Relational Hermeneutics: Essays in Comparative Philosophy 9781350077928, 9781350077959, 9781350077935

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Relational Hermeneutics

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

Relational Hermeneutics: Essays in Comparative Philosophy Paul Fairfield and Saulius Geniusas

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2018 Paperback edition first published 2020 Copyright © Paul Fairfield, Saulius Geniusas and contributors 2018 Paul Fairfield and Saulius Geniusas have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover design by Irene Martinez Costa Cover image © Sam Huggett / Alamy Stock Photo All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-7792-8 PB: 978-1-3501-6169-6 ePDF: 978-1-3500-7793-5 eBook: 978-1-3500-7794-2 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For Evie and Josie.

Contents Editors’ Introduction: Relational Hermeneutics Paul Fairfield and Saulius Geniusas

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Part 1 Hermeneutics and Philosophies of Existence 1 Solicitude: Towards a Heideggerian Care Ethics-of-Assistance Babette Babich 9 2 Sartre: From Hyperbolic Existentialism to Crypto-Hermeneutics 28 Thomas W. Busch 3 The Force of the Embodied Individual: De Beauvoir and Gadamer on 39 Interpretive Understanding Antonio Calcagno 4 The Hermeneutics of Lived Time: Education as the Way of 52 Being Andrzej Wierciński Part 2 Hermeneutics and Pragmatism 5 Hermeneutical Pragmatism Paul Fairfield 6 The Pragmatic Spiral Vincent Colapietro 7 A Poet on Each Side of the Poem: A Hermeneutic and Democratic Demand for Engaging Tradition Ramsey Eric Ramsey and Raelynn Gosse 8 ‘Things as They Are / Are Changed upon the Blue Guitar’: Self-Realization and Productive Imagination Saulius Geniusas

65 77

90 103

Part 3 Hermeneutics and Poststructuralism 9 Foucault and Hermeneutics C. G. Prado 10 Dialogue or Drama? The Event of Interpretation in Gadamer and Foucault Pol Vandevelde 11 Understanding: A Violent Aim? Marc-Antoine Vallée 12 Hermeneutics as Loving Understanding: Towards a Feminist Poststructuralist Hermeneutics Lisa Watrous

119 131 149 158

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Part 4 Hermeneutics and Eastern Thought 13 The Turning Word: Relational Hermeneutics and Aspects of Buddhist Thought Nicholas Davey 14 Confucian Relational Hermeneutics, the Emotions, and Ethical Life Eric S. Nelson 15 Thinking through Words: The Existential Hermeneutics of Zhuangzi and Heidegger David Chai Notes Index

177 193 205 221 250

Editors’ Introduction: Relational Hermeneutics Paul Fairfield and Saulius Geniusas

The purpose of this volume is to investigate a variety of connections between philosophical hermeneutics and four more or less neighbouring traditions of thought. The intent of the volume is to analyse hermeneutics in relational terms, by placing it in conversation with key figures and themes in existentialist, pragmatist, poststructuralist, and Eastern philosophy. Considerable ambiguity surrounds the question of how post-Heideggerian hermeneutics, as represented by Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur in particular but also more recent scholars following in their wake, relates to these traditions and some others, both in general terms and as it bears upon specific questions. Poststructuralist writers, for instance, often imply that their general position opposes hermeneutics at the root, and while on some issues this is likely the case, it is not invariably so, and important affinities and opportunities for mutually enriching conversation exist and have been too seldom analysed in the literature. Existentialism, pragmatism, poststructuralism, Eastern philosophy, and hermeneutics itself are all characterized by a good deal of internal diversity, and this adds to the difficulty of an interpretation that is at once comparative and critical. None of these traditions is anything like a unified system of belief; all are umbrella terms which are at once useful and imprecise, and the differences internal to each must not be understated. While a work of comparative philosophy, this volume strives to avoid oversimplification and to offer specific analyses that treat hermeneutics in relation to particular themes in the writings of a few key figures in each of these traditions of thought. Philosophical hermeneutics is explicitly dialogical, and it is in this spirit that the chapters that follow are written. The challenge of comparative philosophy is to build bridges where this is possible and to point out where it is not, to cross boundaries without losing our bearings, and to avoid oversimplification and distortion. As Heidegger illustrated in his ‘Dialogue on Language’, it remains a possibility and an imperative to speak and to think across boundaries, and while remaining mindful of the difficulty of the task. Gadamer and Ricoeur also both knew and demonstrated in their work that ideas invariably benefit from conversation with their respective others, and it is with this in mind that the volume that follows is offered. It aims to demonstrate some of these interconnections in ways that might move the current discussion of hermeneutics forward. Undoubtedly, significant and at times profound differences separate philosophical hermeneutics from the four traditions under discussion here, yet what is not always clear is whether differences in orienting questions, idiom, style, or indeed temperament amount to substantive and unbridgeable philosophical differences. Both the letter and

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spirit of hermeneutics are dialogical and Socratic in a way that a poststructuralist like Foucault or Derrida is not. It is also decidedly less empirically minded than the pragmatism of James or Dewey, and does not appear to share the sense of life of existentialists like Kierkegaard or Nietzsche, but what philosophical significance do such differences carry? How should we understand the relation between hermeneutics and Eastern traditions such as Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism? The latter traditions and hermeneutics emerged under very different cultural and historical circumstances, yet here again scholars have noted important affinities between them which bear further attention. That philosophical hermeneutics is fundamentally relational is demonstrated clearly in Part One of this volume, which focuses on the relation between hermeneutics and the philosophies of existence. There is no need to build bridges between these two philosophical traditions if only because these bridges are strongly entrenched in the history of both, so much so that the hermeneutics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries could itself be qualified as a philosophy of existence. While it is impossible to understand either hermeneutics or philosophies of existence without reflecting on their mutual relation, fresh reflections on the relation between these traditions are very much needed for, arguably, a fruitful development of either tradition rests on fruitful interaction between them. Babette Babich reengages in the question concerning the intricate relation between hermeneutics and the philosophy of existence by focusing on how both traditions come into unity in Martin Heidegger’s writings. Babich pays special attention to the polemical question concerning Heideggerian ethics, whose very possibility has been recently brought into question in light of the publication of the ‘Black Notebooks’, which reopened the discussion concerning Heidegger’s political commitment to Nazi ideology. Taking up this challenge, Babich offers an account of a Heideggerian ethics of solicitude, which she conceives in terms of freeing others for themselves and bringing others towards their utmost potentiality for being. Thomas Busch focuses on the development of Jean-Paul Sartre’s thought and argues that this development should be conceived in terms of a fundamental transformation from a phenomenologically oriented existentialism to a ‘cryptic’ hermeneutic existentialism. This transformation, marked as it is by Sartre’s indebtedness to Heidegger, enables one to open a fresh dialogue between Sartre and post-Heideggerian hermeneutics, most notably as it is represented by Gadamer. The relation between Gadamer’s hermeneutics and Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy of existence is the focus of Antonio Calcagno’s investigation, which pays special attention to the historically conditioned nature of freedom and its significance for acting and understanding. The task of this study is to show what hermeneutics has to gain by incorporating Beauvoir’s insights into the embodied and developmental nature of freedom. According to Calcagno, by paying close attention to embodiment, hermeneutics would obtain the possibility to singularize its otherwise too general conception of freedom, which is mostly accounted for in terms of tradition’s historical understanding. Andrzej Wierciński in his contribution articulates a hermeneutical conception of pedagogy, arguing that education, interpreted hermeneutically, is nothing other than a particular philosophy of existence, conceived as a lifelong endeavour and a form of life. To make his case, Wierciński pays special

Editors’ Introduction: Relational Hermeneutics

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attention to the hermeneutics of lived time, which he conceptualizes in terms of a distinction between chronological and kairological temporality. The relation between hermeneutics and pragmatism is the topic that is taken up in Part Two of this volume. One could claim that just as post-Schleiermachean hermeneutics is, in its core, a philosophy of existence, so it is also, mutatis mutandis, inherently pragmatic. One should not, however, overlook that the representatives of classical pragmatism (Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey) did not consider themselves to be hermeneuticists, just as the main spokespersons of postSchleiermachean hermeneutics (Dilthey, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur) did not think of themselves as representatives of philosophical pragmatism. Nonetheless, the affinities between these traditions are striking, as a number of now classical studies of the 1970s and 1980s have shown. The goal of the essays collected in this part of the volume is not to reconfirm this thesis but to demonstrate how a relational approach continues to generate new insights, thereby opening new horizons of development in both traditions of thought. Paul Fairfield addresses the intricate relation between Gadamer’s hermeneutics and Dewey’s pragmatism by paying close attention to some central themes we come across in the writings of both thinkers: the contextual nature of truth and understanding, the finitude of knowledge and interpretation, the inseparability of understanding, interpretation, and acting, and the phronetic nature of judgement. Fairfield demonstrates that despite the profound affinities between these thinkers, their philosophical approaches are also significantly different, largely because Dewey was mainly focused on the purposive (i.e. instrumental) dimension of thought while Gadamer emphasizes its non-purposive nature. Vincent Colapietro in his contribution configures the everyday figure of a spiral, in light of its capacity to double back upon itself while avoiding closure, as a philosophical trope best suited to represent pragmatism. Such an approach enables one to shed light on the relation between pragmatism and hermeneutics by comparing the pragmatic spiral with the hermeneutic circle. Ramsey Eric Ramsey and Raelynn Gosse offer a hermeneutical reading of Walt Whitmann’s pragmatically oriented writings on democracy. The authors conceptualize democracy as a way of life rather than a form of government and, in light of Gadamer’s reflections on poetry, argue that Whitman is a hermeneutical philosopher of the first order. In his contribution, Saulius Geniusas develops a hermeneutically and pragmatically oriented conception of self-realization, identifying productive imagination as the source that feeds self-realization. Geniusas opens a dialogue between Ricoeur and Dewey, arguing that such a dialogue provides the resources needed to clarify the temporality of selfrealization. He grants special attention to Baudelaire’s and Picasso’s reflections on poetry and painting, and argues that they should not only be conceived as exemplary accounts of art’s transformative function, but also as clues which can clarify the structure of self-transformation and self-realization. The relation between hermeneutics and poststructuralism is the central focus of the essays collected in the third part of this volume. While hermeneutics has always been favourably disposed towards philosophies of existence, and while the relation between hermeneutics and pragmatism is generally conceived as complementary, the relation between hermeneutics and poststructuralism is much more complex, as

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witnessed in various dismissive approaches that the representatives of both traditions have taken towards each other. Nonetheless, despite the general suspicion concerning the complementarity of these traditions of thought, it is also undeniable that both traditions have either directly or indirectly borrowed not only insights but central concepts from each other. It appears undeniable that the relation between hermeneutics and poststructuralism calls for a fresh reassessment. While thematizing Foucault’s relation to hermeneutics, C. G. Prado brings to light the equivocal nature of hermeneutics, demonstrating that it has meant different things to different thinkers. Besides drawing a distinction between traditional (Schleiermachean and Diltheyan) and philosophical (Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur) conceptions of hermeneutics, Prado also singles out three different senses in which Foucault has employed this concept. In the archaeological period, Foucault conceived of hermeneutics methodologically, in line with how Schleiermacher and Dilthey had conceived of it; in the genealogical period, he conceptualized hermeneutics as an unsettled composite of how it was conceived in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, namely, both methodologically and ontologically. Finally, in his ethical period, Foucault understood hermeneutics in line with the Heideggerian-Gadamerian conception. According to Prado, it is precisely the latter conception of hermeneutics that enables Foucault to transition from genealogy to ethics. The relation between Foucault and Gadamer, and especially their respective conceptions of language and interpretation, is addressed in Pol Vandevelde’s contribution. While being sensitive to the far-reaching differences between hermeneutics and poststructuralism in general, and to Gadamer and Foucault in particular, Vandevelde demonstrates the profound transformations in the conception of truth that lie at the heart of Gadamer’s and Foucault’s writings. For both, truth first and foremost concerns the manner in which interpretation transforms the interpreter. Marc-Antoine Vallée brings hermeneutics into dialogue with poststructuralism by addressing a distinctly postmodern view, which suggests that the act of understanding is inherently violent. Vallée argues against such a perspective, demonstrating that it suffers from too narrow an understanding of understanding itself. As an alternative, Vallée articulates a hermeneutically oriented conception of understanding, building his case on the basis of Gadamer’s and Charles Taylor’s works. Lisa Watrous offers an account which she qualifies as a feminist poststructuralist hermeneutics. Relying on the work undertaken by Patricia Huntington, Linda Martin Alcoff, and Grace Jantzen, Watrous offers a theologically informed reading of Irigaray’s conception of love and language, which in its own turn serves as a mediator to reconceive hermeneutics as a philosophy of loving understanding. The essays collected in Part Four of this volume are focused on the relation between hermeneutics and Eastern thought. At first glance this relation might appear less intimate than hermeneutics’ relation to philosophies of existence, pragmatism, and even poststructuralism. However, the dialogue between hermeneutically oriented Western philosophy and Eastern philosophies is perhaps especially fruitful, so much so that the expression ‘comparative hermeneutics’ is often employed to characterize exclusively this relation. One should also mention in passing that the interest in hermeneutics among philosophers in the Far East reaches back to the 1920s, when a number of students from China and Japan came to Germany to study under Heidegger.

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Their presence provoked some interest in Eastern thought among those working in hermeneutics in Germany at the time, and while for some European thinkers this interest was only nominal, others considered the cross-cultural encounter to be a highly fruitful resource for the further development of hermeneutical reflection. Such an open philosophical orientation characterizes the present-day hermeneutical mindset, which is largely marked by the conviction that the future of hermeneutics rests in significant part on its capacity to open a fruitful dialogue with Eastern traditions. The essays collected in Part Four of this volume pay special attention to the relation between hermeneutics and Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism. Nicholas Davey brings hermeneutics into dialogue with Chinese and Japanese Buddhism. Paying careful attention to the different ways in which language itself is employed in hermeneutics and Buddhism, Davey maintains that while Heidegger and Gadamer never doubted that language produces disclosive events, conceived in terms of a passage from one horizon of meaning to another, neither succeeded in offering an account that would clarify the possibility of such a transition. In this regard hermeneutics may learn from the Buddhist conception of the turning word. Understood as a placeholder, a turning word functions as a catalyst that links and transforms different horizons of meaning. In such a way, the Buddhist conception of the turning word invites philosophical hermeneutics to turn from theory to a more local, relational hermeneutics. Eric Nelson’s contribution is focused on the role that emotions play in Confucian discourses. All too often it is assumed that Confucian thought, due to its emphasis on duty, has little to contribute to a philosophy of emotion. Nelson demonstrates how misguided such an assumption is and that in fact in Confucian discourses, emotions are understood as a non-accidental and non-eliminable structural condition of human praxis. Nelson pays special attention to the social education and self-cultivation of ‘genuine feelings’, which indicates that Confucianism conceives of education as the cultivation of naturalness. Nelson brings Confucian relational hermeneutics into dialogue with Heidegger’s ontological interpretation of moods and demonstrates that while Heidegger stressed the ontological perspective of being to the point of deemphasizing ethical, psychological, and anthropological considerations, the Confucian discourses offer us a viable philosophical alternative, which demonstrates that emotions are significant not just ontologically but ethically and pedagogically. David Chai addresses the relation between hermeneutics and Daoism. Focusing on the works of Zhuangzi and Heidegger, Chai maintains that for both arriving at the level of primal meditative thought calls for a state of non-willing restfulness. Of central importance is the mindful awareness of nothingness that emerges in such restfulness. Precisely due to such restful awareness of nothingness, for Daoism authentic thinking is necessarily linked to wordless imagining. Precisely due to the givenness of nothingness, for Heidegger being mindful of the truth of being is a matter of partaking in the nothingness, conceived as the region of releasement. In the final analysis, whether one awakens to Dao or to Dasein, the goal appears to be the same – to arrive at an understanding of thinking which does not conflict with the human onto-cosmological root. For this, however, we are in need of a language of non-words.

Part One

Hermeneutics and Philosophies of Existence

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Solicitude: Towards a Heideggerian Care Ethics-of-Assistance Babette Babich

What is the orientation of care if not to reinstate the human in his/her essence? – Heidegger, Letter on Humanism

Friends and enemies Heidegger has been criticized for lacking an ethics, a point of view Heidegger himself highlights as perhaps the key to his well-known but elusive Letter on Humanism, a response offered in reply to a letter written to him after the war by Jean Beaufret, a scholar of ancient philosophy. Certainly, in this post-war era (where Sartre’s 1945 Paris lecture ‘Existentialism Is a Humanism’ sought to defend the ethical credentials of existentialism in the face of the charge of nihilism) and more so today in the wake of the Black Notebooks scandal, Heidegger’s philosophy falters on ethical grounds as on political complications. Thus, a deservedly unrelenting indictment of Heidegger’s ‘world-historical’ anti-Semitism may be added to his undisputedly enduring Nazi loyalties. Where questions concerning the status of Heidegger’s ethical and political thought inevitably involve debates on Heidegger’s Nazism, similar debates contra Heidegger were already at work under National Socialism where he was criticized by party superiors for having his own ‘private’ Nazism. None of this is news, despite the claims of a new scandal associated with Heidegger’s ‘world-historical’ anti-Semitism.1 Nor was this damning judgement limited to his enemies. Heidegger’s erstwhile friend and colleague, Karl Jaspers, wrote the key official ‘reference’ on Heidegger’s behalf, assessing both his guilt along with his potential for rehabilitation in the de-Nazification hearings. These proceedings affected all German academics after the end of the Second World War, and Heidegger too was subject to the official rehabilitation process.2 Heidegger failed the rehabilitation hearings, and his right to teach was suspended from 1945 to 1949 directly as a result of Jasper’s Gutachten but no surely less as a result of the deficiencies of Heidegger’s response. Subsequently, Heidegger was not to resume university teaching until after becoming emeritus (1951).3 Heidegger highlights

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this ban on teaching as William J. Richardson, S. J. details Heidegger’s amendments to the ‘Appendix’ Richardson included in his Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought.4 For context, note that most academics managed to be ‘rehabilitated’ after the war and this included former university rectors. Thus one must underscore the respective post-war fates, as it were, of Freiburg’s ‘other’ Nazi rectors, beginning with Eduard Kern, who immediately succeeded Heidegger as rector in Freiburg (1934–6). In 1945, Kern was reinstated as Professor Ordinarius in the faculty of law at the University of Tübingen. Friedrich Metz, a geographer who next served as rector (1936–8), was seemingly dealt with more harshly as he was officially dismissed from the university only to regain a university chair in Heidelberg in 1954. But this is misleading as Metz remained officially engaged as a geographer throughout the years from 1945 to 1954, serving not only as head of the Freiburg Alemannischen Institut but continuing to serve as director of the Freiburger Geographischen Gesellschaft – an office he had also occupied under Nazi rule. The next rector in Freiburg was the zoologist, Otto Mangold (1938–40), who exemplified publicly explicit anti-Semitism and was thus, and like Heidegger, banned from teaching at Freiburg. But unlike Heidegger, Mangold could almost immediately go on to establish the Heiligenberg-Institut for Experimental Biology in Baden in 1946, serving as its director, becoming emeritus professor in 1953. Finally, the last Nazi rector at Freiburg was Wilhelm Süss, a mathematician. Süss, a member of the Nazi Party, was more conventionally aligned with the values of National Socialism than Heidegger. Yet although Süss was promptly placed under the infamous Lehrverbot in 1945, Süss returned to a professorial teaching appointment in Freiburg in December of that very same year: 1945. Heidegger would be the only Nazi rector of Freiburg to serve less than two years.5 Indeed, Hannah Arendt could make the claim that, by comparison with others, Heidegger rectified ‘his own “error” more quickly and more radically than many of those who later sat in judgment over him – he took considerably greater risks than were usual in German literary and university life during that period’.6 Today Heidegger is denounced at the level of any desired crime, beginning not just with Guido Schneeberger or Victor Farias, Hugo Ott or Emmanuel Faye, but also with Tom Sheehan, Richard Wolin, and Tom Rockmore, along with Peter Trawny and other soonto-be known future names of the newest debacle.7 Recent collections have appeared, all condemning Heidegger, whether in French or German or, most recently, in English.8 All of these have antecedents.9 If I continue to include, on the most thoughtful level, Reiner Schürmann,10 Graeme Nicholson’s reading remains the most balanced to date,11 and to this I would add Tracy B. Strong’s account from the side of political theory along with his fellow travellers in that discipline.12 The ethical question of Heidegger’s philosophy is a matter of scandal and associative ‘tainting’ or ‘contamination’ (these are terms used in the literature), not only with Heidegger’s private Nazism (whatever that was) but also with his personally private anti-Semitism, whatever it is that we are meant to understand as ‘world-historical antiSemitism.’13 Worthy of a secret, details are whispered, challenges are issued, rumours surge, all in a perfect illustration of the court of opinion and prejudice about which Socrates spoke. Plato alludes to such a circumstance of conviction via prejudice not

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only in the famous locus of the Apology but also at the outset of The Republic where just as Socrates is delayed against his will to return to Athens by being claimed (or hijacked) as a houseguest for the sake of conversation and diversion for Polemarchus’ friends and family, Socrates asks the young man if he might not be willing to hear a counterclaim, to which question Polemarchus asserts his resolution ‘not to listen’ to any of Socrates’ arguments (and the esoteric spirits of Platonists have been running riot all the way to Leo Strauss ever since). The convoluted circumstance based on what seems to be the case – worthy of Heidegger’s illustration of hermeneutic phenomenology in his own discussion of the appearance of appearances in Being and Time14 – Jonathan Derbyshire informs us that Eric Aeschimann, writing in Le Nouvel Observateur, reports that Heidegger’s Schwarzen Hefte (Black Notebooks) will trouble even the most faithful of his acolytes in France. It appears that the German editor of the notebooks, Peter Trawny, has written an essay entitled ‘Heidegger: The Black Notebooks and Historial Antisemitism’ (‘historial’ being one of those neologisms of which Heidegger, and Heideggerians, were and are fond) in which he argues that these manuscripts, written between 1931 and 1946, contain ideas that are ‘clearly antisemitic, even if it is not a question of anti-Semitism of the kind promoted by Nazi ideology.15

What is at stake is more than a matter of prejudice; this is also the heart of ethics inasmuch as the ethical tradition of the West, so Nietzsche reminds us following Schopenhauer, is a desire to judge the character of others and to prescribe to them what they ought and ought not do, whereby ethical prescription turns out to be less about cultivating ‘virtue’ than setting rules for others.16

Ethics and the man Beaufret’s question concerning humanism17 was posed to Heidegger in the wake of the Second World War, second in a span of mere decades between these once-upona-time official enemies who were now corresponding as friends. On Heidegger’s account, he had already offered a reply in a foundational sense to the question put to him just after the publication of Being and Time, ‘When are you going to write an ethics?’18 Here I argue that Heidegger writing on ‘Dasein’s Being as Care’ in Being and Time may be read as an ethics. But how can one talk about Heidegger’s philosophical ethics when the very question is ‘tainted’, to use the title of one antagonistic book collection, with the question of Heidegger’s personal conduct? From the perspective of political theory on the related connection between Nietzsche’s thought and Nazism, Tracy Strong points out that one can either argue that, on the one hand, there is no relevance of the man to the political or – and this is where it becomes interestingly complex – on the other hand, one can argue that there is such a connection. The first case separates the man and the politics, arguing for sheer contingency or else in other instances (with other names, say in the case of Gottlob Frege) bracketing matters, a strategy which lets us go on reading whomever we happen to

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be reading. For Strong, a more urgent sequence of questions emerges in this latter case, where we do not practice such an isolating strategy:19 If it is an aberration (say due to a historically specific combination of the sense of betrayal after World War I, of a revengeful peace, of the particularities of German anti-Semitism, and of the development of technologies of propaganda), then it need not be part of future history and there is no need to do anything except to make sure that it does not happen again. Any relation Nietzsche might be said to have to it will be destined for the historical ash heap. This stance has been highly significant for political philosophy as much of the political philosophy written since World War II has been done with the more or less explicit aim of making sure that ‘it’ never happens again – to shut down, that is, any possibility of anything that looks like Nazism.20

The decisive point Strong makes above is borrowed, although Strong himself does offer a powerful reflection on formation. For Adorno, and singulare tantum, the problem is barbarism, and what is at stake concerns the future of what Nietzsche called our educational institutions. For Adorno, what makes Auschwitz a problem is not that it is something that we are henceforth to prevent but the very fact that it was, Auschwitz is and remains given. It was, and this having done as we did is the condition of trauma; this having been is the stone fact. Thus, Adorno reflects that every debate about the ideals of education is trivial and inconsequential compared to this single ideal: never again Auschwitz. It was the barbarism all education strives against. One speaks of the threat of a relapse into barbarism. But it is not a threat – Auschwitz was this relapse, and barbarism continues as long as the fundamental conditions that favored that relapse continue largely unchanged.21

With respect to Heidegger, we might say, whether in terms of his ethics or his politics, Heidegger is to be judged on just such terms of supposedly pre-emptive efficacy, as Strong speaks of this, and in terms of which Heidegger presents little in the way of a case. Where there is (ontically) less of a problem with Nietzsche, despite his language of will to power, despite Nietzsche’s historical association with the question of nihilism, Nietzsche would seem to be beyond direct suspicion, having been dead for more than three decades before the Nazi rise to power. We read whatever we are reading (Nazism, Ayn Randism, Jordan Petersonism, whatever-ism) into Nietzsche. Heidegger catches some of this projective element in his Nietzsche lectures, which he claimed as the stage for the ‘resistance’ he offered to Nazism from within university teaching.22 Despite his claims to have resisted (Nazism by teaching Nietzsche), Heidegger was a member of the Nazi Party, and if what one wants from an ethics is that it pre-empt Nazism, Heidegger presents a singularly lost cause. For not only is it claimed that he does not have an ethics, but it is claimed that his thought is ‘tainted’ and should be junked. In addition, there is also the patent division of philosophical disciplinary concern, just to use Kant’s questions to mark those divisions. If Heidegger’s question is, as we know, the Being question, that is, the question of the ontological difference as opposed

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to the more traditionally ontic question of beings as such, as first presented in Being and Time and again outlined at the outset of his Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger’s concerns are epistemological: Do we know what we mean by what we take to be Being? Yet the question of knowledge – What can I know? – seems to lack the same urgency in the hierarchy of Kantian questions: What must I do? What can I hope for? If Heidegger seems to address the last question in his own later writings, explicitly in the Der Spiegel ‘Interview’, with the appeal to an as yet unspecified deity, his word, Nur ein Gott, only a God, has an unnerving singularity about it in our very monotheistic era. ‘Two thousand years’, Nietzsche rues drily, ‘and not a single new god.’23

‘When are you going to write an ethics?’ Alasdair MacIntyre remarked that certain moral elements seem well compatible with Nazism. For MacIntyre, these moral elements are presupposed as part of the project of moral re-education, and this would be what is involved with de-Nazification and any moral rehabilitation just to the degree to which it presupposes ‘something on which to build’.24 Yet to ask whether Heidegger, qua Nazi, might have been capable of rehabilitation – and, as noted above, in historical matter of fact, Heidegger was judged as having required a suspension of his right to teach at the university level for such a length of time “(this juridical detail would not have been lost on Jaspers) that could only take Heidegger past the time of expecting any ultimate teaching rehabilitation to matter past the official time for his retirement – is not so much the issue here. Beaufret’s leading question – how to restore meaning to the word ‘humanism’, the sense that makes the language of humanism a vapour in the gas fields of the First World War, extinguishes its sense along with the incomprehensible inhumanity of the gas chambers of the Second World War, lost in fire-bombings and, above all perhaps, in the impact of two hydrogen bombs, all of which we are still far from understanding, transpiring in a span of less than half a century. Replying, Heidegger also undertook to answer Beaufret’s implicit question regarding the putative lack of ethics in his philosophy as in his person by putting Beaufret’s question into a student’s mouth: ‘Soon after Being and Time appeared a young friend asked me, “When are you going to write an ethics?” ’25 Heidegger’s reply suggests that an ethics was always already at hand in his work, reflecting that ‘the tragedies of Sophocles – provided such a comparison is at all permissible – preserve the ethos in their sagas more primordially than Aristotle’s lectures on “Ethics”’.26 In this way, Heidegger immediately goes on to refer to his concern with building, dwelling, and thinking: themes that increasingly occupied him, by no means accidentally in tandem with the housing crisis in a devastated post-war Germany – we recall, as Americans sometimes are fond of saying, with no little pride, that cities were flattened – citing Heraclitus, ‘ἦθος ἀθρώπω δαίμων’. For Heidegger, retranslating the routine rendering, it can be observed that for the Greek, the word ethos ‘signifies dwelling, place of habitation’ (115), and consequently these three words are more attentively rendered: ‘Man dwells insofar as he is human, in the nearness of god’ (233/351). In Heidegger’s essay on the Anaximander Fragment (which should, I submit, be read together with Nietzsche’s reflections on Anaximander),27

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Heidegger’s reference is to ‘the reck corresponding to δίκη, order’.28 By conservatively rendering το κρεών as ‘der Brauch’, such a usage corresponds to the ethical, meaning: ‘To hand something over to its own essence and to keep it in hand, preserving it as something present.’29 The reflection on humanism after the war foregrounded and perhaps had to foreground the inhuman. The post-war challenge was not analogous to today’s discussions of transhumanism, posthumanism as these are literally imaginary stipulations of humanity as having arrived at some numeric condition denoted as 2.0 in which anxieties and phantoms remain nevertheless ‘real’ or efficacious enough, considering the eagerness of our self-projections into our own devices, via social media, via texting on cell phones and the whole of social relatedness engendered thereby (important for students: Are you on the right app? Can you be found on Tinder? Instagram? All these are vapours – and that is the good point of Snapchat: but we have taken up residence in such vapours).30 The post-war debate on humanism included existentialism in France but also Jaspers’ Existenzphilosophie as well as the Frankfurt School and even, in the person of Bertrand Russell, analytic philosophy, and so cut across the usual schools of philosophy as immediate and urgent, given the patent failure of humanism and the heightened challenge to any possible theodicy that might come forth (the current resurgence of theological issues in philosophy is related to this) along with the spectres, in Heidegger’s terms, of nihilism and, as the Frankfurt School emphasized it, alas via the enduring literary criticism of Lukács as Habermas inhaled the language and the imperative, of irrationalism. For Heidegger, what would be problematic – this is already evident in his Nietzsche lectures delivered during the war – is neither our nihilism nor our irrationalism but, and much rather, our humanism just as this stands and falls with us, as Heidegger famously quotes his friend, the physicist Werner Heisenberg, that ‘it seems to us as if the human being encounters only himself everywhere’.31 For Heidegger, per contra, the danger was the growing absence of the human from what Heidegger elsewhere details as the quadrate: earth and sky, mortal and divine. We are far from hearing the point Heidegger endeavours to make regarding the ‘danger’ and thereby regarding the insurgence of the human in The Question Concerning Technology. To this day our ethical theories remains ineluctably absorbed with the question of human ‘dignity’ as of human ‘value’, thus ineluctably humanistic, anthropocentric. Like nationalism and subjectivism, humanism would seem to be the problem. We get in our own philosophical way, blocking our insight into the question of what we should and, mostly to be sure, what we should not do. In articulating the question of what is to be done in this way, I follow Nietzsche with regard to the concern for any ethical way of dwelling on this earth that might come forth, that might be possible. I use Kantian language to underscore that the question of the human may be heard in Kantian terms, not via anthropology but today’s very basic discussions of human values. Kant’s term is dignity, Würde, which Kant defined as value beyond or apart from price. Taking his cue from Nietzsche-Kant once again, Heidegger’s reflection in response underlines that every distinction of value is itself a kind of valuing.32 Heidegger draws his insight from a meditation on value, continuing Nietzsche’s mocking invocation of our dedication to ‘shopkeeper’s gold’33 as Nietzsche had argued that

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this is the heart of the idealization of the ‘higher gold of the spirit’.34 For Nietzsche, the good Christian, even the saint, seeks his reward, in effect: to be ‘well-paid’.35 In Heidegger’s encapsulation, precisely through the characterization of something as ‘a value’ what is so valued is robbed of its worth. That is to say, by the assessment of something as a value what is valued is admitted only as an object for human estimation. But what a thing is in its Being is not exhausted by its being an object, particularly when objectivity takes the form of value. Every valuing, even where it values positively, is a subjectivizing. It does not let beings: be. Rather, valuing lets beings: be valid – solely as the objects of its doing.36

Ethics and solicitude Key to Heidegger’s reflections on humanism, apart from his recommendation that one take a step back before Aristotle, invoking both the tragic poets, like Sophocles, and the tragic philosophers, like Heraclitus and Anaximander, was the intimation that an ethics could already be found in Being and Time, a text he repeatedly asserted had not been understood. There is no shortage of scholars who have dismissed Heidegger’s claim that Being and Time had not been understood. In fact, the great majority of Heidegger scholars dispute only which interpretation one might best follow, beyond, say, Dreyfus (and this is a name pars pro toto for the analytic readings which currently dominate). There are now turf disputes, most loudly claimed by Tom Sheehan. Yet given all the handbooks written on Being and Time, surely this book is known and understood all the way down to elaborations of the unwritten bits: hence a number of articles and books over the years purport to finish it. Despite the conventionality of repeating that Heidegger lacks an ethics, there are also a number of contributions including Heideggerian ‘care ethics,’ which arguably tend to combine an analytic philosophical enterprise with Heideggerian concerns. One of the first efforts to consider a Heideggerian ethics of care appears in Michael Theunissen’s magisterial study of The Other,37 a book surprisingly little received by scholars. Care, in a Heideggerian modality, also appears more generically in nursing and in connection with the separate tradition of care ethics in Jean Watson in 1985, and fifteen years later John Paley’s article on the same topic was featured in the inaugural issue of Nursing Philosophy.38 Paley’s own philosophical formation is Anglophone analytic, and an analytic formation handicaps any scholarly reading of Heidegger, a detail which has yet to hinder such readings. Engaging exclusively analytically oriented Heideggerian scholars like Mulhall, Olafson, and Guignon, Paley can write, contra Heidegger himself as we have just cited him above, that ‘there is no ethical theory in Being and Time’, just because, as Paley writes, ‘Heidegger was not particularly interested in ethics.’39 In this sense, any effort to deduce any kind of ethics, particularly an ethics of care, fails to elaborate a practical or applied ethics, particularly ‘any form of ethics nurses would find congenial’.40 The last point seems self-confirming whereby addressing the applied aspect of any applied ethics, from business ethics to medical ethics, must

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exclude attention to Heidegger’s own meaning in favour of what are thus designated as ‘congenial’ readings of Heidegger.41 The consequence of such a tactical approach, excluding what Heidegger might, in spite of any inconvenience or ‘uncongeniality’, otherwise have to offer nursing and other concerns that might profit from conjoining Heidegger and ethics, sacrifices an important resource (his text) and arguably throws the baby out with the bathwater. By contrast, I consider Heidegger’s suggestion in his Letter on Humanism that he had ‘already’ offered an ethics by taking another look at Being and Time. The discussion of Dasein as care concerns what one might name the Heideggerian human condition.42 This description fits Heidegger’s discussion of fallenness, publicness, anxiety (‘real’ and not), ambiguity, and, even more than idle talk and being-in, the very worldliness of the world, qua surround, qua our around: with-which, and the sheer regionality of our environs including day to night and the seasons of the year and of life, as the context of the with-which of equipmentality, qua ready-to-hand as juxtaposed to present-athand, as this later forms the basis for Heidegger’s post-war articulation of his question concerning technology, an articulation addressed not to professors of philosophy but to businessmen, and perforce a practical, applied, and, irrecusably, ethical discussion.43 Heidegger argues that the project of Being and Time, that is, inquiring after ‘the question of the meaning of being’, had required, owing to the ontological significance of Dasein, ‘that one be able to answer the guiding question of the Being of the totality of Dasein’s structural whole’,44 and thereby required an attention to the phenomenon of anxiety, in the context of ‘existentiality, facticity, and Being-fallen’ (§41, 191). Heidegger thus reprises his point of departure, restating Dasein’s singular ontological excellence: ‘Dasein is an entity for which, in its Being, that Being is an issue’ (§41, 192). Recalling his discussion of ‘understanding as self-projective Being towards its ownmost potentiality-for-Being’ (ibid.), Heidegger rearticulates the Augustinian insight that drives every phenomenological analysis: ‘Ontologically, Being towards one’s ownmost potentiality-for-Being means that in each case, Dasein is already ahead of itself in its Being’ (ibid.). In this ‘ahead of itself ’, as Heidegger notes at once, ‘Dasein is always “beyond itself ”’, an intentional directionality which Heidegger immediately distinguishes from a relation to ‘other entities which it is not, but as Being towards the potentiality-for-Being which it is itself ’ (ibid.). For Heidegger, there is no way to think Dasein solipsistically, autistically we might say, as if this were or could be a solitary self solely concerned with itself. Thus, ‘Even Dasein’s Being-alone is Being-with in the world. The Other can be missing only in and for a Being-with’ (BT 1.4. §26, 120). In this most intimate sense and from the start and throughout, one is ‘with’ others, qua Being-with which Heidegger qualifies as having an ‘existential-ontological meaning’ (1.4. §26, 120) and which he had already clarified by saying – and this is key – ‘from whom, for the most part, one does not distinguish oneself ’ (§26, 118). In this sense (and thus I began with a reference to the political), Heidegger’s ethics is always also a politics, as is also patent in Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics. For Heidegger, ‘The world of Dasein is a with-world [Mitwelt]. Being-in is Being-with-Others. Their Being-in-themselves within-the-world is Dasein-with [Mitdasein]’ (ibid.). It is on the basis of this analysis of how we find ourselves among the others that we encounter in the world that Heidegger refers to his earlier tool analysis which already

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echoes the distinction Kant had made between beings that are for us (or mere means) and those that are, like ourselves as Kant always emphasized, ends in themselves. As beings that ‘are themselves Dasein’, Heidegger argues that these ‘entities are not objects of concern, but rather of solicitude’ (§26, 121). The word Heidegger uses here is Fürsorge, and what makes this relevant as an ethics of assistance/solicitude is how Heidegger unpacks this in the world of care [Sorge], that is, again, the world of our preoccupations or concerns with a wide variety of involvements and projects, all so very many garden variety ontic matters. But Fürsorge, assistance/solicitude, concerns and is always directed towards others. As these others, Mitdasein are together-with-us in our common with-world. As Heidegger defines it, in its ‘positive modes, solicitude has two extreme possibilities. It can, as it were, take “care” away from the Other and put itself in his position in concern: it can leap in for him’ (§26, 122). This quote should at once catch our attention, for it makes it quite clear that ‘the Other’ is, like ourselves, Dasein in every sense, including authenticity/inauthenticity, expressed in our empathic engagement with the Other (wherein solicitude takes over for the other). For Heidegger, the ideal here is not ‘to substitute for the other and relieve him of his “cares” but to restore them to him authentically’ (ibid.). If there is a great deal to say about authenticity in this context (and if a great deal has already been said about this in the literature both explicative and critical), what is important to note is not only that for Heidegger ‘authenticity’ – the holy grail of Heideggerians – is not a given but we are, most of the time and in the most intimate, heartfelt of ways, inauthentic: ‘Dasein is not itself.’ (§25, 116) Ontico-ontologically, authenticity is, as Heidegger takes care to remind us, a mode of inauthenticity. Heidegger begins his general discussion of solicitude by noting that it includes basic ‘preoccupations’ such as ‘with food and clothing and the nursing of the sick body’ (§26, 121), and by emphasizing that most of these concerns are dispensed with in the most intimate ways and, most of the time, negatively, deficiently – Nietzsche would say, sheerly or merely reactively (ignoring something is also a reaction). The predominance of such negative modes of solicitude foregrounds in turn the social requirement of alleviating (and also routinely dis-attending to) human needs. Thus, for Heidegger, ‘welfare work’ or ‘social assistance’, which also happens to be named Fürsorge as he mentions (and there is a parallel with the technical force of Heidegger’s use of the term Fürsorge and the everyday, mechanical or automatic sense in which we speak of such ‘caring’ or ‘solicitude’), has to be set up precisely as an institution. This is so because, in parallel with Heidegger’s emphasis on the predominant modality of inauthenticity, ‘Dasein maintains itself proximally and for the most part in the deficient modes of solicitude’ (ibid.). Just as Heidegger does not mean to claim inauthenticity as reprehensible but only as the basic way of, so to say, being oneself, so too he more or less straightforwardly defines ‘Being for, against, or without one another, passing one another by, not “mattering” to one another – these are possible ways of solicitude’ (ibid.). For Heidegger, such ‘modes as cited in the last instance, of deficient and indifferent modes … characterize everyday, average Being-with-one-another’ (ibid.). This deficient modality does not permit us to draw the conclusion that we have here to do either with ‘the mere Being-present-at-hand of several subjects’ or indeed simply to ‘assume that others are merely present at hand’ (ibid.). Already in advance,

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and already and without introduction, we find ourselves without excuse. This insight Sartre and de Beauvoir appropriate from Heidegger, and as we know it, it becomes for Beauvoir the basis of what she calls an ethics of ambiguity, as both our freedom and our responsibility to others are co-founded. We already know the others we encounter as Mitdasein, as part of our own with-world, Mitwelt, and hence we are, as Cain was, already-responsible. But we can discharge that responsibility either expeditiously, taking it over, or we can free the other to his own projects, his own authentic potentiality for being. The first mode, determinative in large part, as Heidegger says, of our Being with one another (cf. §26, 121) allows us to treat others as for the most part we treat things, as mere means, and certainly not as ends in themselves, but the way we might treat supposed ‘friends’ on Facebook, and the new designation of friends (echoing the parlance of Twitter) as one’s ‘followers’, as ready-to-hand. As an instantiation of this, consider the affective difference, to use a social media illustration, between being ‘unfriended’ on social media and being ‘unfollowed’. It matters, so I would submit, that there is a website who unfollowed me but no app to track how many friends lost on Facebook for the good ontic reason that most of one’s supposed friends are not in fact friends – and Facebook can allow one (shades of real life) to affect the appearance of friendship while shutting off notifications, such that only older folk using Facebook need ever unfriend anyone in order not to see their posts. By contrast, one’s ‘followers’ – here Twitter is far more intimate – give consent to have one’s tweets show up in their Twitter feed, that is, on their phones, in their pockets. Very ready-to-hand. Lady Gaga has some million followers, or so it is bruited about, which is the point of Twitter. Following is non-reciprocal by definition. I may follow you, you need not follow me, and vice versa. Aristotle had already analysed human interaction in his Nicomachean Ethics in similar terms: friends, for the most part, are useful, more rarely and then only in one’s innocent youth, decreasing as one gets older, are they friendships of pleasure, sheer delights to us. Thus taking pleasure in one’s friend is a matter of youth and it is changeable depending on our own disposition. Apart from utility, friendship in general is rare enough, that as Nietzsche emphasized, following Montaigne, following the logic (that is to say not the letter but the spirit) of Aristotle’s distinction between kinds and heights of friendship, one might say, O friends, there are no friends.45 The ethical point here is not the lamentation of the lack of ‘true’ or ‘good’ friends. For Aristotle, as we know, to have a good friend requires that one be good, an excellent or even perfect human being – that is, that one be without excesses, without deficiencies, simply perfect. That is such a tall order that philosophers, beginning with Aristotle himself, make just this ideal, in its sheer unrealizable ideality, the ideal point from the ideal start. It is in this sense that ethics is a modal noun. We have to do in practical philosophy with what we should do, with how we should act, and that is to say with ideals that tend to remain unattained. Reflecting in 1870 on freedom of the will and the seeming of appearances, Nietzsche writes: ‘We shall always behave as we are and never as we ought to be.’ In what follows, I argue that we may, however, speak of an ethics of authenticity, not in the popular sense of authenticity (this would be one aspect of Nietzsche’s point above) as being true to oneself, one’s real self, or following one’s bliss, and not as the Ayn Randian ideal of self-affirmation or -aggrandizement which is often the only thing one takes out of Nietzsche’s critique (or genealogy) of morals and his animadversion

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contra pity. The problem of solicitude is not wholly with caring for another person in terms of their cares and concerns, but the positive and the negative or deficient expressions of such caring. Thus, the problem in the first extreme modality is an appropriated and thereby negatived positive solicitude insofar as it takes ‘care’ over and thus away from the Other, is that one, thereby as Heidegger emphasizes, ‘takes over for the Other that with which he is to concern himself ’. This is fatal, for Heidegger, and we should not miss the Kantian element here, because it illustrates that for the most part and often at best, our involvement with Others is ordered as, that is, merely subordinated to, our concern with the ready-to-hand. There is a project that needs doing, the one charged with doing it is inefficient or limited or what have you, and thus one takes over on the other’s behalf, for his or her sake. Someone needs something and one supplies that something for that other. Homeless families are homeless and hungry, social services in New York City (for a proximate example) devises a system of feeding and housing them that requires them to become adjuncts to the public social help system, filling out forms, again and again, meeting with public social workers, again and again, and sleeping, every night, so that they do not acquire permanent residence, in a different residence, because the day must be spent applying for assistance and travelling to sites seemingly as far flung as possible from one another. It is as if one sought to devise techniques to keep them as occupied as possible, and in the most impoverishing way possible. One lived definition of poverty is the sheer amount of time spent on a daily and nightly basis on public transportation, with the logical extreme, hardly limited to New York, of those who make the subway cars themselves their home – but even there they are not spared the task of constantly changing trains and fleeing police. Here what is at stake appears to be little more than a matter of expedience. Feed the hungry, but make them pay for it, either by the sheer task of applying for food stamps or by enduring the religious pieties and time demands of the same at the YMCA or the Salvation Army (there is a sense that the poor are also insufficiently occupied, so efforts to help them often entail consuming or occupying their time).46 Bracketing New York City’s deficient modes of dealing with the poor and the homeless, for now, what is at issue in Being and Time is authenticity. Qua ethics of authenticity, the authenticity in question, the ownedness in question, is not only one’s own ownedness but that of the Other. Thus, Heidegger considers the contrasting ‘possibility of a kind of solicitude which does not so much leap in for the Other as leap ahead of him [ihm vorauspringt] in his existentiell potentiality for Being, not in order to take away his “care” but rather to give it back to him authentically as such for the first time’ (ibid.). At this juncture it is common to imagine that what Heidegger refers to – certainly every college professor teaching Heidegger’s Being and Time seems to have had recourse to such examples – is the care the mother of a young child might take to allow the child to work things out for themselves as opposed to taking over for them, be it finishing a school assignment or what not. The tying of shoelaces tends to loom large in such illustrations.47 If Heidegger had been as convivial a mind as Jean Piaget,48 one might emphasize the autobiographical detail, as others have, that beyond such a mother’s concern for very young, that is, shoe-tying children, Heidegger’s sons would have been, at the respective

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ages of eight (Jörg) and seven (Hermann), recipients of their father’s solicitude. In addition, as professor extraordinarius in Marburg, as Heidegger was at the time of the writing of Being and Time, Heidegger as teacher would also have had to have been solicitously engaged with each student, no matter whether we know their names or not, in ways differentially specific for each one.49 Thus, Heidegger’s words to Arendt, ‘Denken is ein einsames Geschäft’ as Arendt recorded this (she would also write ‘There is a teacher, it is perhaps possible that one can learn to think’), as Margarethe von Trotta’s film Hannah Arendt emphasizes it for us in the film’s fleeting vignette of the young Heidegger and the young Arendt, would not necessarily speak to Gadamer or other students and it may not speak to us, his readers. Nor does the engagement between teacher and student need to involve a word. It can be a matter of example, what Nietzsche called an exemplar; it can be a positive action – arranging a job is the fantasy ideal of a positive effort here50 – and perhaps it is most often negative or lacking. Wim Wenders’ film, Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire), gives another illustration of Heideggerian solicitude. The film begins with Peter Handke’s meditation on the child as child, written out on screen, and spoken in the charming conceit of the childish (qua adult’s meditation on being a child, Vom Kindsein) in sing-song fashion by Bruno Ganz: ‘Als das Kind Kind war.’51 As filmic poesy, the film plays upon and with filmic poetic device after filmic poetic device: two angels, Cassiel and Damiel (the lead or hero angel, played by Ganz), the veritable Berlin angel itself, and the notion that the innocent eyes of children can see angels, as well as Rilke’s Duino angels, allusions to which also run throughout the film. Significantly, for me, the film offers several Heideggerian moments of solicitude, one of which refers to a child, shades of the classroom example, tying his shoes with great concentration, to which Ganz’s Damiel observes, ‘Ein doppelter Knoten ist das einzige, was hält’ (a double knot is the only thing that holds). The recognition here is not only of the achievement of tying one’s shoes on one’s own but of circumspection, the insight into the demands of the environment, shoe leather and laces, weather, the stress of one’s feet, flexing over different situations, and, the key thing for Heidegger when it comes to care and especially to solicitude, time. Thus Peter Falk, who plays the once fallen angel, has a visible-invisible exchange with Damiel – ‘I can’t see you, but I know that you are there’ – and speaks to the angelic presence of embodiment, not just technical things like knots but tangible intangibles like rubbing one’s hands together to warm them in the cold, like drinking a cup of coffee from a kiosk on the street. When Damiel gives up the wings of his eternity for mortal desire and time, he looks for Falk who is, of course, on the set making a movie. Damiel, newly incarnate, encounters limits for the first time and cannot get through the gate, but he shouts and waves to Falk, who sees him and comes over to shake his hand through the fence. Falk then offers money. Damiel responds that he has some. ‘The armor?’ Falk asks, ‘How much did you get for it?’ Hesitantly, Damiel replies: ‘200 Marks?’ Falk laughs. ‘You got robbed. It happens.’ Passing his cigarette to Damiel who takes it with pleasure, Falk turns away, waving goodbye. But Damiel calls after him; he wants to know everything, but Falk laughs again: ‘You have to find it out all by yourself. That’s the beauty of it!’ For Wenders, these angelic discoveries are of the human condition and the wings that mortal love, more accurately erotic desire, gives to our soul (Wenders knew his

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Plato), but for Heidegger we always act in this way whether negatively or positively in our solicitous regard for the other. We may ignore the other, we may find ourselves too preoccupied with our own troubles or cares to notice them, or we can be attentively circumspect in our regard for the other and for his or her own projects or possibilities in his or her world. In either case, no matter whether negatively or positively, so Heidegger maintains, we always have to do with a world in which we are with others precisely like ourselves, sharing the same condition as Dasein, as Mitdasein and whom we encounter peripheral to and in the midst of and sometimes in the way of our own concerns and projects. For the most part, and for good reason, solicitude is expressed negatively. It is positive solicitude when we engage others and allow them to appropriate their own possibilities as their own, but even in such explicitly positive modes there are two modalities and hence two kinds of positive solicitude for Heidegger: ‘Everyday Being-with-one-another maintains itself between the two extremes of positive solicitude – that which leaps in and dominates, and that which leaps forth and liberates [vorspringend-befreienden]’ (ibid.). In other words, in its positive positive modality at, solicitude can free the other to and for themselves, in the classical spirit that Pindar celebrated – ‘become the one you are’ – or and this is by far more common: positively appropriate/alleviate the other’s project or task on his or her behalf. It is here that the shoelace example is misleading. The point is not that it is an oversimplification, though it is, but rather that what such a letting-be frees the child for is exactly not his or her own Dasein or ‘having’ to be. Heidegger has more in mind. As opposed to a leaping-in, vorauspringen allows the other to fulfil his own tasks, an ‘assist’, concernfully considered such that the other is brought to his or her freedom for his or her own sake, as Heidegger says ‘in his existentiell potentiality for Being, not in order to take away his “care” but rather to give it back to him authentically as such for the first time’ (§26, 122). What is at stake is more than the niceties of knots (double knots just where one must be sure of them), but it can be about a cup of coffee or tea or a cigarette (think of Damiel and Falk) or a word of human connection and so on. The concernful solicitude of which Heidegger speaks is one that looks (or more commonly that fails to look) to the other. In its positive fulfilment, that is, when it is ventured (mere meaning to be helpful is not enough for Heidegger precisely as, and this parallel is quite instructive, it was not enough for Nietzsche and irrelevant for Kant), that is, when one concernfully brings the other towards his or her own utmost potentiality for being, just where one has a potential involvement with the other and where one’s involvement has the potential to make a difference for the other’s possibility. More than shoelaces are at stake and more than a mother’s loving forbearance: letting a child fumble with his own shoelaces as opposed to the simple intervention whereby ‘he no longer has to concern himself with anything’ (122). And yet and even then, as Kant already pointed out in his Groundwork of the Metaphysical Foundations of Morals, separating one’s selfish self-investment in one’s sense of oneself as aiding others from the help afforded others for their own sake is hard to do. This same ethics of concern-for or assistance – and note that ‘assistance’ as a translation of Fürsorge emphasizes its relatedness where ‘solicitude’ foregrounds the essentially hermeneutic dimensionality of Fürsorge such that it is less a matter of choosing for a better or a worse translation than it is a matter of attending to Fürsorge

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as itself as an exemplification of relational hermeneutics – may also illuminate Nietzsche’s complicated and ethically challenging dismissal of pity. For Nietzsche, pity requires nothing of the one who pities but pity and offers nothing but pity to the pitied. In English some commentators thus opt to reflect on what they argue to be a more relationally sensitive translation of Mitleid using the word compassion, a Latinate English word, feeling with, which could also translate Fürsorge. But it is pity that is at issue, as it is pity that can elicit compassion as compassion has already involved us with the other for whom we feel. It is pity, not compassion, that is problematic. Nothing for nothing, the exchange proffered in pity, whereby the other claims our pity and we in turn pity the other, is productive nonetheless. The valuation of nothing is the engine of what Nietzsche calls the genealogy of morals, and it is, as he says, what makes humanity interesting for the first time. In the process, pity makes the pitier feel superior while being at the same time irresistibly seductive for the one pitied because – this is Nietzsche’s most Hegelian moment – it recognizes and confirms the one pitied in what he or she takes himself to be in relation to others. As Nietzsche’s Zarathustra asks in third section before the end of the second book of Also sprach Zarathustra, entitled (Nietzsche uses no numbers in Zarathustra) Von der Erlösung – almost as if it were related in advance to Heidegger’s distinction between leaping-in and leaping-ahead – what is the humpback without his hump? Nietzsche has his Zarathustra put the question and the answer in the people’s mouth: ‘Wenn man dem Bucklichten seinen Buckel nimmt, so nimmt man ihm seinen Geist – also lehrt das Volk.’ In the same section, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra poses the question Heidegger himself makes his own, if Nietzsche also sets this question in relation to the people, ‘wer ist uns Zarathustra? Wie soll er uns heißen?’ – ‘who is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?’ In Zarathustra’s mouth the question is posed with respect to the bodily lacking, the deficient or crippled precisely as occasions for pity which Zarathustra turns around to the ones highly esteemed for the magnification and exaggerations that commonly characterize the supposed great men among the common run of humanity – the example is of a man regarded by the folk as a ‘genius’ but who is nothing but a giant ear with a wisp of a tiny stem of a body attached thereto, and this exaggeration pains Zarathustra who connects both the cripple, in the eyes of the people, and the genius of the popular crowd-mind’s esteem, in his search for a complete human being: Verily my friends, I wander among humanity as if amidst broken bits and appendages. In my eye this is the most fearsome, that I find humanity shattered and strewn as if across a field of battle and slaughter. And if my eye flees from now to former ages: it finds ever the same: broken bits and appendages and dreadful accident – yet no humanity! Now and in former ages on the earth. (Z II, Concerning Redemption)

The parallel to the gospel here is clear and not least for this reason has abundant commentary been dedicated to this parallel. Significantly, Zarathustra does not distance himself from this insight, but declares himself part of all and all, rather like Angelus Silesius, who also intrigued Heidegger: ‘A seer, a willer, a creator,

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a future itself and a bridge to the future – and ah, at the same time, also a cripple on this bridge: all that is Zarathustra.’ (ibid). Reactive to this same extent, and in order to demonstrate one’s condition to others, the injured or handicapped person can be inclined to bend into that condition, thereby taking care to ensure that others do not miss it. One feels fatigued: even the teenager slouches to show this fatigue to themself and to their teachers and parents, or one feels the growing weight of age as one gets older and slumps one’s shoulders into what then becomes all the more permanent. One has a headache, and in order to manifest the pain of this ache to oneself and others, one clutches one’s face or forehead, grimacing and groaning, all the more so when family and friends are around. Another example of Fürsorge may be drawn from sports. The practical terminus I am thinking of is called ‘running interference’, a phrase which is itself not specifically football terminology. But in American football – although soccer and other types of football have clear parallels – when the quarterback has the ball and is running for a goal, rather more is involved than the quarterback’s speed and agility, important as this is. Relative to the other men on the team, quarterbacks tend to be ranged on the small side, thus a good coach, so I am told, will tell the quarterback to ‘lay down’ as soon as he is threatened with interception. To prevent interception, the other players are indispensable, and so too their coordination one with another: anticipating on behalf of the quarterback not only his best course but advancing one another in the joint attainment of that same common project. But if we speak of ‘team work’, the ultimate benefit – and each player feels this viscerally – is to the glory of the quarterback, should he pull it off. The other players, anticipating the moves of the opposing team, taking the hints of the opposing efforts on the part of other players seeking to do the same, advance the quarterback to a goal which works to the benefit of the team as a whole in the context of the game. But – and this is the point of positive Fürsorge – in the context of this one sports illustrated moment, the one who comes into his ownmost, utmost possibility as it were, is the quarterback who has thereby been freed through his teammates for just this attainment. A Heideggerian ethics of solicitude or ‘assistance’ entails that one act for the sake of the other when one has to do with others. But if Kant had reminded us of just how difficult such an action truly is, Irigaray has also emphasized that the ‘question of the other’ remains a question. At issue here is not the question of who is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, as Heidegger repeats the popular question, but who is the other? And this is a very old question. The parable of the Good Samaritan, well known and often discussed, illuminates this question in terms of a quite specific hermeneutic of relation. This parable also articulates Heideggerian Fürsorge, expressed as a question of what is required of us, what is incumbent on us with respect to others in need of assistance, especially those we do not know: A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he traveled,

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In the citation from Luke given above, I have taken care to include the Greek term, ἐσπλαγχνίσθη, for what is here translated as pity as well as the Latin, misericordia. This tracing back through the standard translation already suggests that ‘pity’, which the famously ‘good’ Samaritan takes on the man left for dead, is more than what we usually mean by pity. The Greek itself ἐσπλαγχνίσθη refers to the wrenching movement in one’s gut (the reference for the Greek term is to the bowel), and thus we are often recommended to translate this as compassion.52 By contrast with (keeping the koine Greek in mind) gut-felt, body wrenching compassion, as Nietzsche reminds us, pity requires no more than feeling sorry for someone, ourselves included. Pity is thus utterly compatible with the behaviour of both priest and Levite, both of whom, even as they physically went out of their way to avoid the man in the ditch, may well have felt sorry for him. Only the Samaritan, however, stopped his own journey and took the time to attend, himself, to the beaten man’s wounds, and then personally took the man, interrupting his own concerns and using his own means to do so, to an inn to recover. At the inn, the Samaritan undertook to assign the task of concern for the injured man to one whose remunerated profession it is (qua innkeeper) to offer solicitude to strangers. But, and this is key, we speak of the Samaritan as ‘good’ not only in distinction from the kind of Jew other Jews ordinarily think less of, but also because he did not leave it at that, but in circumspect consideration, gave his assurance, this is a temporal encumbrance, to follow up on the care specifically contracted, saying that he would return to cover any further expense. In this sense, positive solicitude in its positive mode entails doing whatever is needed for the sake of the other, even where it takes one out of one’s own concerns and out of one’s way to do so, and time is key to this. Thus, what is at stake is an involvement in care – for the other’s cares – and what is important is the perspicacity of this care, a sense of all that it involves: Fürsorge. This can be effected also positively by negating the extent of the involvement; this is leaping-in for the other where the time of involvement, one’s own time, is minimized. In the case of someone at the edge, one at the edge of being, as we fancifully say, ‘past all cares’, such a chance to quickly offer assistance is often not an available option. In this case – that of the Good Samaritan – others who usually do step up to the plate (the priest, the Levite) see that here there is an extreme situation and go out of their way not to be involved in what, as they anticipate this very clearly, cannot turn out well. The man robbed and beaten within an inch of his life now has no goods, no horse, nothing. The Samaritan who ‘saves’ this beaten and abandoned other frees this other for his now precisely encumbered worldly cares. Robbed of all resources, those troubles would have been immense. It is to those concerns and troubles of living to which the Samaritan ‘restores him’, as Heidegger puts it, ‘authentically as such for the first time’. Yet if the reading offered above, with the illustrations lent from a poetic film fantasy, the sports illustration, and ultimately the example of the Good Samaritan’s solicitude,

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Kant’s reflection, to help where one can, also outlines what is required of us in each case. What Heidegger brings to Kant details the obligation still binding on us, in what he calls negative or deficient Fürsorge, that is: binding even when we do not otherwise act. For Heidegger, as for Kant, what matters ethically is only what we do as opposed to our personal intentions and as opposed to consequences. What we recognize in Kant is the rule that holds where we do not in fact observe it. If Kant is at pains to argue that he is not merely advocating the golden rule, his categorical imperative is a test that permits us to evaluate our own maxim with respect to its generalizable suitability as universal law, even to the point of disallowing the option of inaction, or compulsion, as a law of nature. Thus, we noted above that the routine focus of philosophical ethics (apart from but sometimes even in virtue ethics) tends to be a focus on the actions of others. By means of ethics, we tell others, quite as Schopenhauer liked to say, what they ought to do. Heidegger, by contrast, advances a tragic Sophoclean or Heraclitean ethics, just as he argues in his Letter on Humanism. A Sophoclean ethics has to do with one’s character, which is not a matter of Aristotelian habit but thrownness into already given circumstances and dispositions. Such a tragic ethics always involves others, as Antigone knew, to the extent that one already knows not only one’s own project but its disposition to the other’s project as well, and therefore includes a circumspect awareness not only of one’s ownmost possibilities but of the other, even, as the example of Antigone again makes clear, in the case of death, as the possibility of impossibility for all time. This is not, as in the case of the Good Samaritan, a matter of reading the other’s mind or of knowing better than the other would what would be good for the other. For in the limit case of the burial of one’s brother, one does for the sake of eternity for the other and for all time what condemns one to the loss of all time, losing thereby one’s life possibilities. In the case of the man beaten and left for dead, the ministrations of the Good Samaritan serve to restore the victim to his life, meaning to troubles he had very nearly left behind. These are not different cases, except to the extent that the other – the unburied brother, the man at the edge of death – makes different claims. In the case of Antigone, her claim is shared by the one person who refused it, for the sake of her own life possibilities, Ismene. Ismene ‘chooses life’ in that she asks what one can do as a woman and what can be required of a woman to do. Antigone looks to eternity for her brother’s sake, conscious of sharing with her brother, in the order of time, here and now, what Heidegger emphasizes as Hegel’s hic et nunc, but also in the fullness of time in the light of the same eternity to which her brother remains otherwise exposed, in what Nietzsche later articulates as a ‘brotherhood of death.’ There are many kinds of circumspect attention to what is around us that do not involve men beaten by robbers and left for dead, or brothers slain and condemned to be left to the destitution of time, including the everyday others in the everyday world that is always with us. One might in a busy intersection notice someone moving more slowly than others in dangerous conditions, and this notice need not mean that one rushes to their side, just to the extent that there are many ways of running interference and hence of solicitude. Teachers and friends have still other possibilities to look out for those related to them and in their charge, on the street, among strangers, asterisked, in Agamben’s linguistic distinguishing, and claiming our response. Given our shared human condition, when we pass a needy person – and in these days of austerity there

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is no urban environment where we are not presented with such needs – our most common response is the non-response. What Heidegger calls (negative) solicitude is a mode of care to be sure, as he also explains, as we carefully look away (this is only one mode of negative Fürsorge). We may justify our inattention by assuming that social help or other assistance will attend to this, as Heidegger says. Such organized assistance corresponds to the ‘caregiving’ industry, as these industries exist for the benefit of a profession. Alternatively, we judge that the needy person is likely themselves to blame and ‘ought’ to be left to their own devices (notice that this too is a moral judgement, negative solicitude, as Heidegger describes it). The negative negative modality is another and more extreme deficit that does not simply look away or disattend – to the extent that omission for Heidegger, is already well underway to commission. It can help in this regard to think of Ivan Illich’s (1926–2002) reflection omission, the failure of concern in the parable of the Good Samaritan, not as a breach of rules but mutual relation, one to another, as the (non) response of the priest and the Levite: ‘This denial, infidelity, turning away, coldness is what the New Testament calls sin, something which can only be recognized by the light of this new glimmer of mutuality.’53 In this sense ethics is, as Heidegger says part and parcel of Dasein’s Being: ‘That very potentiality-for-Being for the sake of which Dasein is, has Being-in-itself as its kind of Being. Thus it implies ontologically a relation to entities within-the-world. Care is always concern and solicitude even if only privatively’ (§41, 194). Heidegger emphasizes that what we call ‘empathy’, in an argument parallel to the long-standing ethical debate on altruism, ‘does not first constitute Being-with’ (§26; 125). Instead, Heidegger argues, Mitsein is itself already what makes empathy possible. Only on this pregiven basis, as it were, ‘of Being-with does “empathy” become possible: it gets its motivation from the unsociability of the dominant modes of Being-with’ (ibid.). This unsociability, as it were, applies with regard to oneself just as much as it applies with regard to others as Heidegger details in the next section, ‘Everyday-Being-One’s-Self and the “They”’ (§27). For Heidegger, our Being-with Others is always already given or present to us as we make our way in the world. In his prior analysis of the presentat-hand and ready-to-hand of the craftsman (a world he knew well from his father’s workshop), Heidegger observed ‘that along with the equipment to be found when one is at work [in Arbeit], those Others for whom the “work” [“Werk”] is destined are “encountered” too’ (§26, 117). The with-world of this involvement does not require that one be a craftsman or even that one know those who are (as with his example, echoing Plato’s shoemaker example, of judging between suppliers as good or bad), instead he gives the everyday and seemingly innocuous example of walking ‘along the edge of a field’, pointing out that we take care as we do so ‘to walk “outside it” ’, an attentiveness or ‘solicitude’ corresponding to our recognition of the field as it ‘shows itself as belonging to such-and-such a person and decently kept up by him’ (ibid.). Likewise, he gives the more academically universal illustration of ‘the book we have used’ which ‘was brought at So-and-so’s shop and given by such-and-such a person, and so forth’ (ibid.). In an ethico-political example, Heidegger uses the case of a boat ‘anchored at the shore’ (§26, 119) to acknowledge the boat’s signature ‘in its Being-in-itself to an acquaintance who undertakes voyages with it’. Heidegger reflects that ‘even if it is a “boat which is strange to us,” it is still indicative of Others’ (ibid.). The object indicates relation, relatedness; it is for journeying on the sea, it is for, it belongs to, someone. Towards solicitude, that same

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ethics also takes into its compass the omnipresence of what Heidegger calls fallenness. Speaking of Being-in-the-world as care, Heidegger emphasizes that Dasein’s factical existing is ‘a thrown potentiality-for-Being-in-the-world’ (§41, 192), as this entails that ‘it is always also absorbed in the world of its concern’ (ibid.). This presupposes the flight in the face of the uncanny which is always suppressed or ‘tranquilized’ according to ‘the publicness of the “they”’ (ibid.). But it is also clear that the focus on Dasein seems inherently self-oriented, if not selfish: the goal is authenticity, is it not? Dasein is ever mine to be – thus Adorno’s joke on the cruelty echoing in Jemeinigkeit. This takes Heidegger through a discussion of fear, oriented to the same uncanniness of anxiety that he emphasizes as being annulled or minimized by everyday conventionality. The focus on Dasein would seem to be a focus on the self – for itself, as it were, not Dasein-for-others. Yet the focus of Aristotle’s ethics is similarly on the ethical perfection of the individual, which for Aristotle presupposes or takes others as a given, and thus as political, with friendship at its crown, just as Heidegger does being with Others, in a world that is originarily a with-world.54 Heidegger argues that ‘Resoluteness, as authentic Being-one’s-Self does not detach Dasein from its world, nor does it isolate it so that it becomes a free-floating “I”. And how should it, when resoluteness as authentic disclosedness, is authentically nothing else than Being-in-the-world? Resoluteness brings the self right into its current concernful Being-alongside what is ready-to-hand, and pushes it into solicitous Being with Others’ (§60, 298). In this sense, Heidegger’s argument parallels Kant; we are with and for one another, and we may not treat those with whom we are in the world, whether in our own person or in that of another, merely as a means but always also as an end. What Heidegger reminds us of is that we always already know that end, and we already know what is asked of us, even as Heidegger also explains the chained and constant mechanism whereby we lose sight of that.55 As care … Dasein has been Determined by facticity and falling. … Dasein as a they-self, gets ‘lived’ by the common-sense ambiguity of that publicness in which nobody resolves upon anything but that which has already made its decision. ‘Resoluteness’ signifies letting oneself be summoned out of one’s lostness in the ‘they’. … [But even] resolutions remain dependent upon the they and its world. (§60, 298)

The mutual claim as Illich puts it, the relational focus of Heidegger’s ‘solicitude’ reminds us we are already claimed by and towards and with and for the other and always have been.

2

Sartre: From Hyperbolic Existentialism to Crypto-Hermeneutics Thomas W. Busch

The two most important influences on Sartre’s existentialist classic Being and Nothingness1 were Husserl and Heidegger. Husserl, the philosopher of consciousness, offered Sartre a method of relating consciousness and a world that preserved the autonomy of consciousness. Sartre’s version of the essence of consciousness featured its reflexivity, a self-consciousness whereby consciousness, in intending its objects, recoiled upon itself, breaking with any fusion with its objects. Throughout Being and Nothingness metaphors of distance, rupture, and breakage dominate. As an antidote to Husserl’s idealism, what Sartre perceived to be his reduction of being to meaning, Sartre refers to Heidegger’s being-in-the-world, the facticity of consciousness, its situatedness, its belongingness. These influences sit side by side, in tension, and on those occasions when he is forced to side with one or the other on freedom, Husserl carries the day. Subsequent to Being and Nothingness, emphasis changed due to Sartre’s admission of ‘the force of circumstances’. Situatedness and belonging, particularly to history, dominate and are no longer marginalized. A new, dialectical method was called for, one that incorporated the action of events and institutions on the conscious subject. This brought about a revised view of temporality and language on Sartre’s part. Whereas previously he had inserted difference between his autonomous subjectivity and temporality and language, he now inserts the subject within them. This is evident in his progressive–regressive dialectical methodology. Freedom and expression are now thought of as developing in and through history and language. Weight is now given to instituted traditions of culture and the subject’s self-understanding and freedom in their terms. Looking at the entire development of Sartre’s work, it is possible to see him working towards a hermeneutical view of subjectivity and freedom. Sartre first heard of Husserl and Heidegger in 1928 when he met weekly for two and a half months with Shuzo Kuki, a visiting Japanese scholar who studied phenomenology with Oscar Becker and who had met Husserl several times and had also studied with Heidegger in Marburg. It was only in 1933 when, at the suggestion of his former classmate Raymond Aron, Sartre travelled to the French Institute in Berlin on a grant to study phenomenology, that he had time to seriously devote to Husserl’s work. Sartre purchased a copy of Being and Time in Berlin, read about fifty pages, and put it aside to

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continue his immersion in Husserl. He wrote of that time: ‘Husserl had gripped me. I saw everything through the perspectives of his philosophy – which was in any case more accessible to me, thanks to its semblance of Cartesianism. I was “Husserlian” and long to remain so.’2 Under Husserlian inspiration Sartre published phenomenological studies on imagination, emotion, and the structure of consciousness. But by the time he had begun writing Being and Nothingness, in the notes he was taking down for it from 1938 to its publication in 1945, Sartre began to entertain serious reservations about Husserl. ‘Gradually, however, without my fully realizing it, the difficulties were piling up and a deeper and deeper gulf was separating me from Husserl. His philosophy evolved ultimately towards idealism, which I could not accept’ (WD 184). He therefore turned to Heidegger: ‘It was certainly to escape from the Husserlian impasse that I turned toward Heidegger’ (WD 184). Sartre found Heidegger’s influence ‘providential … since it supervened to teach me authenticity and historicity just at the very moment when the war was to make these notions indispensable to me’ (WD 182). Yet, even with regard to Heidegger, Sartre expressed reservations, particularly in regard to the understanding of ‘nothingness’, which ‘is not, as Heidegger believes, … the Nothingness which retains the world in it, but … the Nothingness which consciousness itself is’ (WD 179). This latter point is crucial for it jeopardizes Heidegger’s understanding of historicity and the need for hermeneutics. Sartre thought that he could bring together in Being and Nothingness an Husserlian phenomenology purged of its idealism, but not of its Cartesianism, and a Heideggerian facticity and historicity, not purged of Cartesianism, for at this time Sartre saw a version of Cartesianism as the only way to defend radical freedom. Sartre’s Transcendence of the Ego3 takes up the issue of the essence of human consciousness and reveals his commitment to Cartesianism, albeit in his own revision of it. He agrees with Husserl that all conscious acts are intentional, relational to objects, and that the objects are disclosed as meant in, and thus tied to, those acts. Conscious acts can exist on two levels: pre-reflective and reflective. The reflective level is that of Descartes’ cogito, whereby Descartes in claiming ‘I doubt, therefore, I am’, directed a reflecting consciousness on another act of consciousness (the doubting consciousness). When Descartes was actually doubting, and not thinking about his doubting, his doubting consciousness was on the pre-reflective level. His focus then was not on his consciousness but upon the objects doubted. In the move to the reflective level, the doubting consciousness itself becomes the object of a new, reflecting consciousness, which does not focus on itself but on the doubting consciousness. Thus, whether on the reflective or pre-reflective levels, consciousness is intentional of objects. Sartre then asks whether, in intending and focusing upon their objects, reflective and pre-reflective consciousnesses are unconscious of themselves (since they are other-directed). He holds that they are not unconscious of themselves, but that they are not focally or intentionally aware of themselves. Their self-awareness is not ‘positional’ as is their awareness of their intentional objects, but is ‘non-positional’, or marginal, tacit. Sartre draws major existential implications from this structural analysis. In its non-positional reflexivity, consciousness is always ‘present to itself ’, marking its differentiation from its objects and founding the primacy of the subject/ object relationship in all human experience. For Sartre, the ‘self ’ is constituted by its differentiation from its objects and, lacking this differentiation, would be dissolved in

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the continuous identity of being. The self, or subject, is a mode of being (being-for-itself) which is sharply distinguished from the mode of being of objects (being-in-itself). A fundamental (and existentially catastrophic) error is to identify the self as an object, and thus in a form of stasis, and this is the point of his early existentialist manifesto, The Transcendence of the Ego. The ego, for Sartre, is constituted by a reflective objectification of the self, a thinking about the self. This objective representation of the self has the result of creating an essentialized version of the self, which cannot be adequately objectified. Sartre uses the example of a young woman who entertained thoughts of being unfaithful to her husband. She was frightened by these thoughts and attempted to dismiss them by claiming to herself that she was not that sort of person. She was married and faithful, and people such as that do not act unfaithfully, so that was not a real possibility. She identified herself with her representation of herself as a kind of self. Sartre agrees that if one has a deep identity then one’s acts would flow out of and reflect that identity. However, this initial defence collapsed when the woman experienced in anxiety that there was nothing to prevent her from acting unfaithfully, that it was a real possibility after all. What she experienced in anxiety was her existential self, a self that is radically free and creates and sustains ‘identities’. For the existential self, its being is a making. Sartre questions why the woman so strongly resisted recognizing her radical freedom, and he proposes that perhaps the ego is a mask that provides for us a way to hide our radical freedom, that there is something desirable about the dream of secure identities. This would become the subject matter of Being and Nothingness. Being and Nothingness is an ontological narrative about the various strategies whereby radically free subjectivity tries to deceive itself by trying to flee into various identities in order to secure a state of necessity ontologically impossible to them. The ontological impossibility is due to the presence of nothingness in the heart of conscious subjectivity, a nothingness that precludes self-identity and that creates radical freedom itself. Sartre had established the essence of consciousness as positional consciousness of objects and non-positional self-consciousness. Now, on the ontological level of Being and Nothingness, he claims that in being self-conscious, human subjectivity is distanced from itself, not identical with itself, a break in being. What breaks the continuity of being and thus of identity is the negation of continuity and identity: ‘The coincidence of identity is the veritable plenitude of being exactly because in this coincidence there is left no place for any negativity. … Presence to self … implies that an impalpable fissure has slipped into being. If being is present to self, it is because it is not wholly itself ’ (BN 77). Were coincidence of self with self achieved (the supposed goal of securing an identity), subjectivity would disappear and, of course, radical freedom. Thus, Sartre indicates at the end of Being and Nothingness that an authentic life, as opposed to the vain search for identity, would be the acknowledgement of our lack of deep identity and the acceptance of our radical freedom. Sartre’s defence of radical freedom is a powerful one, grounded in his reading of the essence of consciousness, deeply indebted to Descartes and Husserl, although with his own spin upon them. Although appealing to Heidegger’s being-in-the-world as an antidote to Husserl’s idealism, Sartre’s Cartesianism prevents him from embracing the depth of Heidegger’s understanding of historical situatedness and its consequence in hermeneutic methodology. This is evident in Sartre’s treatment of temporality and language in Being and Nothingness.

