneutic model to history is to be found. If history is genuinely based on research, as Droysen’s Historik emphasizes, if the facts are always preceded by the historian’s questions, then there can be no absolute truth about history. 33 Droysen is assuredly one of the founders of historicism, which can flirt with a kind of relativism and anticipate the hermeneutic turn found in Gadamer and Heidegger. If the past is always a mirror image of the present, if there is no historical knowledge without presuppositions and pre-judgments, if the historian is a historical being who asks questions on the basis of his present, how may we hope to ground historical objectivity? Droysen would no doubt denounce any naïve form of historical objectivity like what he found in the Ranke school with its ambition to analyze historical facts as they really happened (even though that “as” is far from leading to a pure and simple historical realism for Ranke). What Droysen asks the historian to assume is the historical relativity of his position (the pre-Heideggerian ground of his historicism). But this does not come down to denying the pertinence of methods and interpretive techniques for analyzing the past as it does for Gadamer. What is more, as Jean-Claude Gens emphasizes, if it is not a question of eliminating prejudices as the Enlightenment wanted to do, it is at least a question of clarifying them, reflecting on them (which requires critique). This is why Droysen’s emphasis on “taking a stand” is important. It requires not just commitment on the historian’s part but also an openness to the other’s position: “taking a stand is not just listening to all the parties, and doing so successively for each of them, or even thinking in their place to make their strongest case, it is also to take a stand on what is good, what true, that is, defending what, at least, seems to be so.” 34 In the end, Droysen’s historicism does not lead to a strict relativism but to a form of relationism. 35 One of the best illustrations of this relationism can be found in the analogical method that Droysen makes use of in the three volumes of his History of Hellenism. 36 Starting from Alexander, the question the historian poses is what type of unity his conquests led to building between the Orient and the Occident. This is where the problem of Hellenism lies. Yet, in going back and forth between past and present, the historian poses this question as analogous to that of the unification of Germany brought about by Prussia: “This way of learning from the elements of history leads, using Droysen’s method and way of thinking—as a kind of mirror effect—to a hermeneutic that consists in interpreting, yes, the totality of

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events studied, but even more so, through a complete displacement of historical perspective to the events grasped as a totality.” 37 However, we may ask whether this kind of approach does not have the opposite effect in that wanting to understand past human action runs the risk of hermeneutics falling back into psychologism. The considerable gain of Droysen’s theory of history lies, in fact, in the distinction it introduces of a plurality of interpretive methods that fall between the distinction between grammatical and technical interpretation from philology. This prevents its historicism from being a prefiguration of an anti-methodological hermeneutics. Among the methods he distinguishes, only one is really psychological in that it seeks to account for acts in terms of the agent’s character, in that it “seeks in the given fact, the acts of will which produced it.” 38 Paradoxically, this psychological interpretation has at the same time a quasi-causal status: actions are imputed to the psychological properties of a historical actor. Droysen’s originality, even if it inherits a lot from von Humboldt on this point, consists in combining understanding and explanation into a type of psychological explanation. He refuses to assimilate historical research to the type of explanation found in the natural sciences, as the kind of nomological explanation that consists in deducing phenomena covered by a law as being necessary. “Were the life of History only a reproduction of what is permanently identical with itself, it would be void of freedom and responsibility, any moral content and only of an organic nature.” 39 This rejection of nomological explanation does not, however, exclude explanation through conditions. Pragmatic interpretation and interpretation through conditions confirms the causal dimension in Droysen’s historical hermeneutics. Pragmatic interpretation places an event in a series that is a result of the “facts.” It interprets, for example, a military action on the basis of the immanent logic of military strategy or the course of diplomatic negotiations starting from the demands of an overall political situation. The interpretation of conditions thus includes geographical ones like natural frontiers, temporal conditions (the historical situation of an event, contemporary events having exercised an influence on other related events), and technological and moral means (human passions, the mood of the masses, opinions). Does the importance given to causal factors pull Droysen’s theory toward a kind of positivism? If not, it is because the object of history is not inert matter, but beings marked by meanings and intentions, but also because history, even when it seeks to establish casual relations, does not abolish human freedom. On this point, Droysen clearly is an heir of German idealism, of Kant in particular as mediated by von Humboldt. It is in this sense that Droysen talks of human free will and argues for a fourth interpretive method having to do with ideas, which is nothing other than the historical understanding of a self-determined human act. Interpretation of ideas in principle forbids any assimilation of historical research to a determinist material

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science. Moreover, the second original contribution of Droysen’s Historik is that it pre-figures the historical theory of the later Dilthey and of Simmel. Droysen inscribes human will within broader socio-historical settings that he calls, drawing on Hegelian Sittlichkeit, “ethical worlds” or “ethical powers” (natural communities, families, peoples, tribes). The ontological referents of historical research are never simply individual human actions. They are human choices anchored in social institutions that encompass them: But even the most highly endowed man, strongest of will and most exalted in power, is only an element in this movement of the moral potencies, though always, in his place, specially characteristic and efficient. In this role and in this only does historical investigation view any man, not for his person’s sake but on account of his position or work in this or that one among the moral potencies, on account of the idea whose bearer he was. 40

This willingness to think a dialectic of understanding and explanation, even if pre-figured in Humboldt’s The Historian’s Task, is the most decisive breakthrough in Droysen’s theory. His epistemology seeks to preserve a space for willed human self-determination (through what makes human beings not simply natural beings), without over-emphasizing this, in that the historian inscribes human actions in (material, geographical, and political) conditions and circumstances that they have not directly produced. By introducing a causal model, without losing the comprehensive dimension of historical research, Droysen contributes to broadening hermeneutics starting from its philological matrix and at the same time warrants the scientific claim of history as a discipline. Droysen does more than lay the groundwork for a dialectic of explanation and understanding beyond even Dilthey. What is more, and we shall see the decisive implications in what follows, Droysen pursues an expanding of hermeneutics even beyond historical method, not just through the attention he pays to the historian’s own historical condition, but equally through his anthropological audacity. Understanding becomes the most fundamental human act, as every human action rests on it and draws upon it, including even its ethical dimension. With Droysen, we already have all the ingredients, which still need to be synthesized, for the Janus face of the act of understanding and interpreting, both as a scientific practice (in philology and history) and in ordinary human practice. What remains problematic, over and above the metaphysical grounds for his Systematik, is that the psychological provenance of his hermeneutics fits badly with the conditions for history as a science. It is always with reference to the model of understanding others, inherited from Schleiermacher as well as Humboldt, that Droysen thinks when it comes to historical understanding. We do find, however, a promising enlargement (and through it a partial way beyond psychologism) with the reference to the entities of historical research as ethical worlds in which the acts of individuals take on meaning.

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The dynamic of integrating hermeneutics into a historical paradigm that Dilthey calls for was thus largely outlined by the founders of the German historical school, at least by Boeckh and Droysen who had exercised a great influence on the author of the Foundations of the Human Sciences. We still need to consider what contribution Dilthey’s epistemology makes to deregionalizing hermeneutics. The psychological matrix of inter-subjective understanding, coming from Schleiermacher’s philological model, along with the great importance granted to biography, was still important at least for the early Dilthey, as we have seen in the previous chapter in our discussion of Gadamer. The continuity that predominates on this level confirms the problems posed by a psychological foundation for the historical sciences. Like Droysen, Dilthey preserves the distinction between explanation and understanding. If the antagonism between them is sharper for Dilthey than for Droysen, for whom understanding includes an explanatory element, we need to remember that, in The Rise of Hermeneutics, Dilthey does not exclude the model of explanation in analyzing certain historical phenomena. For example, the study of ballistics can be a real help in understanding the history of military strategies just as today population genetics can be for understanding historical patterns of large-scale migrations. What is essential is to preserve the proper method (understanding) for history, which stands out among the human sciences owing to the singularity of its object. Dilthey therefore agrees with Droysen in wanting to defend a methodological autonomy for the historical sciences. Dilthey’s first contribution, from this point of view, is to further broaden the hermeneutic paradigm to include all the human sciences (and not just history) by proposing a general epistemological reflection, one freed of the metaphysical residue still found in Droysen. 41 On the methodological plane, the great contribution of the later Dilthey as it appears in the Rise of Hermeneutics is the relative break with psychologism, despite the importance of the biographical model, to the profit of a more general hermeneutics: “the understanding of what is singular depends on the general knowledge inherent in it, which, in turn, presupposes understanding. Finally, the understanding of a part of the historical course of events can attain completeness only through relating this part to the whole, just as the universal-historical survey of the whole presupposes the understanding of the parts united in it.” 42 Dilthey does not reject understanding the motives of individual actors, but the new point is the requirement to reconstruct the spiritual world as an interactive whole, the objective world of an era, institutions like law or religion. It is not an individual author’s intention (say for a law) that needs to be reconstituted, but the ensemble of meanings, the immanent logic, the structure of a historical system: “the world of human spirit” or “objectifications of life” for Dilthey are closely related, in a Hegelian sense, to Droysen’s “ethical world.” The entities referred to by historical research exceed

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individual psychology. This is the case for Roman law: “The understanding of that spirit is not psychological cognition. It is a regress to a spiritual formation that has its own structure and lawfulness. Jurisprudence rests on it, from the interpretation of a point in the Corpus Juris to conceptual cognition of Roman law and the comparison of legal systems with one another.” 43 The later Dilthey introduces a real methodological shift in historical hermeneutics in moving beyond the bounds of psychologism, without renouncing the requirement to understand what is meant. This shift enriches the model of explanatory understanding sketched by Droysen in a useful way. Here, therefore, we have an extending of the philological hermeneutic model to the historical sciences, even to all the human sciences, without bringing with it the burden of psychologism. We also find this methodological program in the philosopher Georg Simmel, who does not come from the philological tradition but does contribute to renewing the epistemology of history. 44 Without being a copy of Dilthey, Simmel’s approach has much to offer on this level. He does not doubt the necessity for the historian to reconstruct the reasons and motives of historical actors, but, taking a distance on Droysen and Weber, he also calls for explanatory understanding. What is truly new in his approach, which links up with the hermeneutics of the later Dilthey, lies in his granting an autonomous objective dimension to the objective spirit of historical reality. It is this Hegelian heritage, purged of its metaphysical underpinnings, that connects Simmel closely to Dilthey in a common desire to show that the historian must deal not just with first-person intentions, but also with third-person ones, akin to Sittlichkeit, detached from their original intentions. Distrustful of any hypostatic intention, Simmel, more than Droysen and Dilthey, seeks to make a place for those historical objects (classes, nations, peoples) not reducible to individual intentions and actions, even if they do obliquely refer, as Ricoeur puts it, to real individuals interacting with institutions. Dilthey and Simmel largely lay the groundwork for historiography, which will be further enriched by the Annales School in France, in undertaking to write a new history (an economic, a social history) that will no longer just be that of battles, dynasties, and great men. Also worth noting is the convergence on an already explanatory understanding of history between a philosopher (Dilthey), drawing on philology, who contributed to deregionalizing the hermeneutics of the historical sciences and another philosopher (Simmel) who, not coming from the same hermeneutic tradition, helped to expand historical understanding to include anonymous entities not reducible to the psychology of individual actors. If the project of redoing hermeneutics within the horizon of history that we owe to Dilthey has to do, as we have seen, with its methodological dimension, it equally affects the ontological status of the reality that is to be understood. An essential threshold had already been crossed by Boeckh

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when he broadened the object of historical philology to include objects not reducible to oral or written discourse. With Dilthey and Droysen, the “text” to be interpreted covers the whole intellectual world or ethical world, that is, those externalized, objective, and “enduring fixed” expressions of life. The text as a classic work or document or archive is only one component or manifestation, among others, of the inter-connected expressions of life. Everything that human life has been able to produce as an acquired structure, that is, as externalized inner expressions that persist into the present, can become the object of historical inquiry. Droysen includes among them vestiges of the past, monuments, and of remaining sources. It is in this sense that historical reality overall becomes a quasi-text whose interpretation exceeds individual intentions, which are themselves “interconnected” within larger structures (family, legal systems, society, communities). The author of this quasi-text, if there is one, at least as a quasi-author, is Spirit or the objective world taken in a Hegelian sense, the ethical world Droysen would say, the world of Spirit according to Dilthey. This is the reason why the psychological model of other people is not sufficient to understanding this vital historical totality: Everything on which human beings have impressed their productive stamp forms the subject-matter of the human sciences. Thus the reference to spirit in the term Geisteswissenschaft (human science) receives its justification. Earlier we spoke of the spirit of the law, of justice, of the constitution. Now we can say that everything in which human spirit has objectified itself falls within the scope of the human sciences. 45

The introduction of a philosophy of life to the heart of the object of the human sciences has a large ontological implication, one that gives a new orientation to the movement of extending hermeneutics to the study of history. Human life is in a way already its own exegete: life can grasp itself as meaningful because life already has a hermeneutic structure. The interpreting historian therefore must deal with a historical reality that is already autointerpretive. Acquired, sedimented meanings, shared values constitute the framework and dynamism through which life interprets itself. By setting understanding and interpreting at the heart of human existence, Dilthey does more than anticipate the ontological reversal of hermeneutics first outlined by Heidegger, then developed by Gadamer: “The historical world is always there, and the individual does not merely contemplate it from without but is intertwined with it. . . . We are historical beings before being observers of history, and ony because we are the former do we become the latter.” 46 The advantage of this philosophy of life is that it broadens the scope of auto-understanding beyond the narrow circle of the hermeneutics of facticity and the meaning of being. For Dilthey, we have to deal with a more anthropological than ontological turn when it comes to any ordinary ways of deci-

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phering the world. Not only do the expressions of life not have a limit, they are indexed, far beyond the analytic of Dasein, to the large-scale social and cultural totalities through which we understand ourselves. This collective dimension of understanding constitutes the heart of Dilthey’s historical anthropology. Without necessarily taking the name “philosophy of life,” the move to reinscribe hermeneutics within human existence can already be found in some proposals in Droysen’s Historik. We recall that “historical investigation presupposes the reflection that even the content of our ‘I’ is a mediated content, one that has been developed, that is, is a historical result.” 47 What is valid for the common man who first receives history through a tradition is equally valid for the historian, who has first pre-understood history before understanding it. We further recall the anthropological importance Droysen grants to understanding in everyday life. However, it is in Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutics that, even before Droysen and Dilthey, who are its direct heirs, that we find the most audacious innovations. Even though later criticism reproaches Schleiermacher for reducing the act of understanding to the method of text interpretation, a tendency it is true that dominates his work, his Hermeneutics clearly leaves room for what he himself calls a “natural hermeneutics.” The general theory of the act of understanding, in other words, exceeds its application to literary productions to include a whole discursive sequence of ordinary interactions when humans confront misunderstanding or something strange. In his 1829 Academic Discourses, Schleiermacher writes, I am often surprised in the course of ordinary conversation to recognize hermeneutic operations, when I am not satisfied with the usual degree of understanding, when I seek to discern how a friend could move from one idea to another, or when I seek the opinions, judgements, and tendencies he is drawing on when he expresses himself on one subject of discussion but not another. 48

By referring to hermeneutic operations in ordinary conversations, Schleiermacher lays the foundation, before Dilthey and Droysen, for what we have called an anthropology of ethnointerpretations, namely, ordinary techniques of interpretation mobilized for overcoming cases of the problematicity of meaning. This makes it worth noting that the technique of the hermeneutic circle (the reciprocal understanding of whole and parts), before being a scholarly, exegetical, or philological technique for interpreting texts can be found in the world of everyday life. Schleiermacher pays more attention to natural hermeneutics when it comes to the translation of foreign languages and how young children learn their maternal language (the relation between words and sentences, between sentences and forms of discourse): “Each child comes to the meaning of

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words through hermeneutics.” 49 Hermeneutics, as an art, a learned techne applied to texts, as a reflective and meta-hermeneutical process applied to the act of understanding proceeds originally from a natural hermeneutic technique that goes back to childhood and is at work in our everyday operations. In both cases, interpretation is by trial and error, experimental, and provisory as long as the problematicity of meaning has not been entirely removed. It is capable of being reactivated in the face of new misunderstandings, or the discovery of new elements, or the appearance of new doubts about what a word, a sentence, or a situation means. Following the example of the reciprocal understanding of whole and parts, the interpretation of a text, a sentence, a speech-act is potentially an infinite task in the search for the correct meaning. The double breakthrough (however embryonic) Schleiermacher makes consists in enlarging hermeneutics methodologically to include non-professional techniques, having to do with our “everyday commerce” among ourselves, and ontologically as regards the reality to be interpreted expressed by evanescent expressions. It is the set of linguistic expressions, including those indexed to the event of a conversation, that are open to hermeneutic treatment. There is a place for hermeneutics each time in a discourse something is unclear or strange. With this, we can see that why the presence of Schleiermacher in Dilthey’s work is so considerable. Dilthey never denied or concealed this. Schleiermacher even seems to us more innovative in opening the way to a natural hermeneutics applied to evanescent, indexical linguistic expressions irreducible to the model of a text. What Dilthey adds is setting hermeneutics within the frame of a vital, historical anthropology that allows disengaging the fundamental historicity of both the being we are, who only exist historically, and of historical knowledge. The fundamental move Dilthey makes does not first have to do with the epistemology of the human sciences in order to get to the meaningful structures of life interpreting itself, but just the opposite: to move from the autointerpretive constitution of lived experience to get to the methodology of the human sciences. Inscribing understanding and interpreting in the flow of human life is correlative with the inscription of history in a more originary experience that is nothing other than what Heidegger will later call historicality. 50 Like Droysen, Dilthey resists, however, formulating such a unilateral foundation that could lead to historical relativism. It is on this condition that he preserves a place for a method of objectification and interpretation for the study of history—one that will be rejected by Heidegger and Gadamer. Following Droysen, Dilthey knew how to grasp human beings as historical beings (including the historian himself), beings affected by the effect of history (in the sense Gadamer will systematize), beings who understand history in that they are understood through it by way of transmitted traditions and large-scale social and cultural institutions. But it comes down to history

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itself, using its specific methods, to give meaning to this fundamental historicality. An ambiguity remains in the way Dilthey presents this, however. 51 In showing that historical knowledge (with its methods, its questions, its concepts) is a product of history and in this sense relative, Dilthey, following a neo-Kantian line, does not renounce the claim of history to produce universally valid propositions. In every science, he states in the Aufbau there is a demand for universal validity. This is why Heidegger criticizes Dilthey for not following through to the end on his historicism. Despite this ambiguity, with Dilthey, we are closer to the recognition of the double nature of the act of interpreting that is the point of the long route of hermeneutics we are seeking to reconfigure: both as an objective method of historical knowledge and as the auto-interpretive reality of historical communities. With Dilthey, even if the ground had been prepared by his illustrious predecessors (von Humboldt, Boeckh, Droysen), history is historical twice over, as a human science and as a philosophical anthropology of life. For all that, has Dilthey accomplished the necessary enlarging of hermeneutics that the historical sciences require? Not entirely. There remain residues of psychologism in his epistemology, for example, that are also found in Collingwood. 52 The ambition to “reenact the past in the present,” at the price of giving an exorbitant power to the historical imagination, comes down to annulling the temporal distance that separates present being and being as having-been, which is equivalent to annulling the very status of a being that no longer exists. To be sure, the historiographical operation of “reenactment” does not imply the possibility of the historian’s being able to relive the lived experience of past human beings. This operation, nonetheless, does contain a claim to faithfully rethink past representations, not in an intuitive manner, but thanks precisely to the role of the historical imagination and the interpretation of traces. The psychological root of historical reconstruction is also found in the early texts Ricoeur devoted to the epistemology of history, where Dilthey is seldom mentioned. 53 What we expect from the historian, Ricoeur tells us, is an effort at “sympathy,” “not merely an imaginative transfer into another present but a real projection into to another human life.” 54 This recourse to sympathy, which threatens the constructive principle of history, does not signify that the historian should “relive” in the present what others experienced in the past. Nor does it signify that the historian should write a hagiography of men and women from the past. Yet this recourse to sympathy does rest, at bottom, on a psychological hermeneutics of understanding that “consciences can communicate”: History is therefore one of the ways by which men “repeat” their belonging to the same humanity. It is a sector of the communication of minds which is divided by the methodological stage of traces and document; therefore it is

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We would repeat here our deep distrust regarding this psychological strain that remains at the root of the hermeneutical tradition ever since Schleiermacher. Not only because of its anchorage in Romantic aesthetics, but also because it gives too much power to the historian’s imagination. Ricoeur himself, starting in Time and Narrative, clearly takes his distance from this psychological model that he judges to be too intuitive and irrational. We should not, therefore, conceptualize the work of historical reconstruction as a simple extension of communication between minds. However, in that we do not want to reduce history to a series of graphs, tables, or schemes, because history is still a narrative when it is economic or social history, we can expect the historian to use their imagination to make sense of what is shared with men and women of earlier times. This life that interprets itself is not just that of individuals taken in isolation; it includes cities, villages, eras, and events that have familiarity and strangeness we have to recognize. Therefore, the historical approach is not so much intuitive as patiently reconstructive, which depends on projecting oneself into a past like the ethnographer does with an exotic society. It is from this angle that the historian can speak to us about the life of past people, their deaths, their labor, their hopes and fears. This is true even when the historian claims to break with traditional narrative forms to present an account of the history of old, even very old tumults in human life. Ricoeur demonstrates this marvelously well through his reconstruction of the narrative found in Fernand Braudel’s work on the world of the Mediterranean in the age of Philip II. 56 Even on the scale of a long time span, one close to geographical time that resists change, in this physical space, with its “inner sea,” its “littorals,” its “liquid planes,” humans are everywhere present and with them a swarm of symptomatic events. The mountains appear as a refuge and a shelter for free people. As for the coastal plains, they are not mentioned without a reference to colonization, to the work of draining them, of improving the soil, the dissemination of populations, displacements of all sorts. 57

The importance of Ricoeur’s reading lies first of all in how it takes up Husserl’s technique of questioning back to derive the threefold division of social time in Braudel from a more originary time. The originality of this approach consists next in its reconstituting of a quasi-plot (the decline of the Mediterranean as a quasi-character on the stage of world history) that runs through Braudel’s account. The methodology most removed from and most distrustful of psychologism, the one invented by the Annales School, which is

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least interested in the story of battles, or the action of “great men” and their dynasties, which does not hesitate to borrow procedures from sociology, demography, economics, or anthropology, this “new history” never loses its tie to the art of telling, of recounting the story of the past. It is through the construction of plots or quasi-plots that the historian seeks to make us understand things about the life of men and women in the past, even when they are presented in terms of a more all-encompassing structure (like the Mediterranean world), such as social, economic, and cultural ones (communities, social classes, towns and cities). History as refashioned by the Annales historians can thus still call itself interpretive, even hermeneutic in a non-psychological sense, in that it does not entirely reject the question of meaning. Historical reality proceeds from an ongoing interpretation of life’s expressions. Reciprocally, those historical schools closest to the other social sciences bring an added aspect of explanation and science to a historical hermeneutics that remains concerned precisely with the question of meaning. We have seen this commitment clearly at work in the models of explanatory understanding in Droysen and Simmel. We could find other exploratory forms in contemporary historical debates that seek to give a workable status to explanation in history, without ceding the terrain to a positivism like that of Hempel. 58 He sees nothing particular about historical explanation compared with explanation in the natural sciences, at the risk of eclipsing the question of meaning as well as that of the singularity of the historical event. It was Ricoeur who tried to renew the program of explanatory understanding in history, drawing notably on Anglo-American neopositivist and narrativist theories. It essentially came down to distinguishing different levels of explanation that correspond to different ways of saying “because.” For instance, Ricoeur was willing to speak, with Gilbert Ryle and Patrick Gardiner, of a “dispositional” type of regularity, defined in terms of probabilistic tendencies: “One of the functions of the connective ‘because’ is to set an agent’s action within the framework of his ‘habitual’ behavior. This case of explanation in terms of dispositions opens the way to reflection upon the diversity of levels of imprecision that the notion of regularity allows.” 59 In history, regularities can at best be highly frequent correlations rather than invariable and necessary ones. This concession to the neopositivist model, when weakened, has a decisive counterpart: explanation through a “dispositional regularity” (a weak form of law), which is just one form of explanation among others, and which therefore does not exhaust all the uses of “because” in history. An intermediary function that Ricoeur takes from analyses by William Dray is akin to the singular causal explanation proposed by Max Weber, that is, an explanation detached from the nomological model. 60 Such a separation allows accounting for the singular character of the historical event, not in the sense of a metaphysical unity, but in the sense that the historian never deals exactly with the

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same historical reality again. The casual explanation in question is essentially a selective testing that consists in verifying the applicability of this or that candidate to function as the cause in question. This analysis includes two tests: “The first is an inductive one. The factor in question must be a really necessary one. The second is a pragmatic test. There must be a reason for selecting the condition in question from among the conditions that as a whole constitute the sufficient condition for the phenomenon.” 61 With this operation, we are presented with an explanation, but not one that proceeds from a deductive model or one of subsumption under a law (in the sense of invariable and necessary relations). In a perspective close to that of Droysen, Ricoeur makes a place for a third connective function of “because”: explanation in terms of reasons. Explaining something by the reasons for it is clearly distinct from a psychological model meant to relive or rethink the intentions of historical agents. Like the Aristotelian theory of deliberation, explanation in terms of reasons aims at reconstructing the calculation used by historical agents, the means and strategies they employed, in the given circumstances, in view of some determined end. To explain historical action, “we need to know what considerations convinced him [the agent] that he should act as he did.” 62 The model of explanation in terms of reasons on a narrativist model, without being directly built in the work of William Dray, does offer an appropriate transition for elaborating a fourth model of explanation: explanation through emplotment. Explanation through emplotment, which is the subject of a long discussion in the first volume of Time and Narrative, is presented as the antithesis of the neopositivist model. Because it belongs to the general category of narrative, history, in its internal configuration as a result of emplotment, in that it connects characters, events, peripeteia, and actions, is already a form of explanation. Explanation through emplotment draws on other explanatory functions (reasons, causes, dispositional regularities) when the historian is confronted with lacunae as to how to say “because.” Given this conceptual clarification, the opposition between explaining and understanding takes on a new relief. Here Ricoeur confirms in a different way his project, formulated during the 1950s, of integrating explanation to the heart of the episteme of history, without sacrificing understanding meaning, now considered using the resources of the hermeneutic theory of interpreting texts and narrative theory. The historian can make use of a whole range of operations situated on a scale running from the most explanatory (explanation through dispositional regularity and singular causal explanation) to the most comprehensive ones (through reasons for and emplotment). In sum, the conditions of possibility of expanding hermeneutics to the historical sciences are principally of three orders. First, a methodological condition that breaks with the psychological root of hermeneutics to the profit of a more encompassing hermeneutics, one that includes reasons and is