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Already, in The Transcendence of the Ego, Sartre had stressed the dynamic, temporal nature of consciousness over against the static understanding of essence. However, his articulation of temporality seemed to contest itself. To avoid positing an ego in consciousness itself as a means of accounting for the unity of conscious acts, Sartre claimed that the temporal stream of consciousness unified itself, citing Husserl’s notion of retention. ‘It is consciousness which unifies itself, concretely, by a play of “transversal” intentionalities which are concrete and real retentions of past consciousnesses’ (TE 36). The past is not lost (for this would interrupt the continuity of a life) but is carried along in the emerging present. Yet, in his existential moments, defending radical freedom from essentialism, he stresses the break of present from past. ‘We may therefore formulate our thesis: transcendental consciousness is an impersonal spontaneity. It determines its existence at each instant, without our being able to conceive anything before it. Thus each instant of our conscious life reveals itself to us a creation ex nihilo. Not a new arrangement, but a new existence’ (TE 99). This tension between continuity and break is not addressed in The Transcendence of the Ego, and is carried over into Being and Nothingness, where temporality merits the full look of a chapter. Here again, temporality is presented as a ‘synthesis’ of the heterogeneous moments of past, present, and future, with the insistence that ‘I am my past’. Yet it is also true that ‘I am not my past’, since the past exists in the mode of ‘was’, and is ‘behind’ me. It is in the context of explicating the difference of the present from the past that Sartre portrays the difference as sharply as he did in The Transcendence of the Ego: It is in the past that I am what I am. But on the other hand that heavy plenitude is behind me; there is an absolute distance [distance absolue] which cuts it from me and [it] falls out of my reach, without contact, without connections [sans contact, sans adherences] … . Between past and present there is an absolute heterogeneity; and if I cannot enter the past, it is because the past is. The only way by which I could be it is for me myself to become in-itself in order to lose myself in it in the form of identification. (BN 118–19)

In Being and Nothingness the tension between continuity and break is caught up in the ontology developed there between being-for-itself and being-in-itself, the former being the being of the conscious self, continuously formed by bursting out of identity, and thus committed to continuously make itself, while the latter consists of reality immersed in identity. Sartre places nothingness (neant) in consciousness with the effect of distancing consciousness from itself in the forms of self-consciousness, temporality, and radical freedom. Neant preserves consciousness from determination by the given state of things. No given factual state whatever it may be (the political and economic structure of society, the psychological ‘state’, etc.) is capable itself of motivating any act whatsoever. … No factual state can determine consciousness, … [can] define it and circumscribe it. … Consciousness is a pure and simple negation of the given, and it exists as the disengagement from a certain existing given. (BN 435–6;478)

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The ontology of temporality stresses ‘I am not my past’ to the point of marginalizing the assertion of ‘I am my past’. Sartre’s hyperbolic expressions, ‘ex nihilo’, ‘without contact, without connections’, ‘absolute distance’, are no doubt meant to avoid any determinism (in a causal sense) of the present by the past, of a seamless continuity between them, but he presses further by denying any conditioning of the present by the past: ‘But if consciousness exists in terms of the given [consciousness always intends a given], this does not mean that the given conditions consciousness; consciousness is a pure and simple negation of the given. … Freedom is simply the fact that this choice is always unconditioned’ (BN 478–9). The existential commitment to radical freedom, ‘existence precedes essence’, defended by the ontology of the neant, compromises the temporal, historical sense of continuity that grounds a hermeneutical approach to freedom and understanding. Sartre’s existential approach to language in Being and Nothingness reiterates the compromising of hermeneutic grounds. In the few places where he addresses language in his existential ontology, he stresses the break between the given state of a language and the creation of new meaning. But, as with his portrayal of the ‘break’ between present and past in temporality, the sense of continuity between past and present expression is marginalized. Again, the background is the possibility of determinism: ‘It has been maintained recently that there is a sort of living order of words, of the dynamic laws of speech, an impersonal life of the logos … and that to some extent man must obey it … as he does with Nature … . People have made of speech a language which speaks all by itself   ’ (BN 516). For Sartre the existentialist, the given state of a language, its laws and literature, do not constrain free expression. The act of speech orders words into a meaning by synthesizing them, creating an organization of given words that promotes them to new levels of meaning. ‘Suppress this synthetic unity and the block which is called ‘speech’ disintegrates; each word returns to its solitude and at the same time loses its unity, being parceled out among various incommunicable meanings’ (BN 517). This surpassing of the given state of language is due to the neant, the distance secreted by consciousness which disrupts its unity with itself and all objects. When it comes to expressing the nature of this surpassing, again Sartre engages the hyperbolic: ‘The for-itself can choose itself only beyond certain meanings of which it is not the origin. … This “beyond” is enough to assure its total independence [totale independence] in relation to the structures which it surpasses’ (BN 520). Yet, Sartre admits, the ‘beyond’ is a beyond ‘in relation to these particular structures’, but what this entails, and what it might mean in relation to ‘total independence’ he does not pursue. Language is used as a stand-in for tools, techniques, institutions in general, and all are equated to situational givenness. In taking up any of them for use by the existential subject, they become an extension of the subject’s intentional capacity: ‘By employing a technique, the For-itself surpasses the technique toward its own end; it is always beyond the technique which it employs.’ But, in being incorporated into the intentional act of the existential subject, ‘the technique which was originally a pure, meaningful conduct fixed in some Object-as-object, now because it is interiorized, loses its character as a technique and is integrated purely and simply in the free surpassing of the given toward ends’ (BN 523). This ‘subjectivizing’ of the technique excludes consideration of how the technique acts upon its employer. Psychologically the tool may disappear

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from explicit awareness, but its objective qualities and capacity to modify the subject are not lost. But, in Being and Nothingness, Sartre’s concern is to preserve the existential subject’s autonomy, its capacity to shape its identity and its world, and in doing so does not explore the passivities of the existential subject. This would soon change, and in the process open Sartre to a hermeneutic approach to understanding and freedom. In an interview Sartre gave in 1969, ‘The Itinerary of a Thought’, he spoke of why my outlook changed so fundamentally after the Second World War. A simple formula would be to say that life taught me la force des choses – the power of circumstances. In a way, L’Etre et le Neant itself should have been the beginning of a discovery of this power of circumstances, since I had already been made a soldier, when I had not wanted to be one.4

The power of consciousness, so focused upon in Being and Nothingness, in his subsequent thought must give room to the power of circumstances to fill out a more adequate understanding of the human condition. Sartre, despite this admission of change of view, continued to be read as the philosopher of radical subjectivity, and it puzzled him: ‘They all stop too soon. I think that a study of my philosophical thought should follow its evolution. But no, they don’t do it. It’s odd.’5 In the 1969 interview, Sartre claimed that ‘L’Etre et le Neant traced an interior experience, without any coordination with the exterior experience of a petty-bourgeois intellectual’. The ‘coordination’ would mark the coming together of subject and situation in an intelligible way, where they would act on one another dialectically. Exploring this ‘coordination’ would bring Sartre into a recognizable hermeneutic approach to understanding and freedom, undercutting the hyperbolic distancing of subjectivity from its past and from its linguisticality. Thus, in L’Etre et le Neant, what you could call ‘subjectivity’ is not what it would be for me now, the small margin in an operation whereby an interiorization re-exteriorizes itself in an act. But ‘subjectivity’ and ‘objectivity’ seem to me entirely useless notions today, anyway. I might still use the term ‘objectivity’, I suppose, but only to emphasize that everything is objective. The individual interiorizes his social determinations; he interiorizes the relations of production, the family of his childhood, the historical past, the contemporary institutions, and then he re-exteriorizes these in acts and options which necessarily refer us back to them. None of this existed in L’Etre et le Neant. (IT 35)

Perhaps we can see the conceptual development of these ideas best by starting with Sartre’s work on Jean Genet, St. Genet: Actor and Martyr.6 In attempting to understand Genet’s life, Sartre is compelled to begin with his childhood, and this marks an important step in Sartre’s probing of the ‘coordination’ of subjectivity and situation by opening a developmental approach to subjectivity absent in Being and Nothingness. Developmentally considered, a life, Sartre now admits, displays its passivities. Children are vulnerable to complex series of socializations, and this is very clear

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in Genet’s case. Genet was illegitimate and thus entered the human world with a social meaning, an identity he did not constitute. He was ‘suddenly provided with a monstrous and guilty ego … with a nature … a destiny’ (SG 18). Thus, Sartre refers to ‘the making of Genet’ (SG 23), whereas in Being and Nothingness the emphasis was on how one makes one’s own life and destiny. As a child, Genet did not have the resources to rebut and challenge the social stigmas he received. According to Sartre, he ‘internalized’ them, thought of himself on the terms set by others. According to Sartre, Genet’s life was an expression of this internalization which permanently marked him, giving an overdue appreciation to ‘I am my past’, and the continuity of temporality. Although Sartre understood Genet’s life to be an ‘expression’ of his socialization, he did not at all think of it as determinism. Genet expressed his ‘illegitimacy’ by first taking it up in the project of being a thief, then of being a writer and in the process discovering his freedom. Genet was not a thief or writer as a ‘thing’, causally produced by early socialization. Genet had to work at being a thief and then a writer and, in the process, abandon being a thief as he discovered his own capacity to shape his life. Perhaps the book where I have best explained what I mean by freedom is, in fact, Saint Genet. … For I believe that a man can always make something out of what is made of him. This is the limit I would today accord to freedom: the small movement which makes of a totally conditioned social being someone who does not render back completely what his conditioning has given him. Which makes of Genet a poet when he was rigorously conditioned to be a thief. (IT 35)

Here we see clearly the important admission on Sartre’s part of conditioning, something he explicitly denied in Being and Nothingness. This admission repairs the linkage between past and present broken in Being and Nothingness by the hyperbolic ‘absolute distance’ and ‘without connections’, and opens the way to a hermeneutic understanding of freedom. ‘Coordination’ became ‘conditioning’, and this in turn becomes ‘dialectic’, featured in Search for a Method7 and Critique of Dialectical Reasoning:8 ‘We cannot conceive of this conditioning in any form except that of dialectical movement’ (SM 34). This move expresses Sartre’s turn to history: ‘The concrete is history and dialectical action’ (SM  25). The abstract ontological subjectivity of Being and Nothingness, being-for-itself, and its undialectical opposite, being-in-itself, are replaced with the dialectically related ‘praxis’ and ‘practico inert’. Praxis is defined by action, project in the form of realizing goals by shaping matter, while the practico inert is shaped matter, matter imprinted by action (including the linguistic cultural), which, having its own intelligible structure, constrains future action. Praxis, in its capacity to project goals, exhibits existential surpassing of givenness, and thus embodies the neant of Being and Nothingness. But now, in the context of dialectic, it is not presented as ‘a pure and simple negation of the given’. Rather, ‘in relation to the given, the praxis is negativity  … . [It] opens onto the “non-existent,” to what has not yet been. A flight and a leap ahead … the project retains and unveils the surpassed reality’ (SM 92). The addition of retention on the same level of importance as negation is significant:

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‘The movement of human praxis goes beyond … while conserving’ (SM 87), for this continues the emphasis upon subjectivity as a developing process, one now to be seen in terms of a personal history and inscription into general histories. This nuances considerably the existential sense of identity from Sartre’s earlier work, in which are contrasted the dual options of essence and radical freedom. While Sartre continues to reject essentialism, his later understanding of subjectivity as a developing process admits to levels of constraint and limitation, albeit not determinism. What was once both a vague comprehension of our class, of our social conditioning by way of the family group, and a blind going-beyond, an awkward effort to wrench away from all this, at last ends up inscribed in us in the form of character. At this level are found the learned gestures (bourgeois gestures, socialist gestures) and the contradictory roles which compose us … . To surpass all that is also to preserve it. We shall think with these gestures which we have learned. (SM 100–1)

Thus, Genet was not determined to be a thief or a poet. These were possible ways of living his initial circumstance of being born illegitimately in a certain era of French culture. There were other possibilities. He was existentially working out an identity, not in the hyperbolic sense of ex nihilo, but now in the image of ‘spirals’. ‘A life develops in spirals; it passes again and again by the same points but at different levels of integration and complexity’ (SM 106). Genet’s poetry expresses, but is not deducible from, his former life as a thief, and his life as a thief expresses, but is not deducible from, his illegitimacy. One’s situation is both a limitation and an opening to create. ‘The field of possibles is the goal toward which the agent surpasses his objective situation. And this situation depends strictly on the social, historical reality … . Thus, both positively and negatively, the social possibles are lived as schematic determinations of the individual future. And the most individual possible is only the internalization and enrichment of a social possible’ (SM 95). Whereas in Being and Nothingness, where we find freedom ontologically defined, it was difficult to see how there could be degrees of freedom, Sartre’s dialectical understanding of freedom, by tying practical freedom to the retention-potential of past life experience and openness of one’s situation, allows for expansion or contraction of freedom. Accompanying Sartre’s later articulation of a deeply historically situated subjectivity is an emphasis upon the linguisticality of concrete subjectivity. The earlier, existentialist, Sartre hyperbolically claimed a ‘total independence’ of the speaker from constraint by language. Now Sartre emphasizes ‘the individual who is inside culture and inside language’, and that ‘what is fully lived is never untouched by words … since the reality of man living and speaking is created from moment to moment by the mingling of these two orders.’9 Language is the place where life as lived comes into meaning, where a ‘natural’ environment (which he equates with animal existence) becomes a ‘world’. People desire to express themselves because they want their lives to have meaning. ‘Each of us wants to write because each of us has the need to be signifying, to signify what he experiences. Otherwise, everything goes too fast, you have your nose to the earth like the pig which is forced to dig up truffles. There is nothing.’10 Language is an historical facticity one is born into,

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learns, in the sense of ‘internalizing’ it and thinks in its terms. ‘My life’, he tells us, ‘is centuries old, since the schemata which permit me to understand … my practical undertakings … have entered the present’ (CDR 54). Language is both an enabler, offering one such ‘schemata’, and a limitation in so far as language is a historical, finite fund of possibilities of expression. Expressed language, externalized expression, in written form becomes the ‘Objective Mind’ of a culture, becoming as it were the culture’s public intelligible schemata. The difficult problem for the later Sartre, one that preoccupies him, is the existential one of how it is possible to say or think something new, to break out of sedimented schemata. He takes up this issue in his work on Flaubert. As in the case of his account of Genet’s life, Sartre locates the key to understanding Flaubert’s life project as a writer in his early childhood. A developing life is called by Sartre ‘personalization’, an ongoing process of synthesizing (making sense of) life experience, organizing one’s life coherently while pursuing various goals. Personalization is a form of ‘totalization’, the organizing of experience in a meaningful way in pursuing goals. Institutions are examples of totalizations, as when one refers to the ‘business world’, the ‘academic world’, the ‘entertainment world’. Here one finds organized activity, creating systems of meaning and value, in pursuit of goals. Individuals, in personalization, participate in any number of totalizations in life and are continuously attempting to synthesize various life experiences into a coherent identity. The personalization process is caught between maintaining coherence and encountering the ‘stress’ of new experience. The stress of new experience is the threat it poses to one’s already established categories (schemata) of meaning, their potential failure to assimilate what is new and other. In this regard, ‘failure’ can precipitate a ‘transformation’ of self, a ‘retotalizing’ of previous categories of self and world understanding, or an engagement in various forms of denial and evasion. Freedom appears as ‘transformation’, the surpassing ability to ‘retotalize’, but is far from its hyperbolic expression of ex nihilo. There is the incorporation of the new and other into a new integration and reworking of previous categories, creating a new level of coherent synthesis, a new way of looking at self and world. Sartre found it ‘odd’ that people did not follow the ‘evolution’ of his thought, with the result that his reputation to a great extent remains that of the hyperbolic existential philosopher of freedom. Taking seriously the evolution of his thought leads, I believe, to appreciation of his ‘transformation’ from that of phenomenological existentialist to that of a ‘cryptic’ hermeneutic existentialist. Perhaps we can see this in comparing him to such an avowed hermeneutic thinker as Hans-Georg Gadamer. Gadamer, like Sartre, was a philosopher of freedom, and Sartre would enthusiastically agree with Gadamer when he wrote: ‘No higher principle is thinkable than that of the freedom of all, and we understand actual history from the perspective of this principle: as the ever-to-be-renewed and never-ending struggle for freedom.’11 But when Gadamer set out to understand the nature of freedom, he did not look, as Sartre did, in the direction of Husserl and the tradition of the power of consciousness, but rather took up Heidegger’s strong notion of being-inthe-world. Transcendental consciousness, according to Husserl, could suspend its involvement with its lifeworld to the point of objectifying it before itself in order to

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make it the object of phenomenological science. As Gadamer points out, and Sartre had come to appreciate, the universal horizon of the life-world also embraces transcendental subjectivity … and therefore brings into play all the special subjective, relative characters of the personal horizon that distinguishes the Negroes of the Congo or Chinese farmers, for example, from Professor Husserl. In light of the unsuspendably specific character of the pregiven horizons of the life-world, how is phenomenology as a ‘rigorous science’ possible at all?12

Correlatively, how could a freedom emerge that had transcended ‘the specific character of the pregiven horizons of the life-world’? For Gadamer, subjectivity exists as always ‘horizoned’, and freedom must be understood from within the notion of horizon. ‘We define the concept of “situation” by saying it represents a standpoint that limits the possibility of vision. Hence essential to the concept of situation is the concept of horizon. The horizon is the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point.’13 The horizon consists of a background of sedimented (and developing) categories – linguistic, cultural, historical, praxial – that enable understanding and, as well, concrete possibilities. As sedimented, these categories act as ‘prejudices’, expectations of what makes sense and is possible. For Gadamer, prejudices are conditions of understanding and as formative of finite subjectivity cannot be ‘bracketed’. Prejudices are not essences. Horizons are mobile and understanding and possibilities can be expanded. ‘The prejudgments that lead my preunderstanding are also constantly at stake right up to the moment of their surrender – which surrender could also be called a transformation’ (PH 38; emphasis added). A new way of seeing oneself and one’s world (opening new possibilities) can be effected by the challenge of experience – the new, the strange, the other – to our present schemata. One’s identity, then, is always at risk because of what Gadamer calls ‘the untiring power of experience’ (PH 38). Gadamer’s use of ‘transformation’ to describe the moment of reschematization is the same word Sartre uses to depict the moment of retotalization because of the stress of new experience to one’s present totalization. In fact, Gadamer’s ‘horizon’ and Sartre’s ‘totalization’ in the form of ‘personalization’ refer to the same phenomena: the sedimented schemata of understanding and possibility under the risk of ever new experience. A personal totalization ‘can comprehend and resolve problems only insofar as it is directed and limited by the concrete totality of the determinations it preserves within it’.14 When Sartre speaks of ‘internalizing’ the ‘external’, he is in fact using internalizing as ‘interpretation’, making sense of experience in terms of present schemata. Experience (and the danger it poses), he tells us, ‘is interpreted on the basis of affective and conjectural presuppositions that the individual has collected along the way and the options that have surpassed and maintained them’ (FI2 4). But, for Sartre, as for Gadamer, one’s totalization is mobile; it is not a totality, and is open to transformation: ‘The totalizing reaction can be effected by a transformation of the collectivity to be totalized’ (FI2 4). Gadamer’s views on horizon and transformation are at the core of his hermeneutics, particularly of his understanding of freedom. Although never consciously identifying

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his later philosophy with hermeneutics, Sartre’s notions of totalization/personalization and transformation serve the same hermeneutical functions in his later thought as Gadamer’s notions of horizon and transformation do in his hermeneutics. Additionally, Sartre’s crypto-hermeneutic notions help us to understand the ‘evolution’ of his thinking, as the challenge of new experience in his life, what he called ‘the force of circumstances’, provoked a transformation, a retotalizing of his understanding of freedom. It turns out that Sartre is his own best commentator.

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The Force of the Embodied Individual: De Beauvoir and Gadamer on Interpretive Understanding Antonio Calcagno

Simone de Beauvoir’s thought privileges intersubjective relations conditioned by a subject’s freedom. While de Beauvoir’s philosophy does not primarily focus on the hermeneutic question of the nature of interpretation and the understanding of texts, she does have much to say about the relationality that is established between subjects as they engage in common undertakings of understanding and creating meaning. She remarks, Thus, every man has to do with other men. The world in which he engages himself is a human world in which each object is penetrated with human meanings. It is a speaking world from which solicitations and appeals rise up. This means that through this world, each individual can give his freedom a concrete content. He must disclose the world with the purpose of further disclosure and by the same movement try to free men, by means of whom the world takes on meaning.1

This chapter focuses on the relation between freedom and history, and how they make possible the actions of being and understanding. Gadamer sees freedom arising out of and being conditioned by historicity and tradition, a concept he owes to Heidegger’s thinking. In The Second Sex, de Beauvoir argues that what it is to be a woman is so historically and materially conditioned by patriarchal powers and structures that women have been relegated to a secondary status vis-à-vis men. It would seem that both philosophers view the possibility of freedom as conditioned by one’s historical and material circumstances. Both philosophers also agree that freedom arises out of our encounters with others; they both believe that resistance from the other makes manifest our own freedom to respond to the other’s understandings or determinations. The body and its vicissitudes,2 however, play less of a role for Gadamer than for de Beauvoir. For de Beauvoir, freedom is also part of what it is to be an individual human being dwelling in the world, apart from, with, or against historical constructions.

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We have an embodied, originary capacity to make choices and carry out actions that develops as we grow and it wanes as we grow old. It also weakens as we confront the force of circumstances or matters before us. In this sense, freedom becomes highly individuated and embodied. De Beauvoir understands freedom as growing and declining; freedom follows a life process as well as a historical trajectory. We can call this view of freedom developmental. If we accept de Beauvoir’s insight concerning a developmental model of freedom linked to the birth, growth, and decline or ageing of individuals, what impact does this model have on our possibility of understanding and interpreting meaning, the world and others, especially within the framework of tradition and historicity? I argue in this chapter that de Beauvoir’s developmental model of freedom brings to hermeneutics the possibility of the existence of a singular freedom that stands with and sometimes against the broader notion of freedom that emerges with a culture or tradition’s historical understanding of freedom. De Beauvoir’s developmental model allows for a radical individuation that can help produce the singular events that alter the historicity and tradition of a given epoch. In other words, the growth and decline of a singular, embodied individual can and has changed the course of history, as exemplified in de Beauvoir’s own life and writings. She is what Husserl would call a ‘personality’ of a higher order, that is, a unique individual who brings to philosophy the force of growth and ageing of the sexed body and mind, which ultimately allows philosophy to resituate itself within a new paradigm of feminist thinking and interpretation. For Gadamer, freedom is not merely an abstract power or capacity; rather, tradition and what it historically gives over to subjects (Überlieferung) is the condition for the possibility of knowledge and the ‘life comportment’ between subjects. He notes, To be situated within a tradition does not limit the freedom of knowledge but makes it possible. Knowing and recognizing this constitutes the third, and highest, type of hermeneutical experience: the openness to tradition characteristic of historically effected consciousness. It too has a real analogue in the I’s experience of the Thou. In human relations the important thing is, as we have seen, to experience the Thou truly as a Thou – i.e., not to overlook his claims but to let him really say something to us. Here is where openness belongs. But ultimately this openness does not exist solely for the person who speaks; rather, anyone who listens is fundamentally open. Without such openness to one another there is no genuine human bond. Belonging together always also means being able to listen to one another. … Openness to the other, then, involves recognizing that I myself must accept some things that are against me, even though no one else forces me to do so. This is the parallel to the hermeneutical experience. I must allow tradition’s claims to validity, not in the sense of simply acknowledging the past in its otherness, but in such a way that it has something to say to me. This too calls for a fundamental sort of openness. (TM 369)

Hermeneutics, then, is marked by a profound intersubjectivity of subjects who freely hear and speak to one another; they also resist one another.

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History and freedom in Gadamer and de Beauvoir Gadamer views hermeneutics as a rigorous mode of interpreting and understanding existence, speech, and text. It could also be said that Gadamerian hermeneutics is a philosophical way of being. Language, historicity, tradition, conversation, art, and writing form important aspects of interpretation. He remarks: All understanding is interpretation, and all interpretation takes place in the medium of a language that allows the object to come into words and yet is at the same time the interpreter’s own language. Thus the hermeneutical phenomenon proves to be a special case of the general relationship between thinking and speaking, whose enigmatic intimacy conceals the role of language in thought. Like conversation, interpretation is a circle closed by the dialectic of question and answer. It is a genuine historical life comportment achieved through the medium of language, and we can call it a conversation with respect to the interpretation of texts as well. The linguisticality of understanding is the concretion of historically effected consciousness. The essential relation between language and understanding is seen primarily in the fact that the essence of tradition is to exist in the medium of language, so that the preferred object of interpretation is a verbal one.3

Gadamer points out that subjects interpret and understand one another; their conversation is an engagement of the self with others. The subject enters into a hermeneutical relation with the other and a genuine ‘life comportment’ develops. The engagement with the other is done freely, but this freedom emerges out of a tradition, which is historically conditioned by its own imaginings of itself and its possibilities. In discussing the work of Wilhelm Dilthey and its relevance for hermeneutics, Gadamer argues that Dilthey’s notion of lived experience (Erlebnisse), because it is too focused on self-experience, cannot fully give an account of the historicity that structures the subject’s capacity to interpret itself as being formed by a certain situatedness in an historical epoch (TM 288). Gadamer remarks, At any rate, our usual relation to the past is not characterized by distancing and freeing ourselves from tradition. Rather, we are always situated within traditions, and this is no objectifying process – i.e., we do not conceive of tradition as something other, something alien. It is always part of us, a model or exemplar, a kind of cognizance that our later historical judgment would hardly regard as a kind of knowledge but as the most ingenuous affinity with tradition. (TM 293)

Gadamer also notes that tradition is not an absolute conditioning force, a kind of brute fate; rather the fact is that in tradition there is always an element of freedom and of history itself. Even the most genuine and pure tradition does not persist because of the inertia of what once existed. It needs to be affirmed, embraced, cultivated. It is, essentially, preservation, and it is active in all historical change. But preservation is an act of reason, though an inconspicuous one. (TM 293)

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Preservation is as free an act as revolution and renewal. We can understand this freedom in its basic form as taking a stance, to borrow the language of phenomenology. Yet in our attempts to understand what we are trying to achieve and what we are responding to, Gadamer insists that we cannot achieve a hermeneutical distance that can thrust the subject out of its historical context: ‘In the case of a philosophical text or a work of literature we can see that these texts require a special activity of the reader and the interpreter, and that we do not have the freedom to adopt a historical distance toward them. It will be seen that here understanding always involves applying the meaning understood’ (TM 341). Meaning and understanding arise out of the tradition that we are in; to interpret and understand this tradition requires a free act, but we are bound to the objectivity of the meaning of that epoch and we are not free to distort the senses of the epoch we are dealing with. We recognize the authoritative sources of an age, an authority based on knowledge rather than brute power. Gadamer observes, ‘Genuine experience is experience of one’s own historicity’ (TM 365). Tradition is a language and expresses itself as a Thou. Like the general stance-taking that allows one to launch acts of interpretive understanding, the questioning and answering that are so fundamental for dialogue presuppose a freedom to begin to engage in such questioning and answering. Questioning and answering never simply imply resisting the force of opinion (TM 375). A genuine freedom to question and answer is necessary for the artwork to arise but also for understanding. For Gadamer, freedom is not merely an abstract power or capacity; rather, tradition and what it historically gives over to subjects (Überlieferung) is the condition for the possibility of knowledge and the ‘life comportment’ between subjects. He notes, To be situated within a tradition does not limit the freedom of knowledge but makes it possible. Knowing and recognizing this constitutes the third, and highest, type of hermeneutical experience: the openness to tradition characteristic of historically effected consciousness. It too has a real analogue in the I’s experience of the Thou. In human relations the important thing is, as we have seen, to experience the Thou truly as a Thou – i.e., not to overlook his claims but to let him really say something to us. Here is where openness belongs. But ultimately this openness does not exist for the person who speaks; rather, anyone who listens is fundamentally open. Without such openness to one another there is no genuine human bond. Belonging together always also means being able to listen to one another. … Openness to the other, then, involves recognizing that I myself must accept some things that are against me, even though no one else forces me to do so. This is the parallel to the hermeneutical experience. I must allow tradition’s claims to validity, not in the sense of simply acknowledging the past in its otherness, but in such a way that it has something to say to me. This too calls for a fundamental sort of openness. (TM 369)

Hermeneutics, then, is marked by a profound intersubjectivity of subjects who freely hear and speak to one another; they also resist one another. In addition to a general sense of freedom that can launch the very act of interpretive understanding – albeit a freedom conditioned by the historical tradition one finds

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oneself living in – there is another sense of freedom that Gadamer discusses, namely, inner freedom. Like Hegel, Gadamer believes that reason is free. Despite one’s being embedded within a specific context and thinking, reason is free to respond to this content. In thinking, language can freely deploy and create signs and translation to understand and respond to the tradition in which it finds itself. Even if we remember that our reason preserves its freedom in the face of the bond of our thinking with language, either by inventing or using artificial signs or by translating from one language into another – which presume a capacity to rise above bondage to language to attain the sense intended – nevertheless this capacity itself is, as we have seen, linguistic. (TM 438)

Gadamer highlights how this inner freedom was important for theology and philosophy, especially in the understanding of logos. In language, one has the freedom to reject and select, to accept what is given to interpretation (TM 478). Thought can create new possibilities that are made manifest in interpretive understanding. The new possibilities are an expression of freedom, perhaps even the spontaneity of new creations often associated with freedom in the German Enlightenment tradition. Gadamer maintains, The word of human thought is directed toward the thing, but it cannot contain it as a whole within itself. Thus thought constantly proceeds to new conceptions and is fundamentally incapable of being wholly realized in any. This capacity for incompleteness has a positive side: it reveals the true infinity of the mind, which constantly surpasses itself in a new mental process and in doing so also finds the freedom for constantly new projects. (TM 442–3)

There is one last sense of freedom that emerges through understanding but which also stems from one’s freedom of environment. Man’s freedom in relation to the environment is the reason for his free capacity for speech and also for the historical multiplicity of human speech in relation to the one world … . The truth is that because man can always rise above the particular environment in which he happens to find himself, and because his speech brings the world into language, he is, from the beginning, free for variety in exercising his capacity for language. (TM 460)

Gadamer specifies that to be free from one’s environment means that language can empower individuals to orient themselves to the world in a particular way; it is this very orientation in language that allows the world to appear in a certain form. Following Heidegger, Gadamer believes that language ‘worlds’. Such worlding is only achievable insofar as humans are free in language to configure the world by orienting themselves towards their environment in specific ways. Language, according to Gadamer, has an unprecedented power for freedom of expression: In fact, language is the single word, whose virtuality opens for us the infinity of discourse of speaking with one another, of the freedom of ‘expressing oneself ’ and

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De Beauvoir fully recognizes that history shapes and forms both a culture’s and an individual’s sense of itself as well as one’s freedom. Unlike Gadamer, however, the situatedness of freedom receives its greatest force in the decision of individuals, who exist in relation with and in opposition to others. Furthermore, because freedom is deeply embodied and viewed as developing and declining with the physical growth and ageing of an individual, freedom is highly individuated and embodied. While the embodied physicality of freedom is not a theme taken up by Gadamer, it constantly crosses the work of de Beauvoir and arises in her discussion of different phenomena, including birth, death, ageing, and the battle over reproductive rights. How is freedom historically conditioned for de Beauvoir? The Second Sex4 begins with an important discussion of how biology, psychoanalysis, and historical materialism have analysed and treated women. Biology presents us with a view of the physical and physiological nature of women, whereas psychoanalysis and economic history show us the psyche and social status of women. Each discipline reveals women as deficient, marginalized, and powerless. The goal of The Second Sex is to challenge the determinations of such disciplines, explaining how they foster patriarchal and oppressive structures on women. There are two significant treatments of history and freedom in the aforementioned work that are relevant for our project here: historical materialism and the five configurations of women that we find in de Beauvoir’s treatment of the historical development of Western society. In the historical materialist description of women, the emphasis lies on positioning women within the class struggle between bourgeois property owners and the proletariat. Historical materialism, she maintains, has shown us that ‘humanity is not an animal species; it is a historical reality. Human society is an anti-physis: it does not passively submit to the presence of nature, but rather appropriates it’ (SS Location 1449). Women cannot be simply defined by their biological sex: ‘Woman’s consciousness of herself … reflects a situation that depends on society’s economic structure’ (SS Location 1453). De Beauvoir criticizes Engels for his analysis of property and tool development, which have changed the nature of work and the relations between men and women. The rise of bourgeois capital and the new industrial, highly technologized society that characterize our modern world reduce female sexuality to reproductive necessity. Though women are now employed – albeit their work is usually considered to be of lesser quality or productive value – the state continues to need workers and citizens in order to sustain its life. This need, cast within the framework of a highly developed capitalist economics, extends to determine female sexuality and reproduction: women are viewed as units of reproduction, providing future workers and citizens. The economic machine of the state absorbs female sexuality: And more serious still, woman cannot in good faith be regarded only as worker; her reproductive function is as important as her productive capacity, both in the social economy and in her personal life; there are periods in history in which it is more useful to have children than till the soil. Engels sidestepped the problem; he

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limited himself to saying that the socialist community will abolish the family, quite an abstract solution; everyone knows how often and how radically the U.S.S.R. had to change its family policy in order to balance out production needs of the moment with needs of repopulation; besides, eliminating the family does not necessarily liberate women … . There is no way to directly oblige a woman to give birth: all that can be done is to enclose her in situations where motherhood is her only option: laws or customs impose marriage on her, anti-conception measures and abortion are banned, divorce is forbidden. (Location 1537–51)

De Beauvoir’s critique of historical materialism, while it calls for the equality of the sexes and the abolishing of the repressive family structure, ends up ignoring the fact that the uniqueness of female sexuality has been pressed into the service of the state through all kinds of repressive mechanisms in which women have little freedom to do anything but comply; that is, they are tools for the repopulation of the state. In addition to her critique of material historicism contributing to the biological ‘destiny’ or ‘nature’ of women, history itself shows how women’s freedom has been curtailed and determined. De Beauvoir looks at five important moments in the historical development of the West: prehistory and early societies; the advent of private property; women in ancient Middle Eastern society and law; Christianity and women; and modern revolutionary movements. Obviously, the history that de Beauvoir is presenting is neither comprehensive nor detailed; rather, she looks at formative moments that show how women have become Other, how they have been oppressed and marginalized. She cites the work of Lévi-Strauss on primitive societies: To say that woman is the Other is to say that a relationship of reciprocity between the sexes did not exist: whether earth, Mother, or Goddess, she was never a peer for man; her power asserted itself beyond human rule: she was thus outside of this rule. Society has always been male; political power has been in man’s hands. ‘Political authority, or simply social authority, always belongs to men’, Lévi-Strauss affirms at the end of his study of primitive societies. For men, the counterpart – or the other – who is the same, with whom reciprocal relationships are established, is always another male. (Location 1748)

Further, no direct or autonomous relationship with men was possible in such early societies: Women have thus never constituted a separate group that posited itself for itself before a male group; they have never had a direct or autonomous relationship with men. ‘The relationship of reciprocity which is the basis of marriage is not established between men and women, but between men by means of women, who are merely the occasion of this relationship,’ said Lévi-Strauss. Woman’s concrete condition is not affected by the type of lineage that prevails in society to which she belongs; whether the regime is patrilineal, matrilineal, bilateral, or undifferentiated (undifferentiation never being precise), she is always under men’s guardianship, she is still subjected to the authority of her father or her oldest brother – authority that will also extend to her children – or of her husband. (Location 1756–61)

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Key here is the subjection of woman and the non-reciprocity of relations: woman’s freedom, as far back as prehistory shows, has been subject to the power and authority of man. Even with the advent of private property, which in theory could provide women with the material means to overthrow their subjection and express their individual freedom, woman’s liberty is severely curtailed by man. Once woman is dethroned by the advent of private property, her fate is linked to it for centuries in large part, her history is intertwined with the history of inheritance. The fundamental importance of this institution becomes clear if we keep in mind that the owner alienated his existence in property; it was more important to him than life itself; it goes beyond the strict limits of a mortal lifetime, it lives on after the body is gone, and earthly and tangible incarnation of the immortal soul. (Location 1965–74)

In marriage, woman is passed from clan to clan, and in Muslim and Christian cultures woman is both an object of desire that must be controlled and also limited in how she can participate in worship. Moving into modernity, de Beauvoir remarks that the revolution did nothing to change the plight of women: The Revolution might have been expected to change the fate of woman. It did nothing of the kind. This bourgeois revolution respected bourgeois institutions and values; and it was waged almost exclusively by men. It must be pointed out that during the entire ancient régime working-class women as a sex enjoyed the most independence. … In the country-side, the peasant-women play a considerable role in rural labor. … From within their difficult lives, these women could have asserted themselves as individuals and demanded their rights, but a tradition of timidity and submission weighed upon them. (Location 2680–9)

De Beauvoir’s examination of history shows how woman and her sexuality have been determined and oppressed not only by the analyses of biology and psychology but by the practices of economic history and social practices. Her freedom was determined by what men had imposed and enforced upon her. Yet despite this limitation of freedom by history, de Beauvoir claims that individuals, both men and women, also have an innate capacity to respond to the situation they are in: individuals have the possibility of determining the meaning of their own existence, outside of the pressure of constructed nature, psychology, and history. In The Ethics of Ambiguity, freedom is distinguished from power. Each individual is free, and this freedom discloses itself in experiences of resistance – to things and to others. Though one may be free, one may have limited power to exercise this freedom: one may be limited by either the force of circumstances, the oppression of others, or even one’s own personal limitations. De Beauvoir remarks, Every man is originally free, in the sense that he spontaneously casts himself into the world. But if we consider this spontaneity in its facticity, it appears to us

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only as a pure contingency, an upsurging as the clinamen of the epicurean atom which turned up at any moment whatsoever from any direction whatsoever. And it was quite necessary for the atom to arrive somewhere. But its movement was not justified by this result which had not been chosen. It remained absurd. Thus, human spontaneity always projects itself toward something. (EA 25)

In The Ethics of Ambiguity, freedom is understood as spontaneity that surges forward, much like the clinamen of the Epicureans. Spontaneity may not be mobilized towards an end, in which case freedom remains unrealized. De Beauvoir says one can choose not to direct one’s spontaneity towards an action, for example, in laziness or cowardice spontaneity remains unrealized. It is only when spontaneity grounds itself and aims at a certain end that freedom is fully recognized. The direction of spontaneity towards the actualization of a goal or an end is what de Beauvoir calls will; the will develops as one exercises and continues to direct spontaneity: ‘It must first be observed that this will is developed in the course of time’ (EA 26). For the will to have power and strength, one must persevere in one’s will. ‘To will is to engage myself to persevere in my will’ (EA 27). Our spontaneity can be revealed to us when confronted by resistance, which in turn discloses the world: However, man does not create the world. He succeeds in disclosing it through the resistance which the world opposes to him. The will is defined only by raising obstacles, and by the contingency of facticity certain obstacles let themselves be conquered, and others do not. This is what Descartes expressed when he said that the freedom of man is infinite, but his power is limited. How can the presence of these limits be reconciled with the idea of freedom confirming itself as a unity and an indefinite movement? … It is the particularity of the project which determines the limitation of the power, but it is also what gives the project its content and permits it to be set up. There are people who are filled with such horror at the idea of a defeat that they keep themselves from ever doing anything. But no one would dream of considering the gloomy passivity as the triumph of freedom. (EA 28–9)

It is clear that in this description of freedom we have a spontaneous possibility that arises but which needs to be exercised and developed in and through the will. Freedom, in de Beauvoir’s sense, is a project insofar as it develops and directs spontaneity into decisive actions. In Pyrrhus and Cinéas, de Beauvoir’s first philosophical essay, freedom can never be taken away: it is invulnerable. But in The Ethics of Ambiguity, we find freedom wrought with ambiguity. Consciousness reveals that we are free to make meaning of the world, but one’s freedom can also be limited or taken away, especially by an other insofar as the other can block the realization of an end of the projective will. Also, we ourselves can fail to take up the demands of responsibility, understood as the demand or response for action. For example, the serious or earnest person – one of the five human types de Beauvoir describes as failing to fulfil one’s freedom – abrogates her freedom and submits to the ideals and commands of another person. The earnest person will cite, follow, and impose the law on all others, following blindly and never questioning the law. The serious person is eager to uphold the law without any

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reflection or responsibility for her own actions or decision to follow blindly. As a case in point, recall the defence of many of the Nazi commanders at Nuremberg who said they were following orders and had no choice to do otherwise. One can alienate oneself from one’s freedom. It should also be remarked that in The Ethics of Ambiguity de Beauvoir distinguishes between ethical and ontological freedom. Ontological freedom can be understood very much in the terms described above, whereas ethical freedom has to do without relations and responsibility for others. Debra Bergoffen notes, In describing the different ways that freedom is evaded or misused, Beauvoir distinguishes ontological from ethical freedom. She shows us that acknowledging our freedom is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for ethical action. To meet the conditions of the ethical, freedom must be used properly. It must, according to Beauvoir, embrace the ties that bind me to others, and take up the appeal – an act whereby I call on others, in their freedom, to join me in bringing certain values, projects, conditions into being. Artists and writers embody the ethical ideal in several respects. Their work expresses the subjective passion that grounds the ethical life. They describe the ways that the material and political complexities of our situations can either alienate us from our freedom or open us to it. By envisioning the future as open and contingent, artists and writers challenge the mystifications that validate sacrificing the present for the future. They establish the essential relationship between my freedom and the freedom of others.5

If ontological freedom can develop and grow, as we saw with de Beauvoir’s notion of the will, ethical freedom can develop as well. We see this insight concretized in her discussion of the growth of freedom in children and adolescents. Children, under the protection of their parents, live in a somewhat idyllic, what de Beauvoir calls a ‘serious’, world: they do not face the ambiguity of ethical choices and are not aware of the world’s demands. Parents have the right to educate their children and help them develop their ability to respond to ethical dilemmas. As a child enters adolescence, she becomes aware of the responsibility to make ethical choices, to direct one’s freedom in the world: It is very rare for the infantile world to maintain itself beyond adolescence. From childhood on, flaws begin to be revealed in it. With astonishment, revolt and disrespect the child little by little asks himself, ‘Why must I act that way? What good is it? And what will happen if I act in another way?’ He discovers his subjectivity; he discovers that of others. And when he arrives at the age of adolescence he begins to vacillate because he notices the contradictions among adults as well as their hesitations and weakness. Men stop appearing as if they were gods, and at the same time the adolescent discovers the human character of the reality about him. Language, customs, ethics, and values have their source in these uncertain creatures. The moment has come when he too is going to be called upon to participate in their operation; his acts weigh upon the earth as much as those of other men. He will have to choose and decide. It is comprehensible that it is hard for him to live this moment of his history, and this is doubtless the deepest reason for the crisis of adolescence; the individual must at last assume his subjectivity. (EA 38–9)

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At this point it should be remarked that directing one’s freedom to specific actions, and that the responsibility this movement of the will entails, are both cast within a framework of intentionality, meaning, and meaning-making. The influence of Heidegger and Husserl are clear in this regard. Bergoffen aptly remarks, The Ethics of Ambiguity opens with an account of intentionality which designates the meaning-disclosing, meaning-making and meaning-desiring activities of consciousness as both insistent and ambiguous – insistent in that they are spontaneous and unstoppable; ambiguous in that they preclude any possibility of self-unification or closure. Beauvoir describes the intentionality of consciousness as operating in two ways. First there is the activity of wanting to disclose the meaning of being. Second there is the activity of bringing meaning to the world. In the first mode of activity consciousness expresses its freedom to discover meaning. In the second, it uses its freedom to become the author of the meaning of the world. Beauvoir identifies each of these intentionalities with a mood: the first with the mood of joy, the second with the dual moods of hope and domination. Whether the second moment of intentionality becomes the ground of projects of liberation or exploitation depends on whether the mood of hope or domination prevails.6

Like Gadamer, de Beauvoir establishes an important connection between freedom, meaning-making, and interpretation of meaning insofar as freedom can disclose such meanings, but it also directs our action to the achievement of possible intended meanings.7 Just as freedom develops with the transition from childhood to adolescence, it also declines and can become severely delimited. This fact becomes evident in de Beauvoir’s treatment of old age and dying, especially when she examines the death of her mother and Jean-Paul Sartre. The candid descriptions of the indignities that beset the elderly and the dying are visceral. Bergoffen poignantly writes, In A Very Easy Death and Adieux, Beauvoir assumes the position of the phenomenological witness. The bodies of her mother and Sartre are given to us in all their disturbing breakdowns and deteriorations. Some have found these works cold, insensitive and even cruel. They miss Beauvoir’s point. She is showing us who we are. The ‘I can’ body revealed by other phenomenologists as a crucial mark of embodiment is the limited condition of the mature healthy body. It is but one phase of the life of the body. In its early days the body is still learning its ‘I can’s’. As we age, the body begins losing them. It is one thing, as with the myth of woman, to alienate an ‘I can’ from its capacities. It is quite another to refuse to attend to the full range of embodied life and to assess the value of that life in terms of its I can possibilities.8

The implications of embodiment and development for the relation between freedom and history Undoubtedly, Gadamer and de Beauvoir both recognize the force of history to shape how we understand others and ourselves. Freedom is conditioned by the times in

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which we dwell. Both philosophers also admit that we possess a freedom to interpret oneself, others, and the world, making decisions that can have both positive and negative effects. But de Beauvoir argues that freedom also has an embodied aspect and is dependent upon our physical and psychological development as human beings, from infancy to old age to our dying and death. What does an embodied and developmental aspect of freedom offer to Gadamerian historicity and understanding? I maintain that de Beauvoir’s notion of an embodied self singularizes or individuates human beings such that the agency of an interpreter or an understanding stands out against both a collective of individuals and a certain epoch. Embodied, developmental freedom is a condition for the possibility of a singular individual changing the course of history, launching an event, to use more Badiouan language, and thereby offering history a new interpretive framework or tradition. The individual offers us the possibility of understanding the life and work of what Husserl called a personality or an eventmaking figure within history. Gadamer recognizes the importance of the conversation between individuals that is necessary for interpretation to occur. These conversants are embedded within a historical time and place; they find themselves within an historical epoch. In their attempts to understand one another and the world that discloses itself in and through their interpretive conversation, Gadamer admits that new, spontaneous insights can arise, insights and ideas that can change the course of history. This kind of spontaneous creativity is part and parcel of the dynamism of language, a point Heidegger makes when he draws from the work of Ernst Cassirer on the creative spontaneity of language.9 But these conversants are still part of a larger dynamic of language and historicity. They can challenge authority and bring in new interpretive paradigms through questioning.10 There is nothing in de Beauvoir’s thought that could be deployed to reject Gadamer’s claim; rather, we find in de Beauvoir an insight that can enrich the hermeneutic apparatus. If we accept de Beauvoir’s embodied developmental model, two important constitutive layers must be added to Gadamerian understanding. First, an account of how individuals develop and interpret their own embodied individuality is vital for understanding both freedom and historicity. I believe this point is exemplified in the work of Michel Foucault. His analyses of biological life11 and how it has been governmentalized, especially in and through the category of population growth, control, and decline, clearly demonstrate that the life of an individual is no longer of importance as economic models of distribution and resource-management no longer admit the value of individual lives. A politics rooted in the lives of individuals, their desires and goals, is no longer possible as populations swell and collectivities become enormous in size. In this case, we have the view that individuals no longer matter, but their collective, embodied, and developmental bodies do, as they are fundamental for epidemiological, economic, and statistical purposes. This loss of individuality prompts Foucault to devote his later years to studying the possibility and necessity of selfhood as taken up in his discussion of the care of the self,12 a project inspired by the work of Pierre Hadot. Another example: the literature of de Beauvoir uses highly developed and individuated characters, situated in a time and place, to bring about the tensions of freedom, history, and choice. In She Came to Stay,13 de Beauvoir

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shows how the lives of Pierre, Xavière, and Françoise are intertwined and how their lives bring about the ambiguities of both history and freedom in the questions their lives pose and the responses of the protagonists to such ambiguities, especially about intimate relationships. De Beauvoir’s characters do not render abstract the interpretive understanding that Gadamer describes, but situate it, enflesh it within the lives of concrete individuals, struggling to make sense of the ambiguities they face. Her characters give a face to the Gadamerian conversants of hermeneutics as they struggle to make sense of their lives. Second, and most importantly, de Beauvoir’s embodied, developmental model of freedom allows us to see the importance of sex and gender in developing an interpretive framework. The Second Sex clearly shows how women have become Other, and how this Otherness manifests itself in history and conditions the oppressive structures that keep suppressing women. But it also shows how individual women – such as de Beauvoir herself, who thinks and reflects about her own life and situation, embodied as a woman living in a historical time – can reject the interpretive framework that has caused egregious suffering to women through time. She identifies as a feminist and becomes a vital figure in twentieth-century feminism.14 Her story, her life, her actions, her writings, and her philosophy become a model for change but also form the legacy of a monumental figure in thought, politics, and feminism. Her reflections on her own sexed embodiment and that of others, including her mother and Sartre, singularize and individuate the personalities she speaks about, creating a vehicle through which one can enter more deeply into the project of understanding and meaning-making, a project that both Gadamer and de Beauvoir advocate and defend.

4

The Hermeneutics of Lived Time: Education as the Way of Being Andrzej Wierciński

Beyond predictability: Transformational character of time Our comprehension of time never exhausts the complexity of the phenomena in need of understanding. This complexity stimulated the Greeks to differentiate between χρόνος and καιρός: mechanical time, which can be easily measured, is distinguished from the fitting or opportune moment, when the time is right.1 A beautiful narrative about the wisdom of doing the right thing at the right time is offered by Kohelet (Eccl. 3.1-8): To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

A striking parallel can be seen in the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, for whom the wisdom of life calls for understanding one’s life as the opportune time to address oneself in all existential dimensions.2 The task of self-guidance demands talking to oneself (thus the title τὰ εἰς ἑαυτόν) in order to come to an understanding that there is a fitting time for everything. The existential undertaking is to grasp the notion of the opportune time, Καιρὸν γνῶθι, to know the right season for something.3 To know the opportune time implies a sensitivity towards καιρός and understanding what needs to be done precisely in a given moment. This sensitivity is particularly required when predictability, calculability, and control coincide with a loss of the meditative approach to life. Calculative thinking stresses the importance of the collective rather than individual and stands in a clear opposition to meditative thinking, which seriously considers the

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meaning of human life in its individuality, uniqueness, and irreplaceability.4 Heidegger, putting himself in the long tradition from St. Paul, Luther, and Kierkegaard, would elevate the glance of the eye or the moment of vision (Augenblick) to the epiphany of authentic Dasein. This moment of vision is the opportune time, καιρός.5 Human beings living in the world inhabit a common space. With other human beings and other creatures we create different constellations in which we encounter time as lived time. This lived time allows us to experience life in its most intimate sense of temporality. However, it is not a question of the vulgar notion of time (vulgärer Zeitbegriff) as expressed in the classical model of the passing of time. The present as the now flows from the future as the not-yet-now into the past as the no-longer-now. The ordinary notion of time prioritizes the present.6 Heidegger, with his fundamental critique of the concept of time as now-time, emphasizes the fundamentality of the future revealed in the personal experience of our own being-unto-death (Sein zum Tode). Dasein is an anticipation and as such comes towards itself as projecting itself towards the future. Kohelet is a sage who invites us to rejoice in life, to take delight in our everyday experiences. This delight in everydayness is the reason to interrupt χρόνος and let ourselves be overwhelmed by the καιρός of vision, which contains an inaugurating character and is, as such, oriented towards action. Thus, it forms and transforms our expectations and decisions and makes us aware of the ‘between’ of χρόνος and καιρός from the experience of acting and the dynamic tension between πρᾶξις and ποίησις. Fundamentally, our relational mode of being-in-the-world (in-der-Welt-sein) is characterized by a kairological manner of ‘doing’ (πρᾶξις) and a chronological manner of ‘making’ (ποίησις). Understanding that there is a right time for everything inspires us to think about life in all its dimensions and to face everything that happens in our life. The temporary nature of human endeavours requires a realistic approach to life: to see things as they are in their complexity, variability, ambiguity, and precious beauty, as in Czesław Miłosz’s ‘No More’: I should relate sometime how I changed My views on poetry, and how it came to be That I consider myself today one of the many Merchants and artisans of Old Japan, Who arranged verses about cherry blossoms, Chrysanthemums and the full moon. If only I could describe the courtesans of Venice As in a loggia they teased a peacock with a twig, And out of brocade, the pearls of their belt Set free heavy breasts and the reddish weal Where the buttoned dress marked the belly As vividly as seen by the skipper of galleons Who landed that morning with a cargo of gold; And if I could find for their miserable bones In a graveyard whose gates are licked by greasy water A word more enduring than their last-used comb That in the rot under tombstones, alone, awaits the light,

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If true poetry is ‘the passionate pursuit of the Real’8 then to be faithful to detail is the way of being not only of a poet but a human being as such. Words, however, always fail to grasp reality in every invitation to try to grasp the moment, to tell it all. But what is all? Is it everything experienced in life or everything that can be imagined, even if the imagined will never be actualized? The real is the true challenge, because in wanting to be grasped and named it escapes our words and any formalized capturing, technical structures, and formal characteristics. Facing reality is the most obvious but most challenging task human beings are entrusted with. It calls for our unconditional love of the world, which leaves us always with the feeling of insatiability. The hermeneutic task is to give expression to this experience of lived time and necessitates a constantly renewed commitment to reality. Human life is the entanglement of the divine and the eternal with the worldly and the ephemeral. Our undertaking is to discover the meaning of everything, especially when this meaning is hidden beyond an apparent lack of sense, intelligibility, and faith in life and in one’s active powers. For reaching and living this understanding we have the whole span of life with all happy and difficult discoveries. When we say that the wisdom of life consists in seeing the relative value of everything, it means that it calls us to see things in perspective. This perspective will always be ambiguous, not because we lack rigour in our critical approach to life but because our vision is by nature fragmentary and provisional. We lack a God’seye perspective, for we are human beings, that is, historical, temporal, and finite. Our understanding of time is based on our rootedness in tradition, but it is directed towards the future. This orientation towards the future is disclosed to us in our beingtowards-death (Sein zum Tode). Therefore, authentic temporality means that we are confined neither to the past nor to the present, but as temporal beings we are always relating to ourselves as possibilities and projecting towards the future. In fact, only a genuine relation to beginnings, which can open up in the experience of time, enables fundamental change in human life. It is a complex process of destructuring the past in order to liberate us towards the freedom of the future. Orientation towards the future is the radical attempt at ‘forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead’.9 This revolutionary transformation requires a complete change of life, μετάνοια, a responsive grounding in a new world that favours possibility over actuality; it is a possibility which discloses the future. Human life is essentially oriented towards the radically new, but the openness towards the new cannot be calculated in advance. This openness characterizes an experienced person. Gadamer reminds us that the experienced person proves to be … someone who is radically undogmatic; who, because of the many experiences he has had and the knowledge he has drawn from them, is particularly well equipped to have new experiences and to learn from them.

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The dialectic of experience has its proper fulfillment not in definitive knowledge but in the openness to experience that is made possible by experience itself.10

Being open to experience means being ready to accept that facing the new we modify our previous understanding and expectations. This negative aspect of experience is, in fact, very productive. It allows us to see things from a new perspective and opens a way to confront our presuppositions and preunderstandings. Experience, as Gadamer emphasizes, does not lead us to final knowledge, which would mean the end of experience. Rather, by embracing disappointments and disconfirmations, experience is not a mere repetition of the past but opens us up towards the new. Being an experienced person means becoming aware of the truth of one’s experience, which is oriented towards new experience. This radical openness towards new experience puts us at risk. It is a question of being ready to see ourselves as finite, historical, and lingual beings called to face reality as it discloses itself to us. It is a call for openness to the other with fundamental willingness to listen to the other and put ourselves in question. Listening to the other challenges our prejudices and thus opens up possibilities for self-transformation. Kohelet grasps the meaning of time which is congenial to biblical faith with its implications on all levels of human life. He calls for integrity of life and for education, which supports such integrity. Education happens throughout the whole of human life, and the sage imparts to his readers the secrets of living an accomplished life: to be a good human being. The results are intrinsic to the task of education and cannot be limited to achieving certain competences. Kohelet meets his readers where they are in their life and encourages them to understand that this is an opportune time, καιρός, to learn and be taught. The world is an educational environment in which we spend our formative years. Human beings as dynamic agents act in response to the existential call which comes to them in the concrete context of life. The human person is the subject of education: being at the very centre of the educational task, a human being grows and matures towards reaching one’s inmost potential. Growth, development, maturation, and formation happen as the result of self-cultivation and are designed to bring about an inner development. However, this self-cultivation is not an expression of a selfcentred pedagogy but responds to an inner call and vocation to be a human being. Kohelet’s philosophy of education reflects an underlying anthropology, an understanding of a human being as an individual who is a self-conscious being living in the community of persons. This individuality means that the person is not only the individual substance of a rational nature (naturae rationalis individua substantia, Boethius),11 but the incommunicable existence of an intellectual nature (intellectualis naturae incommunicabilis existentia, Richard of St. Victor).12 Kohelet’s pessimism and scepticism remind us of a gesture of a Greek philosopher. In fact, he encourages a profound insight into the human condition and offers an understanding of time which is nature-transcending and nature-transforming. The liberating aspect of Kohelet’s hermeneutics of lived time is crucial for him and makes it into a philosophy of education sensitive to the poetic drama of human destiny with all the joys, fears, and trepidation of human life. Seasons of life bring about transitions in life, and to everything there is a season. Our task is to make sense of those seasons.

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To be a human being means to live in the world the same way a line lives on a page and paint lives on a canvas. To experience all the intensity of meaning is the infinite task of interpretation. It is an interpretive call to see ourselves (mis)placed in the concreteness of our internal and external landscapes while writing our life story into the world. In our interpretive attempt to understand ourselves it is essential to grasp the difference between reading from and reading into.13 Reading from ἐξήγησις (ἐξηγεῖσθαι) is very different from reading into εισήγησις. Following the etymology of ἐξηγεῖσθαι, to lead out, ἐξήγησις means to discover what the text has to say to the reader; it is a critical interpretation of a text, a way of reading from the text in order to get shaped by its meaning. Reading is never an exercise for its own sake; it is an engagement with the text, which has the power to shape the life of its reader, since what we read matters to the way we live our life. The hermeneutics of lived time is a hermeneutics of hospitality. The hospitality towards the other means listening to (reading) the words addressed to us and the willingness to understand what is actually said. Opposed to ἐξήγησις, εισήγγησις means reading into the text (εισ-into). It is an engagement with the text, when the reading is based on preconceived ideas of the text’s projected meaning. The meaning of the text is essentially read into the text in order to be subsequently derived from the text. This reading into the text is or can be a violent interpretation in which instead of allowing the text to speak to us we suffocate its voice and (mis-)use it to confirm our own understanding of the subject matter, regardless of existing or possible differences from our own position.14 Education can have an immediate, visceral impact on the people involved, like great art does. For understanding art, it is less a question of discovering the hidden meaning of the work of art than an ability to experience immediate emotional and intellectual sensation while being engaged with the artwork. Touching with the word and facing with an imploring look can transform the human heart. Indeed, education is predominantly about touching with the (healing) word and about this imploring look. It is about (self-)encouragement to make oneself on the journey of self-discovery, self-improvement, and self-realization. Thus, awakening to oneself is understood kairologically as the recognition of the opportune time to (re-)fashion our internal landscape. In this movement of unconcealment, by thinking ourselves kairologically we perceive education kairologically as well.

Lived time: Time, sculpture, and the wisdom of life Three books of the Old Testament, the Song of Songs, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes are written by King Solomon, the son of David and Bathsheba. Some biblical commentators emphasize the continuous preoccupation with the meaning of life, which changes depending on Solomon’s stages of life. They believe that Solomon wrote the Song of Songs in his youth, the books of Proverbs in his middle age, and the book of Ecclesiastes in old age. They like to see Solomon as the sculptor who, maturing in life, eliminates what is not essential in order to create a masterpiece. This interpretation, as glorifying life and love in youth to the teaching of principles of wisdom against relative scepticism in old age, can easily be an exercise of reading into the corpus biblicus. It seems more

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balanced to discover the different aspects of approaching life in its fullness. If sculpture is a way of searching for expression, an exercise in patience and perseverance to disclose what wants to be disclosed, then it can communicate something essential about a human being with all joys and sorrows as experienced in the search for the source of redemption. Living with sculptures, we are as in a primordial magic theatre where the world discloses itself to us in all its manifold features. Consider Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘The Song of the Statue’:15 Who is there who so loves me, that he will throw away his own dear life? If someone will die for me in the ocean, I will be brought back from stone into life, into life redeemed. How I long for blood’s rushing; stone is so still. I dream of life: life is good. Has no one the courage Through which I might awaken? And if I once more find myself in life, given everything most golden, then I will weep alone, weep for my stone. What help will my blood be, when it ripens like wine? It cannot scream out of the ocean he who loved me most.

Rilke’s longing ‘to be brought back from stone / into life, into life redeemed (so bin ich vom Steine zur Wiederkehr ins Leben, ins Leben erlöst)’ expresses yearning for liberation. By lending his voice to the statue, the young poet captures the past as the future and thus imitates in writing poetry the way August Rodin adapted the temporally transient to the permanence of space. It was an influence of Rodin which prompted Rilke to see his poems as the verbal equivalents of Rodin’s sculptures.16 The dialectic of surface and depth permeates Rodin’s and Rilke’s art. The awakening of stones, which so dramatically happens in Rodin’s sculptures, beautifully expresses the task of an artist: to capture reality in stone or in verse. In fact, we can look at Rodin’s sculptures as if they were already in the stones and the work of the artist was to exhibit what he saw in the stone by breaking off all that which hid it from his eyes. What is fascinating about the stone is that it can be containing and imprisoning, and it is by the work of an artist that the tension between confining and releasing is not overcome, but receives its inmost intensity. The hermeneutics of lived time opens us up towards the radicality of human life. It is a powerful reminder that human life is a journey of happiness despite even dramatic exigencies of everyday experience. It is a way of accepting life as it is, without fear of failure, marginalization, and disappointment. The hermeneutics of lived time is predominantly concerned with thinking ourselves kairologically, by recognizing the

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essential incommunicability of the self. It emphasizes the centrality of the relationship of the self to the other. To be a human being means to live our lives not in isolation, separation, and loneliness, but in a community of people, where our lives truly meet. It is not a question of the formal gestures of sympathy towards the other, but a real encounter with the other. It is not about looking down at the other but always looking up in order not just to uncover the potentiality of the other for ourselves but, and even more predominantly, in order to help ourselves and the other to discover one’s own hidden potentiality. To be with and for others seems to embrace the meaning of human life. However, there is an inclination of the human heart, which directs a human being rather towards alienation and self-sufficiency, without engagement with the other.17 Aristotle, in Politics, speaks of πλεονεξία, which is a form of greediness;18 it is an orientation towards gaining profit at any price. It is exactly the life of πλεονεξία which pretends to be self-sufficient and thus reduces wealth to a mere technique of accumulating goods and getting rich. It is called χρηματιστική (from χρήματα, a thing that one uses or needs), and as such cannot fulfil the ethical postulate of reaching happiness in human life. Sharing the world and living with the other is a permanent exercise in attentiveness to oneself and the other. We never know what the moment can disclose to us and what kind of action can be required from us. It is exactly this life in constant attentiveness which characterizes the vocation of a human being as a hospitable agent. We can never know when the other might wish to enter our private space, to want to visit us in our own home. This is reminiscent of the story of Jesus and Zacchaeus, the tax collector in Jericho, a beautiful and prosperous city of palms with air scented with balsam groves (cf. Lk. 19.1-10). Jesus addresses the unknown man by his first name and invites himself to his house: ‘I must stay at your house today’ (Lk. 19.5). Life calls us to be ready to answer such a request with joy as Zacchaeus did; he received his guest with rejoicing (ὑπεδέξατο αὐτὸν χαίρων, Lk. 19.6). To rejoice, to be glad, χαίρω, reminds us that it is an act of grace. Even etymologically, χαίρω is a being conscious of grace and taking delight in grace; it is thus connected to χάρις, grace as a gift of a person who asks for hospitality.19 What is also interesting in the story is that the encounter with the other can truly change our life. This encounter can reveal to us that however important and noble our expectations of the other may be, the other can often surprise us and indeed can exceed our expectations. Despite our beginnings, which are often very weak and humble, the other can gaze up at us and help us to see differently, even diametrically to change not only the way we see ourselves and the world but also to revolutionize our perception of how we are seen by others. What is telling in this biblical story is that the expectation of the other is finally reduced to the personal encounter with the other: to be with the other, spend some time together, have a real relationship with the other. In such an encounter, as an epiphanic moment, we are drawn into the event of meaning (Ereignis). Hermeneutic experience is an ongoing integrative process which widens our horizon. This widening is a happening as and in an encounter with the other. It is an educational encounter not in the sense of gathering information but as an experience of broadening our perspectives. It happens predominantly in a conversation with the other, in which our individual perspectives merge. Our vision is never an abstract formalized capability but is always a concrete, first-person experience. The

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hermeneutics of lived time is about being self-centred, which does not mean being obsessed with one’s own affairs, but understanding one’s rootedness in the world, while being conscious about the limitedness of our perspective: ‘A person who has no horizon does not see far enough and hence over-values what is nearest to him. On the other hand, “to have a horizon” means not being limited to what is nearby but being able to see beyond it. A person who has an horizon knows the relative significance of everything within this horizon.’20 Human life calls for a hermeneutics of humility, generosity, acceptance, attentiveness, and hospitality, and is in clear opposition to pride, greed, and fear. Thus, the hermeneutics of lived time opens up new possibilities of understanding subjectivity in relationship to one’s present and future. In that sense it is radically temporal as disclosing the inmost possibilities for the self and the other. The hermeneutics of lived time is a hermeneutics of living towards the future; it is not an encounter with the present that orients us back to the past but towards the horizon in front of us. It is not sentimental excess and a self-indulgent journey to the joys and sorrows of the past in order to engage in an illusory introspection, but a courageous discovery of one’s own potentiality. New horizons are formidable challenges on our way to overcoming our own seclusion towards radical openness to the new, unexpected, and unimaginable. Going forth from ourselves is not a programme for a spiritual retreat but a one-way path to understanding ourselves: ‘Reality’ always stands in a horizon of desired or feared or, at any rate, still undecided future possibilities. Hence it is always the case that mutually exclusive expectations are aroused, not all of which can be fulfilled. The undecidedness of the future permits such a superfluity of expectations that reality necessarily lags behind them. Now if, in a particular case, a context of meaning closes and completes itself in reality, such that no lines of meaning scatter in the void, then this reality is itself like a drama. Likewise, someone who can see the whole of reality as a closed circle of meaning in which everything is fulfilled will speak of the comedy and tragedy of life.21

The cares of the world are so versatile and seductive that we often misjudge them for the whole of reality. But our existential commitment is always to reality and not to abstract notions and ideas.22 Therefore, to be self-centred means to grasp the meaning of this rootedness not for its own sake but for understanding that it is a necessary condition for seeing the horizon as our horizon, which moves with us. It is a question of positioning ourselves. Gadamer reminds us that the horizon is, rather, something into which we move and that moves with us. Horizons change for a person who is moving. Thus the horizon of the past, out of which all human life lives and which exists in the form of tradition, is always in motion. The surrounding horizon is not set in motion by historical consciousness. But in it this motion becomes aware of itself.23

The hermeneutics of lived time is a hermeneutics of conversation. On the way to understanding ourselves we discover that we are conversation. Seit ein Gespräch

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wir sind und hören voneinander; we belong to tradition (Überlieferung). In German, belonging, gehören, relates to hören, to listen to, and it suggests obedience, Gehorsam.24 When we converse, we truly belong to each other, not in the sense that we create a mysterious community of understanding, but by letting ourselves become engaged in conversation we discover the limitedness of our respective horizons: A horizon is not a rigid boundary but something that moves with one and invites one to advance further. Thus the horizon intentionality which constitutes the unity of the flow of experience is paralleled by an equally comprehensive horizon intentionality on the objective side. For everything that is given as existent is given in terms of a world and hence brings the world horizon with it.25

Belonging to a conversation means participating in a meaning that transcends our individual horizons. Thus, the hermeneutics of lived time is an interpretive exercise of living in a house, which is the world as an open space for our existence. In that sense, it is a hermeneutics of opening the doors and overcoming boundaries, a hermeneutics of permanent transgression and identity transformation. Education as a way of being calls for the permanent rediscovery of oneself on the way to be. (Trans-)forming oneself means (trans)forming the world in which we live. The hermeneutics of lived time is about the readiness to face our life as it is, in all its dimensions, even those we cannot see because of the lack of distance to ourselves. Understanding that living our own life means living our life with others, discloses the potentiality of education as self-education. It is a call to compete with oneself in all existential dimensions. Like in the life of an artist, (self-)education is not about competing with others but a constant discovery of one’s own inmost potential. Originality is the only way to creativity. Embracing the essential incommunicability of one’s own life is not a personal defeat and death sentence to loneliness but a discovery of the potential of solitary confinement on the way to personal greatness. ‘Non coerceri maximo, contineri minimo, divinum est: not to be confined by the greatest, yet to be contained within the smallest, is divine.’ An epigraph at the head of Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hyperion26 is apparently taken from the epitaph on the tombstone of Ignatius of Loyola. The hermeneutics of lived time is about discernment, about seeing oneself from different perspectives without forgetting that our every perspective is our own and always limited and incomplete, because it is a human perspective. Being wise means exercising discernment in every area of our life in order to perceive the necessary ambiguity of life not as a curse but as a potential blessing. A critical awareness of the prevailing culture can help us to see ourselves on a fascinating journey to ourselves without falling prey to assumptions about happiness, personal success, and fulfilment. Discernment, διακρίνειν (διακρίνω: δια-thoroughly, back-and-forth; and κρίνω-to judge), is not just a question of dealing with what is there but a powerful self-examination with regard to the being of a human being. In such an examination, we arrive at the crisis (κρίνω) in which we can see ourselves in a complex way and make judgements about our own life. The kairological aspect of education means grasping how to live out what we learn; it is a complex and (trans-)formative task of discernment, which leads a human being

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through the exigencies of everyday life. Learning is happening as (trans-)formation. The hermeneutics of lived time is a philosophy of lived experience and as such is a way of living our life. The meaning of life always resists assimilation into the horizon of our world. Therefore, the infinite call for interpretation requires hermeneutics, which is open to tension instead of overcoming the dichotomy constantly present in our epistemological attempts at understanding reality. This kind of innovative thinking is essential for understanding changing paradigms and is instrumental for education as self-education with the primacy of asking questions. The greatest challenge of education is to understand that we are friends who have much to learn from one another and who are called to depart from ourselves towards the unknown other and an unknown future. Thus, education is the culture of questioning, which by reframing the present opens us up towards the future. Education is a question of discarding the frame, shifting from immobile time to lived time. The hermeneutics of lived time is a hermeneutics of the event (Ereignis) and this event is the encounter with the other who, charging me with new energy, calls me to change my life (Du mußt dein Leben ändern).

Circumdati varietate Lived time is the personal experience of the embodied human subject living in the world as an open space as the ultimate horizon of human potentiality and capability. The hermeneutics of lived time is an inquiry into the way we live our life. This inquiry is not a purely intellectual enterprise but an existential inquest into the reality of life in order to disclose to ourselves what is happening to us when we live our life on a conscious and subconscious level – Gadamer would have said, ‘over and above our wanting and doing’.27 The hermeneutics of lived time is a philosophy of diversity. It elevates diversity to a major distinguishing characteristic of the human spirit. Diversity is a global spiritual language of humanity. In the Vulgate version of Ps. 44.10 we read of the queen ‘circumdata varietate, surrounded with variety’: filiæ regum in honore tuo. Astitit regina a dextris tui in vestitu deaurato, circumdata varietate.

Human beings are dressed in diversity. Diversity is the splendour of human life which develops in the course of cultural transmission. It is a powerful support to developing a culture of inclusiveness and a reminder that conformity to real or imagined social pressures powerfully limits our diversity. We write and read our life story, and thus are hermeneuticians par excellence. As living writers of our life story we witness the truth of our story as we continue to write, rewrite, and reread it. Lived time is a time to face our wounded self. Recalling Kohelet, we can say that every time is an opportune time to face ourselves. But the wounded self is not a self delighted in one’s woundedness, but a self ready to transgress oneself. The hermeneutics of lived time is a hermeneutics that is open to the mystery of oneself and the other and, in fact, it unconditionally welcomes the other (and

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oneself as other) into one’s mystery. The unknown other is not to be deciphered and domesticated but recognized and accepted with all the idiosyncrasies of one’s life story, which does not fit into the established canon of conformity. The hermeneutics of lived time welcomes strangers as they approach the doors to our hearts. A closed door to the heart is not necessarily an obstacle. It is rather an invitation to rethink the conditions of possibility to reach beyond the closed doors without, however, overpowering the other and while accepting the indisputable dignity of the other in one’s otherness. The essential openness towards the strange and unpredictable does not mean that we need to accept everything uncritically. It is rather a question of radical readiness to face everything that is there in a benevolent gesture of hospitality. Embracing otherness is not just a mode of interaction with other human beings, but expresses something unique about being a human being, a vocation to transgress ourselves in order to gain the courage to exceed ourselves and transform our life. A radical ethics of hermeneutic hospitality calls for sharing responsibility for the world, which for every living being is our guesthouse. Our call is to surpass ourselves by welcoming paradoxical tensions between familiarity and strangeness. It is a lifelong endeavour which impels us to embrace our life as it is and sets us on the path to our inmost potential. The kairological future envelopes the past and the present and thus transforms them. It is a lifelong endeavour, which impels us to embrace our life as it is and set us on the path to our inmost potential.