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paired at the same time with several different registers of explanation (by dispositions, by singular causes). In this way, hermeneutics can assure the scientific status of history. Next, there is an ontological condition that breaks with understanding just individual intentions to the profit of paying attention to larger social and cultural wholes in which meaning occurs and is transmitted. Written and oral discourse are only a small part of the human world that the historian can decipher through the structure of its expressions that take on enduring form. Finally, there is an anthropological condition that considers historical reality as being already narratively configured, that the historical world already is interpreted for beings and communities that only exist historically. SOCIOLOGY AND OBJECTIVE INTERPRETATION Can we continue the process of expanding hermeneutics to include all the human sciences? The question arises particularly as regards those disciplines grouped under the heading of the social sciences. The historical sciences tend more to belong with the humanities, for Dilthey in particular and the German tradition in general, including philology, the branches of history (law, art), political theory, archeology, and historical anthropology. Every human science that aspires to make sense of the objectified expressions of the lifeworld belongs to these disciplines. But when we graft explanatory methods to history, we may take them also as social sciences. In other words, the historical sciences are both human sciences, in that they privilege understanding meanings, and social sciences, in that they privilege causal explanations. The model of explanatory understanding we have proposed allows us to assure the connection between these two paradigms of the human sciences. The problem thus arises of knowing whether other disciplines than the historical ones, singularly sociology in its different forms (ethnology, social anthropology) can equally be inscribed in this dynamic of deregionalizing hermeneutics. If we turn to the French tradition of sociology initiated by Comte and Durkheim, this kind of extension is not apparent and rarely discussed. In fact, the French school of the social sciences—from Durkheim to Bourdieu, passing through Lévi-Strauss and Mauss—largely arose against the German Verstehen tradition. In substituting for the psychological matrix of the human sciences, which was judged to be overly intuitive, the social sciences in France preferred to draw on an explanatory model inspired by the natural sciences to assure the scientific standing of their discipline. Owing to the heavy weight Durkheim and his disciples granted to collective consciousness, both individual intentions and the psychological model, at the heart of the German hermeneutic tradition, were largely discredited. Replacing the preferred referents of the human sciences (human intentions, will, agents), new actors enter the scene that would be called “mechanical solidarity,” the

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“collective consciousness,” and “social memory,” before turning into “social forces” and “social structures.” Durkheim could still talk about “individual representations,” 63 but this was meant to show that they are determined by “collective representations.” By delimiting a domain for sociology—the social fact—the point was to clearly demarcate the new science of the social from psychology (social facts are not reducible to individual representations) and biology (social facts are not reducible to physiological states). This project of carving out an epistemological domain clearly appears in 1897 in his pioneering study, Suicide, where Durkheim begins by setting aside non-sociological causes (psychological, physiological, climatic ones) to place the emphasis on sociological causes (such as anomie) that can explain the statistical tendency for individuals to kill themselves. Where common sense might see suicide as an individual act, Durkheim wants to show us a strictly social determination: “It is doubtless a self-evident truth that there is nothing in social life that is not in the consciousness of individuals. Yet everything to be found in the latter comes from society.” 64 Here is where the positivist heritage is most patently condensed into the famous injunction to “consider social facts as things,” contrary to the injunction of the human sciences to understand the meaning of human actions. Here once again it is necessary to note the equivocity of the comparative “as” in the rules for sociology. Durkheim, contrary to current interpretations, does not state that social facts are things as though suicide and a particle field would have the same ontological status. The first methodological rule only states that sociology must explain (through causal imputation) social facts like an astrophysicist might explain the movement of the planets. Such an explanation is possible only if we view social phenomena from the outside (psychic life being unfathomable for the sociologist) and in terms of their constraining dimension. The existence of social facts therefore implies the possibility of objectifying those collective consciousnesses that act like quasi-characters on individual consciousness: every way of acting, whether fixed or not, is social and capable of exercising an external restraint. Let us note, at least as regards this aspect, that the later Dilthey says the same thing when he extends the object of the human sciences to include externalized and enduring fixed expressions (without our being able to get directly to internal minds). What is more, the reality of the human world largely exceeds, as we have seen, individual intentions to include large-scale social institutions. The true difference between Durkheim and Dilthey lies in the fact that Durkheim deliberately sets aside the auto-interpretive dimension of social reality. To stick with the tradition of French sociology coming from Durkheim, which privileges causal explanation (that is, nomological explanation) and social forces, makes impossible any graft of hermeneutics to the social sciences. 65 The question of understanding meaning, as a sociological

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method and auto-interpretive social reality, disappears largely from the methodological and ontological horizon of the French tradition of sociology. If Durkheim’s sociology leaves no place for the auto-interpretive dimension of social reality, it does provide useful ways of analyzing social forms of thinking as a dimension of spontaneously shared understanding. It is no longer a question of seeing the social as a higher-order or transcendent collective institution, but as an immanent transcendental of human thought. In a manner of speaking, Durkheim sociologizes the Kantian categories of the understanding and the forms of sensibility. This is important for our approach in that it shows how these impersonal forms participate in the continual arranging and rearranging of social relations, guaranteeing stable and shared meanings for the words of ordinary language sufficient to assure mutual understanding. 66 It is this heritage that we find developed by Goffman and ethnomethodology in the way they open sociological inquiry to include pre-reflexive and spontaneous common sense knowledge, its typical techniques when it comes to categorization, and the operations of framing this conceptualization through the schemes that operate in everyday life. It is to the side of Max Weber’s interpretive sociology that we must turn if we want to say more about the heuristic relation between understanding and explanation. Weber is an heir of the German historical tradition of Verstehen, but he remains distant from its anchorage in hermeneutic philology. Unlike Dilthey, Weber did not seek to expand this hermeneutic paradigm to include the social sciences. Nonetheless, his sociology does contain valuable resources for constructing meeting points between understanding meaning (coming from the human sciences) and explanation (coming from the more positivistically oriented social sciences). Over against the Durkheimian social fact, Weber defines social action as the meaning that individuals can give to their behavior, particularly when it is oriented toward other social actors. Taking into account the intentional and rational dimension of individual action (its values, affects) stands at the opposite pole from an explanation of “social facts” that can do without any interpretation of individual motivations. Paradoxically, Weber’s emphasis on understanding does not translate into a rejection of explanation (by causes or rules governing experience), as supposedly promoted by sociological positivism. On the contrary, Weber seeks to adopt a model of explanatory understanding or interpretive explanation to make sense particularly of socio-historical transformations. By constructing “unreal pasts” (through imagining a course of action that might have turned out differently), Weber seeks both to discover the adequate causes (such as the Protestant ethic) without which, among other causes, the spirit of capitalism would not have seen the light of day. The historical imagination and construction of alternative historical plots, because they are based on an explanatory method and the rules of experience, set aside the unlikely results of the “neighborhood crazy.”

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Weber’s solution, which converges at this point on Droysen and Simmel, in opening a way toward explanatory understanding, allows the social sciences and the human sciences to converge, although we still have to consider the borderline between sociology and history. In fact, these two disciplines tend to fuse in Weber’s work, even in its more empirical dimension. This is not by chance if we take him to be one of the founders of socio-history in which historical facts are dealt with sociologically and, correlatively, sociological facts are given a historical perspective. This quasi-assimilation of sociology and history is due to the fact that the privileged reality is made up of enduring fixed expressions. It is in this sense that sociologists, if they are to make sense of contemporary reality, must also be historians. On this condition, socio-history can legitimately receive a graft of the hermeneutic paradigm. The problem that then needs to be considered is whether the object of the social sciences, and of sociology in particular, can be reduced to such enduring fixed expressions. In other words, does socio-history cover the whole domain of the supposed objects of the social sciences? May we not conceive, a contrario, a social reality that would be irreducible to anything like a quasi-text? One of the most promising contemporary attempts to transfer the hermeneutic paradigm to the social sciences again comes from Ricoeur. Unlike Weber, Ricoeur calls directly on the hermeneutic tradition to ground a valid explanatory understanding not only for history but equally for the social sciences in general. It is not a question of establishing a substantial identity between the “world of the text” and that of “action,” but of discovering an analogical relation between them: “To what extent,” he asks, “may we consider the notion of text as a good paradigm for the so-called object of the social sciences? To what extent may we use the methodology of text interpretation as a paradigm for interpretation in general in the field of the human sciences?” 67 The methodological transfer requires the application of four criteria, taken from the theory of the text, to the paradigm of action. The first two— fixation and autonomization—have to be taken together. Just as interlocutory discourse undergoes a transformation in being written down, interactions undergo an analogous modification in being fixed in the form of stable institutions. “In the same way as the fixation by writing is made possible by a dialectic of intentional exteriorizations immanent in the speech act itself, a similar dialectic without the process of transaction prepares the detachment of the meaning of the action from the event of the action.” 68 The autonomization of action results directly from its being institutionalized as a text to be deciphered. Contrary to psychological hermeneutics, the meaning of this text must be analyzed independently of its author’s intentions, in terms of its internal structures and as refigured through the act of reading. 69 Transposed to the domain of action, this gain from textual hermeneutics allows another

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way of understanding how a social activity gets detached from its agent and develops autonomous effects. Action is a social phenomenon, “not only because it is done by several agents in such a way that the role of each of them cannot be distinguished from the role of the others, but also because our deeds escape us and have effects we did not intend.” 70 The other two criteria from textual hermeneutics follow from this. Just as a text can become emancipated from its historic conditions of production in developing its own “world,” the meaning of an action can surpass the pertinence of its original situation and “may be reenacted in new social contexts. Its importance is its lasting relevance and, in some cases, its onmitemporal relevance.” 71 Finally, meaningful action must be considered by analogy as an “open work.” Just as a text can address an infinite series of potential readers, an action or event, through the process of decontextualization and recontextualization, is open to new interpretation regarding its meaning, its horizon of expectation, and new practical appropriations. The autonomization of action as instituted meaning, analogous to the fixation of discourse through writing, makes possible its explanation in both a structural and a causal sense, just as we can explain the internal connections of a system of action in terms of its propositional and illocutionary structures (verbs of action, predicates of action, ideal types of motivation, the rules constitutive of an action) and through its causes (rule-governed experience, acquired dispositions). Understanding can also apply to interpreting how a meaningful event becomes fixed as an institution and the way such fixed action, in return, can, as an open work, generate new appropriations against the horizon of new pertinent contexts. By starting directly from textual hermeneutics, Ricoeur in this way contributes to renewing the foundations of explanatory understanding as adapted to the social sciences. Following in the footsteps of Ricoeur’s textual hermeneutics, we see a profound mutation of anthropology in the work of Clifford Geertz. 72 This paradigm allows another way of understanding cultural realities (like the ritual of cock fighting in Bali), that is, as like a text made up of different copresent levels of meaning. Before the anthropologist puts their observations into writing, the cultural reality they observe presents itself as like an autonomous discourse including structures analogous to those of a text: “our double task is to uncover conceptual structures that inform our subjects’ acts, the ‘said’ of social discourse, and to construct a system of analysis in whose terms what is generic to those structures, what belongs to them because they are what they are, will stand out against the other determinants of human behavior.” 73 Does this model of action, fixed like a text, make sense of every manifestation of the meaning of social and cultural reality and correlatively of all the methods used in the social sciences? In fact, only the social reality that is capable of a lasting inscription like a written discourse can be the object of a

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social science. It is only insofar as social reality can be considered like a quasi-text that there can be something like a hermeneutic social science. The signs privileged by this model are certainly not limited to written ones but are always durably fixed ones. As with Weber, the borderline between sociology and history tends to disappear to function as a kind of socio-history. Ricoeur asks, Could we not say that history is itself the record of human action? History is this quasi “thing” on which human action leaves a “trace,” puts its mark. Hence the possibility of “archives.” Before the archives that are intentionally written down by the memorialists, there is the continuous process of “recording” human action which is history itself as the sum of “marks,” the fate of which escapes the control of individual actors. 74

The meaning of action, of course, is not entirely reducible, for this paradigm, to its inscription as a text to be deciphered. The criterion of human action as an “open work” permits assigning a dynamic to social meaning, beyond its fixed once and for all texture. Through the inter-play of interpretations and reinterpretations over generations the text of human action, like that of a work of literature, is capable of receiving new meanings and new pertinence. Therefore, there is an auto-interpretive social reality that gives a history to instituted social meanings. But it is always with regard to an already instituted social text that such an understanding of meaning may hope to see daylight. The hermeneutic model of meaningful action considered as a text is then well adapted to covering the field of durably inscribed social reality and founding a socio-history or cultural anthropology like Geertz’s, between the human and the social sciences. On the other hand, this model is largely unfitted for making sense of the meaning of action as it is happening, action that is productive of a meaning grasped as an event, even if an anthropological approach like Geertz’s does acknowledge the impact of the participant observer on the reality he is interpreting. It is as though, with the hermeneutic model drawn from text interpretation, it is not possible to scientifically understand action as it occurs in a situation. It is as though such action, like a the saying of a speech act, is the real epistemological obstacle to understanding the meaning of social reality: “In living speech, the instance of dicourse has the character of a fleeting event. The event appears and disappears. This is why there is a problem of fixation, of inscription. What we want to fix is what disappears.” 75 It is the salience of the model of the text that prevents a sociological investigation of social meaning as it happens and disappears. We meet the same problematic restriction on the interpretation of signs to fixed expressions in the trajectory leading to a hermeneutics of natural reality. Ricoeur, like Dilthey before him, contributes to setting outside the field of hermeneu-

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tics those signs that do not have the character of inscription. This is why ancient medical hermeneutics, in seeking to decipher symptoms in their fugacity, was not able to find a place in modern hermeneutics with its emphasis on textuality. In this sense, this type of hermeneutics remains a real obstacle when it comes to interpreting natural and social signs considered as situated events. It is why, in the passage just quoted, Ricoeur speaks of a “problem of fixation, of inscription.” There is a “problem” because understanding is limited to inscribed signs, like those in writing. Like his predecessors, Ricoeur does not consider the possibility of a hermeneutics adapted to social meaning grasped on the fly or through its indexicality. This is the sense of the objection Louis Quéré addresses to the model of a textual hermeneutics, which is unable to consider whether action as it unfolds, that is, as a quasi-autonomous object available for understanding by means of interpretation and hence as removed from any analysis of this action as completed by the actors who make it happen, within the framework of an interaction they bring about jointly on the basis of their interpretations of each other’s words and acts. 76

What is considered to be an epistemological obstacle from the point of view of the textual provenance of the paradigm for the social sciences can, on the contrary, be the object of actual sociological investigation, on the condition of leaving behind the, methodological, snare of a socio-history and, ontologically, of a social reality being considered as a quasi-text. On what conditions then is a social science of action as it is happening possible? On the condition of privileging the saying over the said of action, the condition of referring to speech acts and acts as they are occurring, in that they are self-referential, the condition of placing the focus on the event meaning of the action before its eventual fixation as a quasi-text, the condition of considering the action in its indexical dimension (here and now). Only a different paradigm for the social sciences, one irreducible to sociohistory, has the methodological tools capable of accounting for this other meaningful social reality. This is the case with the different versions of socio-phenomenology, pragmatism, interactionism, and ethnomethodology, which privilege not archived action but indexicalized action. Is it not by these indexical manifestations of human action that the sociologist clearly demarcates their work from that of the historian? We have to recognize the abyss that separates a hermeneutics based on the fixation of discourse from a pragmatics of ordinary language that has led to the analysis of conversations initiated by Goffman’s sociology of “face-toface” interaction and to Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology and, above all, to the work of Harvey Sacks. 77 Both banal in its ordinary forms and highly complex owing to the rules governing its functioning, (verbal or non-verbal)

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conversation, which involves several interlocuters in different situations, cannot be analyzed without taking into account the meaning contexts in which it occurs. This analysis takes into account the way in which the social organization of verbal interactions is always co-constructed by and maintained between its interlocutors. Procedures are brought to light through which the persons involved guide their verbal and non-verbal exchanges in routine ways—a whole span of reality not available to the text-based hermeneutics of action. Hence the importance for sociologists to be able to observe conversations as they happen in the situations where they happen. 78 This change of focus on social reality correlatively implies a change in the choice of materials and methods. The empirical material privileged by the hermeneutic model coming from the theory of text interpretation and sociohistory (a fortiori when it deals with the long time span) are constituted by the forms of durably fixed expressions (archives, monuments, documents, material remains). In contrast to this, the materials privileged by pragmatist and ethnomethodological models are drawn directly from ethnographic methods, from observations made in the situation of different social interactions. It was in this way that ethnology, in its ethnographic variant, contributed to renewing in depth the method used in the social sciences. Ethnography, owing to the emphasis placed on live action and the observer’s presence, remains, as we shall see, rebellious to any integrating of the social sciences into a hermeneutics drawing on a text-based analysis of human action. ETHNOGRAPHY AND INTERPRETIVE DESCRIPTION Can hermeneutics find a way to make sense of social reality as it happens? If so, we have to imagine a model of interpretation irreducible to the model of the text. The principal currents of the social sciences, notably those issuing from the Chicago School, which seize on the indexical reality of the social are largely alien to the hermeneutic tradition. It was (socio-)phenomenological and pragmatist sources that directly inspired methodological tendencies centered on the social situation rather than on social structures or forces. These new sociologies may appear even more resistant to a hermeneutic approach in that they are more interested, at least when it comes to ethnomethodology, in the natural attitude, in routine, everyday life, in the dynamics through which social processes conserve themselves than in social experience marked by a changed meaning. 79 This auto-comprehensive dimension is certainly central for a methodological approach that seeks to describe the operations through which a social world maintains itself and makes sense for its members, and that seeks to identify its procedures for producing intelligibility and practical reasons. If

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ethnomethodology pays small attention, apart from the special cases like Agnes, to problematic situations of social experience (where interpretation in the strong sense is required), 80 it does so because it assumes a relatively immediate accommodation to the circumstances of any action that creates satisfying mutual understanding, “in the sense that it allows continuing the action without either partner feeling the need to explicitly confirm such an understanding exists.” 81 It is this sense that interpretation—for the “objective” model—has nothing to do with a subjective or inter-subjective act that might allow removing the problematicity concerning the social meaning of a situation. Everything takes place as if interpretation takes place without any interpreting subjects and without any testing of what is meant. This sociological perspective is, to say the least, disconcerting if one wants to distinguish, as we do, immediate understanding and mediate interpretation. In fact, the “objective interpretation” inherent in social life as it takes place has more to do with understanding than with interpreting in that the partners do not experience any misunderstandings about what the situation means, or about what they are doing, or about what others are doing. Ethnomethodology does allow recognizing the constitutive part of meaningful social activity. This is what Louis Quéré, building on Garfinkel, speaks about as “fundamental hermeneutic situation” to indicate that the rationality of the meaning of an action takes place locally (here and now in the interaction), and further to indicate that the meaning of social rationality is always public (and not something hidden). In other words, “the joint organization of an intelligible interaction implies that the meaning is co-constructed and therefore mutually observable, accessible, and stateable.” 82 In reality, the hermeneutic situation appears as such when the co-construction of social meaning and the mutually observable meaning do not go together, when the localized applied meaning is submitted to a test of its problematicity. The American pragmatists (with Mead and Dewey leading them), as we saw in part I, are better equipped than is ethnomethodology to describe such experiences of social misunderstanding, when the usual and routine ways of behaving are thrown off track by events or perturbations or reversals of meaning. It is in this strong sense that we can recognize not just the auto-interpretive component of social interactions but also the auto-interpretive component of a social reality that has lost its familiarity. Then it is necessary to think together the problematization of the natural attitude and its preservation. This implies engaging in inquiry that is founded on a problematicity that steps away from the “natural world,” because it questions the evident meanings predominant there, rattles its certainty, questions the taken-for-granted values, etc. But, by the same token, it also calls for recognizing that every endogenous production

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Should we then conclude that there exist two irreconcilable social realities? On the one side, that of already accomplished action that has become like a text, the side of durably fixed expressions (as privileged by sociohistory); on the other, action as a meaningful event, action that is still happening (as privileged by ethnomethodology). Two social realities and in the end, two hermeneutics: that of a co-construction of meaning indexicalized here and now and that of meaning sedimented as a trace and tradition. The two social realities no doubt do call for different methods of investigation but cannot really be thought apart from each other. This is our hypothesis. On the one hand, a hermeneutic with a text-based or socio-historical provenance is required to interpret the configurations of meaning of an instituted and autonomized social order, like a quasi-text that must be deciphered. On the other hand, the social order is never definitively fixed following predetermined rules: the world of action, with its gaps, its deviations, its transformations, reconfigures itself in every interaction in daily life. This continuous renegotiation of the social order demands another method of investigation (an ethnographic one) than that required for analyzing already accomplished actions. The co-construction of indexicalized action is never fully accomplished without the fixed meanings of the actions carried out by its predecessors. There is always a tradition of meaning and enduring fixed expressions in the background of social meaning being constructed in situ. This does not mean that the problematized social meaning of some situation will be the mechanical reflection of the socio-historical shadows of meaning deposited like an archi-text. What needs to be brought to light is a less radical approach than that of ethnomethodology: the crucial, irreducible gap between rules and actions that make use of them (how a rule works in a particular situation), or the hiatus between the part determined by institutions (a logical determination that closes off and opens up formal possibilities), which prescribe gestures, actions, and words in one way rather than another if one wants to accomplish something, and the concrete order that must be produced in order to organize a course of intelligible action that actualizes some instituted practice. 84

These gaps in meaning generated by action as it is occurring can in return generate a transformation in the social meaning deposited as a quasi-text. Is this not the way we can conceive of action as an “open work”? This opening

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is only possible because the quasi-text of lasting fixed social expressions as institutions is not an inert deposit but a reservoir of meaning capable of varying appropriations and interpretations as a function of actual situations and interactions, as many localized variations of social meaning that figure and reconfigure differently the texture of social institutions and contribute in so doing to giving them a history. Does this recognition of a “fundamental hermeneutic situation” imply, as we might think, a hermeneutic method for rendering it objective? In other words, does the auto-interpretive dimension of social reality call for a sociological approach that is itself interpretive to grasp it? If we look at certain upholders of ethnomethodology, the answer is clearly negative. Louis Quéré accepts just one hermeneutic level: social reality itself. Consequently, he refuses assigning an interpretive or explanatory methodological task to sociology: “This approach which makes interpretation the object of empirical investigation, by treating it as what empirically makes possible the organization of meaningful practical activities and the preservation of a given social order, internal to the structures of experience, is itself neither an interpretation nor an explanation.” 85 Recognizing a fundamental hermeneutic situation paradoxically turns into an anti-hermeneutics when it comes to method. The principal reason Quéré presents to justify this choice is that to attribute an interpretive task to the social sciences would come down to wanting to correct the actors’ own interpretations (by sociologists), which would mean setting aside the endogenous production of the co-construction of social meaning, which would mean calling on an external determination to explain behaviors. This is the principle we found at the bottom of ethnomethodological approach. “The sociologist must abandon his claim to possess privileged access to the truth, in whose name he is authorized to criticize or ‘deconstruct’ those descriptions of reality produced by the people he studies.” 86 What method, then, given these conditions, is prescribed for the social sciences to make sense of action as it unfolds? Essentially, a descriptive method, coming in part from the phenomenological tradition and from pragmatism, which is distinguished from interpretation based on the goal of understanding as much as from causal explanation. In other words, the ethnomethodologist, as Quéré conceives him, is not to see a surplus of meaning or to attribute external causes to the way in which members involved in some interaction co-construct the meaning of their social order. The sociologist is merely to describe, in the form of a report, what he observed. It is easy to understand the reasons that justify mistrust of a hermeneutic method that would possibly lead to the excesses of a constructive perspective or a deterministic perspective in the social sciences. This mistrust can be expressed in the following way: social agents, like the “cultural idiots” imagined by Garfinkel, do not literally know what they are doing, or at least are

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ignorant about the deep reasons that make them act and speak the way they do when they reproduce schemes of largely internalized forms of behavior. Thus it comes down to the sociologist to uncover the hidden meaning of such behavior, to inscribe them in underlying regularities or an unconscious structure. The adoption of a hermeneutic approach would mean, paradoxically, setting aside the “fundamental hermeneutic situation,” even if it finally appears to us to be less than fundamental when ethnomethodology shows the difficulty of making sense of how the problematicity of meaning is dealt with in ordinary social life, with its misunderstandings and odd moments. The paradox is that a hermeneutic method would not help make sense of the coconstruction of endogenous meaning in the social world. Only a purely descriptive method has the resources and the legitimacy for doing so. Recognition of the fundamental hermeneutic situation is a real acquisition of ethnomethodology. And we share Quéré’s reticence when it comes to the overuse of methodological constructivism in the social sciences. But we cannot subscribe to the idea that only a descriptive approach is justified when it comes to making sense of the auto-interpretive dimension of social reality, even when it is unfolding. The case for a descriptive turn to the social sciences, called for by Louis Quéré (in a text which today is an old one) and Albert Ogien, is based on ethnomethodology and various currents of philosophy, from phenomenology to pragmatism (Husserl, Peirce, James, Dewey, Wittgenstein). This case, however, is far from covering all the methodological principles claimed by ethnomethodology (and the same may be said for phenomenology), even among its founders. In Studies, Garfinkel takes from Karl Mannheim “the documentary method of interpretation.” 87 This method is based less on the phenomenological tradition of description than on the hermeneutic tradition from Schleiermacher to Dilthey (the method of understanding, interpretation, empathy). Garfinkel does not share in all these different methods of hermeneutics—far from it—but he does draw from them to fashion a methodological principle for sociology. He clearly speaks deliberately about description. Yet, from the start, he does so in terms of the documentary method to formulate what constitutes an interpretive description (thanks notably to assuming the hermeneutic circle in the analysis of the local indexicality of a situation that gets related to background social structures). If a pure description is impossible, for Garfinkel, the researcher is obliged to make a choice among different ways of interpretation and possible investigation, to determine the method to be used. It is perhaps more in the sociological analysis of life stories that this documentary method of interpretation is most obvious: “The documentary method is used whenever the investigator constructs a life history or a ‘natural history.’ The task of historicizing the person’s biography consists of using the documentary method to select and order past occurrences so as to furnish the present state of affairs its relevant past and prospects.” 88

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This is particularly manifest when Garfinkel presents his analysis of the case of Agnes. The sociologist offers an exercise in (scholarly) interpretation of an (ordinary) interpretation when he shows, through a technique of uncovering things how Agnes uses procedures meant to conceal certain information (from her doctors, her friends, the sociologist): “Prominently, she employed euphemism—making the thing she was talking about out to be a vastly better, more valuable, nicer, more pleasant thing than it could realistically have been.” 89 To warrant this assertion, Garfinkel does not just present a report of what Agnes says. He interprets what she says (without over-interpreting it), taking into account what he already knows about her, her life, her history, the circumstances in which she could have said what she did say (without telling everything), what she is supposed habitually to say in ordinary interactions. It is not just a question of explaining Agnes’ words, but equally of uncovering them, as another passage demonstrates: “Also, as we have seen, the female character of her early history was exaggerated while evidences that she had been raised as a boy were suppressed.” 90 Without considering every such example, we do find a similar approach in one of the most creative of Garfinkel’s disciples. 91 Lawrence Wieder makes use of the documentary method of interpretation, applying it not to the analysis of a life story like that of Agnes but to the “convict’s code” in a prison as an ethnographic observation (like what Goffman did about the Saint Elizabeth hospital in Washington). If Wieder calls this a description of the convict’s code, it is not meant to oppose it to interpretation so much as to a posterioi explanations meant to add to or, worse, correct how the prisoners talk about this code, reminding them about it, and justifying and sanctioning the behavior of other prisoners who do not follow it. Like with Garfinkel, we are dealing here with an interpretive description that is far distant from the principle of a pure description. This interpretive description, drawing on Mannheim, is called a respecification by Wieder. He can “respecify” the version of the code he was able to listen to during his visit to the prison only as a function of a background plan he himself constructed using other manifestations of a convict’s code (using a typical understanding of the hermeneutic circle). Nonetheless, this operation was only possible because it was done by a participant observer, not by a disengaged spectator. What is important about Wieder’s approach, which is similar to that of this teacher, Garfinkel, is that the use of description is interpretive. Respecification takes place through making explicit the prisoners’ words and practices. So we ought not to simply oppose description and interpretation but rather description and two modes of interpretation: a corrective interpretation and a respecifying one, as two versions of the documentary method of inter-