Part Two

Hermeneutics and Pragmatism

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Hermeneutical Pragmatism Paul Fairfield

The world situation during the time when philosophical hermeneutics and pragmatism received their original and still somewhat canonical formulations rendered it unlikely that any affinities, however profound, would be perceived or pursued by writers who were largely working in separate traditions on separate continents. Friedrich Nietzsche, Wilhelm Dilthey, Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer were as steeped in the German tradition as Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey were in an emerging American tradition. As Gadamer would remark in 1997, After a delay of almost a century it is being made plain to us how powerfully we had been enclosed in isolation since the beginning of World War I despite all efforts to breach such isolation. That there was philosophical pragmatism in America was certainly not unknown to us, but it had no presence for us. One knew about James who had been a friend of my own teacher Paul Natorp, and one knows about Dewey and his enormous influence on American culture. But only now do we begin to understand that American philosophy did have an impact on us and that certain impulses from there became part of German philosophizing.1

Pragmatism’s early reception both in England and on the continent was largely dismissive, while west of the Atlantic Dewey was increasingly speaking of ‘continental Europe in general and Germany in particular’ as something of a spent force, philosophically speaking, and of America ‘as a New World in other than a geographical sense’.2 While fully acknowledging ‘that acquaintance with Hegel has left a permanent deposit in my thinking’, Dewey’s indictment of German philosophy thereafter could not have been more adamant, most apparently in his somewhat unfortunate book of 1915, German Philosophy and Politics.3 Dewey’s voluminous writings and correspondence alike contain few or no references to German philosophers after Karl Marx despite a profound and lifelong indebtedness to Hegel, a deeply phenomenological sensibility, and a commitment to replace many of the same Enlightenment doctrines that his German contemporaries were with ideas that had their basis in lived experience. Anyone who reads Dewey’s Experience and Nature (1925)

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and Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), for instance, will note unmistakable areas of convergence which went largely unnoticed. The situation began to change by the end of the 1970s and early 1980s, when some of these affinities were brought to the attention of the philosophical world in such texts as Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Gary Madison’s Understanding: A PhenomenologicalPragmatic Analysis (1982), and Richard J. Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (1983). Writing for an audience of analytic philosophers, Rorty for a short time spoke of ‘hermeneutics [as] as expression of hope that the cultural space left by the demise of epistemology will not be filled – that our culture should become one in which the demand for constraint and confrontation is no longer felt’.4 Rorty soon dropped the term ‘hermeneutics’ altogether and in 2003 remarked in an interview that in his book of 1979: ‘I tossed in Gadamer at the end of that book because I happened to be reading him when I was writing the final chapters. I agree with most of what Gadamer says, but his work, like Wittgenstein’s, seems to me largely negative and therapeutic.’5 Far more substantive were Madison’s and Bernstein’s contributions in which a more thoroughgoing rapprochement between hermeneutics and pragmatism began to seem a genuine possibility. The ‘separation’ between traditions that Gadamer at the age of ninety-seven spoke of as so much ‘human madness’ is indeed to be lamented and, as he further noted, ‘it should not be surprising that now hermeneutics is being scrutinized as to its proximity to a philosophy that starts with Dewey’.6 For philosophers well disposed either to Gadamer and Dewey in particular or to the two traditions more generally, it may be optimistic to speak with Bernstein of a ‘pragmatic turn’ in contemporary philosophy, yet it seems largely correct that, as Joseph Margolis has remarked, ‘converging themes of the entire movement of contemporary Western philosophy are decidedly pragmatist in cast’. As he clarifies, This is not to say that the specific doctrines favored by Peirce or Dewey or James are correct or vindicated, or that current theories are returning to their specific views. It is not even to lay much importance on the term ‘pragmatist’. The fact remains, however, that in nearly all contemporary speculations about reality, cognition, methods of inquiry, certain large conceptual tendencies that had not been expected to converge in this way and that now promise a distinctly novel, even radical, orientation capable of being shared throughout the Western tradition are struggling to find a coherent expression. Of course, these converging tendencies are as much phenomenological, Marxist, hermeneutic, deconstructive as they are pragmatist.7

Using pragmatism as a term of art rather than a doctrine, Margolis characterizes any philosophy as pragmatist insofar as it opposes foundationalism, understands cognition in fundamental unity with the survival of the species, while also grasping together knowledge and praxis. For Margolis, it is equally fitting to characterize as pragmatists in this sense such otherwise diverse thinkers as Marx, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, the later Wittgenstein, Marcuse, Habermas, and Gadamer. The pragmatic turn of which Bernstein speaks connotes a trajectory in a good deal of contemporary philosophy towards such pragmatic themes as antifoundationalism and opposition to

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‘Cartesian anxiety’, epistemic fallibilism, the community of inquiry, contingency and the plurality of perspectives, theory/practice continuity, and democracy as a way of life.8 None of these themes is unique to the classical American pragmatists, of course, and in one form or another all could well be characterized as hermeneutical. While Gadamer and Dewey were working in separate traditions, the point should not be exaggerated. Both philosophers traced their work back to Plato and Aristotle (although their interpretations of both figures differ significantly), and a ‘permanent Hegelian deposit’ is as evident in Gadamer as in Dewey. If the latter received a more direct impetus from modern science – Darwinian biology in particular – and empiricism, this was not the older empiricism of Hobbes, Locke, and Hume but an American variant that James was calling ‘radical empiricism’ and which looked more like phenomenology than its British ancestor. Dewey was as vehement a critic of epistemological foundationalism and scientism as any phenomenological or hermeneutical thinker was and was equally committed to advancing ‘beyond objectivism and relativism’, although Gadamer’s concentration on textual interpretation and point of departure in German romanticism are notable differences. Albeit not in the same ways, Dewey and Gadamer were profoundly dialectical thinkers who rejected the opposition of theory and practice, insisted on the primacy of lived experience and the contextuality of thought, and conceived of knowledge as, in Gadamer’s words, ‘dialectical from the ground up’.9 Hermeneuticists and pragmatists further agree that, as Rorty expressed it, ‘we cannot … rise above all human communities, actual and possible. We cannot find a skyhook which lifts us out of mere coherence – mere agreement – to something like “correspondence with reality as it is in itself ”.’10 Both would concur with Nietzsche that ‘the “in-itself ” is even an absurd conception; … we possess the concept “being”, “thing”, [also truth] only as a relational concept’.11 While the ontological dimension of human understanding was never thematized in Dewey’s writings, and the word hermeneutics itself was not part of his philosophical lexicon, his hermeneutical affinities ran far deeper than has been generally recognized. A full explication of this would require book-length treatment; however, let us outline in what these affinities mainly consist, beginning with Dewey’s explicit recognition from his earliest writings of the 1880s of the mediated nature of all acts of knowing. Dewey would remark in 1887: The whole previous discussion has been such as to make us recognize that there is no such thing as purely immediate knowledge. Any cognition is dependent; that is, it is because of some other cognition. The act which is apparently most immediate is perception. But perception, as when I say this is a book, is still mediated. The sensation which I have, the direct presentation, does not tell me that this is a book. I know that this is a book when I can refer these present sensations to my past experience and interpret them thereby. Were it not for this act of reference the sensations would have no meaning, and would not be interpreted as a book, or as anything. All knowledge implies, in short, a going beyond what is sensuously present to its connection with something else, and it is this act of going beyond the present which constitutes the mediate factor.12

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Before long Dewey would hit upon the notion that this mediate factor was none other than language and tradition. Thus his words in 1920: The conceptions that are socially current and important become the child’s principles of interpretation and estimation long before he attains to personal and deliberate control of conduct. Things come to him clothed in language, not in physical nakedness, and this garb of communication makes him a sharer in the beliefs of those about him. These beliefs coming to him as so many facts form his mind; they furnish the centres about which his own personal expeditions and perceptions are ordered. Here we have ‘categories’ of connection and unification as important as those of Kant, but empirical not mythological.13

Countless similar passages are found throughout Dewey’s early, middle, and later works and evidence a philosopher who was fully mindful not only of the mediated and finite condition of knowledge but of the radical situatedness of a species whose mode of being is defined by relationality, by its transactions and embeddedness in a world of relations at once biological, cultural, practical, and linguistic. Epistemological notions of a worldless subject, absolute foundations, and the ‘quest for certainty’ were constant targets of Dewey’s criticism, as was the entire Cartesian problematic. As Thomas Alexander has noted, Both Dewey and Gadamer see human experience as radically contextual and bound by tragic finitude. As beings-in-the-world, we never find ourselves with the possibility of absolute knowledge of completely determinate Being. We are always in process and on the way. We find ourselves in contexts which are dynamic, in which there is both clarity and ambiguity, determination and indetermination. The sense of meaning of the situation is not strictly cognized intellectually, but is pervaded by a tacit horizon and the dim sense of direction we are taking.14

What knowledge and experience are not, for Dewey, as for Peirce and James before him, are a presuppositionless beholding of an objective world; Dewey termed this the ‘spectator conception of knowledge’15 and replaced it with an ‘instrumentalist’ or ‘experimentalist’ conception in which knowing is the social practice of inquiry into a ‘problematic situation’ that arises in the course of an experience that ‘is already overlaid and saturated with the products of the reflection of past generations and by-gone ages’. Experience so conceived ‘is filled with interpretations, classifications … which have become incorporated into what seems to be fresh naive empirical material’, while inquiry proceeds from ‘the intellectual habits we take on and wear when we assimilate the culture of our own time and place’.16 Dewey explicitly held that ‘there is no thinking which does not present itself on a background of tradition’, and where ‘traditions are ways of interpretation and of observation, of valuation, of everything explicitly thought of. They are the circumambient atmosphere which thought must breathe; no one ever had an idea except as he inhaled some of this atmosphere.’17 The basic elements of what Heidegger would call the hermeneutics of facticity feature prominently in Dewey’s pragmatism, although attention to this in the critical reception

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of his work was minimal from the beginning, a fact likely due in part to the accent on science that always characterized his work. A vehement anti-positivist, Dewey never subscribed to any objectivist or totalizing view of science but regarded it as pragmatic inquiry methodologically identical to what characterizes ordinary experience but carried to a higher order of explicitness and sophistication. ‘The scientific inquirer’, he held, no less than the philosopher or artist, ‘derive their substance from the stream of culture’ and operate invariably within ‘the constant spiral movement of knowledge’.18 The scientist belongs to what Peirce had called a ‘community of inquiry’, as do knowers in general. Truth itself, for Dewey, has a social dimension, and was conceived by him as a contingent and often temporary consensus at which a community of inquirers have arrived; it is the hypothesis that has ‘worked’, as James liked to say, to the satisfaction of competent inquirers in a given field by withstanding challenges, creating experiential coherence, and resolving a problematic situation in a way that is judged superior to its alternatives. Thought in general ‘is creative, – an incursion into the novel’, and ‘involves some inventiveness’ in adjusting new ideas with old.19 It ‘lives, moves, and has its being in and through symbols, and, therefore, depends for meaning upon context as do the symbols’.20 To think is ‘to extract the net meanings’ that are to be discovered in a given context, and where meaning itself, as Peirce had argued, is nothing apart from consequences for practice.21 The term ‘understanding’ itself Dewey employed in a limited capacity. ‘To understand’, as he put it, ‘is to grasp meaning’ in a given context.22 It ‘means something intellectual, but it means something that is much more than intellectual’; it is ‘an inclusive word – it signifies coming together, bringing things together; and when we say that human beings have come to an understanding, we mean that they have come to an agreement, that they have reached a common mind, a common outlook from which they see the same things and feel the same way about them’.23 To understand something is to regard it not as a bare particular but in relation to something else: a context, cause, or sequence which is ‘not simply a sequence of ideas, but a con-sequence – a consecutive ordering in such a way that each determines the next as its proper outcome’.24 The meaning of anything is comprehended through its association with other things, including ‘how it operates or functions, what consequences follow from it, what causes it, what uses it can be put to’.25 One rare occasion in which he mentions an example finds this empirically minded thinker speaking not of a text, work of art, historical event, or human action but of a machine: ‘he does not understand the machine’, Dewey wrote, ‘unless he knows how it works and how to work it; and, if it doesn’t work right, what to do in order to make it work right. You can carry that simple illustration through any field that you please.’ The point, then, is generalizable: ‘Understanding has to be in terms of how things work and how to do things. Understanding, by its very nature, is related to action.’26 The “means-consequence” relation assumes a certain priority here; ‘things gain meaning when they are used as means to bring about consequences’, as for instance ‘chairs, tables, shoes, hats, food’ – a philosopher’s choice of examples is always telling – are understood in light of the practical uses to which they are put.27 How this analysis of understanding carries over to the kind of examples that interested Gadamer is not immediately clear, given that a text or text-analogue is neither means nor consequence nor object of practical use (in any ordinary sense), however, Dewey’s

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view would appear to be that the meaning of a text emerges contextually by creating coherence between disparate passages and by generating consensus among readers. In the realm of ideas it is coherence and agreement that are the surest indicators – although they are never a guaranteec – of truth. Understanding and interpretation are far less prominent themes in Dewey’s writings than experimental inquiry, his conception of which goes to the heart of his pragmatism.28 Without proffering an altogether monolithic conception of knowledge, Dewey spoke of this as the practice of inquiry into a problem which arises from some region of human experience, the basic trajectory of which is purposive and solutionoriented. Inquiry, or thinking in his preferred sense of the term, refers to what he often called ‘the intelligent element in our experience’, that is, the element that involves active investigation into the resolution of a ‘problematic situation’, the invariable starting point of inquiry.29 A particular line of thinking begins with the experience of some difficulty or perplexity, where his examples are again typically empirical or scientific, while thinking itself he defined as ‘the actual transition from the problematic to the secure, as far as that is intentionally guided’.30 To think is to inquire in a given experiential context into ‘some unsettled situation’, where inquiring involves gaining an explicit grasp or ‘sense of a problem’ before us, followed by the formulation of an hypothesis regarding its possible solution.31 The progress of the hypothesis is followed and tested against other experiences, with an eye to whether it leads successfully from one perception or idea to the next and thus forms a chain of experience that guides us towards a credible resolution to the specific situation that occasioned the inquiry. The specifics will vary with the context – inquiry in the natural sciences, for instance, will differ from what occurs in the humanities32 – however, speaking in broad strokes, inquiry is an experimental and social undertaking the aim of which is to settle the matter in question in a way that generates consensus among competent inquirers. Examples from ordinary life are easily found. The problematic situation of one’s chainsaw failing to start may lead one to hypothesize that it is out of gas. The hypothesis leads one to remove the gas cap and look inside the chamber. If true, the hypothesis inclines one to expect to find it empty. Presently one notices that it is half full of a liquid that looks and smells very much like the appropriate mixture of oil and gas and is forced to abandon the hypothesis for another. Perhaps the motor is flooded – and the inquiry proceeds in like manner until the remedied machine starts as expected, confirming the truth of the second hypothesis. A given hypothesis leads one to anticipate that experience will unfold in a certain way, and the fulfilment or frustration of an expectation counts as evidence regarding its truth value. In a second example, a collector of early Canadian furniture notices that on a given cupboard a section of paint, advertised as original, has worn in a pattern unlike what one would expect given how such a piece would have been used and for how long. One hypothesizes that it is an overpaint carefully applied to look original but of more recent vintage. Further examination reveals that in back, instead of hand-forged nails which are associated with the period one finds a machine-made product with a distinctly twentieth-century look to them. The piece is a fake, or some dubious combination of original elements and new, which is confirmed by running the new hypothesis by one’s fellow collectors who can follow much the same investigative process one has just performed. The two

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examples are not scientific, but ‘scientific method’ as Dewey conceived of it ‘represents the same sort of thing carried on with greater elaborateness, by means especially of instruments and apparatus devised for the purpose and of mathematical calculations’.33 Science, then, although always having a certain priority in Dewey’s pragmatism, is not a privileged or totalizing method of inquiry in general. While holding that ‘there is but one sure road of access to truth’, the road is not science but something broader and more contextual: ‘the road of patient, cooperative inquiry operating by means of observation, experiment, record and controlled reflection’.34 One does not perform a scientific experiment on a text, work of art, or historical event, although the mode of thinking that is called for still falls under the general category of pragmatic inquiry. When Peirce proffered the idea that ‘there is no distinction of meaning so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice’, to many it appeared that pragmatism regarded philosophical and indeed all knowledge as a means of building a better mousetrap and that any line of thought that did not produce results of this order was suspect or irrelevant.35 Dewey formulated the basic point of his pragmatism as follows: ‘The test of ideas, of thinking generally, is found in the consequences of the acts to which the ideas lead, that is in the new arrangements of things which are brought into existence.’36 The ‘consequences’ and ‘acts’ in question – as was obvious to anyone who bothered to read any of the pragmatists’ texts – need not be of the mousetrap-building variety and include what can appear to be purely cerebral and formal issues but that on closer inspection do carry implications for how we negotiate our way through the world. What Dewey and other pragmatists were reacting against was not philosophical speculation itself but ‘the traditional separation of doing and knowing’ which began with the Greeks and ‘the traditional prestige of purely intellectual studies’.37 No chasm properly separates knowledge from action, theory from practice, and any thinking that fails to touch down somewhere in human experience is a castle in the air. Dewey’s point was as much educational as philosophical: traditional education’s fundamental error, in his view, was to regard knowledge or thought as ‘complete in itself ’ rather than as emerging from and providing illumination on some particular region of experience, rather as Plato’s philosopher exits the cave to attain knowledge of the Forms.38 Philosophy from the beginning has been bewitched by the idea of a realm of pure thought, and it is this, not theoretical reflection itself, that was the constant target of Dewey’s criticism along with any conception of the mind as a thingly being comprised of faculties of perception, memory, reasoning, and so on, that are separate both from each other and from the power to act. ‘We are learning to know’, as Dewey expressed it, ‘that thought is thought only in and through action’ – and action in a richer sense of the word than pragmatism’s early and singularly ungenerous critics realized.39 Knowledge is not an affair of forms for forms’ sake but remains a servant of human purposes. Again, ‘there is no such thing as genuine knowledge and fruitful understanding except as the offspring of doing’, but what manner of ‘doing’ is this?40 What are we doing, or what purpose does it serve, when we contemplate the human condition or some particular aspect of it (the nature of knowledge, truth, or Being)? Pragmatism itself is precisely a theory that builds no mousetraps but sheds light on our condition as knowers and facilitates our transactions with the world, including the world of ideas. The medieval

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consubstantiation versus transubstantiation controversy likely fails the pragmatic test, as does any theoretical dispute that partakes of the spirit of pure formalism, yet what does not is any question that helps us to ‘make our ideas clear’, as Peirce had said, or to render our ideas and experiences useful in the sense of coherent both with each other and with other people’s ideas and experiences.41 Ensuring that our beliefs hang together is among the foremost purposes of thinking, as James had made abundantly clear in Pragmatism and its ‘sequel’, The Meaning of Truth: ‘After man’s interest in breathing freely, the greatest of all his interests (because it never fluctuates or remits, as most of his physical interests do) is his interest in consistency, in feeling that what he now thinks goes with what he thinks on other occasions. We tirelessly compare truth with truth for this sole purpose.’42 James’ and Dewey’s conception of truth itself is a coherence theory of a kind, and both would have likely concurred with Gadamer that in interpreting a text ‘the harmony of all the details with the whole is the criterion of correct understanding. The failure to achieve this harmony means that understanding has failed.’43 Similarly: ‘The perfect coherence of the global and final meaning is the criterion for the understanding. When coherence is wanting, we say that understanding is deficient.’44 Negotiating our way through the hermeneutic circle is precisely a search for coherence between part and whole, much as knowledge as Dewey spoke of it has a spiral structure. For Dewey, the result of any successful inquiry warrants the designation of ‘truth’, but in a connotation not of correspondence or formal certainty but of ‘warranted assertibility’, a notion that is invariably fallible and contingent upon ongoing investigation.45 This is not to suggest that Gadamer and Dewey were of one mind on the question of either truth, knowledge, or understanding. Indeed they were not, although identifying precise areas of disagreement is not straightforward not only for the reason that the two thinkers were working in distinct philosophical idioms but because when Dewey, the empiricist (however Hegelian and ‘radical’), spoke of knowledge he meant propositional knowledge alone, and it is here that the two diverge. Whether this divergence amounts to disagreement is not immediately evident. On Bernstein’s account, ‘Gadamer is appealing to a concept of truth that (pragmatically speaking) amounts to what can be argumentatively validated by the community of interpreters who open themselves to what tradition “says to us”. … We judge and evaluate [truth] claims by the standards and practices that have been hammered out in the course of history.’46 I would concur with this reading, with the qualification that in the vast majority of instances when Gadamer spoke of truth he was speaking not of the propositional variety but of something altogether different. Much of the impetus of Truth and Method came from Heidegger’s ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ and other writings of his teacher in which truth signifies altheia, which maps onto notions of argumentation and validity claims far less readily than the modes of understanding that concerned Heidegger and Gadamer. That there are experiences of truth that fall outside of propositional knowledge and of which epistemology knows nothing is among Gadamer’s most fundamental claims and, but for occasional references to coherence and harmony such as those just cited, he had little to say about the kind of methodological issue that pragmatism proposes to resolve. In some measure, Gadamer and Dewey spoke at cross purposes. Had Dewey lived long enough to read

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Truth and Method (he died eight years before its publication), I suspect he would have found little in it with which to disagree. Indeed, Dewey was once presented with a copy of Being and Time, and upon examination of the book is reported to have said that Heidegger was writing much the same as he had been, but in a decidedly different and strange vocabulary. While the affinities between philosophical hermeneutics and pragmatism are clear and important, it would not be accurate to describe Truth and Method as a pragmatist text (Being and Time likely is, or portions of it), or any of Gadamer’s later writings. Dewey and Gadamer were substantially like-minded thinkers who were travelling distinct and sometimes overlapping roads. The former continued a trajectory that ran from Plato and Aristotle through empiricism and Hegel to anglo-American neoHegelianism, Darwinian biology, and finally the pragmatism of Peirce and James, while Gadamer, as noted, appropriated a tradition leading from Plato and Aristotle through Roman humanism, German romanticism, phenomenology, and the hermeneutics of Dilthey and Heidegger, to make two long and complicated stories short. Dewey opposed foundationalism and the entire Cartesian problematic as thoroughly as any of his continental counterparts, yet retained an epistemological bent which Gadamer did not share. Fundamental to the latter’s project is the claim that there are forms of knowledge and truth that are beyond the realm of methodology, and this would include pragmatic methodology. There is more to truth than any method knows, Gadamer insisted, including notably the modes of experience that characterize the human sciences. Exhibit A is the encounter with art: ‘Art is knowledge and experiencing an artwork means sharing in that knowledge.’ To ‘do justice to the truth of aesthetic experience (Erfahrung)’, we must ‘overcome the radical subjectivization of the aesthetic that began with Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment’ and recognize that art issues a claim to truth. Art speaks, and speaks the truth, but its manner of speaking is not a proposing but a showing or revealing of the meaningful dimension of something in a way that resists translation into assertions. Art is ‘a way of truth in its own right’, to which he immediately added that ‘we must fully realize what truth means here. It is in the human sciences as a whole that an answer to this question must be found. For they seek not to surpass but to understand the variety of experiences – whether of aesthetic, historical, religious, or political consciousness – but that means they expect to find truth in them.’47 Experience and the truth that belongs to it do not fall within one register but exhibit a plurality which is difficult to see when truth is reduced to correspondence or any other essentialist notion, or when whole disciplines of the humanities are colonized by natural science and compelled to speak a language that is foreign to them. Remaining with the aesthetic, ‘taste knows something’, and ‘in a way that cannot be separated from the concrete moment in which that object occurs and cannot be reduced to rules and concepts’. It is ‘a special way of knowing’, and so are some others. Bildung, tact, common sense, and judgement are forms of understanding for which there is no method, which can be neither formalized nor demonstrated, which are of the nature of a ‘sense’, and which are ‘at the same time a mode of knowing and a mode of being’. Bildung, for instance, is as much a capacity or sensibility as it is a form of understanding and selfunderstanding. Its cultivation in the educative process is nothing as straightforward as

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the acquisition of informational knowledge, nor is it any kind of end-state or means to something beyond itself. It ‘has no goals outside itself ’, but signifies, as Wilhelm von Humboldt expressed it, ‘something both higher and more inward, namely the disposition of mind which, from the knowledge and the feeling of the total intellectual and moral endeavor, flows harmoniously into sensibility and character’.48 A similar description applies to judgement. Be it practical, ethical, political, or what have you, the good judge not only knows what is good in particular contexts but is inclined to do or pursue it. Aristotle’s phronimos exhibits at once the intellectual and ethical virtues, and their knowledge is closer to a sensibility than a matter involving propositions. Hermeneutical understanding in general is like this: it follows no method, is oriented towards particulars without jettisoning universals (for the isolated particular defies understanding), is inseparable from self-understanding, and has an immediacy about it. Knowing and being cannot be separated here, as we open ourselves to what another has to say and anticipate its possible truth value. Jean Grondin articulates this point as follows: Hermeneutic knowledge … intends to be open to others. And the knowledge which it is a matter of acquiring arises less from an intellectual process than from an experience that overcomes knowledge … . It is obvious that the experience at issue is not one which the scientist prepares in his laboratory, an experience which allows itself to be objectified, controlled, verified and repeated and which is an essential condition of the exact sciences and of their success. The fundamental hermeneutic experience is of another sort.

There are modes of experience and knowledge that are beyond the scope of epistemology and either do not call for or do not lend themselves to inquiry as Dewey conceived of it. This is a knowledge in which, as Gabriel Marcel said of a mystery, there is a vital matter to be thought and understood at the same time that there is no problem to be solved, no space between the questioner and what is being questioned, and nothing to be controlled or verified. As Grondin further notes, ‘Gadamer is fascinated by this model of knowledge that is not detached from the subject and from its concrete application’, and it is a fascination that Dewey did not share or not to the same extent.49 It is the finitude of scientific, methodological, and propositional knowledge that was Gadamer’s constant theme, and while Dewey was alive to this theme it was not one that he emphasized, just as he was alive to the hermeneutical dimension of experience and inquiry without placing it in the forefront of his concerns. It is equally mistaken to suppose that Gadamer was ‘against method’ (to point out the finitude of something is not to abolish it) as that Dewey was against unscientific knowledge.50 Indeed, that there is a knowledge that is inherent to practice is among the premises that pragmatism and hermeneutics share, and that there is an understanding or a fundamental orientation that precedes pragmatic inquiry, and which both makes it possible and limits it, is a matter of which Dewey was well aware. His central focus was on ‘the intelligent element in our experience’ in a non-reductionist sense of the words ‘intelligent’ and ‘experience’. Dewey’s general inclination was against reductionism and foundationalism alike and

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towards a far more nuanced, dialectical, and contextual account of knowledge, even while retaining an epistemological orientation that Gadamer did not. The latter’s focus was not on the ‘how’ of knowledge but on ‘what happens to us’, what has always already taken place behind our back in the act of knowing or understanding. In his words, ‘Fundamentally I am not proposing a method; I am describing what is the case.’ Further: ‘My real concern was and is philosophic: not what we do or what we ought to do, but what happens to us over and above our wanting and doing.’51 Dewey’s pragmatism is prescriptive in a way that philosophical hermeneutics is not, even while the distinction between phenomenological description and prescription should not be inflated into a grand opposition. One way of putting the matter is that where Dewey thematized the purposive or instrumental dimension of thought – while never mistaking it for the whole – Gadamer accentuated the non-purposive or the way in which ‘coming to an understanding is not a mere action’ but ‘a life process in which a community of life is lived out’. Differences of emphasis do not always amount to disagreements, and little substantive disagreement is to be seen here. The way in which thinking is bound together with the way ‘a community of life is lived out’ was hardly lost on Dewey, for whom inquiry is inseparable from democracy, conceived not merely as a set of political procedures but as the ethos or way of life that underlies them. Gadamer likely had a richer sense of ‘the idea that subject and object belong together’, that understanding ‘is to be thought of less as a subjective act than as participating in an event of tradition’, although to say that Dewey was also aware of the idea is an understatement.52 He well knew that the pragmatic inquirer is no Cartesian meditator but a participant in a social practice and a tradition over which one is not sovereign, and that knowledge itself is bound up with the context in which it occurs. What he did not see, or not as clearly, is the ontological dimension of understanding and what Gadamer referred to as ‘the universality of the hermeneutical problem’.53 That understanding is not only what we do but what we are, that it ‘embraces the whole of [our] experience of the world’, is a hypothesis that Dewey would have likely granted; at the very least, I can find in his writings no basis on which he would have denied either this or that there is more to experience than experimental inquiry.54 For Dewey, it is not experience in general but propositional knowledge that takes one form, and not everything that comes to the mind is a ‘problematic situation’ requiring inquiry in his sense of the word. Regarded hermeneutically, pragmatic inquiry is one mode of understanding. It is a method that is indispensable in its sphere and also limited to it, which is preceded and made possible by prejudices operating behind its back, and which does not exhaust the experience of meaning and truth. Dewey acknowledged this in part and had it within his means to acknowledge it in full. Regarded pragmatically, hermeneutical understanding contains an ‘intelligent element’ which Dewey explicated in a way that shows surprising affinities with a phenomenological and hermeneutical tradition with which he was unfamiliar. If there is a larger conclusion to which both the hermeneutical and pragmatic ‘turns’ in contemporary thought have led us, it is that knowledge is not one, but is multifarious, historically situated and contextual, imaginative and experimental, dialectical and dialogical, variously purposive, and

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also the tip of the iceberg of our experience. It is our species’ fundamental means of coping with a world of mystery and unlimited variability, and in which illumination never annihilates the darkness that surrounds us. We experience and know in different modes, and truth itself, as Karl Jaspers believed, ‘is not of one sort, single and unique in its meaning. It has as many senses as there are modes of communication in which it arises.’55 Pragmatic truth encompasses primarily the realm of the empirical and the propositional while truth as altheia belongs to the modes of experience with which Gadamer was primarily concerned, and where the distinction indicates a rough and ready division of mental labour rather than yet another dichotomy or exhaustive account of the nature of truth.

6

The Pragmatic Spiral Vincent Colapietro

We are not caught in a circle. We traverse a spiral … and [do] so … forever. – John Dewey

Imaginative philosophers have seized upon the most commonplace figures (lines, circles, squares, triangles) along with nominally unfamiliar ones (e.g. the rhizome1) and configured them as philosophical tropes. These tropes have occasionally proven to be extremely suggestive and broadly influential, especially when conjoined to more concrete images. To take a classical example, Plato conjoins the dramatic image of prisoners bound with their backs to the mouth of the cave in which they are unknowingly sequestered with the abstract one of the divided line. As instructive as each of these images is in itself, they obtain far greater power in conjunction with one another and with other images. There is often implicit in the most abstract figures (say, the line or the circle) a qualitative sense of various dramatic situations. The experience of having gone around in circles in an argument or that of having travelled far and returned home possibly invests the abstract image with felt significance.2 The spiral in its definitive arc doubles back upon itself but avoids closure. In doing so, it shows itself to be invincibly open-ended. A story ends without definitively concluding, both bringing the characters back around to whence they set out and unmistakably hinting at the unforeseeable contingencies of an open future. In other words, its arc is that of a spiral. While a story may assume this form, it is far from unreasonable to wonder whether inquiry and more broadly interpretation must do so.3 On this occasion, I would like to focus on the figure of the spiral and to do so in reference to a contemporary philosopher of enduring importance.4 While I take John Dewey to be an exemplar of pragmatism and, in addition, the figure of the spiral to be central to not only his thought but also the entirety of this movement, my aim here is not to argue for this broader claim. Plato’s allegory of the cave provides us with an interpretive framework for understanding the human condition and, moreover, for interpreting our cognitive endeavours. Analogously, Dewey’s valorization of the spiral gives us an alternative framework for doing no less than this. As it stands, this is no doubt an exaggeration: This image by itself certainly does not provide us with such a framework, but the account of nature, experience, and inquiry of which it is

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emblematic does. One way to render this plausible is to make even more explicit than Dewey tends to do the reflexive character of his philosophical project. After all, he defines philosophy as ‘a criticism of criticism’ (LW I 1, 298), hence a highly ‘generalized instrument of criticism’ (LW 1, 306). That is, it is reflective critique. This, however, requires it to be reflexive interpretation (see, for example, LW 1, 40). We are, for Dewey no less than Charles Taylor, self-interpreting animals. Our status as such beings itself calls for interpretation. This encompasses a vision of the world in which such animals as us make sense and a portrait of our agency in which our efforts to make sense of things and events possess some degree of efficacy. Dewey provides us with such a vision and such a portrait. Regarding both, the seemingly humble image of the spiral assumes incalculable philosophical power. The human animal, portrayed as a finite, fallible agent, thrown into a world in which chance and contingency are as pervasive as regularity and intelligibility, is nonetheless able to make sense out of the disclosures of its experience. Its irrepressible efforts to make sense of its experience are anything but linear. They are characteristically circuitous (see, for example, Dewey LW 8, 223). If one steps back from the bewildering details of its interpretive gropings (at least when confronted with complex phenomena), the human animal seems inevitably to traverse a spiral. There is unquestionably an irony here. While the figure of the hermeneutic circle is central and explicit in the writings of Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, and others in this tradition, that of the pragmatic spiral is, whatever its centrality, rarely explicit. This indeed counts against the plausibility of my thesis. But, in good pragmatic fashion, I insist the proof of the pudding is to be found in the eating. By implication, this means that it is not to be found in the recipe, at least apart from the eating. Explicit formulations and designations are far from unimportant, but recurrent strategies and procedures are, in the end, of greater significance. There are places where Dewey is quite explicit about the spiralling character of efficacious reflection. They are found not merely in the hidden crannies of minor works but at climatic moments in some of his most important writings. This is nowhere truer than the conclusion of Human Nature and Conduct (1924). In order to appreciate his recourse to the figure of the spiral, however, a bit of stage setting is required. In the concluding chapter of that text, Dewey appears to become ineluctably entangled in the task of trying to disentangle several pivotal relationships in moral philosophy. For now, let us focus on just one of these relationships. In this sphere, is the good prior to obligation or is obligation prior to the good? Are we to begin with a morally neutral description of the human condition or an explicitly normative account of moral reason? Do we begin with ethical norms and ideals in abstraction from social customs and demands or rather with some historical form of inherited morality as an inescapable fact? When Dewey addresses these questions, he is in effect staging a piece of philosophical theatre, since his efforts aim not so much to disentangle himself as to show how our immersion in thought inevitably assumes a certain form, one quite different than the form our thinking appears to adopt. In any event, he considers in ‘Morals Is Social’, the concluding chapter of Human Nature and Conduct, among other relationships that between the right and the good. In granting priority to one or the other, our efforts appear to be hopelessly circular: in

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trying to define the good as prior to the right, we seem to be forced by the very logic of our terms to incorporate right into our definition of the good; and in striving to define the right as prior to the good, the dialectic of meaning appears to coerce us into including good in our definition of right. We seem to be inextricably caught in a circle, but we are not. Rather we are actually, and ineluctably, traversing a spiral. What we need to do, then, is recognize the character of the movement in which we are caught up and facilitate this movement from within the rhythmic phases of the ongoing development of this constitutive movement. While this is in a sense the movement of thought, thought should not be conceived as a process going on in our heads or consciousness. It is without exaggeration going on in the world, in large part because of the way the world prompts and facilitates agents such as the human animal to think over the situations in which they are entangled. There is no locus outside of the arcs by which the incomplete spirals of embodied reflection realize themselves5 and by which we are able to traverse and indeed re-traverse such spirals. As it turns out, our traversal is reversible, for we can retrace our steps no less than work to trace out a trajectory beyond any point yet realized. The ability to retrace our steps is, indeed, immensely important.6 Often it is only by doing so that we can detect the point at which we went astray. The data from which we set out need often to be reexamined and reimagined, while the conclusions drawn need themselves to be reconsidered in light of both our initial and subsequently acquired data. The purpose of this chapter is to show, first, just how deeply the figure of the spiral characterizes Dewey’s pragmatist orientation and, second, how emancipatory this image is for carrying out our own philosophical tasks. The first part is hermeneutic, the second philosophical. The first is doubly a meta-interpretation, since it encompasses both Dewey’s interpretation of interpretation and my interpretation of his efforts in this regard. The second part is at once philosophical and meta-philosophical, for it deals directly with such philosophical topics as agency, rationality, and intelligibility while also at least hinting at a philosophical critique of traditional philosophy. In the scope of an essay, however, some of the details must be left out of account; also not all of my claims can be established by argument.

The spiralling movement of historical processes Before considering the particulars of Dewey’s entanglement and his efforts to extricate himself from it, a general point must be made. I take this entanglement and his efforts to be as disclosive of the distinctive character of his philosophical project as any other feature or move to which one might point. Moreover, I take the strategy by which he endeavours to extricate himself to be of the utmost significance. Indeed, this way of putting it is likely misleading: Dewey does not try to disentangle himself but struggles to make clear that we are inextricably enmeshed in the spiralling movement of historical processes, including processes of thinking, inquiry, and understanding. In my judgement, nothing is more revelatory of the character of Dewey’s own thought than the strategy on display in the concluding pages of Human Nature and Conduct. My aim, however, is not to argue for this claim but to bring into focus this facet of

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Dewey’s project as it is displayed in such texts as Human Nature and Conduct, How We Think, and The Quest for Certainty. While there is a discernible kinship between Dewey and Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, George Herbert Mead, and C. I. Lewis, I shall not make the case for this affinity. Here my focus is on Dewey’s pragmatism. His account of inquiry is in effect a theory of interpretation, since this account is principally concerned with showing how we make sense of the objects and events encountered in our experience. There is, at the centre of this account, an appreciation of our experience of perplexity, our inability to make sense of things. The relationships or connections by which we so often overcome our perplexity are, for Dewey, what most of all what needs to be understood. ‘The most incomprehensible thing about the universe’, Albert Einstein suggests, ‘is that it is comprehensible’ (1954, 292). At a mundane level, however, Dewey does not imagine that there is anything mysterious about the intelligibility of the world of our experience. For instance, rocks as purely geological phenomena exhibit numerous traits, many of which are perplexing or (to us at present) incomprehensible, some of which are anything but puzzling. (Some of these traits are indeed the ones by which we identify these objects as rocks.) Some of the perplexing traits are rendered intelligible by being related to processes and objects beyond the immediate context of our dealings with these objects. Glacial movements taking place in past millennia to some extent account for the perceptible traits of present phenomena. These phenomena become intelligible by being seen in a network of relationships not immediately evident to most of those for whom these phenomena are observable. If we alter the example and consider rocks on which inscriptions have been made, or the walls of caves on which images have been painted, nothing is changed. More cautiously, the processes and procedures by which we make sense of these humanly made inscriptions are akin to those by which we make sense of unintentionally made marks. Geological phenomena no less than human artefacts exhibit explicable traits and the explanation of the former no less than the latter involves connecting seemingly disparate things with one another. Of course, the manner of explaining such phenomena at some point diverges from that of interpreting such artefacts, but the activity of making sense of things is, at the highest level of generality, the same in each case. This activity involves forging intimate connections between or among seemingly disparate phenomena. In other words, the Deweyan account of these interrogative processes is a manifest instance of relational hermeneutics. Our reflective activity is, Dewey insists, ‘literally reflective [or reflexive] in that it turns back to go over (sometimes over and over) one’s past experiences’ or, for that matter, one’s future possibilities (LW 1, 341). He is quick to add, ‘It is hardly possible to exaggerate the applicability of the expression “going over” or the semi-slang expression “giving a good going over”’ (ibid.). Near the outset, I noted how Dewey in the concluding chapter of Human Nature and Conduct appears to be caught up in several circles. One of these relationships is that between the right and the good, another that between what appears to be amoral and what is customarily recognized as moral. The context of his discussion of these topics is of course critical – and it is the context of inquiry, one into the practical meanings of the most basic terms of moral philosophy. ‘Practical’ here signifies that which pertains to practice. So understood,

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practice is not to be set in stark contrast to theory since theoretical endeavours are, for Dewey, historically evolved and evolving practices. The dualism of theory and practice is, at once, a site wherein a number of other dualisms are telescoped (e.g. that between thought and action, also that between deferred, or diverted, engagement in a concrete situation and ‘immediate’ response to some contextual demand, also that between the preoccupations of a leisure class and the crafts of the working poor.) Ethical reflection is born of ethical conflict, and this conflict extends to the terms in which conflicts among persons are most adequately articulated. Dewey is acutely aware that ‘the very meaning of the general notions of moral inquiry is a matter of doubt and dispute’ (MW 14, 224); they invite, and indeed demand, investigation. In our attempts to clarify the meaning of such terms, however, traps of circularity abound. For example, one side endeavours to define the good in terms of the right, while the other tries to do the opposite. Neither side, however, can offer a satisfactory account of the practical import of these pivotal terms. As a consequence, the disputants go round and round in a circle, proliferating technical distinctions and increasingly moving away from the concrete actualities of our moral life. Or we are offered a descriptive account of the concrete situations in which moral reflection arises, but that account seems to many to be merely psychological, sociological, anthropological, or simply devoid of the normative dimension definitive of ethical reflection. But emphatically normative accounts seem to many others to be unduly abstract. We seem to be forced to choose between Humean naturalism and Kantian deontology. If we begin with an is, there is no way to get to an ought. If, however, we begin with ought,7 we have in effect severed our ties from the world of experience in which obligations have their point and purpose. Stressing the historically given character of human norms seems to deprive them of their normativity, while locating the rationally binding character of these norms in the formal acts of a solitary will strips these norms of their concreteness, historicity, and arguably much else. Of course, one might defend a Humean position against Kant or a Kantian stance against Hume. For many of us, however, the alternatives are construed too narrowly when all positions are taken to be ultimately reducible to one of these two frameworks. Aristotle, Hegel, and indeed Dewey cannot be cast as variants of one or the other of these positions without being disfigured beyond recognition. I am interested less in the specific issues from which Dewey at the conclusion of Human Nature and Conduct attempts to disentangle himself than in the general strategy manifest in his efforts here and elsewhere. In his explication of the concept of right, he finds himself compelled to stress, ‘Right is only an abstract name for the multitude of concrete demands in action which others impress upon us, and of which we are obliged, if we would live, to take some account’ (224). He goes so far as to assert that the authority of right is the exigency of the demands of others, ‘the efficacy of their insistences’ (ibid.). He is fully aware of the response to this assertion: ‘It will be retorted that all [such] pressure is a non-moral affair partaking of force, not of right; that right must be ideal’ (ibid.). For our purposes, Dewey’s response to this retort points to the heart of the matter. He takes this retort to entail an invitation, and it is just this invitation that he declines: ‘Thus we are invited to enter again the circle in which the ideal has no force [because no actuality] and social actualities [have] no ideal quality’ (ibid.; emphasis added). Again, the specific case is not our principal concern; Dewey’s

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general manoeuvre is, ‘We refuse the invitation, because social pressure is involved in our lives, as much as the air we breathe and the ground we walk upon.’ This is, however, not merely social pressure; it is inherently ‘moral’ pressure in the concrete sense in which the efficacious terms of our moral vocabulary command our agential attention and prompt our moral deliberations. The dualism of actuality and ideality needs to be deconstructed as much as those between theory and practice, thought and action, ethics and politics, or politics and economics. While numerous distinctions need to be drawn and redrawn, traditional dualisms need to be deconstructed. What Dewey emphatically says in this context he clearly implies in countless other ones: ‘We are not caught in a circle; we traverse a spiral’ (225; emphasis added). The specific spiral being traversed in the concluding chapter of Human Nature and Conduct encompasses, on the one hand, the fact that ‘social customs generate some consciousness of interdependencies’ (this consciousness being at least in embryonic form ethical consciousness) while on the other this emergent consciousness drives towards concrete embodiment in the social environment. The embodiments of this consciousness in institutions, practices, and discourses are both expressions of a distinctive moment in the history of ethical sensibility and goad to the further development of such a sensibility. ‘Morals Is Social’ (the title of the chapter under discussion) because the social environment is a moral environment. The social environment is a moral one in part because it generates ethical deliberation about the various interdependencies constitutive of social life. The recognition of this does not preclude acknowledgement of the opposite: in some respects, virtually every social environment works against the emergence and maturation of efficacious forms of ethical consciousness (a point to which I will return). It blocks and frustrates as well as facilitates and advances more awareness of the actual forms of social relationships. Progress is never unequivocal, collapse hardly ever total. For the moment, however, let us focus on Dewey’s even-handed recognition of social conditions generating ethical consciousness and, in turn, ethical consciousness embodying itself in altered conditions and thereby generating ‘new perceptions of social ties’ or interdependencies. We move from such conditions to such awareness and from such awareness to the alteration of such conditions and then from such alteration of these conditions to altered consciousness of our social ties – ‘and so on forever’. This makes of this movement a spiralling in which there is no absolutely secure or finally fixed terminus ad quem. The terminus a quo is itself not anything we can definitively establish. In light of the present, our point of departure comes to be re-envisioned. In turn, this re-envisioned origin at least occasionally prompts us to reimagine different futures than the ones framed in reference to prior figurations of our starting point. Time and again, we are invited to enter a circle. Dewey’s counsel is emphatic: we must decline this invitation. We are always already caught up in traversing one or more spirals. Such traversals are historical, in the sense that they are movements in history (though as such they might hold possibilities for transcending a determinate configuration or our actual history; that is, the transcendence of history in a specific context is always a movement in history; even so, it might truly be an instance of transcendence, in the only sense in which finite, fallible agents might rise above the circumstances of their inescapably historical lives).

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In addition to these passages from Human Nature and Conduct, there is one from How We Think (1910) in which Dewey’s explicit endorsement of the pragmatic spiral (as it might be called) calls for careful consideration. In this text he makes clear how the pragmatic spiral might be compared to the hermeneutic circle. I am inclined to take the hermeneutic circle to be itself a spiral rather than a circle, hence the pragmatic spiral to be not a rival but an alternative formulation of the ineluctably historical character of all human inquiry or understanding. It is, however, beyond the scope of this chapter to argue for this claim. Let us return to the pragmatic spiral quite apart from its possible affinities with the meta-interpretive configurations to be encountered in other philosophical traditions (i.e. the images and figures by which our practices of interpretation are themselves interpreted or depicted). From Francis Bacon, Immanuel Kant borrowed the expression ‘anticipations of experience’ but radically transformed the Baconian import of this suggestive expression. Apart from Kant and indeed Bacon, however, that to which this expression points needs, from a pragmatist perspective, to be taken into account. The having of experience is in part a function of our anticipations of experience. Like all other animals, the human animal is on the alert to what is unfolding in the present. Its primordial stance is an anticipatory orientation towards an ongoing series of what the human animal instinctually takes to be an unfinished drama. We are first and foremost agents and, as such, actors implicated in overlapping, intersecting, and to some extent incompatible dramas. The situated task of such agents encompasses the contextual identity of whatever is encountered in the ongoing course of a sustained exertion (by its colour, the ice on which one is walking appears not to be an affordance but an unanticipated obstacle or, worse, an imminent hazard). For the purpose at hand, such agents must, often with no time for deliberation, ascertain the identity of the being that expectantly enters the scene. ‘Who goes there – friend or foe? What confronts me – facilitating or thwarting force?’ Frequently, the task of going on, especially going on in the inherited forms of human endeavour, meets such obstacles and impasses that the very possibility of doing so is called into question. Recall the incident in Chapter VI (‘Pig and Pepper’) in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland where she asks the Footman once again, though in a louder voice, ‘How am I to get in?’ ‘ “Are you to get in at all?” said the Footman. “That’s the first question you know.” ’ Alice’s reply to this point is also worth recalling: ‘It was, no doubt: only Alice did not like to be told so. “It’s really dreadful”, she muttered to herself, “the way all the creatures argue. It’s enough to drive one crazy!”’ But, then, it might be disastrous, not only dreadful, not to argue, at least with oneself, about whether one can continue doing the done thing or entering a blocked passageway. To some extent, we acquire a sense of the scenes and dramas in which we are implicated, the fateful sequence of ongoing events in which our own improvisational actions are often pivotal events (for much turns on what we do in situ). This immediately felt sense is a defining feature of our improvisational agency. The jump shot feels wrong upon release and, alas, clangs like a brick off the rim, and so on. This brings us back to the passage in How We Think, but with a richer sense of the Deweyan context in which the deeper resonances and wider implications of this important text would have lacked had I cited it without attention to the anticipatory character of human agency.

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Having experience, in the distinctively Deweyan sense of this, is in part a function of the ubiquitous anticipations of the presently imminent moments of an unfolding experience that are woven into the very fabric of our agency. James perhaps goes too far when he claims: ‘The occasion and the experience … are nothing. It all depends on the capacity of the soul to be grasped, to have its life currents absorbed by what is given’ (‘On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings’ in Wilshire [ed.], 338). Even so, the experiences we have are in great measure a function of the habits we bring to the occasions and situations in which the currents of our lives absorb and are absorbed by the currents of whatever we encounter in situ. While not everything depends on the sensibility (or ‘soul’) made up for the most part of these habits, much indeed does. Contra Kierkegaard, we live forward and, as a consequence, we cannot help but think forward, to some extent at least. The ongoing interplay between our immediately felt sense and our complexly mediated deliberations – between the promptings, inhibitions, and impulsions of our unreflective sense, on the one hand, and the directives, cautions, and resolves of our deliberative rationality, on the other – deserves critical attention. While this interplay might be depicted as a back-and-forth movement, Dewey deploys a different image to capture its inherent dynamic or vital form. The proximate context is one wherein Dewey draws a distinction between two ways of grasping the meaning of the things or events encountered in our experience, a distinction made clear by a simple example. Meanings might be immediately apprehensible or frustratingly elusive. ‘When the English language is understood, the person grasps at once’, Dewey contends, ‘the meaning of “paper”. … Similarly, the person identifies the object on sight as a stone; there is no secret, no mystery, no perplexity, about that’ (LW 8, 226). Such immediate identification or recognition, however, might prove to be an occasion for perplexity, since (say) the features of the stone immediately grasped as such might elude not only immediate comprehension but also a sustained effort to grasp, even in the most imperfect manner, their most basic meaning. That is, while the person unhesitatingly takes the stone for what it is, that individual ‘does not understand the markings on it’. ‘They [however] have some meaning. But what is it?’ Put more cautiously, it seems reasonable to suppose that these markings bear some meaning, if only unsuspected relationships could be discovered (e.g. ‘a piece of rock might be understood by referring it to a sedimentary stratum known to have been formed under certain conditions’, in particular, the markings ‘no longer stand alone’ or in isolation from other things but ‘have been brought into connection with a past era of the earth’s history in which great masses of slow-moving ice descended into regions now temperate, carrying with them grit and rocks that ground and scratched other rocks embedded in place’). Let us change the example. I immediately recognize the face of a friend, but upon our meeting am deeply perplexed by the expression on her countenance. Ordinarily, such perplexity elicits a question or set of questions and, in turn, questions inaugurate an inquiry. What is immediately intelligible contains within itself what is immediately perplexing. As this implies, the very distinction between the two modes of human understanding is not only one that can be conceptually drawn (hence, mediately formulated) but also one that is immediately had. Indeed, it is both one that must be drawn and one that quite apart from explicit formulation structures the rhythmic patterns of human

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inquiry, even at the most rudimentary level. In other words, we operate with at least a tacit sense of this distinction. Moreover, various languages offer idiomatic resources for drawing this critical distinction. Dewey takes pains to highlight just this point: Most languages have two sets of words to express these two modes of understanding; one for the direct taking in or grasp of meaning, the other for its circuitous apprehension, thus: and εἰδέναι in Greek; noscere and scire in Latin; kennen and wissen in German; connaître and savoir in French; while in English to be acquainted with and to know of or about have been suggested as equivalents. Now, our intellectual life consists of a peculiar interaction between these two types of understanding. All judgment, all reflective inference, presupposes some lack of understanding, a partial absence of meaning. We reflect in order that we may get hold of the full and adequate significance of what happens. Nevertheless, something must be already understood, the mind must be in possession of some meaning that it has mastered, or else thinking is impossible. We think in order to grasp meaning, but none the less every extension of knowledge makes us aware of blind and opaque spots, where with less knowledge all had seemed obvious and natural. … Increase of the store of meanings makes us conscious of new problems, while only through translation of the new perplexities into what is already familiar and plain do we understand or solve these problems. This is the constant spiral movement of knowledge. (LW 8, 227; emphasis added)

Newly discovered meanings tend to become funded in experience in such a manner that they operate increasingly at a tacit and unreflective level, while even deeply sedimented meanings can from time to time be unsettled by episodic upheavals or the persistent pressure of our cumulative experience. The immediate grasp of meaning is largely the function of experientially generated habits, hence historically mediated immediacies. The immediate apprehension of the meaning of a word is of course the result of linguistic training and, in that sense, a mediated ability. Much intervenes in the life of an individual between the stage of infant (etymologically, the non-talker) and the acquisition of literacy. In the attainment of this competency, there is a complex interplay between immediately felt qualities and linguistically mediated meanings. Such qualities, however, not infrequently function as signs (Peirce calls them qualisigns!), while words can either possess from their initial acquisition or gather from occasions of subsequent use their own felt qualities. The word ‘taste’ has perhaps got too completely associated with arbitrary liking to express the nature of judgments of value. But if it be used in the sense of an appreciation at once cultivated and active, one may say that the formation of taste is the chief matter wherever values enter in, whether intellectual, esthetic or moral. Relatively immediate judgments, which we call tact or to which we give the name of intuition, do not precede reflective inquiry, but are the funded products of much thoughtful experience. Expertness of taste is at once the result and the reward of constant exercise of thinking. Instead of there being no disputing about tastes, they are the one thing worth disputing about, if by ‘dispute’ is signified

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The chef tastes the dish she is making and it tastes off; something is missing. She immediately apprehends its blandness and just as immediately ‘knows’ what to do to correct this deficiency. Her performance is artful because her judgement is aesthetic; it is indeed animated and guided by a compressed series of discriminating judgements rooted in her cumulative experience and, moreover, imaginative reflection about various episodes in the tangled course of her previous efforts. Her successes might invite experimentation beyond the bounds of anything she could have imagined without these successes. In turn, such adventurous experiments court the possibility of spectacular failure. The lessons gathered from the course of her experience become consolidated in a more or less integrated set of habits, and this set of habits practically expresses itself in qualitatively immediate judgements (‘Too little salt’, ‘Too much saffron’, ‘Too low a temperature’). But the experienced chef can take a critical stance towards even the most emphatic instances – the most seemingly incontestable deliverances – of her immediate judgements. (‘My palate remains too much one of a provincial, one favouring all too bold and familiar flavours, shunning more subtle and unexpected ones.’) That is, she can judge her very modes of judgement and even the criteria by which she has become habituated to render such judgements. There is, however, nothing outside of the career of her experience to which she can appeal to establish the validity or efficacy of her critical judgements, including her metacritiques (her reflective evaluation of her immediate judgements and much else). Her qualitatively immediate judgements seek validation in explicit authority, or formal authorization, but such authorization must ultimately itself appeal to the qualitative immediacy of direct experience. That is, she seems to be caught in a circle. If Dewey is right, she is not: she is traversing a spiral and the course of her life as a chef is destined to do so interminably. If she is faithful to the dynamic of her own experience, the mastery of the unfamiliar does not banish the unusual and unexpected, the perplexing and the troublesome, from her world. Rather it expands and deepens the range of possibilities for her to encounter what contravenes what she assuredly ‘knows’. Dewey makes the point only partially when he asserts: ‘There is no end to this spiral: foreign subject matter transformed through thinking [or inquiring] into a familiar possession becomes a resource for judging and assimilating additional foreign subject matter’ (MW 8, 351). This is undoubtedly true, but what needs to be stressed is that the transformation of the foreign into the familiar drives us beyond the familiar. It throws us back upon our habits because it throws us into situations in which novelty and hence uncertainty and perplexity are the hallmarks. This is one way of saying that

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the spiral in question is open-ended and its open-endedness is integral to the processes and practices, including those of interpretation, under consideration here. Hermeneutics is by its very nature relational. For meaning is meaningless except in reference to a growing network of interpenetrating meanings, only in conjunction with the discovery or institution of connections (or relationships) beyond anything yet established. The brute thing is a brute thing by virtue of its disconnectedness. Put otherwise, a meaningful thing is meaningful as a result of its relations to things beyond itself, often ones far removed in space, time, and otherwise. ‘To grasp the meaning of a thing, an event, or a situation is’, Dewey insists, ‘to see it in its relations to other things: to note how it operates and functions, what consequences follow from it, what causes it, what uses it can be put to’ (MW 8, 225–6). The ‘brute thing, or the thing without meaning to us, is something whose relations are not grasped’ (MW 8, 226). Hermeneutics in the inclusive sense encompasses all of the processes and practices by which the human animal and other intelligent agents make sense of things and events. Such agents manifestly accomplish this by discovering or instituting relationships, not least of all between the near and the far, the familiar and the novel, the present and the absent. While hermeneutics is by definition relational, it is nevertheless worthwhile to make this explicit. It is, moreover, instructive to explore how a philosopher who is more commonly associated with a theory of inquiry than an account of interpretation explains how we make sense out of things and events by relating them to one another in variable and imaginative ways. In his efforts to do so, Dewey deconstructs the dualism of inquiry and interpretation without erasing the numerous and important differences between, say, the procedures of the theoretical physicist and the activity of a literary scholar. Such differences are truly differences that, for important reasons, often make a difference. But attention to such differences should not work to eclipse the affinities between inquiry in its most basic sense and interpretation even in its most reflexive forms. Whatever else interpretation is, it is always in some measure an instance of inquiry. Ideas must be framed to cope with the novel and perplexing. Hypotheses must be improvised and tested on the run in order to make even superficial sense out of the more manifest levels of a literary text or historical document, an ancient monument or a cave painting. In great measure, the selective emphasis of situated thought insures that effective criteria are to some extent built into our interpretative and investigative practices. At the very least, these largely tacit criteria provide variably effective resources for an effective critique of our ongoing, or spiralling, endeavours. We can certainly spiral out of control. But we can often spiral into arenas of activity in which our funded experience proves an adequate resource to transform ourselves into improvisational agents up to the adventurous task of confronting perplexing novelty. If our initial encounters with novel and perplexing situations often prove overwhelming and disconcerting, even if some of them frustrate for the entirety of our lives our most ingenious, sustained efforts, our eventual successes are not so rare or so insignificant, so happenstance or so isolated, that we should refuse to take our willingness to fall back on our improvisational abilities to be, time and again, a possible match for even an overwhelming perplexity. Often, what has seemed to be impossible turns out to be simply difficult, though perhaps incredibly arduous.

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The spiral of reflection drives towards adventures of ideas, beyond anything presently imaginable. Ideas, in Dewey’s sense, are primarily guides to observation and action. They are the means by which the doubtful as such is confronted. When they prove successful, they are transformed into conceptions. In contrast to an idea, a conception ‘is employed, not tentatively and conditionally, but with assurance as instruments of understanding and explaining things that are still uncertain and perplexing’ (MW 8, 235). The tentative and provisional meanings conveyed by ideas can, in the course of experience, become validated and indeed consolidated into reliable and ‘established meanings’ (in a word, into conceptions). But even deeply sedimented conceptions can become unsettled by dramatic upheavals, just as even the seemingly most fantastic ideas can become validated by the commonplace procedures of experimental inquiry. Such is the adventure of ideas, and such is the spiral of reflection. No thinker has done more than John Dewey to locate our endeavours and indeed our agency in the dramatic context of this spiralling adventure. If I have called attention to the pragmatic spiral as a defining feature of his philosophical project, my efforts will have been well spent. If, beyond this, I have brought into focus the defining traits of the pragmatic spiral itself then all the more so is this true. If Dewey is, as I am disposed to think, right about the character of interpretation then his contribution to hermeneutics is likely far greater than we appreciate. My hope is that, combined with the earlier efforts of Louise Rosenblatt, Paul Fairfield, and others, this chapter helps to garner for this exemplary pragmatist a wider community of critical interpreters. His writings, as they bear upon questions regarding interpretation, might make of the history of hermeneutics an even more open-ended spiral than it has been.

References Bacon, Francis. Novum Organon. Boulting, Noel. 2006. On Interpretive Activity: A Peircean Approach to the Interpretation of Science, Technology and the Arts. Leiden: Brill. Browning, Douglas. 2002. ‘Designation, Characterization, and Theory in Dewey’s Logic’, in Dewey’s Logical Theory: New Studies and Interpretations, edited by F. Thomas Burke, Robert Talisse and D. Micah Hester. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Colapietro, Vincent. 2005. ‘Cultivating the Arts of Inquiry, Interpretation, and Criticism: A Peircean Approach to Our Educational Practices’. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 24, no. 3–4, 337–66. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1983. On the Line, translated by John Johnston. Cambridge: MIT Press. Dewey, John. 1910. How We Think. The Middle Works of John Dewey, volume 8, edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale, IL: SIU Press. Cited as MW 8. Dewey. 1924. Human Nature and Conduct. The Middle Works of John Dewey, volume 14, edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale, IL: SIU Press. Cited as MW 14. Dewey. 1988 [1929]. The Quest for Certainty. The Later Works of John Dewey, volume 4, edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale, IL: SIU Press. Cited as LW 4, 29. Dewey. Logic: 1986 [1938]. A Theory of Inquiry. The Later Works of John Dewey, volume 12, edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale, IL: SIU Press. Cited as LW 12.

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Einstein, Albert. 1954. Ideas and Opinions. NY: Bonanza Books. Fairfield, Paul. 2011. Philosophical Hermeneutics Reinterpreted. London: Continuum. Hiildebrand, David L. 2003. Beyond Realism and Anti-Realism: John Dewey and the Neopragmatists. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Ingold, Tim. 2007. Lines: A Brief History. New York: Routledge. James, William. 1981 [1890]. The Principles of Psychology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press James. 1979 [1896]. The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press James. 1978. Pragmatism & The Meaning of Truth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1965. The Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Langer, Susanne K. 1996. Philosophy in a New Key. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Noë, Alva. 2010. Out of Our Heads. New York: Hill & Wang. Peirce, C. S. The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, volumes 5 and 6, edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Putnam, Hilary. 1990. Realism with a Human Face, edited by James Conant. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rorty. 1991. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth [Philosophical Papers, volume 1]. New York: Cambridge University Press. Russell, Bertrand. 1939. ‘Dewey’s New Logic ’. In The Philosophy of John Dewey, edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp. New York: Tudor Publishing Company), 135–56. Taylor, Charles. 1985. Human Agency and Language [Philosophical Papers, volume 1]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sleeper, Ralph W. 2001. The Necessity of Pragmatism: John Dewey’s Conception of Philosophy. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Weissman, David. 2008. Styles of Thought: Interpretation, Inquiry, and Imagination. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

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A Poet on Each Side of the Poem: A Hermeneutic and Democratic Demand for Engaging Tradition Ramsey Eric Ramsey and Raelynn Gosse

Democracy’s demand for poets The function of art has always been to break through the crust of conventionalized and routine consciousness … . Democracy will come into its own for democracy is a name for a life of free and enriching communion. It had its seer in Walt Whitman. – John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems

Sometimes a seemingly simple turn of phrase points towards a way worth pursuing. We begin with this orientating aphorism to turn towards our contribution to relational hermeneutics: The ability to understand better belongs to anyone who understands at all. For the scope of this chapter we understand this phrase as a hermeneutic and democratic promise, a promise that is best kept if we are able somehow to meet the demand of placing a poet on each side of the poem. We shall make our defence of this democratic demand for poets by way of Walt Whitman, America’s poet of democracy, whose prose work defends the role of literature and learning to read well. Not only shall we consider Whitman’s thought philosophical but, along with our reading of Gadamer’s thoughts about poetry, we shall consider it hermeneutic philosophy of the first order. Those who promote the power of poems are not able to provide a blueprint, nor are they able to say just when or where a poem might do what all great poems are able to do. Yet this much one might say of reading poems well: It is possible under the proper circumstances for a phrase or even a word to be able to make quite a difference. Somehow in the right setting words are able, as we say, to change everything. Undertaking change – a radical change and transformation – is something poetry seems to encourage almost by being poetry. Hermeneutics, as the philosophical response to the age of interpretation, has much to learn by turning to poetry as a way of doing philosophy. Our way of saying how this might be accomplished is through the phrase, a poet on each side of the poem.

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The hermeneutic concept of tradition – one we recognize as contested, especially by many theorists who often find it only suspect – adds another orientation to our project. We shall promote the power of reading tradition otherwise, seeing it in light of the future such that tradition does not only hold us up by holding us back, yet rather also is seen as that which holds us up in that other and better sense of buoying and orienting us. Giving us something with which we can make something other of what is, tradition is understood as being essential for achieving the radical change called for by our wanting otherwise, by our understanding better, by our meeting democracy’s demand. We shall sidestep, if we are able, by way of only mentioning the obvious when dealing with hermeneutic philosophy and poetry, that is, poetry and philosophy have had their long and tension-filled history (and one anywhere near this conjunction nods in some manner to Plato’s first suspicions). Gadamer in his ‘Philosophy and Poetry’, after praising Jaspers, Merleau-Ponty, Marcel, and ‘above all, Martin Heidegger’ for their ‘daring approach to the borders of poetic language’, says each such attempt time and again faces a ‘bitter criticism’.1 Gadamer paraphrases any number of such criticisms thus: ‘The prophet’s garb ill becomes the philosopher who wishes to be taken seriously in the age of science.’2 So as to pick up the word ‘prophet’ from Gadamer and turn it towards less damning ends, we accept Cornel West’s phrase ‘prophetic pragmatism’ as one fitting to describe our project of leftwing hermeneutics. Admittedly, West in his early writing had lost sight of Whitman. Whitman comes favourably, however, to West’s thinking after some time. Only in the wake of some rethinking does West see the virtue of Whitman, who is ignored completely in The American Evasion of Philosophy.3 In what West calls ‘a distinct change in my views’ in a lecture to a French audience he shares his new appreciation of Whitman as a part of prophetic pragmatism. This change has, as among its many important insights, West’s reclaiming Whitman’s Democratic Vistas as belonging to a list of ‘landmark texts in democratic thought.’4 The books on this list – Mill’s On Liberty, Du Bois’ Souls of Black Folks, and Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems – place Whitman among the philosophers, and it is within a philosophical matrix where we shall offer our interpretation of him. Furthermore, the explication of three waves of left romanticism which West fashioned so wonderfully in The American Evasion of Philosophy is all the evidence one could need to see a version of American pragmatism as a type of hermeneutic and continental philosophy. In addition to this situating of Whitman hermeneutically, we share as well West’s claim for one aspect of Whitman’s genius: ‘What sets Whitman the critic apart from his fellow men and women of letters is his enervating faith in democracy as a way of life and a mode of being in the world – not simply as a form of governance.’5 In Democratic Vistas Whitman puts it in the form of a question: ‘Did you, too, O friend, suppose democracy was only for elections for politics, and for a party name?’ before going on to assert: ‘I say democracy is only of use there that it may pass on and come to its flower and fruits in manners, in the highest form of interactions between men, and their beliefs.’6 Our reading of Whitman is meant to make it an American philosophy – a prophetic pragmatism – and a rich contribution to continental hermeneutics as well as to the philosophy of emancipatory democracy, a philosophy seeing democracy as the cornerstone of ‘religion, literature, colleges, and schools’ and in ‘all public and private life’.7

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Readers as poets These [pure reason, absolute spirituality, knowledge in itself] always demand that we should think of an eye that is completely unthinkable, an eye turned in no particular direction, in which active and interpreting forces, through which alone seeing becomes seeing something, are supposed to be lacking. – Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals

Poems, for all they have to say, nonetheless remain reticent until they are read. This seems obvious, yet hermeneuticists understand this in an explicit way, which is to say, reading is, as Whitman notes, always something difficult to do well: ‘For know you not, dear, earnest reader, that the people of our land may all read and write, and may all possess the right to vote – and yet the main things may be entirely lacking?’8 Reading well engages, with transformative consequences, the varied addresses of poetry and philosophy. What poems stand ever-ready to say when readers read them is, as we know, dependent in its own way on what the reader is able to bring to what we shall call the ready-reticence of the poem. The locus classicus of both Whitman’s Preface to Leaves of Grass, his enthusiastic early work, and his later and somewhat less hopeful Democratic Vistas, is that what will save the New World’s democratic promise is literature.9 It does not overstate the case to proclaim, for Whitman, that only poetry can save a democracy. To ask what is needed of poetry such that it becomes a worthy host to the arrival of democracy allows us to explore Whitman’s keen hermeneutic response, even if the word ‘hermeneutics’ does not belong to his conceptual vocabulary. In both the Preface and Democratic Vistas Whitman’s answer is, surprisingly perhaps, unequivocal: we must become readers who meet literature and philosophy in a fitting manner or, as we put it here, as poets on the other side of the poem.10 By taking seriously his claims for readers as poets, we are required to add: readers are, likewise to poetry, essential to democracy. It is Whitman’s defence of the power that readers not simply may have but indeed must have if democracy is to come that we shall explore. If everyone must be a poet for democracy to work, we must provide an account of how it is that everyone is potentially a poet. Hermeneutics provides such a view. The demand, the requirement, and the forceful address for the ever-present need of hermeneutic praxis announced on nearly every page of Whitman’s Democratic Vistas contributes to this account. Put somewhat straightforwardly, Whitman’s articulation of democracy’s absolute need of poetry and accomplished readers of poetry provides openings for thinking seriously about hermeneutics and tradition. Whitman holds that every human being is capable of poetry and of being part of a larger, communal poem which he names democracy. This faith in poets-to-be is central to our understanding of Whitman’s hermeneutic claims. These ideas are only able to be made good by necessitating a particularly thoughtful kind of writing and speaking, reading and listening. Whitman makes his hermeneutic case for this interplay between the two sides of a poem first in the Preface to Leaves of Grass:

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The messages of great poets to each man and woman are, Come to us on equal terms, Only then can you understand us, We are no better than you, What we enclose, What we enjoy you may enjoy. Did you suppose there could be only one Supreme? We affirm there can be unnumbered Supremes, and that one does not countervail another any more than one eyesight countervails another.11

The hermeneutic commitment to perspectivism is embraced here by Whitman’s affirmation that one eyesight does not completely offset another. This is, accordingly, a version of the often made hermeneutic insight that it requires multiple and various voices to have a genuine dialogue. To be rich enough to provide the sufficient differences that make productive dialogue possible means we shall be in need of various voices. To that end, Whitman says elsewhere in his Preface that ‘every perfect poem’ is built upon the understandings of those who are not ‘poets’ as such, and he names astronomers, geologists, sailors, travellers, and about a dozen more examples, each embodying a perspective whose existence adds to the meaning of the democratic project. Such a move serves to make concrete Whitman’s faith in every citizen as being able to contribute to the perfect poem. Throughout the Preface Whitman calls for a new literature, new voices, and new ways of reading as that which alone will save democracy. For Whitman, American democracy has achieved more than enough material success, so much so that it is in danger of becoming content and of reducing democracy to this measure alone. Yet it also contains a spiritual deficit: ‘I too hail those achievements [of material success] with pride and joy: then answer that the soul of man will not with such only – nay, not with such at all – be finally satisfied; … but needs what … is address’d to the loftiest.’12 This lofty summons to the souls of men and women will necessitate addressees who are readied for this beckoning and the task it implies. Whitman makes the other iteration of the essential need of readers as poets and the qualities befitting them late in Democratic Vistas. It is telling, in our interpretation, that it appears near the end of this lengthy text. It functions there as the near-final word of the piece, as the last and, for us, most lasting demand in a text full of such: Books are to be call’d for, and supplied, on the assumption that the process of reading is not a half sleep, but, in highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast’s struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself, must be on the alert, must himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay – the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start or frame-work.13

It is a call rooted in the relationship between the poet and the reader of poetry. (Are they not now, somehow, one and the same?) Whitman understands that the work of poetry ‘in the highest sense’ is to demand its reader be not in a ‘half sleep’, but in a state of intellectual athleticism, readied to grapple with words and their transformative and inexhaustible meanings at every turn. Nonetheless, this cannot remain the work of the poem or the poet alone, for genuine poetry requires a genuine reader, one who will remain ‘alert’, one who will carefully seek the ‘hints’ and ‘clues’ and ‘starts’ of the

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text with thoughtful passion and hermeneutic vigour. Whitman calls this action of a genuine reader ‘a gymnast’s struggle’, and we as hermeneuts understand this endless struggle over meaning as necessitating what we shall call interpretive agility. The best reader-as-poet, like the most accomplished gymnast, is as limber as she is strong, for strength without litheness cannot bear the weight of tradition nor handle the necessity of interpretive force. Intellectual vitality untempered by supple understanding births brittle readings that may shatter at the slightest confrontation of a critical eye. Maintaining interpretive agility means genuine readers are able to bear with and respond to tradition in meaningful ways without succumbing to or ignoring tradition as such. To read a poem with the too-assured expectation of what it will say, without an openness to interpretation or recognition of our prejudices, is purely to perpetuate a dogmatic reading. On the other hand, reading poetry without any keen interpretive effort at all negates any meaningful struggle that might have occurred, leaving the interpreter, if not the poem itself, in Whitman’s feared half sleep. Thus, a poem poorly read remains a poem still in need of being read. Consequently, we must be agile in our practice of reading – as the best gymnasts are and as Whitman so fervently desires us to be. We must distance ourselves from words and the one-dimensional meaning we might initially force upon them, or they force on us, all the while without severing the fundamental connection we have to them. In this tension we are asked to exercise freely our interpretive agility. Poets make poems and, as we have shown in our reading of Whitman, poems need readers as poets. The issue – and it is not a new one to hermeneutic thinking – is how one becomes a poet so as to be a worthy and interpretively agile reader. The straightforward and yet unfortunate answer would be we become poets by reading poems, unfortunate because the rub here is evident: one would already need to be a poet to read well enough to become one. No doubt Schiller in his classic Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man has put it as well as any – including those who have confronted this dilemma since – when in his Eighth Letter he writes of philosophers: ‘They would first have to be wise in order to love wisdom.’14 We find a hope for poetry in light of this long-standing challenge by returning to our hermeneutic claim that understanding better belongs to anyone who understands at all. Because we share the hermeneutic understanding of language as constitutive of our being-in-theworld, we furthermore hold that poetry does not come after everyday language or as mere post festum decoration to accomplished practical affairs. Thus there is hope for interpretation always, as the poetic is there with language and thus with each of us from the start. In this inescapable closeness of language we find an opening to reading well. To put it otherwise, the language of the poem is not different in kind but different in degree from the language of the everyday. Accordingly, anyone who understands has understanding enough to achieve by way of interpretation a better understanding through the poem. Any understanding, therefore, is potentially the understanding from out of which becoming a poet might emerge. Owing to this, the understanding our version of hermeneutics has of language allows us to see poems as a kind of invitation, a way of asking if the words of the poem have consequences for the words we already use. We have, and often for good reasons, grown attached to some of these words. This fondness both honours and threatens

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such words, the latter because in their repeated use they are always in danger of saying less than they might, worn as they are from this habitual and too customary use, and the former because they are words we wish to hold dear and reinterpret endlessly. For words are vital and visceral; they need to be embodied in poetry and critically interpreted, contested by poets and  readers alike. Whitman, of course, understands the eminent risk of poetry, finding even his beloved democracy in danger of being rendered painfully ineffectual, its meaning hollowed out or overlooked altogether: ‘We have frequently printed the word Democracy. Yet I cannot too often repeat that it is a word the real gist of which still sleeps, quite unawaken’d, notwithstanding the resonance and the many angry tempests out of which its syllables have come, from page or tongue.’15 Whitman recognizes the inevitable threat poetry poses against our use and understanding of language, but he also understands it to be a risk worth taking, made all the more rewarding as it challenges and enriches our living vocabularies. To be able both to give up old words and take up new ones is part of the transformation inspired by, and often follows from, reading the tradition well. Nonetheless, this accomplished engagement with tradition does not simply materialize uncultivated. It requires care; it will, in a word, demand some type of education in reading well.

Tradition as Democracy’s poetic dwelling Prophetic pragmatism conceives of philosophy as an historically circumscribed quest for wisdom that puts forward new interpretations of the world based on past traditions in order to promote existential sustenance and political relevance. – Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy

Tradition is no less powerful and consequential for our dislike of its inherent conservatism. We are not able to gainsay its boundary- and trajectory-setting influence. Whitman is in many ways an odd defender of the radical potential of tradition, calling often as he does in both Democratic Vistas and the Preface to Leaves of Grass for a truly original American literature and philosophy – one not European in the least, as if such a thing were possible in North America. Nevertheless, both works also make their claim in spite of this for a way of reading, for a way of making the careful interpretation of tradition an essential part of a new democratic revolution. As what are called classics make up in large part the intellectual tradition with which readers will be required to deal, there is a long series of sentences in Democratic Vistas deserving of our attention. Whitman writes beautifully in these passages about how these works have come to us. He likens the classics to little ships and marvels at the ‘miracles that have buoy’d them, and by incredible chances safely convey’d them’ to us.16 These classic works are our heritage, and Whitman can affirm they ‘bear a freight so dear – dearer than pride – dearer than love’.17 These classics are in need of good readers to greet their arrivals. We shall require a fitting understanding of tradition and what is possible in our interpretation of it if we are going to be able to make something new or if we, as Whitman recommends, are to allow this cargo

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‘to illuminate our own selfhood’.18 One way to embrace meaningfully this maritime inheritance is to welcome tradition while putting it to critical use, as feminist philosopher Linda Martin Alcoff argues we are able to do with the help of Gadamer’s philosophical work. Alcoff claims Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics shows that tradition holds an as yet undischarged feminism, if we read it well.19 Indeed, Gadamer’s hermeneutics can be read as crediting traditional feminine mannerisms, traits, and characteristics as holding hermeneutic and democratic value in seeking philosophical truth and pursuing genuine interpretation.20 She recognizes Gadamer’s valorization of tradition could be seen as a point of conflict between Gadamer’s theories of understanding and feminist critical theory, which is often concerned with overturning, critiquing, and defying patriarchal traditions rather than celebrating tradition’s inherent value. Nonetheless, Alcoff argues for a more deeply rooted understanding of tradition, as do we, one that demands respect for the past even as it evolves to fit the social needs and intellectual mores of the present in order to better the future. Whitman too saw the necessity for reworking tradition for radical political and poetic purposes: Of course, in the States, for both man and woman, we must entirely recast the types of highest personality from what the oriental, feudal, ecclesiastical worlds bequeath us, and which yet possess the imaginative and esthetic fields of the United States, pictorial and melodramatic, not without use as studies, but making sad work, and forming a strange anachronism upon the scenes and exigencies around us. Of course, the old undying elements remain. The task is, to successfully adjust them to new combinations, our own days.21

If we follow this definition, we must realize that we are embedded in tradition, and accordingly cannot cast off our inheritance: ‘To keep tradition alive is, as Gadamer understands, to keep it alive to the questions and experiences of the present, which means to interpret it anew in light of the changing conditions of our lives and those we care for.’22 This active and critical interpretation, which invents new combinations of thoughts, is how we take responsibility for what becomes of our own days. Tradition is nothing but and nothing less than the accumulated interpretations that have been archived, institutionalized, and embodied in words and deeds. As a result of this view of tradition in general, we must embrace the particular traditions in which we find ourselves, remaining critical of both tradition as such and our role within it. Obviously, tradition must not be merely accepted as an unchallenged truth. As agile interpreters, we must gratefully inherit the classic texts and readings left to us, reread these same texts with an evolving hermeneutic eye, and leave better readings and texts for those to come. This is one of Whitman’s greatest hopes. Referring to the wealth of European classics, he asks: ‘Yet could ye, indeed, but breathe your breath of life into our New World’s nostrils – not to enslave us, as now, but, for our needs, to breed spirit like your own – perhaps, (dare we say it?) to dominate, even destroy, what you yourselves have left!’23 With this understanding, it becomes quite clear that our conception of tradition calls for interpretive insight, marking this engagement as a philosophical and free hermeneutic endeavour rather than a purely fated and harmful passivity. This

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kind of left-wing hermeneutics and radical reworking of classic philosophical texts in favour of historically oppressed identities reminds us that tradition is ever-changing, especially if our interpretive efforts function as they ought.24 We take away from this reading a central hermeneutic insight: it is due to our being in a tradition that we have something to say and, furthermore, this having something to say ought not be mere repetition; it may lead us to say something new. To have something to say belongs to each of us, yet it is not always the case that when we speak we are saying something. On Gadamer’s account, saying is something more than the mere exchange or transmission of information, and democracy will have to demand more of communication than this. The understanding of saying which is central to democracy is articulated by Gadamer when he writes: ‘The only way in which we perceive the possibility of speaking with one another is that we have something to say to each other’, and we would add it takes some work to have something to say.25 ‘If someone is to say something to someone else it is not enough’, Gadamer recognizes, ‘that there should be a so-called recipient who is there to receive the information.’26 In line with our argument for the need of poets reading poems (and being ready to read poems), Gadamer continues by saying: ‘For over and above that there must be a readiness to allow something to be said to us.’27 This readiness, as Gadamer puts it, is for us an echo of Whitman’s demand. In order to promote a democratic way of life, we must understand the centrality of language before we are able to be active in the world with enough of what Whitman calls affection. Consequently, it is un- or even anti-democratic that what is most closed off to the poetic power of words is our understanding of the power words have because they constitute our essential nature: ‘Language always furnishes the fundamental articulations that guide our understanding of the world.’28 Our failure to understand language as our essential nature is what leaves democracy grasping for something that is in one sense far way and yet in another sense always near. It will be the task of reading well that is able to lead to this understanding and in so doing bring this nearness and thus something more democratic to the fore. Against this backdrop, a few lines from Whitman take us towards an understanding of this nearness. We have thus far tried to stay close to Whitman’s prose as his poetry has garnered many volumes of attention. We find as early as the opening lines of ‘Song of Myself ’ a profound hermeneutic echo. We shall read these lines closely as they hold for us almost enough in their own right to hail Whitman as a significant theorist who has much to contribute to contemporary hermeneutic philosophy. Just thirty lines into the poem, their early occurrence suggesting they are meant to guide us in a primary way, Whitman provides the following: ‘Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much? have you reckon’d / the earth much? / Have you practis’d so long to learn to read? / Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems? / Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess / the origin of all poems.’29 In these few lines of poetry Whitman does more than announce the truth that engaging poems is fraught with difficulty. From our perspective, he gives us a hermeneutic way of seeing how reckoning is reading and is linked to understanding, how in turn understanding is linked to meaning, and how together reading, understanding, and meaning are linked to what he calls the origin (of all poems). Following this chain of reckoning leads to

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the heart of hermeneutic thinking. The reckoning cited here is always ongoing. Each line makes much of what it presupposes. These lines do not ask if one is able to reckon; rather they assert in a sound hermeneutic way that one is always able to do so because one is always already reckoning in some manner or another. Asking ‘have you?’ for each specific reckoning shows the lines themselves are built on the hermeneutic idea that one is an interpretive being by virtue of being-in-the-world. Consequently, the question is have you reckoned much, have you long practised reading, have you struggled to get at the deeper meaning of poems. On this interpretation we are able to see Whitman’s ‘much’, ‘long’, and ‘getting at’ as saying one’s everyday understanding is able to be made better by an effort of reading. It follows that reading as reckoning names one’s working diligently, carefully, and reflectively on a text – whether that be a thousand acres, the earth, a poem, or whatever each might mean allegorically. From out of an always already at-work sense that some reckoning is going on, which is made possible by the understanding with which we cannot help but begin, a better and deeper reading is able to be made. Whitman’s uses of ‘reading’ and ‘reckoning’ are thus employed in a broad hermeneutical way as synonyms for interpretation, and in making this connection he begins to theorize what reading is able to accomplish in a profound and fecund sense and why he is able call for a poet (reckoner) on each side of the poem. This way of thinking also allows Whitman to have some faith when he queries every citizen – as is required of democratic thought – will you practice so long to learn to read? Each who hears the question is able, in Whitman’s estimation, to say something in their reading. We benefit from a constant reminder that the tradition to which we cannot help but belong also, in potentially radical ways, belongs to those who seek something other than what is today. Saying we need to read and engage the works that have already and that are in constant process of making us what we are and what we are able to become is one way of embodying the understanding of tradition in its transformative power. Today, long into the post-feudal world and now that America has not in fact lived up to this New World promise nearly well enough, we face the responsibility of re-singing, re-writing, and re-stating the lessons and insights of what has been handed down to us. We shall begin reworking (almost) everything by thinking hermeneutically within the sound of Whitman’s voice: ‘We see that almost everything that has been written, sung, or stated, of old, with reference to humanity under the feudal and oriental institutes, religions, and for other lands, needs to be re-written, re-sung, re-stated, in terms consistent with the institution of these States.’30 To be a reader with interpretive agility is to be able to look to what has been said and allow it a chance to say something new. It also means allowing what has been silenced because of its difference to speak as a part of our working through the past.

Heirs It so happens that Walt Whitman is the one white father who shares the systematic disadvantages of his heterogeneous offspring trapped inside a closet that is, in reality, as huge as the continental spread of North and South America. What Whitman

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envisioned, we, the people and the poets of the New World, embody. He has been punished for the moral questions that our very lives arouse. – June Jordan, ‘For the Sake of a People’s Poetry’

There are many Whitmans. The popular, all too popular Whitman is in danger of being the facile Whitman, the one too easily read, too easily digestible, too easily made compatible with the status quo. We prefer and are moved by another Whitman, the trouble-making Whitman, the one who calls himself ‘the sworn poet of every dauntless rebel the world over’.31 This rebel-inspiring Whitman understands that the modern world’s weakening of authoritarian structures – structures seeking to control interpretation in every detail and punishing any deviation from them – is a guarantee only that freedom must do its work. That is to say, the democratic opening of interpretive space onto a wide horizon of possible interpretations occurring in the wake of lessening the force of the authoritarian structures of the past ushers in its dangers as well as its promises. The freedom to interpret anew is also and unavoidably the freedom not to interpret well but on the basest dogmatic grounds promoting from the past its most oppressive, anti-democratic, and cruel moments, the freedom to interpret with an exclusionary malice that also belongs to this new freedom. We will not be the first to observe that such anti-democratic interpretations have had and are having their day. Whitman understands better interpretations are needed to ‘fend off ruin and defection’. Moments before calling for readers as poets, he laments the worst of interpreters who also belong to democracy’s possible futures: ‘It is useless to deny it: Democracy grows rankly up the thickest noxious, deadliest plants and fruits of all.’32 He is aware that the ‘demonism of greed’ and its like will attempt to make themselves the dogmatic authority to which every other interpretation must be made to answer. Whitman acknowledges the danger and the promise of tradition, has a radical hermeneutic sensibility towards the modern world, and asks: ‘We understand then do we not?’ whom we wish to embrace.33 It is this Whitman to whom we wish to call ourselves heirs. This Whitman is here, already waiting for us. He awaits us in words and in the hope we shall come to him on equal terms, as poets, ready and interpretively agile enough to handle the democratic demand. Because Whitman waits for us, let us spend a moment with him here in the 1856 ‘Sun-Down Poem’, later titled ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’. The text, abounding with prophetic proclamations, is Whitman’s exploration of body and soul, in which he carefully considers questions of identity and of American peoples and landscape. The poem contains the recognizable and lengthy descriptive catalogues that made Whitman so innovative and singular. This poem, from the second edition of his seminal work, is our meeting with Whitman, one that he clearly anticipates: ‘I too lived, / I too walked the streets … / I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me.’34 Indeed, the majority of the poem is in the past tense, and the tone is remarkably contemplative in its address – a call that now extends beyond Whitman’s then-current historical moment and into the future to meet us: ‘What is it, then, between us? What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us? / Whatever it is, it avails not – distance avails not, and place avails not.’35

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Months and years have and will continue to stand between Whitman and his reader, as will differently measured moments of victories and defeats, moments of celebration and of sorrow. Yet to Whitman, this impossible temporal and existential obstacle is nothing: ‘Closer yet I approach you / … I considered long and seriously of you before you were born.’36 The poem itself now unfolds as both a romantic lament and a hopeful call, for Whitman has longed for us as we have, albeit unknowingly and perhaps to our detriment, yearned for him: ‘You have waited, you always wait / … We receive you … / We use you … / We fathom you not – we love you.’37 Thus, ‘Sun-Down Poem’ can be read as Whitman’s affectionate address to and for the democratic and cosmopolitan vision he hopes to bring to fruition. Ultimately, it is a call to thought and word and deed in the contemporary reader – a call to read and critically interpret classic texts, to better our own understandings, and to fulfil our hermeneutic responsibilities as reader-poets. Not every stranger is recently come. Many have been around awhile. The tradition, if well read, holds open a space for both the strange, the new, and the surprising. There might be more strangers in our midst than we yet acknowledge: to welcome them; to be able to welcome them belongs to the hermeneutic and democratic project. This is the treasure that tradition might become to radical hermeneutics, a place filled with strangers whose robust voices have not yet been allowed a hearing but whose insights belong to democracy’s future if it is to be worthy of our efforts. It will take courage to read well and thus to be revolutionary: ‘courage yet my brothers or my sisters’, Whitman tells us.38 Every critical theory of any merit begins in part by welcoming such strangeness and making the voices thought lost or abandoned vital again, brought to life by interpretation, by the act of being a welcoming poet on the other side of the words already spoken yet remaining to be read. ‘It belongs to the nature of familiarity with the world’, Gadamer shows us, ‘that whenever we exchange words with one another, we share the world.’39 Elsewhere, he tells us the work of art – the poem preeminently – provides a ‘joy in knowing more than what is already familiar’.40 Yet, as our discussion of tradition has shown, it is always from out of the familiar, first and foremost, that the joyful and unfamiliar might be able to arrive. The ever-present danger of the familiar’s not giving way is, without doubt, a danger against which we must always remain on guard. Poems are best suited to de-familiarize the world because poems set words into relief given that the poem is what Gadamer calls an eminent text. If we are, as it were, made of words, when reading a genuine poem well we are able to set ourselves, or our self-understanding, into relief. By doing this we get a view of who we are, who we would like to become, or are persuaded to give up some aspect of our being-in-theworld that we have come to see as detrimental to living well. When words place us in such a situation, we are able to come to an understanding that we are who we are by way of the relations that words constitute. The more genuine the poem and the reading of the poem, the more it stands out from the rest of language and hence the better able we are to set our self-understanding into relief, not so much seeing ourselves in the poem (as mere identification), but rather seeing ourselves and our relations by way of the poem. This is why Whitman is able to say in the last of the lines we cite from ‘Song of Myself ’ the origin of all poems is

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available to our understanding. The origin of all poems is language. Reading well gets us in touch with ourselves in the sense of allowing us to understand how we come to self-understanding amid the linguistic conditions of our historical situatedness. If we are what we are from reading words then to get at the meaning of poems is to get to the meaning of living itself. The pride of getting at the meaning of poems becomes a pride at getting to an understanding of ourselves as interpretive beings through and through. Poems give us, by allowing us to think of language as essential to our being, a distance, however slight, from what would otherwise be the tyranny of tradition. Oscar Wilde famously avowed that poetry might have passed Whitman by, but philosophy would take note of him. Poetry came back around to find Whitman. It is a better thing too that those who came for him were strangers, forced exiles, and until recently, unwelcome voices in the literary canon; in varied verse Whitman’s dauntless rebel heirs are everywhere worldwide. This chorus of voices, different in wonderfully democratic ways, keeps alive Whitman’s cosmopolitan wish. As great as this is, however, Whitman still waits for the philosophy (and philosophers) that missed him, that did not come back to take note of him despite Wilde’s assurance. As we have shown, a left-wing democratic hermeneutics stands well poised to make this return to Whitman and his philosophical insights and provocations and to read the tradition in radical and emancipatory ways with his encouragement. We are able to engage it; indeed, we must do so if we are to twist away from it in a manner judged better by the light of tradition’s genuine poems, of which Whitman’s and his heirs’ are exemplary.

Learning to read and tradition O, let America be America again – / The land that never has been yet – – Langston Hughes, ‘Let America Be America Again’

The task of learning to read in and against certain aspects of tradition is as much a part of the democratic project as many other well-documented educative strategies. Pedagogically we find ourselves still in agreement with George S. Counts’ insights along these lines concerning teaching and tradition composed some seventy years after Whitman’s calls in Democratic Vistas yet touched by its spirit: To refuse to face the task of creating a vision of a future America immeasurably more just and noble and beautiful than the America of today is to evade the most crucial, difficult, and important educational task. Until we have assumed this responsibility we are scarcely justified in opposing and mocking the efforts of so-called patriotic societies to introduce into the schools a tradition, which, though narrow and unenlightened, nevertheless represents an honest attempt to meet a profound social and educational need.41

The question is not whether we shall have a tradition but which tradition shall we share and how shall we be readied to interpret it well, which is to say, read it towards better

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ends in freedom taught by hermeneutics. A mere lament over tradition and its hold on us will not be enough. Lamenting tradition will remain complicit with the problem to which we are attempting to respond. What we have called understanding better, Counts calls ‘finer and more authentic’: ‘Only when we have fashioned a finer and more authentic vision than they will we be fully justified in our opposition to their efforts.’42 To leave this engagement with tradition and what shall count as our most compelling inheritance to a narrow conservatism and an anti-democratic fundamentalism would be a betrayal of the radical potential of tradition itself. It would be a failure to heed the democratic demand for educating citizens as reader-poets. Whitman no doubt agrees. ‘The American bards shall be marked for generosity and affection and for encouraging competitors … . They shall be … without monopoly or secrecy.’ He goes on to assure us that these poets will be ‘glad to pass any thing to any one … hungry for equals night and day’.43 Fundamentalism, that is, all stripes of unenlightened narrowness ever keen for a monopoly on thought, wants but one unattainable and undemocratic thing: to be the only Sun. A poet on each side of the poem teaches one to see the virtue of the night and its millions of suns, none clamouring for the title of the only. Whitman praises the day, to be sure, yet he reminds us in subtle ways that stars are also suns; they are humble enough to share the stage. This is the good night, or at least the better night, seen from one possible democratic vista. One wonders if it is a far brighter and more promising time of day than any falsely claimed noon that pretends and would desire to burn with only a single Sun.

8

‘Things as They Are / Are Changed upon the Blue Guitar’: Self-Realization and Productive Imagination Saulius Geniusas

The ego and the self Although in everyday language, ‘the ego’ and ‘the self ’ are used interchangeably, there are good philosophical reasons to distinguish them. In what follows, the ego will be understood as the subject of the cogito, to whom experiences are given and who takes joy in them, suffers from them, or remains indifferent to them. The ego thus conceived is distinguishable from everything physical, social, or cultural; it is neither embodied nor culturally or historically embedded. Moreover, insofar as the ego is not the content but the subject of the cogito, it is separable not only from its body and its natural as well as sociocultural environment, it is also separable from the stream of experiences. The ego is not the content given in the stream; rather, it transcends the stream in that it is the subject to whom the stream belongs. By contrast, here I will understand the concept of the self the way it is usually understood in both hermeneutics and pragmatism – as an already embodied as well as culturally and historically contextualized agent of thoughts, feelings, and actions. The self is always already a self among other selves, a member of a particular community. Insofar as the subject is conceived as the self, it does not stand at a distance from its body, surroundings, and thoughts. Quite on the contrary, the self is perpetually affected and transformed by its sensations, feelings, and thoughts. In short, the self is an ‘enworlded’ subjectivity. What role does imagination play in the context of philosophical reflections on the ego? Here it is conceived methodologically, as the basis of our insights into the essence of the ego. If it is possible to imagine A in separation from B then we can conclude that A does not belong to B’s essence. By the same token, if it is not possible to imagine A in separation from B, we can conclude that A belongs to the essence of B. Following such a method, philosophers, both in the West and in the East, have often argued for two claims: (1) the body does not belong to the essence of the ego, while (2) thinking constitutes the essence of the ego.

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Of what significance is imagination when one conceives of subjectivity as an embodied and socioculturally embedded agent of actions, feelings, and thoughts, in short, as an ‘enworlded’ subjectivity? A new possibility opens up in such a framework. Besides thinking of imagination as the methodological basis that generates insights into the essence of any phenomenon under scrutiny, one can also conceive of imagination as the method that leads to self-differentiation, self-transformation, and self-realization – to the pursuit of new possibilities, whose realization would simultaneously mark self-actualization. When it comes to philosophical reflections on the self, imagination opens a path that transcends presumed invariables as it leads to the apprehension that to be oneself, one must become other than one is. This distinction between the ego and the self is significant not only for philosophy of imagination but also for philosophy of self-realization. In the following analysis, I will rely on a conception of self-realization that was recently worked out by Danish philosopher Jan Tønnesvang. According to Tønnesvang, ‘The basic structure of selfrealization should be understood as the processes through which an individual realizes his potentials in an individually creative and original style in relation to those horizons of meaning that lie beyond himself and those forms of connectedness in which he is involved as part of his humanity and as foundation for his self-understanding.’1 On this definition, the self, not the ego, is the subject of self-realization. If it is at all possible to speak of the realization of the ego, this turn of phrase would mean something entirely different from what is suggested in this guiding definition. According to the view that I will aim to substantiate in the following investigation, self-realization is not possible without imagination. Self-realization is a peculiar form of self-transformation which rests on the subject’s capacity to project a vision of a future self that cannot be identical with the present self. This capacity to liberate oneself from one’s present and past self-identifications and to project a different sense of selfhood into the future has its seat in imagination.

Subjective and objective conditions of self-realization As Lars Geer Hammershøj argues in his ‘The Social Pathologies of Self-Realization’, there has been a shift in the modern conception of individualization. We no longer become individuals through self-determination but through self-realization. ‘Freedom as self-determination means that the individual is obliged to decide for him- or herself and choose between existing possibilities of lifestyles, whereas freedom as selfrealization entails that the individual is obliged to create his or her own self-realization projects.’2 In the words of Axel Honneth, ‘more and more the presentation of an “authentic self ” is one of the demands placed upon individuals, above all in the sphere of skilled labor, so that it is frequently no longer possible to distinguish between a real and a fictitious self-discovery, even for the individuals concerned.’3 Individualization, conceived as the fundamental form of self-realization, appears to be especially prevalent in the Western world. Joseph Epstein’s observation that ‘81 percent of Americans feel that they have a book in them – and should write it’4 is a good illustration of this shift in perspective. As Epstein further remarked, this time

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with reference to Europeans, ‘it was Paul Valéry who said that the word “creation” has been so overused that even God must be embarrassed to have it attributed to him.’5 This shift suggests that we, as individuals, no longer exercise our freedom by adjudicating between different possibilities which are handed down to us. Rather, we exercise our freedom by determining the very field of our possibilities. In a way deprived of meaning, we are ‘condemned to be free’ and destined to ‘become who we are’. This shift in individualization rests on a strange assumption. It is as though we know what self-realization is and what exactly we want to realize; moreover, it is as though we know the formula for its execution and know what it takes to successfully implement it. Recent approaches to elementary education, which suggest that we regard children as fullfledged individuals fully capable of independent reasoning, self-determination, and selfrealization, provide a good illustration of the shift in perspective I am here referring to. Yet there are no formulas for self-realization that one could simply implement so as to obtain a desired outcome, if only because self-realization is contingent upon the world that the self inhabits – a world which comprises natural and sociocultural conditions that affect the possibilities of self-realization. Nonetheless, the now dominant conception of individuation, conceived in terms of a shift from self-determination to self-realization, suggests that we all have the powers needed for self-realization. It is this assumption, questionable as it is, that renders the phenomena of social pathologies highly intriguing. There are good reasons to maintain that in the past decades the significant increase of such pathologies as depression, attention deficit disorder, dependence pathologies, and self-imposed solitude are closely related to the demand for self-realization. As Hammershøj argues, ‘The nature of these pathologies indicate a shift in individualization from freedom as self-determination to freedom as self-realization in that they seem to resemble or reflect failed self-realization projects.’6 This being said, one should nonetheless stress that self-realization is equally dependent on purely subjective conditions. Self-realization is determined from within, even though it might depend on what lies without. Yet how exactly is one to understand the interiority of the self? One could suggest that the self is a natural being filled with natural desires and needs, and that therefore self-realization is nothing other than their fulfilment. One sometimes refers to such a view as ‘the pattern of maximum fulfillment of desires’. This view, however, fails to reach those levels of interiority that constitute the subjective conditions of self-realization. This view overlooks an important distinction between such phenomena as desires and needs, on the one hand, and the phenomenon of the will, on the other. As Plato already argued in The Republic (here I am referring to the famous story of Leontius in Book IV), conflicts of this nature are ineliminable from human existence. With regard to self-realization, this means that I myself must will my own realization, even if the content of my will is set against my desires and needs. I myself must choose my future self as a possibility. I must both will and strive to realize it. Otherwise, the realization that follows is not my own realization and cannot be qualified as self-realization. There can be no self-realization without a freely chosen vision of one’s future self, a vision that must contrast with the present self and motivate one to actualize the envisioned possibility. In what follows, I maintain that imagination is the power that enables us to envision one’s future possibilities and lies at the root of self-realization.

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The horizontal and vertical dimensions of self-realization The problematic of self-realization unfolds on two levels: a horizontal and a vertical one. The horizontal dimension concerns the relation between the self and others. The self that is capable of self-realization is always already a self in relation with others, a self who is nourished and vitalized through relations to others. In short, self-realization is the realization of the social self. The vertical dimension concerns what one could call a subjective hierarchy of values. By this I mean that self-realization is the actualization of a potentiality, which simultaneously signals the suppression of other possibilities. To illustrate what is at stake in this horizontal and vertical schematization of selfrealization, let me introduce a guiding example, to which I will return continuously in this investigation. Imagine that, in my aim to live a philosophical life, I am working on a paper on imagination and self-realization. Moreover, imagine that the writing of this paper forms a significant part of my self-realization project. On the vertical axis, my commitment to write this paper must win over other commitments if I am to identify the first commitment as a form of self-realization. Now and again, the commitment and dedication that come along with the pursuit of self-realization can take rather extreme forms. Consider the case of Gauguin who chooses a life of painting in Tahiti over life with his family. He thereby deliberately rejects his other obligations for the sake of painting, which he conceives as a form of self-realization. On the horizontal axis, this means that I am committed to a value that is not merely personal. I am committed to a public form of life – call it a philosophical life or a life of scholarship. This means, however, that even such an extreme case as Gauguin should not be conceived in terms of a distinction between what is exclusively private and what is public. As Somogy Varga insightfully observes, even Gauguin ‘owes to the public value of art and thereby to a community of valuers in a way that limits the way he can consistently pursue his project’.7 If it is indeed true that the subject of self-realization is always an ‘enworlded’ self then it must also be true that self-realization is only possible as a peculiar transformation of the personal world that the self inhabits: self-realization and world-transformation walk hand in hand. Self-realization is the realization of oneself in relation with others; it is, as Tønnesvang observes, a ‘self-realization-in-connectedness’.8 This brief look at the structure of self-realization clarifies some central reasons why philosophical reflections on self-realization have downplayed the significance of imagination. Since the self is not cut off from its surrounding world, self-realization is only possible as a simultaneous transformation of the world one inhabits. Yet according to the standard view, while the world is public, imagination is private. How, then, can imagination be the seed from which self-realization grows? The private nature of imagination appears to be irreconcilable with the public horizon of self-realization and world-modification. It thereby becomes understandable why philosophical analyses of self-realization pay little attention to imagination.

Productive and reproductive imagination In light of the outlined problem, it is important to draw a distinction between two forms of imagination: productive and reproductive imagination. In what follows, I will

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mainly rely on how this distinction is conceptualized in Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology of imagination. In the words of some of Ricoeur’s French and American critics, imagination constitutes the single philosophical problem that pervades Ricoeur’s highly diverse inquiries,9 while the distinction between productive and reproductive imagination lies at the centre of Ricoeur’s reflections on imagination. According to Ricoeur, reproductive imagination constitutes an almost exhaustive horizon of reflections on imagination in the history of philosophy. One could briefly characterize reproductive imagination as the form of imagination that generates copies or replicas of a pregiven reality. Following Jean-Paul Sartre, let us say that imagination exposes the subject of experience to nothingness and that nothingness can be understood in four fundamental ways: as absence, existence elsewhere, non-existence, and neutralization.10 Within such a taxonomy of nothingness, one could say that reproductive imagination conceives of nothingness under the paradigm of absence. Sartre’s favourite example in his L’imaginaire illustrates this form of imagination remarkably well: Sartre often returns to the example of Peter, who is not in Paris, but now and again in London or in Berlin. In short, Peter is absent. Yet the manner in which one intends his image presents Peter how he would be given if he were still in one’s perceptual field. To be sure, imagination does not reproduce Peter the same way he would be given in propria persona. A number of his features are blurred and remain indeterminate. Moreover, imagination can certainly fuse his bodily features with those of Paul. Yet there is nothing productive about such inescapable modifications. These alterations indicate not the strength but the weakness of imagination. If only one’s imaginative powers were more distinct, the image of Peter would be free from these indeterminacies. By contrast, productive imagination does not reproduce a pre-existent reality. Its function is not merely that of generating images, which have no analogues in the perceptual world. As we will soon see on the basis of some examples which I will borrow from painting, productive imagination has the power to reach and transform personalistically conceived everyday reality. In his published writings, Ricoeur has thematized productive imagination first and foremost in two frameworks, namely, those of poetic and sociopolitical imagination. Most of his published essays on imagination focus on poetic imagination. In these essays, Ricoeur argues that productive imagination is language-based.11 This is a contentious issue, which in the present context I will leave unexplored.12 However, still in 1975, Ricoeur delivered a set of nineteen lectures on imagination at the University of Chicago. These lectures provide us with the most elaborate account of productive imagination in Ricoeur’s writings in general.13 In the sixteenth lecture, Ricoeur remarks that productive imagination can be studied in at least four frameworks: the above-mentioned frameworks of poetic and sociopolitical imagination and also in the frameworks of epistemological and religious imagination. Some of Ricoeur’s leading interpreters have taken this to mean that Ricoeur conceives of these four domains as exhaustive frameworks of productive imagination.14 I would nonetheless contend that this fourfold taxonomy of productive imagination is not exhaustive. For, as Ricoeur remarks in the seventeenth lecture, productive imagination can be studied by following the ‘artistic approach’.15 Where exactly is one to fit ‘the artistic approach?’ It is out of place within the fourfold classification. Although it is closest to poetic imagination, it

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need not take the form of linguistic expression. One could qualify the artistic approach as ‘quasi-poetic’. No other of Ricoeur’s published or unpublished works provides as detailed an account of productive imagination in arts in general and in painting in particular as his Lectures on Imagination. My goal is to show that Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology of painting provides the resources needed to conceptualize productive imagination as a fundamental resource that underlies self-transformation and self-realization.

Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology of painting The seventeenth lecture provides us with a number of examples taken from the history of painting, which are meant to illustrate that painting does not merely break with reality by transferring us to the imaginary world. It does not merely disrupt our daily routine and thereby enable us to become once again sufficiently strong and nonchalant so as to continue with our daily duties and obligation. Far from being just an exquisite form of escapism, which temporarily diverts our attention from real concerns, art places in brackets the actual world yet only so as to refashion reality in a new way. According to Ricoeur’s central claim, precisely by breaking with reality, painting expresses reality in a productive way. More precisely, art enables us to ‘forget’ our surroundings, yet this form of forgetfulness enables us to see the world with new eyes and hear it with new ears. Let me turn to a few illustrations, which concern one and the same colour blue. The first example is taken from Byzantine paintings: although we perceive the sky as blue, in these paintings it is redescribed as gold. According to Ricoeur, we should not think of such forms of redescription as mere illusions but as detours that enable the painter to bring the object’s value, which in its own turn transforms our subsequent perception of the object itself. Supposedly, in light of these paintings, we no longer see the sky as blue: our vision projects onto the sky a value, which becomes its inherent quality. With an eye on the role that the concept of Einströmen plays in Husserl’s late writings, one could say that we are confronted here with the insight that painting, conceived as a prelinguistic reflection on the lifeworld, flows into and transforms our basic perceptual relation to our surrounding world. The second example also concerns the colour blue, but this time as it appears in Picasso’s blue period (1901–4), which focuses on those living on the fringes of society – beggars and prostitutes, and, more generally, the poor, the frail, and the downtrodden. Ricoeur pays particular attention to Picasso’s ‘The Old Guitarist’, which depicts a blind beggar in torn clothes, absorbed in the sounds of his guitar and oblivious to his loneliness and poverty. Picasso modelled ‘The Old Guitarist’ after a blind artist whom he knew in Madrid and completed this painting in 1903, shortly after his close friend, Carlos Casagemas, strongly affected by a failed love affair, committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. At the time when Ricoeur was delivering his Lectures, this painting was hanging in the Art Institute of Chicago (it is still there today), and according to Ricoeur’s own admission, he returned almost weekly to the Art Institute

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‘to see the blue Picasso’. In this painting, the anguish, isolation, poverty, melancholia, and misery take on the blue colour. To be sure, in the history of painting, this is not an unprecedented occurrence. Picasso’s predecessors – especially the symbolist painters from France and Spain – used the colour blue to convey the emotions of sadness and despair. Moreover, in a way reminiscent of El Greco, whom he was studying at the time, Picasso portrays these emotions by deforming the guitarist’s body and stretching it out, as witnessed especially in the guitarist’s face and fingers. Thus ‘The Old Guitarist’ makes understandable why Picasso would have been credited with such expressions as ‘good artists borrow, great artists steal’ and ‘when there’s anything to steal, I steal’. Nonetheless, this explicit admission that the background that underlies his art is not of his own making does not place Picasso’s works within the confines of reproductive imagination. In this regard, Picasso’s following observation calls for special attention: We all know that Art is not Truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies. If he only shows in his work that he has searched, and re-searched, for the way to put over lies, he would never accomplish anything.16

In a way reminiscent of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, who tells his disciples that poets tell many lies and immediately adds that he is also a poet, Picasso describes his painting as a lie that enables the viewer to see the truth. One can interpret this turn of phrase as a suggestion that for an artist to qualify his work as a successful accomplishment, he must be convinced that the viewer of his work is transformed by it and can no longer see the blue colour the way he saw it before. Only then could the work be a lie that subsequently becomes a truth. The blue colour in this painting is meant to absorb human emotions; it is meant to become inseparable from their depiction. In the words of William James, it is meant to become flesh of their flesh and blood of their blood. Although Ricoeur does not provide us with a reference to Wallace Stevens’ poem, ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’, it appears to be supremely well suited to illustrate Ricoeur’s interpretation of this painting. Stevens composed this poem in 1937 and conceived of it as an imaginary conversation with Picasso’s ‘The Old Guitarist’. ‘They said, “You have a blue guitar, / You do not play things as they are.” / The man replied, “Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.” ’17 So also for Ricoeur, by transferring the viewer into the imaginary world, this painting transforms the viewer’s perceptual relation to the actual world. Here we face productive imagination in its full force, as it manifests itself in the prelinguistic field of experience. In Picasso’s words, here we face a lie that is meant to become a truth. But if so, what we actually see when we see colours is to a large degree shot through with imagination. ‘Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar’. To present this point in a more forceful way, let me turn to one more illustration, which concerns the impressionists’ use of colour. The history of colour with Cezanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh is the conquest of the redescriptive value of colours for expressing the qualities of things. Baudelaire’s critique of photography plays a central

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role in this context. It is important to keep in mind that photography, which comes under attack in Baudelaire’s Salon of 1859, is the photography used almost exclusively for the purpose of copying fleeting realities and preserving memories. Since Baudelaire sees photography as a threat to art and its aspirations, his goal is to describe ‘a madness, an extraordinary fanaticism’ that ‘took possession of all these new sun-worshippers’: In matters of painting and sculpture, the present-day Credo of the sophisticated ... is this: ‘I believe in Nature, and I believe only in Nature … . I believe that Art is, and cannot be other than, the exact reproduction of Nature. … Thus an industry that could give us a result identical to Nature would be the absolute of Art … .’ And now the faithful says to himself: ‘Since photography gives us every guarantee of exactitude that we could desire (they really believe that, the mad fools!), then photography and Art are the same thing.’18

As Ricoeur puts it, for Baudelaire ‘photography was a disaster’19 first and foremost because it described reality without introducing any break from it, and second, because it threatened to reduce art to the level of reproductive imagination. Put otherwise, for Baudelaire, photography is marked by the complete suppression of productive imagination in that it only aims to transpose the objective dimensions of the exterior world. Baudelaire has nothing to say about the photographer’s choice of angle, shadows, or the light of day. Yet let us suspend the question concerning the legitimacy of this critique. In the present context, what matters more is the alternative, which Baudelaire identifies with art. For Baudelaire, precisely because art introduces a break with reality, it accomplishes what he believes photography fails to achieve, namely, it redescribes our perceptual relation to the world. This, indeed, is what is essential to art and to imagination: without breaking with reality, that is, without transposing us into the imaginary world, neither art nor imagination could offer us reality’s redescription in a way that would modify our perceptual relation to the surrounding world. Such, then, is the distinction between productive and reproductive imagination: while reproductive imagination is in Baudelaire’s sense ‘photographic’ in that it merely copies or replicates that reality which we come across in the pregiven world, productive imagination is in Baudelaire’s sense ‘artistic’ in that it introduces breaks with reality and on this basis offers reality’s redescription. One could further describe both forms of imagination as utopian insofar as one understands utopia in the literal sense of the term: what is given in imagination remains without place in the horizon of actuality. To borrow Sartre’s terminology to express an anti-Sartrean insight, while both forms of imagination are isolating and annihilating, only productive imagination is constitutive in the sense that it constitutes not only imaged objects but transforms our experience of the actual world as well. As Baudelaire’s critique of photography powerfully suggests, productive imagination, taken along with its constitutive functions, is essential not only to poetry and prose but also to painting. Moreover, with Picasso’s ‘The Old Guitarist’ in mind, one can further add that the constitutive function is essential not only to painting but to music, which marks a highly significant augmentation of our emotive relation to the world.20

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Hermeneutic phenomenology of painting and the ethics of self-realization Ricoeur’s reflections on art in general, and painting in particular, provide a convincing answer to the suspicion that imagination lacks the power needed to modify our actual world. We faced a problem because of the assumption that imagination is closed within the walls of subjectivity, yet now we see that this is unjustified. Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology of painting demonstrates that imagination is one of the powers that codetermines our perceptual relation to the world. We absorb and appropriate imaginative interpretations of our surroundings, which need not be of our own making. To use another example from Ricoeur’s lectures, it is only thanks to painting that we can see landscapes: Each painting develops a feeling, a mood, which had no name before this painting. We had no place in our vocabulary for these feelings, because they are created by the painting. Nature is a landscape because of landscape painting. The painting of landscape is relatively recent. The first landscapes appear in the background of Renaissance painting before coming to the foreground with English painting and then French Impressionist painting. The invention of landscape painting is at the same time a new way of looking at nature as a landscape. There is an augmentation of our world.21

Perception is soaked in an imagination that modifies our world. Perceptual objects appear to us as dressed up in particular meanings, many of which are of not only a perceptual but an imaginary nature. I want to interpret Ricoeur’s reflections on painting as a blueprint for working out a more elaborate conception of productive imagination, conceived as the basis of selfrealization and the correlative modification of the personal world. Painting enables the viewer to abandon the actual world and enter the irreal world, where he encounters something other than himself (e.g. the colour blue) and is affected by this encounter in such a way that when he returns to the actual world, his exposure to the same object is no longer what it used to be. ‘Could we not say that it’s precisely when painting is no longer figurative that it’s completely fictional and then that it orients us toward aspects of our way of inhabiting this world according even to the nonfigurative?’22 What could this tell us about self-realization? Let me return to my guiding example: in my aim to pursue a philosophical life, I am preparing a paper on imagination and self-realization. Suppose I have an insight that I am striving to work out, yet I also know that a number of others have come across this insight and are also, at this very moment, striving to articulate it. Yet if a successful completion of this paper is the form my self-realization takes, will it not give rise to the desire that I be the only one, or at least the first one, to express this insight? Moreover, will this desire not lead me to prevent others from running ahead and ‘winning the race’, thereby crushing my project of self-realization?23 Yet such a narrow pursuit of self-realization conflates self-realization with self-interest, and therefore it cannot be successfully carried through. Paradoxically, to carry out the project of self-realization

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successfully, I must forget about myself in the process. I must be fully absorbed by, fully committed to, the project’s realization. Put otherwise, the self must take an analogous step to the one that the artist takes as he abandons the perceptual world and transitions into the world of imagination. In the case of art, this detour is indispensable if art is to transform one’s perceptual relation to the world. When it comes to projects of selfrealization, the abandonment of narrow self-interest is no less necessary. Insofar as one does not abandon them, one cannot pursue the themes under scrutiny wholeheartedly. Thus insofar as I actively hinder the attempt of others to ‘win the race’ and crush my self-realization project, I in effect hinder my own possibilities of dedicating myself to the project unswervingly and carrying it through effectively.

From phenomenological hermeneutics to pragmatism: Self-realization, self-duplication, and temporality There is another reason why such narrow pursuits of self-realization turn out to be anticlimactic. To clarify this issue, we need to supplement phenomenological hermeneutics of self-realization with insights borrowed from pragmatism. In this regard, we need to turn to John Dewey’s analysis of self-realization, which we come across in his early study, ‘Self-Realization as the Moral Ideal’ (1893). Here Dewey reproaches the mainstream discussions of his day concerning the origins of moral judgement as largely sterile debates, which are more concerned with expressing allegiance to the empiricist and intellectualist standpoints than with making a substantive contribution to moral philosophy and particularly to philosophical analyses of the moral end. Dewey identifies the idea of self-realization as a newer and much called for possibility – a third way which provides fresh resources to reengage the debate regarding the moral end. Dewey maintains that the idea of self-realization liberates one from two deep-rooted prejudices: it neither subordinates the self to any law outside itself (as happens in some dominant versions of intellectualism), nor does it reduce the self to a passive bundle of sensations (as happens in some dominant forms of empiricism). Rather, the ethics of self-realization suggests that one can meaningfully speak of the moral ideal if, and only if, one starts with a notion of the self conceived as an active, volitional agent of moral action. However, with an eye on the prevalent philosophical analyses of self-realization, Dewey further remarks that ‘with those who use this phrase [self-realization], there is often a tendency … to rest in it as a finality, instead of taking it as a statement of a problem’.24 Dewey is deeply critical of those notions of selfhood that presuppose a fixed schema and conceive of self-realization as the filling up of this schema. Building on the basis of Dewey’s analysis, one could suggest that such a schematic conception of selfhood can take three fundamental forms. The first version conceives of the past self as a general outline which the present and future selves are meant to fill up. The second version pays no attention to the past as it conceptualizes the present self as the schema which the future self is meant to bring to realization. The third version instrumentalizes the present self and conceives of it as a mere means which serves the future self. To these three versions of a ‘rigid’, ‘fixed’, or ‘presupposed’ self Dewey

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opposes the notion of a ‘practical self ’ – ‘a reality as specific and concrete as a growing tree or a moving planet’.25 Dewey’s attempt to work out a pragmatic conception of selfhood on the basis of specific activities it is involved in is set against both hedonistic ethics (which hypostatizes the present self and reduces self-realization to a project of realizing the wishes and desires of the present self) and theological ethics (which instrumentalizes the present self and subjects it to the demands of the future self). Let us look at this matter more closely. Self-realization is a peculiar form of fulfilment and rests on a peculiar form of anticipation. What the self anticipates is not just a set of events that will unfold in the future but a set of events in which the self is destined to play the role of the protagonist. In this connection, the self does not merely ask, what should I do? It rather asks, what should I make of my life and how am I to live it in a non-alienated way? The structure of self-realization is such that it splits the self into two – the present self and the future self. How exactly is one to understand the relation between what might appear to be two separate selves? In this connection, Dewey’s critique of T. H. Green’s conception of selfhood deserves special attention. This critique enables Dewey to articulate the following insight: ‘This division of the self into two separate selves [the realized and the ideal], is the fallacy of hypostatizing into separate entities what in reality are simply two stages of insight upon our own part.’26 This means that the structure of self-realization does not split the self into two separate entities but rather brings to light the irreducibly temporal nature of the self. To say this is to suggest that the present self is fundamentally incomplete and that the present self is the subject of not yet developed capacities. Moreover, the present self recognizes its incomplete character; it recognizes that to become a self, it needs to develop the capacities it has, while it also realizes that it cannot develop all of its capacities. It is this future orientation of the self, which derives from its essentially incomplete nature, that forces the self to break through the limits of its present actuality and to enter the domain of possibilities, where it can intend an ideal self – the self it wants to be and strives to become. This detour to the pragmatic conception of self-realization leads to the further realization of the irreducible role that productive imagination plays in the projects of self-realization. The self implied in self-realization projects is both an actual and an imaginary self, occupying a place both in the actual present and in the imaginary future. This insight brings to light another conceptual mistake that underlies the conflation of self-realization with self-interest, which I started addressing in the last section. Like other forms of hedonism, this view reduces the self to its present moment and hypostatizes this moment into a separate reality. If the self inhabits both the actual present and the imaginary future then the concept of self-interest turns out to be highly ambiguous, since the interest in question can equally apply to the present and the future self. Although the interest of the present self can stand opposed to the interest of the imaginary future self, the reduction of self-realization to present self-interest ignores such conflicts of interest. One thereby overlooks the possibility implied therein that the fulfilment of the present interest might directly hinder the possibility of future self-realization. The self implied in self-realization projects always finds itself in between the actual present and the imaginary future. In Dewey’s words, ‘To find the self in the highest

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and fullest activity possible at the time, and to perform the act in the consciousness of its complete identification with self is morality, and is realization.’27 That is, the self is neither reducible to its past, present, or future modalities, nor is it explainable as their sum. Rather, the self is first and foremost the movement from the actual present into the imaginary future, and this transition can be identified in terms of self-realization if the self succeeds in transforming what appears to be only imaginary into an actuality. Due to the ‘transitional’ nature of selfhood, Efraim Shmueli is right to remark that the self ‘knows himself as being much “broader and deeper” than his momentous manifestation of himself suggests’.28 Thus the self always finds itself within a myriad of relations, which allow one to determine the self naturally and sociopolitically, yet at the same time, the self always realizes that it is above and beyond all of these relations. The self is neither a bundle of sensations nor a bundle of relations. The reason for this primarily relies upon productive imagination, which enables the self to transcend the horizon of the present by intending an ideal self, which the present self then strives to bring to realization. Let me turn back to my example and consider one more scenario. Suppose my attempt to complete the paper on self-realization and imagination is successful: here I am, at the very end of this project. Suppose, moreover, that in this paper I manage to articulate the set of insights I was striving to articulate. Even more, suppose this paper is a significant contribution to the set of philosophical reflections on selfrealization. It is certainly conceivable that at this very point, I would experience deep disappointment. ‘That’s it? That’s all I had to say?’ Under such a scenario, my interest is fulfilled, while my project of self-realization is frustrated. With this in mind, it is only appropriate to corroborate Kai Nielson’s conclusion offered in ‘Alienation and SelfRealization’: ‘The doctrine of self-realization is indeed a murky one – but it all the same signifies something, we know not clearly what, that we quite unequivocally take as precious.’29 This concept signifies something precious because in its absence we could not meaningfully speak of dehumanization. Yet what this concept signifies is difficult to define. One of the reasons for this ambiguity concerns the temporal nature of the self. When we speak of self-realization, do we mean the present self or the imaginary future self? It is by no means obvious how to answer this question, and this is one of the central reasons why the doctrine of self-realization is murky.

Conclusion: Self-realization as temporal appropriation On the basis of such a hermeneutically and pragmatically oriented conception of selfhood, let me conclude by saying that while it is the present self that initiates the project of self-realization, only the imaginary future self can decide if the project’s successful completion is to be qualified as self-realization. This makes, I believe, the problematic of self-realization less murky: while the present self is the agent, the future self is the judge. To be sure, it is one and the same self that plays these roles of agent and judge, yet in two fundamentally different ways. The project of self-realization presupposes a consciousness of the future as well as the consciousness of the past. This allows one to say that the project of self-realization is the project of a temporal

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appropriation of one’s existence. Such a temporal appropriation of one’s existence as a whole is not possible without productive imagination. Although the self is not reducible to any single temporal modality, it only exists in time. It escapes the confines of the present by projecting an imaginary vision of the future self. It is especially the future orientation, conceived as a striving for self-realization, which allows one to say that productive imagination is the seed from which self-realization grows. I must fictionalize my life if I am to render it my own. I earlier argued that the problematic of self-realization splits the self into two moments, namely, the present self and the future self. This is how the problematic of self-realization appears from the perspective of what I have just identified as the agent. From the perspective of the judge, we also face a duality, yet this time a duality of the present and the past self. While the agent strives to appropriate the totality of his existence by turning to the future, the judge aims to regain the very same totality by turning back to the past. One might argue that while the consciousness of the future is soaked in imagination, the situation is fundamentally different when it comes to the consciousness of the past. While I can only imagine my distant future, I can only remember my past, and we can only remember what we have perceived. Memory is constrained by perception and thus lacks the freedom characteristic of the consciousness of the future. This important difference between the two forms of consciousness notwithstanding, there are nonetheless good reasons to maintain that when it comes to self-realization, productive imagination is equally significant for the judge and for the agent. What could it mean to identify the present self as the fulfilment of past intentions, as the very self the past self was striving to become, as the self that has transformed life into what the past self wanted it to be, as the self who has overcome the forms of estrangement from which the past life was inseparable? The self always finds itself in a myriad of relations, yet at the same time it is above these relations. Insofar as the self is embodied and socioculturally embedded, its decisions and commitments are subject to natural as well as sociocultural explanations. Yet insofar as the self is above these relations, it is not reducible to them. As actuality, the past self always was immersed in the world; as a possibility, it was always at a distance from the world. Yet if such is the case, how is the self to appropriate its past life? How is one to know up to what degree the striving for self-realization was naturally and socioculturally determined and to what degree this striving was a matter of realizing one’s potential in an individually creative and original style? To recall Merleau-Ponty’s ‘Cezanne’s Doubt’, ‘As he [Cezanne] grew old, he wondered whether the novelty of his painting might not come from trouble with his eyes, whether his whole life had not been based upon an accident of his body.’30 Or to return to my guiding example: up to what degree my motivation to write this paper on self-realization was not merely driven by inertia, which in its own turn was created by all the minute accidents that have landed me in the situation in which I find myself? The givenness of one’s past is inseparable from this kind of ambiguity and indeterminacy. For this very reason, the appropriation of one’s past in its totality, which self-realization calls for, also calls for productive imagination. Besides fictionalizing my future, I must also fictionalize my past, if I am to render it my own.

Part Three

Hermeneutics and Poststructuralism

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Foucault and Hermeneutics C. G. Prado

Three construals Hermeneutics has been and is different things to different thinkers. The most basic difference is between two related and temporally sequential but significantly disparate conceptions of hermeneutics as first an applicable technique and later a holistic viewpoint. The earlier of the two conceptions is best referred to as ‘traditional’ hermeneutics, and it is hermeneutics as conceived by Schleiermacher and Dilthey. This is hermeneutics understood as a method or even theory of interpretation, one paradigmatically employed in interpreting texts, particularly biblical ones, and aspects of other cultures. The later of the two conceptions is philosophical hermeneutics, as originated by Heidegger and developed by Gadamer and Ricoeur. This is hermeneutics as an all-inclusive approach, or better, a mode of thought pivoting on the realization that all understanding is intrinsically relational and invariably modifies both subjects and objects. It is philosophical hermeneutics that Michel Foucault embraced, and that he interpreted and employed in three markedly different ways. To proceed, it bears stressing that unlike traditional hermeneutics, philosophical hermeneutics – henceforth simply ‘hermeneutics’ unless otherwise specified – is not primarily a methodology or analytic procedure. Rather, it is an all-encompassing and continuous understanding of awareness and comprehension, even of awareness generally, as interpretive and therefore as relationally interactive, as in a sense collaborative, between subject and object. The deliberate and purposive application of this understanding is the endeavour to delineate and describe how interpretation functions, how it demarcates and defines objects, and thereby moulds and conditions subjects, and so how it underlies all knowledge and belief. Application of hermeneutics is a continuing effort to understand as clearly as possible how our intrinsically interpretive awareness both shapes us as subjects and determines the content of our awareness as so many objects and events. Foucault can be fairly described as a poststructuralist, and as such the natural expectation would be that he endorsed and employed hermeneutics. The actuality is more complicated, but there can be little argument about describing him as a poststructuralist. The key point is that Foucault discarded his inclination ‘to treat language as autonomous and as constitutive of reality’. In doing so he rid himself of

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the idea that ‘discourse organizes … all social practices and historical epochs’ and thus of the core of structuralism.1 If nothing else, it is because of the abandonment of the conception of discourse as an autonomous determinant of cognitive and social practices that Foucault is deemed a poststructuralist. Structuralists see cultural phenomena as determined by underlying structures best understood on the model of rule-bound systematic interrelations of signs. Against this, Foucault saw cultural phenomena as the results of power-relations. Furthermore, structuralists see the individual subject as a product of constitutive logical relations. Foucault – at least the genealogical Foucault – saw the subject as emerging from discursive and behavioural practices and from interactions with equally emergent others. As we will see below, though, later rejection of this view of the subject is what renders Foucault’s ethics problematic. Unsurprisingly, Foucault complicated hermeneutics by developing and employing three different construals in light of his early and late archaeological thought and eventually his ethics. Not only did Foucault develop three separate construals of hermeneutics, each construal played a notably different role in his thinking and writing with respect to both application and importance. In Foucault’s archaeological period, hermeneutics is construed more or less as what I referred to above as traditional hermeneutics, namely, as mainly a discursive methodology. In his genealogical period, hermeneutics seems to be a somewhat unsettled composite of traditional and philosophical, but in any case plays a minor role in Foucault’s genealogical thought because of the dominance he attributed to power-relations in the formation of subjects. This is a point I expand on below. It is in Foucault’s ethics that hermeneutics plays a major role and where it is construed in a manner close to the Heideggerian/Gadamerian conception. The most succinct description of Foucault’s three successive construals of hermeneutics that I have encountered is one that describes the construals as different ‘perspectives’. Additionally, rather than attempting to define the three construals or perspectives, thereby risking problems regarding Foucault’s not always consistent application of them, the description relates each construal or perspective to works representative of Foucault’s thought at the relevant stages of his career. Pol Vandevelde articulates the description in this way: ‘In The Order of Things, hermeneutics is … a kind of discourse … ; … in Archaeology of Knowledge, hermeneutics is … a method of investigation that archaeology criticizes and claims to overcome; and … in some of his last works hermeneutics is … a new approach to the self, for example in The Hermeneutics of the Subject.’2 The reference to Foucault’s last works is to his ethics, as presented in The Use of Pleasure and particularly The Care of the Self. As to the times of these representative works, with respect to the first construal, The Order of Things was published (in French) in 1966. The second work mentioned, The Archaeology of Knowledge, was published (in French) just three years later in 1969.3 In The Order of Things, hermeneutics was a contextualized, interpretive discourse or a kind of conversational sorting and prioritizing of claims, descriptions, and ascriptions. In The Archaeology of Knowledge, hermeneutics was treated as an investigative method, one competing with and supposedly losing out to archaeological descriptive analysis. How faithful Foucault’s three construals were to traditional or philosophical hermeneutics is open to debate,

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but his early use of the term tends more to a traditional understanding of hermeneutics than philosophical. By the time Discipline and Punish was published (in French) in 1975, hermeneutics was in abeyance due to the prioritization of power-relations and hence genealogical analytics.4 Putting the point very briefly, the holistic and pervasive effects of power-relations essentially preclude productive interpretation or at least its efficacy regarding behaviour. Hermeneutics reappears dramatically by the time of The Use of Pleasure and especially The Care of the Self, both published (in French) in 1984. Hermeneutics, though, does not reappear in its traditional form, as a method or approach. Whether Foucault’s third construal is faithful to Heideggerian/Gadamerian understanding, hermeneutics is decidedly philosophical in Foucault’s ethics. In fact, I believe that for the ethical Foucault, hermeneutics was only in the most general and basically uninformative sense an approach to the self, as Vandevelde puts it. In Foucault’s ethics, hermeneutics is the interpretive essence of ethical self-creation. Rather than an approach to the self, hermeneutics is the interpretive exercise the result of which is the self. Putting things differently, in Foucault’s ethics there is no self to be approached. The self, considered as the ethical agent, is not a given; it is not an object open to internal examination and interpretation. The self is in constant process of becoming in the sense that every ethical decision and action is a contribution to self-creation. The internal perception in ethical self-creation is not of a self or oneself as an agent; it is of intentions, decisions, and actions as steps or moves towards or away from an aspired-to idealization, a self or persona that one is striving to be, not a self or persona that one is. Generally speaking, every interpretive act, whether ethical or not, is a contributing factor to the shaping, to the ongoing creation of the ethical self, in particular, and the self in general. When an interpretive act is ethical, it is particularly significant because each ethical decision and action is a move either towards or away from an aspired-to self that displaces the traditional external moral codes that otherwise determine good and bad, right and wrong decisions and actions. For the Foucault of The Use of Pleasure and principally of The Care of the Self, then, hermeneutics was not an approach to anything. Hermeneutics was the self-reflective and to an extent analytical interpretation of one’s own ethically pertinent perceptions, inclinations, desires, and envisaged acts in order to select those most suitable to productive self-creation.

Foucauldian ethics Given the foregoing, it is important to emphasize how Foucauldian and traditional ethics differ. Traditional ethics primarily are about obligations to others while Foucauldian ethics are about ‘the self ’s relationship to itself ’.5 Ethics for Foucault are, first of all, how we define ourselves in the process of attempting to be an aspired-to person. Ethics are only secondly about others, and the way they are about others is that the nature, limits, and priorities of other-oriented ethical action are dictated by how the character and dispositions of the aspired-to self entail treating others. Contrary to traditional ethical thought, it is not that others must be treated in certain ways; rather it is that the aspired-to ethical self is what it is because it treats others in certain ways.

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A further difference between traditional and Foucauldian ethics is implicit in the foregoing, which is that we do not achieve self-creation as an aspired-to person, and thereby proper ethical conduct, by conforming to external moral codes as in traditionally conceived ethics. Instead we do both by making our selves into individuals who instantiate particular values and purposes. A significant aspect of this added difference is that in Foucault’s Nietzschean thinking about ethics as the self ’s relationship to itself, the telos, the aspired-to goal of self-creation, is as much aesthetic as it is ethical. Interpretive decisions about one’s own intended actions, as well as the aims and desires that shape those actions, are not only about rightness and wrongness; they also are about appositeness, felicity, and elegance. The upshot here is that Foucault shifts the focus of ethics from wilful compliance to codes, whether those codes are grounded on or generated by religion, reason, or culture, and puts the focus on subjective assessment of what is perhaps best described as fittingness determined by the character and objectives of the envisaged idealized self that is the aim of self-creation. The role and the importance of self-creation in Foucauldian ethics reveal how hermeneutics underlies, in a sense generated, and largely determined Foucault’s ethical thought. His third and last construal of hermeneutics not only prioritizes the relation of the self to itself; the construal makes comprehension of the self as self-creating by its actions a precondition of appropriate treatment of others. Foucault’s ethics are above all about how ‘a human being turns him- or herself into a subject’.6 What is only implicit in this idea is that the treatment of others is no longer the ethical priority. Treatment of others is instead a function of self-creation in the sense that the sorts of Foucauldian ethical subjects into which individuals have made themselves determine how those subjects treat others. Consideration of treatment of others serves to accentuate how the presupposed capacity and explicit requirement in Foucauldian ethics that persons create themselves as subjects is at odds with his mid-career genealogical position. The capacity to create or recreate oneself as a subject is discordant with the message of Discipline and Punish and the very notion of power-relations, which are about how individuals are shaped by external peer, social, and political influences. The discordancy is also present, though to a lesser extent, in the difference between the first volume of The History of Sexuality, on the one hand, and the second and third volumes, The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self, on the other hand.7 The latter two volumes, especially the third, no longer portray the self as a product of external influences but rather as the result of self-creation. It is notable that early in The Use of Pleasure, the term ‘power’ occurs in quotation marks and Foucault speaks as if a progressive development in theoretical focus has taken him in a direction away from the heart of genealogy.8 There indeed was a shift, but it was neither progressive nor continuously theoretical, and it was less intentional and less well defined than as he portrays it. Some have maintained that Foucault’s shift from genealogy to ethics was not an intellectual progression or transformation at all but a loss of nerve. Bronwyn Singleton argued plausibly that Foucault’s ethical turn was a desperate attempt to salvage personal autonomy and thereby preserve the authority of his work, in effect, to counter or at least resist the corrosive relativizing effect of genealogical analytics on his writings. Singleton attributes the move to Foucault

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strongly suspecting that he would die of AIDS, or what he initially ridiculed as ‘the American disease’, and not wanting his books and lectures to eventually be seen as so many exercises determined by power-relations.9 Whatever we may decide about what prompted Foucault’s move to ethics, I believe that there is no question that his move to ethics was enabled by his third construal of hermeneutics. Looking more closely at Foucault’s ethics, five different elements are discernible. Speaking of morality, Foucault in effect acknowledges traditional ethical dependence on codes and remarks that individuals conduct themselves ethically ‘in reference to a prescriptive system’ and chooses to call this (i) ‘the morality of behaviors’. However, conforming to a prescriptive system may be done in various ways that fall within the range of acceptable compliance. Foucault refers to this array of viable conduct options and the choosing among them as (ii) ‘determination of the ethical substance’. There is, then, recognition of moral codes and their requirements. Reference to allowable differences in how those requirements are met, though, is somewhat problematic. Some ethicists would argue that there are few quite minor differences in how moral codes are complied with, and that mention of those differences invites questionable personal interpretation, which, as will emerge, is precisely what Foucault is after. Next, Foucault notes that the code-compliance differences also have to do with how individuals relate to their respective codes’ rules and how they know when to apply them. He calls this (iii) the ‘mode of subjection’. What we have, therefore, is that not only may individuals comply with moral-code requirements in varying ways, there is latitude in interpretation of the requirements’ applicability. In this way, this third element is already a fair distance from the traditionally understood ethics as compliance with moral codes. Furthermore, there also may be differences in what Foucault refers to as (iv) ‘elaboration’ or the ‘ethical work that one performs on oneself, not only in order to bring one’s conduct in compliance … but to attempt to transform oneself in … one’s behavior’. Here compliance to a moral code is interwoven with self-creation as an ethical subject. Finally, Foucault admits that there are still other differences to consider, namely, those that concern (v) ‘the telos of the ethical subject’.10 This is specifically the precise actions of particular individuals, actions which, while supposedly conforming to one or another moral code and in that sense being moral in themselves, are actions that contribute to the self-creation of oneself as an ethical subject. These elements, taken together, clearly move being ethical from straightforward compliance with a moral code to much more complex behaviour that is not only compliance, but involves individual interpretation and selective application, all of which behaviour is itself further constitutive of one’s ethical self. Despite recognition of the role of external moral codes, the third, fourth, and fifth elements establish what traditional ethicists would see as out of line with the priority of obedience to and willing internalization of an ethical canon.11 The central issue here has to do with authority. Traditional ethicists are committed to disallowing individual interpretation of ethical requirements because ethical or moral codes invariably derive their authority from religious doctrines or from reason, as in Kantian ethics. Neither one of these generative bases allows much latitude for individual interpretation. The key feature of Foucauldian ethics is that interpretation of proper compliance shifts to the individual

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because every ethical decision or action is both a product of and a contributing factor to self-creation. What is most philosophically problematic about Foucault’s move to ethics is the radical change in his thought evident in bestowal of a measure of autonomy on subjects that is not only at odds with Foucault’s previous contentions but, as we will see, is in fact seriously unrealistic. The fact is that his embracement of Nietzschean self-creation is significantly contrary to Foucault’s earlier and quite explicit insistence that efforts at self-determination are not original or self-prompted and constitute invariably futile resistance to external influences. He maintained that resistance was futile because there is ‘no escaping from power’, because power ‘is always already present, constituting that very thing which one attempts to counter it with’.12 It was this idea of power-relations, and the entailed passivity of subjects, that moved Foucault to develop genealogy to try ‘to create a history of the different modes by which … human beings are made subjects’.13 It was this idea of power that rendered his anti-essentialist histories of the prison and of human sexuality descriptive accounts of how subjects are made, how they are produced by external factors. Genealogy had nothing to offer regarding how we might become other than as we are shaped by power-relations, much less how we might achieve Nietzschean self-creation by making ourselves into ethically and aesthetically idealized subjects, or at least striving to do so. The move from genealogy to ethics in Foucault’s thought, therefore, was less a progressive development, as he paints it, than an extreme and sweeping reversal of his conception of the nature of the subject.

A hermeneutical insight I come now to my fundamental contention regarding Foucault and hermeneutics. I believe that the espousal of his third construal of hermeneutics, Foucault’s ‘new approach to the self ’ as Vandevelde puts it, was prompted by a profound realization that Foucault never admitted to or articulated. What he must have realized, likely in the transition from having written the first volume of The History of Sexuality and preparing to write the second volume, The Use of Pleasure, was that the idea of powerrelations shaping subjects as presented in Discipline and Punish and, to a point, in the first volume of The History of Sexuality must ultimately fail. Realization of the inevitable failure of power-relations as the determinant of subjects and subjectivity was a hermeneutical insight. It is impossible to determine if Foucault’s third construal of hermeneutics preceded or followed the insight in question, but the insight is decidedly a hermeneutical one and it is that subjects are never wholly passively receptive of external influences. The reason is that there is always some measure of interpretation operant just in being a subject of experience. Simply by being aware of their surroundings and of themselves, individuals engage in interpretation. Given the inescapable presence of interpretation in subject awareness, in subjectivity, the idea that influences that shape the subject, the self, could be entirely one-way is fatally misconceived. There is an interesting parallel here with the retrospectively simplistic and unacceptable empiricist notion that objects of awareness

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simply present themselves as so many sense-data and that the only interpretive move on the part of subjects is externalization of most of the presented sense-data. One of the most fundamental constituents of hermeneutics as a perspective is that being a subject entails interpretation of the kaleidoscopic deluge of data that is the raw content of awareness. It is interpretation that moulds and sorts the deluge of data into the objects and events of which we are aware. Just as the empiricist view of the contents of awareness as given data proved to be misconceived, Foucault’s genealogical view of subjects as the products of power-relations ultimately emerges as unworkable. The issue about how Foucault’s ethics could develop as they did, given powerrelations’ apparent preclusion of self-determination in his genealogical analytics, is not just a question about how ethical self-creation might or could overcome power’s external constraints on subjectivity-redefining acts. It is also a question about internal constraints, about how agents determine what to do in trying to achieve a ‘certain state of perfection’. The deeper problem is that ethical self-determination presupposes a high degree of self-knowledge, knowledge that would be either precluded or rendered merely historical if agent-formation is a result of power-relations. Remaking oneself into the telos of Foucault’s Nietzschean ethics requires that subjects both know who and what they are and what they need to do and can do to change themselves. If power-relations do configure subjects then they condition both subjects’ self-knowledge and whatever they may think they can or should do to change. If power is inescapable because it ‘constitut[es] that very thing which one attempts to counter it with’ then every judgement about who we are and what we ought to do, every assessment of a situation, its moral options, and our possible and advisable actions, are assessments and judgements shaped by power because they are produced by a subjectivity that is itself a product of power-relations. In other words, for the genealogical Foucault, power constitutes the subject that recognizes itself as a moral agent, and it constitutes the values the subject applies in trying to be a certain kind of moral agent as well as that subject’s efforts to act in particular ways. This is the hard truth of genealogy that Foucault well appreciated, since before he developed his ethics he sought to change himself, not by wilful acts of self-creation but by exploring forbidden areas of behaviour – mainly sexual behaviour – in order to provoke what he considered subjectivity-altering ‘limit experiences’ or challenging incidents demanding highly unconventional responses.14 The central point here can be summarized in this way: our attempts to change ourselves have consequences that are both distorted as results and misrepresented to introspection by the basically random effects of power-relations’ influences. Foucault himself put the point succinctly in a comment that ironically enough captures the essence of his genealogical analytics while at the same time raising serious questions about how he conceived of ethics and his commitment to Nietzschean self-creation. The comment was to the effect that while people ‘know what they do’, and while they also ‘frequently know why they do what they do’, the trouble is that ‘what they don’t know is what what they do does’.15 Given power-relations, however informed our behaviour and regardless of our intentions, what actually ensues from what we do is significantly unforeseeable. This is because we never act in a vacuum. The actions of others condition both our perceptions,

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assessments, and intentions and our actions and their effects. What we do and why we do it are all influenced by others’ actions. In Foucault’s genealogical analytics the emphasis was on the conditioning of the results of actions, for that was what was most important regarding the shaping of subjects. The questions about Foucauldian ethics shift the focus to subjects’ perceptions, intentions, and decisions. The very idea of power-relations and their conditioning effects has to go if Foucault’s ethics are going to work. The possibility that an ethical agent could independently and objectively assess an ethical situation and choose to perform a specific moral act, in an effort to partly achieve becoming an idealized ethical/aesthetic self, is simply precluded by powerrelations, which would condition both the assessment, choice, and action. However, Foucauldian ethics require more than mere abandonment of the central thesis of genealogy, as seems to happen in the writing of The Use of Pleasure. Foucauldian ethics require explicit rejection of the genealogical conception of power or power-relations, and Foucault does not do that. His espousal of the third construal of hermeneutics seems to have simply negated the heart of his genealogical analytics, to have rendered it somehow immaterial. As noted, I believe this development was due to Foucault’s realization that interpretation can never be wholly passive, and that had to have been part of his third construal.

The becoming subject Even if there were no conflict between Foucault’s ethics and his genealogical analytics, his adoption of Nietzschean self-creation as the essence of ethics is a difficult one to reconcile with some implications of philosophical hermeneutics and with what we know about human nature. Consider that what is presupposed is the ability of individuals, or at least a few individuals if we adhere to Nietzsche’s original view, to introspectively determine their values and desires and to form a vision of themselves as exemplifying aspired-to values and desires. Moreover, individuals must be able to evaluate and determine what decisions and actions on their part will contribute to their redefinition of themselves as the selves they want to be. With respect to the human nature aspect of the issue, Foucault was closer to the truth when he saw subjects as shaped by power-relations and their own efforts as benighted. With respect to hermeneutics, it seems to me that the problem is that Nietzschean self-creation and Foucault’s version of it require a degree of consistency in determination of what decisions and actions partly achieve the aspired-to subjectivity that is incompatible with genuine, continuing interpretation of ongoing events and their effects on us. That is, the very idea of a telos, a defined and unyielding idealized self, is at odds with the constant reassessments and reconsiderations suggested to and forced on us as we interpret what we experience and our own reactions in different contexts and in light of new information and better understanding. As noted, Foucault’s insight into how others’ actions influence us, the core of his notion of power-relations, contains a great deal of truth and it applies to our efforts to define and redefine ourselves. For one thing, we seem never to really know whether what we want to achieve is what we want or what we have been made to want.

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When we introspect, when we look inward to judge who we are and who we want to be, we cannot altogether trust what we find. Psychology, psychoanalytic theory, social psychology, and sociology all tell us a great deal about how our choices are influenced by factors not evident to us. If we have learned anything about ourselves it is that we are not self-transparent. The Cartesian conception of the self as an ego, a singularity, defined by thought and transparent to itself is not a conception we can realistically hold and employ given what we have learned in the past century or two. The Freudian conception of the self as a fluid, multifaceted entity shaped by psychic dynamics, inculcated beliefs, and trauma is a much more credible one. Most of the Freudian self ’s facets are opaque to introspection because psychic dynamics occlude beliefs and desires, rendering them impenetrable except to protracted expert analysis. Calvin Schrag articulates the point succinctly. Perhaps Schrag overstates things, but he succeeds in reminding us of what Foucault apparently put aside when he abandoned genealogy. Schrag tells us that ‘in the aftermath of the dissolution of the [modern or Cartesian] subject … the most that can be asserted is that the self is multiplicity, heterogeneity, difference, and ceaseless becoming’.16 This is not a self in full control of its own remaking. Quite aside from the incompatibility with genealogy, then, the question raised by Foucauldian ethics is whether it is possible to create or recreate oneself as a moral agent, in particular, and as a persona, generally, and to do so in a consistent, objectively self-aware manner. What Foucault offers, especially in The Care of the Self, demands a degree of accurate recognition and understanding of one’s own thoughts, perceptions, inclinations, and aspirations that looks impossible to achieve. Nor is the problem simply one of our objective access to our own aspirations, inclinations, perceptions, and thoughts at a given time. We may achieve such access, but it would not be enough because the problem that arises has to do with a lack of criteria for judging that our internal observations, our assessments of self, are consistent. Changes of mood, context, and external pressures can skew introspective assessments in various ways, the likeliest and most straightforward one being that assessments may be skewed over time because of shifts in priorities. Some external changes may alter what individuals consider important or pressing at particular times, which in turn will colour their assessments of what is appropriate behaviour or may alter their values. The unfortunate consequence here is that because of changes effected by this sort of influence, as well as by other external influences, Foucauldian self-creation seems ultimately to be relative to the moment and what seems right to subjects at that time. There is an interesting parallel here with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s argument against the possibility of a private language. The essence of that argument is that without external criteria, as provided by other users of a language, an individual can never be sure that he or she is using a putative private language correctly, in the sense of using it consistent with previous usage.17 In like manner, Foucauldian ethics have no criteria for establishing consistency in individuals’ efforts to achieve the telos he describes as the goal of ethical self-creation. The only alternative, one that actually is compatible with some of Foucault’s earlier thought, is that ethical self-creation, including its aesthetic aspect, is forever an exercise of the moment and that the aspired-to telos is inescapably a momentary one, even if possibly recurrent.

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In my view, by the time of his ethics, Foucault would not have accepted a wholly temporally relativistic conception of self-creation. What his ethics require is what he himself described in discussing Christian self-examination and especially ‘Christian hermeneutics’.18 He observed that for Christians, ‘each person has a duty to know who he is, that is, to try to know what is happening inside him, to acknowledge faults, to recognize temptations, to locate desires, and everyone is obliged to disclose these things either to God or to others in the community and hence to bear public or private witness against oneself ’.19 The matter of disclosure aside, this is the sort of selfexamination and understanding that is basically presupposed by ethical self-creation, one where each person knows who he or she is in a meaningful sense and not as reflections of the moment. Temporally relative introspection and assessment are not enough. Ethical self-creation is not production of a myriad of fleeting personae, each of which manifests one or another trait or collection of traits until later introspection offers up different or altered traits on the basis of new internal perceptions. Ethical self-creation is the making of a new self, but the new self must persist as a self that is capable of development and further fulfilment in becoming the aspired-to ethical self that is the telos of self-creation. Given that there are no criteria for establishing the consistency of individuals’ dayto-day perceptions of themselves as persons or of their understanding of the nature of their present characters and goals, it does seem that even if overstated, Foucault’s genealogical analytics and their key notion of power-relations was closer to a realistic understanding of how human beings become who they are and why they act as they do than his ethics could ever be. Foucault’s ethics not only call for a measure of introspective and volitional autonomy that seems beyond human achievement, his ethics demand a level of introspective and volitional consistency that looks even less achievable lacking criteria for such consistency. To this extent, human beings do seem better described in terms of ‘multiplicity, heterogeneity, difference, and ceaseless becoming’ because what Schrag calls ceaseless becoming is not a rationally governed, reliably and determinably consistent process. Instead it is an ongoing multifaceted pastiche of our own perceptions, intentions, and actions – all conditioned by emotion as much as reason – and the influences of others’ actions.

Varying perspectives Foucault denied being a structuralist, despite his insistence in The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge on the autonomy of discourse.20 In his ‘Foreword to the English Edition’ of The Order of Things, Foucault complains that ‘half-witted’ commentators label him a structuralist, lamenting that he has been ‘unable to get it into their tiny minds’ that he used ‘none of the methods, concepts, or key terms that characterize structural analysis’.21 However, this impatient denial is contradicted by Foucault’s own statement of purpose in The Order of Things.22 Additionally, James Miller, describing how The Order of Things was received, remarks that the reviewer for L’Express ‘never used the magic word “structuralism” because she did not need to’, since Foucault’s ‘structuralist sympathies’ were evident in his talk of ‘system’ and his references to Lévi-Strauss.23 The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge

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do read as if intended to be contributions to a discipline succeeding epistemology, and that is exactly what structuralism was intended to be and how it was presented.24 In those works Foucault basically contends that while philosophical analysis simply cannot justify knowledge claims as traditionally claimed, nonetheless sophisticated analytics can successfully investigate and discern the role of discourse. The core of what he has to say is that discourse is an autonomous determinant of cognitive as well as social practices, which precisely is the heart of structuralism. Foucault also had doubts about being or being thought a poststructuralist, less because of the nature of his ideas than because of a marked aversion to labels, particularly when applied to him. Foucault was undeniably a poststructuralist if only and minimally because of his explicit rejection of structuralism. The positive aspect of his poststructuralism, though, is rather more complicated than straightforward adherence to certain crucial conceptions and beliefs, practices and objectives. Richard Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow offer perspective on Foucault and the several stages in his thinking and work that is considerably more useful and satisfactory than trying to shoehorn him into one or another school of thought. They remark that early in his career Foucault ‘used variants of a strict analysis of discourse’, justifying description of him as a structuralist, but that particularly after 1968, ‘Foucault’s interests began to shift away from discourse’ and he began to focus on power-relations.25 The genealogical Foucault was in many ways unique and more difficult to assimilate to an established philosophical approach than his archaeological and ethical personifications. Assimilation, though, is not easy in either of the other two personifications. As much of the foregoing is intended to show, the ethical Foucault was far closer to philosophical hermeneutics than either of the earlier ones, but still hard to describe as a Heideggerian or Gadamerian hermeneut. Assimilation problems are what prompt the central message of Dreyfus and Rabinow’s Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, which is that to properly understand Foucault’s thought and work he must be triangulated within three distinct schools of thought or standpoints: phenomenology, hermeneutics, and structuralism. Their insightful contention is that Foucault’s ‘interpretive analytics’ go beyond particular analytical standpoints and methodologies and constitute a new and exceptional way of discerning, understanding, and describing just how ‘human beings have become the sort of objects and subjects structuralism and hermeneutics discover and analyze’.26 It bears mention that Foucault obviously was in agreement with Dreyfus and Rabinow, considering that he provided an Afterword for the book as well as participated in an interview reproduced in it. While I also am in general agreement with Dreyfus and Rabinow’s contention, and assuming the legitimacy of describing Foucault as a poststructuralist, I see his espousal of hermeneutics as more a matter of inspiration than application, more as an embracing of a principle than adoption of a practice. As I have tried to make out, Foucault’s third construal of hermeneutics was more a catalyst than a position; it was a construal that prompted abandonment of power-relations and genealogical analytics, and in the process fostered development of an ethics centring on self-creation. As one might put it, the ethical Foucault owed Heidegger and Gadamer the impulse that defined his final philosophical stance, but he owed Nietzsche the essence of its content.