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pretation. The following passage is a good illustration of this in that Wieder reviews a whole series of codes, including one with the following form: Do not cop out.—That is, do not admit that you have done something illegal or illegitimate. Someone who turned himself in willingly would be regarded as strange, “not like us,” dumb, and probably not trustworthy, because to “cop out” was a form of defecting to the other side. To turn oneself in could be viewed as a form of defection, because it implied agreement with the standards that one had violated. To turn oneself in to a parole agent when one was about to be caught anyway or when one was “tired of running” and likely to get caught by the police, however, was not talked about as “copping out.” 92

Beyond the ethnomethodological practice of Garfinkel and Wieder, we can assert the following: first, the interpretative methods used in the social sciences are not all of a nature to lay an artificial meaning or external causes on auto-interpretive social practices. This is the case when it comes to explication as well as to contextualization when it is meant to expand our understanding of the interactive construction of social meaning or to reduce it to a pre-determined meaning for which the sociologist holds the key in his study. For example, we find such an approach in the sociology of Boltanski and Thévenot when they seek not to explain the principles of justice implicit to appeals to a logic of justification in disputes but to make them explicit. 93 If we can legitimately oppose the idea that the sociologist would possess a truth seen from on high, we cannot simply pre-judge in advance the transparency of meaningful activities in everyday social life. An interpretive approach in the social sciences, on the condition of being used carefully, can clearly contribute to removing some of the opacity in human behavior, as Garfinkel shows in his interpretation of the story of Agnes and Wieder does in respecifying the convict’s code. To give up the idea of the best interpretation, as we have seen with Apel, does not mean giving up the idea of proposing a better one, even if it will continue to be discussed or even may be refuted, if it adds something through the use of good argumentative procedures. To the degree that social meaning is never plainly given indexically, in that social meaning is always localized in relation to a universe of meaning already deposited in enduring expressions, we cannot set interpretation aside if we are going to make sense of the gaps between the social as a quasi-text and as a situated performance. Second, description, when it is part of an ethnographic approach, assuredly constitutes a valuable method for making sense of the immediate autocomprehending of social life when it is submitted to tests of its validity. But this does not come down to saying that a pure description of social reality, as of any or all reality, is possible. To call for a pure description comes down paradoxically to embracing a form of positivism and the possibility of absolute observation. It would be as though the positivist or behaviorist ethnogra-

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pher were not situated anywhere. There is no pure description any more than there is a completely neutral observation because the sociologist occupies an indexical position on the map of time, space, the social, and history, because the sociologist has a body and a life history, and because they always perceive a social situation from a particular point of view. The behaviorist or positivist ethnographer denies to the sociologist what they grant to the social life of ordinary individuals, as though they did not belong to the genus homo interpretans, as though they were not understood or pre-understood through what is sought to study. The ethnomethodologist, in other words, cannot assume the privileged position of a purely disinterested observer. Like those submitted to the kinds of problematicity of meaning in everyday life, they draw on ethnointerpretations in contextualizing social complex meanings using deictic forms (here, now, I, you, this, that) and in analyzing sequences of action. Moreover, as Habermas points out, “the social scientific interpreter must in principle orient himself to the same validity claims to which those immediately involved also orient themselves.” 94 The report prepared about a social situation is no more neutral than the observations it is based on in that it is always the product of an interaction between the here and now position of the sociologist and the social world they are observing. Observation is always a form of implication. What is valid, as we have seen, for quantum physics, which has integrated a hermeneutic paradigm to interpret a material reality that is a process that interacts with the observer, is also valid for the social sciences when the observed reality is modified by the observer’s presence. In this sense, if there can be a description, it is never pure and always includes as a result a varying dose of interpretation. Description is all the more impure in that the observed reality is itself subject to a problematic meaning. Just as ordinary social life can include all sorts of strangeness and equivocity, the reality observed by the sociologist can lead to misunderstanding. A pure description would presuppose that one could immediately understand the meaning of what is happening in any social reality as it unfolds, that the sociologist need not choose the meaning of an event or of the elements of the social life they are trying to make sense of. By definition, the same reality is infinitely describable depending on the details granted it, the actors, their actions and interactions chosen to mean more than others (all this as a function of the observer’s own position). The variations in scale of the social world, 95 like those of a situation analyzed to its smallest details, are, we may say, the sociologist’s methodological choices, which are not neutral and which directly influence the reality that one claims to describe and already interprets. Methodological interpretation is further required in that social and cultural reality is made up of layers of meaning some of which are fundamentally

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plurivocal. They are so for ordinary human beings as much as for the sociologist. In this regard, we can make use of the distinction inherited from Gilbert Ryle and taken up, in a critical manner, by Clifford Geertz, between thick and thin description. 96 Thin description is supposed to cover what is observable independently of all other contextual information, whereas thick description presupposes taking into consideration a whole series of contextual elements in order to grasp a meaning. In Ryle’s well-known example, only the particular context allows discriminating the meaning of a wink (eye tick, fake, connivance). Thinness finally refers to a meaningful reality where things go as they should, without any problematicity regarding the sign. Thickness, on the contrary, refers to social tests of reality when it has lost its meaning. Thick description thus indicates an interpretive description that seeks to remove doubt about meaning by contextualizing it, even if it can always still be subject to the conflict of interpretations. Geertz, in this sense, takes up Ricoeur’s concept of inscription (as a judicious contraction of description and interpretation) to demonstrate that there are scales of interpretive thickness to the reality being described as a function of the depth of meaningful layers considered. Justification of a thick or interpretive description runs up against the methodological imperative for an initial description of brute, immediate reality like that called for by positivist anthropology. If there are degrees of thinness or thickness of reality, thin description, which is finally the watch word of a non-interpretive ethnology, must postulate an observation without a point of view: “Thin” description is haunted by the ghost of the behavioristically observable but Clifford Geertz is well aware that one cannot assimilate experimental observation of behavior to the point of view of a camera or other photographic device, which is blind, and has no cameraman or photographer, in other words, no protocols governing observation. The danger would be, above all, to encourage, in contrast to this, the opposite meaning of a “thick” description that would seek to break through the surface of things to wallow in the unfathomable depths of subjectivity. 97

The behaviorist ghost that haunts a non-interpretive ethnography also passes over in silence the operation of writing up the observed experiment, this being a simple transfer from the latter to the former. Writing down (the gaze posited here on a reality in a scientific prose there, drawing on notes taken at the time) is always an operation of configuration and translation (a fortiori when the ethnographer is working in a foreign land, in a foreign language) that transforms the first experience: 98 The point for now is only that ethnography is thick description. What the ethnographer is in fact faced with—except when (as, of course, he must do) he

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is pursuing the more automatized routines of data collection—is a multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into one another, which are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit, and which he must contrive somehow first to grasp and then to render. And this is true at the most down-to-earth, jungle field work levels of his activity: interviewing informants, observing rituals, eliciting kin terms, tracing property lines, censusing households . . . writing his journal. Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of “construct a reading of”) a manuscript—foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behavior. 99

Dan Sperber, 100 in a line close to Geertz, challenges in a noteworthy way the descriptive postulate of ethnography. Drawing on the study of sacrifice among the Nuer carried out by E. E. Evans-Pritchard 101 (one of the anthropologists who, with Radcliffe-Brown, 102 was most inclined to found ethnographic method on the descriptive and explanatory principles of the natural sciences), Sperber brings to light the interpretive procedures nesting in an ethnographic discourse that presents itself as being descriptive. For one thing, the choice of terms by which the ethnographer claims to describe brute reality or report what the natives say, far from being neutral, already testify to an interpretation. For example, the Nuer have several terms to designate the ritual slaughter of an animal. Evans-Pritchard privileges “sacrifice” just as he privileges a whole lexical field found in anthropology that testify to a surplus of meaning regarding what is at issue in the research undertaken. The very translation of indigenous terms into the ethnographer’s language is already an interpretation. The problem is increased when there is really not a translation for a term in the interpreter’s language. Then one must choose a term or expression that approximates it (Evans-Pritchard translates the Nuer Kuk by the English “ransom” where French would say “atonement” [rachat]) or opt for a term that moves beyond its ordinary meaning. These are all procedures that testify to an intervention by the ethnographer in what has to be understood. For another, the procedure that consists in reporting the native’s words indirectly, a procedure that apparently is more faithful to what was actually said, subtlety introduces an interpretation. Sperber shows here how the ethnographer’s indirect style often turns to summaries (without the original words being transcribed at length), or it does not repeat the original words, and it is generally accompanied by glosses and commentaries that are not acknowledged. Finally, the ethnographer is not content to passively register the facts unfolded before their eyes that constitute a “sacrifice.” The ethnographer tries to understand what is happening as a mixture of the familiar and the foreign, using fields of meaning held to be equivalent between what are taken

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to be two similar cultures, their own, or those operative in the observed culture: “he chews over what he has heard and seen, he tries to imagine what sacrificing means, what state of mind it requires, what mood might provoke it. . . . The ethnographer’s work consists in assembling and producing mediating representations.” 103 These arguments for a thin description in ethnography no doubt remain illusory. How then, though, are we to make a place for something between rigorous, rule-governed interpretations and eccentric ones? The problem arises even more in that a cultural anthropology like Geertz’s can clearly lead to a form of relativism. This is the case when he affirms that anthropologists really only add new texts, new fictions to the quasi-text that constitutes social and cultural reality. If the anthropologist finally only produces fictions, what becomes of the ethnographer’s scientific vocation? Without going as far as having to talk about fiction, in the ethnological discipline, we do find interpretive ways of deforming the observed reality. This is the case with what is customarily called “Frazer’s error” since Wittgenstein’s comments on the Scotch anthropologist and The Golden Bough have become known. 104 The error in question consists in attributing an error to the object of inquiry that really was committed by the inquirer. This methodological error consists, in short, in wanting to correct ways of being, conceptions of the world, others’ practices rather than seeking to understand them. It is a typical attitude of ethnocentrism or socio-centrism that we also find in Lévy-Bruhl when he interprets the mentality of primitives as prelogical (which comes down to considering only the “civilized” as being endowed with rationality in the plain and full sense). 105 It was largely owing to these “errors” meant to be “corrective interpretation” that led a whole gamut of positivist ethnology to call for a “thin” description and correlatively to distrust interpretive anthropology. We need to acknowledge our awkward position here. On the one hand, the imperative for a thin or pure description, claimed by Ryle and his disciples, seems out of reach to us for the reasons we have given. There is no brute reality. Every reality, as Ricoeur and Geertz as well as Schutz and Habermas remind us, is symbolically mediated and therefore demands, in differing degrees, depending on the layers of meaning, the layers of societal or cultural strangeness, to be interpreted. To call for a thin description comes down to turning the social sciences into experimental sciences for which the observer would be situated in a position of radical exteriority over against their object. But, if the “objects” of the social sciences are already symbolically pre-structured on the basis of intermixed layers of meaning, the researcher, if they are to understand and interpret a social world, has no other choice than to participate in it in one way or another: “Symbolically prestructured reality forms a universe that is hermetically sealed to the view of observers incapable of communicating.” 106 The ways an ethnographer can

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participate in their area of research may vary depending on a scale that runs from a relatively passive and distanced participation (looking from their “corner” at what happens in a post office without taking part in those interactions) to a plainly active participation in the image of the ethnologist who engages body and soul for several months, if not years, in the day-to-day life of a social group. In this latter case, we need to agree with Habermas that the researcher does so only “for the sake of understanding and not for the sake of an end that requires the goal-oriented action of the interpreter with the goaloriented actions of those immediately involved.” 107 In the case of daily life shared with those being studied, “the actions with which the interpreter tries, more or less inconspicuously, to enter into the given context have only the auxiliary function of assisting participation in the process of reaching understanding.” 108 Habermas certainly is correct in saying that the researcher’s goal is above all understanding, but this does not prevent those studied in return from seeking to “understand” the researcher’s motivations, aspirations, and intentions. The researcher has no other choice than to participate fully and directly, not discretely, in those processes that coordinate the actions of the members of a target group. This is why the ethnographer must finally assume, as the anthropologist Alban Bensa says, committing subjectivity to the search for objectivity “inasmuch as it is in acting like another that one understands him.” 109 In other words, we expect from the ethnographer, when they are in the field for a long time, a split attitude toward it. We expect full participation in concrete interactions and a reflexive, comprehending suspension vis-à-vis what they are observing, knowing that the observed territory, from being a brute reality, is modified by their very presence there. 110 In all these cases, interpretation is called for all the more in that the ethnographer will be dealing with foreign universes of meaning, ones radically foreign to their own, and not just with “exotic” societies. On the other hand, we must oppose the principle that the ethnographer should correct the interpretations of the indigenous people. In this case we have to deal with what Habermas calls a “rational interpretation” when the observer claims an evaluative competence better than the other person can call on: We have to believe ourselves capable, if need be of criticizing as self-deception—on the basis of certain indicators—an expressive utterance that the actor himself performs with a claim to sincerity; while within the limits of the dramaturgical model of action, the actor would not be in a position to defend himself against our rational interpretation. 111

This then is not the only valid attitude in a “descriptive interpretation” (or interpretive description), which rests, according to Habermas, on a reinterpretation of what the actor takes to be rational in following a recognized

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norm as legitimate. What is essential has to do the ethnographer’s initial attitude, which must be one of understanding what is going on, as Cyril Lemieux demonstrates. 112 This does not forbid the ethnographer from speaking out or being critical when common sense interpretations or those found in the media or offered by politicians, laden with prejudices and discrimination, bear directly on basic moral principles, but he then so to speak changes hats. Is a “rational interpretation” not justified here? But it is difficult to see that this would be the case for the Nuer or the Kanaks, who would quickly accuse the ethnographer, and rightly so, of ethnocentrism. We would like to imagine things would be different if the researcher were studying members of the National Front. But the researcher’s job is not to correct or judge as an ethnographer what people say when the researcher is studying them, even when they go against their own values. Nothing prevents their making use of what Kant calls a “public use of reason,” when the researcher takes up their pen, or appears in the media or at a political or scientific gathering, were they to denounce racist remarks they have heard or to question the Front National’s strategy of demonization or the threat that such a political party may pose to democracy. In this case, rational interpretation seems perfectly justified. The scientific risk, however, is for the sociologist to apply it to their area of research having “corrected,” in both senses of the word, the rhetorical strategy of the Front National. Beyond the question of the legitimacy of the ethnographer or sociologist’s critical power, the whole question of interpretation still remains. If we expect an ethnography to get as close to possible to the field studied, that it set aside as much as possible any ethnocentric prejudices on the ethnographer’s part, it will never be a “thin, flat, literal” description like that called for by Lemieux, following Ryle, even when not defined in naturalistic terms. Descriptive interpretation in Habermas’s sense is really a “reinterpretation.” The distinction Lemieux proposes between a “thin description of ceremonies, engagements, and lay offs and, on the other hand, a thick description in terms of male initiation rituals,” 113 remains problematic. The ceremonies or procedures used when laying people off are not brute facts, but inscribed in social, cultural, and historic contexts and mediated by all sorts of grammars and symbols that require a whole palette of interpretations. In this sense it seems pertinent to make a distinction between an interpretive description, which is thick but meant to be objective, and a corrective interpretation, which is thick but falls to the side of subjectivism and its avatars (ethnocentrism, socio-centrism). To speak of a claim to objectivity of an interpretive description does not mean that there can be an objective interpretation only at the cost of falling again into the impasses of positivism and behaviorism. Proof is all the more difficult in the case of ethnography as soon as, unlike with socio-history, the reality to be interpreted is localized. Even though the historian is not a witness of what they interpret, unlike the

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ethnographer, they do have the advantage of working with enduring fixed expressions that can be the object of verification, criticism, and rival readings by their peers. Unless the ethnographer works in a team at the same time in the field, they alone are the guarantor of the veracity of their observations. The reality alleged by the ethnographer rests on a kind of implicit pact of attestation with the reader and peers. The confidence one grants the ethnographer is that the described reality (in a narrative, a field report, an article) is indeed what was observed in the given circumstances, using all the interpretive procedures available (contextualization, translation, explanation, field notes). The results of research will necessarily be different, to a varying degree, if another study of the same terrain were to be carried out by another ethnographer, the reality having changed as would have the ethnographic point of view. The constitution of areas of specialization within the same field of research, the fact that a social and cultural reality, even one subject to change and upheavals, is made up of enduring configurations makes possible, despite all this, not a mode of verification analogous to that found in the natural sciences, but at least the possibility of critical discussion, of the evaluation of observations and results and their critique by peers. It is in this sense that there can be a claim to objectivity for ethnography distinguished from sheer fiction. It is in this sense that there can be a claim to valid interpretations in ethnography distinguished from claims to validity in communicative action as it occurs in ordinary interactions. For instance, interpretive description can come from what we have called an amplifying interpretation, which consists in enriching new perspectives on the same object by modifying the point of view assumed (the researcher’s indexical position), by varying the palette of mental schemes, by making use of imaginative variations, by submitting to argumentative discussion the givens and the interpretations offered, by multiplying the field trips (as in longitudinal studies). Placed under the auspices of amplifying interpretation, thick description in ethnography remains checked. Its claim to objectivity, which is a claim, under these conditions is far from a corrective or ethnocentric interpretation and clearly inscribed among the social sciences, not a fiction. Because it takes as its target an occurring reality, ethnography allows for a new extending of the hermeneutic paradigm. The reality to be interpreted is not one that can be assimilated to a quasi-text or enduring fixed expressions, but to an indexicalized reality that happens in the encounter between a researcher and his informant. Certainly, the occurring reality is always inscribed among already accomplished actions of our predecessors that hold as institutions of meaning. But it is at the price of a kind of relative model of the text that action can become meaningful and the object of a situated interpretation. This is why ethnography is interpretive twice over, owing to the fact of recognizing reality and action as it is happening as auto-comprehensive and the fact of having to make recourse to thick description to make sense of this.

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This Janus face of the act of interpreting applied to the field of ethnography or sociology can be found in a passage well worth quoting (relative to the documentary method of interpretation) in Garfinkel’s Studies: The method is recognizable for the everyday necessities of recognizing what a person is “talking about” given that he does not say exactly what he means, or in recognizing such common occurrences and objects as mailmen, friendly gestures, and promises. It is recognizable as well in deciding such sociologically analyzed occurrence of events as Goffman’s strategies for the management of impressions, Erickson’s identity crises, Riesman’s types of conformity, Parsons’[s] value systems, Malinowski’s magical practices, Bale’s interaction counts, Merton’s types of deviance, Lazarsfeld’s latent structure of attitudes, and the U.S. Census’ occupational categories. 114

At the start of this passage, the documentary method of interpretation is clearly assimilated to ordinary methods of interpretation placed under the aegis of ethnointerpretations (contextualization, explication, clarification). In a second moment, the documentary method of interpretation refers directly to more scholarly interpretations (sociological ones in this case) that can make use of the same procedures but do so on the condition of turning them into deliberate, scientific interpretations. In other words, these scientific interpretations are derived and detached from ordinary ones. ECONOMICS AND THE INTERPRETIVE TURN Are ethnography and cultural anthropology the final candidates for expanding the hermeneutic paradigm? This process, in fact, is applicable to every human science. When it comes to facts, they presuppose operations of translation, mediation, and conversion in order to satisfy the particularity of the science in question, as we have seen with psychology, history, sociology, and social and cultural anthropology. At first glance, economics seems more refractory to a hermeneutic graft even though it has a place among the social sciences. Apart from a few economists like Laurent Thévenot, influenced by Ricoeur, 115 it seems, at least in France, that hermeneutics has not really influenced the development of contemporary economics. If heterodox schools like the French School of Regulation or the “structuralism of passions” studied by Frédéric Lordon do exist, 116 the dominant tendency in economics, which is largely neoliberal, has been governed by two principal points of view. On the one hand, an individualistic anthropology that does not go beyond the idea of homo economicus as someone who seeks to maximize his pleasure and interests; on the other, a positivist epistemology in virtue of which the scientific status of economics must be based on the model of

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natural sciences. Whence the predominance of mathematicized models (econometry, the use of quantified and statistical techniques) that seem to separate economics from the human sciences. The ambition to attach economics to the formal and natural sciences means no place is left for interpretation or understanding. However, it was within the liberal, even ultra-liberal and libertarian current that beginning in the 1980s one saw the emergence of a dissident current of the Austrian school that asked about the pertinence of the hermeneutic paradigm to economics. Certainly, this is a minority current, but it is represented by figures of the Austrian school like Ludwig Lachmann, Don Lavoie, Richard Ebeling, and Tom Palmer, a group known as “hermeneutic Austrians.” Their ambition is to have economics undergo the interpretive turn that has affected the other social sciences in order to transform its anthropological and epistemological foundations. These dissidents have played the role of evangelists and mediators for better integrating the hermeneutic paradigm into economics. It is not insignificant that the philosophers most drawn on and cited to assure this transfer are Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Taylor. What is at stake is nothing less than whether economics should take the natural sciences as its ideal or if it should remain within the bosom of the social sciences. Their initiative has led to loud debates even within the renowned Ludwig von Mise Institute among the heirs of one of the most eminent founders of the Austrian school, von Mises (with David Gordon, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and Rothbard Murray being the strongest critics of attaching economics to hermeneutics). The project of the hermeneutic economists appears less surprising and finally less dissident than it might seem if we remember the close ties between von Mises and the phenomenological and hermeneutic tradition (through Weber, Husserl, and Dilthey), and if we recall the presence of Alfred Schutz within the Austrian school. 117 The hermeneutic economists appeal precisely to the epistemological heritage of Verstehen to challenge the vague desires of the positivist orthodoxy of the Austrian school. The hermeneutic graft can intervene on two levels, close to the duality of interpretation: on the one hand, at a meta-interpretive epistemological and methodological level; on the other, at a properly interpretive anthropological level, however little the economic actor gets taken as an inter-interpreting subject. Once again it is the model of the text from Gadamer and above all, from Ricoeur, that serves as a principal basis for a methodological and epistemological regrounding of economics. By analogy, one should understand the movement of prices, financial institutions, and industrial organizations, to cite just a few examples, as texts to be interpreted once these economic phenomena are assimilated to enduring fixed expressions. This project appears most clearly in the essay by Richard Ebeling in which he analyzes price formation. 118 He emphasizes that, until recently, the neoclassical model was

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limited to an explanation of the logic of prices (their role and function given the hypothesis of economic equilibrium), following a mathematical model. Choices are explained thanks to the formalization of invariant relations between competing goals: “Neoclassical economists in general begin their analysis with the individual human decision-maker. After all, only individuals evaluate, prefer, choose, and exchange. The explanatory schema, the analytical grid, that they use for coherence and universal applicability is the logic of choice.” 119 The consequence of the predominance of this model is the total occluding of the comprehensive dimension of prices, that is, the way in which economic actors interpret the conditions by which prices vary in a market, the way they must understand the intentions and meanings of other actors. In a general way, the neoclassical model disconnects the logic of choice and prices from the context of human action, that is, it considers individual choice as a pure abstraction. The problem therefore is to find an alternative model for understanding prices, in contrast to explaining them. This is what Ebeling finds the hermeneutic model proposed by Ricoeur throws light on. The very title of his contribution—what is a price?—directly echoes Ricoeur’s “What is a Text?” As a text is autonomous with regard to its author’s intentions and can be interpreted and appropriated by later generations of readers, in the case of a price, the desire of individuals to obtain goods and services from anonymous others also separated in time and space. And both texts and prices must be interpreted by those others to discern the meanings they contain. Furthermore, as Ricoeur has argued, once written, a text takes on an existence of its own now that is objectified and separated from its author. Market prices have a similar characteristic, since they represent the composite outcome of many interacting supplier and demander choices and since the unintended result of a multitude of actions are separate from the individual “authors” whose decision have generated those composite results. 120

The hermeneutic economist has to be attentive both to the inter-interpretive dimension at work between actors in setting prices and the dimension of rendering prices (following the model of the fixing of a text) autonomous and objective, whereby they end up detached from their actor’s initial intentions. As regards the first dimension, Ebeling demonstrates what we can draw from Schutz’s model of typifications as models of interpretive behavior. It is that the inter-interpretation among economic agents and the anticipations of others’ actions take place thanks to typified schemes. This is the reason why “prices of the market are indicators and not signals.” 121 The require interpretation as a function of interpretive schemes, as a function of circumstances and situations, and as a function of a “stock of social knowledge” accumulated by those involved.

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Taking this double interpretive dimension of price formation into account, along with paying attention to the social forms of actors’ choices and anticipations in the form of typifications clearly allows attaching economics to the hermeneutic paradigm and more generally to the human and social sciences, in opposition to the ideal of reducing economic phenomena to statistical aggregates and mathematical models. Referring to Hayek and von Mises, Ebeling proposes, therefore, that “the economist must now truly become a social scientist” and not a market physicist. If economic phenomena can be assimilated to social actions, economics must learn to draw on the methods and other disciplines of the human sciences: “Social action is by its nature interpretive action, and therefore its analyses require methods that have been developed in other social disciplines for understanding the processes through which individuals interpret one another’s meanings and actions.” 122 In his project to have economics move beyond positivism and the model drawn from the natural sciences, Ebeling ends up forgetting or overlooking the fact that Ricoeur’s hermeneutic model, which he claims as a new epistemological patron, is fundamentally dialectical. In other words, Ebeling, who finally is closer to Dilthey than Ricoeur, tends to sacrifice explanation for understanding, whereas Ricoeur seeks to place them in a dialectic relationship. The status of explanation in economics, therefore, still needs to be reconsidered. It is Gary B. Madison who has taken Ricoeur’s dialectic hermeneutics and applied it to economics. 123 He rightly recalls that the theory of text explication includes an explanatory component, which is the condition for getting beyond a psychological understanding of the author’s intentions. The autonomy of the text, for which Ebeling has not deduced all the consequences, assumes making use of explanatory (structural and semiotic) techniques to analyze its internal relations and formal structures. This explanatory moment only makes sense if it helps us to better understand the text. This is the principle of the hermeneutic arc. Madison’s approach is valuable in that it transposes this dialectic to the analysis of economic phenomena. This means economics, in assuming the hermeneutic paradigm, can also integrate explanatory segments such as its usual quantitative, nomological, and statistical models. What is at stake, and it is important to emphasize this (something Madison fails to do), is to change the explanatory matrix, which for Ricoeur remains dominated by structuralism (with its model of relations and correlations), whereas explanations in economics remain largely caught in the snare of an epistemology of cause and effect. The explanatory models used in economics can, in return, serve to enrich Ricoeur’s epistemology, which, as we have already stated, draws too fine a line between the human and natural sciences. We can, therefore, apply the principle of “explaining more in order to understand better” to economics if we expand the model of explanation beyond the structuralist paradigm, that is, if we import the explanatory models

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initially coming from the natural sciences. What is essential, and here we agree with Madison, is that explanation alone is not sufficient to ground economic methods. For example, to use an example cited by Madison, monetary theory, like that defended by Milton Friedman, explains money using a “mechanical theory”: price levels, meaning the rise of price levels, is mechanically explained by a proportional increase in the amount of paper money in circulation. Not that this explanation is false, but it turns out to be largely insufficient to analyze the phenomenon of inflation. It is necessary to also take into account anticipations, the interpretive structures used by agents, psychological factors like panic, mimetic desires; in short, a hermeneutic model must incorporate a broader range of explanations if it is not to miss the real phenomena at issue: “In economics one is never dealing with ‘brute facts.’ Statistics . . . are themselves interpretations. ‘Economic facts’ are interpretations on the part of the economist; they are interpretations of the actual behavior of a myriad of acting human beings which is itself interpretive.” 124 If we pursue the analogy with texts, economic actors must not be considered, according to Madison, as agents who react mechanistically to stimuli, but as “readers” of prices, opportunities, and relative costs. Madison also draws on Ricoeur’s analysis of narrative to show that human reality, including economic reality, only acquires its intelligibility when narrativized. We may indeed cover, using the ideal of the natural sciences, this reality by subsuming it under laws or statistics (the explanatory component). But in the final analysis, these same laws will be covered by a narrative structure that gives the maximum intelligibility to the phenomena in question. Using the principle of “explain more to understand better,” explanation has an intermediary place in the service of understanding, which remains the real goal. Not only does economic reality include, like all social reality, a narrative configuration, economics itself as a science has, at least from one perspective, a narrative face. This is what Donald McCloskey demonstrates in his contribution. 125 Where Ricoeur tends to reduce narrative to fictions and history texts, McCloskey extends it to include all the sciences, including the natural sciences, to assert that metaphors dominate in physical science and stories in biology. This is not meant to call into question the scientific status of their theories. Formalized, nomological models relate to the explanatory aspect while the metaphors and stories relate to the understanding dimension of science. Economics does not escape this rule. Economics is not only an econometry, but a group of texts presented as narratives. McCloskey illustrates his thesis by an article by Mises on the impossible circulation of economic goods in a socialist regime. In his article, Mises draws both on a formalized framework that explains and a narrative that understands the failure of planning in centralized economies. In a general way, “economists are tellers of stories” 126 and economics is a kind of social history.

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The importance of “Austrian hermeneutic thinkers” is not just that they envisage the hermeneutic graft on economics at an epistemological level in interrogating the way in which economists interpret prices, markets, and the behavior of actors, and how they make use of narrative. It is equally that they do so on an anthropological level by proposing an expansion, even a substantial reworking of the theory of the rational actor. Not that they call into question the idea of the rationality of economic actors, or even its sometime underlying utilitarianism, but that they seek to found economics on another basis than a behavioristic or individualistic one. It is a question, in other words, of integrating the symbolic, interpretive part in every form of economic rationality, by considering that economic reality, like all social reality, is auto-interpretive. Economic actors, if they have preferences, in making decisions and pursuing ends, never do so abstractly but always in contexts of real life, in an immediately meaningful to them world that they must understand and interpret when confronted by problematic situations: the problematicity of markets, the uncertainty that weighs on monetary and financial transactions, the misunderstanding of micro- and macro- economic factors, the intentions of other actors, their tricks, their presumed lies. All this requires more than a spontaneous adaptation to the economic environment. It requires an art of interpretation. As Tom Palmer puts it: “the world of the economic actor is a world of significance.” 127 Which is why the economist’s job does not come down to looking for correlations between data in order to test a theory: the economist must understand the phenomena of the social world in terms of the meaningful structures of that world. Palmer sees in Gadamer’s textual hermeneutics good ways for making sense of the auto-comprehensive component of the economic world. He is particularly interested in the model of a fusion of horizons between the world of a text and that of a reader seen as a dialogical structure in which persuasion plays a rhetorical role: “the market should be seen, then, not merely as a vast mechanism for the efficient exchange of information, as it is often considered by neoclassical economists, but as a forum for persuasion.” 128 In every interaction in a market, for example, that between sellers and buyers, there is always an underlying rhetorical structure which has, according to Palmer, “persuasive force.” For example, the buyers must be persuaded that the offered good is useful or will add to their pleasure. Beyond the particular figure of persuasion, the hermeneutic paradigm is of interest to these economists because it allows them to get beyond a strict methodological individualism that leads to a theory of “public choice.” It may seem surprising, but neoclassical economists mostly ignore, without speaking of it, the symbolic constitution of every market structure. This is the case for the Walrasian model of general equilibrium in which the relation between actors and goods (as the maximalization of utility) is more important than the relation between buyers and sellers:

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Even allowing for the fact that Walrasian equilibrium is an ideal-type in Weber’s sense of this term (not a faithful description of how the market concretely functions but a schematic drawing), sometimes normatively equated with an ideal model (to which the market must conform), it is the atomistic premises that go with this that are most challengeable. On the one hand, this model rests on a conception of substantial values in virtue of which goods have a value in themselves corresponding to their utility, leaving out the social and historical dimension leading to their formation. On the other, this model conceals the interpersonal, interactive, inter-interpretive part in the way economic actors always mutually affect each other through their choices and preferences (for example, in the form of mimetic desires). The critique of subjectivism and the primacy of the sovereignty of consciousness found in Gadamer, Ricoeur, or Taylor offers a good opportunity to introduce an inter-subjective model to economic anthropology. 130 The market is not made up of an aggregate of atomized individuals but of intersubjective and interactional configurations of actors who understand and interpret among themselves. “Understanding or ‘knowledge,’ hermeneutics maintains is always intersubjective. The implication of this for economics would be that the meaningful patterns of human action it studies are not to be made intelligible in terms merely of the action on the part of isolated individuals.” 131 That economics can define itself as a social science is because its “object” is not constituted by subjective meanings and isolated individuals, because, in other words, meaning resides in practices and mutual modes of actions and significant shared actions. Even when Ricoeur talks about a hermeneutics of the self or Taylor defines human beings as self-interpreting animals, there is no subjective bias here. Auto-interpretation is always mediated by language, by shared intersubjective meanings, anchored in communities of interpretation. Taylor’s hermeneutics moreover has economic implications for the way neoclassical theory, considered from the strict point of view of a homo œconomicus transparent to himself, ignores the social and intersubjective grounds of evaluations and choice about goods. Neoclassical theory is interested above all in considering procedures (alternatives, preferences, costs and gains) when it comes to evaluating goods. The philosophy of “goods” professed by Taylor allows taking into consideration this proceduralism and the utilitarianism that underlies neoclassical theory in that it ignores the diversity of goods, the different qualities of action, and of life styles:

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Taylor claims that much of human behavior is only explicable in terms of qualitative contrasts qualities. There are goods which are of ultimate importance, which make the most important demands. There is a plurality, a diversity of such goods. Decisions cannot be enacted on the basis of a single consideration procedure, for this cannot do justice to the diversity of goods. 132

There are, in other words, moral considerations which on the basis of shared meanings allow us to distinguish among “goods” that orient agents’ behavior. This is the case for “higher values” such as concern for the integrity of moral persons beyond a simple utilitarianism that does not permit us to distinguish among them when it comes to the calculations carried out by economic agents. The Austrian hermeneutic thinkers offer many valuable paths, largely still ignored by French theorists, to reground the bases of economics by leaving behind the dominant forms of positivism and methodological individualism. This audacious project can contribute to transferring hermeneutics to economics, on two levels, an epistemological level and an anthropological one. In other words, economics can become a social science that understands economic reality as itself auto-comprehensive. But there are still blind points that need to be pointed out in the attempt to reground the neoclassical model. For one thing, understanding and interpretation are not always clearly distinguished when it comes to their contribution. The fault is largely due to Gadamer and Ricoeur, for whom, as we have seen, interpretation tends to be confused with understanding. It is one thing (and a valuable one) to show that economic reality is a meaningful world and not a brute reality (whereby economics must become a social science based on understanding), something else to show that economic agents only become interpreters properly speaking when and if they are confronted with problematic situations. As with all social reality, the market has routine, typical behavioral phenomena (between buyers and sellers, producers and consumers) that do not necessarily require interpretation. In this case, immediate understanding and a spontaneous adaptation to the environment suffices to reproduce the immanent order of transactions (a consumer goes out every morning to buy their baguette at the same bakery without worrying about the price of bread). Configurations in which the reciprocal typifications of economic interaction do not go as they ought are something else again: monetary crises, market failures, uncertainty regarding investments, a fall in consumer confidence, a surplus in production, a change in providers. In short, any form of modification in the habitual universe of economic transactions and interactions. It is with the dawn of these atypical, troubling, confusing situations that inter-interpretation is truly put in question and that economic agents truly become homo interpretans. The fact that the market is a world of

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meanings does not suffice to make it an auto-interpretive reality, even if over time the market does present itself as an auto-comprehensive reality. On the other hand, if the Austrian hermeneutic economists did take the social dimension into account by drawing on social phenomenology and hermeneutics, it was regarding social forms of thinking, choice, and preference and those forms of inter-subjectivation found in any market, contrary to the individualistic dominant model of the neoclassical economists. This is a valuable contribution that reinforces that economics belongs to the social sciences, at least to a certain kind of social science, one more inspired by Weber and Schutz than by Durkheim. But there is a step that hermeneutic economists have not taken, or only very timidly: to consider the institutional and collective dimension of the market. Their model remains within the narrow limits of a hermeneutic phenomenology of sociology. But to speak of institutions means talking about an impersonal dimension, not one that is solely interpersonal, that presides over the formation of prices, values, and transactions. Talking about institutions also means talking, like Maus, about every sedimented social practice and more specifically organizations (as “positive institutions”) as authorities regulating competition, like central banks and governments. 133 Institutions are truly what is missing from the Austrians’ analyses. They make up, in contrast, the object given the most attention by those economists called “institutionalists” (Aglietta, Orléan, Lordon). The concern to anchor economics in the social sciences pushes these economists to seek a new epistemological foundation not so much in the socio-phenomenological and hermeneutic tradition, too much centered on intersubjectivity, as in the French tradition of sociology (Durkheim, Simiand) or in structuralism (particularly by Frédéric Lordon). Explanation of the formation of markets, price variations, and monetary crises definitively leaves behind the terrain of an individualist rational choice theory to study anonymous, nonpersonal collective forces, called “the power of the multitude,” “mimetic desires and rivalries.” It is no longer labor (as in Marx) or utility (as with the neoclassical theorists) that in the final analysis founds the value of things in a market but mimetic competition and the struggle for prestige between rivals. This, for instance, is how the explanation of the genesis of money gets presented: Ordinarily, in economies such as the ones we are familiar with from our own experience, the problem of liquidity has already been resolved, in the form of money. Insofar as it concentrates the unanimous desire of all actors upon itself, money exerts on every one of them an unequaled power of attraction. 134

This institutional model for Lordon and Orléan is correlated with a Spinozist ontology. If it is the exact opposite of a purely phenomenological paradigm of inter-subjectivity, it is not per se incompatible with a hermeneutic

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theory of the text. This is the case if we consider the text in light of an instituted meaning, as configurations of meanings that preexist as traditions. These are objective constraints that, if they do call for interpretation, constitute something like quasi-things that impose themselves on individuals. The autonomized and fixed text is the equivalent of market institutions, which Durkheim saw as social and collective forces. It is this dimension of textual hermeneutics that the Austrians did not fully exploit. And it is precisely this component of hermeneutics, at least in his Ricoeurian version, that calls for an explanatory model that can be coordinated with a structuralist or causal matrix. In the market there is an instituted force, structured relations of domination, organizational systems, and sedimented practices that are akin to lasting fixed expressions like texts. The models proposed by economists who study institutions or conventions permit considerably enriching the paradigm of explanation coming from text theory, particularly in the specific more cases of analyzing markets, money, and organizations. Institutional economists are happy to fill the gap left by Austrian economists, without for all that betraying the hermeneutic tradition itself, as least when it is oriented toward Ricoeur. On the other hand, some of them do tend to sacrifice understanding in favor of explanation. This is not the case with Thévenot or Orléan, who are more influenced by Simmel. It is clearly the case with Lordon’s project. An almost orthodox structuralism leaves practically no room for forms of inter-comprehension, for the inter-interpretive capacities of agents; it may even confine them to illusory roles. In this sense, the “sociologization” of Spinoza’s ontology of affects, for economists who draw on it, is made possible through the introduction of a theory of structures, assimilated to social institutions, inscribed within the universal determinism of Nature as theorized in Spinoza’s Ethics. It is institutions, in affecting individuals, through augmenting or diminishing their power, that determine their actions. To take an example given by Lordon, the assembly line lessened the bad affects of social precariousness of early capitalism and correlatively augmented the happy ones linked to the workers’ entry into a consumer society. This sociology of affects seeks to explain better the mechanisms of adhesion, even when unconscious ones, affecting those dominated by a principle of domination imposed on them. In this way, it extends Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic violence: There is not on one side constraint (servitude) and on the other freedom (consent) with an intermediary case for what would be misleading freedom (voluntary servitude): there is only universal passional servitude, that is, subjection to the chain of causes and effects that determines our movements. But this, without forgetting the world that makes one happy or sad, makes, conceptually and existentially, for considerable differences. 135

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We may well ask if this ontology does not make the social sciences regress toward a kind of “physicalism,” a “passional” order. Can we reduce the interpretation of human behavior simply to the play of “happy” and “sad” affects or “coalitions of desires”? To be sure, Lordon does not throw away the question of meaning and the imaginary and symbolic dimension of the social. But by sticking with a causal scheme, he does turn them into “superstructures” determined by passional “substructures.” Without returning slyly to a conception of the rational actor or sovereign subject of neoclassical theory, what place can such a social ontology leave for the devices of reflexive auto-affection, for distanciated roles in institutions, and for auto-interpretations? Few, if any, in the name of a universal determinism of social structures. At best, we would be, as the title of his final chapter puts it, “happy idiots.” Paradoxically, by privileging the model of explanation in economics to the detriment of understanding, the way taken by Lordon clearly renews the positivism of the neoclassical economists, even while following a basic orientation diametrically opposed to it. It is close to the positivism of the French school of sociology from Durkheim to Bourdieu, without really embracing all the complexity of their thought (for example, the influence of socio-phenomenology on Bourdieu). A purely explanatory foundation for economics seems regressive to us. We may, on the other hand, argue for a dialectic by taking account both Austrian hermeneutics (with its emphasis on understanding) and the results of institutional economics (with its emphasis on explanation). We find this dialectic in Orléan’s book, The Empire of Value, which conjoins an interactional perspective and an institutional one. The question of interpretation is not central to his analysis and the hermeneutic tradition is largely ignored. Yet, the social sciences based on understanding, by way of Simmel and Weber, are strongly evident and counterbalance his Durkheimianism. The weight granted to mimetic desire, drawing on Tarde, Girard, and Dupuy, also draws his enterprise in this direction. There is certainly something transsubjective and impersonal about power and mimetic rivalries. In the final analysis, however, they are signs that we always imitate those like us. In this process, it is largely a question of an immediate understanding that necessitates no particular interpretation. Signs in the market are understood and preunderstood by agents in their immediacy in a pre-reflexive way. On the other hand, as soon as the meaning of an economic actor’s behavior no longer fits habitual types, as soon as interactions undergo distortions of meaning and are subject to increasing uncertainty, then interpretation is plainly required. This is not to say that such interpretation is simply “subjective.” It occurs within the play of interactions as inter-interpretations; it is preceded by a whole history of meaning; it is constrained by institutionalized meanings. In pursuing the project of an articulation between understanding and explanation in economics, we may look once again at the cardinal notion of

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value, from a threefold point of view. From a first point of view, a largely explanatory, structural or post-structural one, it is a question of analyzing values in their synchronic dimension, as stabilized configurations of meanings that have always already existed. This is the meaning of “developed,” akin to that of “instituted.” This point of view corresponds to the “explanatory moment” in Ricoeur’s model of the theory of an autonomized, fixed text. Each value can be read through inter-woven specific meanings that refer immediately to correlated values. In this respect, values can be characterized and analyzed as quasi-structures, that is, as analogous to linguistic systems, as a relational set where the parts reciprocally constitute and define each other. We find this type of analysis in The Empire of Values in its rejection of any notion of value as a substance: “This systemic dimension of value is unmistakably apparent in works devoted to its quantitative measurement. Because the reckoning of a particular good’s value assumes a prior analysis of the mutual relations that unite it with other goods, value is never determined in isolation, but always in concert with the value of all other commodities.” 136 In other words, we can say there are always relative, correlative, opposed, and intensive magnitudes that define the social character of desirability of a thing, a person, a form of behavior. It makes no sense, for example, to speak of a value in itself of money (different monies being merely relative in relation to one another, which defines their convertibility) just as it makes no sense to talk about an action having value in itself without immediately relating it to what would be its opposite. Structural holism, which we have already encountered with Vincent Descombes, allows us to understand values as a related set having a certain coherence internal to a given social or economic sphere. Ideally and schematically, we should be able to formally reconstruct the set of correlative and oppositional relations of the character of desirability of things or persons within a given social and economic configuration at a given time. These configurations of value present themselves to the members of an institution as one massive, external reality, as a “social thing,” an “objective spirit” that always precedes individual wills. It is as instituted that values, whether economic or not, are constituted and constitute us. From this, at once Durkheimian and post-Hegelian perspective, values can be thought of under the heading of Sittlichkeit, under the form of concrete objectified prescriptions as institutions considered as lasting, fixed expressions. Each newly arrived person discovers a set of splendors for which they learn the codes as a function of the social spheres to which they belong. On a second scale, inspired by socio-phenomenology, values can be analyzed as a historical product and process. This is the meaning of “developing,” akin to instituting, in distinction to “developed.” While a post-structural perspective is auto-sufficient and plainly legitimate for analyzing already constituted configurations of values, it is not a method for understanding the

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socio-genesis of universes of valorization, except perhaps by using Bourdieu’s genetic structuralism. That values are configured as a priori grammars forces us also to recognize they do not escape historicity. To consider the universe of meaning only from the angle of a polyadic system comes down to privileging a synchronic framework and carries the risk of reification. To say that a universe of values is already there, preceding individual wills, is not to say that these valorizations, even though sedimented and objectified, have a history whose genesis and plot can be traced (to make sense of this phenomenon, André Orléan turns to Castoriadis’ “social-historical” analysis of the formation of institutions). Taking seriously the historicity of institutions demands paying attention to more than how values are represented from the perspective of a text hermeneutics or a polyadic system that needs deciphering. This task requires a socio-phenomenological method to analyze the socio-genesis of the meaning of values. The sociologist has to work backwards in tracing the process of objectifying values, that is, show, as Berger and Luckmann do following Schutz, how stabilized configurations of value become “a reciprocal typification of habitualized actions.” 137 This is the perspective usually privileged by Austrian hermeneutic economists: values continue to develop and change in the play of repeated exchanges between those involved in them to the point of constructing value-types, that is, anonymous models of value where the original interaction is no longer remembered. It is precisely when the desirability structure of a thing, person, or behavior is generalized in social space and stabilized in historical time that “valuing” becomes “valued,” when values pass from being inchoative institutions to become ongoing, sustainable institutions. Valuing dispositions that are only pertinent to the biographical time of a few actors will be at best proto-institutions, valuings that may be come values. The whole point of socio-history, it seems to us, is to show how these dispositions can emerge from given symbolic orders, grow, become generalized, and reproduce themselves as value attitudes thanks to all sorts of steps, mediations, and powers. From a third point of view, a pragmatist one, it will be a question of analyzing values at work, as a negotiated, reconfigured order in situ. This is the meaning of the valuable. If a structural perspective on values takes interest by preference in the synchronic aspects of polyadic systems of values, it leaves a place for another mode of investigation on a more microscopic level when it comes to analyzing and interpreting the way in which values are pragmatically made use of in situated “performances.” This is the perspective, we have seen, assumed by Dewey in his reflections on the formation of values. If there is not room from this perspective to submit values to a strict reflexive test, it is always a question of how members continually adapt the values imposed on them as developed values. It is this dimension of negotiation that falls under the heading of what is valuable, where the force of

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“valued” leans toward the side of an instituted meaning and “valuing” toward the historical formation of values. In this sense, there is never a mechanical application of objectified polyadic value systems to actual situations. The text of value systems, like a theatrical play, is always a performance carried out in some particular situation. Whence the importance of microscopic and ethnographic investigations whose objective is to precisely analyze the local adjustments made to the institutional order of values. Whereas a structural perspective on values looks at institutions as an already constituted system of meanings, a microsociological one looks at values as they are played out again and repeated hic et nunc in different performances. This is not meant to deny the central insight provided by structural holism. For values are indeed constituted, at a certain level of description, by impersonal polyadic systems, but, at another level, they are always incarnated in concrete situations. In some situations, the valuable contributes to the unfolding of the historicization of values in the sense of valuing and to de-reifying what is valued. It is on the level of valuing that pragmatism and hermeneutics have the most to say. Confronted with disturbing or problematic situations, agents are blocked in their immediately understanding their environment. A cognitive or questioning attitude is required to reestablish an order of meaning, until new disturbances recur. When values no longer simply make sense, are challenged, criticized, lose their meaningfulness, they are submitted to a kind of reflexive epoché through which they are set at a distance and eventually transformed. To leave behind the world of values as substances means not only anchoring values in history; it also opens them to a future. At the end of this long survey devoted to the conditions for an extension of the hermeneutic paradigm to the human and social sciences, we can list the following conclusions. First, we can recognize three regions of reality that can be the object of a hermeneutic approach, which directly testify to such an extension of the hermeneutic paradigm to the human and social sciences: texts properly speaking; quasi-texts constituted as fixed, lasting expressions; and indexicalized actions. That, under certain conditions, hermeneutics can provide a methodology for the human and social sciences, and even for the natural sciences, does not signify, however, that it can provide all they need. For example, (causal or structural) explanation contributes to grounding the scientific status and objectivity of the model based on understanding used by philology and history (in the sense of an explanatory understanding) and for the interpretive methods based on descriptions, even impure ones, of the ethnographic disciplines (in the sense of an interpretive description). If we take seriously the long history of hermeneutics, the philological model is just one of its ramifications and does not constitute the founding moment from which an extension to the human and social sciences is con-

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ceivable. It is only from the point of view of a narrower history of hermeneutics that we can date its birth from the constituting of a general method for understanding texts. From this point of view, we can conceive, given certain conditions, a movement of deregionalization of hermeneutics to include historical realities as quasi-texts and the localized social realities that are the object of ethnography. The new hermeneutic methods that have been developed in the human sciences have allowed, in return, a rethinking of the conditions of possibility of a hermeneutics of matter and life as a process.

Epilogue

The longer and shorter histories of hermeneutics do not exhaust the ways in which we might have traced the genealogy of the deliberate deciphering of signs of the world in Western culture. This way of looking at things, as a way of covering the field of hermeneutics, does allow us to ask, before concluding our inquiry, if this is a new paradigm for understanding the hermeneutic process. This is the purpose of this epilogue, which is not exactly an academic conclusion: to retrace the big steps in our review while making them undergo one last test from the perspective of a philosophy largely foreign to the hermeneutic tradition. I mean Michel Foucault. Because his philosophical approach is unclassifiable and deeply iconoclastic, it cannot plainly be inscribed in the problematic lines we have sought to weave together in this book. Foucault seems clearly rebellious when it comes to the hermeneutic heritage and rarely appears in specialized works devoted to theories of interpretation. The author of The Archeology of Knowledge draws mostly on traditions that compete with hermeneutics, whether it be the history and philosophy of sciences (from Bachelard to Canguilhem), or some varieties of structuralism, or, finally, Nietzsche and experiments in literature (Blanchot, Bataille). Foucault early on took interest in the sciences of language and of discourse (notably the Port Royal Grammar, in The Order of Things). He paid little attention to general hermeneutics as elaborated by German philology working in the Reformed Protestant tradition, which already testifies to a change in episteme: the shift, inspired by Kant, of sciences of text interpretation to an anthropological and humanist episteme, culminating in the sciences of what Germans call Geist. When the early Foucault deals with hermeneutics, notably in The Archeology of Knowledge, it is more in the sense of a hermeneutics of suspicion or 239

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unveiling, like that found, for example, in psychoanalysis. And the new philosophy of language he wants to defend, a description of statements, is meant to rehabilitate the literal sense of verbal performances, without uncovering a secret meaning buried in them. This is not to say that these statements are immediately visible. The paradox, he says, is that it is both not visible and not hidden: The statement is neither visible nor hidden. Not hidden, by definition, since it characterizes the modalities of existence proper to a group of effectively produced signs. The analysis of statements can never confine its attention to things said, to the sentences that were actually spoken or written, to the “signifying” elements that were traced or pronounced—and, more particularly, to that very uniqueness that gives them existence, offers them to the view of the reader, to a possible reactivation, to innumerable uses or possible transformations, among other things, but not like other things. 1

The other face of the paradox is that the statement, although not hidden, is not for all that visible to simple perception. Foucault adds a few pages later that a “certain change of viewpoint” is necessary to recognize it. The paradox is doubled, with a Heideggerian accent, in that the statement is not familiar to us, distant in its very proximity. One of the reasons that explains this paradox is that language always refers back to something else (objects, practices): “Language always seems to be inhabited by the other, the elsewhere, the distant; it is hollowed by absence.” 2 Does recognizing the character of a statement that is not immediately visible, even when familiar or close to us, then assume some form of interpretation? If Foucault does not explicitly assume such an approach (because this would implicitly be a hermeneutics), even if he does sometimes talk about decipherment to characterize it, can he completely avoid interpretation? We can follow Dreyfus and Rabinow at this point, who talk about an interpretive analytic to designate Foucault’s method for analyzing discourses and practices. They emphasize that if there is an analytic in Foucault, it is directed against every attempt to give a universal foundation to the subject (Kant) or to Being (Heidegger). It is more about—a fortiori for the later Foucault—analyzing the historical variations and cultural practices of the being we ourselves are. This analytic is coupled with an interpretation in a different sense than in a hermeneutics of unconcealment or a “commentary,” as in the paraphrasing of the meaning of a text or practice, which Foucault had already denounced in The Birth of the Clinic: Interpretive understanding can only be obtained by someone who shares the actor's involvement, but distances himself from it. This person must undertake the hard historical work of diagnosing and analyzing the history and organization of current cultural practices. The resulting interpretation is a pragmatically

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guided reading of the coherence of the practices of the society. It does not claim to correspond either to the everyday meanings shared by the actors or, in any simple sense, to reveal the intrinsic meaning of the practices. This is the sense in which Foucault’s method is interpretive but not hermeneutic. 3

May we not say, without denying the originality of Foucault’s approach, that this interpretive analytic borrows certain methods from the older hermeneutics coming from philology? To interpret cultural practices, is it not necessary to contextualize discourse and practices? To interpret the “coherence of social practices,” must the analyst not makes use of the hermeneutic circle? Foucault’s intellectual preoccupation with hermeneutics becomes more insistent starting with the 1980s and clearly is inscribed in the new turn his philosophy takes marked, not certainly, as frequently said, by a “return of the philosophical subject,” but assuredly by an archeology of subjectivations. The hermeneutic question in the later Foucault has to be considered in terms of three paradoxes. First of all, the hermeneutics he takes as his target has less to do with the study of texts than with what he calls a hermeneutics of the self or a hermeneutics of the subject. Second, it is not as a hermeneut that Foucault looks at the origin of the hermeneutics of the self but as an archeologist who studies subjectivations in Western history. Finally, Foucault’s approach seeks not just to assign a historical origin to the hermeneutics of the self, as an archeologist-philosopher, it seeks at the same time the means to surpass it by clearing the way for other practices of selfhood. Attention to the hermeneutics of the self is joined to the hope of philosophically putting an end to hermeneutics. Putting an end to, not just putting an end to hermeneutics could be the watchword of this epilogue. To fully understand the meaning of Foucault’s archeology, it is necessary to look at the central notion of techniques or technologies of the self. Starting from suggestions from Habermas, Foucault distinguishes three principal types of such techniques in human societies: those that permit producing and transforming things, those that serve the exchange of signs, and those that orient and determine human behavior. It is the latter, even though they are clearly tied to the second techniques, that constitute the new site of Foucault’s research focused on government, that is, the way in which human beings are led by other human beings and the way in which they themselves behave. The meeting point of Foucault’s approach lies in the fact that his earlier work was centered on disciplinary techniques (prisons, asylums) and biopolitical techniques, that is, techniques of domination defined by their coercive character. The notion of government one understands is to be distinguished from its traditional political sense, bringing an essential correction to the technologies of domination by pairing them with the technologies of the self.