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The foregoing point is perhaps most evident in the problem I outline above about the possibility of actually enacting Foucault’s vision of self-creative ethical action. Nietzsche had no difficulty with human limitations on self-creation because he envisioned those who would engage in self-creation as beings superior in ways that excluded limitations on introspective objectivity and consistency. Foucault may well have shared Nietzsche’s elitist view regarding the ability to self-create, but he does not stipulate it as a condition of ethical self-creativity, and so leaves his contentions regarding ethical self-creation open to serious questions about their possibility or at least about their knowable possibility.

Conclusion What might we conclude about Foucault and hermeneutics? In my view Foucault is thoroughly consistent throughout his career about only one thing: going his own way. His three construals of Heideggerian/Gadamerian hermeneutics come to this: two rather self-serving adaptations and one enabling insight. Certainly Foucault was not a hermeneut in the sense of having routinely employed hermeneutics as an analytical methodology. His thought and work undeniably reflect espousal of hermeneutics, but it is espousal that is more reflexive adoption of a standpoint or mindset, of cognizance of the importance and efficacy of relational interpretation and of its effects on both objects and subjects of awareness, than it is purposeful application of an investigative or exploratory technique. It would have been difficult, if not impossible, for Foucault to have resisted or ignored the philosophical ambience of his intellectual age, but as Dreyfus and Rabinow perceptively point out, Foucault’s thought and work have to be understood in the context of that intellectual age, which is not to say that he was straightforwardly an exponent of one or more of its constitutive elements. As I have maintained above, for Foucault hermeneutics enabled his transition from genealogy to ethics, from focus on passive and constructed subjects to self-defining subjects. Whether ethical self-creation is in fact achievable, whether subjects actually can define and redefine themselves, is a different question.

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Dialogue or Drama? The Event of Interpretation in Gadamer and Foucault1 Pol Vandevelde

Gadamer and Foucault, who were both influenced by Heidegger in different ways, took from him the notion of ‘event’ as what characterizes thinking: We think within an event. They both apply this notion to speech and, linked to it, to interpretation. Gadamer says that understanding or interpretation is an event (Geschehen) and Foucault uses Heidegger’s expression in Being and Time of a ‘history of the present’ (Geschichte der Gegenwart)2 to describe what he does, which he also calls a ‘turning into events’ (événementialisation) or ‘eventifying’. Both Gadamer and Foucault want to treat what they investigate as an event, analysing it in its singularity and, at the same time, they recognize their own interpretation to be an event and a singularity. For both, interpretation has to be mindful of its situation and of the status of the interpreter. Let us start with two preliminary remarks about their connection to Heidegger and to each other. About their connection to Heidegger, Gadamer repeatedly acknowledged his profound debt to Heidegger in many essays,3 acknowledging, for example, that ‘Heidegger’s criticism of transcendental inquiry and his thinking of “the turn” form the basis of my treatment of the universal hermeneutic problem’.4 In the case of Foucault his acknowledgement is more muted, but no less explicit. ‘Heidegger has always been for me the essential philosopher … . All my philosophical development has been determined by my reading of Heidegger … . Nietzsche and Heidegger, this was a philosophical shock!’5 Indeed, whoever has read Foucault from The Order of Things (1970) to his last lectures at the Collège de France on the hermeneutics of the subject (1982–4) can only marvel at how much Heidegger’s influence must have been at play in his views and at how few references are made to Heidegger. When he examines the genealogy of the subject in The Hermeneutics of the Subject, answering a question from the audience, he says: Let’s say that there have not been that many people who in the last years – I will say in the twentieth century – have posed the question of truth. Not that many people have posed the question: What is involved in the case of the subject and

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truth? And: What is the relationship of the subject to truth? What is the subject of truth, what is the subject who speaks the truth, etcetera? As far as I am concerned, I see only two. I see only Heidegger and Lacan. Personally, myself, you must have heard this, I have tried to reflect on all this from the side of Heidegger and starting from Heidegger.6

Despite this common Heideggerean influence, Gadamer and Foucault did not interact with each other. While Gadamer made some general references to Foucault, Foucault did not return the favour. The index of his massive, more than 3,400 pages long, Dits et écrits does not even list Gadamer. The reason for the lack of interaction may be due to the fact that they saw themselves on opposite sides when it comes to philosophical investigation: Gadamer founded a ‘philosophical hermeneutics’ while Foucault rejected and dismissed hermeneutics. When Gadamer put much of the energy of his ‘philosophical hermeneutics’ in ‘dialogue’, Foucault’s main focus was on ‘discourse’ and, later on, ‘practices’. Yet despite their profound differences they offered us two original approaches to language that have several commonalities and share the same goal of avoiding the two extreme views that language is an ‘expression’ of some mental content or a ‘dissemination’ of any intent. In addition, they view language in its use by speakers, in its performance, but a performance that is not scripted as pragmatics theorizes it. While a performative act, such as ‘I promise’, can be uttered by anybody and is submitted to the rules of a promise, the performance Gadamer and Foucault present, independently of each other, is a living one – a dialogue for Gadamer and a drama for Foucault. What they reintroduce in the speech act is, in a sense, the perlocutionary that the speech act theory had not theorized. But they reintroduce it not as external to speech, as if it were a mere effect on listeners, but precisely as what gives traction to speech and has a return effect on speakers. For both Gadamer and Foucault, speaking means accepting a position of vulnerability, of not knowing at the moment of speech what will happen. Dialogue, Gadamer tells us, may take an abrupt turn, putting the speaker on the spot as someone who has to answer. For Foucault, speaking is a drama that requires courage on the part of the speaker for being put on the stage of a representation, one that consists in telling the truth. In both cases, dialogue and drama, the speaker is transformed by speech. Because their own interpretation is also made through language – the interpretation they perform and the works they wrote – and because the object of their investigation is also of a linguistic form – documents or books – they apply their views on speech as event to their own task as interpreters. Understanding (Gadamer) or analysis (Foucault) is an event as well. To say as they do that their own investigation is an event, Geschehen or événement, is not just the view that an account ‘takes place’ at some time and thus, in an obvious sense, ‘happens’, nor the view that there may be a ‘performative’ aspect to thinking or speaking such that an ‘act’ of interpretation or speech ‘happened’. Rather, they both link the investigation and the object of investigation. The view they both defend is a two-pronged approach. First, the ontological make-up of things is permeated through and through by language (Gadamer) or is formed discursively (Foucault). Second, their own enterprise of description is also historically situated.

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Thus, their own discourse tries to account for the singularity of what they investigate from the vantage point of the singularity that their discourse represents. This leads them to reject the common-sense approach, so entrenched in philosophy, that the object of investigation is static, has an intrinsic self-identity independently of any discursive framework in which this object becomes salient to human concerns. They thus accept the view that there are multiple accounts – ‘interpretations’ for Gadamer and ‘discursive formations’ for Foucault. However, against historicism or relativism, they both claim that the ‘what’ that is interpreted or discursively formed cannot be appealed to as an independent entity over against so-called multiple accounts. Interpreters and investigators operate from their present and bring their present with them when approaching their object of investigation. Rejecting both a direct realist view – that we can recover what really happened and what was really meant – and a reconstructive view – that we project our own questions and ideas onto what we investigate – both Gadamer and Foucault recognize that the correlation between the investigation and the object of investigation is in fact productive of history. When we investigate what is no longer present, we make history. This new approach has significant consequences for what we call the truth by accounting for the place of the concrete investigator in the discourse about truth. In the first part I examine Gadamer’s notion of dialogue in language and in the second part what Foucault calls the dramatic of speech.

Gadamer: Dialogue in language In the third part of Truth and Method Gadamer explores what he calls Sprachlichkeit – ‘the dimension of language’ – which is the beating heart of interpretation. It is a dimension and thus not a mediation, for example, between the mind and objects, which would take the form of the expression of concepts. Rather, Sprachlichkeit is the soil out of which concepts arise. Gadamer’s focus is on language in its exercise or in its performance. He was struck by how the early Heidegger made use of the medieval distinction between the actus signatus – what is conveyed and thus named by the proposition – and the actus exercitus – the performance of the act or the act in its exercise. Language is not just a tool, but it has an operation. What Gadamer draws from this is that we cannot strictly separate the thinking from the speaking or the conceptual dimension from the linguistic dimension. Sprachlichkeit is thus not ‘linguisticality’, as it is often translated, but precisely a dimension that overcomes the false opposition between concepts and words. Language operates, is in exercise, and we are in it. We are in the dimension of language, and the ‘are’ is not a location or a situation but an ontological condition. Being ‘in’ language negatively means, first, that when speaking we do not have mastery over language as if only choosing the expressions for what we have already articulated in concepts. It also means, second, that it is not language that speaks as if we were an echo chamber for another voice. Positively, being ‘in’ language means, third, that what is verbal is inchoately conceptual or is, as Gadamer uses the expression, conceptual in its very exercise as verbal. Thus, language

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neither expresses what would already be thought at some nonverbal level nor directly speaks through us, using us as channels or vectors. As he explains, To be sure, what comes into language is something different from the spoken word itself. But the word is a word only because of what comes into language in it. Its own physical being exists only in order to disappear into what is said. Likewise, that which comes into language is not something that is pregiven before language; rather, the word gives it its own determinateness.7

When Gadamer states that being is language, it is not what Karl-Otto Apel calls a ‘linguicism’8 – everything is language – nor a Derridean dissemination – ‘the subject is a function of language’9 – but the recognition that it is only within an articulation in words that something can gain saliency and enter the realm of what makes sense. To Derrida’s emphasis on the dissemination of signs – which Gadamer examines in a masterful manner in his essay ‘Hermeneutics on the Trail’10 – and to Heidegger’s stress on the original speaking of language, Gadamer re-affirms, after Plato, the articulating role of the dialogue. The dialogue he considers is not to be understood according to a communicative theory that already presupposes ‘subjects’ or ‘communication partners’, as if the origin of sense were to be found in the mind (intuition, volition, judgement, etc.). Dialogue is not primarily a speaking to and fro, but more fundamentally an exchange that leads the partners in discussion to find their own status as speakers. It is a performance with its effects on subjects: listeners, but also speakers. Dialogue thus has a historical dimension, turning the subject away from the maker of sense and back towards a historically situated speaker who is at the receiving end of a process that started before the speaking. There is indeed a dissemination and there is indeed a first speaking before our actual personal speech, but the first initiative is neither by signs nor by language. The first impetus in language as dialogue is the existential and historical situation of those who speak, in which situation a dialogue partner has the power to initiate a discussion or redirect a debate. Gadamer attempts to keep the Sprachlichkeit or dimension of language away from any reduction to a semiotic or metaphysical instance, and to locate it in its activity or what he calls a ‘play’, within which, we, human beings, find our place – always historically situated – and our voice – always responsible and accountable. ‘Language … has its real being only in the fact that the world is presented in it’,11 and because we are in the world we are also ‘involved’ in language in ways that can never be fully clarified. This is not due to a lack, but to the fact that both objects and subjects change and are mutually transformed by their interactions. To say, as in the passage above, that the world is presented in language has significant consequences for how we understand both the object and the subject. On the side of the object or ‘reality’, if thinking is this ‘coming to understanding’ with others in a dialogue and if language is the vehicle for those interactions, reality cannot lie frozen in the position of a referent of discourse. Because there is language and because language is in operation, what we call reality is in fact what is susceptible to be talked about or it is what is negotiated in the dialogues, the interactions among people, and in the

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language used. Reality then is of the order of a transaction. It is what is negotiated by being spoken of, by being presented in discourse. Gadamer writes: Something is placed in the center, as the Greeks said, which the partners to the dialogue both share, and concerning which they can exchange ideas with one another. Hence reaching an agreement on the subject matter of a conversation necessarily means that a common language must first be worked out in the conversation. This is not an external matter of simply adjusting our tools; nor is it even right to say that the partners adapt themselves to one another but, rather, in a successful conversation they both come under the influence of the truth of the object and are thus bound to one another in a new community. To reach an understanding in a dialogue is not merely a matter of putting oneself forward and successfully asserting one’s own point of view, but being transformed into a communion in which we do not remain what we were.12

Against any simplistic idealism, this negotiated reality or this reality that is of the nature of a transaction is not fixed, but always susceptible to be presented again. It is thus not simply what is projected by speakers – as if it were a mere construction – but rather what sustains the dialogue in the ambiguous sense of what nurtures it – what Sartre called the ‘coefficient of adversity’ – and what underlies it. Reality is interpreted, but it is not a fabrication. Dialogue determines the boundaries of the transaction as well as the framework for the vocabulary used in the transaction and the parameters agreed upon. Things, Gadamer tells us, have a language: ‘The language that things have – whatever kind of things they may be – is not the logos ousias, and it is not fulfilled in the selfcontemplation of an infinite intellect; it is the language that our finite, historical nature apprehends when we learn to speak.’13 Dialogue thus offers stability and change; as transactions vary so does the reality that is transacted. There is thus no relativism of scheme over content, as, for example, Davidson understands it.14 With regard to the subject, this emphasis on the productive aspect of language means that subjects are interpreters. We recall that ‘understanding’ is for Heidegger in Being and Time one of the fundamental ‘existentials’ or ontological components of human existence, besides ‘situatedness’ (Befindlichkeit) and discourse (Rede). Because subjects are interpreters, they do not occupy a neutral position and cannot take a sideways view on reality. They are themselves situated in history; they fall into historical times within a language so that interpretation has to remain mindful of its own ‘performance’. Interpretation is thus less a matter of judgement and more a matter of ‘responding’. As Gadamer succinctly puts it, understanding is an ‘event’.15 It is not an event in the sense of something that happens, but in the sense that history is part and parcel of the interpretation. History has an ‘articulating’ function so that the object of interpretation can neither be definitely ‘past’ and done with nor stripped of its historical garment. Because understanding or interpretation is an event, things, facts, and people are approached within the event with the result that any talk of an ‘in itself ’ that things may have before being taken up by history can only be a matter for nostalgia – we can never fully understand – or dogma – sciences tell us what reality is made of.

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To interpret from within the event thus means, on the one hand, to pay attention to the historical situation of what we investigate and, on the other, to be mindful of our own historical position. We recognize here Gadamer’s famous ‘fusion of horizons’. What allows history to have this articulating role is precisely language in the form of dialogue. This is how language can be the engine of history or, as Gadamer says, language is ‘the experience of the world’ (Welterfahrung).16 This view of the object of understanding being formed by understanding blurs the line between what is linguistic and what is conceptual. We recall that Sprachlichkeit names that dimension of language that is also conceptual. Gadamer makes us sensitive again to the fact that concepts, which we tend to take as rigid tools and free from genesis, actually have a birth place. After Heidegger, but in a manner far more concrete and clear, Gadamer argues that concepts originate in language as it is used. Concepts, Gadamer says, do not predate language but are nurtured by language as used, grow out of it so that language neither precedes thinking, as if it were another thinking ‘before’ the actual thinking, nor merely expresses concepts. The ‘hermeneutic experience’, as Gadamer characterizes interpretation, is thus not ‘an experience of thinking’ (Erfahrung des Denkens) as an exercise that tries to ‘free itself entirely from the power of language’.17 It is rather ‘an activity of the thing itself [ein Tun der Sache selbst], an action [Tun] that, unlike the methodology of modern science, is a passion, an understanding, an event that happens to one’.18 We are transformed by our thinking. This entanglement of language and thinking tries to avoid a sequential path from the world to the mind through concepts. Instead of a linear movement it is rather a spiral, as depicted in the famous ‘hermeneutic circle’. We have to start where we are, but the starting point is always modifiable, re-engulfed by the path trodden. It is precisely the task of thinking to maintain the movement so that the positions of subjects and objects do not become rigid but remain placeholders. What matters, as Gadamer says, is to render ‘passable again the path from the concept to the word so that thinking speaks to us again’.19 As a dialogue, thinking is a living enterprise that must keep us from confusing thinking with an argumentative game or solving puzzles. What keeps thinking alive, relevant, grafted onto the world as it goes is the exchange between language and concepts. As Gadamer recommends, ‘We only should not think … as though philosophical concepts were available in some warehouse to be simply hauled out from there … we should follow the semantic life of language and this means: go back to the point where the concept emerges out of speaking itself, out of the “situatedness in life” [Sitz im Leben].’20 Concepts are fluid or, we could say, operative, as opposed to well-established rigid categories of thought or classification of reality. When discussing subjectivity, for example, Gadamer reminds us after Heidegger that the word ‘subject’ comes from the Greek hupokeimenon and the Latin subiectum, which both mean what lies at the basis. This exercise does not give us a truer concept of the subject but only allows us to have a feel for the kind of transformation that took place when Descartes turned the subject from the sense of ‘what lies at the foundation’ into a ‘thinking thing’ that thinks itself. By doing what Gadamer recommends, we have not substituted another concept to the concept of subject and we have not eliminated the notion of subjectivity. We have only opened up a gap in the obvious character of subjectivity, which makes us aware of our own position as interpreters and of our own assumptions. This is the first step for envisaging and imagining other ways of thinking.

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The life in words that concepts enjoy is precisely what allows them to intervene in reality, turning reality into a transaction. ‘In a concept something is put together [zusammengegriffen], combined together [zusammengefasst]. The word says that the concept seizes [greifen], grabs [zugreifen], and puts together [zusammengreifen] and, in this way, conceives [begreift] something. Thinking in concepts is thus an active thinking that is intrusive [eingreifend] and far-reaching [ausgreifend].’21 In another remarkable conceptual analysis, again following Heidegger, Gadamer explains how ousia, which means landed property, became our philosophical term ‘substance’. The landed property indicates the ‘worth’ of a farmer and allows the farmer to have a public persona or a social worth and thus to enjoy presence. To use the term ‘landed property’, ousia, about a thing and say that a thing has an ousia is to say, as Plato and Aristotle did, that, like a farmer can have ‘worth’ and a social presence through a landed property, a thing can be individuated as the thing it is, can be present as a thing, and can dwell through what makes its worth. The abstract sense of ‘substance’ follows from there as what constitutes a thing as such and what remains the same underneath changes. These examples of ‘subject’ and ‘substance’ show that it is not so much the concept that organizes experience, according to common philosophical sense, as it is experience that gives rise to the concept, although not at the same time. Concepts are laden with experiences and this sedimentation in the course of time represents a dimension of history at the heart of our concepts that is our blind spot. ‘Concepts are not arbitrary tools of human understanding by which it organizes or controls experiences. Rather, concepts have always already grown out of experience; they articulate our understanding of the world and predelineate thereby the course of experience. Thus, with any concept through which we think, a pre-decision has already been made, whose legitimacy we no longer verify.’22 Gadamer obviously does not equate words with concepts. Concepts are indeed what remain the same, for example, through translations from Greek and English. They have their own identity in the sense that they can be repeated in their context. What he points out, however, is that this ideality has a genesis. ‘What philosophical reflection discovers is that there are pre-decisions in concepts that are so fundamentally hidden that one is somehow entrapped within their interpretive horizon.’23 It is because of the ‘pre-decisions’ that have been made in the concepts we use, pre-decisions we did not make, that we need to remain mindful of the genesis of such concepts and of the danger of dogmatism in any discipline when the genesis of concepts is erased. For such an erasure of genesis is tempting for any discipline, which can then present its concepts as ‘self-evident’ or necessary. Such a gesture, which is all too common in disciplines that present themselves as ‘science’, will secure power and authority. Gadamer saw with dismay how the dominance of the sciences took hold of the whole realm of human affairs by branding as ‘nonscientific’ or ‘inexact science’ what did not follow the model of the natural sciences.24 By reminding us that our concepts have a genesis, Gadamer reshuffles the power game in which the conceptual order came to have the upper hand. For, when we are mindful that our concepts came from somewhere, were born at some time, and were borne by some predecessors, our blind faith in the sciences and our admiration for the so-called scientific rigour of their knowledge may appear in a different light: as an ideological bias and a tool to power.

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Gadamer follows Husserl’s fundamental critique of the formalization of nature, which started with Galileo, and borrows Husserl’s notion of an ‘oblivion of the subject’. By this Husserl means that scientists tend to forget that their theories, models, hypotheses, or experiments were ‘designed’ by human beings and originated from a lifeworld. They forget themselves as investigators. Gadamer, for his part, characterizes this oblivion of the subject as the subject taking itself out of the equation. ‘This is … the naivety of historical objectivism: to accept such an overlooking of oneself [Absehen von sich selbst] … . The naivety of so-called historicism consists in the fact that … in trusting the methodology of its own procedures it forgets its own historicity [Geschichtlichkeit].’25 Against this overlooking of oneself as investigator, we can bring out the historical inscription of any investigation and interpretation, and thus of any ‘subject’. This gives us the opportunity, as philosophers, to trace the path from the concept back to the fluid field of human experience. To re-open such a path from concepts back to experience allows us to examine the pre-decisions at the heart of the concept. Hermeneutics is precisely this investigation that tries to re-awaken the voice of history in our language and concepts in order to prevent concepts from solidifying and desiccating, in order, thus, to keep them alive. By highlighting the Sprachlichkeit or dimension of language in our intellectual endeavours, Gadamer wants to protect thinking from falling into the methodology of a discipline and maintain it as a practice. What makes thinking a practice is dialogue as what gives traction to thought. Thinking occurs when concepts remain within the flux of language, understood in their dialogical nature and operating at the service of existence. This is how dialogue is the engine of history. Dialogue is an exchange that is a constant unsettling of the subject. Someone starts in the position of speaker but is always susceptible to be questioned and put in the position of a listener. To apply the dialogical structure to subjectivity means that the subject is in the position of someone who is addressed, whose position is subsidiary to the existence of a dialogue. There is, however, an important corrective that Gadamer stresses in the ‘dimension of language’ in order to differentiate it from social constructivism and from Derridean deconstruction. The historical dimension of concepts is not itself a level of meaning or a layer of meaning that could be retrieved as such or could be used to relativize the concepts we use or the content of what someone says. It is not the basis for a generalized genetic fallacy, holding that what we say is relative to who we are, where we live, what culture or religion we belong to. Such a view would simply and naively postulate another layer of concepts behind the concepts we use. The historical dimension, for Gadamer, cannot be reified in such a way as a super-subject. Thus, history is not a voice speaking through us, but only a resource that allows us to make fluid again the path from words to concepts. The dimension of language is also not a reduction of the subject to a play of differences that would eliminate the very notion of subjectivity as a mere effect of language, as Derrida sees the subject as a ‘function of language’.26 Rather, treading the path again between experience and concepts aims at making our concepts less rigid than they tend to become and allows us to find a small gap in them, a dehiscence through which questions can be raised so that we may

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question our own concepts and make them dialogical again, disclosing the linguistic flesh out of which they are made. To emphasize the dimension of language and to consider both subject and object of investigation in their event-character does not amount to replacing the subject by a super-subject of historical or societal forces nor trivializing it as a mere effect. It only aims at making both subject and object more complex than well-delineated entities. Let us now turn to another form of ‘thinking of the event’: Foucault’s views on speech as drama.

Foucault: The drama of speech As he explains in his last lectures at the Collège de France on what he, remarkably, calls a ‘hermeneutics of the subject’, Foucault revisits his former works and claims that his focus had been all along on the ‘experiences’ of subjects. In The Order of Things and Archaeology of Knowledge the focus was on discursive objects but, he says retrospectively, in the sense of the kinds of experiences that made the particular kinds of discourse possible in the Renaissance, the Classical Age, or the nineteenth century. In his investigations of madness or the prison the focus was also, he retrospectively claims, on the kinds of experiences that were associated with madness or criminality as well as the kinds of experiences the institutions of the psychiatric hospitals or the prison system made possible for those in the institution and outside. Finally, in his last lectures the focus was on the experiences of subjectivity or the practices through which subjects form themselves. This focus on experience situates the objects of his investigation – whether analysis of wealth, life, language, or madness, prison, sexuality or, last, subjectivity – in their own specific historical context. This was clearly stated in The Order of Things and Archaeology of Knowledge. The different discourses or utterances that Foucault examined were treated as made of ‘statements’ and understood as ‘events’. But in the course of his development Foucault came to realize more and more that his own approach consisted in ‘turning into events’ what he investigated. He saw this as a ‘procedure of analysis’ and created the word événementialiser, ‘to turn into event’,27 to name this kind of analysis. In addition, besides using the notion of ‘event’ to name the object of his investigation and the approach he chose for investigating such an object, he also theorizes his own work as a ‘pragmatics’. His own works, he says, are also ‘events’, for which he uses the term ‘dramaturgy’.28 They set something on stage and ‘dramatize’ what he investigates. We thus have three levels at which we can apply the term ‘event’: methodologically it is how Foucault treats the documents he examines – as events or, as he says, as ‘monuments’, instead of ‘documents’. Second, this kind of analysis is a way of slowing down the continuity and progress of history in order to detect the ‘events’ that have ruptured it. As a result, this analysis ‘produces events’, ‘turns into an event’, or ‘eventifies’ what it analyses. Third, this means that, when looking at Foucault’s own works, we can see their pragmatic nature as setting up the drama in which what these works investigate unfolded. Let us examine each of these three levels of ‘event’.

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The object of investigation as an event In The Order of Things and Archaeology of Knowledge Foucault uses the notion of event to characterize the specific difference of a ‘statement’ compared to a sentence, a proposition, or a performative. We must grasp the statement in the exact specificity of its occurrence; determine its conditions of existence, fix at least its limits, establish its correlations with other statements that may be connected with it, and show what other forms of statement it excludes … . The question proper to such an analysis might be formulated in this way: what is this specific existence that emerges from what is said and nowhere else?29

Giving as an example the sentence ‘Dreams fulfill desires’, which has been used by Plato and Freud, among others, he argues that, although we have the same sentence (once translated) and the same proposition, which made the translation possible, we have two different statements because we have two different events.30 In The Archaeology of Knowledge he uses four parameters to identify a statement: (1) a referential, (2) a subject, (3) an associated field, and (4) material conditions. The starting point is not a ‘referent’, which is assumed to exist in a self-evident status as universal and, as such, susceptible to be ‘referred to’. Rather, Foucault chooses to start with discourses. He wants to examine what these discourses produce, what he calls their ‘referential’. Different from a referent, a referential is a range of objects or a kind of object that a particular discourse forms and brings into existence. Even if Plato and Freud may have the same referent when speaking about dreams, the referential of their statement is different: Plato’s interest in the psyche and passions, on the one hand, and Freud’s interest in drives and the unconscious, on the other. What Foucault wants to emphasize is that, by describing what has been said as an event, we offer an additional layer of description to what the history of ideas or the history of a discipline can do. Once we focus on the event of the arising of sentences and discourses in time, the referent of those sentences loses its stable and self-evident aspect and comes to be seen as the object produced by those sentences. A statement is not confronted (face to face, as it were) by a correlate – or the absence of a correlate – as a proposition has (or has not) a referent, or as a proper noun designates someone (or no one). It is linked rather to a ‘referential’ [référentiel] that is made up not of ‘things’, ‘facts’, ‘realities’, or ‘beings’, but of laws of possibility, rules of existence for the objects that are named, designated, or described within it, and for the relations that are affirmed or denied in it.31

This also means, then, that the subjects Plato and Freud, besides being seen as constituting subjects and authors of their own thoughts, can be envisaged within the event as placeholders, as those who have been made possible by a certain set of circumstances and a certain kind of discourse to utter the sentences they did and be understood as meaningful and relevant. This is the second parameter of a statement. The subject of the statement is not ‘identical with the author of the

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formulation’. For the author is considered to be ‘the cause, origin, or starting-point of the phenomenon of the written or spoken articulation of a sentence’ or the ‘meaningful intention which, silently anticipating words, orders them like the visible body of its intuition’. By contrast, the subject of a statement is a placeholder, ‘a particular, vacant place that may in fact be filled by different individuals’. For the kind of investigation that Foucault conducts, this means that the issue is no longer to find out what was meant but rather to determine ‘what position can and must be occupied by any individual if he is to be the subject of it’.32 The subject of a statement is thus neither a psychological subject, as of a sentence, nor a transcendental subject of propositions guaranteeing their validity. Instead of being seen as the origin and guarantee of a statement the subject has in fact been prepared, has been granted its status and given voice by a certain discursive practice, of Greek thinking (Plato) or nineteenth-/twentieth-century European scientific clinical discourse (Freud). The third parameter is an associated field. A statement does not stand in isolation but is part of a set of other statements that are linked to practices. For example, the notion of ‘homicidal monomania’ that appeared at the end of the nineteenth century could be talked about because there was a new field or a new discourse: psychiatry. What Foucault claims is that the proposition including the phrase ‘homicidal monomania’ is dated in its birth. The consequence is that, when seen in its historical situation – as a statement – it also loses its validity across time and, in this case, has indeed lost it; we no longer use this notion. The statement has a repeatability that is limited by the field with which it is associated and cannot be repeated outside such a field. Foucault can then claim that the statements that he identifies in the Classical Age are not only different from statements made in the nineteenth century, but that they could not have been made in the nineteenth century. ‘One cannot speak of anything at any time.’33 The fourth parameter is about material conditions. The materiality of the statement consists not only in the words said and recorded but also in the conditions that obtain at the time of the utterance, social, economic, political. It is precisely because of these material conditions that the term ‘archaeology’ can be used meaningfully. Although it is not a task of digging anything material, it is a task of uncovering conditions of possibility that lie behind the statement so that the event of its production can be isolated, identified, and described. The advantage of treating statements as events is that both the thing and the word are ‘bracketed’ and the trap of the reference is avoided: we are not dealing with a word referring to a thing or a concept having an extension, regardless of time and history. As Foucault says, ‘From the kind of analysis I have undertaken, words are deliberately absent as are things.’34 Or more forcefully: What, in short, we wish to do is to dispense with ‘things’. To ‘depresentify’ them [de-présentifier] … . To substitute for the enigmatic ‘treasure’ of things anterior to discourse, the regular formation of objects that emerge only in discourse. To define these objects without reference to their ground in things [sans référence au fond des choses], but by relating them to the body of rules that enable them to form as objects of a discourse and thus constitute the conditions of their historical appearance.35

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The analysis of statements, then, is a historical analysis, but one that avoids all interpretation: ‘It does not question things said as to what they are hiding, what they were “really” saying, in spite of themselves, the unspoken element that they contain … but, on the contrary, it questions them as to their mode of existence … what it means for them to have appeared when and where they did – they and no others.’36 In our example above, Plato could not mean what Freud meant and vice versa. This focus on statements instead of sentences or propositions allows Foucault to speak of a ‘historical a priori’, which he borrows with a significant transformation from the Husserl of the Crisis. This paradoxical formulation aims at identifying a condition of possibility for discourse, but one that is not formal. It is not ‘a condition of validity for judgments’ but ‘a condition of reality for statements’.37 By this he means ‘the conditions of emergence of statements, the laws of their coexistence with others, the specific form of their mode of being, the principles according to which they survive, become transformed, and disappear’.38 When investigating these conditions of emergence, we in fact investigate the ‘archive’ of a certain discursive era, and this investigation is properly called an ‘archaeology of knowledge’. The ‘archive’ is supposed to name ‘that which, at the very root of the statement-event, and in that which embodies it, defines at the outset the system of its enunciability … . It is that which defines the mode of occurrence of the statement-thing; it is the system of its functioning.’39 The methodological difficulty pointed out by critics is that this archaeology as an analysis does not account for the ground on which it stands. Even worse, it cannot apply its method to the present. Regarding the latter point, Foucault wholeheartedly acknowledges it. ‘It is not possible for us to describe our own archive, since it is from within these rules that we speak, since it is that which gives to what we can say – and to itself, the object of our discourse – its modes of appearance, its forms of existence and coexistence, its system of accumulation, historicity, and disappearance.’40 Regarding the former point – the position from where he speaks – Foucault’s position has shifted quite significantly. At the time of The Archaeology of Knowledge he responded that it was not his task to determine the standpoint from which he speaks. This is a task for his interpreters and critics. ‘For the moment, and as far ahead as I can see, my discourse, far from determining the locus in which it speaks, is avoiding the ground on which it could find support … . Its task is to make differences: to constitute them as objects, to analyse them, and to define their concept.’41 He simply claimed for his own discoveries a certain positivity that can serve as a ‘diagnosis’.42 As a correlate of this diagnosis he also accepts the fact that his own discourse is not anchored, but remains free-floating, even with regard to its relevance. ‘I accept that my discourse may disappear with the figure that has borne it so far.’43 Later on, he came to theorize his own situation and specify the kind of diagnosis he was doing. He did this in two steps: in presenting his analysis as a way of treating objects as ‘events’ – this is the second sense in which he uses the notion of event – and in arguing that his own works are a ‘pragmatics’, dramatizing some phenomena and thereby contributing to ‘the history of the present’. This is the third sense in which he uses the notion of event. Let us examine the second sense of ‘event’ that Foucault uses, which is part of a method to turn the objects of his investigation into events, what he calls événementialisation.

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Analysis as a ‘Production of Events’ (événementialisation) Foucault characterizes his overall enterprise as an effort ‘to treat the instances of discourse that articulate what we think, say, and do as so many historical events’.44 The word événementialisation45 that he creates to name this process is easily understandable as ‘making of something an event’, ‘turning into an event’, ‘eventifying’. He calls this a ‘procedure of analysis’. It is thus a methodological principle consisting in injecting ruptures in what may appear as the continuity and linearity of historical development. ‘I consider history as a succession of fragments, a succession of chance occurrences [hasards], of violences, of ruptures.’46 This strategy of ruptures has different components. I see four. First, it consists in ‘causing a singularity to irrupt: to show that it was not necessary after all, it was not so self-evident after all that mad people were recognized as mental patients; it was not so self-evident after all that the only thing to do with delinquents was to incarcerate them’.47 Instead of having a linear causal explanation, we can now see many connections, what Foucault calls a ‘multiplication of finer causes’ (démultiplication causale). For example, the practice of incarceration as an event can be analysed through the process of penalization, of internment, of imprisonment proper to criminal justice.48 Second, and negatively, the strategy of rupture undermines our position in time as a reference point from which we can look back at history as what preceded us and prepared us. The shortcoming of such a view is that past epochs are viewed as preparing us through what look like tentative and misguided preparatory steps. This is often how disciplines tend to see their prehistory: they have evolved by discarding previous views and theories as pseudosciences, and are progressing towards a telos of better scientificity. In addition, the privilege of hindsight confines the past to be a variation of what we know so that the past is rendered tamed and innocuous, as what can be safely discarded for a better present. Third, and positively, the strategy of ruptures unmasks our own contingency by taking away any self-evidence our science, theories, and unassailable concepts – truth, madness, subject of rights – may have. This takes the form of neutralizing ‘referents’ or what Foucault calls a ‘rupture of selfevidence’ against a ‘historical constant’ or ‘anthropological universals’.49 In Foucault’s methodology it meant ‘to reject “madness”, “deliquency” or “sexuality” as universals’.50 Fourth, the strategy of événementialisation also aims at bracketing the subject as author of statements or discourses so that the works Foucault investigates are manifestations of practices within which a subject is constituted. Thus, the événementialisation shifts the focus away from what subjects represent in their mind towards practices: what people do, for example, what did people do with the mad, the delinquents, or the sick.51 ‘What matters is to take as a homogeneous domain of reference not the representations that human beings have of themselves, not the conditions that determine them without them knowing it, but what they do and the manner in which they do it.’52 This method of analysis by turning objects of investigation into events is not historicism, but, Foucault argues, the opposite. Historicism presupposes a universal whereas his ‘problem’ is, he says, ‘totally the opposite. My starting point is the decision, which is both theoretical and methodological, that says: let us suppose that universals do not exist, and then I ask history and historians: how can you write history if you

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do not accept a priori that something like the state, society, the sovereign power, the subjects exist?’53 There is a third sense in which Foucault uses the notion of ‘event’, besides the characterization of the object of investigation and his method of analysis.

Philosophy as a dramaturgy of events Because he rejects hermeneutics, which, he claims, tries to recover another speech hidden behind the text investigated, he also rejects – without mentioning it – any ‘fusion of horizons’ between the object to be interpreted and the interpreter, which is how Gadamer understands the ‘hermeneutic experience’. What Foucault gives us – the result of his analysis – is, he says, itself part of an event, what he calls ‘an event in thought’ [un événement dans la pensée]. At the beginning of his lectures on the Hermeneutics of the Subject, examining the care of the self in antiquity, he writes: What I would like to show you, what I would like to speak about this year, is this history that made this general cultural phenomenon (this exhortation, this general acceptance of the principle that one should take care of oneself) both a general cultural phenomenon peculiar to Hellenistic and Roman society (anyway, to its elite), and at the same time an event in thought [un événement dans la pensée].54

This notion of an ‘event in thought’ comes from Heidegger’s ‘history of the present’55 and, before him, from Nietzsche who, in his Untimely Considerations, talks about the use of history for the present. Foucault recognized that his genealogy is Nietzschean in its inspiration and design. He appropriates Nietzsche’s view of history as being for the sake of the present and understands this standpoint as a recognition of one’s own contingency when speaking and thinking. Instead of being a critique or a critical investigation, the question Foucault asks is rather, in reference to Kant’s question about the Enlightenment, ‘What is our present? [actualité]? What is the present field of possible experiences?’56 Foucault calls it ‘an ontology of the present, an ontology of ourselves’.57 In this third sense of event, Foucault can now respond more convincingly to his readers who wondered from the beginning about Foucault’s own situation and standpoint. In The Archaeology, as we saw, he said that it was not his question or problem. But in his last lectures he accepts to answer this question by characterizing his own discourse in L’usage des plaisirs as a ‘pragmatics’. His studies are, he says, a ‘philosophical exercise’ whose stakes are ‘to learn to what extent the effort to think one’s own history can free thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think differently’.58 Let us ponder this a bit. He already said in The Archaeology that his works are a ‘diagnosis’. Now he makes this characterization more specific: it is a diagnosis of our present and he performs this diagnosis as a ‘pragmatics’. He writes, I am not interested in the eternal, I am not interested in what does not change, I am not interested in what remains stable under the shimmering of appearances. I am interested in the event … . It is here again Nietzsche who was the first, I think, to define philosophy as the activity that helps us know what is going on and

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what is going on now. In other words, we are permeated by processes, movements, forces. We do not know those processes and forces and the role of the philosopher is probably to be the diagnostician of those forces, of diagnosing the present time [l’actualité].59

As a diagnosis of the present Foucault directly links the object of investigation to the investigator or, more accurately, the event of some discursive practices to the event of the analysis. By taking into consideration the position of the speaker – for example, Foucault’s position – when analysing a phenomenon, Foucault performatively, as it were, shows what is involved in any investigation. We mentioned Husserl’s concern about an ‘oblivion of the subject’ and Gadamer’s analogous concern of taking ourselves outside of the picture. Foucault explains his ‘remedy’ to this oblivion (to use Nietzsche’s terms of a ‘remedy’ to the ‘poison’ of history). In my books I try to grasp an event that seemed to me, that seems to me important for our present times [actualité] while being an event of the past. For example about madness, it seems to me that, at one point, there was in the Western world a separation between madness and non-madness. At another moment in time, there was a certain manner of grasping the intensity of the crime and the human problem caused by the crime. It seems to me that we repeat all those events. We repeat those events in our present time and I try to grasp what the event is under the sign of which we were born and what the event is that continues to permeate us.60

This remedy to the oblivion of the subject goes farther than a fusion of horizons. Foucault connects the truth of what is said with the historical situation of utterance or emergence, as we saw in his first two senses of event, and, now he adds a third term: the ethos of the speaker or investigator. This is how his ‘pragmatics’ works, by acknowledging in the investigation the three forces of aletheia, politeia, and ethos. This means, remarkably, that Foucault as an author is also part and parcel of what he is doing and saying. As was the case for the ‘statement’ in The Archaeology, the subject of discourse is a placeholder that is made possible by rules of discourse in a specific set of material conditions. This applies to Foucault as a subject as well. My book is a fiction, pure and simple: it is a novel, but I am not the one who invented it. It is the relationship of our present time and its epistemological configuration to all this mass of statements. As a result, the subject [Foucault] is indeed present in the totality of the book, but it is the anonymous ‘one’ who speaks today in all that is said.61

However, he further grants an efficacy to this pragmatics so that it is not just a pragmatic way of analysing, but the analysis itself has pragmatic effects in the world. His analyses, he says, ‘will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think’.62 Let us see how this pragmatics functions.

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His books, he says, are part of a ‘dramaturgy’: they stage dramas. We saw that in fragmenting history he turned some discourses into events. Now he presents these events as a ‘drama’ of thought. It is a drama because what he does is a ‘dramatization of events’63 or an ‘intensification’ of phenomena. It is not that his works re-enact the drama of people in the past caught in the discourses and practices of medicine or psychiatry, but rather that his works dramatize some events – the arising of natural history or the emergence of the discourse of psychiatry. By so doing, he intensifies the objects he investigates in the sense of making them salient, branding them as noticeable, taking them out of the tranquil continuity of a discipline. The efficacy of his works is thus in turn ‘eventful’. He writes, ‘I would like to write bomb books [des livres bombes], that is to say, books that would be useful precisely at the moment when someone writes them or reads them. Afterward, they would disappear … . Books should be kinds of bombs and nothing else.’64 The efficacy of his works consists in a liberation of the objects and the subjects. In the case of objects, when seen within such a pragmatics, as staged and dramatized, they are protected from being assessed and judged according to present standards given present interests. In the case of subjects, once we acknowledge that the event as a singularity cannot be separated from the thinking of the event, and thus that our own thinking has an ‘event-character’, we have a chance to think as if we were outside our present or, rather, as if we saw our present from another, for example, Greek, perspective. We see our present within history and this gives us, as already quoted, ‘the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think’.65 This has significant consequences for what we call the ‘truth’. While in phenomenology the fact that consciousness is always ‘consciousness of ’ already forced some rearrangement of epistemology and ontology, Foucault goes much farther. The truth is in fact produced so that the analysis has to attend to this process of ‘making true’, which is historically situated. If the truth is of statements, which are themselves events, and if these events are themselves ‘produced’ by a certain methodological attitude that turns its objects into events, the truth has an ontological link to history. Truth itself is of the order of the event. Truth does not belong to the order of what is, but of what happens, of the event. Truth is not discovered [constatée] but elicited [suscitée]: production instead of apophantics. Truth is not given through the mediation of instruments. It is provoked by rituals: it is drawn by ruses, it is caught on occasions: strategy and not method. Of this event thus produced upon the individual who is lying in wait for it and who is struck by it, the relationship is not of the object to the subject of knowledge. It is an ambiguous relationship, reversible, bellicose of mastery, of domination, of victory: it is a relationship of power.66

In short, to the dramaturgy of the analysis there corresponds an ‘alethurgy’ on the side of the statements. ‘Alethurgy would be etymologically the production of truth, the act through which truth manifests itself.’67 Linked to the disappearance of rigid referents characterized by universality, truth is, before being a property of judgements and propositions, what ‘emerges’ from practices. For example, the truth of ‘homicidal monomania’ emerged from within the new discipline of psychiatry and has since then

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disappeared. History, Foucault says, is ‘the history of the emergence of the games of truth [jeux de vérité]. It is the history of “veridiction” understood as the forms according to which the discourses that are susceptible to be true or false find their articulation on a domain of things.’68 ‘Veridiction’ is the name that Foucault gives to truth in its practice or to truth in the event of its emergence. Veridiction is linked to an ‘alethurgy’. Before what is said can be assessed as true – the dictum as verum – there needs to be a true saying – a dicere that is verum.69 When we attend to the event of truth and focus on the production of truth or alethurgy, the goal is to convey on any phenomenon under investigation its meaning, but one that is of a specific kind: it is a meaning that is, Foucault tells us, ‘variable, historical, and never universal’.70 This is due to the focus on the singularity of what is investigated and the recognition of the singularity of the investigation itself. We thus have a hermeneutics of singularity within a thinking of the present. In other words, we attend to what is historically unique – it is thus ‘historical’ – but viewed from our present – it is thus ‘variable’. The combination of the singularity of the subject with the singularity of the object can dispense with universality – it is thus ‘never universal’ – because this is not what the analysis aims at bringing to the fore. The modality of the truth-telling proper to the thinking of the event will be ‘polemic’, as Foucault says in Le courage de la vérité. It is polemic because the meaning to be given to a phenomenon will locate this phenomenon in its unique historical place and such a meaning, of necessity, will be ‘variable’. However, ‘variable’ and ‘never universal’ are not to be understood negatively, but positively as what we see as ‘unique’ in the past from our perspective that is also seen as contingent. ‘Polemic’ is thus also to be understood positively as what questions existing descriptions of phenomena by adding new descriptions of these phenomena. We multiply the descriptions, but do not create competing accounts of the ‘same’ phenomena. We rather carve out things and facts in different ‘discursive objects’ or as different matrixes of experience. The polemic aspect that is at the heart of Foucault’s views on interpretation could not be more at odds with Gadamer’s whole enterprise of hermeneutics as centred on reaching an understanding. Gadamer too wants to do justice to the singularity of the object of investigation. However, he maintains a claim to universality for the hermeneutic experience itself. The truth is reached in a dialogue. In addition, no matter how different interpretations may be, the fusion of horizons guarantees a compatibility even among radically different interpretations. Dissent is thus always local, for Gadamer, confined to the broad mutual understanding of the existing dialogue. We can certainly disagree in a dialogue and may well engage in a polemic, but the very existence of dialogue prevents the polemic from undermining the possibility of reaching an understanding. Even when he has to acknowledge that his dialogues with Derrida could not get traction, Gadamer continues to see this as an accidental problem, not as a fundamental issue.71 His fusion of horizons is the bearer of hermeneutic optimism, free from drama. Yet despite their multiple differences, what both Gadamer and Foucault offer are not merely two options on the same phenomenon of speech or interpretation, but rather two alternate accounts of how interpretation works. The originality of their approaches is, first, to explain how interpretation and the object of interpretation

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are intrinsically linked by focusing on the role of language in both the interpretation process and the formation of the object. It is, second, to articulate the place of the interpreter within the process of interpretation, thereby proposing a notion of truth that is a historical process and a transformation of the subjects. For both, the truth is not only about the interpretation itself, but more originally and fundamentally about how the interpretation can transform the interpreter.

11

Understanding: A Violent Aim? Marc-Antoine Vallée

Is there something intrinsically violent in the aim to understand, especially in the effort to understand another person? This question could at first sound strange, but it is an idea increasingly widespread in postmodern and poststructuralist philosophy and in the social sciences. According to this line of thought, there is violence at work in any attempt to understand, in the sense of to identify a phenomenon, grasp it conceptually, or submit it to the dictates of either reason or some normative requirements. If this conception is true, it seems that we are confronted with a major objection against hermeneutics, which centres its reflection on an aim to understand which fundamentally animates the human being. By putting such emphasis on the phenomenon of understanding, does hermeneutics not recover the overriding and dominating ambitions that would characterize the metaphysical tradition? In this chapter, I would like to shed light on some presuppositions that lead to a narrow and reductionist view of what understanding is. My aim is to show that two great representatives of hermeneutical philosophy, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Charles Taylor, offer a more accurate view of understanding, maintaining a healthy distinction between understanding and violence.

Violence of metaphysics The idea that violence is inherent to every endeavour to understand comes in different forms in different contexts. I do not want to dwell here on a particular case, but rather discuss a number of assumptions shared by most of those who make this charge. First, I would like to describe the philosophical context that most often inspires these authors. It is important to note that this charge is usually advanced in the wake of radical criticisms of the metaphysical tradition expressed by Nietzsche and Heidegger, uncovering the links of metaphysical thought with the will to power, or with the technical and scientific domination of the contemporary world. This type of discourse was articulated in the works of Levinas, Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze, who highlighted the various forms of violence against what is other, different, strange, foreign, and so on.

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One of the most significant discussions on this subject was conducted by Derrida. In ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ (1964), an essay on the thought of Levinas, violence is traced to the Greek origins of philosophy, by uncovering ‘the false innocence of philosophical discourse’ (2001: 114, revised translation). In this context, the notion of violence must be understood in a very broad sense, sometimes extending into unexpected directions. Thus Derrida evokes ‘the imperialism of theoria’ (104), ‘an ontological or transcendental oppression’ (102), and the ‘oppression and …  totalitarianism of the same’ (113). He also talks about ‘violence without victim’ and ‘without author’ (157), ‘transcendental and preethical violence’ (160), ‘violence as origin of meaning and of discourse’ (161), violence of time and presence, (165–6) ‘violence as finitude’ (166), and ‘ontological violence’ (167). Finally, more directly related to the phenomenon of understanding, he discusses the ideas that ‘all violence is a violence of the concept’ (175), that ontological understanding signifies a ‘conceptual or totalitarian comprehension’ (175), that ‘predication is the first violence’ (184), and that ‘violence appears with articulation’ (185). Derrida reminds us that, according to Levinas, Husserlian phenomenology and Heideggerian ontology would be ‘philosophies of violence’ (113) as thoughts of the totality and of the same, leading to assimilation or denial of the otherness of the other. Even more radically, it is the entire philosophical tradition that is targeted (although Levinas will sometimes rely on Plato’s good beyond being or Descartes’ idea of infinity), since it is reason itself that is targeted. For Levinas, solipsism, as failure to recognize the Other, is ‘the very structure of reason’ (113)1 in its claim to universality and totality. The Other is precisely someone who cannot be grasped or known rationally, who does not let himself phenomenologically be constituted as an alter ego or entrapped into the ontological distinction between Being and beings. But in Levinas, the concept of ‘metaphysics’ is preserved as a movement towards the beyond of being, as an opening to the Other. Metaphysics, as a first philosophy, is first and foremost thought as ethics, following the Jewish experience of the infinitely Other. Derrida’s essay asks to what extent, and at what cost, the work of Levinas escapes this violence of discourse and of philosophical thinking. Does not every metaphysical discourse inevitably speak Greek? Does this not imply, always already, one way or another, complicity or compromise with the violence of the concept? Is it possible to formulate a ‘purely heterological thought’, a ‘pure thought of pure difference’ (189)? For Derrida, it seems that a certain violence (‘originary’, ‘transcendental’, ‘ontological’, or ‘pre-ethical’) is concomitant with any form of metaphysical thinking, even a metaphysics of the Other. It not only animates all metaphysical effort of rational understanding of what is, but also any attempt to hold a meaningful discourse on the irreducible alterity of the Other. This difficult question of the close relationship between violence and metaphysics is taken up and developed in a hermeneutic context by Gianni Vattimo, especially in his essay ‘Metaphysics and Violence’ (2007). This text, which reverses Derrida’s title, is the conclusion of a collective work in homage to Gianni Vattimo (for his seventieth birthday) in which Derrida had hoped to participate. Unfortunately, Derrida was already very ill at the time and died before he wrote his paper. The choice of this title by Vattimo should be read as a tribute to his friend, Jacques Derrida. But this proximity between Derrida and Vattimo is not circumstantial. The need to consider

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the relationship between violence and metaphysics is strongly affirmed by Vattimo. This is, in his view, a critical issue for contemporary thought. It raises the question of the possibility and the legitimacy to continue to philosophize today. All his plea for a ‘weak thought’, that is to say, for a thought that relinquishes any metaphysical claim to a fundamental knowledge of reality and fully assumes the nihilism of our postmodern times, derives from the necessity to eliminate the violence inherent to metaphysical thought which is revealed in the radical criticisms of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida. Like the latter, Vattimo sees in Levinas an important interlocutor on this path, because of his denunciation of all forms of violence against the irreducible alterity of the other. But he also criticizes him for not going far enough and having run into aporias he was not able to overcome. He mainly criticized Levinas for seeking a solution in a return to a religious experience that does not fully escape metaphysics and its violence. Vattimo writes: The departure from metaphysics as the reduction of the other to the same is sought through a restoration of the metaphysical Grund in its most originary form and ultimately the most peremptory (and, at least in this sense, most violent) form of the Lord, of majesty and command. But is the relation with this majesty really less violent than the metaphysical ‘foundation’? (Vattimo 2007: 411)

According to Vattimo, Levinas’ approach retains the characteristics of the metaphysical tradition that must be overcome. The return to Jewish religious experience represents a kind of regression from the main goal, which is to enable philosophy itself to discard its links with metaphysical violence. Only a weak thought, giving a free rein to the play of interpretations without any dogmatic claim to be able to determine what is ultimately real, could provide a satisfactory solution to this problem.

Some assumptions It is in the context of a philosophical reflection that questions the relationship between metaphysics and violence that a discourse denouncing violence secretly at work in any attempt at understanding appeared. This violence lies first and foremost in the illegitimate claim to grasp the essential reality of a thing or submit reality to the domination of rational thought. It is characterized mostly by the desire to reduce all otherness to the same or to bring any difference down to a single principle. The violence of knowledge as power is also denounced, mainly as a theoretical or normative discourse of dominant or majority groups. This violence of understanding would follow in particular from the work of conceptualization, which aims at the universal at the expense of the singular, which disregards what is not considered essential, which imprisons beings in fixed definitions or places them in a series of conceptual oppositions with an axiological content. It is directed mainly against everything that is different, foreign, or other, against anything that cannot be set, anticipated, or totalized. However, because it is not in itself a form of physical violence, but rather a ‘theoretical’ one, a violence of thought, most of the time it does not have any striking manifestation – although the violence of

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thought prepares the ground or seeks to legitimize a physical violence which is clearly visible. It is a more subtle form of violence creeping quietly into our speech and ways of thinking, and which critical thinking should systematically uncover or unmask. Without questioning the constant need for critical thinking, I would like to highlight some problematic assumptions of a discourse that tends to identify metaphysics and understanding systematically with violence. First, this type of discourse tends to exclude itself from what is denounced because it is a discourse held in the name of respect for otherness, differences, and so on. However, it inevitably bases itself on an understanding of what is or what should be. The performative contradiction is so obvious that it barely deserves mention. It is needless to dwell on this point. What is most important to note is that this critical discourse presupposes a problematic conception of understanding. What a hermeneutic thought must ask is, Is it a correct understanding of understanding, or does it offer a reductive and distorting vision of the phenomenon of understanding? I want to show that this denunciation of the violence inherent in any effort of understanding is based on a particular understanding of rationality and metaphysics which is at the very least questionable. It stems from a reductionist conception (and therefore a violent one!) of rationality and of the history of metaphysics. To support the idea that any attempt at rational understanding does violence to reality, and especially to people, we must presuppose a close link between understanding and domination or control. Is such a link necessary? I do not think so. It follows from a certain conception of knowledge that takes shape and develops in the early modern period, in man’s relation to nature. The transition from an Aristotelian philosophy of nature to a modern experimental science implies not only a new way of theoretically conceiving nature but also another way of relating to it. This transformation takes place philosophically in the works of Francis Bacon and René  Descartes. As shown particularly by the French philosopher Ré mi Brague, in The Wisdom of the World (2003) and in Le rè gne de l’homme (The Reign of Man) (2015), the work of the first modern thinkers marks a break with the contemplative ideal of the ancients, in favour of a knowledge understood as a source of power and domination of nature. For the ancients, the search for wisdom was understood as a response to the natural vocation of man to develop our rationality, in order to allow contemplation of the order of nature or the cosmos, and to reach a harmonious life with nature by finding our place in the world order. For the moderns, on the contrary, rational knowledge is not what allows us to place ourselves in a larger order but what makes it possible to control natural realities so that they can meet our expectations or objectives. In short, science enables the development of technology that improves the living conditions of human beings by extending its powers over natural realities and reinforces its autonomy. The idea of violence inherent in understanding comes, moreover, from a questionable interpretation of metaphysics and history, which attaches primary importance to modern metaphysics, as if all of ancient and medieval metaphysics was only a slow preparation for modern metaphysics. More specifically, it is a continuation of the criticisms of modern rationalism and Hegelian idealism as philosophies that tend to absolutize reason. It should therefore be able to give a fully satisfactory demonstration, explanation, or justification of everything. This absolute reign of Reason, over nature and history, culminates in the submission of everything that is

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to the systematic objectifying rationality of a perfectly autonomous knowing subject, or to the triumph of the dialectical path from mind to the absolute Spirit. One could easily interpret these ideals of modern philosophy as the clearest expression of the ultimate aim animating Western metaphysics since its beginning. One could oppose to this increase of the metaphysical empire of Reason from Plato to Hegel and up to us in the techno-scientific domination of the contemporary world, the story of a critical thinking gradually seeking to break free from abuse and violence of this metaphysical rationality, from the criticism of dogmatic rationalism by Kant, and the criticism of Hegelian idealism by Kierkegaard and Marx, to the successive destructions or deconstructions of metaphysics in general by Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, Foucault, and others. These successive criticisms highlight the illegitimate or violent pretensions of metaphysics in its attempt to capture and imprison reality in conceptual or axiological schemes relative to particular historical, cultural, political, or religious backgrounds.

Hermeneutical experience of understanding The aforementioned elements contribute to an understanding of understanding as a form of violent control or domination that is neither the only possible way to describe the phenomenon of understanding nor the most accurate. Its main problem is the fact of staying too closely linked to the simple reversal of the abuses of modern metaphysics, which presupposes a problematic conception of the phenomenon of understanding. One of the contributions of the hermeneutics of Gadamer and Taylor is to have reached a different understanding of the phenomenon of understanding, which would be difficult to describe as violent. One of Gadamer’s main objectives in Truth and Method is to release the phenomenon of understanding from a simplistic view, largely inspired by the model of the exact sciences, for which trying to understand something means essentially having to follow a method and rules ensuring access to a perfectly objective truth. In this perspective, inspired by Cartesianism, the truth at stake in understanding would be the simple result of the method that we impose to constitute a knowledge of the object. In the foreword to the second edition of Truth and Method, Gadamer clearly says that his hermeneutical work is foreign to any search for a ‘technology’ of understanding or a set of rules to guide the methodical search for real knowledge. Its primary objective is instead merely descriptive. It aims to describe phenomenologically what happens in understanding itself and what cannot be methodically controlled by a subject that would perfectly dominate his object. Gadamer writes: ‘My real concern was and is philosophic: not what we do or what we ought to do, but what happens to us over and above our wanting and doing’ (2004: xxv–xxvi). This does not forbid any methodological reflection, as the first readers of Gadamer thought, however it invites us to be aware of the fact that understanding is a much wider phenomenon, that it is not an activity among others of the subject but is the mode of being that we are. Therefore, the task that Gadamer undertakes is to describe the event of understanding as it manifests itself to our being-in-the-world in a historical and linguistic manner. Understanding is not always or most often the result of a methodical activity that is

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controlled by the subject but what happens to us in the encounter with a work of art, a text, a person, an event, and so on. In understanding, suddenly, a view opens up to us, an interpretation imposes itself on us, or a truth overwhelms us. From this point of view, if one wishes to speak of ‘the violence of understanding’, one should use that expression to describe the event of understanding that is beyond our control and that imposes itself on us, rather than the violent activity of a thought which would impose its views upon reality instead of trying to understand it. The real effort of understanding is not an attempt to submit reality to our conceptual schemes and our ways of seeing but to pay attention to the phenomena themselves by exposing ourselves to them and by trying to describe the experience in language. This is the experience of the thing itself which Gadamer describes in the third part of Truth and Method, in a section devoted to the concept of Erfahrung. Again, Gadamer warns us against a reductionist view of the experience of understanding, one submitted to the methodical control of a subject and conceived exclusively in order to produce an objectifying scientific knowledge. The danger, then, is to distort the very notion of experience. Conceiving experience from the standpoint of science alone is unduly limiting since experience in its various facets cannot be completely reduced to the teleological orientation of science. Indeed, experience submitted to the control of methodical thinking tends to exclude particular historical and linguistic dimensions of lived experience in favour of a measurable and repeatable experience. This type of experience is certainly very useful to the natural sciences, but it does not shed light on the fundamental structure of all experience. Nevertheless, Gadamer recognizes some value to this teleological perspective on experience, in the sense that it still reveals a facet of experience, namely: ‘The fact that experience is valid so long as it is not contradicted by new experience (ubi non repetitur instantia contradictoria) is clearly characteristic of the general nature of experience, whether we are dealing with scientific procedure in the modern sense or with the experience of daily life that men have always had’ (2004: 345). The constant possibility of denial by experience is precisely what Hegel draws attention to, by making experience an essentially negative process. Following Hegel, Gadamer insists on the importance of this negative dimension of experience. What is revealed by Hegel belongs to the essence of experience: ‘ “Experience” in the genuine sense is always negative. If a new experience of an object occurs to us, this means that hitherto we have not seen the thing correctly and now know it better. Thus the negativity of experience has a curiously productive meaning. It is not simply that we see through a deception and hence make a correction, but we acquire a comprehensive knowledge’ (2004: 347–8). The Phenomenology of Spirit describes this negativity experience as a reversal of consciousness. Here Gadamer follows Heidegger’s reading of Hegel2 by saying that what is at stake is not so much the fact of thinking the experience from a dialectical point of view but that of ‘conceiving what is dialectical in terms of the nature of experience’ (2004: 349). It is a reading that conceives the dialectic as a shift of consciousness, a phenomenological description of experience, an account of what happens against all odds and that contradicts our expectations and expands our horizons. That is, for Gadamer, what is at the core of any true experience and allows us to think the movement of the dialectic. The agreement of hermeneutics with the Hegelian conception of experience, however, reached a limit when this

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conception is reinstated in the broader context of a teleological process leading to absolute knowledge. As explained by Gadamer, ‘For him [Hegel] the consummation of experience is “science,” the certainty of itself in knowledge. Hence his criterion of experience is self-knowledge. That is why the dialectic of experience must end in that overcoming of all experience which is attained in absolute knowledge – i.e., in the complete identity of consciousness and object’ (2004: 349). At this point Gadamer is unable to follow Hegel. Hermeneutic consciousness cannot be understood from the telos of absolute knowledge. For Gadamer, the idea of absolute knowledge depends on a metaphysical ideal to dominate the field of experience by a knowledge that seeks closure. In contrast, Gadamer emphasizes the opening of the experiment, which still contains the possibility of new experiences. The particularity of experience is that it constantly calls for new confirmations and therefore the possibility is always open to new experiences that contradict our prior expectations. It is this position in the middle of things, in the heart of experience, which knows no Archimedean point or completion in absolute knowledge, that characterizes the understanding of the hermeneutic situation or the human condition in its historical nature. The model that best illustrates the hermeneutic theory of experience is that of the experienced person (der Erfahrene). As Gadamer points out, the person of experience is not someone who has a true knowledge of everything; having learned many things from the experiences they have had, they remain deeply alien to dogmatism and are ‘well equipped to have new experiences and to learn from them’ (2004: 350). Gadamer’s thesis is that ‘the dialectic of experience has its proper fulfillment not in definitive knowledge but in the openness to experience that is made possible by experience itself ’ (2004: 350). This openness to experience is the counterpart of the finitude of man, in the sense that the finitude of being-thrown, as Heidegger put it, marks the limit of an organizing reason that is transparent to itself and of a methodical knowledge that claims certainty of all things. What characterizes experience from a hermeneutic perspective is that it is in every case an experience of finitude. The experienced person is open to new experiences precisely because he or she knows the limits of all knowledge. The experience of finitude is nothing else than the experience of our historicity.

Understanding someone else What has been said about hermeneutic experience applies to the understanding of others. This is what Charles Taylor has shown in ‘Understanding the Other: A Gadamerian View on Conceptual Schemes’, where he tries to expose the importance of the hermeneutic conception of understanding for the challenges encountered in the interpretation of cultures or eras that are foreign to us.3 One of Gadamer’s more significant contributions, which Taylor underscores, is to have shown that the modern scientific ideal of a unilateral and complete grasp of an object cannot account for the experience of understanding that is at play in the humanities as well as in our daily relations to others. Against this model Gadamer defends a conversational conception of understanding where the one who seeks to understand must be placed in a bilateral

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relationship with the speaker, where he must agree to be questioned himself and must give up the dream of a comprehensive understanding that would give him an upper hand over an object of study. The task of understanding others differs radically from the analysis and scientific explanation of an object. The other is an interlocutor, that is to say, a ‘you’ in front of me and able to question me in return. This applies not only to the understanding of another person but to the interpretation of a text or a foreign culture. To experience this culture or text, to enter into conversation with this person, always involves an element of negativity. As Taylor writes, ‘The road to understanding others passes through the patient identification and undoing of those facets of our implicit understanding that distort the reality of the other’ (2011: 29). Understanding the other never means imprisoning him in a ready-made conceptuality – this is the best way of misunderstanding him – but risking being questioned and challenged by this person so that our thinking is exposed to the challenge that the other is for us. This necessarily implies recognizing the otherness of the person we seek to understand, a point so emphasized by Levinas. However, this is not enough, since the recognition of otherness can also be a way to distance others and restore a unilateral relation to them. That is, according to Gadamer, the type of attitude that characterized historicism, which interprets the authors of the past as mere reflections of their time such that any claim to truth is cancelled by the passage of time.4 The search for an understanding of others involves recognizing their claim to truth and admitting that they may be right. This is why it is important to try to understand them. This effort of understanding is first and foremost looking for an opportunity to find common ground or a ‘fusion of horizons’. This is the reason why the hermeneutic model favoured by Gadamer, and taken up by Taylor, is that of a conversation or a dialogue which requires a real openness to others and their claim to truth. As Taylor explains, entering into dialogue essentially means letting ourselves be interpellated and challenged: ‘The crucial moment is the one where we allow ourselves to be interpellated by the other; where the difference escapes from its categorization as an error, a fault, or a lesser, undeveloped version of what we are, and challenges us to see it as a viable human alternative. This unavoidably calls our own self-understanding into question’ (2011: 37). No real understanding of others is possible without this prior opening, which immediately throws us into an exchange of questions and answers where we are involved as much as the others. Any genuine effort to understand others forces us to test the understanding we have of ourselves: ‘If understanding the other is to be construed as fusion of horizons and not as possessing a science of the object, then the slogan might be: no understanding the other without a changed understanding of self ’ (2011: 37). Understanding the other does not mean using violence against him but opening up to him, trying to understand his point of view and confronting his arguments in a dialogical relationship.

The finitude of understanding The danger from which hermeneutic thought is a protection is the alleged need for an outright condemnation of reason and of claims to understanding that are considered

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inherently violent in the name of an absolute respect for the irreducible otherness of others. The condemnation locks us into performative contradictions while nourishing a generalized relativism. In wanting to do useful work – to protect what is other against the ambition to seize and control all of what is – we sometimes confuse a research that is aware of its limits with an absolutized reason that seeks to dominate reality. It is equally dangerous to posit an abstract opposition between a violent or totalitarian Reason and a radical Otherness that is totally incomprehensible. It is mistaken to suppose that reason is solipsistic, an error that results from unduly focusing on a narrow and altogether unsatisfactory conception of reason. Gadamer’s hermeneutics overcomes this reductionist vision to find a more expansive understanding of reason. The real effort of understanding is not to impose our ideas or conceptual schemes onto reality but to open ourselves to the experience of what is, mindful of the limitations of our understanding. This means above all recognizing the other person as an interlocutor and opening up to what she has to say, a task that cannot be achieved without admitting at the outset that the other may be right.

References Brague, Ré mi. Le Rè gne de l’Homme. Genè se et É chec du Projet Moderne. Paris: Gallimard, 2015. Brague, Ré mi. The Wisdom of the World: The Human Experience of the Universe in Western Thought. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003. Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Derrida, Jacques. L’é criture et la difference. Paris: Seuil, 1967. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. London and New York: Continuum, 2004. Heidegger, Martin. Off the Beaten Track. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Levinas, Emmanuel. Time and the Other. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987. Taylor, Charles. Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Taylor, Charles. Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Vattimo, Gianni. ‘Metaphysics and Violence’ in S. Zabala, ed. Weakening Philosophy: Essays in Honour of Gianni Vattimo. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007.

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Hermeneutics as Loving Understanding: Towards a Feminist Poststructuralist Hermeneutics Lisa Watrous

The task of the other’s word is to unbind / loosen what has petrified. Psychoanalysts are like the poet or the lover; their healing instrument is language. – Luce Irigaray, 1985, To Speak Is Never Neutral

The task of hermeneutics and the possibility of (mis)understanding begins with the recognition that language, buoyed by tradition and radiant with meaning, is both lived and living. Gadamer describes understanding as a miraculous sharing of common meaning, and the word as lighting, powerful, and open.1 The word is open for interpretation and ever threatened by a closing, by the dogmatic statement of certainty, the delusion of literalism. Hermeneuts and phenomenologists alike have accepted the charge of reading language within language, or attempting to make meaning out of the often rigid, even absolutist, renderings of our experience in time. Rather than seeking a once-and-for-all statement, hermeneutics questions, vigilantly demanding interpretation and response. The respons(ability) of understanding brings the subject to what Calvin Schrag describes as a ‘third dimension’ where ‘the situated configurations of [mixed] discourse and lived-through experience antidate the split between abstracted facts and values and provides the praxial space for infusing responsivity with responsibility’. Understanding happens amid a living language where she who interprets comes face to face with not just any response but a ‘fitting response’.2 The task of understanding is at every moment infused with the possibility of an ethical reorientation and response. What I shall call the lived and living quality of language and the ethical responsibility of something like a fitting response offer one way we might consider a generous relation between two seemingly antagonistic strains of thought, namely, hermeneutics and a poststructuralist feminism. A poststructuralist feminist hermeneutics follows Patricia Huntington, Linda Martin Alcoff, Grace Jantzen, and others who have alerted us to the difficult necessity of a dialogue between the historically male-dominated hermeneutic tradition of Heidegger, Gadamer, and others, and the appropriate

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scepticism of contemporary feminists. For Huntington and for us, much more than disciplinary division is at stake. Indeed, she writes, ‘Heidegger’s thinking, like that of all great figures, endures because the ultimate subject of his thought can, when rightly understood and actualized, deliver us to a lived reality: well-being.’3 Well-being as a lived reality of understanding ever sheltered by language is at the core of a poststructuralist feminist hermeneutics. For the poststructuralist concerned with the inevitable, even incomplete, nature of language, and for the feminist who refuses to make too much of or give power to an oppressive tradition or male-dominated structure of language, hermeneutics offers an interpretive framework grounded in lived human experiences where narrative is an ontological character of being-in-the-world.4 In order to address the possibility of a dialogue between feminisms and hermeneutics this chapter cannot be a philosophical survey of key texts. Rather, it is an imaginative rendering of a poststructuralist feminist hermeneutics in an age unceasingly concerned with the certainty of the absolute and simultaneously aware of the fearful possibility that things are not all right. We will begin with a brief retelling of being-in-the-world where the technological has taken hold of everyday possibilities of understanding. The technological enframes, reduces, alienates, and makes literal. Any effort at understanding is quickly determined worthless against the sway of the technological. Certainty and productivity are the hallmark of this manner of life such that our words and our ways are constantly held under the scrutiny and tyranny of the technological. The literalism of the technological will highlight the hopeful necessity of a poststructuralist feminist hermeneutics marked by love as explicated by Luce Irigaray.5 My theologically informed reading of Irigaray’s conception of love and language will then serve as a mediator reconceiving hermeneutics as loving understanding.

The work of world making Understanding does not, in fact, understand better, either in the sense of superior knowledge of the subject because of clearer ideas or in the sense of fundamental superiority of conscious over unconscious production. It is enough to say that we understand in a different way, if we understand at all. – Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 296

To name language as lived and living is to call attention to a dynamic relation between Being and understanding. It is at the same time to recognize the subtle, even fearful, reality of a staid language – where understanding, though possible at every moment, lies dormant in stayed meaning. In order to uncover and warn against Being so constrained by inhospitable interpretive constructs, Heidegger thinks through the ontological conditions of what he calls the ‘essence of technology’.6 The essence of technology is nothing technological. Instead, it is a way of revealing that investigates, observes, entraps, and enframes, claiming humankind in a rigid reserve of petrified meaning. Gadamer later attends to this condition of modernity, describing it as ‘access to the world by means of methodical isolation and conscious interrogation’, where language

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has been reduced to and marked by the statement of fact, the assertion of the calculable, the measureable, the once and for all.7 Rather than naming itself as one among many ways of meaning-making, the narrative of the technological assumes the position of universal, absolute interpreter, constantly calculating, measuring, and eliminating other ways and words. Irigaray further expands this technological hermeneutics to include the assimilating and violent male-dominated structure of language that disregards sexuate difference and disallows human becoming.8 The technological thus works to fabricate our word and thereby our worlds – manufacturing interpretive possibilities within an inflexible framework of calculation, reduction, and assimilation. It is, or has become, the primary hermeneutics of our everyday being-in-the-world. The technological simplifies choices, streamlines options, and speaks over the presence of possibilities otherwise. Too often in the technological the ethical is misunderstood in terms of efficiency and productivity. Technological hermeneutics is similar to what Steven Katz has named an ‘ethic of expediency’, where any interpretation outside the parameters of the workaday world are judged and rejected as useless against the rapid and measurable results of the technological.9 Being is thus confronted by a hermeneutics that purports to be the only valid interpretive possibility. Amid the apparent absence of hermeneutic openings we encounter the decisive danger of the technological, and ready-made answers are rarely graceful enough to allow being otherwise. Here we catch sight of the force of Heidegger’s insight that the technological is always more than technology. It is the primary hermeneutics of being-in-the-world, ever at work impacting language and thought. Paul Tillich calls attention to the concealing work of the technological as a hermeneutic structure that runs ahead, transforming being, filling every moment with frenetic activity. Tillich names this space of thoughtless activity the ‘horizontal plane’, where we have lost ourselves and replaced the powerful hermeneutic potential of language with the impotent mantra of the technological.10 The force of the technological has little to do with the now global pursuit of production-based progress and much to do with the subtle, everyday ways we have surrendered understanding and subjected language to the harsh demands of a powerless interpretive framework. The problem of the technological is one of understanding and thereby a problem of language. We build our worlds within the constructs of an often impoverished, exceedingly efficient word. The work of the technological transforms the word of the horizontal, replacing a treasured and storied language with stymied scientific proof. Said differently, the ontological wonder of narrative cannot be measured against the accuracy of the technological. The technological has disenchanted us, covering language with literalisms, concealing power with proofs, and so the myth of Being is undone. Uncovering the ontological significance of the disenchantment of language, Tillich warns that we have ‘deprived ourselves of the dimension of depth and the symbols expressing it’, and in so doing have lost ourselves and become things among things.11 Stories and symbols with rich possibilities of meaning have lost their way, and we, it seems, have lost ourselves. The technological stifles understanding by stultifying language. Gadamer helpfully depicts the relation between language and the technological as an ossifying violence of the word.12 This violence occurs within at least two frames of understanding. On the one hand, literalist language binds stories and selves to an unwavering technological

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framework. Within this frame, understanding and language are a matter of discovering ways to remove misunderstandings – understanding as getting to the bottom of things. On the other hand, upon fixing meaning, the technological then works to protect the increasingly literalist truth-based stories from the threat of interpretive variability. Technological literalism strives against the constant threat of heresy. Far from language and a rich heritage of meaning, and instead of conversation towards mutual understanding, the technological promotes rigid conservation and works tirelessly to assuage the perceived damage of interpretation otherwise. It is this staunch allegiance to literalist language coupled with the violent reaction against the possibility of interpretive multiplicity that demands a poststructuralist feminist conception of hermeneutics. Rather than passively remaining in the wilful blindness of the technological, a poststructuralist feminist hermeneut becomes aware of her misunderstandings and the absolutist misreadings of her tradition. Her ongoing realization thus pushes against that which has long been taken as truth for the sake of understanding. In the technological, truth, as Gadamer points out, becomes synonymous with method, a method that promises certainty and the perfect attainment of knowledge. Experts are masters of the way things really are, the way things have been and the way things will be. Describing this effect of the technological against the possibility of a vigilant hermeneutic endeavour towards understanding, Gadamer writes: The implicit presupposition of historical method, then, is that the permanent significance of something can first be known objectively only when it belongs to a closed context – in other words, when it is dead enough to have only historical interest. …  It is true that certain hermeneutic requirements are automatically fulfilled when a historical context has come to be of only historical interest. But the discovery of the true meaning of a text or a work of art is never finished; it is in fact an infinite process. …  The temporal distance that performs the filtering process is not fixed, but is itself undergoing constant movement and extension.13

The technological entraps understanding in a closed circuit of meaning such that a staunch historically accurate method overwhelms any semblance of thought and shapes all forms of inquiry within the fixed parameters of apparent and long accepted objective reason. Questions, answers, and others must conform to the strict interpretive doctrine of the technological, and the certainty, even security, of the project seem to confirm the necessity of maintaining the status quo. The overwhelming word of the technological drowns out the lived world and living word of the other. It is here in the presence of alterity, in the company of an other, that we arrive at the crossroads of a feminist poststructural hermeneutics. Accepting the reality of something like the technological, and calling to task Hegel, Marx, Freud, as well as Heidegger, Irigaray writes, ‘It is not a matter of changing this or that within a horizon already defined as human culture. It is a question of changing the horizon itself – of understanding that our interpretation of human identity is both theoretically and practically wrong.’14 Irigaray helps us see that it is not enough to simply critique the technological. A feminist poststructural hermeneutics is intimately aware of the often

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literalist and inhuman posture of historical hermeneutics. Thus the genuine pursuit of understanding is frequently covered over by technological ways of being-in-theworld, which extend to interpretive possibilities for being-with others. Technological being is technological being-with. The assimilating language of the technological hides difference and categorizes otherness. Irigaray warns against integrating the other into a ‘univocal appellation’ that ultimately destroys alterity and prevents mutual becoming. The other as such has not been sufficiently considered as an essential dimension of our belonging to the world – the other from whom we receive ourselves, the other towards whom we project ourselves, the other who modifies our ability to be. If our horizon is determined by an original ability to be, it is closed. It is open if we accept that this ability to be is not received once and for all but evolves according to our relations with the other, an other who both limits and increases our ability to be. The other limits it because I can no longer be the totality of the whole.15

Irigaray is not interested in a hermeneutics that is limited to a simple uncovering of a taken-for-granted tradition. Understanding must also include an opening for the reconstruction of the relational – an ethical call, as Irigaray says, to ‘be two’. Fixed horizons and absolute caricatures of being are symptomatic of an unquestioning habitation within the technological. Following Irigaray, we recognize that if understanding is constantly threatened by literalist male-dominated language, the harm does not begin or end with utterance. Every speaking is symptomatic of a language already clouded by a technologically determined and aggressively protected interpretation of tradition. In a similar way, Grace Jantzen indicts theologians and philosophers with having focused on the justification of technological systems of theology and banal conservatism to the ‘exclusion of everything else as irrational’. To this end, she asserts: The principle of conservatism starts from the uncontroversial premise that we already hold to a stock of beliefs, including much common sense about everyday matters, and that we derive this initial stock from our lives in community with others who reinforce or modify this set of beliefs. There may be good reasons why one or another (or perhaps a great many) of these beliefs should be questioned or rejected. …  But what will count as adequate grounds? For whom will these grounds be adequate, and who will challenge them?16

Jantzen issues a call to rethink the hermeneutic task, questioning and challenging the dominant narrative of being. Though we may have deprived ourselves of understanding and limited being by one-dimensional, literalist language, understanding otherwise is the very possibility of the hermeneutic task, even in its worst interpretive manifestations.17 Our discontent is the ground for ways and words other than the technological apparatus of being. By its very nature, language is never a closed system but is living as it is lived. In light of this lived, every day, being-together character of language and world making we now turn to a possible conception of a poststructuralist feminist hermeneutics.