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Foucault’s reworking of his project consists, in short, in studying the occidental subject at the contact point between those technologies through which individuals are directed by others (technologies of domination) and the techniques through which they govern themselves (technologies of the self). The novelty lies in the introduction of these technologies of the self, that is, techniques which permit individuals to effect, by their own means, a certain number of operations on their own bodies, on their own souls, on their own thoughts, on their own conduct, and this in a manner so as to transform themselves, modify themselves, and to attain a certain state of perfection, of happiness, of purity, of supernatural power. 4

Foucault’s objective, in other words, is to analyze the historical variations between technologies of domination and technologies of the self. But what relation is there to the hermeneutics of the self? If we turn to Greek and Hellenistic antiquity, there is none. The hermeneutics of the self, defined as a technique for deciphering a hidden truth in the depths of the self, is largely unknown there. The notion of technologies of the self is indissociable from a reflection on alethurgic forms, that is, forms through which the production of truth modifies the subject: the technologies for self-examination, in classical and late antiquity, through which the disciple is constituted through a “force of truth” that comes to them from the outside (the teacher’s discourse that helps the disciple appropriate a whole series of rules of daily behavior). These techniques produce and subjectivize a self called a “gnomic” self: “You see that the task is not to put in the light what would be the most obscure part of our selves. The self has, on the contrary, not to be discovered but to be constituted, to be constituted through the force of truth.” 5 Consequently, the hermeneutics of the self only appears with Christianity incarnated in a specific alethurgic form, which is confession for which the monastic precept is “confess, to your spiritual guide, each of your thoughts.” 6 The self produced in this way will be called “gnoseologic” because it constitutes itself through a work of decipherment of its secret truth. Foucault does recognize practices of confession and self-examination among the Stoics. However, these practices do not have the objective of deciphering a hidden truth, but of constructing a “unity of will and knowledge.” 7 The manifestation of the truth of the self, in the first Christian centuries, appears in penitential practices: what the Greek Fathers call exomologesis (acts of punishment and self-punishment on the sinner’s part in the hope of reintegrating himself into the community of believers). Exomologesis consists less in a canonical confession of sins than in a dramatic staging intended to “put under everybody’s eyes the flesh, the body, which has committed the sin.” 8 If this is already a form of renunciation or self-sacrifice (unlike Stoic practices of self-examination), if it is assuredly an act of showing the sinner’s

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reality, exomolgesis is not yet a hermeneutics of the self. Another practice of confession—exagoreusis—which coincides with the hermeneutics of the self, appears in monastic institutions in the fourth century. It is no longer only a matter of exhibiting and putting “under everybody’s eyes” the sinful condition of the penitent but of verbalizing in a permanent way, under the guidance of a spiritual guide, the Christian’s thoughts, as recommended in Cassian’s rule, by going as far as possible into the folds of the soul, into its darkest and most secret parts. Why talk about a hermeneutics of the self to qualify exagoreusis? Because it is a question of deciphering one’s smallest thoughts, in a sense of interpretation that rhymes with unveiling. Foucault always assimilates hermeneutics with the practice of suspicion: to always seek more about a hidden truth in order to confess it not only to oneself but also to others. The hermeneutics of the self is born, therefore, in a particular form of confession, the obligation to speak the truth about oneself under the scrutiny of another’s gaze. To speak of a hermeneutics of the self of course has an analogy to the interpretation of texts: the self as a quasi-text whose deepest layers of meaning have to be unveiled. But this is not always an analogous relation in that, according to Foucault’s hypothesis, the hermeneutic interpretation of the self and the hermeneutic interpretation of texts did not always converge in Christianity. In fact, the hermeneutics of sacred texts precedes, according to Foucault, the hermeneutics of the self: From the earliest centuries of Christianity, the hermeneutics of the text had recourse to techniques of interpretation that were perfectly elaborated and well known, in either the Jewish or the Hellenic tradition. The text was the object of numerous techniques that were complex and well established. By contrast, the hermeneutics of the self—that is to say, the possibility of discovering something hidden deep within myself, the path that allowed me to discover not so much the unknown as the hidden, which is the definition of hermeneutics in general—I believe this approach, with regard to the self, did not have the antecedents or the instruments available to a hermeneutics of the text either in Greek culture or in Judaic culture. 9

Foucault acknowledges, however, that the techniques of the hermeneutics of the self, akin to exagoreusis, invented in the monastic institutions in the fourth and fifth centuries, were still rudimentary. It was the verbal act itself that had an interpretive value. The subsequent destiny of Christianity, from this point of view, lay in the conflictual relation between the hermeneutics of the self and that of the text. The great reworking of this occurred, if we follow Foucault’s genealogy, with the Lutheran Reformation, both because protestants sought to free the truth about the self and the truth of the text from the authority of dogma and the

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clergy, and because it sought to resolve the conflict between a hermeneutics of the self and a hermeneutics of the text: “Protestantism tried to adjust.” 10 The heritage of the hermeneutics of the self overflows its strictly Christian dimension to fuel, sometimes in opposing ways, a wide section of modernity. On the one hand, Foucault brings to light, in modern literature, especially since Montaigne, a type of writing through which the hermeneutics of the self, as an extension of religious practice, opens itself to the world, in directly importing from Christianity the principle of sacrificing the self, now thought of as transposing of the self to another world. On the other hand, Foucault unmasks, in modern political thought, in psychiatric and medical institutions, and in the development of the human sciences, how the idea of a hermeneutics of the self gets transformed into a “permanent anthopologization.” A positive ground of subjectivity replaces the principle of sacrificing the self. Now it is the figure of a human being as a subject that is the object of infinite interpretation and that becomes the genuine subjectum of the law, institutions, and history. The Foucault of The Hermeneutics of the Subject no doubt is less harsh than the Foucault of The Order of Things regarding this process of anthropologizing hermeneutics. The Nietzschean philosopher still calls for surpassing the hermeneutics of the self. But it is not just as an archeologist of hermeneutics that Foucault states his case, but equally as an ethical and political philosopher concerned with putting an end to the heritage of the hermeneutics of the self, from its Christian origins to its modern anthropological forms. Putting an end to the hermeneutics of the self also signifies breaking with the principle of self-sacrifice and the principle of deciphering and uncovering a hidden truth in the self, in human being. Here is where, no doubt, the political question in the broad sense of power is most visible in Foucault’s rejection of hermeneutics in general and of the hermeneutics of the self in particular. In the Christian techniques for extracting confession as much as in modern techniques of interpretation, from psychoanalysis to the interpretive social sciences, there is always a dissymmetrical relation between authority (the priest, the clinician, the sociologist) presumed to hold the truth of meaning (in being capable of deciphering the hidden meaning of sins, of sexuality, of social consciousness) and the subject placed in a passive, dominated position, incapable of reaching the ultimate truth about the self. Hermeneutics is a wily form domination that does not say its name. It presents itself as a liberating enterprise, of the Christian subject from his sins, of the analysand from their repression, of the social subject in relation to forms of social domination. Putting an end to hermeneutics is therefore meant to free the self from the “masters of truth” when it comes to interpretation who claim to establish the profound meaning of ourselves and do so in order better to exercise their tutelage over us. The contemporary masters of interpretation are the new tutors committed to con-

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fining individuals to their status as minors. This is diagnosis that is already apparent in Foucault’s History of Sexuality: As long as the interpretive sciences continue to search for a deep truth, that is, to practice a hermeneutics of suspicion, as long as they proceed on the assumption that it is the Great Interpreter who has privileged access to meaning, while insisting that the truths they uncover. lie outside the sphere of power, these sciences seem fated to contribute to the strategies of power. They claim a privileged externality, but they actually are part of the deployment of power. 11

Putting an end to the hermeneutics of the self does not mean, for all that, renouncing the invention of new technologies of the self, a new ethics of the self (curiosity, innovation, resistance, making one’s life a work of art), a new politics, even if Foucault leaves this largely unexplored: But the moment, maybe, is coming for us to ask, do we need, really, this hermeneutics of the self? Maybe the problem of the self is not to discover what it is in its positivity, maybe the problem is not to discover a positive self or the positive foundation of the self. Maybe our problem is now to discover that the self is nothing else than the historical correlation of the technology built in our history. Maybe the problem is to change those technologies. And in this case, one of the main political problems would be nowadays, in the strict sense of the word, the politics of ourselves. 12

Foucault’s archeology, which we have outlined schematically, poses a double challenge to the conclusions of our enquiry. On the one hand, a historical challenge arising from the alleged origin and transformation of hermeneutics. On the other, an ethical and epistemological challenge regarding the injunction to move beyond the hermeneutics of the self. Let us examine each of these points. By placing the origin of hermeneutics of the text into the framework of the techniques used in biblical, rabbinic, and Talmudic commentaries, the interpretations of the gospel made by the church fathers, Foucault clearly assimilates textual hermeneutics and exegesis. It is the long history of hermeneutics, or at least one of its ramifications, that is privileged. As a result, Foucault has little to say about the birth of hermeneutics as a general theory of understanding texts at the time of the Göttingen School. The choice of the long history of hermeneutics can be justified. What is problematic is assigning the origin of the hermeneutics of the self that occurred in the early centuries of Christianity to the practice of verbal confession. Foucault emphasizes this, at least in the lectures he gave at Dartmouth and Berkeley in 1980, as well as in the course he gave at the University of Louvain during the same period. 13 He does not talk about a hermeneutics of the self in discussing the technologies of the self found in Greek and Hellenistic antiquity.

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This way of dividing history is contestable. It is so because Foucault reduces the hermeneutics of the self to sacrificing the self, to the deciphering of a hidden truth, and the practice of confession that he does not consider its extension to other technologies of the self. Thus it is surprising that, in his courses at the Collège de France in 1981 and 1982, on the “hermeneutics of the subject,” it is not so much a question of the Christian technologies of the self as those applicable to Greek and Hellenistic antiquity (in particular to Plato, Marcus-Aurelius, Epicurus, and Seneca). It is true that the term hermeneutics is barely thematized in these courses. Yet it clearly appears in the course summary: “The course this year was devoted to the formation of the theme of the hermeneutics of the self. It involved studying it not only in its theoretical formulations, but analyzing it in relation to a set of practices which were very important in classical and late Antiquity. These practices were concerned with what was often called in Greek epimeleia heautou, and in Latin cura sui.” 14 What draws our attention is that, in the Collège de France courses from this time, Foucault encompasses, under the generic theme of a hermeneutics of the self, technologies of the self, notably Stoic ones, that in no way are reducible to techniques for unveiling a hidden truth within the self. Of course, it is essential to distinguish technologies of the self and a care for the self that culminates in a Socratic “know thyself” from Christian technologies of the self under the aegis of verbalized confession. Yet as soon as learned techniques are mobilized for knowing oneself, for better being able to take care of oneself, for examining, transforming oneself, we are dealing with a hermeneutics of the self. Therefore, it was not Christian monastic institutions that invented the hermeneutics of the self. It was already operative in classical antiquity once the self became the focus of a problematicity of meaning, once techniques were taught in the philosophical schools for interpreting and examining oneself. Hence, according to our hypothesis, every technology of the self implies some manner of a hermeneutics of the self. Christian exagoreusis is just one particular historical form of a hermeneutics of the self envisaged as the use of suspicion and seeking to unveil something. It is not its origin. This is the principal reason why we should think of surpassing the hermeneutics of the self if technologies of the self are what is at issue. Foucault’s injunction to experiment with new technologies of the self cannot take place without some process of auto-interpretation of the self, even when this means sacrificing the self and giving up the idea of a foundational subject. Yes, we can uncover in some contemporary attempts, like Ricoeur’s, the ghost of a Christian hermeneutics of the self, even if it is not confession by testimony that serves as a model for rethinking hermeneutics and the attestation of the self, as in Oneself as Another.

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On the one hand, testimony does not lead to a regime of apodictic veridiction or revealing the necessary order of things, but only to a probable order, one that is reasonable but therefore contestable. On the other, testimony does make suspicion the condition for attestation of anything and, in the final analysis, of the self as a reliable word: “Suspicion is the path toward and the crossing within attestation. It haunts attestation as false testimony haunts true testimony.” 15 Suspicion may be applied to the perceptive phase, or be produced or apply to the retentive phase (deformed memory), or be posited at the declarative phase in the case of a false declaration that is sanctioned legally as false testimony or perjury. This makes clearer Ricoeur’s assertion that “suspicion is the path toward and the crossing within attestation.” This justification of suspicion as found throughout the whole history of the hermeneutics of the self is what allows this history to draw on the Christian model of deciphering a hidden truth. The exercise of suspicion, on the other hand, is just one means toward the objective of increasing confidence and belief. The hermeneutics of the self as Ricoeur envisages it does not imply any pure and simple sacrifice of the self (the Christian heritage) or any act of self-foundation (the modern heritage). It is precisely midway between a “humiliated cogito” and an “exalted cogito” that Ricoeur looks for resources that can give a new impulse to the hermeneutics of the self. Its form and exercise clearly differ from Foucault’s call for new technologies of the self. But the invention of a new ethics and a new politics, if it differs from the Christian and modern forms of hermeneutics, still remains, even if yet undiscovered, a variant of the hermeneutics of the self. To talk about technologies of the self, even if they should be historical and cultural forms and variants, is still to talk about rational technologies of interpretation precisely like those we find in the ancient schools of philosophy, in monasteries, and in literature. One of the watch words of our inquiry has been to make room for techniques of auto-interpretation, ones we have designated as being ordinary, the better to distinguish them from professional technologies of the self. Ricoeur and Foucault provide an essentially philosophical and religious basis for an anthropological foundation for these forms of auto-interpretation when a human agent is confronted with problematicity regarding the self, when the meaning of their existence no longer makes sense. Presenting oneself and emplotment are procedures, more rudimentary ones than those we find in the Stoic treatises or monastic rules, but they are an integral part of the ordinary techniques of auto-interpretation. The anthropological path we have followed has taught us to recognize such ordinary techniques when how the world reveals itself is put to the test, or seems uncertain, when meaning is disturbed. We have placed these techniques under the heading of ethnointerpretations (contextualization, translation, making explicit).

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This anthropological condition does not signify, because we move within a universe of meaning, that human beings constantly are interpreting things. As long as understanding does run into an obstacle or something strange, there is no need for interpretation. Social and cultural life is such that it generates all kinds of routines and typifications of meaning thanks to which we do not have constantly to ask about the meaning of things, or what we should do, or who we are. It is only when understanding is confronted with a whole palette of the possible problematicity of a sign that an interpretation may be required, that it may fail or may lead to a new meaning, a clearer, more transparent one. Failed interpretations are a part of the condition of being homo interpretans. We must also distinguish degrees in the problematicity of a sign running from minor distortions of meaning in everyday life to major upsets affecting large-scale cultural and social institutions. And we must further distinguish among the conditions and social and cultural variations of carrying out interpretations, which are never an entirely free and sovereign act of the subject but always inserted in collective schemes of meaning, which always involve interpreting together to redefine the frameworks of experience. Here we can understand how a social and philosophical anthropology of interpretation is distinguished from a philosophical archaeology of the hermeneutics of the self, from an epistemology of the sciences of interpretation, and from an ontological hermeneutics of being or facticity. In one sense, an anthropology of homo interpretans encompasses archeology, epistemology, and ontology, if we consider the philosophical technologies of the self, the scientific techniques of interpreting texts, history, and action to derive from the auto-interpretive substratum of individual, social, and historical life. From this perspective, an interpretive anthropology comes first logically. This is the lesson we have learned from considering the technique of questioning back: philosophy and the sciences of interpretation are derived from a more originary experience defined as an auto-interpretive lifeworld. The reverse trajectory, from anthropology toward epistemology, is nonetheless also justified if we want to deal with the impasses of relativism and the nullifying effects of post-modern hermeneutics. The finitude of understanding certainly prevents our crossing the threshold to the best interpretation. But it does not imply renouncing the horizon of a better interpretation understood as an amplifying one (through using imagination, argument, discussion). It is in going back and forth along these two trajectories that the long route of hermeneutics takes on consistency. The way of hermeneutics is all the longer if we enlarge it, on certain conditions, to include the interpretative methods of the natural sciences, which seek to objectify indexical grammars. This possibility is justified if we preserve a relative autonomy for the human sciences whose object is constituted by a properly auto-interpretive reality leading to the production of meaning (symbolic grammars). Human

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beings are natural beings, and nothing prevents our importing from the natural sciences the explanatory methods founded on the principle of causality. The path of hermeneutics is still longer if we seek to extend the hermeneutic paradigm to the whole range of the human and social sciences. On the one hand, as a methodological expansion, starting from the original site of philology, to the historical and social sciences, on the double condition of a break with the psychological method and a graft of other scientific methods (explication, description). On the other hand, an ontological expansion from textual reality to quasi-textual realities (lasting fixed expressions) up to indexical realities (action as it happens). Hermeneutics, as a long road, is both unsurpassable and insufficient. Unsurpassable as soon as it alone is the way to grasp fully the ordinary condition of homo interpretans and to ground the methods of the human sciences, and even a portion of the natural sciences, which remain sciences of interpretation. Insufficient as soon as the human and natural sciences have need of other methods than interpretation to ground their scientific status; insufficient as soon as the interpretive condition of humanity is just one facet of its constitution when being human confronts its uncanniness and a problematic world. The human interpretive faculty and activities are no more foundational than any other option. They do testify, however, to our reflexive condition of being open to a world that exceeds the boundaries of our closest environment, a world that may have lost a substantial part of its familiarity, or to others whose intentions do not make sense in the expected way, or when the self becomes a stranger to itself. The recovery of meaning, when it is not simply lost, reopens the world to new horizons of meaning. A world that is no longer seen simply as mirroring meaning, when interpretation is genuinely productive, a world reconfigured and reinvigorated by our transformations. Only then do the outlines of a politics of interpretation appear.

Notes

INTRODUCTION 1. See, for example, Daniel Andler, Le Silhouette de l’humain: Quelle place pour le naturalisme dans le monde d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Gallimard, 2016). 2. Jürgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 110. 3. Ibid. 4. Hans Blumenberg, Description de l’Homme, trans. Denis Trieweiler (Paris: Cerf, 2011).

PART I. ORDINARY WAYS OF UNVEILING THE WORLD 1. Arnold Gehlen, Essais d’anthropologie philosophique, trans. Olivier Munnoi (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 2010), 57.

1. THE PROBLEMATICITY OF MEANING AND OPENNESS TO THE WORLD 1. Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray into the World of Animals and Humans with a Theory of Meaning, trans. Joseph D. O’Neil (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Frederik Buytendijk, Traité de psychologie animale (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1952). 2. Jean-Claude Gens, Eléments pour une herméneutique de la nature (Paris: Cerf, 2008), 170. 3. The translator of von Uexküll’s work into French, Phillippe Muller translates Umwelt as entours [surroundings]. Jakob von Uexküll, Mondes animaux et monde humain (Paris: Denoël, 1965), 7. 4. Pierre Clément, Ruth Scheps, and John Stewart, “Umwelt et interprétation,” in Jean Michel Salanskis, François Rastier, and Ruth Scheps, eds., Herméneutique: textes, sciences (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997), 212. 5. Von Uexküll, A Foray into the World of Animals, 51.

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6. Clément, Scheps, and Stewart, “Umwelt et interprétation,” 210. 7. Ibid., 224. 8. Von Uexküll, A Foray into the World of Animals, 190. 9. Ibid., 117. 10. Clément, Scheps, and Stewart, “Umwelt et interpretation,” 227. 11. Ruth Garrett Millikan, Language, Thought and Other Biological Categories: New Foundations for Realism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984); see also Joëlle Proust, Quand l’esprit vient aux bêtes (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 218–21. 12. Marcel Proust, Quand l’esprit vient aux bêtes, 220. 13. Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 14. Millikan, Language, Thought and Other Biological Categories, 101. 15. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953), 197. We draw here on Jocelyn Benoist’s commentary in “Voir comme quoi?” in Sandra Laugier and Christiane. Chauviré, eds., Lire les recherches philosophiques de Wittgenstein (Paris: Vrin, 2009), 237–53. 16. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 212. 17. Ibid. 18. See here Louis Quéré, “Perception du sens et action située,” in M. de Fornel and L. Quéré, eds., La logique de situations (Paris: Editions de l’EHESS, 1999), 301–38. 19. Richard Shusterman, Performing Live : Aesthetic Alternatives for the Ends of Art (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). 20. Ibid., 134. 21. Marcel Mauss, Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2013). 22. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 197. 23. Benoist, “Voir comme quoi?” 247. 24. Guy Deniau, Qu’est-ce qu’interpréter? (Paris: Vrin, 2015), 26. 25. Jacques Bouveresse, Herméneutique et linguistique (Paris: Editions d’Eclat, 1991), 10. 26. Charles Taylor, “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” in Philosophical Papers, vol. 2: Philosophy and the Human Sciences (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 15. 27. Henri Laborit, La nouvelle grille (Paris: Folio, 1986). 28. Hans Lenk, Philosophie und Interpretation (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1993). See also JeanClaude Gens, “L’Interprétation comme mode d’être de l’animal et de l’homme,” in Pascal David, ed., L’Interprétation (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2010). 29. Gens, “L’Interprétation comme mode d’être de l’animal et de l’homme,” 74. 30. We generally agree philosophically regarding this point with Daniel Andler who speaks of a “critical naturalism.” 31. Andler, La silhouette de l’humain, 203. 32. Ibid., 327. 33. Pascal Picq, Il était une fois la paléoanthropologie (Paris: Odille Jacob, 2010). 34. Günter Abel, Langage, signes et interprétation (Paris: Vrin, 2011). 35. Ibid., 61. 36. Ibid., 12. 37. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 3 vols., trans. Ralph Mannheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–1957). 38. See the commentary of Sophie-Jan Arrien, L’Inquiétude de la pensée: l’herméneutique de la vie du jeune Heidegger (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2014), 163–66. 39. Ibid., 67. The self’s world is all the more not synonymous with a turning in on oneself, using Heideggerian language, in that it can be inscribed in an analysis of historical forms of the self in early Christian communities such as that given by Foucault in his lectures at the Collège de France devoted to the hermeneutics of Christian selfhood and its practices of confession. If this comes down to an effort by the self to ameliorate its inner life, this effort is immediately related to transcendence, to God—insofar as its horizons of meaning surpass the boundaries of the Umwelt.

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40. Florence Burgat, Liberté et inquiétude de la vie animal (Paris: Kimé, 2006), 127–28. See also Stanislas Deprez, ed., Autour des œuvres de Georges Chapoutheir et de Florence Burgat (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2013). 41. Marc Richir, Le Corps: Essai sur l’intériorité (Paris: Hatier, 1995). 42. Burgat, Liberté et inquiétude de la vie animale, 190. 43. Gehlen, Essais d’anthropologie philosophique, 24. 44. Jean-Marie Schaeffer, La fin de l’exception humaine (Paris: Gallimard, 2007). 45. Ibid., 160. 46. Von Uexküll, A Foray into the World of Animals and Humans, 142. 47. Ibid., 208. 48. Rémi Brague, Aristote et la question du monde: Essai sur le contexte ontologique et anthropologique de l’ontologie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988). 49. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay in Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 11–12. 50. Josef Simon, Signes et interprétation (Lille: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2004), 64. 51. Proust, Quand l’esprit vient aux bêtes, 14. 52. Christian Berner, Au détour du sens (Paris: Cerf, 2007), 16. 53. Jean-Christophe Bailly, Le versant animal (Paris: Bayard, 2007). 54. Gens, “L’Interprétation comme d’être de l’animal et de l’homme,” 76. 55. Jean-Marc Ferry, Les Grammaires de l’intelligence (Paris: Cerf, 2004), 49. 56. George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 57. Daniel Cefaï and Louis Quéré, Introduction to the French translation of Mead, L’esprit, le soi et la société (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2006), 35. 58. John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (New York: Henry Holt, 1938). 59. John Dewey, Theory of Valuation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939). 60. Ibid., 34. 61. Ibid. 62. Daniel Cefaï and Louis Quéré, “Introduction” to Mead, L’esprit, le soi et la société, 51. 63. Charles Taylor, “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” 16. 64. Bernhard Waldenfels, Topographie de l’étranger (Paris: Van Dieren, 2009), 96. 65. Burgat, Liberté et inquiétude de la vie animale, 198. 66. Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–1982, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2005). 67. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 68. M. Leclerc-Olive, Le dire de l’événement (Lille: Les Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 1997), 34. 69. Claude Romano, Event and World, trans. Shane Mackinlay (New York, Fordham University Press, 2009); L’aventure temporelle: Trois essais pour introduire à l’herméneutique événementiale (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2010). 70. Michel Grossetti, Sociologie de l’imprévisible. Dynamiques de l’activité et des formes sociales (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004). 71. Regarding the impersonal concept of an event, as it is discussed, for example, by Donald Davidson, see his Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980). See also Ruwen Ogien, “Plaidoyer pour l’événement quelconque,” in Jean-Luc Petit, ed., L’événement en perspective (Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 1991), 203–27. 72. Romano, L’aventure temporelle, 36. 73. Marc Bessin, “Le trouble de l’événement: la place des émotions dans les bifurcations,” in Marc Bessin, Claire Bidart, and Michel Grossetti, eds., Bifurcations. Les sciences sociales face à l’événement (Paris: La Découverte, 2010), 320. 74. Romano, L’aventure temporelle, 79. 75. Regarding the notion of turning points as events that “reorients the direction of a life” in opposition to its regular cycles, see especially Everett C. Hughes, “Cycles, Turning Point and

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Career” in The Sociological Eye: Selected Papers (Chicago: Aldine, 1971), 124–31, and Andrew Abbot, “From Cause to Events,” Sociological Methods and Research 20 (1992): 428–55. 76. Anselm Strauss, La Trame de la négociation. Sociologie qualitative et interactionnisme (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1991). 77. Michael Pollak, L’Expérience concentrationnaire. Essai sur le maintien de l’identité sociale (Paris: Métailié, 2000), 10. 78. On the limits of narratives about the self in light of psychoanalysis, see the analysis of Jérôme Porée, “La philosophie au miroir de la psychanalyse,” Laval Théologique et Philosophique 65 (2009): 405–29. 79. Johann Michel, “Narrativité, Narration, Narratologie,” Revue Européenne des Sciences Sociales 41 (2003): 125–42, and Sociologie du Soi (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2012). 80. Galen Strawson, “Against Narrativity,” Ratio 17 (December 2004): 428–52. The refusal of any interpretation can take a more militant turn according to Strawson. It can also manifest a laziness in thinking when it sticks with first impressions, a partial, lacunary comprehension: not to seek to understand further, to stick with what is immediately understood. 81. Joan Stavo-Debauge, “Des événements difficiles à encaisser. Un pragmatisme pessimiste,” in Daniel Céfaï and Cédric Terzi, eds., L’expérience des problèmes publics (Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 2012), 200. 82. Ibid. 83. Romano, Event and World, 110.