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When stories are hard to come by Although things are grim, they are not impossible. – Grace Jantzen, Becoming Divine, 60

The technological heralds the woeful reality of our shared condition as well as the hopeful possibility of hermeneutic redemption. Thus, hermeneutic insight coupled with feminist poststructuralist critique make way for a thoughtfulness uncharacteristic of the technological encumbrance of being. One such version of a feminist poststructuralist hermeneutics is found in Luce Irigaray’s extensive work on love and language. However, before attending to particularities we will first consider a tender note written by Irigaray in commemoration of the work of Martin Heidegger. Though Irigaray has attempted to rethink Heidegger’s philosophy throughout much of her long career, the striking beauty of her note about and for Heidegger demonstrates a hermeneutic posture of love, of listening, and of relation that I will further develop in this chapter. Irigaray’s most exhaustive consideration of Heidegger’s work is found in The Forgetting of Air, and it is in this text that we find the germ of a loving hermeneutics. Here is the note: I began writing The Forgetting of Air a few days after Martin Heidegger’s death, in May 1976. The task of continuing the philosopher’s work imposed itself upon me without any other consideration. His thought enlightened me at a certain level more than any other and it has done so in a way that awakened my vigilance, political as well as philosophical, rather than constraining me to submit to any program. To conceal such a light would be, in my opinion, a serious error and an ethical mistake for our culture. To gather in his light, to allow it to settle, to pass it on seems more valid to me. And this is what I have tried to do, with respect and gratitude.18

Irigaray refuses to allow Heidegger’s work to grow stagnant in a closed system of meaning. She has been caught by the dynamic word, and having been awakened by thought her task as a philosopher and feminist is to keep reading and rereading. Here she models what she later names a cultivation of human becoming made possible in and through love. For Irigaray, against a static literalist rendering, cultivation ‘no longer means simply to reduplicate, to name, to educate, to construct, or to create the already existent universe, but to leave it to its becoming while accepting that it affects my own, without robbing it of its singularity’.19 This cultivation is reminiscent of the ongoing, unfinished nature of the hermeneutic task, forever a work in progress, and of language as a cultivating manifestation of love that lives. Love’s cultivating necessity allows Irigaray to extend Heidegger’s assertion that ‘being is always being-with’, from an individual uncovering to a mutually responsive hermeneutic opening. The ‘common world’, the world that is shared, Irigaray writes, ‘is always in becoming’.20 Hermeneutics here might be understood as love shared between at least two. The shared responsibility of the cultivating character of something like a loving hermeneutics suggests that

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understanding demands more than the assimilating bent of the technological. Where the technological runs ahead, love abides stillness. Where the technological asserts, love listens, often in silence. Where the technological is closed and defensive to difference, love is open and hospitable. If understanding is encountered at the hermeneutic crossroads of responsivity and ethical responsibility, listening is the gesture required for such a possibility. For Irigaray, listening begins with silence. It is active preparation for the difference that resides within the self as well as the difference made apparent in the arrival of an other. Silence, akin to a mindful sigh of relief or a breath of reflection, is the listening cultivation of an embodied and responsive possibility for being-with and sharing worlds of difference. Listening silence takes the whole body to prepare and respond to the coming word of another, and listening is not the same as merely hearing.21 Listening begins with an orientation in the direction of the other. For this reason, listening demands nearness; I must be close enough and quiet enough to encounter difference, not as I wish it were, nor as an assimilating reductive assumption of the technological, but difference as it is in the other. Listening carves pathways for difference above the noise of the technological and the clamouring of idle chatter. Consequently, this listening silence anticipates much; it is the quieting call to attend to difference above the assimilating chorus of what is already (mis)understood. Listening is thus never simple, and it is not from a single saying that the meaning offered to the other for sharing could be received. It is necessary to listen to the saying of the other and to discover a saying that could be fitting for the two. This saying cannot be already said or foreseen by a previous discourse; it arises from a mutual listening, from the sense that is discovered thanks to the confidence of two subjects in one another, from the search for words that correspond to this reciprocal abandon.22 Listening makes meaning from within the banal assimilating language of the technological, and it is not a job for one. Listening is a shared and expectant gesture of hermeneutic hope. Though listening is taken up individually, the possibility of understanding is realized where ‘two or more have gathered’,23 just as Gadamer describes the posture of hermeneutics as a preparation and an intentional ‘sensitivity’ to alterity marked by questioning. As he writes, The hermeneutical task becomes of itself a questioning of things and is always in part so defined. …  A person trying to understand something will not resign himself from the start to relying on his own accidental fore-meanings, ignoring as consistently and stubbornly as possible the actual meaning of the text until the latter becomes so persistently audible that it breaks through what the interpreter imagines it to be. Rather, a person trying to understand a text is prepared for it to tell him something.24

Both Irigaray’s listening and Gadamer’s questioning alert us to the predicament of understanding, namely, we do not at any time have the whole picture of human subjectivity. Questioning, like listening, is a preparation of sorts, a readiness to encounter and to be surprised by the word of difference. Questioning makes demands not only on the unexpected word of another but on the powerful presence of long

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inhabited language. Said differently, hermeneutic questioning is an orientation that asks after truths long fixed in meaning, and listening is the gesture that makes ready the space for a previously unimagined interpretation. Understanding is unearthed in every moment, in the company of others, where language is limited and senses are dulled to the possibility of difference. Questioning is the enduring work of hermeneutics. In order to hear and respond while allowing for a fitting rather than fixed response, we begin with a questioning sensitivity to the remarkable possibility of interpretive dissonance – a bodily recognition of the other(wise). Hermeneutics is not simply concerned with abstract ideas, but is an embodied practice in living well. As Pierre Hadot has claimed, philosophy and the enduring work of sense-making is a ‘way of life’.25 Here we see a feminist concern at the forefront of the hermeneutic project. Thinking and language are not separate from the bodily attunement necessitated by interpretation. Listening here might be conceived as the responsive embodiment of questioning where others are not simply present but a vital part of the possibilities of understanding. The embodied reality of understanding and language is a feminist concept Grace Jantzen has beautifully articulated: In the philosophical analysis of language (mostly by men), vast attention has been paid to the mental aspects of language: how words relate to concepts, how words have meaning, how we understand words. Yet language, whether spoken or written, is also in the first place physical. …  Without a physical basis in the bodies of the speaker and writers there could be no language.26

Meaning and language are always entwined in a bodily responsivity. In other words, I cannot make sense without my body. While listening is in one sense a hermeneutic opening, in another it is a posture, a bodily inclination of hermeneutic attention. Building on the notion of listening as understanding, and in an attempt to think feminisms and hermeneutics together, Alcoff, quoting Gadamer, reconsiders hermeneutic questioning: Gadamer construes openness in a strikingly ‘feminine’ way, as a willing passivity and receptivity that will then allow the truth of alterity to appear: ‘to question means to lay open, to place in the open. As against the fixity of opinions, questioning makes the object and all its possibilities fluid.’ It is a counsel to a kind of listening that holds one’s own views in abeyance long enough to hear a possible truth. It is a counsel to let down one’s epistemic guard.27

Alcoff and Irigaray broaden hermeneutic questioning to include listening and thereby depict a hopeful opening for understanding between two. Beyond insight readily available, hermeneutic listening leads understanding away from rigid interpretive alliances. As openness eases the fixity of once unthought tradition, the language of that tradition is granted renewed flexibility and interpretive reprieve. One possibility of renewed traditional understanding allows listeners to emerge from the dominant and totalizing identity of a singular male subjectivity and language into the space of

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others’ worlds, bringing listeners alongside difference and necessitating a response appropriate to the manifest difference.28 The alterity of the other arrives in excess of apparent understanding, demanding the hard work of lived language. Listening and language thus travel together, beckoning understanding by silence, by question, and by action in the face of otherness.29 For Irigaray, this listening becomes a turning point for a hospitable welcome of the other. The work of hermeneutic listening has brought us to the realization that, contrary to the pseudo-similarity of the technological, difference is the common marker of humanity. Here we recognize the beautiful necessity of hospitality. The other whose coming is anticipated is always already a stranger to me. The embodied response fitting to the arrival of difference is a welcome, a second call, a bridge constructed between two for the sake of the two. Difference here is the hermeneutic invitation to see and sense things otherwise; it is the opening for an unexpected other, both within and without the self for mutual becoming. Irigaray names the space of welcome a threshold, a bridge, a pathway in order to demonstrate the vast expanse and responsibility of worlds distinct and worlds shared. Difference compels, invites, speaks, touches the other: I will have had to arrange for the coming of the other, to prepare a space in time in which the other can appear to me, in which I consent to receive and welcome him or her; but I cannot [foresee], for all that, how the other will modify my existence – my already-have-been and thus my future – the development of my life. This will depend on the embodiment that will follow our meeting, on the engendering of the one by the other that will result from the encounter between our two singularities: of their welcoming each other, their fertilization of one another.30

Hospitality is often limited to those whom we perceive as similar to ourselves, and in so doing we project much of our own likeness onto the other. However, Irigaray’s remarkable claim pushes beyond the false sense of sameness to which we have become accustomed. Hermeneutic listening cultivates a pathway for world-changing, transformative hospitality. In other words, difference welcomes difference as language alters the landscape of interpretive possibility. The strangeness of the other is thus an event or advent that harbours multiple possibilities of interpretation and response. This hospitality is not unlike Gadamer’s claim that understanding is an event that happens to us in conversation where language ‘bears truth and allows something to emerge’ which may not have been but henceforth exists.31 Nor is it different from Heidegger’s ‘event of appropriation’ which, as Huntington describes it, ‘gathers me into the possibility to think freely, to engage that which is granted’.32 In this understanding event we witness a twofold imperative of hermeneutic hospitality, and we catch sight of a feminist articulation of the work of welcome. On one level, language ushers the hopeful possibility of welcome; it does the work of welcome, making room for the event of understanding. Language and action here meet in the welcome of an other. Every conversation has the potential of opening wide the horizon of understanding, and what is understood is contingent upon the language that has shaped and is shaping shared worlds. Hospitality is language at the threshold of understanding, a bodily comportment of welcome ever aware of the interpretive

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event made evident in the coming of difference. On another level, the very possibility of the understanding event is grounded in the lived reality of language. Selves are constructed in stories; we are not separate from the narrative of being. Hermeneutic hospitality recognizes the feminist impetus of attending to narrative particularity where the difference of the self is manifest in concert with specific narratives of the material conditions of life. Regarding the narrative particularity of what Irigaray calls the dual subjectivity of the world, she writes of being compelled to an opening in time and space where ‘the other asks me to interrupt the composition of my own weaving of time and space, not in order to go from a subjective to an objective perspective – as is the case in a scientific approach – but to be capable of meeting another subjectivity’.33 Thus, difference or interpretive multiplicity welcomes us as participants in the ongoing narrative composition of being-in-the-world. Furthermore, hermeneutic hospitality teaches us to respect the constructive stories of the other. Understanding as event engages narrative in conversation as an unfolding of difference for the sake of difference. Taken together, hermeneutic hospitality and listening thus lovingly grant stories and selves both the space and the possibility of reconstruction, if not redemption.

Love, the flesh made word A language constitutes an organic whole developing through history as a living being. It constitutes in each age a sort of collective unconscious, upon which are nourished the enchanted speech of poets as well as the folktales of storytellers. – Georges Gusdorf, La Parole, 31

So far I have sketched the characteristics of what might be called a feminist conception of hermeneutics marked by listening, questioning, and hospitality. In so doing I have attempted to disclose the living reality of language. However, if it is the case that the stories of our ontology are in need of radical intervention, it is necessary to consider the redemptive power of stories yet to be unearthed. Once aware of the binding constraints of technological being-with, and after having been welcomed to witness the dormant beauty of the word of difference, a poststructuralist feminist hermeneutics gently leads us to the wonder of the word both reconstructed and redeemed. Where Irigaray helped us imagine the worldly particularities of a feminist hermeneutics that is respectful of and faithful to difference, Jantzen provides a philosophical and theological framework for the reconstructive labour of understanding. Here, in the final section of this chapter, I turn to Jantzen in order to redeem an old story of the coming of the word and the possibility of making sense. Understanding demands a perpetual wrestling of sorts, and the nature of this wrestling is of concern to feminist thinkers and hermeneuts alike. Jantzen, following Nancy Hartstock, rightly asserts that the trouble with understanding is found in this struggle to find a way out of the oppressive and violent structures of language. If understanding is a work of uncovering, gaining awareness of what has been hidden is particularly difficult, especially from the standpoint of the marginalized. What has gone

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wrong is that a key element has been forgotten. The development of knowledge from a subjugated position is not automatic. It is not simply marginalization that produces insight but, as Hartstock (and Hegel and Marx before her) emphasized, struggle from this position in the face of multiple ways in which a dominant ideology would deny the very possibility of alternatives. Truth, we might say, is a process, as are many ‘truths’ thereby produced, and the same applies to the symbolic.34 The possibility of understanding otherwise and others is not a given, and liberation from the everyday technological is no small task. The event of understanding is a difficult and incomplete struggle from within the lived reality of (mis)understanding. Heidegger points to death as a primary means of momentary escape. For Heidegger, the anxiety that arises in the awareness of time is liberating.35 Being-towards-death allows awareness of latent, authentic possibilities of being-in-the-world, providing temporary freedom from the tight grip of (mis)understanding. Here the remarkable potential of understanding is evidenced from within a language world encumbered by finitude. Heidegger’s being-towards-death offered a groundbreaking ontological conception where death is not external to but constitutive of the living possibilities of being. Before Heidegger, Freud observed the biological reality of death as contributing to the disease of the human condition. Freud compellingly diagnosed the human psyche as encumbered by the unceasing drive towards death.36 Death, for Freud, is what liberates us from the wholly constricting realty of substitutive pleasure. This death is outside of being; it is something that happens to me, something I must react to, but never dwell alongside. Freud’s psychoanalytic theory is indebted to the death narratives of Greek mythology and Judeo-Christian theology: Oedipus, sacrificial atonement, and Jesus of Nazareth. For Heidegger, Freud, and a host of philosophers and theologians, death structures life in particular ways and makes room for other possibilities of being. However hermeneutically persuasive the impetus of finitude may seem, poststructuralist feminists are troubled by the notion that the only position from which to conceive a possible liberation is understanding death. Jantzen’s interpretation of death is indebted to Irigaray’s psychoanalytic reading of Heidegger’s beingtowards-death. Following Irigaray, and mapping a short history of philosophers and theologians, Jantzen indicts Western civilization with having been dominated by masculinist structures and fascinated with death.37 Masculinist structures of language and industry further incorporate being within a technological mindset where death is both the entertainment and the end. Describing this troublesome infatuation, she writes: ‘The preoccupation with death is matched by a fascination with other worlds and some form of reality beyond the uncertainties of this present life, bound up as it is with the material body.’38 Additionally, death and the preoccupation with ‘worlds of the beyond’ distract attention from the here and now as well as our varied responsibilities with one another in the world. Jantzen is reluctant to regard death as the only hermeneutic position that is capable of turning things around because, on her account, death is one more layer of distraction that covers over the lived understanding and ethical imperative of being-with. Impending death trains me to dissociate from the actual world, the world of others, and legitimates an unethical hermeneutic enterprise. Further, death as hermeneutic opening is grounded in a wholly masculine ontological symbolic, and thereby works to conceal and oppress the presence of the feminine subject.

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To the extent, therefore, that the symbolic of death permeates the philosophy of religion …  assumptions about gender are never far away. And since the efforts of mastery which manifest themselves in sexism are closely connected with the desire to master other (m)others, the need to conquer death is also imbricated in racism, colonialism, homophobia, and other forms of dominance. Conversely, if the misogyny and need for domination, conscious and unconscious, of traditional philosophy of religion is to be disrupted, it is essential that the imaginary should be released from its servitude to the hegemony of the symbolic of death.39

Death destroys understanding and conquers life. Death disallows, even denies, difference and, at least for Janzten, is not and cannot be the primary position of hermeneutic insight. In an attempt to grant hermeneutic hope to women and men as well as locate a sight of possible struggle against the patriarchal order of the narrative of death, Jantzen calls for the construction of a therapeutic ‘imaginary of natality’. Natality stands in sharp contrast to mortality and creates the space for women, for (m)others to reconstruct a vital position with regard to the narrative symbolic of being. It is in respect of [the] connection with all other human beings that an imaginary of natality would be at fundamental variance with misogyny. …  It is a shift of Gestalt that recognizes that the weaving of the web of life which each person enters in virtue of our natality means that we are connected with all other persons, female and male. Our sexuate selves, born of women are the basis both of our similarity to and our difference from other sexuate selves, the foundation both of empathy and of respect for alterity.40

Here we see that while Jantzen is certainly willing to admit to the reality of death, her call for an imaginary of natality allows birth to restore women to the narrative structure of world making such that difference, rather than death, becomes the mutual hermeneutic possibility of world sharing. Irigaray too pushes against the horizons of understanding enframed by death and calls for an advent that gives rise to the possibility of making ready for the arrival of the other.41 In her work she continuously returns to establishing the dual subjectivity of the worlds of our language making, inhabiting sexuate selves, and advent is her term for what is created in the wake of difference shared between two. Advent is both what is birthed in the joining of worlds and also the latent possibility for what is yet to come, the perpetual hope of understanding uncovered together. For Irigaray and Jantzen, we might say that understanding is wrested from and laboured over by way of a reimagined narrative of natality. Theirs is a hermeneutics respectful of and faithful to difference and life, rather than pseudo-similarity and death. However, instead of rejecting death as constitutive of being and meaning, I wish to sketch briefly a poststructuralist feminist hermeneutics by way of a theological rereading shaped by finitude and also indebted to the event of understanding and the advent of difference. In a famous passage in the New Testament, the Apostle John speaks of word, living and lived, word in flesh. John writes, ‘In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. …  And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.’42 The creative word here described, the word at the beginning and

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also in time and flesh, is the historical Jesus of Nazareth. While Jesus is the central subject of the common interpretation of this passage, I would like to consider the passage anew. Perhaps the word made flesh could be reconceived as the manifestation of a poststructuralist feminist hermeneutics taken up by understanding in relation with others. This flesh made word: the bodily position out of which the potential of liberation from the binding language of the technological might be realized. Gadamer too calls upon this passage in John in order to demonstrate the creative wonder of the living and lived word. He speaks of this word as an abundant foundation and divine reservoir of meaning always already present in hermeneutic experience. He contrasts the complete divine word with an ever incomplete human word, thereby allowing this lived word to be understood as a potentially rich hermeneutic undertaking. In the middle of a discussion of the historical importance of divine utterance, Gadamer pauses to make sense of the Christian story. Gadamer suggests that the word of the gospel, the meaning of the event, is to be found in an ever renewed fleshly interpretive plurality. He writes, ‘The meaning of the word cannot be detached from the event of proclamation. The human word puts the dialectical relationship between the multiplicity of words and the unity of word in a new light.’43 In his short account of the redemptive narrative of Jesus of Nazareth, I find what I am calling a sacramental communion, or the event of understanding as the conjoining appearance of word made flesh where meaning is made in language. Said differently, Jesus of Nazareth is a poignant but certainly not solitary manifestation of the everyday meaningmaking reality of word made flesh. The creative potential of word is not limited to a literalist rendering of a New Testament narrative. Indeed, this notion of word made flesh appears early in the sacred text where Moses writes, ‘The word is very near you. It is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it’, and ‘it is not an empty word for you, but your very life, and by this word you shall live’.44 Many have interpreted the word here to be the great Law of Moses, and in a historical sense this interpretation is accurate. However, if we take Gadamer seriously, and if we understand the hermeneutic task to be inherently generative, the word here is not simply a once-and-for-all account of a bunch of rules for a million plus former slaves wandering in a Middle Eastern wilderness. The word must be constitutive of world making, of life. Understanding thus is the radical notion that word made fl esh makes word. Here the word and all its traditional renderings emerge differently and full of meaning. The hopeful possibility of word made flesh is thus grounded in the ongoing, enlightening possibility of a hermeneutic process structured by being-towards-death where understanding is an encounter with authentic possibilities of being-in-theworld – an encounter allowed by a generous (mis)reading of being. If understanding is the language event of the hermeneutic endeavour, it is an event allowed by a potential death of sorts. Not only does my finitude alert me to other worldly possibilities for being-in-the-world, but in order to engage these possibilities death must also come to the literalist renderings of the stories of my being. An interpretive framework that does not allow for the advent of understanding as being-towards-death and natality, of word and flesh, cannot free itself from the self-assured literalism of the technological. However, it is crucial to note that being-towards-death, as well as the death of the

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literalist story, is not a ridding of the story but a hopeful invitation to listen differently and a hospitably to the lived and living possibilities of the story. Here Gadamer’s discussion of the murky and powerful nature of naming truths as well as the necessity of moving beyond static renderings of truth claims is particularly helpful. Rising above names, as Gadamer suggests, is necessary not because in thinking we might ‘dispense with the proper name’, or the truth of the thing, but because often it is the case that the name offers a truth claim long disconnected from the living language of the word.45 In like-minded fashion, Ramsey Eric Ramsey offers the possibility of the pseudonym as both a diagnosis and a therapy for the troublesome rigidity of names and covered stories: Rather than following the dangers of one Last Name, we ought to work under pseudonyms whose nature would always remind us that something is being left out and that other and different names are on the way. What this something left out is will make itself known if we allow the pseudonyms to be recognized as being always and necessarily incomplete. The pseudonym, in this existential sense, is not a false name; to the contrary, it is perhaps our only chance to give a true name so as to undertake the ethical work we deem necessary.46

Here, in the incomplete word, we observe a freeing position from whence being, or fleshly world making, is always a hopeful hermeneutic reality. The pseudonym is not a title reserved for the self. It is an invitation to conversation, to communion. It is a call to see the other and her story as more than the constricting proper names of something like a family heritage. Said differently, she need not take her father’s name in order to have a name. Understanding does not demand allegiance to a name entrenched in the assimilating bonds and literalist stories of the technological. The death of interpretive mastery and rigid structures of story make way for being-towards-death, where death is not wholly assimilating but is an advent, an opening to see and be otherwise. It is here that a poststructuralist feminist hermeneutics makes way for an advental encounter in understanding where what is uncovered comes by way of sharing things in common. When thought together, Irigaray, Jantzen, and Gadamer allow us to conceive of understanding that looks like meaning finally granted after the hard labour of translation. The hermeneutic hope of a poststructuralist feminist interpretive framework thus comes to us by way of communion, the word-making ground of conversation which, as Gadamer claims, ‘is a process of coming to an understanding’.47 Beyond a simple reproduction, understanding as advent interprets thanks to the reality of living in language, of listening, and of sharing communion with an other. Meaning otherwise hidden comes to light as two share in conversation, working through the difficult process of understanding other than and always in concert with our (m)other tongue. Describing what I am calling the relational advent of understanding, Gadamer writes: ‘[The] other world we encounter is not only foreign but is also related to us. It has not only its own truth in itself but also its own truth for us.’48 Again, the shared nature of the hermeneutic project is central to understanding. Truth is not just for me, but for us. It is a communal affair, and it happens in conversation. If we return for a moment to John’s passage we notice the plurality of this living and lived word. This is a

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word that ‘dwells among us’, always more than one. The beauty of language appears in the sometimes excruciating labour of gathering together. It is the grace and truth that looks nothing like the stories our senses have covered over. It is the hopeful feminist possibility of listening well and long for the eventual tide that alerts us not only to understanding in the abstract but in the living particularities of the world. It is the embodied hope of something akin to welcome, a hospitable orientation in preparation of the otherwise. Here, in fleshly undertaking of the living word, we witness one possibility of living well.

References Alcoff, Linda Martin. ‘Gadamer’s Feminist Epistemology’. In Feminist Interpretations of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Lorraine Code, 231–58. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003. Alcoff, ‘Phenomenology, Post-Structuralism, and Feminist Theory on the Concept of Experience’. In Feminist Phenomenology: Contributions to Phenomenology, eds. Linda Fisher and Lester Embree, 39–56. Dordrecht: Springer, 2000. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton & Company Inc., 2010. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. London: Continuum Publishing Group, 2004. Gadamer, ‘Language and Understanding’. Theory Culture & Society, 23, no. 1, 2006. Hadot, Pierre. Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 1995. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper and Row, 1962. Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’. In The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper Perennial, 1977. Huntington, Patricia. ‘Stealing the Fire of Creativity: Heidegger’s Challenge to Intellectuals’. In Feminist Interpretations of Martin Heidegger, eds. Nancy J. Holland and Patricia Huntington, 351–76. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001. Irigaray, Luce. ‘From The Forgetting of Air to To Be Two’. Trans. Heidi Bostic and Stephen Pluhá č ek. In Feminist Interpretations of Martin Heidegger. Eds. Nancy J. Holland and Patricia Huntington, 309–15. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001. Irigaray, I Love to You: Sketch of a Possible Felicity in History. Trans. Alison Martin. New York: Routledge, 1996. Irigaray, Sharing the World. New York: Continuum, 2008. Irigaray, The Way of Love. Trans. Heidi Bostic and Stephen Pluhá č ek. New York: Continuum, 2002. Jantzen, Grace M. Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Katz, Steven B. ‘The Ethic of Expediency: Classical Rhetoric, Technology, and the Holocaust’. College English, 54, no. 3, 1992. Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964.

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Ramsey, Eric Ramsey. The Long Path to Nearness: A Contribution to a Corporeal Philosophy of Communication and the Groundwork for an Ethics of Relief. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press International, Inc., 1998. Schrag, Calvin O. God as Otherwise than Being: Toward a Semantics of the Gift. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002. Schrag, The Self after Postmodernity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. Tillich, Paul. ‘Invocation: The Lost Dimension in Religion’. In The Essential Tillich, ed. F. Forrester Church. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987.

Part Four

Hermeneutics and Eastern Thought

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The Turning Word: Relational Hermeneutics and Aspects of Buddhist Thought Nicholas Davey

Relational hermeneutics is to be commended for avoiding two difficulties facing attempts by Western philosophy to engage with the Chinese and Japanese Buddhist tradition of thought. These concern (1) individual reductionism and (2) cultural subjectivism. Regarding (1), whereas there has been much documentation of how key Japanese thinkers such as Kitaro Nishida and Keiji Nishitani have responded to the works of Nietzsche and Heidegger,1 there has been little consideration of the way Buddhist thought has impacted contemporary European philosophy.2 Too often it is assumed that a direct connection can only be demonstrated by biographical evidence rather than by the exposure of logical and ontological structures.3 Relational hermeneutics is not concerned with meaning reduced to mentalism but with patterns of linguistic and conceptual agency that effectively operate independent of individual intention. Concerning (2), Western thought has become increasingly aware of the dangers implicit in the reduction of foreign intellectual tradition to the norms of a more prevalent one. The works of HansPeter Duerr and Edward Said caution against the imperialistic tendencies of such assimilations.4 The difficulty is that hermeneutic exchange is understood in terms of one dominant cultural subjectivity assimilating another. Relational hermeneutics resists such monadic subjectivism; it conceives of subjectivity in terms of the location and situation of participant subjects (agencies) not acting apart from the sum of relations that constitute its environment. Subjectivity is interactive, a consequence of interaction, and not the singular ground of action. A clear advantage of relational hermeneutics is that it recognizes that all agency is grounded in networks of meaning that transcend the agent, that the linguistic horizons of each agency already contain alignments of meaning which can render that agency foreign to itself. Relational hermeneutics is concerned with identifying such common linguistic structures and practices, and allows comparison between intellectual traditions which avoids the pitfalls of both reductive individualism and subjectivist assimilation. It is with two aspects of a shared language ontology – the formal operation of the ‘speculative word’ in philosophical hermeneutics and the powers of the ‘turning word’

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in Chinese Buddhism – that this chapter is concerned. The fact that both traditions of thought are already placed within the participatory frameworks of language and the transformations it affords permits both intellectual orientations to learn from each other’s account of how immersion in language facilitates the achievement of ‘understanding’ and ‘enlightenment’. This overtly ‘theoretical’ appeal to linguistic ontology and the participatory epistemology of interaction that it enables might seem an inappropriately formal approach to modes of thought which assert the primacy of experience over theory. However, we are not concerned here with the reduction of experience to a theoretical model. A participatory epistemology at the heart of any relational hermeneutics recognizes that experience is always multi-registered and never encapsulable within a single conceptual schema.5 It is, as Gadamer argues, experience itself that summons word and concept in order to better understand its illusive complexity.

An eloquent fragment There it was, lying in a glass display case, part of a collection of Buddhist culture in the Preussicher Kultur Besitz, Dahlem, Berlin, all the more powerful for being unexpected. The perfection of a fragment: a torn scrap of parchment, dry, brittle, etched with the fading ink of a Middle Eastern script, a remnant of a document from the eleventh-century Syrian church retrieved from Buddhist desert caves in Eastern China. Somehow, it had survived its passage along the Silk Roads, endured the aridity of its desert stowage and, on its return to Europe, withstood the attentions of Allied bombers razing Berlin. Just as astonishing was the speculative charge of this fragment: though hardly the size of a child’s palm, it spoke of worlds beyond itself. It gave eloquent evidence for the interconnectedness of the worlds of ancient Christian and Buddhist learning. Furthermore, its very contemporaneousness brought those different worlds a living immanence. This miraculous survival vividly embodied both the performative and speculative structure of hermeneutic truth. It brought unseen relations to light and in so doing sharpened an immediate present of the relations between its worlds and ours.6

A family resemblance The interconnections disclosed by this fragment showed what many scholars have sensed: deep conceptual relations between Occidental and Oriental traditions of thought. Nietzsche confessed his admiration of the work of his Orientalist colleague Erwin Rohde. In Beyond Good and Evil he anticipates Gadamer’s discussion of the interconnectedness of philological structures in language. That individual philosophical concepts are not anything capricious or autonomously evolving but grow up in connection and relationship with each other, that however suddenly and arbitrarily they seem to appear in the history of thought, they nevertheless belong just as much to a system as all the members of the fauna of a continent, is betrayed in

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the end also by the fact that the most diverse philosophers keep filling in a definite fundamental scheme of possible philosophies. The strange family resemblance of all Indian, Greek, and German philosophising is explained easily enough. Where there is an affinity of language, it cannot fail, owing to the common philosophy of grammar – I mean, owing to the unconscious domination and guidance by similar grammatical functions – that everything is prepared at the outset for a similar development and sequence of philosophical developments.7

The cave fragment displayed in Berlin evidenced not just that one intellectual community had taken an interest in another but that the intellectual orientation of one ancient community disposed it to select and store the written meditations of another. The circumstances of the fragment’s placement and conservation in one lifeworld disclosed something of the dispositions of the other lifeworld into which it had been received. The speculative charge of the Syrian fragment disclosed a greater hermeneutic whole binding aspects of early Christian and Buddhist thought. The fragment was no mere historical curiosity; it was an invitation to be drawn into the world of those relations and to consider the hermeneutic possibilities within the lifeworlds that the fragment held in proximity. The brittle parchment displayed a key tenet of both philosophical hermeneutics and Buddhist thought: the aesthetic capacity of the particular and singular case to invoke an infinity of meaning. Like Blake’s grain of sand, it served as a conduit for bringing forth that infinity and, by so doing, wisely demarcated the limitations of our understanding.8

A common concern: The address of experience This is not an essay about hermeneutical and Buddhist thought per se but more a meditation on what the relationality of the two modes of thought reveal of each other. In his admirable book, Absolute Nothingness: Foundations for a Buddhist-Christian Dialogue, Hans Waldenfells notes that while there is no uniformly accepted translation of the Buddhist doctrine known as pratityasamutpada, one is especially viable. The notion can be translated as ‘pure-relationality, pure existing from and in relation to’.9 This affords a direct conceptual link to twentieth-century hermeneutic philosophy. The theme of the part-whole relationship is, of course, central to Dilthey’s hermeneutics: ‘The connectedness of life is only adequately understood in the relation which the meaning of events has to the understanding and significance of the whole.’10 Whereas Dilthey’s discussion of relationality is for the most part epistemological, Heidegger treats of the relational ontologically. The relational underpins his concept of Dasein. The term evokes not so much a particular mode of being but a mode of being that is always a being-with or a being-in-relation-to and is neither separable nor discernible apart from the nexus of relations which it sustains and which sustain it. Such relationality is central to philosophical hermeneutics and finds its ontological

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equivalent in key aspects of Buddhist conceptions of philosophy. C. Y. Kim Standish comments eloquently on the centrality of relational thinking within the Kyoto School of Philosophy: Each self or body exists not as an independent closed substance but as a mutually relational being involving a body, its cells and other selves. In addition, all these parts or elements are related to a flow which from prior beings and what flows from the newly emerging beings as body, cell and self. Thus, the self like other beings does not exist as a self-sufficient being but as a relational, open, social and communal being.11

D. S. Wright in his landmark study of the Chinese Huang Po texts emphasizes that the central Buddhist concept of emptiness (k’ung) presents be-ing not as that which either lies behind or grounds all things but as that relational complex which is all things.12 ‘All sentient beings and all beings of any kind, “co-arise”; each originates conditioned by the others and in turn conditions their very possibility …  . Every relation to things in the world is simultaneously a relation to the ground of all things which has no “existence” independent of the “worldly things” through which it is manifest.’13 Nevertheless, though relational thought figures substantially in this chapter, I do not seek to relate two incidental aspects of what might seem quite separate and independent forms of philosophical thought. To the contrary, relational hermeneutics enables the following suggestion: Because of a common language ontology, both traditions of philosophical hermeneutics already stand in a fundamental relationship to one another. Through a joint commitment to language ontology, both share a common speculative grounding in experience, the wisdom of which is to reveal the infinite interconnectedness of its grounding relations as against the finitude of its cognitive grasp. Both modes of thought are defined by what they defer to. Both reflect and refract in comparatively suggestive manners different aspects of what transcends them. Because of a common foundation in speculative ontology, these traditions can bring to light different aspects of each other’s orientation to understanding, its linguistic and finite character, and its capacity to achieve transformative reorientations to the question of existence. On this basis it becomes possible to compare Gadamer’s account of hermeneutic or ‘speculative’ experience with Huang Po’s account of the ‘turning word’. A common foundation in language ontology reflects the fact that both forms of philosophy proclaim the primacy of experience and practice over purely theoretical concerns. N. A. Nikam argues that ‘in Indian thought philosophy is not primarily “thinking” about reality but rather an experience of reality, and as such a verified and verifiable experience of that reality’.14 Precisely because it reflects on the experience of the meaningful, regards that experience as an event and indeed an expression of the real, the same can be said of philosophical hermeneutics. The common preoccupation with experience immediately poses a challenge to propositional or analytic modes of understanding. The difficulty for modes of thinking dominated by ideologies of quantification is that experiential processes do not easily lend themselves to assessment. It is, however, precisely to ongoing experiences of the meaningful that both philosophical hermeneutics and Buddhist thought direct themselves.

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Thinkers like Gadamer recognize that mental life is one of incessant movement. To achieve a reorientation of how one understands a subject matter (Sache) is to effect a further movement in one’s understanding, to reposition one’s relation to both what has been understood and what may now be understood in light of that repositioning. What is at issue is not just the achievement of a novel insight but what the pursuit of that achievement can itself bring about. This can be variously understood as a shift in the hermeneutical subject’s own sense of narrative, an emergent awareness of that subject’s finitude of understanding and an acceptance of the fragility of previous judgements. The other side of such ‘negativity’ is an increasing confidence in the practices of a hermeneutic subject, a sense of having gained new insights, the pleasure of having a hermeneutic insight confirmed. This reinforces the notion that understanding is a kind of movement, which not only progresses the understanding of a subject matter but also (thereby) the hermeneutic subject’s own narrative of self-understanding. It confirms the argument that transformation of insight can only be achieved by participation within a practice, by being already embedded in a nexus of hermeneutical relations that can sustain infinite development and variation. The achievement of new insight is never ex nihilo but always within the context of a specific practice and its historical location. This argument is consistent with Heidegger’s insistence that interpretation fills out or brings to realization the possibilities already held in understanding (Dasein) ontologically conceived.15 In short, the transformation of insight that hermeneutical philosophy aims at is rendered explicable by a participatory or relational epistemology which grounds its transformative interactions. The Buddhist notion of the ‘turning word’ becomes explicable in this context and throws light on the dynamics of hermeneutical transformation itself. If hermeneutical insight depends upon a play of relations that ground but transcend all speaking, how are these relations to be conceived?

Frameworks of encounter: Towards a relational hermeneutics What enables this reflection on philosophical hermeneutics and Buddhist thought to be something other than an encounter with the exotic is the recognition that both forms of thought are grounded in a common language ontology. In Gadamer’s view such an ontology is to be articulated dynamically. Understanding, as facilitated by linguisticality, is eventual. It is not the cognitive achievement of a knowing subject but is revealed to that subject. A key attribute of the hermeneutic event is its relationality.16 When we undergo a meaningful experience we are taken up into a form of movement which unifies the threads of an enabling tradition that conditions our experience with the dawning of the future implications of that experience. What has been understood, what is now understood, and what will be understood are all played out in the undergoing of hermeneutical experience. That undergoing is participatory. Here we touch on one of the limits of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, a limit which is in certain respects brought to light by an aspect of Buddhist ethics. Following Heidegger, Gadamer accepts the fundamental critique of subjectivism initiated in Being and Time.17 This entails a repudiation of the Kantian insistence that all knowledge has its transcendental ground in the structure of consciousness. Asserting

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the ontological priority of understanding over the subject shifts understanding away from a subjective attitude to a dynamic eventual process in which the knowing subject participates. In short, Gadamer displaces subject-based epistemology with a languagebased ontology. Such a move exposes a limit to philosophical hermeneutics but at the same time offers a way of escaping it. Gadamer’s wish to avoid a subject-based epistemology prioritizes the agency of language over any hermeneutical subject. The disclosure of meaning is not a subjective act but the autonomous act of the language world which breaks open subjective consciousness contrary to the willing and doing of such a subject. The problem with this, as Hans Herbert Koegler has pointed out, is that language is elevated to the status of a super-subject before which the hermeneutic subject is prostrate.18 Dialogue and negotiation are rendered problematic. The assertion of the ontological autonomy of language overcompensates for the excesses of subjectivism by refusing to acknowledge the necessary contribution the hermeneutic subject makes to the event of meaning, its receiving, its application, and its transformation. Gadamer fails to see that if it is to serve as the interactive basis for the transformation of understanding, his commitment to a language ontology requires for its development a participatory (relational) epistemology. Relational hermeneutics needs to be based on a participatory epistemology. This entails replacing the traditional notion of the cognitive subject with participatory dialogical centres, that is, hermeneutic subjects or agencies ontologically formed in and through linguistic, cultural, or social practices. Practices conceived as participatory activities (interactions) form the narrative self or hermeneutic identity which can both moderate and be moderated by other such subjects. As an elaboration of Heidegger’s Dasein and Gadamer’s language ontology, participatory epistemology can be outlined as follows.

1. The participant-subject is always ‘positioned’, always situated in a larger nexus or whole.

2. The experience of an embodied and hence situated subject is multi-registered, 3. 4. 5.

6.

and not to be reduced to any singular mode of interpretation. Though it may reflect a point of view, it cannot be reduced to a single perspective. The participant-subject is an embodied subject, not standing apart from the sum of relations that constitutes its environment but simultaneously acting on and being acted on by it. Such a subject is always located within a situation that is both historical and linguistic, but as Gadamer would argue, to throw light on a situation is a task that can never entirely be completed. The situation of a participant agency is not subject to final description; if every cultural positioning is linguistic, its character can never be fully articulated. In language there is no final description of any position, although language will always seek the finality that is constantly inferred from it.19 Because embodied experience is an experience of the temporal, it is also perspectival, that is, characteristic of a specific temporal, spatial, and cultural location. A given perspective is rarely self-transparent, though its characteristics are often clearer when discerned from another perspective. There is always more

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to a positional centre than a singular perspective can imagine. That participatory epistemology should be invoked in favour of interdisciplinary research is no surprise. The situated subject is a dialogical, negotiable being. The other can see things about my perspective that I cannot see; I need the other to present me with perspectives enabling me to think differently about the possibilities within my own. Each (dialogical) position is unfinished and unfinishable, ‘constantly under pressure’ to open itself to what is other than itself.20 To be is to do: participatory-subjects are in effect clusters of activities, not beings that act but actions that have a being insofar as they are effective agencies: their essence is a consequential construct, an effect of and not a prerequisite for action. Subject-participants are, to use Nietzsche’s phrase, multiplicities that act as subjects but are not actual subjects. They are processes of assemblage or composure that gather received events and possible courses of action into one constantly revising story, identity, or practice.21 The situated subject is grounded in what transcends it. If a position’s character and possibilities depend upon the nexus of historical, linguistic, and cultural horizons it is placed within; each ‘position’ is dependent on the sum of interactions of which it is part. It is practices regionally or understanding generally conceived that uphold interactive relationality. Practices artistic, religious, or scientific presuppose ontological positioning in the sense outlined. Positioning within culture and language implies participation. Participation is interactive; the part can change the character of the whole. Practices are vehicles of transformation, forming and yet being formed by their participants.

In light of this formal outline of a relational hermeneutics and its implied participatory epistemology, we can turn to Gadamer’s account of speculative understanding and then to the Buddhist conception of the turning word.

Speculative language For Gadamer, verbal experience of the world is prior to everything recognized and addressed as existing. What is called ‘world’ and the statements made about it are both already within a wider world horizon of language and are consequent to it. The natural language world is prior to the speech-created worlds of discourse. Following Heidegger, he differentiates between what he declares as the primary alethic (disclosive, presentational, or eventual) aspects of language and the secondary or derivative aphophantic use of statements and assertions.22 Gadamer’s key contribution to the philosophy of language concerns his corrective to the analytic approach, namely, that language functions speculatively: ‘Words that bring something into language are themselves a speculative event. Their truth lies in what is said in them and not in an intention locked in the impotence of subjective particularity.’23 ‘The word speculative …  refers to the mirror relation. Being reflected involves a constant

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substitution of one thing for another.’24 Underpinning these remarks is the conviction that the richness and profundity of the spoken word lies literally not in what is directly said but in its ability to summon those unspoken horizons of meaning upon which all meaningful utterance depends. ‘To say what one means …  to make oneself understood …  means to hold what is said together with an infinity of what is not said in one unified meaning.’25 Every word breaks forth as if from a centre and is related to a whole, through which alone it is a word. Every word causes the whole of the language to which it belongs to resonate and the whole of the worldview that underlies it to appear. Thus every word, as the event of a moment, carries with it the unsaid, to which it is related by responding and summoning.26

The speculative capacity of words denotes their power to insinuate an infinite horizon of possible meaning. When operating speculatively, the word discloses (though never fully) our existence in the primordial relational horizons of linguisticality. The eventual nature of language demonstrates that its capacity to generate meaning cannot be controlled. Meanings may be conventionalized by dictionary and grammatical lexicons, but a living language will not be so constrained. We are often subject to meaning. Meanings are encountered in words independent of volition. It is indeed the speculative openness of linguistic meaning that enables such spontaneous productivity, a productivity that Gadamer specifically associates with poetry. Although a way of life may assume a certain stability of meaning for its defining terms, that stability is always open to challenge from other related or contiguous determinations of meaning. The speculative openness of language is such that new meanings are bound to arise. So long as a discourse exists within the primordial language horizon of human existence, it is susceptible to the serendipitous emergence of new meanings. An unusual expression, a novel metaphor, an unexpected phrase, a ‘straunge’ usage or spelling can undermine a received understanding of a word, point to other ways of understanding it, and awaken a sense of the infinite extent of the language horizon sustaining human existence. Hermeneutics is not about understanding words in isolation but concerns setting received and contemporary meanings into play with one another so as to initiate the emergence of new ways of thinking about those meanings and thereby to effect change in the movement of any self-understanding they facilitate. Gadamer’s belief in the transformative value of hermeneutics is premised on his belief that speculative understanding takes place: it makes itself evident as an event of disclosure. Gadamer never asks how it is that speculative understanding takes place. What is it about the structure of our linguistic horizons that enables them to effect such transformations of understanding? This is not asking for the impossible, not asking for why it is at a certain moment that this rather than that idea comes to the poet’s mind, or why this specific phrase and not another strikes a composer’s imagination. Insisting that speculative language is an event of language alone overcompensates Gadamer’s anxieties about epistemological subjectivity. The result is that the contribution of subjectivity to linguistic reception is underplayed. Though the occasion of meaning’s

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emergence may be a spontaneous occurrence, the context and content of the event rarely is. The relationality of meaning indicates that the emergence of the meaningful depends on the anterior existence of networks of meaning which the event varies or transforms. Heidegger indicated this when he proposed that interpretation brings to light possibilities that are already inherent within understanding.27 Yet neither Heidegger nor Gadamer explores what it is in language that allows the disclosive event of meaning to occur. It is here that the Buddhist conception of the turning word is insightful.

The doctrine of the turning word In his remarkable study of the medieval Chinese Buddhist roots of Zen philosophy, D. S. Wright discusses Huang Po’s notion of the ‘turning word’ (ch’uan-yu). Echoing Heidegger’s distinction between apophantic and alethic language, Master Lin-Chi differentiates between ‘ssu-chu’ (dead words) and ‘huo-chu’ (live words).28 Whether ‘dead’ or ‘alive’, words alone are ‘empty’ of inherent significance.29 Explanatory, analytical words are regarded as ‘dead’ in that they lead not to insight but to the need for further explanation and qualification. Live words, however, ‘point less to a meaning than an opening or fissure in a network of meanings’ such that they open that framework in a new and revealing way.30 ‘Turning words’ have no power or significance of their own but rather ‘fit into a context in such a way that they open that context to view in some revealing way’.31 Turning words release the mind from the hold that everyday language has upon ‘allowing it to see things in unusual ways’ and, at the same time, say ‘unusual things’. Wright cites the recording of one such turning: Shen-Tsan (on) returning to the monastery of his former teacher …  is immediately seen by his old teacher to not be the same Shen-Tsan who left to go out on pilgrimage, so he says ‘Who did you visit while out on pilgrimage? I notice you’ve been speaking in unusual ways.’ Shen-Tsan replies: ‘I was awakened by the Zen master Pai-Chang. The teacher can see that Shen-Tsan has undergone a significant transformation, and the evidence is to be found precisely in what he says and how he says it …  . Rhetorical strangeness was thought to be both a natural consequence of awakening …  and an enabling power for others in that it functioned to open the minds of hearers or readers in breaking the hold that ordinary discourse has on them.’32

Consistent with a Wittgensteinian approach to linguistic understanding, no appeal to an ‘inner’ event to explain this transition in understanding is made. The change is facilitated by the transformative capacity of a turning word. Wright comments, The task of interlocutors is not so much to produce the turning word intentionally as it is to prepare for its appearance in the midst of dialogue. ‘Preparation’ here is only a renunciation of subjective intention and an opening out of the self such that, when ‘a turning word’ does appear, it will be able to do its work of awakening.33

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From the perspective of relational hermeneutics and participatory epistemology, several points of congruence show themselves. The young monk can be turned only because he is already ‘positioned’ in a larger linguistic nexus. Though his situation within that participatory framework is not subject to final description, it is capable of being freshly articulated from a range of unexpected perspectives. Because his situation is unfinished and unfinishable, it is ‘constantly under pressure’ to open itself to what is other than itself. As a situated subject, the monk, like any other hermeneutical agent, is grounded in what transcends him or her and it is precisely such grounding that opens the young monk to the possibility of transformative understanding. The parallel between the linguistic basis of Buddhist enlightenment and the speculative understanding that derives from hermeneutical practices becomes clearer. What enables the turning word to function (an anterior positioning across and between different linguistic frameworks) also allows speculative understanding in hermeneutics to operate. This becomes evident if we briefly compare Wolfgang Iser’s account of ‘placeholder’ concepts with Lin-Chi’s notion of the turning word.34 Though key conceptual subject matters may have indeterminate meanings, within different discourses their meanings remain relatively stable though always vulnerable to being destabilized by alternative meanings. Subject matters such as love, truth, justice, nation, or courage differently inhabit (participate in) various discourses so that truth in a religious discourse (an appeal to an ultimate ground) will have different meanings to those associated with the concept when used in a legal context (reasonable evidence), science (ranges of pragmatic probability), or art (the authentic address of a work). In the context of Gadamer’s appeal to the notion of linguisticality, the concept of truth serves not as the ground of a definitive meaning but as a placeholder term aligning different combinations of meaning in a range of discourses. Across discourses it combines similar but significantly different bodies of meaning. On another level, alignments of meaning may not have a common placeholder term. As in the case of metaphor, a placeholder term attached to one body of meaning can be transferred to another analogous alignment of meanings though it may not be (prior to the transference of metaphor) a bearer of that placeholder. The plurality of alignments attached to a placeholder term is not itself important. What is key is that such pre-existent possibilities establish the ontological precondition of the event of understanding. They establish the parameters within which hermeneutic movement (understanding) can occur. Though Gadamer follows Husserl in the invocation of horizons of historical and cultural meaning, he underplays the number of horizons we live among simultaneously (family, professional, religious, and national). To any of these, a hermeneutic agent may feel intense loyalty; on them a sense of identity and cultural expectation can depend. The ‘event’ of understanding clearly comes about when horizons of meaning not only ‘fuse’ (in Gadamer’s sense) but enter into transformative fission (as Iser would have it). Precisely because of the permeable nature of the horizons we live within, a poetic discourse on love can be displaced (sometimes alarmingly so) by a discourse on power. One body of meaning can be read ‘as if ’ it were another. An archaeological discourse concerning the varied migrant demography of Roman cities in Britain such as York can and have effected a critical rereading of the limited presuppositions of political questions of ‘national integrity’ and migration.35 The content of emergent

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understanding is presently not as important as what that emergence itself evidences; it is witness to the fact that movement within and between horizons has taken place. In Buddhist terms, a ‘turning word’ effects a shift from, displaces, substitutes, or transforms one horizon of meaning into another. In the language of philosophical hermeneutics it is the ‘speculative’ capacity of a poetic image, of a strange meaning, or of a painted image to light up the hidden horizons of meaning it participates in or to transform them in unanticipated ways that achieve movement in understanding. Neither the ‘turning word’ nor the ‘speculative world’ operates apart from the anterior participatory frameworks of meaning that ground it. This takes us to another point of comparison between philosophical tradition and the Buddhist tradition.

Ongoing enlightenment There is no doubting the power of speculative turns in both hermeneutic and Buddhist thought. The experience of language’s speculative power is multi-registered and held within a dialectic of openness and dependency. On one level, speculative experience illuminates the extent of our blindness to the enabling Hintergrund of assumptions that contribute to the pre-reflective horizons of our understanding. An unusual phrase, an image seen askance, or a particularly articulate musical phrase can suddenly illuminate the tacit frameworks of our understanding and allow us to see them as if for the first time. A turning word is also able to suddenly light up and resolve nagging doubts about a certain philosophical argument. That exhilarating experience can make us wonder at the short-sightedness of our initial perspective or at the folly of believing that what we had understood was all that there was to be understood. The speculative or turning word has multiple effects. It can change what we think about our tradition and its defining problems, alter our own self-understanding, and reveal the frailty of our powers of judgement. No matter how transforming such speculative turns may be, they remain a realignment of the multiple horizons that fuse within the moment that ‘meaningfulness’ is experienced. This brings us to another significant parallel between philosophical hermeneutics and Buddhist philosophy: there is no final insight, no end state of enlightenment. Though a speculative insight or turning word can have profound and far-reaching transformational effects, those effects remain nothing but realignments of ways of thinking, speaking, and hermeneutic orientation. The finitude of understanding means that for philosophical hermeneutics, no understanding can be complete. Though hermeneutic understanding can, as in the case of Bildung, accumulate, thicken, and intensify, it does not progress towards an end state, to a condition of final understanding.36 Understanding and enlightenment are not static; both involve transformational and ongoing movement. In this context, D. S Wright makes it clear that for Chinese Buddhist thought, a commitment to tradition is a commitment to transcendence: Taking its point of departure from past experience, any new experience of transcendence might go beyond its predecessor insofar as circumstances, thinking,

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practices, and human selves have changed. Understood along these lines, tradition is a living medium, every dimension of which grows, changes, and recedes in relation to other dimensions and surrounding historical circumstances. It is the tradition’s ‘nature’ always to be ‘different’, to ‘go beyond’ itself by considering each new realization – each ‘going beyond’ – as one historical potentiality contained within tradition itself.37

The author notes, after the fashion of Heidegger, that some degree of transcendence or ‘going beyond’ will occur to us whether we want it or not: ‘History …  hurls us beyond, not so much against our will as by shaping our wills.’38 He suggests that as far as Huang Po is concerned, ‘simply to agree with …  tradition, to obey its current form, is to fail to receive the “transmission”. It is to be “ungrateful” for it constitutes a refusal of the true gift of any vibrant tradition, i.e., the invitation to go beyond its current limits of understanding.’39 Christian mystics also recognize the transient quality of ‘enlightenment’. McIntosh emphasizes that ‘the shifting patterns of self-understanding are themselves always the result of an on-going awakening, troubling, by the call of the other’.40 Christian spirituality, he suggests, is never about a silent absorption in a putative inner self but is the (continuous) activity of being drawn into an encounter with the other.41 Each moment of newly won understanding may function as ‘a new theological gestalt, a hermeneutical field within which everything is seen in a new light and is charged with a new resonance’.42 Such an opening is but one in an endless chain of openings. Hermeneutical philosophy entails a way of life that aims at nothing outside itself. It struggles continuously towards its own self-transformation, towards a deeper and more intense form of negotiation with the subject matters which form the terrain of its concerns. Gadamer’s argument that ‘the truth of experience always implies an orientation toward new experience’ is telling:43 ‘The dialectic of experience has its proper fulfilment not in definitive knowledge but in the openness to experience that is made possible by experience itself.’44 The argument is mirrored in McIntosh’s reasoning. What makes spiritual experience important is not that it offers another order of experience but that it is a call to further and new frameworks of experience. Gadamer’s and McIntosh’s accounts of the essential openness of hermeneutical and spiritual experience are in effect notes towards ‘practices for the transformation of experience’ itself. Acquiring such openness is to practice seeking dispossession of oneself. As a mode of being, the disciplines of spirituality and aesthetic response are open to formative encounters with the other and otherness. Gadamer describes this encounter as dialogical and McIntosh moves in the same direction. What I think of, he argues, as my own reality and what I am, is drawn out of myself to encounter honestly the reality of the other.45 The parallel with Chinese Buddhism is striking. Gadamer says of his own position that there is no higher principle than ‘holding oneself open’ to experience and its surprise emergence.46 One may train oneself to be more attentive to experience, though one can never control what arises within speculative experience. Similarly, we may note that, for Wright, enlightenment is described by Huang Po as openness: ‘The mind openly awaits the disclosure of truth: silent composure, no grasping.’47 Openness is a practical virtue because impermanence

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is the truth even of enlightenment: all things change; closure unwisely resists the change that is always under way.48 Wright observes that although the self must strive to open itself it cannot on its own accomplish the event of ‘awakening’. But it can be opened. Like hermeneutic practice, meditational and spiritual practices entail the adoption of certain mental stratagems, but all three stand in the service of living life as a temporal process, as a movement of multidimensional occurrences that are not fully of our own doing. They are means to the speculative event of being opened to the realignment of our understanding, the condition of which is active participation in the relational practices into which our being is woven. We should note that Zen conversation has a spontaneity not unlike that of hermeneutic conversation. The purpose of both forms of dialogue is to set the occasion for bringing something about – the emergence of insight. As Wright argues, ‘Neither the conversation nor its resultant disclosure are the subjective accomplishment of either interlocutor. Nor is it, in another sense, their joint construction. Opening themselves to the unexpected, both await disclosure, the moment in the conversation when open minds find themselves in an event of insight that is not their own product.’49 Hermeneutic practice and Zen dialogue both invoke what Waldenfells describes as ‘open questions’.50 Better put, they are questions that seek openings into how a subject matter might be newly or differently understood, questions that create mental spaces in which new insight might arise. Gadamer’s argument that the fulfilment of hermeneutic dialogue is not the possession of knowledge but the winning of a new openness to further experience, is analogous to Nishitani’s rendition of the ‘emptiness of open hands’ argument; Buddhist meditational practice concerns the emptying out of everyday concerns and commitments not to achieve ‘nothingness’ but to attain an openness to new alignments of meaning which allow us to transcend what we presently understand. It is clear that both traditions of thought allow for progress and improvement in the expedition of their respective practices. However, though traditions accept that insight and understanding are both formative and accumulative, it makes no sense to talk of them as ‘progressive’. The horizons of possible understanding and enlightenment are of infinite extent. While it is logically possible to speak of the deepening, intensification, and transformation of understanding, one cannot speak of its progress. Both traditions grant that we know neither the origin nor the end of understanding. Talk of its progress is metaphysically redundant. The task of understanding and insight is ongoing. This insight is itself a form of ‘enlightenment’. It releases us, first, from the illusion that understanding is fixed, permanent, and possessable and, second, from the suffering that inevitably attends the pursuit of the unachievable. In this context, philosophical hermeneutics and Buddhist thinkers such as Nishitani share a sceptical strand. Each line of thought entertains a version of ‘The Great Doubt’, a letting go of any belief in grand systems of thought as offering insight into changeless truths and fixed meanings. This is entirely consistent with the ‘relational frameworks’ and participatory epistemology implicit within both traditions of philosophy. Both accept that understanding is partial and fragmentary. All insight is rooted within, shaped by, and takes place within complex linguistic, cultural, and historical networks of meaning that transcend the individual locations through which they (partially) manifest themselves. From a spiritual and educational

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perspective, the point of engaging in hermeneutical and Buddhist practices is precisely to become open to what emerges from the infinite horizons of meaning capable of triggering unrealized possibilities within everyday understanding. A clear condition of such emergence is active participation in the networks of meaning in which one’s relational being is grounded. A further and concluding parallel between philosophical hermeneutics and Buddhist thought concerns the eventualist notion that aesthetic experience is an occasion of phenomenological disclosure. Both traditions concur in the claim that both understanding and enlightenment are achieved through the particular instance.

Aesthetic eventing The visual worlds and logics in which philosophical hermeneutics and Chinese Buddhism are located are extraordinarily different. The manner of flat as opposed to perspectival composition gives an entirely different feel to the Chinese tradition of watercolour landscape painting. Yet, and perhaps not unsurprisingly, both the participatory and relational nature of both modes of philosophical discourse and their emphasis on the emergent, the disclosure, the opening, and the turn point to a parallel way of thinking about aesthetic experience. This becomes clear when Gadamer forcibly distances himself from those analyses of an artwork which only discuss formal aesthetic properties (texture, line, composition, foregrounding, etc.) and not what is addressing us in and through that work. It is what emerges speculatively from within the work that interests Gadamer, how it discloses (brings into appearance) unexpected perspectives of its subject matter. As an aesthetic event, the artwork is, for Gadamer, a particular visualization of what is grounded in the work and yet transcends it, namely, the whole nexus of meanings and concerns that constitute a subject matter. Through the occasion of the work, that which is transcendent (the nexus of meaning-relations sustaining a particular image) opens itself to the spectator. Gadamer’s account of aesthetic experience offers an appropriate way of thinking of hermeneutical experience itself. Such experience is always multi-registered and therefore requires different perspectives to occasion the emergence of other aspects of the experience. Like aesthetic experience, hermeneutic experience cannot be subject to theoretical capture. With the help of time and memory, one may come to understand it more profoundly but only by altering one’s relation to it in the nexus of relations in which the subject and object of that experience are placed. Hermeneutical understanding, like its Buddhist counterpart, is always incomplete, aspectual, and partial, but nevertheless extendable and transformable. In this context it can be wagered that Gadamer’s mode of philosophical argumentation resembles modes of haiku assembly. Gadamer does not write in a systematic manner. His style is more conversational in that it establishes one theme and passes to another so that in the movement different alignments of meaning are built up, each offering a different perspective on the unstated totality of meaning speculatively anticipated by the pursuit of any subject matter. Each philosophic Leitmotifen criss-crosses its counterpart, not only affording a different view of one’s initial perspective

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but also enabling a speculative glimpse of the transcendent reach of the whole. Haiku poems are not to be read as singular poetic statements but as constituting a dynamic collective so that by moving back and forth between each poem their unifying subject matter is occasioned and one’s sense of the (unstated) whole is altered.51 What makes a comparison between philosophical hermeneutics and haiku possible has nothing to do with philology or etymology but with a similar temporal device in reading structures. Both suggest patterns of reading and an unstated whole. Immersion in the initial poems or philosophical statements allows them to establish in the reader a horizon of expectation against which subsequent poems and statements are read. It is participation in the movement of the fragmentary and perspectival that allows changing and potentially transformative glimpses of the whole to appear. This brings us to another telling parallel between philosophical hermeneutics and Buddhist aesthetics, namely, the way Gadamer’s account of speculative experience reflects the Japanese gardening practice of shakkei (the art of borrowed landscape). J. Nollman writes of the practice of shakkei: ‘Every single tree, herbaceous plant, and man-made addition to the garden is placed, not so much to hold one’s attention through its own individual beauty but rather to lead the eye to the view beyond. Pruning the trees to frame the vista has been transformed into a higher art.’52 In short, the art of shakkei is to garden in such a way as to let that which is beyond the garden and yet sustains it (giving its place and position) to come into the garden and be seen. ‘Borrowing’ in this context has the dynamic connotation of bringing juxtaposed elements into a new relation. The art of creating gaps and openings in hedges to bring the landscape outside the garden into the garden is brilliantly used as an analogy for the awakening of memory in Tan Twan Eng’s novel, The Garden of Evening Mists.53 Returning to Gadamer, the analogy is clearly with the ability of the writer or teacher to create gaps and openings within a discourse so as to allow that infinity of meaning which lies beyond it and yet sustains it to be speculatively disclosed within its compass. Heidegger’s arboreal notion of a ‘clearing’ has an obvious place in this discussion. Nishitani uses the imagery of borrowing in a different but related way. He deliberately plants foreign terminology into his philosophical discourse in order to bring to light something within it that would not otherwise be seen. Nishitani writes in the idiom of contemporary European thought, but as Waldenfells observes, While he deliberately uses the primary language of Buddhism, these terms are not to be taken as pertaining to a definite religion or to the teaching of a definite school. They are rather ‘borrowed’, says Nishitani, so that he can say in the context of modern philosophy what he is able to say and would like to say from the standpoint of his own tradition.54

The dynamics of such philosophical borrowings, well instanced by philosophical hermeneutics and Buddhist thought, provide a much-needed framework for articulating not only what happens when a discourse facilitates a speculative turn within itself but also what happens when it opens out onto other discourses. Like all true education, this has to be experienced.

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Conclusion Hans-Peter Duerr is well aware of the problems posed for any dialogue between philosophical hermeneutics and Buddhism if understanding is articulated as the transposition of ‘mental’ worlds. Should understanding a foreign thought system require the renunciation of a home view for the sake of grasping the ‘interiority’ of a different world view, I lose the basis of why I wanted to understand the other world view in the first place. Relationality is lost. Locating hermeneutics within a relational participatory framework of understanding avoids the mentalistic connotations surrounding the terms understanding and enlightenment. Both are indicative of significant shifts in the horizons of meaning that constituted a given participatory centre or subject. Understanding and enlightenment emerge not as a change of mental state but as a change of orientation or positioning within the linguistic and cultural frameworks that each participatory subject traverses. Relational hermeneutics emphasizes that understanding and enlightenment are both effects of the participatory character of language. The speculative and the turning words neither turn us away from language nor beyond it. Rather, they lead to other and unexpected reorientations of meaning within its horizons. Heidegger and Gadamer never doubt that language produces disclosive ‘events’ of meaning. Gadamer’s invocation of the speculative dimensions of language goes some way towards showing what occurs in such events, that is, the passage of one horizon of meaning to another. However, what both philosophers fail to offer is an account of how such a transition takes place. In this context the Buddhist notion of the turning word has much to commend it. When understood as a placeholder term, a turning word operates as a linguistic catalyst, linking and transforming different horizons of meaning. A turning word can only turn because it is placed within and works across different relational networks of linguistic and cultural meaning. The turn of the turning word is the event of understanding itself, the very occasion of its coming into being. Philosophical hermeneutics never questions the phenomenological fact that understanding ‘happens’. The doctrine of the turning word offers philosophical hermeneutics an insight into how it happens. In so doing, the doctrine turns philosophical hermeneutics away from theory towards a more regional, local, relational hermeneutics. As the parchment fragment in Berlin indicated, it is, after all, the embodying power of the particular that opens the ‘silken’ roads to enlightenment and understanding.

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Confucian Relational Hermeneutics, the Emotions, and Ethical Life Eric S. Nelson

Ruist (rujia 儒家) East Asian intellectual and cultural traditions stem only in part from the figure of Confucius (Kongzi 孔子).1 What is called ‘Confucianism’ in the West has precedents prior to the life of Confucius and variations that extend beyond, and at points contradict, the recorded sayings gathered in the Analects (Lunyu 論語). The Analects themselves do not point to one systematic unified doctrine but reveal the overlapping and divergent interpretations of the Confucian teaching that unfolded among the initial generations of students. Passages can support the priority of natural simplicity and the moral character of natural emotions, while other passages indicate the necessity and primacy of ethical and aesthetic cultivation in reshaping natural feelings into ethically oriented affects and the natural person into a properly ethical self. Such divergences and tensions between natural spontaneity and ethical cultivation, as we will see in the course of this chapter, reoccur throughout Confucian traditions. ‘Traditions’ in this context signify discourses partaking in overlapping sets of concerns, questions, and hermeneutical strategies. They share a ‘family resemblance’ that is an amalgamation recurrently achieved through adoption and reinvention.2 In Confucian discourses, emotion (qing 情) is perceived to be co-given or equiprimordial with human nature (xing 性). As Dongfang Suo describes, qing is in correspondence with xing.3 The genuine natural condition of human beings (xing) is revealed through experiencing and interpreting expressed and unexpressed emotions (qing). The Confucian idea of the unity of emotion and nature has sources in Chinese antiquity. According to the excavated Guodian text Nature Originates from the Mandate (Xing zi ming chu 性自命出), chapter one, the way (dao 道) is said to arise in emotion (qing) and emotion is born of nature (xing).4 In variations of Confucian and related discourses, emotions are interpreted as co-arising with human nature. Emotion is taken to be a constitutive (i.e. non-accidental and non-eliminable) structural condition of human praxis (e.g. thought and action).5 The performative enactment and modification of human nature in concrete affective life indicate that the emotions are misinterpreted when construed to be expressions of human nature as such, in the abstract, in isolation from the interwoven practices and relational fabric of ethical life. Confucius and the Confucian tradition can be described as advocating the social education and self-cultivation of ‘genuine feelings’ as well as sincerity and correct

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naming in expression, indicating the mutuality of a pregiven naturalness, and the education and cultivation that would ultimately result in the realization of naturalness: ‘At seventy, I could follow what my heart desired, without transgressing what was right.’6 To this extent, there is a Confucian form of ethically inflected ‘naturalness’, ‘interiority’, and sense of self that challenges the stereotype of a merely external and customary following of conventions, habits, and roles. The emotions are neither purely natural, biologically fixed constants (i.e. in the reductive or limited sense of ‘natural’) nor are they merely social-cultural constructions that can be reshaped in any imaginable way. The emotions are psychosomatically and intersubjectively enacted lived realities: neither naturally given and fixed nor artificially constructed and malleable. Cultivation and education require therefore an adequate moral psychology, as they work with, and at times against, the conditions and limits of human nature.7 In the work attributed to Mencius (Mengzi 孟子), Confucian relational virtues from filial piety (xiao 孝) to benevolence (ren 仁) are based in natural feelings (described as sprouts, duan 端) that call for attentive care, cultivation, and the proper pedagogical and social environments to grow. The emotions cannot be isolated from one another, much less from their whole developmental nexus. The sense of self presupposed in this context is not atomistic; the self is relationally interdependent with others and the environing natural and social lifeworlds. The goodness of Mengzi’s four natural affective sprouts (siduan 四端), encompassing feeling responsive to the other’s suffering (ceyin zhixin 惻隱之心), serves as the source of a relational moral anthropology and psychology in which the natural and ethical cannot be bifurcated. Not to be able to feel emotions and sense their ethical import, for instance, in responding to the suffering of others, is in a sense to be inappropriately human, as in the familiar examples of the immediate inclination to respond to the crying ox and the child about to fall into a well: all humans have a heart–mind that cannot bear the suffering of others.8 In this chapter, I offer a strategy for responding to the following question: to what extent can Ruist discourse indicate a non-dualistic emotional awareness or holistic affective intelligence within the relational nexus of everyday ethical life? By addressing this question, I argue that Confucian discourses are relational and holistic in how they understand the emotions and Confucian interpretive strategies suggest significant models for a relational hermeneutics of affective life.

Once more, with feeling Confucian discourses from early Ruist to later Neo-Confucian sources offer complex and nuanced interpretive strategies for articulating and engaging the emotions in the context of ethical life. In Confucian approaches to moral psychology, elemental ‘natural feelings’ are developmentally unfolded (e.g. Mencius) or morally reconfigured (e.g. Xunzi 荀子) through extended lifelong processes of education, self-cultivation, and self-examination. The concern with moral psychology has been at the centre of key disagreements and interpretive conflicts in Confucian and Neo-Confucian traditions. This tradition of reflection and debate about the role of the emotions is evident in – to mention a

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few familiar examples – the divergent interpretations of the relational nexus of nature, feeling, and culture in the Analects attributed to Confucius, Xunzi’s critique of Mencius concerning the goodness and badness of elemental natural feelings, and arguments over whether the Confucian sage (shengren 聖人) is influenced by the five feelings (wuqing 五情) or is emotionless (wuqing 無情 or wu xinu aile 無喜怒哀樂) in the eclectic wei 魏 thinkers Wang Bi 王弼 and He Yan 何晏.9 There are, furthermore, the differences between Song 宋 and Ming 明 dynasty advocates of the primacy of patterning principle (lixue 理學) and the primacy of the heart–mind (xinxue 心學), the Korean Joseon (조선; 朝鮮) era debate concerning the relationship between the four sprouts from the Mencius and the seven feelings (sadan chiljeong lon 사단칠정론; siduan qiqing lun 四端七情論) from the Book of Rites (Liji 禮記), and contemporary intercultural and transnational Confucianisms that articulate sophisticated moral psychologies on the basis of inherited Confucian sources.10 Given the phenomenological significance of the emotions for how the world is disclosed and experienced, and their relational, potentially self-reflective, and alterable character, forms of Confucian thought and practice offer a number of critical models for considering how the emotions can be cultivated and reformed, even if not completely reconstructed. It can be argued that this need to face and deal with the emotions and other conditions of human life steered the practice of Confucian thinkers away from abstract argumentation towards reflection on the concrete ritual (li 禮) and interpretive logic of appropriateness (yi 義) within what Western philosophers have described as everyday ethical life and the intersubjectively reproduced lifeworld. One aspect of the emotions in Mencius is that they are the seeds and sprouts of our moral possibilities for responding and caring for ourselves, others, and our community. A second aspect is that the emotions are linked to the vital forces of human life. The emotions reflect powerful flood-like forces that can lead to personal and social antagonism and destruction. Because of the prevalence and power of destructive emotional states (including resentment, jealousy, hatred, envy, and anger, which Confucians often associate with the petty person or xiaoren 小人), the example of the exemplary person (junzi 君子) indicates how to regulate, cultivate, and educate the emotions and integrate them into an attuned and well-balanced moral life. This is true for the text attributed to Mencius as much as Xunzi.11 Confucian sources define the exemplary person and the sage (shengren 聖人) as orienting models of the embodiment of an ideal human character.12 Confucian discourses have stressed the role of classical exemplars and patterns to attune, inform, and orient dispositions and practices through working with the emotions and critical self-examination. Confucian texts presuppose that self-examination, critical selfreflection, and other techniques of the self can have a transformative effect. Historical cases and canonical texts offer ways of mimetically and reflectively orienting behaviours in their emotional valiance through the pedagogical means of ethical, historical, and cultural examples, and they situate reflection on one’s concrete form of life. Feelings are in the Confucian context not a secondary aspect of ethical life, or merely a negative impediment to it to be overcome and eliminated. The emotions are understood to be the medium through which an emotionally attuned and well-adjusted ethical life can be established and maintained.

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The emotions have a constitutive role in the moral flourishing of communities and individuals even as those relations modify and rewrite them in their performative enactment and repetition. However, as the Daoist Zhuangzi 莊子 indicates, there is a paradox in rewriting the original goodness of nature (shanxing 繕性) or achieving it through a regiment of techniques of the self.13 The spontaneity of naturally arising goodness is inevitably transformed in being transcribed and rewritten in the context of practices and techniques of the self that transpire according to concrete relational situations and circumstances. Confucian ethical self-transformation might achieve a much different self (one created by technique and discipline) than the one (natural and ethically spontaneous) it intends, revealing reasons to be suspicious of the statement attributed to Confucius in Analects, 2.4, to ‘follow what my heart desired, without transgressing what was right’.

Exemplary emotions The Doctrine of the Mean (Zhongyong 中庸) is a key text that has been traditionally interpreted as introducing principles for enacting and practising natural goodness. It refers to (1) avoiding extremes in temperament and action; (2) promoting harmonious interpersonal relationships; and (3) enacting an encompassing harmonizing attitude in the midst of the cacophony and trials of ordinary ethical life.14 One interpretive tendency, evident for instance in He Yan 何晏 and in later NeoConfucian thinkers who have overemphasized the role of principle (li 理), downplays the role of feelings. They emphasize the sage’s neutralization of the emotions. A locus classicus for this position appears in the opening paragraph of the Doctrine of the Mean: ‘While there are no stirrings of pleasure, anger, sorrow, or joy, the mind may be said to be in the state of equilibrium. When those feelings have been stirred, and they act in their due degree, there ensues what may be called the state of harmony.’15 One gloss on this passage is that the exemplary person’s condition of centring equilibrium (zhong 中) appears to be – and I will argue is not – separate from or prior to the stirrings of the four kinds of emotions: happiness, anger, sorrow, and joy. It thus suggests a separation or distance from the emotions that was identified with the position of heaven and earth (tiandi 天地), nature, or – in later Neo-Confucianism – with principle. The Zhongyong here does not relate so much to the feelings of being happy, angry, sorrowful; it refers to affectively inflected appropriateness in the pace and management of human affairs. The passage stresses harmonizing (he 和), which – according to Xu Gan 徐幹 (171– 218) in his Discourse on the Mean (Zhonglun 中論) – is more like the balanced blending of contrasting and discordant sounds in a musical composition or of contrasting flavours in cooking a dish.16 Xu Gan’s conception extends the basic conception found in the Zhongyong. Harmony (he) refers to a balanced affective state after achieving centring or the mean (‘zhong’). Zhong (centring) and he (harmonizing) are practices that the exemplary person aspires to become constant at performing. When the emotions have been stirred, harmony is the balancing that gives each element (e.g. taste or sound) its proper measure. As this text describes centring as the root and harmonizing as the path, it can be read less dualistically as suggesting the coordination of nature and feeling in practice that allows nature and the myriad things to flourish.

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This coordination of diverse and contrary elements can be said to be precisely the role that a classic such as the Book of Odes (Shijing 詩經) plays in Zhongyong, chapter 33, as well as related Confucian texts. The Book of Odes is here credited with stirring complex moral emotional dispositions such as sincerity and reverence (dugong 篤恭). Confucius is described as praising the opening ode ‘The Cry of Osprey’ (guanju 關睢), which ‘is pleasing without being excessive, is mournful without being injurious’.17 The quality of zhonghe becomes one of the quintessential characteristics of traditional Chinese literature, music, and art in terms of its emotional expression of an aesthetic–ethical ideal. Confucius is described in the Analects as seeing a model of living in each poem, which enacts an aesthetical–ethical pattern to be enacted and deepened by the listener. In at least one significant tendency of early Confucianism, artistic sensibility and cultivation are not merely aesthetic phenomena as they are interpreted in relation to ritual propriety. Two examples are the early Confucian reading of the Book of Rites and the Book of Odes. In the former, rites and ritual propriety (li) are compared to dikes (fang 坊) that curb and control through learning appropriateness and teaching the water-like flow of excessive emotions that threaten the destruction of the everyday common life of the people.18 In the ‘Great Preface’ (Shi daxu 詩大序) of the Book of Odes, inner emotions are depicted as manifesting themselves in outer correspondences. The Book of Odes offered in the Confucian interpretation paradigmatic expressions of feelings to be employed as exemplars in the process of moral education.19 The exemplary role of music and poetry, among other arts, is that of a ‘classic’ in the sense that it helps one mimetically and reflectively model and potentially modify a situation. In this case, it suggests giving pleasure and mourning their proper due or appropriate measure without excess or deficiency. The emotions are consequently not elements to be eliminated in an emotionless state of indifference.20 Feelings are the medium of realizing harmony in the midst of the cacophony, pleasure, and suffering of the world that threatens to overwhelm the self and requires the establishment of constancy.

The promise and risk of the emotions The heart–mind (xin 心) has diverse and contradictory roles in Confucian discourses. The contestation concerning how to understand naturalness and cultivation and the roles of the emotions is evident in the differences between Mencius and Xunzi and in the Korean Neo-Confucian Four-Seven debate (사칠논변, 四七論辨, or 사칠논쟁, 四七論爭). The emotions are simultaneously the medium of moral life even as they potentially undermine and destroy it. Mencius sought to show how natural emotions are the sprouts of moral dispositions that are necessary for and constitutive of ethical life. Emotions are the medium of moral education; yet they are also flood-like and threaten to undermine that education and lead to antagonistic and destructive behaviour. Such behaviours are systemically connected with emotions that are typically described as negative. Careful interpretation is needed here, since negative emotions can have a positive role such as indignation for the sake of justice or the moral feeling of shame in the

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Confucian tradition. Shame is a negative self-directed feeling that ought to lead one back to ethically directed practices. Indignation at and condemnation of morally wrong behaviour is also part of the moral judgement of the exemplary person. In Analects 14:34, injury is owed justice rather than kindness: ‘ “What do you say concerning the principle that injury should be recompensed with kindness?” Confucius replied, “With what then will you recompense kindness? Recompense injury with justice, and recompense kindness with kindness.” ’21 A distinction consequently needs to be made between (1) emotionally neutral and even negative emotional states that are part of moral judgement such as appropriate shame at one’s own failures or justified indignation at injustice and (2) negative emotions that consist of destructive experiential states such as resentment, jealousy, hatred, and envy. It is legitimate to ask at this point whether these two categories can always be adequately distinguished and whether there might be cases in which seemingly destructive emotions might further justice or the good more than a positive emotional comportment. Confucian discourses have accordingly included praise of a kind of impartiality of judgement even as they reject egalitarian conceptions of impartiality as applying the same moral rule or norm to all persons in the same way. Furthermore, there are passages in early Confucian texts that speak positively of negative emotions such as anger and hatred when they are properly or morally directed. Analects 4:3 and 4:4 reveal possibilities for humane benevolence (ren) in relation to both overcoming and appropriately using hatred: on the one hand, the benevolent person alone is said to know how to love others and how to hate them (A 4:3: 唯仁者能好人，能惡人。); on the other hand, those who sincerely strive to become benevolent abstain from hatred. (A 4:4: 苟志於仁矣，無惡也。). In Analects 17:24, Confucius tells his student Zigong that the exemplary person hates the haters who dwell on what is hateful in others.22 Roger Ames notes that ‘certain attitudes and conduct, such as hatred and disrespect, fall beyond the pale’.23 How then can we interpret the positive uses of hatred in the Analects? Do negative emotions like anger, grief, and fear have a role in – as Stephen Angle and Michael Ing argue – ‘a holistic response to certain situations?’24 Is there a noble joy and noble hatred, as there is in the works of Aristotle or Nietzsche or Lu Xun, or does the discourse of the Analects speak of the exemplary person’s hatred of x or y in a different – perhaps more metaphorical or impartial – sense in such passages? One additional issue with clarifying a number of these remarks is the ambiguity between (1) e 惡 as evil, vicious, coarse, or harmful and (2) wu 惡 understood verbally as to hate, to despise, to be ashamed, or to fear.25 In this light, the exemplary person might morally disapprove or despise without entering into a destructive hateful or resentful emotional state of mind. If this latter is the case, as seems likely, does it suggest a state of emotional neutrality or rather the appropriate balancing and due measure of negative effects and emotions? In terms of its ethically oriented understanding of the political, Confucian discourses elaborate how to be exemplary persons, serving as officials and educators, who cultivate the ‘five beautiful’ and discard the ‘four bad’ behaviours in order to achieve the middle way in regulating oneself and governing others.26 In the context of Confucius’ idea of governing and regulating bad behaviour, badness (e 恶) is more related to action and its affective disposition than an interior emotive state.

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Before we move too quickly to a conclusion, it should be noted that ‘negative’ emotions are not necessarily negative either politically or morally. Xunzi noted in his discussion of music how people need to be allowed ways of expressing their love and hatred, joy and anger, and the full range of positive and negative emotions, in order for them to be well ordered.27 Xunzi maintains that ‘if the people have emotions of love and hatred, but no ways in which to express their joy or anger, then they will become disordered’, and concludes that having music is as essential to the political sphere as having armies. Music allows a spectrum of emotions from happiness and sadness to be expressed and at the same time harmonized, just as war allows for the expression and resolution of anger. The emotions expressed in music become an indicator of the social situation of the age: All tones are generated from the human mind. The affections (qing) are moved within and take on form in sound. When these sounds have patterning (wen), they are called ‘tones’. The tones of a well-managed age are at rest and happy: its government is balanced (he). The tones of an age of turmoil are bitter and full of anger: its government is perverse. The tones of a ruined state are filled with lament and brooding: its people are in difficulty. The way of sounds and tones (shengyin) communicate (tong) with [the quality of] governance.28

The Analects indicate that negative emotional states (such as being sorrowful or angry) for the sake of others can be readily transformed into affirmative affective states. A number of passages in the Book of Rites and the Mencius speak of the righteous anger of rulers and teachers: a negative emotion such as anger can be appropriate if it is like the sage-king’s anger that, for example, gives repose to the people.29 However, this must be a special case as the general condition of the exemplary remains one without negative socially oriented emotions such as anger and resentment. According to the Liji, the ruler employs courage to overcome anger.30 A cultivated affective state can counter and balance uncultivated emotional forces. The Mencius noted how ‘the benevolent person does not accumulate anger, nor bear resentment against others, but only regards them with affection and love’.31 Along with Analects 4:3 and 4:4, such remarks in the Mencius indicate how morally cultivated emotions such as love and benevolence outweigh negative emotions such as anger and hatred. Even if one momentarily acts out of justified anger and disdain, perhaps against injustice for the sake and good of the people, such emotional states are not to be retained and intensified into a fixed disposition or state of being. It is accordingly the benevolent humane person who knows how to appropriately feel and limit dangerous emotional states such as anger and hatred by directing them without being negatively influenced by them. The correction of excessive like and dislike, love and hatred, is called for rather than the elimination of emotion. According to the Great Learning (Da Xue 大學), self-cultivation shows one how to recognize the faults of those one loves and the merits of those one despises.32 Love and hatred are biased and partial; yet recognizing the faults of those one loves requires correcting the affective–cognitive heart–mind (zhengqixin 正其心) rather than abandoning love. Correcting the heart–mind cannot occur in affective states of

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anger (fen 忿), fear (kong 恐), desire (le 樂), and anxiety (huan 患). Even as afflictive emotional states undermine the constancy of the heart–mind, it cannot be described as being without affective valiance. King Wen’s virtues are described relationally in chapter seven as consisting of humaneness (ren 仁), reverence (jing 敬), filial piety (xiao 孝), loving compassion (ci 慈), and trustworthiness (xin 信).33

A relational hermeneutics of the emotions Confucian discourses offer rich and varied phenomenologies of affective intelligence and its interpretive roles in everyday life. Confucian descriptive expressions and categorizations of the emotions encompass, in two classical models from the Confucian tradition, the four sprouts from the Mencius and the seven emotions from the Book of Rites. We can speak of phenomenology in this context to the extent that it can mean description in the interactive and intersubjective first- and second-person perspectives without presupposing the radical Cartesian separation of the subject from its world. The genetic phenomenological description of the emotions in their temporal development is indicated in the Mencius.34 The portrayal of the four sprouts, or natural moral feelings that call for appropriate cultivation to flourish, attributed to Mencius, discloses the potential and risk of the fragile natural feelings of human beings. In his recent work, Embodied Moral Psychology and Confucian Philosophy, Bongrae Seok has stressed the environmentally reactive character of the four sprouts as they flourish or fail to flourish in response to their environments and circumstances.35 The basic moral emotions of the Confucian tradition, such as shame, are interpreted as having a negative and reactive affective tendency that furthers moral cultivation: the feeling of shame motivates a moral transformation against performing shameful actions. This transformative account contrasts with European philosophical discourses, notably those of Spinoza and Nietzsche, in which the reactive is understood as a characteristic associated with negative emotions whereas activity and spontaneity are characteristics of positive emotions. In this context, it might be asked whether the four sprouts are reactive or do they also involve a kind of spontaneity, responsiveness, and creativity? Can these two categories of the reactive and responsive be adequately distinguished? One way of addressing the question of the reactiveness or responsiveness of the four sprouts is provided by the Korean Neo-Confucian thinker I Hwang (이황; 李滉), often called by his pen name Toegye (퇴계; 退溪). Toegye maintained in the exchange of letters with Gobong (고봉, 高峰; Gi Dae-seung 기대승; 奇大升), in the first phase of the Four-Seven debate that the four sprouts of the Mencius and the seven feelings of the Book of Rites are not both variations on feeling, as Gobong and Yulgok argued, but rather require a distinction between principle and feeling.36 This is Gobong’s response to Toegye who distinguished the four sprouts as the issuance of the principle (li; Korean: ri) from the seven feelings as issuing from dynamic material energy or psycho–physical force (Korean: ki 기; Chinese: qi 氣). The seven feelings (qiqing 七情) from the Book of Rites are pleasure, anger, sorrow, fear, love, hate, and desire (gippeum, bunno, seulpeum, dulyeoum, sarang, sileum, and

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yogmang 기쁨, 분노, 슬픔, 두려움, 사랑, 싫음, 욕망; xi nu ai ju ai e yu 喜怒哀懼 愛惡欲). According to Toegye, as he was compelled to modify his thinking in response to Gobong’s critique of the dualistic separation of principle and emotion in the name of the unity of the four and the seven emotions, both need to be related to forms of feeling. The seven feelings are primarily reactive in Toegye’s account. Like the reflected moon, they are reactions to external stimuli accompanied by external physical changes such as crying, laughing, and so on.37 They are thus related to human nature, which is the heavenly endowment. Toegye relates them to the moral mind, as opposed to the human mind that is precarious, instable, prone to error, and partial. Whereas the moral mind is attuned to goodness, the human mind is inconsistent. It is sometimes good and sometimes bad. The four sprouts, deriving from the portrayal in Mencius, are forms of feelings that are integrally related to reflection and principle. The four sprouts are immediate reflexive moral feelings and are consequently not merely reactive to their environments; they are natural in the sense of being spontaneous internal feelings that form the source of and – through their creative responsiveness in experiencing the world and myriad things – allow higher forms of complex emotions to arise. A common paradigmatic insight of the Cheng-Zhu school is the restraint of emotion by principle (li). Toegye commented in this vein how the psycho-physically generated feeling of anger can be corrected by looking away from it and turning towards principle. Toegye claims: ‘Anger is the thing most easily expressed and hardest to control within the human mind’, and yet ‘if one can forget one’s anger when angered and contemplate what is right and wrong according to principle, then one will see that such external temptations are not worth hating’.38 It was initially Gobong who claimed that both principle and feelings (emotion) are forms of feeling. For Gobong, the key point is that li (Korean: ri) and qi (Korean: ki) cannot be separated from one another in theory or practice. While Toegye recognizes this point in theory, being a follower of the orthodox Chung-Zhu school of principle (lixue), he wants at the same time to hierarchically prioritize ri.39 Feelings cannot be separated from principle in this understanding of their hierarchical relationship, revealing how they sought to undo the tension between nature and cultivation that is constitutive of Confucian discourses. The dualism of reason and emotion typical of multiple discourses of Western philosophy cannot have a place here, even when speaking of the rationalistic school of principle. Emotion, or feeling, is a response to external stimuli; even intellectual responses continue to be affectively coloured responses, as explained in the beginning of the Zhongyong (Doctrine of the Mean) and maintained throughout the Four-Seven Debate. In the long history of Sino-Korean Neo-Confucian debates about the role of emotions in human life, the relation between qing (emotion) and li (principle) is convoluted to the extent that there are varying degrees of emphasis on qing, li, or an intermediate state. The Cheng-Zhu school (chengzhu lixue 程朱理學) promoted the onto-cosmological state of heavenly principles. Consequently, in their formulations, qing is typically restrained by principle even as it cannot be eliminated or overcome. Toegye was compelled through their ongoing argumentative exchange to agree to Gobong’s claims that both the four and the seven are feelings because they react and respond to external stimuli. In Toegye’s account, however, all feelings are fundamentally responsive and arise in the same way, with ethical responses conforming to ri (the source

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of the patterned fit) and externally motivated reactions conforming to ki (unstructured dynamic material energy) that they succumb to as a source of distraction. Toegye’s argument is that there must be more than merely a reference to the distinctive roles of the components, since there are actually different sorts of feelings, and so there must be some difference in the way they actually originate. In the first phase of his philosophical development, Toegye claims that the four originate from principle (ri, li) but the seven originate from dynamic energy (ki, qi). However, in his later phase, in response to Gobong’s arguments, he revises his original theory and conceptualizes the doctrine of ho-bal-seul (互發說): the reciprocal co-arising of modelling principle and dynamic material force. According to this revised account of the mutual inspiration and complicity of ri and ki, principle arises and energy rides principle in the case of the four sprouts; while energy arises and it is principle that rides on energy in the case of the seven feelings. Ri and ki, patterning principle and material energy, are always distinct (in line with his earlier conception), and principle is given hierarchical priority as ethically motivated nature, even as they cannot be separated in their mutual co-arising and inspiration. More subtle emotions are ethically mediated spontaneities that are holistically and relationally cultivated through moral, intellectual, and aesthetic practices. The mediating role of the emotions and the cultivation of emotional intelligence moderates the apparent duality of principle and psycho–physical force in the teaching of principle (lixue) in Sino-Korean Confucianism. The debate between Gobong and Toegye should not be interpreted as one between holism and dualism. Despite differences in their assessment of the import of the emotions, both are holistic relational thinkers who articulated two different perspectives of the emotions in relation to the dynamically mediated nexus of nature and human life. I have argued for a less dualistic and more feeling-friendly reading of Toegye based on Toegye’s increasing emphasis on the mediating role of the emotions between principle (ri) and psycho–physical nature (ki). The rationalistic side of the Confucian tradition represented by Zhu Xi and Toegye, which privileges principle over energy, retains a significant role for the emotions and their interpretation in human life. Despite the different understandings of Mencius, and interpretations of the relationship between principle and the emotions in Gobong and Toegye, the Four-Seven debate indicates the centrality of the emotions and appropriately educating and cultivating the emotions. The four emotive sprouts lead to moral virtues in Mencius. In Mencius’ dialectic between the natural goodness of the four sprouts and the ‘flood-like’ forces of human nature that threaten to overwhelm their appropriate cultivation, in the interpretations of Wang Bi and Xu Gan of the balanced emotional comportment of the Confucian sage that blends and harmonizes a cacophony of emotions, and in the Four-Seven dispute between Toegye and Gobong concerning ethically orienting and harmful emotions, emotions are revealed as constitutive and positive if fragile and potentially destructive for the cultivation of a benevolent and attuned disposition in the midst of practical life.40 The ethical character of the emotions is undermined and misdirected through excess and deficiency. It is the role of intellectual, moral, and aesthetic classics in learning and self-reflection to orient and re-orient our emotional life that at times is threatened by an excess of its own vitality, responsiveness, and creativity.

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Hermeneutics and the emotions in Confucianism and Heidegger In this concluding reflection, I consider whether Confucian relational hermeneutics allows for the reconsideration and formulation of an alternative to the overly subjectcentred phenomenological tradition that still reverberates in its post-Husserlian forms. In his writings and lecture courses of the second half of the 1920s, Martin Heidegger analysed the world-formative and world-disclosive character of fundamental affective moods. A grounding-mood (Grundstimmung) such as radical anxiety (in Being and Time) or profound boredom (in What Is Metaphysics? and The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude) is disclosed in a crisis boundary situation that interrupts the average self-understanding of everyday existence. Mood as a complex underlying affective state orients and its shifts can re-orient cognitions; moreover, it discloses the world in a particular concrete way to the subject (Dasein). Whereas moods happen to Dasein, Confucian thinking maintains that self-cultivation can shift moods and their associated affective–cognitive states. Affective states are not to be understood as discrete unalterable conditions of human nature nor overwhelming forces of being, much less irrational passions determining human practice. They are modifiable according to how individuals and groups respond to and work with them. The way emotions are interpreted within their larger context of significance is part of what it means for it to be an emotion. Insofar as they are relational and interpreted realities, emotions are not given as independent units of joy or anger that can be calculatively predicted and controlled or as moods that inflict themselves as destinies onto human existence. The affects are contextually interpreted from their sources, such as seen in the image of the four sprouts, and transformed through how they are practised and performatively enacted, that is, through how they are felt, understood, and interpreted. Phenomenologically speaking, basic emotions and moods have a world-disclosing and life-orienting character. In primordial moods or states of attunement such as anxiety and boredom, according to Heidegger, the world as a whole appears and slips away through the prism of that affective state. Heidegger did not attend to the ethical dimensions and implications of moods. We find this insight better articulated in Confucian moral psychological discourses, in which basic emotional states can prove to be debilitating or destructive to emotional balance and moral life itself. Confucian thinkers have accordingly warned how positive emotions like joy and happiness can become excessive as a distortion of the world and the self. The emotions are assessed, then, not according to a hedonic measure of pleasure and pain, but through their moral qualities that are interwoven with, to use a more Aristotelian language, sustainable human flourishing. Heidegger proposed reactivating the significance of past models and exemplars through a destructuring (Destruktion) that would free them from their reification by the tradition. In a sense this process could be interpreted as a form of the ‘rectification of names’ (zhengming 正名). Heidegger stressed the ontological perspective of being to the point of deemphasizing the ethical, psychological, and anthropological considerations as the ontic concerns of beings. Heidegger posited the primordial

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disruptive power of existential moods in reorienting human existence from mundane intra-human relations to a more fundamental disclosure of and attuned understanding of being (Sein). Finally, Heidegger dismissed any ontic understanding and lived experience of the emotions for the sake of an analysis of emotion as part of the analytic of the ‘being-there’ (Dasein) or existential constitution of human existence.41 All of this points towards the deep differences between the ontological hermeneutics of Heidegger and the ethical relational hermeneutics of Confucian discourses.

Conclusion As analysed in this chapter, emotion, phenomenologically speaking, has a special sense of openness. In Chinese philosophy, qing 情 has the openness to the world that is similar in multiple ways to Heidegger’s account of the disclosure of the world and being. Notwithstanding overlapping points of convergence concerning affective intelligence, and the importance of the affective dimension in thought and knowledge, there are irreconcilable differences between these two models of the relational hermeneutics of emotional life. Offering an ethical and pedagogical hermeneutics of the emotions, one that is lacking in Heidegger with all its problematic political and ethical consequences, Confucian ‘moral psychological’, and ‘philosophical anthropological’ discourses articulate the ethical character of the emotions and – implicitly or explicitly – their moral psychological relationship in the context of human nature. Confucian discourses offer a variety of historical exemplars and cultural models of bringing the cacophony of the emotions into balance and harmony as part of promoting stable and expectable patterns of human flourishing through ritual propriety that orients the repetition and reproduction of familial and communal relationships.

15

Thinking through Words: The Existential Hermeneutics of Zhuangzi and Heidegger David Chai

Philosophers have debated the roots of human knowledge since antiquity. In The Republic, Plato speaks of a dividing line between what is visible yet unthinkable and what is invisible yet thinkable. As the components comprising this line are both ontological and epistemological, it set the stage for a debate among rationalists over the relation of thought to being that would reach its peak with Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. Although Kant tried to bring rationalism back to its Platonic roots, it was not until the arrival of Heidegger that the question of thinking about being once again assumed centre stage. Indeed, Heidegger railed against rationalism for fostering the oblivion of being in that it ‘takes being as the object of thought and therefore understands the pair “being and thought” as a disjunction rather than an originary conjunction; that is, it fails to understand that thought belongs to being’s givenness’.1 In light of this, Heidegger claimed that in order to overcome the calculative thinking responsible for being’s oblivion, we must seek out an originary thinking, one that returns us to meditative thought in which the truth of being reveals itself as the unconcealment of Dasein. The need for this new mode of thought is made explicit in the Introduction to Metaphysics where Heidegger writes: ‘In the seemingly irrelevant division being and thinking we have to recognize that fundamental position of the spirit of the West that is the real target of our attack. It can be overcome only originally – that is, in such a way that its inceptive truth is shown its own limits and thereby founded anew.’2 In order to overcome the artificial division of being and thinking propagated by rationalists throughout Western philosophy’s history, Heidegger argued, it must be discarded so as to make way for a new beginning, one that is decidedly non-rationalist in bearing. Around the same time as Plato on the other side of world, the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi also took humanity as having a tenuous relationship with words in that they deceive us through their allure and grandeur. Words becloud the true reality of the world – a state of natural oneness in Dao – because they rely on thinking, but thinking is not reliant on words. What is more, books contain words and said words are seen to hold value; thus books are a measure of thinking; however, the thinking contained in books cannot compare to the genuine thinking that takes place when words are rendered silent. Zhuangzi thus argued that authentic thinking

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can only be reached through so-called non-words In light of Zhuangzi’s desire to discard words so as to elevate the minds of humanity, scholars such as Karen Carr and P. J. Ivanhoe contend that Zhuangzi is not so much a philosopher as someone whose advice leads to religious salvation and spiritual achievement.3 They even go so far as to claim that Zhuangzi is an antirationalist; as for why he is not an irrationalist or non-rationalist, their answer is taken from the late A. C. Graham: ‘[Antirationalism is] the principled refusal to take account of facts which conflict with one’s values or desires.’4 Using Graham’s definition, Carr and Ivanhoe believe Zhuangzi to be an antirationalist in that antirationalists do not ‘wholly reject rationality but they also find it not only inadequate but potentially inimical to a proper appreciation of how things really are’;5 this is because, for Zhuangzi, while ‘the religiously accomplished individual knows that certain things are the case, they also insist that an exclusive or even excessive concern with right knowledge, at least as this is normally construed, can prove counterproductive and even disabling to the religious life’.6 By focusing on the methodological aspects of Zhuangzi’s thought, scholars like Carr and Ivanhoe neglect the subtle profundity of his commentary on human thinking. Zhuangzi, as Heidegger would do in his own lifetime, reformulated the questions used to direct how we think about ourselves and the world around us. Unlike Heidegger, however, Zhuangzi was able to transcend the realm of being, finding a higher plane of knowledge in Dao. Zhuangzi could do so not because he eliminated rationalistic knowledge; on the contrary, he turned to ‘non-words’ in order to transcend words, thereby revealing the path to thinking at its foundational level.

Zhuangzi on words: Eschewing rationalism Before we can attempt to grasp Zhuangzi’s doctrine of non-words, we must first understand his general hermeneutic outlook. While Chapter 27 of the Zhuangzi outlines the various ways it employs words in their literary sense (imputed, repeated, and goblet words), the earliest instance in which the hermeneutic significance of words is drawn occurs in Chapter 2: ‘Words are not just wind. Words have something to say. But if what they have to say is not fixed, then do they really say something? Or do they say nothing? … If we want to right their wrongs and wrong their rights, then the best thing to use is clarity.’7 We can glean five points from this passage. First, words are as transient as the breath uttering them. The wind upon which they are carried is but a natural issuance, and so words are not entirely artificial but belong to the domain of Nature as mere sound. Second, despite their transience, words possess meaning. The question is whether words inherently contain meaning or is it the case that words assume meaning only after they have swept up the image behind said meaning? If we say it is the former then words are not just empty wind but rather wind plus meaning; if the latter then they are indeed empty apparitions. The third point of Zhuangzi’s statement pertains to the fixity, or lack thereof, of the meaning of words. Should we believe that words lack inherent meaning, that is, the ability to authoritatively lay claim to the reality of that upon which they are being directed, we can thus argue that words themselves are unregulated leading to inconsistent application; conversely, to trust the

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meaning they convey is also to support the veracity of the object they are pointing to. This question lay at the heart of the debate over language and thinking in ancient China and is one that Daoists such as Zhuangzi vehemently attacked. This being the case, Zhuangzi thus asked, if words lack fixity, do they in fact say nothing at all? What does it mean to say nothing when we know we are saying something? Does Zhuangzi mean to say that language and the words therein are meaningless gibberish? Not at all. This is our fourth point, that if words are tasked with describing Dao, which is indescribable in all manners of speaking, then words are truly incapable of representing, explicating, justifying, and so forth, that which is itself immune to qualities of fixation and permanence. In other words, it is not that words lack fixity in terms of their ability to match the reality of what they are describing; rather it is Dao that continuously and spontaneously transforms itself, preventing words from becoming attached to it. Words can say nothing about Dao in that Dao is not a thing but that which makes all things possible. It does so without the need for names because of its affiliation with nothingness.8 Dao is hence the negatively creative root of the cosmos without being detrimentally so. As we shall see, saying nothing is to approach Dao while saying something is to be driven from it. The more one speaks, the less insightful are one’s words; hence it is better to remain silent. This brings us to our fifth point: that of clarity. Zhuangzi holds that life praxis requires harmony, to right what is wrong and wrong what is right. How can this be done without using words? If you say right and I say wrong then there is discord, not equanimity. The solution entails brightness of mind attained through nonwords, which is why elsewhere in Chapter 2 Zhuangzi argues: ‘Great understanding is relaxed and comprehensive; small understanding is narrow and meager. Great words are firmly powerful; small words are rambling and trivial.’ The play between the clear and the muddy is not only an epistemological motif in Daoist writing; it refers to the cosmogonist relation between nothingness and being as well, influencing our understanding of non-words and words in the process. Using clarity to distinguish what is right from what is wrong, therefore, is not a matter of semantic determinism – Zhuangzi’s epistemological triad of imputed, repeated, and goblet words shows us the impossibility of such a task; rather, clarity and muddiness refer to one’s stance, or lack thereof, towards Dao. For example, in Chapter 24 of the Zhuangzi we are presented with the following statement: ‘That is what is called the Dao that has no method [Dao], while this here is called the debate that is unspoken. Thus when virtue is gathered in the oneness of Dao, and words rest where understanding no longer understands, there is perfection.’ Words that rest where knowledge ceases to know is called perfection. What we have here is not an account of the application of words but an early glance into the wellspring of non-words. We can speak of the above account as pointing to the wellspring of non-words, instead of non-words themselves, because of the attributes of silence, rest, and understanding that is non-understanding. Phenomenologically, these qualities can be said to symbolize the characteristics inherent to nothingness. Interestingly, these three terms are complementary with one another while also stressing the apophatic side of Daoist thought. Let me explain. Silence is a form of stillness, a refraining from the act of speaking. To be still in the use of one’s words is to abstain from pursuing speculative knowledge in favour of

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engaging the world through quiescent observation. Words thus fall by the wayside, having been rendered irrelevant by the act of embracing the non-words of Dao. This does not imply that words, the texts containing them, or our knowledge of both is unattainable, for to do so would entail making language incommensurate; on the contrary, the Zhuangzi is appealing to our innate sense of ontological oneness with the world so as to weaken our dependency on using words to account for what we experience. In this way, our inborn nature is unharmed by what Zhuangzi calls vulgar learning – learning that is guided by sensory and moral norms – leaving the rightness and wrongness of words to be mutually resolved in the ultimacy of Dao. Stripping away the implied antagonism of right towards wrong and wrong towards right is to use the clarity of Dao to neutralize both by harmonizing the authority each term is presumed to hold. The debate that is not spoken is hence to use the onto-cosmological nothingness of Dao to engage the minds of men, thereby alleviating the conflict that results when the minds of men are pitted against one another. This explains why in Chapter 22 of the Zhuangzi we read, ‘Those who have clear vision will not catch sight of Dao, hence it is best to remain silent than discuss it. As Dao cannot be heard, to listen for it is not as good as plugging up your ears.’ Said differently, words that are ornate or ostentatious do nothing to improve our proximity to authentic thinking; if anything, they highlight how far removed they are from the principle of mutual dependency and coexistence that is the natural world. Thus to seek rest in the abode of that which is constantly at rest (i.e. Dao) is to leave understanding behind so as to take up the authentic knowing of non-words. Returning to simplicity hence draws near the nothingness employed by Dao to spontaneously set itself in motion; from this drawing close non-words are sent forth, releasing their silence into the world as if one’s ears were plugged up. Of course, only the uninitiated, calculative mind takes such quietude as a wanton disregard of the transformative power of the spoken word. For the Zhuangzi, words are alluringly deceptive in their power to sway the minds of men, a point Chapter 13 elaborates upon as follows: Those in the world who treasure Dao turn to books. Books are comprised of words and so words are treasured. What is treasured in words is their meaning and meaning has that which it pursues. However, what meaning pursues cannot be put into words and passed down to others and yet, the world treasures words and passes down books. Although the world treasures them, I do not hold them worthy of treasuring. What they treasure is not the truly treasurable.

There is much that can be said of this passage, beginning with the notion that learners of Dao seek wisdom and guidance from books. Given that in the passage following this one, Duke Huan is chided by a lowly wheelwright named Pian for loving books whose words are the chaff and dregs of their authors; the claim that ‘those who treasure Dao turn to books’ is obviously misleading. Indeed, what is misleading is that the Dao spoken of here does not belong to Zhuangzi – the last sentence tells us this – but to the school of Confucius. The Dao of Confucius is most certainly indebted to the collective wisdom of the sages of high antiquity and so is dependent on the continued transmission of their ways. Confucius’ Dao, in other words, only exists in the words

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and deeds of men who are long since deceased. By treasuring the words and meaning of such men, Confucius and his followers can recreate the Dao of the early sage-kings in their own time. Zhuangzi, however, argues that the Confucians have failed to progress beyond where words stop and meaning begins. To treasure words as the Confucians do is to pursue the meaning of words and nothing more. Books are comprised of words and words, in turn, contain symbolic meaning. But from where does meaning arise? Zhuangzi says meaning pursues something of its own, different from that of words, but that something cannot be expressed through verbal articulation. This explains why wheelwright Pian defends his stance by saying: ‘One can get [chiseling a wheel] in one’s hands and feel it in one’s mind but this cannot put it into words, there is just something to it. I cannot teach it to my son, nor can he learn it from me, hence I’ve gone on like this for seventy years.’ Books, therefore, are responsible for falsely valuing words instead of non-words. This gives rise to an interesting question: If we treasure the meaning of words and books because they preserve such meaning, why are there no wordless books? Is it because books lay down the meaning of words in a manner that non-words cannot, or is it because words hold value in light of their being transmittable? Zhuangzi holds the latter claim is untrue; what we ought to treasure most is beyond transmission. This leaves us with a conundrum: Do we continue to espouse knowledge of what is knowable through words or do we try to understand the unsayable stillness of non-words? It would seem, for Zhuangzi at least, the latter option is the preferred one.

Zhuangzi and foundational thought: On non-words That which is silent, still, and unknowable is nothingness, and that which makes nothingness its abode will embody these traits too. Only the inherently perfect can conjoin with the oneness of nothingness, hence there is first and foremost Dao, then the authentic mind of the sage, followed by non-words. These three levels of perfection are all inherently unknowable, and yet we attempt to gain insight into them via the use of words. It is the failure of words to grasp the meaning of non-words that motivates Chapter 17 of the Zhuangzi to declare: ‘What words discuss is merely the coarseness of things; what the mind visualizes is merely the fineness of things. Thus what words cannot describe and the mind cannot visualize has nothing to do with coarseness or fineness.’ In his Discourse on Thinking, Heidegger made a remark of a similar tone: For the way to what is near is always the longest and thus the hardest for us humans. This way is the way of meditative thinking. Meditative thinking demands of us not to cling one-sidedly to a single idea, nor to run down a one-track course of ideas. Meditative thinking demands of us that we engage ourselves with what at first sight does not go together at all.9

In terms of Daoist hermeneutics, that which at first sight does not go together is the pairing of nothingness and non-words. To think meditatively is to abandon thinking one-sidedly with words and wander in the apophatic realm of non-words.

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What does it mean to wander in the nothingness of non-words? Is such wandering a metaphorical exercise or is there some concealed merit to it? Recall the three types of perfectibility mentioned above; this perfection is both attainable and sustainable insofar as each cascades from the other, forming a circularity of nothingness that unfurls as the unknowability of things. The perfection of non-words does not, therefore, speak to the imperfectability of words; rather, their onto-epistemological purpose is to direct our gaze away from the shallowness of words towards the depths of that giving rise to them. When Heidegger writes that in order to think meditatively we must engage ourselves with what at first glance does not seem to go together, if we apply this to Zhuangzi’s argument, the question is no longer concerned with thinking about being but how to transcend our tendency to use words as a visualization of the mind. In order to uncover the reason why such transcendence is necessary, we must understand the Zhuangzi’s claim that words are forever relegated to the level of things. A thing is a thing because we name it as such. Through the act of naming we render things immobile, unable to become other things should their inborn nature dictate so. An example of this can be seen in the ancient Chinese sophist Gongsun Long who argued that a ‘white horse’ is not a ‘horse’. His argument was based on successfully splitting the compound term ‘white horse’ into its attributes of ‘white’ and ‘horse’ because the words white and horse are empty unless pointing to a specific white horse. In other words, uttering the words ‘white horse’ will only result in our understanding the genus horse and the colour white; neither takes us beyond this basic level of knowing to one wherein the root of horse and white rests. Our use of words to describe things thus fails to convey their underlying reality; likewise, visualizing a thing such as a horse is also insufficient in that we may picture a horse, or a variety of horses, but we cannot arrive at an image of that which gives rise to horses. We are thus stuck at an immature level of thinking, unable to move forward or return to what was prior; we are hermeneutically deficient due to our clinging to words. Our definitions of words are so narrow that they smother and suffocate that which we are attempting to comprehend. Wherein lies the solution? Chapter 25 of the Zhuangzi serves as a good place to start. Here we are told one ought to follow non-words for the simple reason that they do not track what has gone before nor trace what has yet to appear; in this way, they adhere to the root of all things in Dao. The same chapter says: ‘What words describe and understanding reaches only extends to the level of things. Those who follow Dao do not pursue what has ended nor seek how things began. This is where all discussion comes to an end.’ Near the end of this chapter it is said: ‘Without end, without stopping, this absence of words shares the same principle with things themselves. But “nothing does it”, “something makes it so”, these are the root of words and yet, words begin and end with things.’ The condition behind the absence of words is nothingness which is embodied by Dao as empty stillness and quiescent non-action. Seeing as these qualities symbolize the perfection of Dao, and Dao fosters them throughout the natural world, non-words are the ultimate realization of Dao in the human mind. The problem with the minds of men is that they are not easily tamped down and brought to rest. Sitting in quietude while the mind gallops asunder, to quote Zhuangzi, is akin to spewing forth an endless stream of meaningless words. Such

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words are like a blustery wind: full of fury but lacking in substance. This is how the speech of ordinary men operates, men whose calculative ways make no attempt to traverse the everydayness of words. The scheming of the Sophists and ornamentation of the Confucians are, for Zhuangzi, examples of those who speak without knowing what they say. What they speak of is not the indescribable Dao or its unsayable root in nothingness; rather, their words are a source of harm and division, which is why Chapter 13 notes: ‘Those who know do not speak and those who speak do not know, hence the sage practices the teaching of non-words.’ Common words are as transient as the life of the one uttering them; they are verbalized traces of images in the mind, hence their brevity forever falls short of the traceless perpetuity of non-words. Non-words thus surpass words insofar as they never enter the realm of calculative thinking. They appear and disappear without leaving any trace because they are in themselves traceless. Being as such, non-words are the epitome of mystery and to employ them is to affirm one’s unity with Dao. Non-words are therefore hermeneutically essential as they point the way to meditative thinking which is why Chapter 25 of the Zhuangzi concludes by describing meditative thought in these terms: ‘Dao, being the ultimacy of things, cannot be expressed in words or silence. To not have words and to not have silence, this is when our discussion of it reaches perfection.’ If words and silence are insufficient for the task of thinking, how should one proceed? Before answering this question, let us turn for a brief moment to Heidegger. In his Memorial Address, a speech serving as a preface to Discourse on Thinking, Heidegger makes the observation that ‘man today is in flight from thinking. This flight-from-thought is the ground of thoughtlessness.’10 What is more, in his Country Path Conversations, Heidegger gives us even more astute views: first, thinking is not a thing but a process; second, thinking is an activity that belongs to man alone, thus there is no possibility of distancing ourselves from it, and yet this distance is not one of nearness but of farness; third, thinking is a form of representing, but not all representing is thinking, and as all representing is directed towards what is before us, we strive after it; thus striving is representing.11 Heidegger’s ideas are relevant because they show the inherent flaw in calculative thought: we chase after our thoughts and in doing so introduce distance between them and ourselves. Issuing forth words compels us to act upon them and the more words we introduce into the world, the greater is our obligation to pursue them. Words are compounded by ever broader speech and actions are compounded by ever greater consequences. Once words start there is no stopping them. This is why, for Zhuangzi, silence is not a solution; the solution is given in Chapter 22: ‘He who follows Dao does less every day; less and less until he reaches the point where he does nothing. He does nothing yet nothing is left undone.’ This, however, is not the end of the matter. The final say on the importance of non-words is tied to the trio of hermeneutic terms appearing at the start of Chapter 27 of the Zhuangzi, which we mentioned above, but can now formally quote: As long as nothing is said about them [goblet words], they are equal; but this equality and what I say about it are not equal, thus I say we must use non-words! With words that are non-words, one may speak one’s whole life without having

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said anything, or one may go through life without speaking them, in which case one will have never stopped speaking.

While the Zhuangzi’s hermeneutics stands in stark contrast to other ancient Chinese thinkers, its determination to awaken in us the need to let go of our rationalist conventions when it comes to discussing the ultimacy of Dao is one of the highlights of its philosophical enterprise. Indeed, the text’s protest against the rigidity with which words are used is not rooted in its objection to language but to the means by which language veils the true meaning of thought, preventing us from dwelling upon it meditatively. In other words, we are overly rash in how we express ourselves, be it verbally or in written form, and so what is needed is a mechanism that will allow us to avoid the conflict and confusion arising from the misunderstanding of words. This mechanism is non-words, words that are not anti-words but rather a form of discourse constantly reflective of and in harmony with Dao.

Heidegger and the flight from thinking Whereas the Zhuangzi sought to lay bare the roots of thinking through the metaphor of non-words, Heidegger attempted to do so via the concepts of non-willingness, releasement, and that-which-regions. These terms induce in us a self-reflection Heidegger characterizes as meditative (das besinnliche Denken). Meditative thinking stands in sharp contrast to what is calculative (das rechnende Denken); indeed, it is due to the calculative mind that there is a growing thoughtlessness towards being in modern society such that it finds itself in flight from thinking. The flight from thinking arising from an over-reliance on calculative thought also implies the ubiquity of human technology, the dangers of which were raised by Zhuangzi and Heidegger alike. Where the former differs from the latter is in arguing that calculative thinking is not only detrimental to the inborn nature of beings but to the root of being (i.e. Dao) as well. Both agree, however, in saying the solution is to awaken oneself to meditative thought. Meditative thinking is not religious in bearing, nor is it of the kind that finds its home in the brambles of mental wilderness. It must rather ‘be able to bide its time, to await as does the farmer, whether the seed will come up and ripen’ such that humanity must learn ‘to dwell on what lies close and meditate on what is closest; upon that which concerns us, each one of us, here and now; here, on this patch of home ground; now, in the present hour of history’.12 This idea is similar to a tale in the Zhuangzi wherein a farmer dismisses the technology of the well-sweep as an example of how calculative thinking distracts us from the task at hand when what is needed is a deeper reflection on the wellspring of being. The idea, it would seem, is to develop a fondness for thought that is groundless so as to reassert the role of non-rationalism in the world. The risk of ignoring fundamental thinking by succumbing to the fleeting gains of that which is calculative is alienation and is why Heidegger is careful to say one ought not ‘run down a one-track course of ideas’ but ‘engage ourselves with what at first sight does not go together at all’.13 The reason one must not pursue a singular line of thinking, he says, is that ‘suddenly and unaware we find ourselves so firmly shackled to these

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technical devices that we fall into bondage to them’.14 Allowing the rational mind to consume and dominate the non-rational is to forfeit the purity and simplicity of one’s inborn nature. It is to take what is inherently free and self-generating and turn it into something bound to its own instrumentality. We are accustomed to clinging to our variegated tools, hence we must learn to foster a degree of comportment towards the beings of the world. By viewing the world as such, we will come to think of it and ourselves in a new light, one Heidegger referred to as Gelassenheit.15 Gelassenheit, the releasement or openness of being to Dasein, comes from Meister Eckhart but is Heidegger’s existential response to the calculative thinking of rationalism. One can argue as such because, for Heidegger, releasement is the final outcome of waiting upon and revealing the meaning of being which constantly beclouds itself in the face of technology. This beclouding of the profoundest form of thinking – its mystery – is mentioned by Heidegger in a variety of texts. For example, the Memorial Address notes that if we explicitly and continuously heed the fact that such hidden meaning touches us everywhere in the world of technology, we stand at once within the realm of that which hides itself from us, and hides itself just in approaching us. That which shows itself and at the same time withdraws is the essential trait of what we call the mystery. I call the comportment which enables us to keep open to the meaning hidden in technology, openness to the mystery.16

In On the Essence of Truth Heidegger frames the mystery in response to the question: ‘What conserves letting-be in this relatedness to concealing? Nothing less than the concealing of what is concealed as a whole, of beings as such, i.e., the mystery; not a particular mystery regarding this or that, but rather the one mystery – that, in general, mystery (the concealing of what is concealed) as such holds sway throughout man’s Dasein.’17 Similar words are used in The Question Concerning Technology: ‘All revealing belongs within a harboring and a concealing. But that which frees – the mystery – is concealed and always concealing itself. All revealing comes out of the open, goes into the open, and brings into the open.’18 Finally, in Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event) mystery is alluded to as follows: ‘Philosophy seeks the truth of the essential occurrence of beyng and this truth is the intimating-resonating concealment (the mystery) of the event (the hesitant withholding).’19 As we are concerned with Heidegger’s idea that rationalism has given rise to thoughtlessness as human society increasingly flees from non-rational, atypical modes of thinking, the mystery finds itself evermore entwined with Gelassenheit through the discourse of non-willing. Non-willing has intonations of Daoist nondeliberate action (wuwei 無爲) in that both function onto-epistemologically insofar as they are not only taken to be the essence of thinking but life praxis too.20 The paradox of willing non-willingness hence unfolds as the unveiling of thinking about thinking; we release ourselves to thought that is for all intents and purposes nonthought. In other words, releasement is about drawing near that which is already at hand but is presumed to be afar. This nearness and farness is what ensures the perpetuity of the mystery – its thingness if you will: ‘The concealed in the enigma is

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properly what conceals. The concealed of the enigma is unconcealed when we find the solution: but never such that the enigma is discovered. Even where we first only come upon the enigma, this is not a discovery.’21 What constitutes true discovery of the enigma qua the mystery is its nondiscoverability. To be lost in thoughtlessness is thus not to be without sound mind; rather, it is to pursue the essence of being single-mindedly. To illustrate this point Heidegger uses the image of a tree and its treeness, an example that, coincidentally, also appears in the Zhuangzi. Heidegger writes: When we, for example, stand before a tree and look at it – be it fleetingly or be it studiously – then we always catch sight of more than what we see in this tree. We catch sight of treeness … the nature of trees, from out of which we first see a tree as a tree, is a representational idea, this is accurate to the extent that what is tree-like is set out before us; but it is in no way made by us.22

Zhuangzi takes the tree as demonstrating the art of non-deliberate action, a skill that lends itself to life-prolongation and enrichment. He also employs it as a means by which to argue for the usefulness of what is otherwise presumed to be useless. In other words, the utility of the tree is what ultimately harms and shortens its life. This is not to say that Zhuangzi, and Daoism in general, is anti-utilitarian; rather, the message is that making the tree into something useful – something of our own – is to craft it into something that violates its essence, disturbing the integrity of the mystery in the process. Heidegger, however, uses non-rationalism to stem the flight from thinking by redirecting our gaze back to the essence of man: The human is, as the animal rationale, the living being who thinks. However, insofar as horizonality – that is to say, the relation to the horizon – is what distinguishes the human, while thinking is the distinguishing characteristic of the human, thinking must, as it were, embody the essence of horizonality … . Our conversation is then really concerned with the essence of the human.23

Heidegger’s analysis is hence a purely ontological one while Zhuangzi’s is ontocosmological. It would thus appear that the key question for Heidegger is how to recapture Dasein when all traditional means to think about it have failed. The solution, or at least a great part of it, lies with Gelassenheit.

Awakening to Gelassenheit: Heideggerian non-words? Although Heidegger does not speak of non-words per se, they, or something very similar, are implied in the pursuit of awakening to releasement. Indeed, Heidegger asks us to think about what is other than willing (i.e. non-willing) whereby one waits for releasement and is hence awakened to it: ‘Thinking, conceived of in the traditional manner as representing, is a willing … . Thinking is willing, and willing is thinking … that is why, in answer to your question as to what I really will in our meditation on the

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essence of thinking, I replied: I will non-willing.’24 Two points can be made here: first, foundational thinking is non-representational; it lies outside representation in the traditional sense insofar as what it seeks to represent is beyond the realm of the willing self. This is one of the major shortcomings of calculative thinking and is why much of modern society can be said to be in a state of thoughtlessness. Second, the desire to will thinking is a willing whose purpose is solely self-preservationist; it can neither will the unwillable nor think what is beyond thought. We are thus faced with the conundrum of how to will non-willing. In fact, Heidegger gives us the solution: ‘By saying that I want non-willing I mean that I willfully renounce willing.’25 If one willfully renounces willing, this is not akin to non-willing in that the renouncement of willing can only result in the suppression of willing; it cannot give rise to the releasement to be had in genuine non-willing. Authentic non-willing is what Daoism calls wuwei and is what makes nonwords possible. Non-deliberate action is thus a non-rational counter to rationality’s dependence on reason and mental strife by way of intellectual discrimination. The harmonization between meditative and calculative thinking brought about by authentic non-willing awakens us to Gelassenheit in spite of the fact that the latter is always already awake. Such awakening is the essential mode of thinking and the essence of thinking is other than willing, as Heidegger states: ‘You will a non-willing in the sense of a renouncing of willing, so that through this renouncing we can let ourselves engage in – or at least prepare ourselves for an engagement in – the sought-for essence of that thinking which is not a willing.’26 But what is this sought-for essence? It is nothing but the mystery we spoke of earlier. Contained within the nothingness of the mystery lies the root of primal thought. For Heidegger, this root points the way to being while for the Zhuangzi it points to the pervasiveness of Dao. In light of this, the ceiling of calculative knowledge can be surpassed through letting-be and drawing near that-which-regions. While the Zhuangzi was able to surmount the perpetual space between thought and words by regressively forgetting both, Heidegger employs thought to reveal the essence of words in being: What we speak of, language, is always ahead of us. Our speaking merely follows language constantly. Thus we are continually lagging behind what we first ought to have overtaken and taken up in order to speak about it. Accordingly, when we speak of language we remain entangled in a speaking that is persistently inadequate.27 The word, the nature of the word, conceals within itself that which gives being. If our thinking does justice to the matter then we may never say of the word that it is, but rather that it gives – not in the sense that words are given by an ‘it’, but that the word itself gives. The word itself is the giver. What does it give? To go by the poetic experience and by the most ancient tradition of thinking, the word gives being. Our thinking, then, would have to seek the word, the giver which itself is never given, in this ‘there is that which gives’.28

To speak is to use words, however, speech forever trails the horizon of words. This is because the horizon lies in meditative thought and thought that is primordial in

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essence gives words their force of meaning. The wellspring of this force is Gelassenheit, an act that surpasses all else found in the world. Given this, words that attempt to make known the gift of being are duplicitous. They are such in that their conveyance of the mystery occurs through the will, however, only that which is non-willing and unspoken can transcend thought that is representational in focus. In light of this, Gelassenheit cannot be awoken as one would awaken another from sleep; rather, it is we who become awoken and remain awake to the futurity of language qua the horizon of thinking, a point Heidegger acknowledges as being especially hard: ‘The transition out of willing into releasement is what seems to me to be the genuine difficulty.’29 What makes it all the more challenging is that the essence of releasement is perpetually concealed, much like Dao is for Zhuangzi: ‘Perhaps concealing itself in releasement is a higher activity than that found in all the doings of the world and in all the machinations of the realms of humankind.’30 We must be mindful of the word activity for it is a non-willingness that draws close what is other than itself and in the context of Gelassenheit, this otherness is the waiting for awakening: ‘We should do nothing at all, but rather wait.’31 However, what we are waiting for is not a thing but the open-region of the mystery; moreover, our waiting is a symbolic resting in the openness of meditative thought such that the truth of being becomes apparent: ‘The relation to that-which-regions is waiting. And waiting means to release oneself into the openness of that-which-regions and that-which-regions surrounds us and reveals itself to us as the horizon.’32 To be released into the openness of that-which-regions is to be authentically so because the region gathers – just as if nothing were happening each to each and everything to everything else, gathering all into an abiding while resting in itself. Regioning is a gathering re-sheltering into an expansive resting in the abiding-while. Thus the region is itself at once the expanse and the abiding-while. It abides into the expanse of resting. It expands into the abiding-while of what has freely turned toward itself. And in view of the accentuated usage of this word, we can also henceforth say ‘open-region’ [gegnet] instead of the familiar term ‘region’ [gegend].33

However, humanity constantly swings between modes of expansive resting and abiding, from thinking that is reflective to thinking that is logically purposeful. Indeed, the vast majority of us only know of the latter; we will never encounter the former due to our reluctance to abandon reason and wander in the openness of unconcealed existence. Wandering implies distance, the region implies space, the gathering implies time, and the abiding-while implies rest. These terms are not only important metaphors for wakefulness; they lend themselves to illuminating the truth of being as it occurs in the clearing. To be sure, the clearing is tied to the experience of awakening being discussed here. Since words bear the gift of being, for being to be truly so it must arise from words that are in turn true as well. However, words that are willed into being are not authentic since the willing-force behind them does not gather together but pushes away, does not rest in the abiding-while but chases after the fleeting-now. Words that are hence reasoned-out instead of returning-to prove incapable of acting

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as an all-embracing horizon because their very presence seeks to collapse the region of collectivity into a dichotomist either-or scenario. In this situation, the that-whichregions becomes veiled to the world, resulting in its thoughtlessness. The difficulty Heidegger spoke of above thus lies in explicating releasement qua the mystery: ‘This nearness and distance can be nothing outside that-which-regions. Because that-which-regions regions all, gathering everything together and letting everything return to itself, to rest in its own identity. Then that-which-regions itself would be nearing and distancing. That-which-regions itself would be the nearness of distance, and the distance of nearness.’34 With his pairs of complementary opposites – close and far, collecting and returning – Heidegger neatly avoids limiting Gelassenheit to a few restrictive terms. The Zhuangzi, on the other hand, provides a much fuller account of how the world degenerates from knowing the mystery of things to obsessing over instrumental reason. Chapter 11 states: ‘What is it we call Dao? There is the Dao of Heaven, and there is the Dao of man. To rest in non-deliberate action and be respected, such is the Dao of Heaven; to engage in deliberate action and become entangled in it, such is the Dao of man.’ What is more, those who have been awoken to releasement practice the art of non-words in the manner laid out in Chapter 16: ‘Those in ancient times who practiced Dao cultivated their knowledge in tranquility ; although knowledge lived in them they did not act on its behalf. In this way, we may say they used knowledge to cultivate tranquility. Knowledge and tranquility took turns cultivating each other and harmony and natural order emerged from the inborn nature.’ Having said as much, Heidegger ultimately chose a word to symbolize the mystery of the horizon, a word that not only preserves its own elusiveness but also speaks to the gift of being within – herangehen. This word, borrowed from Heraclitus, is a ‘movinginto-nearness … in the sense of letting-one-self-into-nearness’.35 What is moved near is not that which is distant but the unseen closeness that is the essence of thinking. If this were not the case, the open-region that is gegnet could not expand into the abidingwhile of what has freely turned towards itself because doing so would imply an act of will, and any deliberateness on the part of the subject would immediately becloud that to which she is hoping to be awakened. Furthermore, the encirclement of the horizon secures its mystery by ensuring that the nearness of distance and the distance of nearness remain intact. In other words, meditative thinking is not only tasked with weakening our dependency on linguistic schemata, which, for Heidegger, paints an erroneous picture of being, but dismantling our need for conceptual hierarchies such as near and far so as to bring to light the authentic ground of human experience. What makes human experience particularly unique, at least for rationalists, is that humans are first and foremost thinking beings. We are, however, limited in our thinking by thinking itself; we think representationally through words, but words are empty even though in some respect they possess the gift of being. The Zhuangzi takes things one step further than Heidegger, arguing that words fail to portray the veracity of the world because they only touch upon the visible side of being; we thus need non-words to bring us into contact with its invisible side in the guise of nothingness. More fundamentally, the Zhuangzi wants to reflect the fact that Dao is unspeakable yet all is known through it; Dao is beyond language, yet much ink has been spilt trying to explicate it. Dao is hence best left unsaid and untouched to unfold as the horizon

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of all things while serving as their returning abode. Indeed, the same can be said of Heidegger. Rational thought has led to the preponderance of technology, a toolset that overshadows being by splicing it into future and factical selves. Calculative thinking makes us forget that they are one and the same whose coexistence can only be recognized once we start regarding them as such. Humanity’s quest for increasingly specious knowledge has driven us away from ourselves; it has induced a flight from thought that is in desperate need of abatement. It seems that Heidegger has been tasked with redirecting our gaze towards the truth of being as laying not in the beings of the world but the mysterious nothingness of thinking about being. Herein is the essence of truth, a truth whose truthfulness is bounded only by Gelassenheit.

Conclusion This chapter has sought to exhibit the importance of non-rationalism to the philosophy of Daoism and Heidegger. In the course of this we saw how arriving at the level of primal or meditative thought required a state of non-willing restfulness. This quiet imperturbability enabled us to think beyond the dichotomy of near and distant such that the horizon of thought transformed into a mindful awareness of the nothingness surrounding us. For Zhuangzi, the apophasis of Dao imprints upon us the extent to which the true nature of the world remains cloaked in dark mystery. As this mystery is an inherent part of Dao, it is impregnable, which is why words can never convey the degree to which authentic thinking is linked to wordless imagining. For Heidegger, being mindful of the truth of being is not only to think of this truth in the context of thinking about being, but to partake in the fertile nothingness that is the open-region of releasement. Whether we are awakening to Dao or Dasein, the goal is the same: to arrive at an existentially transcendental understanding of human thinking that avoids conflicting with our onto-cosmological root. Herein lies the value of existential hermeneutics, a value wherein we are pushed to compose, read, and think about words and how their uplifting effect has been reduced at the hands of rationalistic thought. If we are to permit the mind to wander carefree within its own creative flux, what better way to do so than via the language of non-words?

References Carr, Karen and P. J. Ivanhoe. The Sense of Antirationalism: The Religious Thought of Zhuangzi and Kierkegaard. New York: Seven Bridges Press, 2000. Engelland, Chad. ‘Heidegger on Overcoming Rationalism through Transcendental Philosophy’. Continental Philosophy Review, 41, no. 1 (2008): 17–41. Graham, A. C. Unreason within Reason: Essays on the Outskirts of Rationality. LaSalle: Open Court, 1992. Heidegger, Martin. Discourse on Thinking: A Translation of Gelassenheit, translated by John Anderson and E. Hans Freund. New York: Harper and Row, 1966. Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, translated by William Lovitt. New York: Harper & Row, 1977.

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Heidegger, Martin. On the Way to Language, translated by Peter Hertz. New York: Harper and Row, 1982. Heidegger, Martin. ‘On the Essence of Truth’ translated by John Sallis, in Basic Writings, edited by David F. Krell. New York: HarperCollins, 1993. Heidegger, Martin. Introduction to Metaphysics, translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Heidegger, Martin. Country Path Conversations, translated by Bret W. Davis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Heidegger, Martin. Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), translated by Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. Zhuangzi 莊子. The True Classic of Zhuangzi 南華真經 in The Daoist Canon 道藏, 36 volumes. Shanghai: Shanghai Shudian Chuban She, 1988.

Notes Chapter 1 1 Although Karl Jaspers would eventually come to be estranged from Heidegger to some complicated degree, he was one of his closest and oldest friends, and shared parts of Heidegger’s intellectual project and trajectory. Indeed, I go so far as to argue that Theodor Adorno’s 1964 Jargon of Authenticity is directed more to Jaspers than Heidegger himself. I discuss this in part in Babette Babich, ‘Adorno on Genocide’, in Adorno and the Concept of Genocide, eds. Ryan Crawford and Erik M. Vogt (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014). I focus on Heidegger and Jaspers in Babette Babich, ‘Jaspers, Heidegger, and Arendt: On Politics, Science, and Communication’, in Existence 4, no. 1 (2009): 1–19. For one overview of relevant primary sources, see Bernd Martin, ed., Martin Heidegger und das ‘Dritte Reich’: ein Kompendium (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftlich Buchgesellschaft, 1989). 2 Some enterprising scholars have ‘imagined’ what a transcript of Heidegger’s deposition before this ‘rehabilitation’ commission held on 23 July 1945 might have looked like and have published their work in Heidegger’s name as if they were translators in ‘Heidegger on the Art of Teaching’, in Heidegger, Education, and Modernity, trans. Valerie Allen and Aris D. Axiotis in eds. Michael A. Peters and Valerie Allen (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), pp. 27–45. I thank Miles Groth and Matthew James Kruger-Ross for engaging this question. See too Heidegger, ‘The Self-Assertion of the German University and The Rectorate 1933/34: Facts and Thoughts’, Karsten Harries, ed., Review of Metaphysics 38, no. 3 (March 1985): 467–81. The original Rectoratsrede, which likewise focused on education, was originally published as Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universitdt Rede, gehalten bei der feierlichen Ubemahme des Rektorats der Universitdt Freiburg i Br. am 27. 5, 1933 (Breslau: Korn Verlag, 1933). I take this up in the context of a discussion of Heideggerian questioning and pedagogy (and including further references) in Babette Babich, ‘Towards Questioning: On Heidegger and Education’, in Encyclopedia of Education, ed. Michael Peters (Frankfurt am Main: Springer, 2016), pp. 18-26. The topic of Heidegger’s reflections on education in this particular context has been discussed by several authors. I recommend reading in addition to those who focus on Heidegger and the German condition of de-Nazification, Holger Zaborowsky, Eine Frage von Irre und Schuld?: Martin Heidegger und der Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2010). 3 In Günther Figal, Einführung. Heidegger Lesebuch (Frankfurt am Main: Klosterman, 2006), p. 38. 4 William J. Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1963), pp. 678–9. 5 Heidegger had taken over to replace Wilhelm von Möllendorf who was eliminated after two weeks as ineligible on technical grounds as a social democrat. 6 Hannah Arendt, ‘Heidegger at Eighty’, in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), pp. 293–303.

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7 See Guido Schneeberger, Nachlese zu Heidegger Dokumente zu seinem Leben und Denken (Bern: Franke, 1962). See for a general overview, Rüdiger Safranski’s Martin Heidegger Between Good and Evil, trans. E. Osers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999) and Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, trans. A. Blunden (New York: Basic Books, 1993) as well as Ernst Nolte, Martin Heidegger: Politik und Geschichte im Leben und Denken (Berlin: Propyläen, 1992). In addition to Derrida’s several reflections on ash and spirit, see Reiner Schürmann’s From Principles to Anarchy: Heidegger on Being and Acting, (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1987) and see too his already mentioned article, ‘Tragic Double Binds’ in Martin Heidegger: Politics, Art and Technology, eds. Karsten Harries and Christoph Jamme (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1994), pp. 89–105. If Graeme Nicholson’s reading in his ‘The Politics of Heidegger’s Rectoral Address’, Man and World 20, no. 2 (1987): 171–87 remains the most balanced see Strong’s chapter on Heidegger in his recent Politics Without Vison: Thinking Without a Bannister in the 21st Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), pp. 263–324 8 Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly, eds., Heidegger et ‘les juifs’ (Paris: Grasset, La Règle du Jeu, N° 58/59, September 2015), as well as most recently, Ingo Farin and Jeff Malpas, eds., Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks: 1931-1941 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016) and the results of a conference held in Siegen, Marion Heinz and Sidonie Kellerer, eds., Martin Heideggers ‘Schwarze Hefte’ – Eine philosophisch-politische Debatte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2016). 9 Some of these classic points are reprised and reviewed (already as it were) in the contributions to Harries and Jamme’s collection on Heidegger and politics. See especially Alexander Schwann and Reiner Schürmann among the other contributions to Harries and Jamme, eds., Martin Heidegger as well as Günther Neske & Emil Kettering, eds., Martin Heidegger and National Socialism: Questions and Answers, trans. Lisa Harries and Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Paragon House, 1990). 10 See Reiner Schürmann, Le Principe d’anarchie, Heidegger et la question de l’agir (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1982) in English as From Principles to Anarchy, and see too his article, ‘Tragic Double Binds’ in Harries and Jamme, eds., Martin Heidegger, pp. 89–105. 11 See, again, Nicholson’s ‘The Politics of Heidegger’s Rectoral Address’. 12 See Tracy Strong’s chapter on Heidegger in his recent Politics without Vision: (cited above) and see too his contribution to ‘On Relevant Events, Then and Now’ to Farin and Malpas eds., Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks: 1931-1941, pp. 223–38. 13 See Jürg Altweg, ‘Ein Debakel für Frankreichs Philosophie’, Frankfurter Allgemeine (13 December 2013) and see too Thomas Assheuer, ‘Er spricht vom Rasseprinzip’: Nach seinen jetzt bekannt gewordenen Ausfällen gegen die Juden lässt sich Heidegger nur noch schlecht verteidigen, Die Zeit (27 December 2013): 48, as well as a parallel contribution from Peter Trawny in the same issue and on the same page although going on to the following page as well: ‘Eine neue Dimension’ Die Zeit (27 December 2013): 48–9. 14 I refer to Heidegger’s discussion of Krankheitserscheinungen, ‘symptoms of a disease’. Being and Time, 52/29. Such manifestations refer to ‘certain occurrences in the body which show themselves and which, in showing themselves as thus showing themselves, ‘indicate’ [‘indizieren’] something which does not show itself ’. (Ibid.) Emphasizing that ‘this showing itself, which helps to make possible, the appearing, is not the appearing itself ’ (53/29). Heidegger’s point is the heart of hermeneutic phenomenol-

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ogy: ‘Appearing is an announcing-itself [das Sich-melden] through something that shows itself ’ (Ibid.). Circumstances make all the difference and in this often cited illustration, Heidegger speaks of the para-phenomenon or pseudo-appearance of such appearances as ‘mere semblance’: ‘In a certain kind of lighting someone can look as if his cheeks were flushed with red; and the redness which shows itself can be taken as an announcement of the Being-present-at-hand of a fever, which in turn indicates some disturbance in the organism’ (54/30–1). I discuss this in connection with Ludwik Fleck and the hermeneutic elusiveness of medical aetiology in history and diagnostics in Babette Babich, ‘Calling Science Pseudoscience: Fleck’s Archaeologies, Latour’s Biography, and Demarcation or AIDS Denialism, Homeopathy, and Syphilis’, International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 29, no. 1 (2015): 1–39. John Derbyshire, ‘Heidegger in France: Nazism and Philosophy’, Prospect Magazine, 13 December 2013. Available on line at https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/derbyshire/heidegger-in-france-nazism-and-philosophy/#.Ur3ohLTWsVY Note here a not-accidental parallel with the scientific tradition of the Enlightenment and its goal of explaining, predicting, and ultimately, controlling nature. See Martin Heidegger, Über den Humanismus. Brief an J. Beaufret, Paris (Bern: Francke, 1954) and in translation, ‘The Letter on Humanism’ in Krell’s edition of Heidegger, Basic Writings (New York: Harper & Row, 1977) and the same translation appears in William McNeill’s edition of Heidegger, Pathmarks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). I discuss this in an essay included in the published Proceedings of the Heidegger Circle, ‘Shattering the Political or the Question of War in Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism”’ (1 May 2013): 25–49. See, again, for these variations, Strong’s exactly titled Politics without Vision. Tracy Strong, ‘Introduction’, in Strong, ed. Friedrich Nietzsche (Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), p. xxvi. Strong reprises this same point more generally, quite beyond Nietzsche alone, to state his own suggestion for his own part in his recent book, Politics without Vision and in a sense this earlier editorial paragraph may be read as epitomizing part of the project of his monograph, namely, ‘that, instead of writing to make sure “it” never happens again, we have to open some doors that have been closed down in order to explore paths that come after those doors but were not taken’. Strong, Politics without Vision. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Erziehung nach Auschwitz’. In Adorno, Erziehung zur Mündigkeit, Vorträge und Gespräche mit Hellmuth Becker 1959 – 1969, Gerd Kadelbach, ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), pp. 92–109. See for further references for this assertion and further discussion, Babette Babich, ‘Heideggers Widerstand. Nietzsche lesen als eine “Konfrontation” mit dem Nationalsozialismus’, in Heidegger und der Nationalsozialismus II. Heidegger Jahrbuch 5, eds. Holger Zaborowski and Albert Denker (Freiburg: Alber, 2010), pp. 397–415. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist (German: Der Antichrist), §19. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), p. 180. Heidegger, Letter on Humanism, 231/349. Martin Heidegger and Jean Beaufret, Lettre sur l’Humanisme (Aubier, Montaigne, 1957) and R. Munier, édition bilingue, Paris, Aubier, 1983. Yet some authors ask, as we shall see, how concerned could Heidegger be with ethics, especially if he could not give a straight answer to a young man who asked him when he might be writing one? Ibid., 232–3/350.

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27 Nietzsche names Anaximander ‘the first ethical philosopher’, in Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, trans. Marianne Cowan (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1962), §6. 28 Heidegger, ‘Der Spruch des Anaximander’, in Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1994), p. 356. 29 Heidegger, ‘Der Spruch des Anaximander’, p. 363. 30 In Die Antiquirtheit des Menschen (Munich: Beck, 1956), Günter Anders had already diagnosed much of this, focusing on the human as such just where his Frankfurt School colleague in Southern California, Herbert Marcuse, spoke more generically in his One Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964). 31 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper Perennial, 1977), pp. 13–19. 32 There are of course many who write on Heidegger and value. In particular, I recommend for an overview, Jacques Taminiaux, not less for his own theoretical background in law. See Taminiaux in English and with specific reference to Heidegger and Nietzsche: Taminiaux, ‘On Heidegger’s Interpretation of the Will To Power As Art’, New Nietzsche Studies 3, no. 1 and 2 (1999): 1–22, see for a direct discussion: Babich, ‘On Connivance, Nihilism, and Value’, New Nietzsche Studies 3, no. 1 and 2 (1999): 23–52. Robert Sinnerbrink discusses Taminiaux’s analysis in an aesthetic context in his ‘Heidegger and Nietzsche on the “End of Art”’, in Heidegger and Nietzsche, eds. Babette Babich, Alfred Denker and Holger Zaborowski (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012), pp. 417–28. 33 Nietzsche’s term in his Also Sprach Zarathustra is ‘Krämer-Gold’. Cf. Z III, Von alten und neuen Tafeln, §21. 34 Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra. 35 Cf., to cite English titles, Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals, etc. 36 Heidegger, Letter on Humanism, 228/345. 37 Michael Theunissen, Der Andere: Studien zur Sozialontologie der Gegenwart (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1965.), see here especially with reference to Mitsein and Fürsorge, p. 177ff. 38 John Paley’s ‘Heidegger and the Ethics of Care’, Nursing Philosophy 1 (2000): 64–75. In nursing ethics, the (only partially) Heideggerian conception of care may also be traced in different expressions very classically in Jean Watson, Nursing: Human Science and Human Care. A Theory of Nursing (New York: National League for Nursing, 1988 [1985]); in Madeleine M. Leininger, ‘Die Theorie der kulturspezifischen Fürsorge zur Weiterentwicklung von Wissen und Praxis der professionellen transkulturellen Pflege’, in Erster Internationaler Pflegetheorienkongreß in Nürnberg, ed. Jürgen Osterbrink (Bern: Hans Huber Verlag, 1998), pp. 73–90. On Leininger, see too Cheryl L. Reynolds, ‘Zum Ursprung von Leiningers Theorie der kulturellen Fürsorgevielfalt und -gemeinsamkeiten’ in Multikulturelle Pflege, eds. S. Alban, M. M. Leininger and C. L. Reynolds (Munich: Urban & Fischer, 2000), pp. 276–86. See for a recent discussion, Pawel Krol and Mireille Lavoie, ‘De l’humanisme au nihilisme: une dialectique sur la théorie du caring de Jean Watson’, Rech Soins Infrm. 122 (September 2015): 51–65. 39 Paley, ‘Heidegger and the Ethics of Care’, p. 66. 40 Ibid. The problem here is that what Paley calls ‘congeniality’, or what business ethics often reduces to, that is, ‘all the ethics one can afford’ or all the ethics not grandfathered in by law, is a particularly feeble kind of ethics.

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41 Analytic readings are, to use Paley’s own term here, notoriously ‘uncongenial’ to Heidegger as such. 42 For a discussion of care in Heidegger with reference to Goethe’s care, see Ellis Dye, ‘Sorge in Heidegger and in Goethe’s Faust’, Goethe Yearbook 16 (2009): 207–18. See also on care, from a Heideggerian and Schelerian philosophical perspective, Daniel Dahlstrom’s discussion ‘Scheler’s Critique of Heidegger’s Fundamental Ontology’ in Max Scheler’s Acting Persons: New Perspectives, ed. Stephen Schneck (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), pp. 67–92. 43 See for a further discussion, Babette Babich, ‘Constellating Technology: Heidegger’s Die Gefahr / The Danger’ in Babich and Dimtri Ginev, eds., The Multidimensionality of Hermeneutic Phenomenology Frankfurt am Main: Springer, 2014), pp. 153–182. 44 Heidegger, Being and Time, §40; cf., §41 191. 45 See here, with reference to both Nietzsche and Montaigne, for example, Paul van Tongeren, ‘“On the Friend” in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra’, in the journal I edit, New Nietzsche Studies Vol. 5, Nos. 3/4 and Vol. 6, Nos. 1/2 (Winter 2003/Spring 2004): xx–xx, as well as Alexander Nehamas, ‘Because it was he, Because it was I: Friendship and its Place in Life’ (theme of Nehamas’ Gifford lectures of 2008 in Edinburgh), as well as Jacques Derrida’s humanistically inspired Politiques de l'amitié (Paris: Galilée, 1994). Kant himself also invokes the example of friendship as a non-realizable idea in order to illuminate the factic limits of ethics and its ideal: ‘daß z. B reine Redlichkeit in der Freundschaft um nichts weniger von jedem Menschen gefordert werden könne, wenn es gleich bis jetzt gar keinen redlichen Freund gegeben haben möchte, weil diese Pflicht als Pflicht überhaupt vor aller Erfahrung in der Idee einer den Willen durch Gründe a priori bestimmenden Vernunft liegt.’ Immanuel Kant, Die Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, Karl Vorländer, Hg. (Leipzig: Dürr, 1906), 2nd section, p. 28. 46 See in this context Eileen M. McGee, ‘The Healing Circle: Resiliency in Nurses’, Issues in Mental Health Nursing 27 (2006): 43–57. McGee writes regarding the pressures of the nursing vocation, underlining the dimension of institutionalized caregiving from the side of the patient, particularly the insolvent, particularly those with substance abuse dependencies. 47 Thus, one author characterizes Heideggerian solicitude as maternal restraint: ‘I do not leap-in and take over this careful struggle to be from him – I hold myself back in a type of restraint that is nevertheless characterized by a hovering attentiveness, a silent co-willing, an expressive encouragement and recognition of his struggle’. Irene McMullin, Time and the Shared World: Heidegger on Social Relations (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2013), p. 227. Scott Campbell argues that McMullin’s book answers Richardson’s desideratum for an ethics that would respond to his own exploration of errancy over the years and beginning with his discussion in his Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1967). I share the same sense of the importance of this theme (see my edited collection, Babette Babich, ed., From Phenomenology to Thought, Errancy, and Desire: Essays in Honor of William J. Richardson, S.J. [Phænomenologica] (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995), but I am less confident that what Richardson is calling for is to be found here. See for the original context in question John Caputo’s ‘Dark Hearts: Heidegger, Richardson and Evil’, in Babich, ed., From Phenomenology to Thought, Errancy, and Desire. The same collection also includes Richardson’s reply: ‘Heidegger’s Fall’ which was also reprinted in American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly LXIX, no. 2 (1995): 229–53. 48 I use convivial here in Ivan Illich’s elusive and comprehensive sense. See Illich, Tools for Conviviality (London: Marion Boyars, 2001 [1972]) a text which may be better

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Notes understood as a guide to living together in a comprehensive sense considering where we find ourselves in a disparate world and wishing to share common life-values but also attuned to the differences made by both technologies and techniques as well as institutions. Thus, the teacher brings a new scholar who will eventually also be a teacher, to themselves, as Nietzsche once argued, but the difference between Nietzsche’s argument for the individual task that is the student’s task of finding an educator to free oneself to oneself, is adumbrated for Nietzsche, as it was for Heidegger, by Pindar’s ‘become the one you are’. It can also be giving feedback on a text or the practical life of a scholar; think of Weber’s irreplaceable Wissenschaft als Beruf. Peter Handke, Lied vom Kindsein, film quote. Online version here: http://www.wimwenders.com/movies/movies_spec/wingsofdesire/wod-song-of-childhood-german. htm. It is instructive for me as a Nietzsche scholar to hear this distinction as it is behind the translator’s efforts to render Nietzsche’s Mitleid with one or the other term. See Ivan Illich in conversation with David Cayley, The Rivers North of the Future (Toronto: Anansi Press, 2005), p. 52. If the primary import of ethics today, in philosophy as in political theory is to go beyond the self, towards others, towards animal being, even towards the earth itself, Heidegger would not seem to offer us what we are looking for and the allure of Levinas, despite his dependency on Heidegger, is that he makes ethics central to his philosophy, as first philosophy. ‘As care … Dasein has been Determined by facticity and falling … . Dasein as a they-self, gets “lived” by the common-sense ambiguity of that publicness in which nobody resolves upon anything but that which has already made its decision. “Resoluteness” signifies letting oneself be summoned out of one’s lostness in the “they.” … [But even] resolutions remain dependent upon the ‘they’ and its world’ (§60, 298).