2. THE LIFEWORLD AND THE MIRROR OF MEANING 1. Jan Patočka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, trans. Erazim Kohák (Chicago: Open Court, 1996). 2. Ibid., 14. 3. Ibid., 44. 4. Ibid. 39–40. 5. Louis Quéré and Cédric Terzi, “Pour une sociologie pragmatiste de l’expérience publique,” SociologieS http://sociologies.revues.org/4949. 6. Carlos Ginzburg, Clues, Myths and the Historical Method, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 96–125. 7. Ibid., 103. 8. Ibid., 104. 9. Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 40. 10. Ibid., 43. 11. Ibid., 44, quoting Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago University of Chicago Press, 1966), 243. 12. Ibid., 48–49. 13. Ibid., 56. 14. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 22. 15. Philippe Descola, Par-delà nature et culture (Paris: Gallimard, 2005). 16. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. James Harle Bell, Richard von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 93. 17. Descola, Par-delà nature et culture, 147. 18. Ibid., 151. 19. Inwardness includes a vast range of related notions, such as mind, consciousness, soul, and subjectivity, whereas physicality may refer to the body, to exterior form, to nature, to physiological processes. 20. We might question, more than Descola does, the rigidity of these ontological categorizations as a function of different cultures. It is not certain that societies, where naturalism predominates, entirely ignore the totemist or animist scheme when it comes to the continuity

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between the human and non-human—not only in the way some may “humanize” their domestic pets (in the way they name them, talk to them), but also in the store of popular and poetic symbolization through which they give attributes, human intentions properly speaking to animals. 21. Ibid., 153. 22. Ibid. 23. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 95. 24. Ibid., 55. 25. Daniel Cefai, Phénoménologie et sciences sociales. Alfred Schütz, Naissance d’une anthropologie philosophique (Paris: Droz, 1998), 135. 26. Alfred Schutz, “The Stranger,” in idem., Collected Papers II: Studies in Social Theory, ed. Arvid Brodersen (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), 104. 27. Jürgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 121–23. 28. Ibid.,125. 29. Which comes down to relativizing the border between the home world and the foreign one, as discussed in Bernhard Waldenfelds’ phenomenology of the foreigner (Topographie de l’étranger, 113). On the one hand, each of us is always phenomenologically foreign to the other. For example, the older German worker, in the preceding example, is a kind of stranger to the young immigrant. On the other, a world is never “purely” a world. There is always something foreign (starting with foreign words or words with a foreign origin in our maternal language) that affects the “home world.” Finally, the relation to a foreigner is always relative to particular forms of life: who is most foreign to me, asks Waldenfelds, the Indian doctor who gives me care or the German neighbor who speaks to the spirit? 30. Byron Good, Comment faire de l’antthropologie médicale? Médecine, rationalité et vécu (Le Plessis-Robinson: Les empêcheurs de tourner en rond, 1998). See also the comments by Evelyne Lassere, “La maladie en récit: l’hétéroglossie anthropologique de Byron Good,” in Jean-Philippe Pierron, ed., Introduction à l’herméneutique médicale, 87–96. 31. Ibid., 93. 32. Jerôme Porée, “Limites de l’explications, limites de la compréhension: Le moment phénoménologique,” in ibid., 49. 33. Cefai, Phénoménologie et sciences sociales, 132. 34. Louis Quéré, La sociologie à l’épreuve de l’herméneutique (Paris: Le Harmattan, 1999), 25. 35. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, 1:101. 36. Quéré and Terzi, “Pour une sociologie pragmatiste de l’expérience publique.” 37. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, 1:100. 38. Ibid., 100–01. 39. Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974). 40. David Snow, “Analyse de cadres et mouvements sociaux,” in Daniel Cefaï and Cédric Terzi, eds., Les formes de l’action collective (Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 2001), 28. 41. Benford and Hunt, “Cadrages et conflit,” 165. 42. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1959). If this work lends itself to a more interactionist reading than does the more structuralist reading of Frame Analysis, Céline Bonicco-Donato goes beyond this antagonism by rending the interpretation of Goffman’s work more complex: “La métaphore théâtrale et la théorie des jeux dans l’oeuvre de Erwing Goffman,” in Daniel Cefaï and Laurent Perreau, eds., Goffman et l’Ordre de l’interaction (Paris: Presses Univérsitaires de France, 2012), 267–85. 43. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, 1:90. 44. Goffman, Presentation of Self, xi. 45. In the sense here of what Vincent Descombes calls a “structural holism.” Les Institutions du sens (Paris: Minuit, 1996).

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46. Jérôme Goffette, “Soi et ses rôles: contribution à une herméneutique du soin,” in Pierron, ed., Introduction à l’herméneutique médicale, 121–34. 47. Ibid., 127. 48. Ibid., 128. 49. Ibid., 131. 50. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, 2:140.

3. THE PRODUCTION OF MEANING AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE WORLD 1. Marielle Macé, Façons de lire, manières d’être (Paris: Gallimard, 2011). 2. Abel, Langage, signes et interprétation, 272. 3. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 1:101. 4. Ibid., 93. 5. Ibid., 100. 6. Hans Joas, The Creativity of Action, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Paul Keast (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), 128–29. 7. Charles Sanders Peirce, Peirce on Signs, ed. James Hoopes (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). See also the discussion of this threefold division by Jean-Marc Ferry in Les Grammaires de l’intelligence. 8. Peirce, Peirce on Signs, 239. 9. Ibid., 240. 10. Without being able to take up the details, we can add that the trichotomy (icon, index, symbol) is just one of three trichotomies in Peirce’s theory of signs. This trichotomy, which defines the categories of signs in relation to their object, is unpacked in terms of two other trichotomies (qualisign, sinsign, legsign; rheme, dicisign, argument) to form twenty-seven classes of signs. 11. Peirce, Peirce on Signs, 239. 12. Pascal Engel, “Herméneutique, langage, vérité,” in Denis Thouard, ed., Herméneutique contemporaine (Lille: Presses Universitaires de Septentrion, 2012), 329. 13. See the commentary of Sandra Laugier, “Où se trouvent les règles?” in Sandra Laugier and Charles Chaviré, eds., Lires les Recherches philosophiques avec Wittgenstein (Paris: Vrin, 2009), 133–58. 14. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 81. 15. Donald Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), drawing here on Pascal Engel’s already cited commentary “Herméneutique, langage, vérité.” 16. In his attempt to place into dialogue (and conflict) continental hermeneutics under the influence of Heidegger and the analytic tradition, Pascal Engel clearly demonstrates the family resemblance one can discern between what Davidson calls background beliefs and the notion of pre-understanding in Gadamer. One of the major disagreements lies, however, in the fact that Davidson refuses to admit any limit to the possibility, through inference, of determining the truth conditions of a proposition, where hermeneutic pre-understanding, because it admits prejudices and traditions, necessarily leads to a form of relativism (to interpret, is always to interpret differently). Gadamer “conceives the process of interpretation as a process of understanding, in the sense of Verstehen,” whereas Davidson looks at it as a type of empirical theory that can be tested following “a process that is at least partly explanatory and causal, a form of Erklären” (326). On another level, Engel rightly notes the significant difference between the relatively narrow character of the assumptions that govern, as beliefs, agents’ interpretation (in Davidson’s model) and the rich store of pre-understandings (prejudices, history, translation) that presides over understanding (in Gadamer’s model). On this point, see Pascal Engel, “Interprétations, raisons et faits,” Critique 71 (2015): 502–17. The core of Engel’s attempt to move beyond Davidson’s model consists in moving beyond the interpretation of beliefs to an inter-

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pretation aimed at learning what an agent knows (the agent’s knowledge of reasons and the interpreter’s knowledge of what the agent knows). 17. This is less true for the work of Daniel Dennett, The Intentional Stance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), even if his problem is more about rationality and human intentionality than about the attribution of beliefs and desires. 18. Engel, “Herméneutique, langage, verité,” 329. 19. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 81. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., 85. 22. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar, ed. Rush Rhees, trans. Anthony Kenny (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 47. 23. Bouveresse, Herméneutique et linguistique, 39. 24. Stop lights, Albert Piette notes, ordinarily do not require much attention on the driver’s part. As he puts it, the co-presence of the driver and the red light belongs to a “minor mode” of our relation to the world and things (letting things go by, not paying much attention, a sense of detachment, day dreaming). In such minor modes there is no interpretation: “It is rather willing, skill, intending, justifying, strategy that appear as leftovers in the presence of a red light.” Fondements à une anthropologie des hommes (Paris: Hermann, 2011), 144. Interpretation intervenes, in a major mode if we can put it that way, when a problem, a disturbance, a test arises. This is the case, to return to our example, if the light should suddenly change to an unexpected color or if it begins to blink in an unexpected way. All sorts of questions then arise for the driver: what does this color which does not belong on a traffic light mean? Is there simply a technical problem? Is the state trying to modify the usual rules and I didn’t know about it? What should I do? Go ahead while obeying the other rules (such as those governing right turns on red)? Watch other drivers and do what they do? 25. The exact division between linguistics and hermeneutics is all the more problematic in that Schleiermacher acknowledges a hierarchy of three degrees of understanding: that, first, which has to do with a kind of mechanical, pre-reflexive “unthinking” which applies to immediate understanding; next, one that rests of a store of mutual experiences and observations; finally, one that requires some skill, a learned technique, especially when it comes to the interpretation of texts. The hierarchy we proposed, at the start of this work, in part inspired by Taylor, between proto-interpretive, interpretive, and meta-interpretive is clearly close to Schleiermacher’s. Besides Schleiermacher and Wittgenstein, Bouveresse also draws on recent work by Gareth Evans and John McDowell, Truth and Meaning: Essays in Semantics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), to point out the non-reflective character of ordinary linguistic behavior (Schleiermacher’s first level). Furthermore, Bouveresse correctly notes that the hypothesis of a totally strange meaning (for example, in the case of translation) is a limit-hypothesis, not to say false, in that mutual understanding, even when marked by a real (linguistic, cultural) strangeness always assumes a minimum of common experiences and beliefs (in Gadamer’s as well as Davidson’s sense). We can always separate, although rarely in a strict sense, interpretation and immediate understanding, even while admitting that no interpretation starts from zero, that is, from no meaningful background. 26. Peirce, Peirce on Signs, 239. 27. Besides “logical interpretants,” Peirce distinguishes “affective interpretants” (feelings that provoke signs like snatches of music) and “energetic interpretants” which imply a physical or mental effort (ibid., 30–31). 28. Abel, Langages, signes et interprétation, 154. 29. Ibid., 159. 30. Ibid., 168. 31. Contrary to what Jean-Marc Ferry says, Peirce grants greater importance to artificial indexes (for example, a weather vane for indicating the wind direction, mercury in a thermometer). Peirce also shows that indexes are equally present in the grammars of natural languages (in symbolic signs). This is the case, for example, with demonstrative pronouns like “this” or “that” “for they invite hearer to use his capacities for observation and, in doing so, to establish a real connection between his mind and the object” (ibid., 153). 32. Ferry, Les Grammaires de l’intelligence, 43.

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33. Ibid., 46. 34. H. Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967), 36. See also Louis Quéré and Cédric Terzi, “Pour une sociologie pragmatiste de l’expérience publique,” SociologiesS, http://sociologies.revues.org/4949. I thank Louis Quéré for his comments and suggestions on this topic. 35. What Albert Ogien calls, following Wittgenstein and Garfinkel, “ordinary conceptualization” to designate the phenomenon of permanently adjusting to what is happening during the course of an interaction.”[AQ1] Albert Ogien, “Rules and Details,” The Journal of Classical Sociology 9 (2009): 449–73. 36. Here is one such scenario from Studies: “The subject was telling the experimenter. A member of the subject’s car pool, about having had a flat tire while going to work the previous day: (S) I had a flat tire. (E) What do you mean, you had a flat tire? She appeared momentarily stunned. Then she answered in a hostile way ‘what do you mean?’ A flat tire is a flat tire. That is what I meant Nothing special. What a crazy question!” (Garfinkel, Studies, 42). 37. Ibid., 23. 38. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, 1:130. 39. Ibid., 130–31. 40. Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology, 137. 41. This case is close to the (problematic) interpretation of a social role in face-to-face situations like those we have discussed in the previous chapter, presented by Goffman. 42. This is clearly the case in the case for Garfinkel and his students’ experiments when they ask a subject (S) to clarify the meaning of his or her banal statements. 43. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1981), 56–57. 44. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), A144. 45. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 18. 46. Harvey Sacks, “Hotrodder: A Revolutionary Concept,” in George Psathas, ed., Everyday Language: Studies in Ethnomethodology (New York: Irvington Publishers, 1979), 7–14. 47. Willard van Orman Quine, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969). 48. Günter Figal, Gegenständlichkeit: Das Hermeneutische und die Philosophie (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007). 49. Wilhelm Dilthey, La vie historique, trans. Christian Berner and Jean-Claude Gens (Lille: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2014), 57. 50. D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock, 1971). 51. Jean Piaget, The Child’s Concept of the World, trans. Joan and Andrew Tomlinson (Totowa, NJ: Littlefield Adams, 1967). 52. Denis Diderot, The Paradox of Acting, trans. Walter Harries Pollock (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957). 53. Michel Serres, “L’Ambroisie et l’or,” in Hermès III: La Traduction (Paris: Minuit, 1974), 192. 54. Albert Blankert, “L’Oeuvre de Vermeer dans son temps,” in Gilles Aillaud, Albert Blanckert, and John Micheal Montias, eds., Vermeer (Paris: Nathan, 1986), 183. 55. Georges Didi-Huberman, Ce que nous voyons. Ce qui nous regarde (Paris: Minuit, 1992). 56. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968). 57. Didi-Huberman, Ce que nous voyons. Ce qui nous regarde, 51. 58. Ibid., 76 59. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (Penguin Classics, 2008). 60. The invisible, as not apparent, may take two orientations, and call for almost two distinct phenomenological projects. The first of these, closest to Merleau-Ponty following Husserl, makes the invisible what phenomenologically reveals itself in perception (like the sides of a cube that I do not see, the background that escapes my attention). What is not yet clear is capable of becoming so. In this case, transcendence as intending something beyond what is

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immediately given occurs in immanence, in perception when it overflows its limits. There is a twofold overflowing for Merleau-Ponty, toward ever distant horizons, both larger and smaller, through which the world opens itself to us and in particular corporeal things, carnal experiences that absorb, inflect, and enrich this moment’s seeing. Didi-Huberman clearly stands in this line of phenomenology. The second perspective, which falls under the rubric of the “theological turn in phenomenology” with Levinas, Henry, and Marion makes the invisible another (metaphysical, suprasensible, divine) reality inaccessible to mere sensory perception. Transcendence goes beyond the sphere of immanence. See Dominique Janicaud, La phénoménologie en tous ses états (Paris: Folio, 2009). 61. Edmund Husserl, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology: From the Lectures, Winter Semester 1910–1911, trans. Ingo Farin and James Hart (The Netherlands: Springer, 2006). 62. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (New York: Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 1966). 63. Gilles Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 64. Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs: The Complete Text, trans. Richard Howard (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 65. Ibid., 7. 66. Richard Shusterman, Performing Live : Aesthetic Alternatives for the Ends of Art, 119. 67. Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies in the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 261. 68. Hans Joas, The Creativity of Action, 71. 69. Suzi Adams, ed., Ricoeur and Castoriadis in Discussion: On Human Creation, Historical Novelty, and the Social Imaginary (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), 5. 70. Ibid., 5. 71. Ibid., 4. 72. Luc Boltanski, On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation, trans. Gregory Elliot (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), 70. 73. Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 288–89. 74. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, trans. Günter Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 213. 75. Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, ed. George H. Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 201. 76. Boltanski, On Critique, 95. 77. Luc Boltanski, Love and Justice as Competences: Three Essays on the Sociology of Action, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Polity, 2012), 28. 78. Cornelius Castoriadis, A Society Adrift: Interviews and Debates, 1974–1997, eds. Enrique Escobar, Myrto Gondicas, and Pascal Vernay, trans. Helen Arnold (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 3. 79. Yves Citton, L’Avenir des humanités. Economie de la connaissance ou cultures de l’interprétation (Paris: La Découverte, 2010). 80. Ibid., 79, citing Deleuze’s course at the university at Vincennes for January 24, 1984.

PART II. SCHOLARLY DECIFERING OF SIGNS 1. Deniau, Qu’est-ce qu’interpréter? 68. 2. Bruno Latour, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts, trans. Steve Woolgar (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). 3. See, for example, Ali Mérad, L’exégèse coranique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998); Junjie Huang, Mencian Hermeneutics: A History of Interpretation in China (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2001); Michael F. Marra, Japanese Hermeneutics: Current Debates on Aesthetics and Interpretation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002).

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4. I thank Ernst Wolff for having helped clarify this point for me. See Ernst Wolff, “Décoloniser la philosophie. Autour des contestations universitaires en Afrique du Sud,” La Vie des idées, http://www.laviedesidees.fr/Decoloniser-la-philosophie.html.

4. THE INFINITE AND THE RELATIVE 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 293–300, where he questions the possibility of establishing causal relations among phenomena. 2. Ibid., 342. See also the helpful commentaries of Christian Berner, “Nietzche et la question de l’interprétation,” http://stl.recherche.univlille3.fr/sitespersonnels/berner/textsenligne/ nietzscheetinterprétation.pdf; and Anthony Manicki, “Nietzsche et la radicalisation de l’interprétation,” Tracés: Revue de Sciences humaines, http://traces.revues.org/3823. 3. Ibid. 4. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 5. Nietzsche, Will to Power, 330. 6. Manicki, “Nietzsche et la radicalisation de l’interprétation.” 7. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); see also the critical comments in Jean Grondin, L’Herméneutique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2008), 109–12. 8. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 318. 9. Ibid., 319. 10. Gianni Vattimo, Éthique de l’interprétation (Paris: La Découverte, 1991). 11. Jean Greisch, L’âge herméneutique de la raison (Paris: Cerf, 1985). 12. Vattimo, Éthique de l’interprétation, 121. 13. Ibid., 127. 14. Ibid., 36. 15. Ibid., 9. 16. Grondin, L’Herméneutique, 114. The same point may be found in Marc-Antoine Vallée, Gadamer et Ricoeur. La conception herméneutique du langage (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013). 17. Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor; Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” New Literary History 6 (1974): 5–74. 18. See the excellent article by Michel Foessel, “La lisibilité du monde. La véhémence phénoménologique de Paul Ricoeur,” in Ricoeur, Cahiers de Herne, no. 81 (Paris: Editions de l’Herne, 2004), 178. 19. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 292. 20. Hayden White, The Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). 21. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 186. 22. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 253. 23. Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 24. Carlos Ginzburg, “Just One Witness,” in ibid., 82–96. 25. Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism and Other Writings, trans. and ed. Andrew Bowie (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 23. 26. As Habermas, Apel, and Ricoeur all emphasize, simply distinguishing two categories of prejudice assumes a critical criterion capable of making such a distinction. Furthermore, as Bouveresse points out, we have to delineate clearly between the authority that prejudices and language games impose upon us (in the sense of our accepting certain things in our lives) and

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the justification in principle (as Gadamer suggests) of the authority of tradition and of certain prejudices (Herméneutique et linguistique, 26–27). 27. Abel, Langage, signes, intreprétation, 302. 28. Karl-Otto Apel, Transformation de la philosophie, two vols., trans Christian Bouchindhomme, Thierry Simonellie, and Denis Trierweiler (Paris: Cerf, 2007–2010). 29. Using a perspective close to that of Apel, Bourveresse is right in emphasizing the contradiction to which Gadamer, who in principle refuses the superiority of one interpretation in comparison to others (in order better to set aside the hermeneutic principle that an interpreter can understand an author better than he understood himself) leads: “But how can a historical sequence of ‘different’ ways of understanding represent the equivalent of that teleology of a progressive unveiling of the actual meaning, which is in question in other places?” Gadamer does not say that Heidegger simply understands the metaphysical tradition in a different way, but that he does so a better way than it has been understood. Clearly it is not sufficient to say that to understand is to understand differently, if we want to account for the positive effect of temporal distance and the necessity of historical distance if we are to eliminate the arbitrary and unconscious prejudices that govern interpretation in the present (Herméneutique et linguistique, 31). Paradoxically, Bouveresse is not ready to follow Apel to a transcendental pragmatics in virtue of which a particular language game—that of an ideal communication community— would be able to look at other language games and particular forms of life, at the price of reintroducing a typically metaphysical language game like what Wittgenstein sought to expel. If Bouveresse does admit in principle the translation of a language game or cultural form of life into another, how, without presupposing such a transcendental language game (which need not be metaphysical), can we hope to overcome the relativism of language games and the hermeneutic principle of historical changes in understanding with which he reproaches Gadamer? 30. Apel, Transformation de la philosophie, 1:122. 31. Ibid., 218. 32. Abel, Langage, signes et interprétation, 83. 33. Ibid., 86–87. 34. Berner, Au détour du sens, 104. 35. Jean-Marc Ferry, Les puissances de l’expérience, vol. 1: Le sujet et le verbe (Paris: Cerf, 1991). 36. Ibid., 106. 37. Ibid., 107. 38. Ibid., 128. 39. Paolo Virno, Et ainsi de suite. La régression à l’infini et comment l’interrompre (Paris: L’Éclat, 2013). 40. Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 1991), 308–9. 41. Reinhard Koselleck, “Théorie de l’histoire et herméneutique,” in L’Expérience de l’histoire, trans. Alexandre Escudier (Paris: Seuil/Gallimard, 1997), 258. 42. Niklas Luhmann, Das Recht der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995). 43. Hughes Rabault, “Le problème de l’interprétation de la loi,” http:leportique.revues.org/ 587. See also by the same author, L’Interprétation des normes. L’Objectivité de la méthode herméneutique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997). 44. Jean-Philippe Pierron, “Une herméneutique en contexte: le droit,” http://methodos.revues.org/3040. 45. Ibid. 46. Ronald Dworkin, Matter of Principle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), particularly the second part: “Law as Interpretation,” 117–77. 47. Francesco Viola, “Herméneutique et droit,” Archives de Philosophie du Droit 37 (1992): 331–47. 48. Paul Ricoeur, “Interpretation and/or Argumentation,” in idem., The Just, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 109–26. 49. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998); see also Robert Alexy, A Theory of Legal Argumentation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).

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50. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 198. 51. Ricoeur, The Just, 120. 52. Carlo Ginzburg, “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm.” in Clues, Myth, and the Historical Method, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 96–125. 53. Ibid., 106. 54. Louis Liebenberg, The Art of Tracking: The Origin of Science (Cape Town: New Africa Books-David Philip, 1990). 55. Ibid., 166–67. 56. Ibid., 151. 57. Ibid., 117. 58. Ginzburg, “Clues,” 105. 59. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 138. Defined negatively, the Lebenswelt designates the overall sphere of human activities we can qualify as pre- or non-scientific. 60. See, for example, Denis Thouard, ed., L’Interprétation des indices. Enquête sur le paradigme indiciaire (Lille: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2007). 61. Ibid., 83. 62. Jean-Marc Ferry, “Le paradigme indiciaire,” in ibid., 92. 63. Paul Ricoeur, “L’Originaire et la question-en-retour dans la Krisis de Husserl,” in A l’école de la phénoménologie (Paris: Vrin, 1986), 295. 64. This text, “History and Hermeneutics,” which dates from 1976, was first published in English in The Journal of Philosophy 73 (1976): 683–95. A French translation by François Dosse and Catherine Goldenstein was published in Paul Ricoeur, Penser la mémoire (Paris: Seuil, 2013), 13–28. 65. Ricoeur, “History and Hermeneutics,” 687. 66. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).

5. BEING AND METHOD 1. Apel, Transformation de la Philosophie, 2: 70. 2. See Jean Grondin, Le Tournant herméneutique de la phénoménologie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2003). 3. Martin Heidegger, Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity, trans. John van Buren (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); see also Sophie-Jan Arrien, L’Inquiétude de la pensée. Herméneutique de la vie du jeune Heidegger (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2014). Alain Boutot, in the French translation of this course, following F. Vezin, translates Heidegger’s Fakitzität by factivité rather than facticité. Unlike things present-to-hand (in the sense of facticité), Dasein “exists” (in the sense of factivité) in the mode of thrownness and care. 4. Arrien, L’Inquiétude de la pensée, 187. 5. Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle: Initiation to Phenomenological Research, trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 76. 6. Grondin, Le Tournant herméneutique, 65. 7. Ibid., 134. 8. Ibid. 9. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1962), 441. 10. Ibid., 31. If Heidegger judges Dilthey to be responsible for the fall of hermeneutics into methodology, he does not hesitate to render homage to his philosophy of life, which leaves a place that suggests a conversion of hermeneutics to ontology: understanding is set within the

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world of life (of life that interprets itself) for a being that only exists historically. This is why, for Heidegger, Dilthey ought not to be read simply for his methodology or epistemology. 11. Without denying the possibility and pertinence of such a derivation, Reinhard Koselleck undertakes to correct the Heideggerian analysis of existentials by going beyond their still too “privative” character (centered on Dasein’s death) in order to “sociologize” and “historicize” them using structural oppositions (friend/enemy, secret/public, inside/outside). It is these existentials that make possible the “diversity of real histories.” Reinhard Koselleck, “Théorie de l’histoire et herméneutique,” in L’Expérience de l’histoire (Paris: Seuil/Gallimard, 1997), 253. 12. Heidegger, Being and Time, 445. 13. Ibid., 447. 14. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Utility and Liability of History for Life,” in his Unfashionable Observations, trans. Richard F. Gray (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 87. 15. Paul Ricoeur, From Text to Action, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 69. 16. Rudolf Bultmann, “The Problem of Hermeneutics,” in New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings, ed. and trans. Shubert Ogden (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1964), 69–94. For Ricoeur, “Preface to Bultmann,” trans. Peter McCormick in The Conflict of Interpretations (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 381–401. 17. Bultmann, “The Problem of Hermeneutics,” 86. 18. Emilio Betti, General Theory of Interpretation, two vols. (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015). 19. Grondin, Le Tournant herméneutique de la phénoménologie, 74. 20. Ibid., 78. 21. Ricoeur, “Task of Hermeneutics,” From Text to Action, 53–74. 22. Wilhelm Dilthey, The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). 23. In the introduction to his French translation of this work, L’Edification du monde historique dans les sciences de l’esprit (Paris: Seuil, 2005), Mesure, as do others, takes up the thesis of Misch (and also Groethuysen), which has played a great role in the editing, diffusion, and thinking about Dilthey’s work. On this history of debates and reception of Dilthey’s works, see Jean-Claude Gens, La Pensée herméneutique de Dilthey, entre néo-kantisme et phenoménologie (Lille: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2002). 24. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 224. 25. Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, 265–69. 26. Ibid., 106. 27. Ibid., 265. 28. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 297. We thus agree with Jean-Claude Gens regarding the idea that the later Dilthey’s hermeneutics largely anticipates that of Gadamer and Ricoeur: “Dilthey’s hermeneutic of works is in principle indissociable from a hermeneutic of the world. In other words, it is not just with Dilthey that the passage from the second to the third moment in the history of hermeneutics is accomplished, as Szondi believes. There is a passage from a hermeneutics of the author to one of the work” (Gens, La Pensée herméneutique de Dilthey: entre néo-kantisme et phénoménologie, 167). On another level, if Gadamer rejects Dilthey’s emphasis on method, he does not hesitate to salute the importance of a philosophy of life for the author of the Aufbau. The promise to analyze the ways of understanding in the natural, prescientific attitude is what interests the author of Truth and Method, an attitude that is not so far removed from the analytic of Dasein, which defines understanding essentially as a mode of being in the world before becoming the stance of scientific knowledge. 29. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 7. 30. Guy Deniau, Qu’est-ce qu’interpréter? (Paris: Vrin, 2015), 57. 31. Ibid., 59. 32. Claude Romano, “La règle souple de l’herméneutique,” Critique 71 (2015): 464–79. 33. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 241. 34. Romano, “La règle souple de l’herméneutique,” 469.

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35. For example, Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Text and Interpretation,” in Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter, ed. and trans. Diane P. Michelfelder and Richard E. Palmer (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989), 22. 36. This is one of the points argued for by Marc-Antoine Vallée in Gadamer et Ricoeur. La conception herméneutique du langage. 37. Ibid., 96. 38. See Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. 39. Karl-Otto Apel, Towards a Transformation of Philosophy, trans. Glyn Adey and David Frisby (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), 72. 40. Ricoeur, From Text to Action, 129. 41. Ibid., 116. 42. We can still ask whether structuralism does not borrow some elements of its methodology from the formal and the natural sciences. This is the case with structuralists like LéviStrauss or Lacan, who look to logic and mathematics to find methodological resources for analyzing myths and the products of the unconscious. Like Ricoeur, Lévi-Strauss seeks to get beyond the duality of explanation and understanding, but he does so in a different way. As Vincent Descombes’s commentary shows, this comes down to combining the kind of causal explanation found in the natural sciences with understanding the meaning of social institutions. Vincent Descombes, La denrée mentale (Paris: Minuit, 1995), 90. Structural anthropology, far from rejecting the model of causal explanation, integrates it as an epistemological tool. 43. Ricoeur, From Text to Action, 118. 44. Ibid., 166. 45. Some epistemological models, that of Bourdieu’s sociology, for example, combine a structural and a causal model. His notion of a field draws both on a relational and a structural approach (the oppositional relations of agents or social groups within a given social configuration) and a causal approach (to determine the positions assumed by social agents through their “dispositional forces”). 46. If we extend Ricoeur’s reflection to include history, other models of explanation need to be added, those coming from narrative theory, notably explanation through emplotment and teleological explanation. But we can also question whether these latter two do not stem more from understanding (understanding a story or history, understanding motives in light of a goal) than explanation, if we consider that beyond Humean causality we are dealing with reasons for action (see Time and Narrative, 1: 137–43). 47. Gens, Eléments pour une herméneutique de la nature, 60; see also Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception, trans. Alan Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1973), 93–101. 48. Gens, Eléments pour une herméneutique de la nature, 82. 49. Jean-Philippe Pierron, “L’interprétation médicale,” in Pierron, ed., Introduction à l’herméneutique médicale (Paris: Le cercle herméneutique, 2011), 11. 50. Jean-Philippe Pierron, “Les guidelines, la décision médicale et l’herméneutique de l’action,” in ibid., 73–84. 51. Elodie Crétin, “L’émergence de la médecine narrative: quelles propositions pour la formation des soignants?” in ibid., 113–20. 52. Ibid., 115. 53. Jérôme Porée, “Limites de l’explication, limites de la compréhension: le moment phénoménologique,” in ibid., 45–61. 54. Ibid., 59–60. 55. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 89. 56. Jean Laplanche, “La psychanalyse comme anti-herméneutique,” in Salankis, Rastier, and Scheps, eds., Herméneutique: textes, sciences (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997), 149–61. 57. Ibid., 160. 58. Ibid. 59. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, trans. Katherine Jones (New York: Vintage, 1957); Jensen’s “Gravida” and other Works, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1959).

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60. Sigmund Freud, Leonardo de Vinci: A Memory of His Childhood, trans. Alan Tyson (New York: Norton, 1989). 61. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 2005). 62. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, trans. Peter Gay (New York: Norton, 1989). 63. Gens, Élements pour une herméneutique de la nature, 144. 64. Ibid., 154. 65. Pierre Duhem, The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, trans. Philip P. Wiener (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954). 66. Gilles Cohen-Tannoudji, “La théorie quantique des champs,” in Salanskis, Rastier, and Scheps, eds., Herméneutique, textes, sciences, 255. 67. Patrick A. Heelan, “L’herméneutique de la science experimentale,” ibid., 280–-90, however, does see nominalism as leading to relativism if we integrate the conditions under which observation occurs, the social-historical givens, and the role of research communities, which means that we do not measure an objective reality but “a system made up of an object and a measured-subject who does the measuring.” “In contrast to traditional physics, the new concept of scientific research affirms the essential character, for an analysis of its process, of data of a social-political and hermeneutic type: where, when, by which group of experts, in what sequence of actions, with what goal, etc. For the Bohr/Heisenberg perspective, the pertinence of at least two degrees of non-classical freedom, notably the social and historical factors, is implicit in the understanding of quantum science. For this view, quantum theory incorporates social-historical processes in its measurements and is hermeneutically related to the socialhistorical itinerary of the appearance of this system in the world” (280). 68. Cohen-Tannoudji, “La Théorie quantique des champs,” 259. 69. We must confess our lack of expertise in this subject but would refer the reader to JeanMichel Salanskis, L’herméneutique formelle (Paris: Klincksieck, 2013), who seeks to ground the mathematical sciences on a hermeneutic base derived from Heidegger and Gadamer. In this undertaking, it is not just a question of showing that mathematics is like a language, however abstract it may be, but that it stems from a particular category of a “symbolic grammar.” More fundamentally, if we have understood Salanskis’s thesis, it depends on being able to derive the principal mathematical concepts (continuity, infinity, space, number) from a kind of “immemorial semantics and syntax,” which offers type of being whose mode of being is understanding and questioning (what is infinity? What is space?). 70. Gens, Eléments pour une herméneutique de la nature, 329. 71. Ibid., 128.

6. TEXT AND ACTION 1. In the second treatise of his Organon, better known as the Peri Hermenieas, Aristotle presents a first sense of the concept of interpretation, but a quite particular one far removed from the modern sense. Not only does a text not have any privilege when it comes to what is to be interpreted, interpretation is not properly speaking an act of deciphering confused, equivocal, or obscure expressions. For Aristotle, interpretation is about saying something about something. Hermeneia refers to the signification of a sentence that may be a true or false proposition. It is not so much through his propositional logic (where the oneness of meaning is based on a thing’s essence) that Aristotle offers a path for tracing the way to an ontological hermeneutics as through his metaphysics: being can be talked about in many ways—as quality, quantity, time, place, etc. The ontological equivocity of being upsets the architecture of a propositional logic based on the search for univocity, opening the way to the tradition of ontological hermeneutics that Heidegger seeks to renew. 2. Before the establishing of professional techniques for understanding texts, one of the oldest expressions of hermeneutics as “interpreting what is said” derived from mythology and Greek poetics, in a sense opposite to that of a propositional logic like the one found in Aristotle. This is a line found, for example, in Plato (notably in Ion 534e) owing to the kinship between

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hermeneuein and Hermes: “the poets are the messengers of the gods” (hermenes eisin ton theon). If the poets interpret the gods’ messages, it is up to other interpreters like the orators to interpret the poets’ interpretations. “These references outline the prescientific origin, and the problematic of a doctrine dealing with the ‘exposition’ and ‘interpretation’ of words and texts. Interpretation includes the art of the herald and the rapsode, who, as such, already expand communication or proclamations to include interpretation through their ‘recitations,’ up to the art of exegesis and commentary, passing through the art of the interpreter who ‘translates’ a message from one language to another and thereby ‘interprets’ it” (Apel, Transformation de la Philosophie, 2:66). 3. See, for example, Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, three vols., trans. Mark Sebanc (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998–2009). 4. Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism and Other Writings, trans. and ed. Andrew Bowie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); see also Christian Berner, La philosophie de Schleiermacher. Herméneutique, dialectique, éthique (Paris: Cerf, 1995). 5. Denis Thouard, “Quand lire est penser,” Critique 71 (2015): 555–68, demonstrates that Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics cannot be reduced to a set of interpretive techniques, however central they may be. Because it is presented as a general theory of knowledge, this hermeneutics is plainly philosophical (in a different sense than that presented by Gadamer), which is why it is necessary to consider together Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics and his Dialectic, or, the Art of Doing Philosophy: A Study Edition of the 1811 Notes, trans. Terrance N. Tice (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1996). 6. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism, 92. 7. Ibid., 93. 8. Ibid., 266. 9. Christian Berner, “Comprendre et communiquer: Kant à l’horizon du paradigme herméneutique,” in André Laks and Ada Neschke, eds., La naissance du paradigme herméneutique (Lille: Presses de Septentrion, 1990), 43. 10. Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretation, 56. 11. Berner, “Comprendre et communique,” 28. 12. Ada Neschke, “Matériaux pour une approche philologique de l’herméneutique,” in Laks and Neschke, eds., La naissance du paradigme herméneutique, 44–69. 13. Jean Quillien, “Pour une autre scansion de l’histoire de l’herméneutique. Les principes de l’herméneutique de W. Von Humboldt,” in La naissance du paradigme herméneutique, 71–105. 14. A traditional reading still found in Franz Mussner, Historie de l’herméneutique (Paris: Cerf, 1972). 15. See Wilhelm von Humboldt, “On the Historian’s Task,” History and Theory 6 (1967): 57–71. 16. Quillien, “Pour une autre scansion de l’histoire de l’herméneutique,” 96. 17. Ibid., 99. 18. Ibid., 97. 19. Denis Thouard, Herméneutique critique (Lille: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2012), 12. 20. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism, 23. 21. “The aim of emancipation should not be taken as what discriminates texts that are to be interpreted, otherwise we will limit ourselves to a ‘golden legend’ of martyrs for criticism or condemn ourselves to allegorical contortions in order draw an emancipatory potential from works” (Thouard, Herméneutique critique, 128). 22. See Pierre Judet de la Combe and Heinz Wismann, L’avenir des langues. Repenser l’humanité (Paris: Cerf, 2004). 23. Ulrich Schmitzer, ed., Enzyklopädie der Philologie (Göttingen: Ruprecht, 2013). 24. August Boeckh, The Public Economy of the Athenians, trans. Anthony Lamb (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1857). 25. Christiane Hackel, “L’avènement du paradigme herméneutique chez Boeckh et Droysen,” in Jean-Claude Gens, ed., Johann Gustav Droysen. L’avènement du paradigme herméneutique dans les sciences humaines (Paris: Le Cercle Herméneutique, 2009), 117.

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26. Ibid., 119. 27. Koselleck, “Théorie de l’histoire et herméneutique,” in L’expérience de l’histoire, 258. 28. Axel Hortsmann, “Herméneutique come théorie générale et comme organon des sciences philologiques chez August Boeckh,” La naissance du paradigme herméneutique, 270. 29. Johann Gustav Droysen, Outline of the Principles of History, trans. E. Benjamin Andrews (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1897). 30. Droysen’s theory of history includes a method (Methodik) for pursuing historical research (a heuristic question, the critique of sources, and their interpretation), a systematic theory (Systematik) of the objects of historical inquiry, and a topics (Topik) of how to present the results of such inquiry (narrative exposition, didactic exposition). 31. Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, trans. Peter Putnam (New York: Knopf, 1953), later will say that history is an indirect observation of the past, a “knowledge through traces,” and Ricoeur, following Droysen, will speak of “taking the place of” and “standing for” (représentance) to indicate the ontological status of the historical past as “having-been.” 32. Ulrich Muhlack, “Johann Gustav Droysen: ‘Historik’ et herméneutique,” La naissance du paradigme herméneutique, 290. 33. Breaking with the idea of an absolute truth about history is a way for Droysen to take his distance on Hegel’s philosophy of Spirit and set himself plainly in the camp of positive research and a professionalization of the historian’s job, for which Ranke’s school (itself a declared adversary of Hegel) was the leading front in German universities. This is true even if we stick closely to the idea of a Methodik. It no longer is if we cross the threshold to a Systematik in which the historian does not hesitate to return to a teleology of history assimilated to the progress of freedom, not very distant from Hegel’s own Lectures on the Philosophy of History. It was in fact the existence of a metaphysical and theological ground of history that led to a cautious, not to say distrustful reception of Droysen by the Annales School. Cf. Bertrand Müller, “Droysen et les Annales. Réflexions méthodologiques et interprétation d’une nonréception,” La naissance du paradigme herméneutique, 132. 34. Jean-Claude Gens, “Le concept droyséen de compréhension,” in Gens, ed., Johann Gustav Droysen, 132. 35. Otto Gerhard Oexle, “La science historique en tant que recherche et le problème de l’historicisme,” in ibid., 31–42. 36. Gustav Droysen, Histoire de l’hellénisme, trans. Auguste Bouché-Leclercq (Paris: Lafont, 2003). 37. Pascal Payen and Ana Lobo, “La question historique de l’unité. L’herméneutique de Droysen face à Hegel et à Ranke,” in Gens, ed., Johann Gustav Droysen, 50. 38. Droysen, Outline of the Principles of History, 26. 39. Ibid. One of the more telling criticisms Droysen addresses to historical positivism is found the review he wrote of The History of Civilization in England by Henry Thomas Buckle. The British historian wants to elevate history to the rank of being a science through assimilating historical facts and general laws. Droysen is against the idea that history should be an exact science like mathematics and argues for a method that would be a historical method: understanding. Long before Dilthey, it was Droysen who sought to base history on its own specific method. If Wolf and Boeckh used the notion of understanding to define the philological method, they did not clearly distinguish it from explanation. It is Droysen who first distinguishes three distinct methods, faced with philosophy as well as the natural sciences: the speculative method of philosophy, the explanatory method of the natural sciences, and the method of understanding used by the historical sciences. 40. Droysen, Outline of the Principles of History, 30. 41. Droysen’s Historik combines a purely methodological reflection on the science of history with a metaphysical, even theological one on the meaning of history, taken as a “second Bible,” as God’s incarnation in human destiny. 42. Dilthey, The Formation of the Historical World, 174. 43. Ibid., 107. 44. Georg Simmel, Gesamtaufgabe, vol. 18: Englishsprachige Veröffenlichungen 1893–1910, ed. David P Frisby (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2008). See also the excellent comparative study of Dilthey and Simmel by Denis Thouard, “Les deux modes de la compréhension du

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sens chez Simmel,” in Luigi Cataldi Madonna, ed., Natrualistische Hermeneutik. Ein Neues Paradigma des Verstehens und Interpretierens (Würzburg: K&N, 2013), 47–65. 45. Dilthey, The Formation of the Human Sciences, 170. 46. Ibid., 297. 47. Droysen, Outlines of the Principles of History, 17. 48. Friedrich Schleiermacher, Herméneutique, trans. Marianna Simon (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1989), 179. 49. Ibid., 59. 50. Heidegger does not hesitate to offer homage to Dilthey in the closing sections of Being and Time for having found the science of history on a more originary historical experience. However, Karl-Otto Apel rightly notes that what distinguishes Heidegger from Dilthey on this point lies in the fact that life, in relation to being, is not just articulated for Dilthey as what has already been articulated as meaningful, but what equally must be lived in the future: “The idea of hermeneutics is radicalized in a specifically ‘existential and ontological’ way in this understanding of being as ‘that in view of care’ (Worumwillden der Sorge) in terms of which what we call the ‘past’ receives its meaning as what ‘is always there’ (immer noch bevorstehend)” (Transformation de la Philosophie, 2:80). 51. Arrien, L’inquiétude de la pensée, 136–37. 52. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 53. Paul Ricoeur, “Objectivity and Subjectivity in History,” in idem., History and Truth, trans. Charles K. Kelbley (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 21–40. 54. Ibid., 28. 55. Ibid., 29. 56. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, two vols., trans. Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper and Row, 1972–1974). 57. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 1: 209. 58. Carl Hempel, “The Function of General Laws in History,” The Journal of Philosophy 39 (1942), 5–48. 59. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 1: 115–16. 60. William Dray, Laws and Explanations in History (New York: Harper and Row, 1966). 61. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 1: 126. 62. Ibid., 1: 129. 63. Emile Durkheim, “Individual and Collective Representations,” in idem. Sociology and Philosophy, trans. D. F. Popcock (New York: Routledge, 1996), 1–34. See also Bruno Karsenti, La société en personnes. Études durkeimiennes (Paris: Economica, 2005). 64. Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, trans. W. D. Halls (New York: Free Press, 1984), 287. 65. A different, non-holistic reading of Durkheim is also possible, one that does not turn society into a thing. Durkheim is more interested in the way in which individuals are determined by society or the way in which society acts on them through collective or social forms. In this sense, if we follow the illumining commentary of Bruno Karsenti, the notion of “person” is central to Durkheim’s sociology. Not in the Kantian sense of a being who ought never be consider simply as a means to an end, but in the sense that the individual is structured by society: “Between the impersonality of society and the quality of person applicable to individuals, a paradoxical relation of implication is established. Society is what makes there be persons, but it is also what makes the category of person differ considerably from the representations individuals spontaneously have of it. By becoming present to individuals, society constitutes them as persons” (La société en personnes, 6). It is this impersonal something deposited in each individual that is the object of sociology, that is, a social thing, something quite different than a physical thing. 66. Albert Ogien, “Durkheim as a Sociologist of Knowledge: Rudiments of a Reflexive Theory of the Concept,” The Journal of Classical Sociology 16 (2016): 7–20. 67. Ricoeur, “The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text,” in From Text to Action, 145. 68. Ibid., 151.

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69. We can extend this concept of refiguration to other things than texts (paintings, sculptures). This is what, Martin Seel, for example, proposes for the visual arts: Die Künste des Kinos (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2013). The world of cinema only appears phenomenologically speaking with the spectator’s experience. See also Ioana Vultur, “Vers une herméneutique du cinéma,” Critique 71 (2015): 594–606. Seel’s argument seems more heuristic for our concept of interpretation in that the world of the work as a world of a work has the power to disturb and make the world of the reader unfamiliar. We could say then that the more the world of a work affects that of the reader, or a spectator, or listener, the more it requires (creative) interpretation. Movies are significant, moreover, as Seel points out, owing to their “total” character. They borrow the languages of other forms of art (music, theater, literature) and using them invent other ways of refiguring sound, images, and what is seen. In this spirit, Marielle Macé has proposed enlarging the concept of refiguration to include mediations other than those found in novels or other texts, for example, in music (through its rhythm) and painting (through is figuration). Self-narration finally is just one mode among others of subjectivation that can be encompassed in what she calls “stylistic identity” (Macé, Façons de lire, 154–57). 70. Ricoeur, “The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text,” 153. 71. Ibid., 155. 72. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973). 73. Ibid., 27. 74. Ricoeur, “The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text,” 154. 75. Ibid., 146. 76. Quéré, La sociologie à l’épreuve herméneutique, 26. The same objection against a textbased hermeneutics can be found in the work of Albert Ogien: “If the idea of the objectivity of a text does allow escaping the arbitrariness of individual interpretations, it does so by eliminating completely the dynamic that engenders the contingency of shared action: its explanation must come after the fact, when things have settled down as a result and are already recognizable as consequences” Les formes sociales de la pensée (Paris: Armand Colin, 2007), 142. 77. Albert Ogien, Michel de Fornel, and Louis Quéré, eds. Une sociologie radicale (Paris: La Découverte, 2001). 78. Harvey Sacks, Lectures on Conversation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). See also Alain Bovet, Esther Gonzalez-Martinez, and Fabienne Malbois, eds., Langage, Activités et ordre social: faire de la sociologie avec Harvey Sacks (Berne: Peter Lang, 2014). 79. See Joan Stavo-Debauge, “Des ‘événements’ difficiles à encaisser. Un pragmatisme pessimiste,” in Daniel Cefaï and Cédric Terzi, eds., L’Expérience des problèmes publics (Paris: EHESS, 2012), 191–223; Quéré and Terzi, “Pour une sociologie pragmatiste de l’expérience publique.” 80. Following T. P. Wilson, “Conceptions of Interaction and Forms of Sociological Explanation,” American Sociological Review 35 (1970): 697–710, and Ogien, Les forms sociales de la pensée, 125–27, we can distinguish two sociological models of interpretation. The one, called subjective, recommended by symbolic interactionism (notably in the work of Blumer), relates interpretation to the construction of individual identities in the very course of social interaction. The other, called objective, and claimed by ethnomethodology, “does not consider the procedure of attributing a meaning to the objects making up a universe of action as a postulate, but transforms it into a phenomenon that sociological analysis must account for. In this version, interpretation therefore is not a work of understanding carried out by interacting individuals but combined instead with the instantaneous attribution of intelligibility to what is happening around them. This attribution assumes that the individuals are capable of recognizing the inherent order of any practical activity” (ibid., 128). 81. Ibid., 139. 82. Quéré, La sociologie à l’épreuve de l’herméneutique, 32. 83. Quéré and Terzi, “Pour une sociologie pragmatiste de l’expérience publique.” 84. Laurance Kaufmann and Louis Quéré, “Comment analyses les collectifs et les institutions?” in de Fornel, Ogien, and Quéré, L’ethnométhodologie. Une sociologie radicale, 379. 85. Quéré, La sociologie à l’épreuve de l’herméneutique, 33. 86. Ogien, Les formes sociales de la pensée, 129.

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87. Karl Mannheim, “On the Interpretation of Weltanschauung,” in idem., Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952), 53–63. 88. Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology, 95. 89. Ibid., 167. 90. Ibid. 91. Lawrence Wieder, Language and Social Reality: The Case of Telling the Convict Code (The Hague: Mouton, 1974). There is a partial translation of this material into French by Cédric Terzi, “Dire le code du détenu,” along with a discussion, “L’art de la respécification ethnométhodologique,” in Daniel Cefaï, ed., L’engagement ethnographique (Paris: EHESS, 2010), 169–81, 183–215. 92. Wieder, Language and Social Reality, 115–16. 93. Luc Boltanski and Lauren Thévenot, On Justification: Economies of Worth, trans. Catherine Porter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). 94. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, 1:130. 95. Jacques Revel, ed., Jeux d’échelles. La micro-analyse à l’expérience (Paris: EHESS, 1998). 96. Gilbert Ryle, “The Thinking of Thoughts. What is Le Penseur Doing?” in Collected Papers, vol. 2 (London, Hutchinson, 1971), 480–96; Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures. See also André Mary, “De l’épaisseur de la description à la profondeur de l’interprétation,” Enquête http://enquete.revues.org/1433. 97. Mary, “De l’épaisseur de la description à la profondeur de l’interprétation.” 98. Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988). 99. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 9–10. 100. Dan Sperber, “L’Interprétation en anthropologie,” L’Homme 21 (1981): 62–92. 101. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940) 102. A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Structure and Function in Primitive Society: Essays and Addresses (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1952). 103. Sperber, “L’Interprétation en anthropologie,” 79. 104. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, trans. A. C. Miles, rev. by Rush Rhees (Nottinghamshire: Brynmill, 1979). 105. Lucian Lévy-Bruhl, Primitive Mentality, trans. Lilian A. Clare (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966). 106. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, 1:112. 107. Ibid., 114. 108. Ibid. 109. Alban Bensa, “Père de Pwädé. Retour sur une ethnologie au long cours,” in Alban Bensa and Didier Fassin, eds., Les politiques de l’enquête (Paris: La Découverte, 2008), 37. 110. Jean Favret-Saada, Les Mots, la Mort, les Sorts: la sorcellerie dans le bocage (Paris: Gallimard, 1977). 111. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, 1:118. 112. Cyril Lemieux, Le devoir et la grâce (Paris: Economica, 2009), 52–53. 113. Ibid., 51. 114. Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology, 78–79. 115. Laurent Thévenot, “Des institutions en personne. Une sociologie pragmatique en dialogue avec Paul Ricoeur,” Ricoeur Studies/Études ricoeuriennes 3 (2012): 11–33. 116. Frédéric Lordon, La société des affects. Pour un structuralisme des passions (Paris: Seuil, 2013). 117. Don Lavoie, ed., Economics and Hermeneutics (London: Routledge, 1990), 7. This collection constitutes one of the key contributions to this debate. 118. Richard M. Ebeling, “What is a Price? Explanation and Understanding (with apologies to Paul Ricoeur),” in ibid., 174–91. 119. Ibid., 182. 120. Ibid., 178. 121. Ibid., 187.

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122. Ibid., 191. 123. Gary B. Madison, “Getting Beyond Objectivism: The Philosophical Hermeneutics of Gadamer and Ricoeur,” in ibid., 34–58. 124. Ibid., 47. 125. Donald N. McCloskey, “Storytelling in Economics,” in ibid., 61–75. 126. Ibid., 61. 127. Tom G. Palmer, “The Hermeneutical View of Freedom: Implications of Gadamerian Understanding for Economic Polity,” in ibid., 300. 128. Ibid., 300. 129. André Orléan, The Empire of Values: A New Foundation for Economics, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 40. In place of direct interactions between buyers and sellers, it is up to the market in Walras’s model to assure the function of communicating prices to the economic agents in this market, to smooth out any disequilibrium between offers and demands, and to organize exchanges. 130. French so-called institutionalist economists like André Orléan our Frédéric Lordon, for all that they are critical for the same reasons as the Austrian hermeneutic economists of the individualist presuppositions of neoclassical economists, are more oriented toward a Spinozist ontology (paired with a sociology inspired by Durkheim or structuralism) than toward the hermeneutic tradition when it comes to refounding the bases of economics. We shall say more about this subsequently. 131. Madison, “Getting Beyond Objectivism,” 39. 132. Lawrence Berger, “Self-Interpretation, Attention, and Language: Implications for Economics of Charles Taylor’s Hermeneutics,” in Lavoie, ed., Economics and Hermeneutics, 267. 133. “Uses and modes, prejudices and superstitions, as well as essential political constitutions or legal systems.” Paul Fauconnet and Marcel Mauss, “Sociologie,” from the Grande Encylopedia, Oeuvres, vol. III (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1969), 150. 134. Orléan, The Empire of Value, 115. 135. Lordon, La société des affects, 238. 136. Orléan, The Empire of Value, 22. 137. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Penguin, 1966), 72.

EPILOGUE 1. Michel Foucault, The Archology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 109. 2. Ibid., 111. 3. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 124. 4. Michel Foucault, “About the Beginnings of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth,” Political Theory 21 (1993): 203. 5. Ibid., 210. 6. Ibid., 204. 7. Ibid., 209. 8. Ibid., 214. 9. Michel Foucault, Wrong-Doing Truth Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice, ed. Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Hardcourt, trans. Stephen W. Sawyer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 167. 10. Ibid., 168–69. 11. Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 180–81. 12. Foucault, “About the Beginnings of the Hermeneutics of the Self,” 222–23. 13. It is these courses that make up Doing Wrong Speaking Truthfully. It is worth noting that in his courses at the Collège de France in 1979 and 1980, published under the posthumous title

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The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France 1982–1983, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Foucault develops his study of the practices of confession and Christian exagoreusis, the verbalization and injunction to state the truth about oneself. However, there is no conceptual introduction in these lectures of the hermeneutics of the self, its origin, or its relation to textual hermeneutics. They depend on a change that took place around 1980 to 1981, seen in the Dartmouth and Berkeley lectures and the Louvain course. Following them, Foucault inscribes his analyses of confession and Christian exagoreusis using the framework of a more general reflection on the origins of the hermeneutics of the self (henceforth the central concept) and the hermeneutics of the subject. 14. Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–1982, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2005), 491. 15. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 302.

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Index

Abel, Günter, 15, 60, 70, 123–124 action, xix, 4, 59, 92, 94, 103, 107, 205, 206, 208, 209, 211, 212, 224, 226, 235, 237, 249; rational, 60 Aglietta, Michel, 232 Alexy, Robert, 261n49 Andler, Daniel, 13 Annales School, 195, 200 anthropology, xv; cultural, 14, 39; historical, 35; interpretive, 147, 149, 248; philosophical, xv, 2; social, 36; structural, 39–40, 264n42 Apel, Karl-Otto, xiii, 113, 115, 120–122, 124, 126, 145, 161, 162, 164, 177, 187, 216, 260n26, 268n50 Arrien, Sophie-Jan, 262n3 Aristotle, 20, 28, 148, 265n1 Arendt, Hannah, xvii, 125 art, 70, 80, 84, 88, 111, 114, 156, 171, 188 Ast, Friedrich, xx, 180, 181, 186 Augustine, 181 Bachelard, Gaston, 239 Backe, Jacob de, 87 Bailly, Jean-Christophe, 23 Bataille, Georges, 90, 239 behaviorism, 24, 25, 223 Bellah, Robert, xiii Benford, Robert, 52 Benjamin, Walter, 187 Benoist, Jocelyn, 8, 11

Bensa, Alban, 221 Berger, John, 89 Berger, Peter, 236 Bernard, Claude, 165 Berner, Christian, 22, 120, 124, 182, 260n2 Bessin, Marc, 253n73 Betti, Emilio, 128, 151, 152, 162, 177 biographical event/situation, 27–28, 49–50, 52, 80 biosemantics, 6, 7, 11 biosemiotics, xii, 5, 6, 7, 11, 16, 25, 174, 177 Blanchot, Maurice, 90, 239 Bloch, Marc, 267n31 Blumenberg, Hans, xx Boltanski, Luc, 77, 94, 97, 98, 216 Boeckh, August, 173, 188, 189, 190, 194, 195, 199 Bohr, Niels, 175 Bollack, Jean, 186 Bonicco-Donato, Céline, 255n42 Bourdieu, Pierre, 9, 11, 40, 44, 79, 96, 97, 203, 234, 235, 264n45 Bouveresse, Jacques, 11, 67–68, 257n25, 260n26 Braudel, Fernand, 200 Brague, Rémi, 20 Broca, Pierre Paul, 13 Bultmann, Rudolf, xiv, 151, 162 Burgat, Florence, 18, 23, 26 Buytendijk, Frederik, 3, 22, 174 285

286

Index

Canguilhem, Georges, 239 Cassirer, Ernst, 15, 16, 20, 21, 39, 63 Castoriadis, Cornelius, xi, 93, 94, 99, 101, 235 Cefaï, Daniel, 253n57 Charon, Rita, 167 Churchland, Paul, xvi Citton , Yves, 102, 103 Clément, Pierre, 5, 7 cognitive sciences, xvi, 13; neurosciences, xvi, 13 Cohen-Tannoudji, Gilles, 175 Collingwood, R. G, 199 Combe, Judet de la, 210 Comte, Auguste, 155, 203 Crétin, Elodie, 167 Davidson, Donald, 64–65, 69, 256n16 Deleuze, Gilles, xiii, 90, 91, 102, 110 Dennett, Daniel, 257n17 Deniau, Guy, 156 Derrida, Jacques, 90, 112, 114, 116–117, 119, 148 Descola, Philippe, xv, xvi, 39, 40–41, 43, 79, 254n20 Descombes, Vincent, 51, 235 De Waal, Frans, 12 Dewey, John, xi, 10, 24, 51, 68, 69, 211, 214, 237 Diderot, Denis, 85 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 88, 89, 90 Dilthey, Wilhelm, xii, xx, 16, 82, 114, 121, 125, 127, 146, 149, 151, 153–156, 158, 160, 162, 165, 173–174, 176, 178, 180, 183, 184, 185, 188, 189, 194–195, 196, 197, 198–199, 203, 204, 205, 209, 214, 225, 227, 262n10 Dosse, François, xi Dreyfus, Hubert, xiv, 240 Dray, William, 201 Droysen, Johann Gustav, 189, 190–194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 201, 202, 206 Duhem, Pierre, 175 Dupuy, François, 234 Durkheim, Emile, 40, 101, 203, 204–205, 232, 234, 268n65 Dworkin, Ronald, 132–133 Ebeling, Richard, 225, 227

Engel, Pascal, 65, 256n16 Epicurus, 246 Ernesti, Johann August, 180 ethnology, xiv, 219–220 ethnomethodology, xiii, 72, 77, 82, 162, 164, 168, 194, 205, 206, 209, 211, 212, 214 Evans-Pritchard, Edward, 219 explanation, xiii, xviii, 2, 12, 15, 48, 52, 62, 67, 72, 73, 77–78, 82, 99, 142, 155–156, 162–164, 168, 169, 173, 177, 192, 193, 194, 201–202, 203, 204, 205–206, 213, 215, 223, 225, 227, 232, 234, 237 Favret-Saada, Jeanne,6n110 Ferry, Jean-Marc, xiii, 72, 124, 127 Foessel, Michael,4n18 Foucault, Michel, xv Frazer, James, 220 Ferry, Jean-Marc, 64, 120, 125, 126, 127 Feuerbach, Ludwig, xix, 99 Figal, Günter, 82 Foucault, Michel, xi, xiv, 102, 179, 239–249, 252n39 Freud, Sigmund, xiv, 26, 72, 98, 136, 169–171, 172 Friedman, Milton, 227 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, xii, xiii, xx, 9, 10, 29, 62, 86, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118–119, 121, 122, 123, 124, 128, 129, 145, 151, 152, 155, 155–160, 160, 162, 164, 177, 180, 183, 184, 186, 191, 194, 196, 198, 225, 229, 230, 231, 256n16 Gardiner, Patrick, 201 Garfinkel, Harold, 72, 74, 209, 211, 214, 215, 216, 224 Geertz, Clifford, 207, 208, 217, 219, 220 Gehlen, Arnold, 19 Gens, Jean-Claude, 8, 23, 165, 173, 174, 176, 177, 191 Giddens, Anthony, xix Ginzburg, Carlo, xix, 35–36, 118, 136–137, 138, 141, 164 Girard, René, 234 Godelier, Maurice, xvi Good, Byron, 49

Index Goodman, Nelson, 78 Goffette, Jérôme, 56 Goffman, Erving, 48, 53, 54, 75, 204, 209, 215 Gordon, David, 225 Grondin, Jean, 152 Grossetti, Michel, 27 Guattari, Felix, 91 Habermas, Jürgen, xiii, xix, 47, 48, 52, 54, 56, 60, 61, 62, 65, 70, 73, 74, 95, 100, 113, 114, 126, 134, 160, 187, 217, 220–222, 241, 260n26 habit, 9, 11, 12, 15, 17, 24, 27, 29, 36, 38, 42, 44–45, 46, 47, 61, 66, 69, 73, 78, 85, 86, 101, 103, 147, 164, 174, 201, 215, 232, 234, 236 Hackel, Christiane, 189 Hayek, Friedrich, 227 Heelen, Patrick, 265n67 Hegel, G. W. F., 154 Heidegger, Martin, xii, xiii, 17, 18, 20, 21, 76, 112, 114, 115, 116, 117, 119, 121, 122, 145, 146–150, 151, 152–153, 156, 158, 160, 162, 180, 183, 184, 185, 186, 191, 196, 198, 199, 240, 256n16, 262n10, 268n50 Hempel, Carl, 201 Hermeneutics, xvii, xx, 10, 23, 31, 67, 74, 79, 91, 106, 107, 112, 113, 114, 115, 120–121, 124, 126–127, 145, 147–149, 151, 152–161, 164, 168, 170–171, 175, 177, 186, 187, 192, 195, 205, 210, 213, 214, 239, 241, 244; hermeneutic circle, 112, 124, 146, 151, 157, 181, 197, 214, 215, 241; historical distance, 86, 261n29; history of, 179–187; legal, xii, 128–135, 180; limits of, 30; medical, 56, 161–170, 175, 176, 180, 209; of facticity, 196; of suspicion, xiii, xiv, 79, 98, 109, 239, 243, 245; of the self, 242–243, 244; ontological, xx, 117, 145, 149, 158, 160, 185, 248, 265n1; paradigm, 179, 185, 187, 194, 205, 206, 223, 225, 229, 237, 249; philological, xii; postmodern, 115–116, 118, 120, 160, 186, 248; psychological, 152, 206; theological, xii, 107, 131, 133 Heyne, Christian Gottlob,, 180, 184, 188

287

historicity, 44, 113, 115, 142, 149, 165, 235 Hooch, Pieter de, 88 Hoppe, Hans-Herman, 225 Hortsmann, Axel, 190 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 183–185, 187, 188, 190, 192, 199 Husserl, Edmund, xix, 9, 23, 34, 89, 127, 139, 141, 143, 146, 148, 149, 157, 200, 214, 225 ideology, 96, 97, 99, 100 imagination, xviii, 43, 85, 101, 117, 127, 200; historical, 199, 205 intentionality, 7, 20, 21 interpretation, xii, xvi–xviii, 2, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 14, 15, 16, 20, 34, 39, 43, 50, 59, 68, 75, 96, 97, 101, 103, 111, 116, 120, 130, 221, 243; amplifying, 77, 134, 136, 141, 145, 223, 248; autointerpretation, xiv, 50, 80, 149, 176, 198, 199, 205, 208, 211, 213, 214, 216, 229, 230, 231, 234, 246, 247, 248–249; conflict of, xx, 119, 124, 217; better interpretations, 150; corrective, 216, 220; creative, xviii, 7, 38, 93; documentary method of, 214–216, 224; demystifying, 98; ethics of, 115, 117, 119, 124; ethnointerpretation, 72, 76, 77, 78, 98, 103, 127, 136, 139, 143, 164, 197, 224, 247; failure of, 62, 82, 248; indirect, 138; inter-interpretation, 48, 52, 57, 62, 225, 226, 229, 232, 234; legitimacy of, 121; limits of, 30; mediate, 73, 211; meta-interpretation, 13, 16, 23, 34, 38, 62, 111; nonreflexive, 42; of texts, 13, 93, 243; pathologies of, 95; politics of, 101, 249; pre-interpretation, 55, 94; pre-reflexive, 11, 16; process of, 50, 51, 63, 69, 157; productive, 84, 92, 103, 249; protointerpretation, 11, 13, 15, 22, 26, 31, 42, 45, 59, 66, 73, 94, 103, 111, 176, 177; relativity of, xx, 112; reproductive, 84, 85; reconstructive, 98, 100–101; reflexive, 42, 62, 73, 127; reproductive, 103; respecifying, 216; selfinterpretation, 25–31, 57; traditions of, 7; truth of, xiii; two faces of, xix;

288

Index

validity, 143, 223 interpretationals, 76, 82, 98, 103, 164 Jacob, François, 40 James, William, xii, 61, 214 Jaspers, Karl, xiii, 168 Jonas, Hans, 26, 256n6, 259n68 Kafka, Franz, 89 Kant, Emmanuel, 6, 9, 42, 76, 78, 79, 109, 147, 182, 192, 221, 239, 240 Klee, Paul, 88 Kleist, Heinrich von, xii Koselleck, Reinhart, 129, 189 Laborit, Henri, 12 Lacan, Jacques, 156 Lachmann, Ludwig, 225 language, linguistics, xv, xvi, xvii, 2, 9, 10, 12, 13, 16, 21, 30, 36, 47, 48, 50, 56, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 77, 80–82, 83–84, 85, 91, 92, 93, 99, 112–113, 115–116, 118, 119, 121, 121–122, 130, 136, 137, 157, 159, 160, 162, 169, 171, 175, 180, 181, 182, 187, 188, 189, 197, 205, 209, 216, 218, 230, 239, 240, 257n25; ontological vehemence, 17; plurivocal, 20–21; univocal, 20 Laplanche, Jean, 170–171, 172 Lasserre, Evelyne, Lavoie, Don, 225 Latour, Bruno, 106 Lebenswelt. See lifeworld Leclerc-Olive, Michèle, Leibniz, G. W., 110 Lemieux, Cyril, 47, 221 Lenk, Hans, 12, 15 Levinas, Emmanuel, 90 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, xv, xvi, 36–39, 40, 42, 44, 79, 203, 264n42 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 36, 220 Liebenberg, Louis, 137–139 lifeworld, 3, 4, 5, 7, 11, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 23, 36, 47, 51, 56, 57, 59, 136, 139, 141, 142–143, 146, 149, 164, 174, 203, 248 Lille School, xx, 186, 187 Lobo, Ana, 267n37

Lordon, Frédéric, 225, 232, 234 Luckmann, Thomas, 236 Luhmann, Niklas, 261n42 Lyotard, Jean-François, 101 Macé, Marielle, 59, 269n69 Madison, Gary, 227 Mannheim, Karl, xiv, 215 Marx, Karl, xix, 97, 98, 99, 232 McCloskey, Donald, 228–229 Mead, George Herbert, xi, 16, 24, 26, 122 Millikan, Ruth, 6, 7 Manicki, Anthony, 260n2 Mannheim, Karl, 214 Marcus-Aurelius, 246 Marx, Karl, xiv, 97, 160 Mary, André, 270n96 Mauss, Marcel, 10, 203, 232 Mead, George-Herbert, 54, 68, 84, 211 meaning, xviii, xx, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 15, 19, 20, 22, 25, 27, 38, 42, 51, 55, 60, 71, 72, 74, 75–76, 79, 86, 90, 102, 113, 116, 119, 121, 125, 127, 141, 146, 147, 152, 157, 160, 164, 171, 173, 176, 177, 184, 188, 201, 202, 205, 207, 210, 212, 217, 234, 237, 249; collapse of, 31, 47; crisis of, 57; cultural, 72; event of, 119; felt, 28; horizons of, 19, 31; instituted, 54, 92, 207; limits of, 57; loss of, 72; new, 25; non-meaning, 30; problematicity of, 3, 33–35, 38, 42–43, 46, 57, 62, 63, 73, 75, 82, 85, 87, 97, 103, 130, 146, 149, 159, 178, 179, 181, 197, 198, 211, 214, 217, 246; public, 52, 72; reflexive, 28; semantic innovation, 85, 92; shared, 50; social, 53, 72, 208, 209, 212, 216; surplus of, 17, 19, 37, 39, 79, 213, 219; suspended, 67; typification, 73, 86, 248 memory, 6, 13 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 5, 19, 88 Mesure, Sylvie, 154 metaphor, 54, 70, 75, 92, 95, 116–117, 137, 228 Mill, John Stuart, 155 Millikan, Ruth Garrett, 6, 7 Montaigne, Michel de, 97, 244 Morelli, Giovanni, 136 Muhlack, Ulrich, 267n32

Index Müller, Johann von, 190 Murray, Rothbard, 225 Mussner, Franz, 266n14 Nagel, Thomas, 7 narrative, 16, 29, 36, 49, 53, 80, 82, 124, 127, 133, 142, 154, 162, 166–167, 171, 200, 202, 228; emplotment, 27, 28, 29, 49, 80, 202; identity, 29, 125 Neschke, Ada, 266n12 Nietzsche, Fredrich, xiii, xx, 3, 15, 91, 98, 109–111, 113, 115, 117, 145–146, 150, 160, 239 Ogien, Albert, 214, 258n35, 269n76 Ogien, Ruwen, 253n71 Oexle, Otto Gerhard, 267n35 ontology, xii, xiii, xix, xx, 17, 19, 41, 43, 107, 114–115, 117, 118, 139, 148, 149–150, 151, 153, 158, 179, 185, 195–196, 198, 203, 204, 209, 234, 249, 271n130 Orléan, André, 232, 234, 235 Palmer, Tom, 225, 229 Pascal, Blaise, 97 Patočka, Jan, 33–35, 43 Payen, Pascal, 267n37 Peirce, Charles Sanders, xi, 24, 63, 64, 68, 69, 122, 161, 214, 257n31 phenomenology, 5, 18, 23, 148, 169, 209, 210, 213, 214, 232, 235; hermeneutic, 146, 232 philology, xx, 7, 60, 68, 107, 111, 136, 139, 140, 143, 145, 156, 177, 180, 183, 184, 185, 187, 188–189, 190, 192, 193, 196, 203, 205, 239, 241, 249 phronesis, 56, 158 Picasso, Pablo, 89 Piaget, Jean, 83 Picq, Pascal, 252n33 Pierron, Jean-Philippe, 130 Piette, Albert, 257n24 Plato, xvii, 97, 151, 246, 265n2 Porée, Jérôme, 49, 168 positivism, 146, 155, 156, 162, 177, 192, 201, 217, 223, 225, 227, 231, 234; legal, 117; sociological, 205; textual, 187

289

Pierron, Jean-Philippe, 166 pragmatism, xiii, 10, 25, 30, 68, 112, 121, 164, 209, 213, 214; hermeneutic, 74; transcendental, 120 Proust, Joëlle, 7, 22 psychoanalysis, xiii, 72, 160, 161, 169–173, 182, 240, 244 psychologism, 26, 153, 155, 192, 193, 194, 195, 199, 200 Quéré, Louis, 35, 209, 211, 213, 214 Quillien, Jean, 183–184, 184 Quine, Willard van Orman, 65, 81 Rabault, Hugues, Rabinow, Paul, xiv, 240 Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred, 219 Ranke, Leopold von, 190, 191 recognition, 9, 20, 45–46, 57, 83, 167 reflexivity, xvii, xviii, 2, 7, 9, 11, 15, 16, 18, 19, 21, 25, 26, 28, 31, 42, 45, 49, 70, 83, 85, 90, 94, 97, 111, 120, 122, 125, 126, 127, 157, 159, 160, 186, 205, 221, 234, 237, 249 relativism, 118–119, 120, 122, 127, 129, 133, 141, 160, 175, 191, 198, 248 Revel, Jacques, 267n35 Richir, Marc, 18 Ricoeur, Paul, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, xix, xx, 20–21, 27, 29, 30, 36, 37, 38, 39, 79, 92, 93, 94, 96, 100, 116–117, 120, 125, 127, 133, 135, 141, 142, 143, 150–151, 153, 160–161, 161, 163–164, 164, 167–168, 169, 171, 172, 176, 177, 180, 182–183, 185, 186, 187, 195, 199–200, 201–202, 206, 207, 208, 209, 217, 220, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 230, 231, 234, 246–247, 260n26 role playing, 54–56 Romano, Claude, 27, 28, 158–159 Rorty, Richard, xiii, 112, 113, 116, 120 Royce, Josiah, xii, 161 Ryle, Gilbert, 201, 217, 220, 222 Sacks, Harvey, xii, 79, 210 Salanskis, Jean-Michel, 265n69 Santa Barbara Program, 14 Saussure, Ferdinand de, xv Schaeffer, Jean-Marie,

290

Index

Scheler, Max, 19 Schlegel, Friedrich, 180 schemes, schematization, xviii, 10, 13, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45–46, 49, 50, 53, 71, 72, 78, 85, 92, 103, 214, 227, 248 Scheps, Ruth, 5, 7, 8 Schlegel, Friedrich, xx, 186 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, xii, xx, 22, 67, 68, 114, 118, 151, 153, 158–159, 162, 180, 181–183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 189, 194, 197, 198, 200, 214, 257n25 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 110 Shusterman, Richard, 9, 10, 91 Schutz, Alfred, 17, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 53, 65, 68, 72, 75, 142, 220, 225, 226, 232, 236 Seel, Martin, 269n69 Seneca, 246 signs, 4, 5, 6, 7, 11, 14, 19, 37, 63–64, 67, 68, 69–70, 74, 77, 95, 103, 111, 116, 164–166, 173, 175, 208, 234; iconic, 63; natural, 164, 174; problematicity of, 63, 68, 70, 74, 77, 95, 103, 111, 217, 248; semiology, 16, 116, 164, 166, 168, 174 Simiand, François, 232 Simmel, Georg, 195, 201, 206, 234 Simon, Josef, 21 Smith, Tony, 89, 90 Snow, David, 53 Sontag, Suzan, 90, 91, 102 Sperber, Dan, 219 Spinoza, Baruch, 233 Stavo-Debauge, Joan, 254n81, 269n79 Stewart, John, 5, 7 Strawson, Galen, 29 Strawson, Peter, 78 Strauss, Anselm, 29 structuralism, xv, 44, 113, 116, 159, 162, 168, 186, 227, 232 symbol, symbolization, xvii, xviii, 7, 12, 16, 19, 21, 37, 41, 60, 63 Szondi, Peter, 186, 187 Tarde, Gabriel, 234 Taylor, Charles, 11, 13, 25, 26, 42, 73, 125, 225, 230–231 Terzi, Cédric, 35

texts, 7, 13, 60, 82, 93, 151, 155, 175–176, 180, 206; autonomy of, 182; model of, 208, 210, 225; world of, 7, 229 Thévenot, Laurent, 77, 98, 216, 224 Thouard, Denis, 186, 266n5 tradition, 35, 38, 57, 113, 119, 121, 125, 141, 152, 157, 158, 160, 197, 198; sedimented, 39 translation, xviii, 71, 81, 85, 171, 172, 212, 218, 219, 224 Troeltsch, Ernst, xiv truth, 103, 106, 112, 119, 120, 121, 122–123, 124, 127, 155, 158, 191 Umwelt. See lifeworld understanding, xiii, xvii, 10, 37, 48, 57, 60, 67, 73, 77, 109, 111, 113, 119, 122, 124, 127, 148, 151, 153, 155, 158, 161, 162, 164, 168, 177, 183, 184, 188, 192, 194, 196, 198, 205, 227, 231, 234, 248; act of, 153, 180, 181, 182, 184, 187, 191, 196, 197, 198; embodied, 10; equilibrium of, 123; event of, 153, 159; explanatory, 188, 195, 201, 203, 205–206, 207, 237; finite, 120, 121–122; hermeneutic, 41; historicity of, 115; immediate, xvii, 9, 21, 23, 25, 41, 68, 73, 102, 111, 147, 211, 231, 234; inter-interpretation, 232; interpretive, 188; mediate, xvii, 10, 23, 25, 68, 71, 77, 102; misunderstanding, 68; mutual, 61–62, 205, 211; ontology of, xii, 107, 179; pre-reflexive, 234; pre-understanding, xx, 61, 65, 121, 157, 187, 256n16; process of, 128; reflexive, 10, 22; shared, 45, 83; spontaneous, 10, 21, 66, 73 Vallée, Marc-Antoine, 160 Viola, Francisco, 5, 133 Vattimo, Gianni, xiii, 112, 113, 114–115, 116, 120 Vermeer, Johannes, 86, 88 Viola, Francesco, 118 Virno, Paolo, 126 Vultur, Ioana, 269n69 Von Mises, Ludwig, 225, 227, 229 Von Uexküll, Jacob, xii, 3, 5–6, 7, 17, 19, 174

Index Waldenfels, Bernhard, 26, 255n29 Weber, Max, 63, 96, 101, 137, 163, 195, 201, 205–206, 208, 225, 229, 232, 234 Wieder, Lawrence, 215, 216 Wilson, Thomas, 269n80 Windelband, Wilhelm, 136 Winnicott, Donald, 83 Wisman, Heinz, 186 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 8–9, 10, 11, 64, 66–67, 69, 77, 121, 122, 161, 214, 220

291

Wolf, Friedrich August, 180, 183, 184, 186, 188 Wolff, Ernst, 260n4 world, 11, 17, 19, 20, 23, 47, 51, 62, 71, 75, 83, 84, 85, 88, 94, 109, 117, 121, 136, 147, 148, 157, 207, 212, 249, 255n29; of the reader, 151; social, 44, 45, 46, 50, 51, 61, 74, 84, 92, 98, 214, 217, 221, 229 White, Hayden, 117–118, 136

About the Author

Johann Michel is professor at the University of Poitiers and is affiliated with the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. He is member of the scientific council of the Fonds Ricoeur and the Institut Universitaire de France. Specialist of hermeneutics and social theory, he is author of many books in French, translated into several languages, including Ricoeur and the Post-Structuralists.

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