Chapter 2 1 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956). Hereafter BN. 2 Jean-Paul Sartre, The War Diaries of Jean-Paul Sartre, trans. Quintan Hoare (New York: Pantheon, 1984), p. 183. Hereafter WD. 3 Jean-Paul Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, trans. Forest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick (New York: Noonday Press, 1957). Hereafter TE. 4 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘The Itinerary of a Thought’, in Between Existentialism and Marxism, trans. John Mathews (New York: William Morrow, 1974), p. 33. Hereafter IT. 5 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Interview with Sartre’, in The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, ed. Phillip Schlipp (LaSalle, IL: Open Court Press, 1981), p. 8. 6 Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Mentor, 1963). Hereafter SG. 7 Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Random House, 1958). Hereafter SM. 8 Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. l, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (London: Humanities Press, 1976). Hereafter CDR.

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9 Jean-Paul Sartre, The Family Idiot, vol. 1, trans. Carol Cosman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). 10 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘The Purposes of Writing’, in Between Existentialism and Marxism, ed. John Mathews (New York: William Morrow, 1974), pp. 30–1. 11 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Reason in the Age of Science, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), p. 9. 12 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, ed. and trans. David E. Linge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 190–1. Hereafter PH. 13 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1994), p. 302. 14 Jean-Paul Sartre, The Family Idiot, vol. 2, trans. Carol Cosman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 4. Hereafter FI2.

Chapter 3 1 Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Citadel Press, 1976), p. 74. Hereafter cited as EA. 2 Louise D. Derksen and Annemie Halsema, ‘Understanding the Body: The Relevance of Gadamer’s and Ricoeur’s View of the Body for Feminist Theory’, in Gadamer and Ricoeur: Critical Horizons for Contemporary Hermeneutics, eds. Francis J. Mootz III and George H. Taylor (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), pp. 203–25. 3 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and David G. Marshall (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 390–1. Hereafter cited as TM. 4 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany – Chevallier (New York: Vintage E-Books, 2009). Hereafter cited as SS followed by electronic location number. 5 Debra Bergoffen, ‘Simone de Beauvoir’, in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed on 15 November 2015 at: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ beauvoir/#PyrCinRadFreOth 6 Bergoffen, ‘Simone de Beauvoir’. 7 See Gail Weiss, ‘“Politics is a Living There”: The Intellectual’s Dilemma in Beauvoir’s The Mandarins’, in The Contradictions of Freedom: Philosophical Essays on Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins, eds. Sally J. Scholz and Shannon M. Mussett (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005). 8 Bergoffen, ‘Simone de Beauvoir’. 9 See Ernst Cassirer, The Warburg Years (1919–1933): Essays on Language, Art, Myth, and Technology, trans. Stephen G. Lofts and Antonio Calcagno (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014). 10 Patricia Altenbernd Johnson, ‘Questioning Authority’, in Feminist Interpretations of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Lorraine Code (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2003), pp. 307–24. 11 Michel Foucault, On the Government of the Living: Lectures at the Collège de France 1979–1980, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 12 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 3: The Care of the Self, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 2012). 13 Simone de Beauvoir, She Came to Stay (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990). 14 See interview with Simone de Beauvoir, ‘Why I am a Feminist’: https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=9LYx5T1yhqU

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Chapter 4 1 Henri Bergson’s opposition between intuitively lived time (la durée) and mechanical clock time (le temps) has highly influenced our way of thinking about time and the passing of time. Only the former is the real, lived time of our experience. Henri Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity, ed. Robin Durie (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 1999). Cf. Gaston Bachelard, The Dialectic of Duration, trans. Mary Mcallester Jones (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2000). 2 ‘Consider, for example, the times of Vespasian. Thou wilt see all these things, people marrying, bringing up children, sick, dying, warring, feasting, trafficking, cultivating the ground, flattering, obstinately arrogant, suspecting, plotting, wishing for some to die, grumbling about the present, loving, heaping up treasure, desiring consulship, kingly power. Well, then, that life of these people no longer exists at all. Again, remove to the times of Trajan. Again, all is the same. Their life, too, is gone. In like manner view also the other epochs of time and of whole nations, and see how many after great efforts soon fell and were resolved into the elements. But chiefly thou shouldst think of those whom thou hast thyself known distracting themselves about idle things, neglecting to do what was in accordance with their proper constitution, and to hold firmly to this and to be content with it. And herein it is necessary to remember that the attention given to everything has its proper value and proportion. For thus thou wilt not be dissatisfied, if thou appliest thyself to smaller matters no further than is fit. The words which were formerly familiar are now antiquated; so also the names of those who were famed of old, are now in a manner antiquated: Camillus, Caeso, Volesus, Leonnatus, and a little after also Scipio and Cato, then Augustus, then also Hadrianus and Antoninus. For all things soon pass away and become a mere tale, and complete oblivion soon buries them. And I say this of those who have shone in a wondrous way. For the rest, as soon as they have breathed out their breath, they are gone, and no man speaks of them. And, to conclude the matter, what is even an eternal remembrance? A mere nothing. What, then, is that about which we ought to employ our serious pains? This one thing, thoughts just, and acts social, and words which never lie, and a disposition which gladly accepts all that happens, as necessary, as usual, as flowing from a principle and source of the same kind.’ Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, iv. 32–3. http://www.bartleby.com/2/3/4.html. 3 Cf. The gnome, ‘know thine opportunity’ is attributed to Pittacus. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, ed. R. D. Hicks, Book I, p. 79, http://www.perseus.tufts. edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0258. 4 In Discourse on Thinking, Heidegger introduces a distinction between ‘meditative and calculative thinking’ (besinnliches und berechnendes Denken): ‘Calculative thinking computes. It computes ever new, ever more promising and at the same time more economical possibilities. Calculative thinking races from one prospect to the next. Calculative thinking never stops, never collects itself. Calculative thinking is not meditative thinking, not thinking which contemplates the meaning which reigns in everything that is. Martin Heidegger, ‘Memorial Address’, in Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), p. 46. 5 Cf. Felix Ó. Murchadha, Zeit des Handelns und Möglichkeit der Verwandlung (Königshausen und Neumann, 1999); English, The Time of Revolution: Kairos and Chronos in Heidegger (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013). 6 Cf. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, GA2, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hermann (Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 1977), §81, ‘Die Innerzeitligkeit und die Genesis des

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vulgären Zeitbegriffes’, pp. 555–64. Macquarrie and Robinson translate ‘vulgärer Zeitbegriff ’ as ‘ordinary conception of time’ rather than ‘vulgar concept of time’. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962): ‘Within-time-ness and the Genesis of the Ordinary Conception of Time’, p. 472. See also Martin Heidegger, The Concept of Time, trans. William McNeill (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992). Czesław Miłosz, ‘No More’, in idem, Poezje wybrane/Selected Poems, trans. Anthony Miłosz (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1996), p. 133. Cf. Andrzej Wierciński, ‘Confusion of Voices: The Crucial Dilemmas of Being a Human Being, Czesław Miłosz’s Poetry, and the Search for Personal Identity’, in Cultural Politics and Identity: The Public Space of Recognition, eds. Barbara Weber, Karlfriedrich Herb, Petra Schweitzer, Eva Marsal, and Takara Dobashi (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2011), pp. 147–74. Czesław Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 25. Czesław Miłosz, ‘But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.’ Phil. 3.12-14. For St Paul it is evident that the inbreaking of καιρός reveals a new order of grace. It is, at the same time, a call to perseverance. It is interesting to see the relationship between this new order of grace, perseverance, and patience, perceived as ὑπομονή, as remaining steadfast under the challenges and hardships. Cf. Rev. 14: 12: ‘ Ὧδε ἡ ὑπομονὴ τῶν ἁγίων ἐστίν, οἱ τηροῦντες τὰς ἐντολὰς τοῦ Θεοῦ καὶ τὴν πίστιν Ἰησοῦ’: ‘Here is a call for the endurance of the saints, those who keep the commandments of God and their faith in Jesus. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2000), p. 350. Boethius, Liber de persona et duabus naturis contra Eutychen et Nestorium, ad Joannem Diaconum Ecclesiae Romanae, cap. PL 3, PL 64/1343C. Richard of St. Victor, De Trinitate. IV 18, 181. (liber 4, cap. 22, PL 196/945). Duns Scotus referring to the authority of St. Victor states: ‘Est igitur persona, secundum Richardum, 22 cap., intellectualis naturae incommunicabilis subsistentia vel exsistentia.’ Rep. I-A, d. 23, q. un., n. 16. Cf. Richard Kearney, ‘Diacritical Hermeneutics’, in Maria Luisa Portocarrero, Luis Umbelino and Andrzej Wierciński, ed., The Hermeneutic Rationality/La rationalité herméneutique, International Studies in Hermeneutics and Phenomenology, vol. 3, ed. Andrzej Wierciński (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2012), pp. 177–96. On the dichotomy between exegesis and eisegesis see Robert J. Dobie, ‘Thomas Aquinas and Meister Eckhart on Exodus 3:14: Exegesis or Eisegesis?’ Medieval Mystical Theology, 24, no. 2 (2015): 124–36. Dobie argues that ‘Aquinas and especially Eckhart challenge our contemporary tendency to reduce Scripture to an historical artifact: a puzzle to be solved, an object to be analyzed, a corpse to be dissected for its “historical” or “original intent”. By contrast, both Aquinas and Eckhart approach Scripture as a literally living Word whose self-subsistent being must become, by grace, the ground of my own very being, thinking, willing, and acting. As manifesting the Word in and through whom all things were created, no philosophical science is alien to Scripture. So eisegesis – literally “reading into” Scripture philosophical concepts to uncover the inner meaning of Scripture and of philosophy – is not just allowed but demanded by Scripture.’ Ibid., 135. Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘The Song of the Statue’, in idem, The Book of Images: Poems, trans. rev. bilingual ed., trans. Edward Snow (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1994), p. 19.

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16 Cf. Rainer Maria Rilke, Rodin, trans. Jessie Lemont and Hans Trausil (London: The Grey Walls Press, 1946). See also Der Briefwechsel und andere Dokumente zu Rilkes Begegnung mit Rodin (Frankfurt a.M.: Insel Verlag, 2001). 17 Cf. the parable from Lk. 12.13-21, where in Lk. 12.15 we hear, ‘Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions’: ‘Ὁρᾶτε καὶ φυλάσσεσθε ἀπὸ πάσης πλεονεξίας, ὅτι οὐκ ἐν τῷ περισσεύειν τινὶ ἡ ζωὴ αὐτοῦ ἐστιν ἐκ τῶν ὑπαρχόντων αὐτῷ.’ 18 Aristotelis Politica, ed. William David Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), 1232 b, 30–5. 19 For Brendan Byrne, ‘hospitality of God’ is the hermeneutic key to Luke’s understanding of Jesus’ mission. Brendan Byrne, The Hospitality of God: A Reading of Luke’s Gospel, rev. ed. (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2015). 20 Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 301. Further, Gadamer clarifies: ‘Every finite present has its limitations. We define the concept of “situation” by saying that it represents a standpoint that limits the possibility of vision. Hence essential to the concept of situation is the concept of “horizon”. The horizon is the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point. Applying this to the thinking mind, we speak of narrowness of horizon, of the possible expansion of horizon, of the opening up of new horizons, and so forth.’ Ibid. 21 Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 112. 22 Education as an experience of reality concerns the whole person. Cf. Andrzej Wierciński, ‘Hermeneutic Education to Understanding: Self-Education and the Willingness to Risk Failure’, in Education, Dialogue, and Hermeneutics, ed. Paul Fairfield (New York: Continuum, 2010), pp. 107–23. 23 Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 303. 24 Cf. Andrzej Wierciński, ‘Sprache ist Gespräch’ Gadamer’s Understanding of Language as Conversation’, in idem, ed., Gadamer’s Hermeneutics and the Art of Conversation (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2011), pp. 37–58. The affinity of gehören, hören, and Gehorsam can be seen in many Indo-European languages. 25 Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 238. 26 Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Gedichte und Hyperion (Frankfurt a.M.: Insel Verlag, 1999); English, Hyperion and Selected Poems, ed. Eric L. Santner (New York: Continuum, 1990). 27 Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. xxvi.

Chapter 5 1 Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘Reply to Thomas M. Alexander’, in The Philosophy of HansGeorg Gadamer, ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn (Chicago: Open Court, 1997), p. 346. 2 John Dewey, ‘Challenge to Liberal Thought’, LW 15 (1944): 274. All references to Dewey’s texts are from The Collected Works, 1882–1953, edited by Jo Ann Boydston and published by Southern Illinois University Press. In the endnotes, EW refers to The Early Works, 1882–98 (five volumes), MW refers to The Middle Works, 1899–1924 (fifteen volumes) and LW refers to The Later Works, 1925–53 (seventeen volumes). 3 John Dewey, ‘From Absolutism to Experimentalism’, LW 5 (1930): 154. For a thorough analysis of this theme, see James A. Good’s A Search for Unity in Diversity: The ‘Permanent Hegelian Deposit’ in the Philosophy of John Dewey (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2006). For a broader series of essays on Dewey’s relation to continental philosophy,

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see John Dewey and Continental Philosophy, ed. Paul Fairfield (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010). Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 315. C. G. Prado, ‘A Conversation with Richard Rorty’, Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy 7, no. 2 (Fall 2003): 228. Gadamer, ‘Reply to Thomas M. Alexander’, p. 346. Joseph Margolis, Pragmatism without Foundations: Reconciling Realism and Relativism (London: Continuum, 2007), pp. 168–9. See Richard J. Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), as well as ‘The Pragmatic Turn’, a lecture of 2013 on YouTube. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., trans. J. Weinsheimer and D. G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1989), p. 365. Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 38. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1967), p. 313. John Dewey, Psychology, EW 2 (1887): 192. All italics in the original. John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, MW 12 (1920): 132. Thomas M. Alexander, ‘Eros and Understanding: Gadamer’s Aesthetic Ontology of the Community’ in The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn (Chicago: Open Court, 1997), pp. 324–5. This is ‘the idea that knowledge is intrinsically a mere beholding or viewing of reality’. Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy: 144. Dewey, Experience and Nature (1925). LW 1: 40. Dewey, ‘Context and Thought’ (1931). LW 6: 12. Dewey, Art as Experience (1934). LW 10: 270; Dewey, How We Think (1933). LW 8: 227. Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916). MW 9: 165. Dewey, ‘Context and Thought’ (1931). LW 6: 5. Dewey, Experience and Education (1938). LW 13: 59. Dewey, How We Think (1933). LW 8: 221. Dewey, ‘Understanding and Prejudice’ (1929). LW 5: 396. Dewey, How We Think (1933). LW 8: 114. Ibid., 225. Dewey, ‘The Challenge of Democracy to Education’ (1937). LW 11: 184. Dewey, How We Think (1933). LW 8: 233. In his later years, having become increasingly frustrated with the abuse of the term ‘pragmatism’ itself and the uncharitable criticism it continually received, Dewey would write that ‘so much misunderstanding and relatively futile controversy have gathered about the word [pragmatism] that it seemed advisable to avoid its use’. Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938). LW 12: 4. Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916). MW 9: 152. Dewey, The Quest for Certainty (1929). LW 4: 181. Dewey, How We Think (1933). LW 8: 172, 318. ‘The word “methods” is italicized as a precaution against a possible misunderstanding which would be contrary to what is intended. What is needed is not the carrying over of procedures that have approved themselves in physical science, but new methods as adapted to human issues and problems, as methods already in scientific use have shown themselves to be in physical subject matter.’ Dewey, ‘Philosophy’s Future in our Scientific Age: Never Was Its Role More Crucial’ (1949). LW 16: 379.

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33 Dewey, How We Think (1933). LW 8: 251. 34 Dewey, A Common Faith (1933). LW 9: 23. 35 Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers, vol. 5 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931–1958), 400. 36 Dewey, The Quest for Certainty (1929). LW 4: 109. 37 Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916). MW 9: 284. 38 Dewey, ‘Imagination and Expression’ (1896). EW 5: 195. 39 Dewey, ‘Imagination and Expression’ (1896). EW 5: 195. 40 Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916). MW 9: 284. 41 Peirce, ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’, Popular Science Monthly, 12 (January 1878): 286–302. 42 William James, The Meaning of Truth (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 113. 43 Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 291. 44 Gadamer, ‘The Problem of Historical Consciousness’, in Interpretive Social Science: A Second Look, eds. Paul Rabinow and William Sullivan, trans. J. Close (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 127. 45 Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938). LW 12: 15. 46 Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), p. 154. 47 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 97, 98–9. 48 Ibid., 38, 16, 11, 10–11. 49 Jean Grondin, The Philosophy of Gadamer (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), pp. 116, 106. 50 As Gadamer plainly stated in Truth and Method, ‘I did not remotely intend to deny the necessity of methodical work within the human sciences.’ Also: ‘It is not my intention to make prescriptions for the sciences or the conduct of life, but to try to correct false thinking about what they are.’ Gadamer, Truth and Method, xxix, xxiii. 51 Ibid., 512, xxviii. 52 Ibid., pp. 446, 461, 290. 53 See Gadamer, ‘The Universality of the Hermeneutical Problem’, in Philosophical Hermeneutics, ed. David E. Linge, trans. G. B. Hess and R. E. Palmer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). 54 Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. xxx. 55 Karl Jaspers, Reason and Existenz, trans. William Earle (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press), p. 80.

Chapter 6 1 While the meaning of the word rhizome might not be widely known, the image of a tangled system of roots is readily familiar. 2 William James playfully introduces the pragmatic method by means of a memorable anecdote. ‘Some years ago, being with a camping party in the mountains, I returned from a solitary ramble to find everyone engaged in a ferocious metaphysical dispute. The corpus of the dispute was a squirrel – a live squirrel supposed to be clinging to one side of a tree-trunk; while over against the tree’s opposite side a human being was imagined to stand. This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly round the tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel moves as fast in

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the opposite direction; and always keeps the tree between himself and the man, so that never a glimpse of him is caught. The resultant metaphysical problem now is this: Does the man go round the squirrel or not?’ (Pragmatism, 27). Though he does not say so, James can be taken to imply that the disputes have themselves been going round and round, arguably (!) in circles. James proposes pragmatism to free them from the interminable circle of what otherwise would be an irresolvable dispute, one about two actors themselves going in a circle! David Weissman draws a categorically sharp distinction between inquiry and interpretation. In contrast, I take most all genres of responsible interpretation to be instances of inquiry. There is, from my perspective, more to most genres of interpretation than inquiry, but I want to avoid any dualism between the two. To a large extent, we are drawing upon the same traditions and thinkers (not least of all pragmatism and, in particular, Dewey). By now, a handful of expositors, including Ralph Sleeper, Peter Manicas, and Hilary Putnam, have called attention to the centrality of this figure. While the text from Human Nature and Conduct, serving as an epigram for this essay, is occasionally cited, the context in which it is put forth and, beyond this, the deep-cutting and wide-reaching implications have been for the most part merely hinted at. Bertrand Russell criticizes Dewey’s definition of inquiry since it is so inclusive that putting scattered bricks in order would fall within the scope of its meaning. So radically divergent are their philosophical temperaments, Dewey would take this as substantiation, rather than an invalidation, of his definition. This is indeed central to the empirical method as Dewey conceives it. This method ‘points out when and where and how things of a designated description have been arrived at. It places before others a map of the road that has been travelled; they may accordingly, if they will, re-travel the road to inspect the landscape for themselves’ (LW 1, 389). Of course, this is fair to neither Hume nor Kant. A viable interpretation of Hume is that socially inherited customs are, for him, inherently normative. He in effect wants to return to the rough ground, leaving aside the idle disputes of theological rationalism. In turn, an even less controversial interpretation of Kant is that a purely rational imperative is, in his judgement, to be found in ordinary moral consciousness. That is, he does not begin with the categorical imperative in its purity, but in the more or less implicit form it assumes in the moral consciousness of rational agents who may not have – most likely, have not – thought deeply or systematically about either the character or the authority of this imperative. John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty. Later Works of John Dewey, volume 4 (cited as LW 4). Carbondale, IL: SIU Press, 1988. LW 4, 209.

Chapter 7 1 Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘Philosophy and Poetry’, in The Relevance of the Beautiful, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 131. 2 Gadamer, ‘Philosophy and Poetry’, p. 131. We note here Whitman’s respect for science, and ours as well, belongs to our age of interpretation, yet it does not extend to such thinking as that which claims for the so-called facts that they say once and for all the truth of human practice. The tyranny of scientism, from which reading poetry seeks to twist away, is yet another fundamentalism threatening democracy. See both Linda

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Notes Weiner and Ramsey Eric Ramsey, Leaving Us To Wonder (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005) and Gianni Vattimo, ‘Verwindung’, Common Knowledge 3 (1992): 37–44. Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). Cornel West, ‘On Walt Whitman’, in The Cornel West Reader (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2000), p. 489. West, ‘On Walt Whitman’, p. 489. Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas in Whitman: Poetry and Prose (New York: The Library of America, 1982), p. 956. Whitman, Democratic Vistas, p. 956. Ibid., p. 932. Ibid., p. 930. In Specimen Days Whitman ends an essay with a claim picked up by a number of poets since. It is often taken into their talk as a way to praise those who are already readers of poetry, namely, ‘to have great poets, there must be great audiences too’. Although we could not agree more, we find this passage one that, at least in the uses to which we have seen it put, still restricts the issue of the audience’s role in poetry to what we might call the world of poetry. The claims we make on behalf of readers around which we build this chapter we understand to be about hermeneutics in a universal sense, about the world in the sense it has in the phrase being-in-the-world. Walt Whitman, ‘Preface 1855 – Leaves of Grass, First Edition’, in Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, ed. Michael Moon (New York: W. W. Norton & Company), p. 624. Whitman, Democratic Vistas, p. 936. Ibid., p. 992. Friedrich Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man in Essays, eds. Walter Hinderer and Daniel O. Dahlstrom (New York: Continuum, 2005), p. 107. Whitman, Democratic Vistas, p. 960. Ibid., p. 974. Ibid., p. 972. Ibid., p. 973. Linda Martin Alcoff, ‘Gadamer’s Feminist Epistemology’, in Feminist Interpretations of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Lorraine Code (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), p. 232. Alcoff notes four distinct features in Gadamer’s philosophical work that are useful to a feminism seeking to engage the tradition: openness to alterity; move from knowledge to understanding; holism in justification; and immanent realism. Whitman, Democratic Vistas, p. 968, italics added. Alcoff, ‘Gadamer’s Feminist Epistemology’, p. 255. Whitman, Democratic Vistas, p. 974. Alcoff, ‘Gadamer’s Feminist Epistemology’, p. 234. Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘On the Contribution of Poetry to the Search for the Truth’, in The Relevance of the Beautiful, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 106. Gadamer, ‘On the Contribution of Poetry to the Search for the Truth’, p. 106. We move away from Gadamer here as he seems, in this essay at least, to find this description too thin to belong to poetry as such. To make room for our understanding of poetry and democracy we shall defend this as being closer to poetry than Gadamer suggests in the remainder of the essay from which we are citing here.

Notes 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

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Gadamer, ‘On the Contribution of Poetry to the Search for the Truth’, pp. 114–15. Whitman, ‘Song of Myself ’, in Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, p. 27. Whitman, Democratic Vistas, p. 993. Whitman, ‘To a Foil’d European Revolutionaire’, in Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, p. 311. Whitman, Democratic Vistas, p. 990. Whitman, ‘Sun-Down Poem’, in Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, p. 139. Ibid., p. 137. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p.138. Whitman, ‘To a Foil’d European Revolutionaire’, p. 311. Gadamer, ‘On the Contribution of Poetry to the Search for Truth’, pp. 114–15. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 113. George S. Counts, Dare the School Build a New Social Order? (New York: ARNO Press & The New York Times, 1969), p. 55. Counts, Dare the School Build a New Social Order?, p. 55. Whitman, ‘Preface 1855 – Leaves of Grass, First Edition’, p. 625.

Chapter 8 1 Jan Tønnesvang, ‘The Structure of Self-Realization’, Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 26, no. 1–2 (2006): 57. 2 Lars Geer Hammershøj, ‘The Social Pathologies of Self-Realization: A Diagnosis of the Consequences of the Shift in Individualization’, Educational Philosophy and Theory 41, no. 5 (2009): 511. 3 Axel Honneth, ‘Organized Self-Realization. Some Paradoxes of Individualization’, European Journal of Social Theory 7, no. 4 (2004): 467. 4 Joseph Epstein, ‘Think You Have a Book in You? Think Again’, New York Times, 28 September 2002. 5 Joseph Epstein, ‘Think You Have a Book in You? Think Again’. 6 Hammershøj, ‘The Social Pathologies of Self-Realization’, p. 512. 7 Somogy Varga, ‘Self-Realization and Owing to Others: An Indirect Constraint’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies 19, no. 1 (2011): 84. 8 Tønnesvang, ‘The Structure of Self-Realization’, p. 54. 9 See Myriam Revault d’Allonnes, ‘Avant-propos à l’édition française’, in Paul Ricoeur, L’Idéologie et l’utopie, trans. Myriam Revault d’Allonnes and Joël Roman (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1997), p. 13. See also George Taylor, ‘Ricoeur’s Philosophy of Imagination’, Journal of French Philosophy 16, no. 1 and 2 (2006): 92. 10 See Jean-Paul Sartre, The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination, trans. Jonathan Webber (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 12. 11 See the following four texts by Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling’, in On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 141–57; ‘The Function of Fiction in Shaping Reality’, Man and World 12, no. 2 (1979): 123–41; ‘Sartre and Ryle on the Imagination’, in The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, ed. Paul A. Schilpp (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1981), pp. 167–78; ‘Imagination in Discourse and Action’, in From Text to Action, trans.

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Notes Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991), pp. 168–87. For a critique of this view, see Saulius Geniusas, ‘Between Phenomenology and Hermeneutics: Paul Ricoeur’s Philosophy of Imagination’, Human Studies 38, no. 2 (2014): 223–41. Ricoeur’s Lectures on Imagination are still unpublished, although at the moment they are being prepared for publication. I am grateful to George Taylor, the editor of Ricoeur’s Lectures on Imagination, for the permission to cite this so-far unpublished text. In what follows, when citing this text, I will indicate the lecture number before the manuscript page number. As George Taylor argues in his ‘Ricoeur’s Philosophy of Imagination’, ‘for Ricoeur, three of the four domains of productive imagination – social and cultural imagination (the utopia), epistemological imagination, and poetic imagination – come under the rubric of being fictions’ (p. 97). As Taylor further observes, ‘The fourth domain of productive imagination – that of religious symbols – is excluded’ (p. 103) from this structural characterization. In the 17th Lecture, Ricoeur further suggests that the transfiguration of experience and of reality that productive imagination makes possible can be studied ‘on the basis of a certain number of approaches borrowed from different aspects of experience’ (Lectures on Imagination, 17-1) – literary, artistic, scientific, religious, and political. Alfred Barr, ‘Picasso Speaks’, in Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1946), p. 315. Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Vintage Books Edition, 1990), p. 166. Charles Baudelaire, The Mirror of Art: Critical Studies, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 1955), p. 230. Ricoeur, Lectures on Imagination, 17:14. ‘It’s strange that Sartre was more ontological in his philosophy of emotions than in his philosophy of imagination, because for him we have only a kind of anti-world in imagination, whereas in fear, joy, and all the fundamental feelings, we are in the world’ (Ricoeur, Lectures on Imagination, 17:16). Ricoeur, Lectures on Imagination, 17:17. Ibid., 17:15. See in this regard Varga, ‘Self-Realization and Owing to Others’, p. 84. John Dewey, ‘Self-Realization as the Moral Ideal’, The Philosophical Review 2, no. 6 (1893): 653. John Dewey, ‘Self-Realization as the Moral Ideal’. Ibid. Ibid., p. 662. Efraim Shmueli, ‘Freedom and the Predicaments of Self-Realization in a TechnoScientific Age’, Idealistic Studies 7, no. 2 (1977), p. 133. Kai Nielsen, ‘Alienation and Self-Realization’, Philosophy 4, no. 183 (1973): 33. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Cezanne’s Doubt’, in Sense and Nonsense, trans. H. L. Dreyfus and P. A. Dreyfus (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 9.

Chapter 9 1 David Couzens Hoy, ed., Foucault: A Critical Reader (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 4.

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2 Pol Vandevelde, ‘Hermeneutics’, in The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon, eds. Leonard Lawlor and John Nale (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), Entry #33, pp. 182–6. 3 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1973); The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972); The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990); and The Care of the Self, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1988). Note that the dates of these English editions may be misleading. The Order of Things was published in 1966, The Archaeology of Knowledge in 1971, and The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self were both published in 1984, all by Editions Gallimard. 4 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Allen Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). 5 Arnold Davidson, ‘Archaeology, Genealogy, Ethics’, in Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed. David Couzens Hoy (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 221–33. 6 Michel Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, Afterword to Richard Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Brighton, UK: Harvester Press, 1983), pp. 208–26. 7 Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, pp. 208–26. 8 Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, p. 6. 9 Bronwyn Singleton, Foucault’s Failure of Nerve: From Genealogy to Ethics (Kingston, Ontario: Queen’s University, 1998). See also James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993). 10 Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, pp. 25–8. 11 C. G. Prado, Starting with Foucault: An Introduction to Genealogy, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000), pp. 165–8, 171–2. 12 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), p. 82. 13 Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, p. 208. 14 Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault. 15 Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault, p. 187. 16 Calvin O. Schrag, The Self After Postmodernity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 8. 17 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. Elizabeth Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1960), paragraphs, 243–71, pp. 88e–95e. See also: http:// plato.stanford.edu/entries/private-language/. 18 Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick Hutton, eds., Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), pp. 39–49. 19 Martin, Guntman and Hutton, Technologies of the Self, p. 40. 20 Hoy, Foucault, p. 4. 21 Foucault, The Order of Things, p. xiv. 22 Ibid., p. xx–xxii. 23 Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault, p. 148. 24 See Hoy, Foucault and Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault. 25 Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault, p. 104. 26 Ibid., p. xii, also xix–xvii; but see Gary Gutting, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Foucault (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 35.

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Chapter 10 1 I would like to thank Sarah Kizuk and Jorge Montiel for their editorial help. 2 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 445. 3 See, for example, ‘Remembering Heidegger’s Beginnings’, ‘The Turn in the Path’, ‘On the Beginning of Thought’, or ‘On the Way Back to the Beginning’, in Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hermeneutics between History and Philosophy, The Selected Writings of Hans-Georg Gadamer, vol. 1, ed. and trans. Pol Vandevelde and Arun Iyer (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), pp. 209–69. 4 Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., trans. revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1998), p. xxxvi. The ‘turn’ names the change of perspective in Heidegger’s philosophy when he understands the question of being no longer from the vantage point of Dasein, which is still human existence, but from the vantage point of history. This is when Heidegger speaks of being as an ‘event’ (Ereignis) and of a ‘history of being’. 5 Dits et écrits II, 1976-1988, ed. Daniel Defert, François Ewald with the collaboration of Jacques Lagrange (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), p. 1522. My translation. 6 Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–1982, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2005), p. 189. 7 Truth and Method, p. 475. 8 Karl-Otto Apel, Die Idee der Sprache in der Tradition des Humanismus von Dante bis Vico. Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte, vol. 8 (Bonn: Bouvier, 1963), p. 88. 9 Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: University Press of Chicago, 1982), p. 15. 10 ‘Hermeneutics on the Trail’, in Hermeneutics between History and Philosophy, pp. 103–22. 11 Truth and Method, p. 443. 12 Ibid., p. 379. 13 Ibid., p. 476. 14 On this issue of relativism see John McDowell, ‘Gadamer and Davidson on Understanding and Relativism’, in Jeff Malpas, Gadamer, Davidson, and the Ground of Understanding, in Jeff Malpas, Ulrich Answald and Jens Kertscher, Gadamer’s Century: Essays in Honor of Hans-Georg Gadamer (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002). 15 Truth and Method, p. xxiii. 16 Ibid., p. 438. 17 Truth and Method, Ibid, p. 465. 18 Ibid. 19 ‘On the Beginning of Thought’, in Hermeneutics between History and Philosophy, p. 235. 20 ‘Hermeneutics on the Trail’, in Hermeneutics between History and Philosophy, p. 187. 21 ‘On the Beginning of Thought’, in Hermeneutics between History and Philosophy, p. 232. 22 ‘Is there a Causality in History?’, in Hermeneutics between History and Philosophy, p. 6. 23 Ibid. 24 See ‘The History of the Universe and the Historicity of Human Beings’, in Hermeneutics between History and Philosophy, p. 37. 25 Truth and Method, p. 299. Translation modified. 26 Margins of Philosophy, p. 15.

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27 Dits et écrits II, p. 842. My translation. 28 Ibid., p. 574. 29 The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), p. 28. 30 Archaeology, p. 103. 31 Ibid., p. 91. 32 Ibid., p. 95–6. 33 Ibid., p. 44. 34 Ibid., p. 48. 35 Ibid., pp. 47–8. Translation modified. See also Ibid., p. 63. 36 Ibid., p. 109. 37 Ibid., p. 127. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., p. 129. As he explains further, ‘The archive defines a particular level: that of a practice that causes a multiplicity of statements to emerge as so many regular events … . It reveals the rules of a practice that enables statements both to survive and to undergo regular modification. It is the general system of the formation and transformation of statements’ (Archaeology, p. 130). 40 Archaeology, p. 130. 41 Ibid., p. 205. See also: ‘Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write’ (Archaeology, p. 17). 42 Archaeology, p. 206. On ‘diagnosis’ see Tuomo Tiisala who argues that ‘all the remarks on archaeology as a diagnostic project, ranging from 1966 to 1984, constitute an essential strand of continuity throughout Foucault’s philosophical career’ (‘Keeping It Implicit: A Defense of Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge’, Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1, no. 4 (2015): 669). 43 Archaeology, p. 208. 44 ‘Qu’est-ce que les Lumières ?’, in Dits et Écrits II, p. 1393; ‘What is Enlightenment ?’ (‘Qu’est-ce que les Lumières ?’), in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), p. 46. 45 Dits et écrits II, p. 842. 46 Ibid., p. 82. My translation. 47 Ibid., p. 842. My translation. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., p. 1453. My translation. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid., pp. 1453–4. 52 Ibid., p. 1395 (My translation). These practices cover three domains: mastery over things, actions over others, and relationships to self. To these domains correspond, respectively, the axis of knowledge, the axis of power, and the axis of ethics, what Foucault expresses by the three terms of aletheia, politieia, and ethos: ‘How have we been constituted as subjects of our knowledge, how have we been constituted as subjects who exercise or are submitted to relations of power; how have we been constituted as moral subjects of our actions?’ (Ibid., p. 1395. My translation). 53 Naissance de la biopolitique, 5. Thus, the investigation does not examine history to see whether history ‘gives me, reflects back to me something like madness’ and to

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56 57 58

59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

70 71

Notes conclude that it does not so that ‘therefore madness does not exist’. As Foucault insists, ‘This was not the reasoning. This was not the actual method’ (Naissance de la biopolitique, 5). He explains further: ‘The method consisted in saying: let us suppose that madness does not exist. Then, what is the history that we can make of these different events, of these different practices that apparently are ordered around this something assumed to be madness? It is thus the exact opposite of historicism that I would like to establish. Not questioning the universals by using history as a critical method, but starting from the decision that universals do not exist in order to ask what history can be made’ (Naissance de la biopolitique, 5). Hermeneutics of the Subject, p. 9. On the notion of ‘rupture’ in Heidegger and Foucault from an epistemological perspective, see Arun Iyer, Towards an Epistemology of Rupture: The Case of Heidegger and Foucault (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). Dits et écrits II, p. 1506. My translation. Ibid. Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité 2. L’usage des plaisirs (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), p. 15; The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of the Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1984), p. 9. Dits et écrits II, p. 573. My translation. Ibid., p. 574. My translation. Dits et écrits I, 1954-1975, ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald with the collaboration of Jacques Lagrange (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), p. 619. My translation. ‘Qu’est-ce que les Lumières ?’, in Dits et Écrits II, p. 1393; ‘What is Enlightenment?’ (‘Qu’est-ce que les Lumières ?’), p. 46. Dits et écrits II, p. 574. Ibid., p. 476. My translation. ‘Qu’est-ce que les Lumières ?’, in Dits et Écrits II, p. 1393; ‘What is Enlightenment?’ (‘Qu’est-ce que les Lumières ?’), in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, p. 46. Dits et érits I, p. 1562. My translation. Le courage de la vérité. Le gouvernement de soi et des autres II. Cours au Collège de France. 1984, ed. Frédéric Gros (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2009), p. 5. Dits et écrits II, p. 1451. My translation. Foucault explains this notion of truth as a practice of telling the truth, which he found in Hellenistic philosophy under the name of parrhesia; I have examined this notion elsewhere (Pol Vandevelde, ‘Two French Variations on Truth: Ricoeur’s Attestation and Foucault’s “Parrhesiastic” Attitude’, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 46:1 (2015): 33–47. Hermeneutics of the Subject, 462. See ‘Hermeneutics on the Trail’, in Hermeneutics between History and Philosophy, p. 117f.

Chapter 11 1 On this point, see Levinas, 1987: 65. 2 See Heidegger’s essay ‘Hegel’s Concept of Experience’, in Heidegger, 2002. 3 On this issue, see also Taylor’s essay ‘Understanding and Ethnocentricity’ in Taylor, 1985: 16–133. 4 See Gadamer, 2004: 352–5.

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Chapter 12 1 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London: Continuum Publishing Group, 2004), p. 292. 2 Schrag, The Self after Postmodernity, p. 98. 3 Patricia Huntington, ‘Stealing the Fire of Creativity: Heidegger’s Challenge to Intellectuals’, in Feminist Interpretations of Martin Heidegger, ed. Nancy J. Holland and Patricia Huntington (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), p. 352. 4 Linda Martin Alcoff, ‘Phenomenology, Post-Structuralism, and Feminist Theory on the Concept of Experience’, in Feminist Phenomenology: Contributions to Phenomenology, eds. Linda Fisher and Lester Embree (Dordrecht: Springer, 2000), p. 49. 5 Attempting to place Luce Irigaray’s work within a specific feminist, philosophic, psychoanalytic, and theological tradition is difficult. Her work is, to use her words, ‘at the threshold’ of a number of philosophical openings and marked by vigilant, even harsh, critique of the philosophical heritage she inhabits. In this chapter I attempt to place her in the category of poststructuralist feminism. Grace M. Jantzen has taken up this task with clarity and insight specifically attending to Irigaray’s philosophical and theological poststructuralist commitments. See Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), pp. 24–6. 6 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’. 7 Gadamer, ‘Language and Understanding’, Theory, Culture & Society 23, no. 1 (2006): 15. 8 Luce Irigaray, The Way of Love, trans. Heidi Bostic and Stephen Pluháček (New York: Continuum, 2002), pp. 91–2. 9 Steven B. Katz, ‘The Ethic of Expediency: Classical Rhetoric, Technology, and the Holocaust’, College English 54, no. 3 (1992): 255–75. 10 Paul Tillich, ‘Invocation: The Lost Dimension in Religion’, in The Essential Tillich, ed. F. Forrester Church (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 1–11. 11 Tillich, ‘Invocation: The Lost Dimension in Religion’, 5. 12 Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 415. 13 Ibid., pp. 297–8. 14 Luce Irigaray, I Love to You: Sketch of a Possible Felicity in History, trans. Alison Martin (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 20. 15 Luce Irigaray, Sharing the World (New York: Continuum, 2008), p. 75. 16 Jantzen, Becoming Divine, pp. 81–4. 17 For a lengthy discussion of the technological in terms of one-dimensional being, see Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964). ‘We are again confronted with one of the most vexing aspects of advanced industrial civilization: the rational character of its irrationality. Its productivity and efficiency, its capacity to increase and spread comforts, to turn waste into need, and destruction into construction, the extent to which this civilization transforms the object world into an extension of man’s mind and body makes the very notion of alienation questionable. The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment. The very mechanism which ties the individual to his society has changed, and social control is anchored in the new needs which it has produced’ (p. 9). 18 Luce Irigaray, ‘From The Forgetting of Air to To Be Two’ trans. Heidi Bostic and Stephen Pluháček in Feminist Interpretations of Heidegger, eds. Nancy J. Holland and

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28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

47 48

Notes Patricia Huntington (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), p. 315. Irigaray, ‘From The Forgetting of Air to To Be Two’, p. 314. Irigaray, Sharing the World, p. 8. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 207. Ibid., p. 6. Mt. 18.20. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 271. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 1995). Jantzen, Becoming Divine, p. 194. Alcoff, ‘Gadamer’s Feminist Epistemology’, in Feminist Interpretations of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Lorraine Code (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), p. 239. Alcoff, ‘Gadamer’s Feminist Epistemology’, 37. Calvin O. Schrag, God as Otherwise Than Being: Toward a Semantics of the Gift (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002), p. 96. The relation between alterity and the lived reality of language is of particular concern to Schrag whose conception of ‘praxial presence’ is helpful here: ‘The phenomenon of alterity, insinuated into the heart of praxis, determining the existential givenness of discourse and action, language and social practices, provides the backdrop for what we have come to call the “ethic of the fitting response”. … [The] fitting response is not simply beholden to any current moral state of affairs nor is it bound to the heritage of any given tradition. Indeed, that which is fitting may require a radical intervention and an abridgement of that to which a tradition has held fast’. Schrag, God as Otherwise Than Being, p. 93. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 385. Huntington, ‘Stealing the Fire of Creativity’, p. 362. Ibid., p. 93. Jantzen, Becoming Divine, p. 215. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 395. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton & Company, 2010), pp. 106–14. Jantzen builds much of her critique of the Western imaginary of death in concert with Luce Irigaray’s discussion in Ethics of Sexual Difference and Adriana Caverero’s In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy. Jantzen, Becoming Divine, p. 130. Ibid., pp. 132–3. Ibid., p. 150. Irigaray, Sharing the World, pp. 63–96. Jn 1.1, 14. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 426. Deut. 30.14; 32.47. Ibid., p. 428. Ramsey Eric Ramsey, The Long Path to Nearness: A Contribution to a Corporeal Philosophy of Communication and the Groundwork for an Ethics of Relief (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press International, Inc., 1998), p. 112. Ramsey, The Long Path to Nearness, p. 387. Ibid., p. 439.

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Chapter 13 1 See Graham Parkes’ excellent study of Nietzsche’s reception in Japan, Nietzsche and Asian Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) and Hans Waldenfell’s landmark study of Keiji Nishitani’s reception of the Christian philosophical tradition in Absolute Nothingness: Foundations for a Buddhist-Christian Dialogue (New York: Paulist Press, 1980). 2 Although it contains one chapter on Confucius, the recent and commendable Routledge Companion to Hermeneutics, eds. J. Malpas and Hans-Helmuth Gander (London: Routledge, 2015), makes no effort to engage with the Buddhist tradition of hermeneutics. Gianni Vattimo introduced a text on Japanese Hermeneutics, ed. Michael F. Marra (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002), pp. 9–16, but only approaches the Oriental modes of thought as a necessary means for any Geisteswissenschaften to constantly hold its presuppositions under review. One of the best essays in such a vein is Eberhart Schieffle’s ‘Questioning One’s Own from the Perspective of the Foreign’, in Parkes’ Nietzsche and Asian Thought, 1991, see note 1. 3 Contemporary hermeneutics might well profit from the musicological studies of composer-theorists such as Hans Zender who has produced excellent studies of noteclusters that are not only passed unthinkingly from composer to composer but are transformed in the passage. His reworking of Schubert’s Winterreise is exemplary. See Hans Zender, Winterreise, Klangforum Wien, Kairos, 2000. 4 See Hans-Peter Duerr, Dreamtime (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987) and Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003). It is noteworthy that in a second introduction to the 2003 edition of his book (the original being published in 1978), Said takes a slightly less sceptical tone with regard to Occidental interpretations of East thought. Indeed, it is precisely to the humanist philological tradition of critical reading that he appeals. He cites Erich Auerbach’s ‘Philologie der Weltliteratur’ (1951) as an example of reading foreign texts philologically, concretely, sensitively, and intuitively, using erudition and an excellent commander of several languages to support (p. xix) readings of different traditions ‘that resist the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history’ (p. xxii). 5 See below, Section 5. 6 This chapter is in part the result of a long-standing personal interest in Buddhist philosophy. It draws on parallels which I have long reflected on. I offer these reflections from the perspective of a hermeneutic philosopher and not as East Asian specialist. It has been a pleasure to return to some of my published comments on the philosophy of Keiji Nishitani. See my short essays ‘Kitaro Nishida’ and ‘Keiji Nishitani’, in the Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth Philosophers, eds. Stuart Brown, Diane Collinson and Robert Wilkinson (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 573–6. 7 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (New York: Vintage, 1966), sec 20. This passage can be rightly compared with Gadamer’s argument that concepts articulate and develop notions that are already held in language. The common destiny that Nietzsche alludes to is the development of philosophical nihilism. One of the strongest links between philosophical hermeneutics and Buddhist thought is the fact that in terms of metaphysics both deny changeless truths, essences, and extra-mental realities. 8 ‘To see A World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour’. William Blake, Augeries of Innocence, 1. 9 Waldenfells, Absolute Nothingness.

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10 Wilhelm Dilthey, ‘The Construction of the Historical World’ in Selected Writings, ed. P. Rickman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 238 (emphasis added). 11 C. Y. Kim, ‘William James, Kitaro Nishida and Religion’, in Paul Standish and Naoko Saito, eds., Education and the Kyoto School of Philosophy, in Contemporary Philosophies and Theories in Education, vol. 1 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2012), p. 103. David Cooper in his book The Measure of Things: Humanism, Humility and Mystery (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), one of the best attempts to moderate systematic problems in Western philosophy by reading them against analogous arguments in the Indian and Chinese traditions, writes: ‘There are no atoms or constituents of reality with intrinsic identity or own being for everything is interdependent in the process of dependent origination.’ ‘As Nagarjuna re-iterates, the doctrine of emptiness just is the doctrine of dependent origination … . [It] has none of the dramatic implications drawn by the transcendentalists and nihilists. Their problem is fixation on the idea that truth and reality require independence from dependent origination, from merely conventional designation. The sensible person will strive to rid himself of that fixation, in the manner of the Ch’an (Zen) Buddhist, Ching Yuan, who recalls how he at first reacted to the atrophy of his naively realistic belief in mountains by denying their existence, goes on to explain how after further meditation, he became able to see mountains again as mountains’ (Cooper, The Measure of Things, p. 300). Here one may draw a parallel with Gadamer’s reworking of Husserl’s doctrine of the Sache selbst. A subject matter is nothing essential in itself but is effectively the continuity of its temporal appearances. A subject matter becomes more what it is by extending the manner of its appearances. The argument is close to that of dependent origination since the subject matter is no more or less than the chain of appearances it has always been and will yet become. 12 On Nishida’s understanding of emptiness and nothingness, see J. J. Wargo, The Logic of Nothingness, A Study of Nishida Kitarō (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005). 13 Dale S. Wright, Philosophical Meditations on Zen Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 188–9. 14 Waldenfells, Absolute Nothingness, p. 122. 15 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1978), sections 31–3. 16 See Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘On the Problem of Self-Understanding’, in Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. and ed. David E. Linge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), p. 50. Gadamer writes: ‘Just as the relation between the speaker and what is spoken [about] points to a dynamic process that does not have a firm basis in either member of the relation, so the relation between the understanding and what is understood has a priority over its relational terms.’ 17 Gadamer, ‘On the Problem of Self-Understanding’, p. 48. 18 Hans Herbert Koegler, The Power of Dialogue (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). 19 Gadamer contends in this context: ‘Hermeneutic philosophy, as I envision it, does not understand itself as an absolute position but as a path of experiencing. Its modesty consists in the fact that there is no higher principle than this: holding oneself open to the conversation’. ‘Autobiographical Reflections’ in The Gadamer Reader (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), p. 34. 20 See Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 122. 21 Friedrich Nietzsche: ‘The assumption of one single subject is perhaps unnecessary: perhaps it is just as permissible to assume a multiplicity of subjects whose interaction and struggle is the basis of our thought and our consciousness in general? … My hypothesis: The subject as multiplicity. … The continual transitoriness and fleetingness of the subject.’ Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968), section 493.

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22 See Heidegger, Being and Time, sections 31–2 for his articulation of this key differentiation in language use and expression. 23 Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Continuum, 1989), p. 489. 24 Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 465. 25 Ibid., p. 469. 26 Ibid, p. 458. 27 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969), sections 31–3. 28 Wright, Philosophical Meditations on Zen Buddhism, pp. 84–6. 29 On ‘live’ and ‘dead’ words, also see Robert F. Boswell, ‘Ch’an Hermeneutics’, in Buddhist Hermeneutics, ed. D. S. Lopez (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1998), pp. 231–54. 30 Wright, Philosophical Meditations on Zen Buddhism, p. 103. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid., pp. 86–7. 33 Ibid., p. 102. 34 See Wolfgang Iser, The Range of Interpretation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). 35 See Charlotte Higgins, Under Another Sky (London: Vintage, 2014), Chapter 9. 36 See Nicholas Davey, Unquiet Understanding (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), pp. 37–106. 37 Wright, Philosophical Meditations on Zen Buddhism, p. 152. 38 Ibid., p. 154. 39 Ibid., p. 156. 40 Mark A. McIntosh, Mystical Theology (London: Blackwell, 2006), p. 140. 41 McIntosh, Mystical Theology, p. 152. 42 Ibid. 43 Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 355. 44 Ibid. 45 McIntosh, Mystical Theology, p. 29. 46 Gadamer, ‘Autobiographical Thinking’, in The Gadamer Reader, ed. R. Palmer (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), p. 34. 47 Wright, Philosophical Meditations on Zen Buddhism, p. 202. 48 Ibid., p. 204. 49 Ibid., p. 200. 50 Waldenfells, Absolute Nothingness, p. 115. 51 See Haiku, ed. Peter Washington (London: Everyman’s Pocket Library, 2003). 52 Jim Nollman, Why We Garden: Cultivating a Sense of Place (Boulder: First Sentient Publications, 2005), p. 129. 53 Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists (Newcastle: Myrmidon Books, 2012). 54 Waldenfells, Absolute Nothingness, p. 62.

Chapter 14 1 Unless otherwise noted, Chinese texts are from the Chinese Text Project: http://ctext.org/. 2 On the notion of ‘discourse’ in the Confucian context, see Dongming Zhao, ‘NeoConfucian Theory of Mind as a Discourse of the Infinite’, Frontiers of Philosophy in China 10, no. 1 (2015): 75–94.

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3 See Dongfang Suo 東方朔, ‘Xing zi min chu pian de xinxing guannian chutan’ 《性自 命出》篇的心性觀念初探, in Guodian Chujian guoji xueshu yantaohui lunwenji 郭店 楚簡國際學術研討會論文集 (Wuhan: Hubei renmin chubanshe, 2000), pp. 322–9. 4 ‘dao shi yu qing, qing sheng yu xing 道始於情，情生於性’. On the conception of nature in Nature Derives from Mandate, see Shirley Chan, ‘Human Nature and Moral Cultivation in the Guodian 郭店 Text of the Xing Zi Ming Chu 性自命出 (Nature Derives from Mandate)’, Dao 8, no. 4 (2009): 361–82. 5 Despite the hermeneutical–phenomenological dimensions of Confucian philosophy, it would be anachronistic to designate this condition as transcendental and inappropriate insofar as it suggests a structural and interpretive moral psychology at odds with transcendental reflection. 6 Analects, 2:4: ‘qishi er congxinsuoyu, bu yu ju 七十而從心所欲，不踰矩’. I have relied on and modified the following translations of the Analects: Roger Ames and Henry Rosemont, Jr. (New York: Random House, 1998), Raymond Dawson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), Charles Muller (http://www.acmuller.net/con-dao/ analects.html), and Edward Slingerland (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003). 7 Michael Slote’s critique of the idea of cultivation overemphasizes the fixity of human states and disregards the changes that are possible through techniques of the self. See Michael Slote, ‘Moral Self-Cultivation East and West: A Critique’, Journal of Moral Education (2016): 1–15. 8 Mencius 2A:6: ‘ren jie you buren ren zhi xin 人皆有不忍人之心’; Mengzi: with selections from traditional commentaries, trans. Bryan W. Van Norden (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2008), pp. 45–6. 9 As noted in Chapter 28 of Weishu 魏書 in The Records of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguozhi 三國志): ‘何晏以為聖人無喜怒哀樂，其論甚精，鍾會等述之。弼與不同，以為 聖人茂於人者神明也，同於人者五情也，神明茂故能體沖和以通無，五情同故 不能無哀樂以應物，然則聖人之情，應物而無累於物者也。’. 10 See Bongrae Seok, ‘Moral Psychology of Shame in Early Confucian Philosophy’, Frontiers of Philosophy in China 10, no. 1 (2015): 21–57. Also see Bongrae Seok, Embodied Moral Psychology and Confucian Philosophy (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2013). 11 On the significance of resentment and negative emotions in early Confucian moral psychology, see Michael D. K. Ing, ‘Born of Resentment: Yuan 怨 in Early Confucian Thought’, Dao 15, no. 1 (2016): 19–33; Eric S. Nelson, ‘The Question of Resentment in Western and Confucian Philosophy’, in Jeanne Riou and Mary Gallagher, eds., Rethinking Ressentiment: On the Limits of Criticism and the Limits of its Critics (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2016), pp. 33–52; and Eric S. Nelson, ‘Recognition and Resentment in the Confucian Analects’, Journal of Chinese Philosophy 41, no. 2 (2013): 287–306. On the problem of negative emotions, see Owen J. Flanagan, ‘Destructive Emotions’, Consciousness and Emotions 1, no. 2 (2000): 259–81. 12 ‘孔子對於此即做過論述，子貢曰：「如有博施於民而能濟眾，何如？可謂仁 乎？」子曰：「何事於仁！必也聖乎！堯舜其猶病諸！」’ 《雍也》, 30; ‘孟子 稱「聖人，人倫之至也」’ 《述而》, 37. 13 Zhuangzi, chapter 16, ‘Mending Nature’: ‘繕性於俗，俗學以求復其初，滑欲 於俗，思以求致其明，謂之蔽蒙之民。’ Zhuangzi (莊子) passages are cited by chapter. I consulted the Chinese translation and James Legge’s translation available at http://ctext.org/zhuangzi, the Library of Chinese Classics Chinese-English edition of the Zhuangzi by Wang Rongpei, Qin Xuqing, and Sun Yongchang (Changsha: Hunan People’s Publishing House and Foreign Language Press, 1999); and Yang Liuqiao 楊柳橋, Zhuangzi yigu 莊子譯詁 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1991);

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15

16

17

18

19 20

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29 30 31 32 33

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Liu Rongxian 劉榮賢, Zhuangzi waipian yanjiu 莊子外雜篇硏究 (Taipei: Lianjing, 2004). Chinese text and Legge’s translations of the Doctrine of the Mean and the Great Learning are available on http://ctext.org/; see also Ta Hsüeh and Chung Yung: The Highest Order of Cultivation and on the Practice of the Mean, trans. Andrew Plaks (London: Penguin, 2003). Doctrine of the Mean, 1, James Legge’s translation; the whole passage reads in Chinese: ‘天命之謂性，率性之謂道，修道之謂教。道也者，不可須臾離也，可離非道 也。是故君子戒慎乎其所不睹，恐懼乎其所不聞。莫見乎隱，莫顯乎微。故君 子慎其獨也。喜怒哀樂之未發，謂之中；發而皆中節，謂之和；中也者，天下 之大本也；和也者，天下之達道也。致中和，天地位焉，萬物育焉。’ Compare Xu Gan, Balanced Discourses: A Bilingual Edition, trans. John Makeham (Beijing and New Haven: Foreign Language Press and Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 9 and 25. ‘le er bu yin, ai er bu shang 樂而不淫，哀而不傷。’ Analects, 3.20; see Roger T. Ames and Henry Rosemont, Jr., The Analects of Confucius: A Philosophical Translation (New York: Ballantine, 1998), p. 86; and E. Bruce Brooks and A. Taeko Brooks, The Original Analects: Sayings of Confucius and His Successors (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 79. Compare Michael Ing’s discussion of Angle’s point in The Dysfunction of Ritual in Early Confucianism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 158; Heiner Roetz, Confucian Ethics of the Axial Age (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), p. 122. See Stephen Owen’s discussion of the ‘Great Preface’ in his Readings in Chinese Literary Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 38–40. Differences over the role of the emotions in moral life play a role in intra-Confucian debates, as we have seen, as well as in Neo-Confucian/Buddhist arguments. See, for instance, Eric S. Nelson, ‘Suffering, Evil, and the Emotions: A Joseon Debate between Neo-Confucianism and Buddhism’, International Journal of Korean Studies 16 (2016): 447–62. 或曰：’以德報怨，何如？’子曰：’何以報德？以直報怨，以德報德。’ 子貢曰： ‘君子亦有惡乎？’子曰： ‘有惡：惡稱人之惡者，惡居下流而訕上者， 惡勇而無禮者，惡果敢而窒者。’曰： ‘賜也亦有惡乎？’ ‘惡徼以為知者，惡不孫 以為勇者，惡訐以為直者。’ Ames, The Analects of Confucius, p. 27. Compare Ing, The Dysfunction of Ritual in Early Confucianism, 75. Also compare expressions such as yanwu 厭惡 and henwu 恨惡. 子張曰：’何謂四惡？’子曰：’不教而殺謂之虐；不戒視成謂之暴；慢令致期謂 之賊；猶之與人也，出納之吝，謂之有司。’ Xunzi, 20.3. ‘且樂者、先王之所以飾喜也；軍旅鈇鉞者，先王之所以飾怒也。 先王喜怒皆得其齊焉。是故喜而天下和之，怒而暴亂畏之。’ Owen, 1992, 52; Book of Rites: ‘凡音者，生人心者也。情動於中，故形於聲。聲成 文，謂之音。是故治世之音，安以樂，其政和；亂世之音，怨以怒，其政乖； 亡國之音，哀以思，其民困。聲音之道，與政通矣。’ Mencius, 1B: ‘而武王亦一怒而安天下之民。今王亦一怒而安天下之民.’ ‘yongren zhi yong qu qi nu 用人之勇去其怒.’ Mencius, 5A: ‘仁人之於弟也，不藏怒焉，不宿怨焉，親愛之而已矣。’ Great Learning, 9: ‘故好而知其惡、惡而知其美者、天下鮮矣。’ Great Learning, 7.

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Notes

34 Compare the argument presented in Eric S. Nelson, ‘Levinas and Early Confucian Ethics: Religion, Rituality, and the Sources of Morality’. Levinas Studies 4 (2009): 231–7. 35 Bongrae Seok, Embodied Moral Psychology and Confucian Philosophy, 62. 36 Michael C. Kalton and Oaksook Chun Kim, The Four-Seven Debate: An Annotated Translation of the Most Famous Controversy in Korean Neo-Confucian Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994). 37 Kalton and Kim, The Four-Seven Debate, 81–82. Compare Edward Y. J. Chung, The Korean Neo-Confucianism of Yi T’oegye and Yi Yulgok: A Reappraisal of the ‘Four-Seven Thesis’ and Its Practical Implications for Self-Cultivation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 49. 38 Kalton and Kim, The Four-Seven Debate, 74. 39 On the problematic of equality and hierarchy in Confucianism, and its sources in the interpretation of the Yijing 易经, see Eric S. Nelson and Liu Yang, ‘The Yijing, Gender, and the Ethics of Nature’, in Ann Pang-White, ed., The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Chinese Philosophy and Gender (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016), 267–88. 40 Compare Chung, The Korean Neo-Confucianism of Yi T’oegye and Yi Yulgok, 182; and James R. Averill, Kyum Koo Chon, and Doug Woong Hahn, ‘Emotions and Creativity, East and West.’ Asian Journal of Social Psychology 4, no. 3 (2001): 175–9. 41 Attunement and mood are never to be understood as lived experience or feeling, according to Heidegger: ‘Die Gestimmtheit (Stimmung) läßt sich jedoch nie als “Erlebnis” und “Gefühl” fassen…’ in Martin Heidegger, Wegmarken (GA 9). (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976), 192.

Chapter 15 1 Chad Engelland, ‘Heidegger on Overcoming Rationalism through Transcendental Philosophy’. Continental Philosophy Review, 41, no. 1 (2008): 18. 2 Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 123–4. 3 See Karen Carr and P. J. Ivanhoe, The Sense of Antirationalism: The Religious Thought of Zhuangzi and Kierkegaard (New York: Seven Bridges Press, 2000), pp. 58 and 74, respectively. The Zhuangzi is not a homogenous text in that parts of it were written by the historical figure Zhuangzi and parts of it were written by his disciples; however, in order to avoid confusing the reader, I shall refer to Zhuangzi and the text bearing his name interchangeably. 4 A. C. Graham, Unreason within Reason: Essays on the Outskirts of Rationality (LaSalle: Open Court, 1992), p. 109. 5 Carr and Ivanhoe, The Sense of Antirationalism, 33. 6 Ibid., 58. 7 All translations from the original Chinese are my own unless stated otherwise. 8 For more on the concept of nothingness in the thought of Daoism and Heidegger, see: David Chai, ‘Meontological Generativity: A Daoist Reading of the Thing’, Philosophy East and West 64, no. 2 (April 2014): 303–18; and, ‘Nothingness and the Clearing: Heidegger, Daoism and the Quest for Primal Clarity’, Review of Metaphysics 67, no. 3 (March 2014): 583–601.

Notes

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9 Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking: A Translation of Gelassenheit, trans. by John Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), p. 53. 10 Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, p. 45. 11 See Martin Heidegger, Country Path Conversations, trans. by Bret W. Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), pp. 17, 18, and 34, respectively. 12 Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, p. 47. 13 Ibid., p. 53. 14 Ibid., pp. 53–4. 15 For a detailed study of this term in the thought of Heidegger, see Bret W. Davis, Heidegger and the Will: On the Way to Gelassenheit (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007). 16 Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, p. 55. 17 Martin Heidegger, ‘On the Essence of Truth’, trans. John Sallis, in Basic Writings, ed. David F. Krell (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), p. 130. 18 Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, p. 25. 19 Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), p. 63. 20 Martin Heidegger, Country Path Conversations, trans. Bret W. Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), p. 42. 21 Heidegger, Country Path Conversations, p. 51. 22 Ibid., p. 55. 23 Ibid., p. 58. 24 Ibid., p. 68. 25 Ibid., p. 69. 26 Ibid. 27 Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. by Peter Hertz (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), p. 75. 28 Ibid., pp. 87–8. 29 Heidegger, Country Path Conversations, p. 70. 30 Ibid., p. 109. 31 Ibid., p. 71. 32 Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, pp. 72–3. 33 Heidegger, Country Path Conversations, pp. 73–4. 34 Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, p. 86. 35 Heidegger, Country Path Conversations, p. 102.

Index Adorno, Theodor 12, 221 n.1 Adorno and the Concept of Genocide 221 n.1 Aeschimann, Eric 11 aesthetic eventing 190–2 affection 97 Alcoff, Linda Martin 4, 96, 158, 165, 234 n.20 alethurgy 146–7 Alexander, Thomas 68 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland 83 ‘Alienation and Self-Realization’ 114 Also sprach Zarathustra (Nietzsche) 22 American Evasion of Philosophy, The (West) 91 American philosophy 65, 91 Ames, Roger 198 Analects 193, 195, 196, 197–9 Anaximander 15 Anaximander Fragment 13 anger 201 Angle, Stephen 198 antifoundationalism 66 Antigone (play) 25 Apel, Karl-Otto 134 Apology (Plato) 11 Archaeology of Knowledge (Foucault) 120, 128, 139, 140, 142, 144, 145 Arendt, Hannah 10, 20 Aristotle 13, 15, 18, 27, 58, 67, 73, 74, 137, 198 Aron, Raymond 28 art and education 56 and truth 109 Art Institute of Chicago 108 Auerbach, Erich 243 n.4 authenticity 17, 18–9 awakening, event of 189

Babich, Babette 2, 221 n.1 Bacon, Francis 83, 152 barbarism 12 Baudelaire, Charles 109–10 Beaufret, Jean 9, 11, 13 Beauvoir, Simone de 18, 39 Ethics of Ambiguity, The 46–8, 49 and freedom 39–50, 51 history in 41–9, 51 philosophy of existence 2 Pyrrhus and Ciné as 47 The Second Sex 39, 51 She Came to Stay 50 A Very Easy Death and Adieux 49 Becker, Oscar 28 being 16–7, 21, 26, 159–60 Being and Nothingness (Sartre) 28, 29–35 Being and Time (Heidegger) 11, 13, 15, 19–20, 28, 66, 73, 131 being-in-the-world 27, 28, 30, 36, 53, 94, 100, 159–60, 162, 167, 168, 170 being with one another 17, 18, 21 Bergoffen, Debra 48–9 Bergson, Henri 228 n.1 Bernstein, Richard J. 66, 72 Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche) 178 Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (Bernstein) 66 Bildung 73 Black Notebooks (Heidegger) 2, 9, 11 blue colour 108 Bongrae Seok 200 Book of Odes 197 Book of Rites. See Liji Brague, Ré mi 152 Buddhist thought and relational hermeneutics 5, 177–92, 243 n.2, 243 n.6 address of experience 179–81 aesthetic eventing 190–2 cave fragment in Berlin 178

Index enlightenment 187–90 family resemblance of philosophising 178–9 frameworks of encounter 181–3 speculative language 183–5 turning word 185–7 Busch, Thomas 2 Byzantine paintings 108 Calcagno, Antonio 2 calculative thinking 52, 205, 211, 212–13, 215, 218, 228 n.4 Care of the Self , The (Foucault) 120, 121, 122, 127 Carr, Karen 206 Cartesianism 30 Casagemas, Carlos 108 Cassirer, Ernst 50 Caverero, Adriana 242 n.37 Cezanne 109 Chai, David 5 Cheng-Zhu school 201 Chinese Buddhism, philosophical hermeneutics and 190 Ching Yuan 244 n.11 Christian hermeneutics 128 Christian spirituality 188 circumdata varietate 61–2 cognition 67 Colapietro, Vincent 3 Collè ge de France 139 colour blue 108 history 109 community of inquiry 69 comparative philosophy 1 compassion 22, 24 concepts 137 Confucian discourses 5, 193, 195, 198, 200 Confucian relational hermeneutics 193–204 approaches to moral psychology 194–5 emotions 193–7 traditions 193 congeniality 15–6, 224 n.40 consciousness 28–31, 36, 82, 114–15 conservatism, principle of 162

251

construals of hermeneutics 119–21, 124 contemporary European philosophy 177 contemporary philosophy 66 Contributions to Philosophy (Hweidegger) 213 Country Path Conversations (Heidegger) 211 Counts, George S. 101–2 Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (Kant) 73 Critique of Dialectical Reasoning (Sartre) 34 ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’ (Whitman). See 'Sun-Down Poem’ (Whitman) ‘Cry of Osprey, The’ 197 culture and tradition 68 Daoism, hermeneutics and 5, 207–12, 214, 215, 217 Dasein 11, 16–7, 21, 26–7, 53, 179, 182, 203, 205, 226 n.55, 238 n.4 Davey, Nicholas 5 dead words. See ‘ssu-chu’ death 168–9, 171 democracy 3 Democratic demand 90–1 Democratic Vistas (Whitman) 91, 92, 93, 95, 101 Derbyshire, Johnathan 11 Derrida, Jacques 134, 138, 147, 150, 151, 153 Der Spiegel 13 Descartes, René  29, 47, 136, 152 developmental freedom 50 Dewey, John 86, 88, 231 n.28, 233 n.6 analysis of self-realization 112–14 conception of truth 72 criticism 68 Experience and Nature 65 and Gadamer 67–9, 72–5 German Philosophy and Politics 65 grasping meaning 84–6 How We Think 80, 83 Human Nature and Conduct 78, 79–80, 81–2, 83 indictment of German philosophy 65 mediate factor 67–8 practice of inquiry 70–1, 87, 233 n.5 pragmatism 3, 66, 68–9, 71, 79, 80 The Public and Its Problems 91

252 The Quest for Certainty 80 recognition of social conditions 82 Self-Realization as the Moral Ideal 112 valorization of spiral 77–8 dialogue in language 133–9 ‘Dialogue on Language’ 1 Dilthey, Wilhelm 41, 65, 119, 179 Discipline and Punish (Foucault) 121, 122, 124 Discourse on the Mean (Xu Gan) 196 Discourse on Thinking (Heidegger) 209, 211, 228 n.4 Dobie, Robert J. 229 n.14 Doctrine of the Mean. See Zhongyong Dongfang Suo 193 drama of speech 139–48 Dreyfus, Richard 15, 129, 130 Duerr, Hans-Peter 177, 192 Duke Huan 208 early Christian and Buddhist thought 178, 179 Eastern thought, hermeneutics and 4–5 Ecclesiastes (King Solomon) 56 3.1-8 52 Eckhart, Meister 213 education and art 56 and human life 55 kairological aspect of 60–1 philosophy of 55, 71 self- 60, 61 and self-cultivation 193–4 ego 30, 31 ego and self 103–4 Einstein, Albert 80 El Greco 109 Embodied Moral Psychology and Confucian Philosophy (Bongrae Seok) 200 embodiment 49–51 emotions 193–6 in Confucianism and Heidegger 203–4 exemplary 196–7 promise and risk 197–200 relational hermeneutics of 200–2 empathy 26

Index emptiness, concept of 180 enemies, friends and 9–11 Engels 44 enlightenment 187–90, 192 Epstein, Joseph 104 essence of technology 159 ethical life 195–6, 197 ‘ethic of expediency’ 160 ethics Foucauldian 121–6, 128 freedom 48 and man 11–3 reflection 81 of self-realization 111–12 and solicitude 15–27 writing 13–5 Ethics of Ambiguity, The (Beauvoir) 46–8, 49 é vé nementialisation 142–4 event analysis as production of 143–4 object of investigation as 140–2 philosophy as dramaturgy of 144–8 existentialism 14 Existenzphilosophie (Jaspers) 14 experience, truth and 73 Experience and Nature (Dewey) 65 Facebook 18 Fairfield, Paul 3, 88 feelings. See emotions feminisms and hermeneutics 159 First World War 13 Flaubert 36 Fleck, Ludwik 223 n.14 Forgetting of Air, The (Irigaray) 163 Foucault, Michel 50, 131, 153, 239 n.52, 240 n.53 drama of speech 139–48 and hermeneutics 4, 119–30 notion of truth 240 n.69 Four-Seven debate 197, 200, 201, 202 Frankfurt School 14 freedom 32, 33, 36, 39–49, 51 ethical 48 of future 54 and history 49–51 and interpretation 99 ontological 48

Index women 45, 46 Freud, Sigmund 140, 161, 168 friends and enemies 9–11 friendship 18 fundamentalism 102 Fü rsorge 17, 21, 23, 24–5 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 1, 4, 5, 19, 36, 59, 61, 65, 78, 100, 119, 129, 131, 145, 149, 155, 159, 178, 234 n.20, 244 nn.16, 19 account of aesthetic experience 190 account of speculative experience 191 and democracy 97, 234 n.27 and Dewey 67–9, 72–5 dialogue in language 133–9 experienced person 54–5 and freedom 39, 40–50, 51 hermeneutics 2, 3, 66, 96, 132, 144, 147, 153, 155–7, 164–5, 180–1, 184, 189 historical method 161 history in 40–9, 51 and language 183, 192 subject-based epistemology 182 thoughts about poetry 90 and truth 76, 186, 188 Truth and Method 72–3, 133, 153, 154, 230 n.20, 232 n.50 and understanding 158, 166 use of transformation 37 views on horizon and transformation 37–8 word of gospel 170–1 Galileo 137 Ganz, Bruno 20 Garden of Evening Mists, The (Tan Twan Eng) 191 Gauguin 106, 109 Gelassenheit 213, 214–18 genealogy 122, 124–6, 128, 129 Genet, Jean 33–4, 35 Geniusas, Saulius 3 geological phenomena 80 German philosophy 65 German Philosophy and Politics (Dewey) 65 Gobong 200–2

253

God as Otherwise Than Being: Toward a Semantics of the Gift (Schrag) 242 n.29 Gongsun Long 210 good, right and 78–9, 80 Good Samaritan 24–5 Gosse, Raelynn 3 Graham, A. C. 206 Great Learning 199 Green, T. H. 113 Grondin, Jean 74 Groundwork of the Metaphysical Foundations of Morals (Kant) 21 Hadot, Pierre 50, 165 Haiku poems 191 Hammershø j, Lars Geer 104, 105 Handke, Peter 20 Hannah Arendt 20 harmony, state of 196 Harries, Karsten 222 n.9 Hartstock, Nancy 167 Hegel 153, 154–5, 161 Heidegger, Martin 2, 5, 49, 50, 65, 78, 91, 119, 129, 133, 136, 137, 149, 151, 153, 181, 185, 188, 191, 210, 221 nn.1, 5, 225 n.47, 226 n.54 authenticity 17 Being and Time 11, 13, 15, 19–20, 66, 73, 131, 135, 181, 222 n.14 being-in-the-world 27, 28, 30, 36 being-towards-death 168 Being with one another 18 Black Notebooks 2, 9, 11 conception of care 224 n.38 concept of time 53 Contributions to Philosophy 213 Country Path Conversations 211 Dasein 16–7, 21, 27, 179, 182, 238 n.4 and Dewey’s pragmatism 68–9 ‘Dialogue on Language’ 1 Discourse on Thinking 209, 211, 228 n.4 emotions in 203–4 essence of technology 159 On the Essence of Truth 213 ethics 11, 13, 15, 23 'event of appropriation’ 166

254 and flight from thinking 212–14 hermeneutics 11, 154–5, 158, 205, 222–3 n.14 Introduction to Metaphysics 13, 16, 205 and language 192 Letter on Humanism 9, 16, 25 and love 163 meditation on value 14–5 Nazism 9 non-words 214–18 ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ 72 philosophy 10 question 12–3 The Question Concerning Technology 14, 213 reflections on education 221 n.2 rehabilitation process 9–10, 13, 221 n.2 resoluteness 27 solicitude 26 technological hermeneutics 160 world-historical anti-Semitism 9, 10 Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (Richardson) 10 ‘Heidegger: The Black Notebooks and Historial Antisemitism’ 11 Heisenberg, Werner 14 Heraclitus 13, 15, 217 hermeneutic phenomenology 11 and ethics of self-realization 111–12 of imagination 107 of painting 108–12 hermeneutics 40, 42, 87 approach to understanding and freedom 33 and Buddhism 5, 190–1 Christian 128 circle 78 conception of pedagogy 2 Confucian relational 5 and Daoism 5 Dilthey’s 179 and Eastern thought 4–5 and emotions 203–4 experience 58 experience of understanding 153–5 Foucault and 4, 119–30 Gadamer views 41

Index and language 94 of lived time 57, 59–62 as loving understanding 159 philosophical 1–2 as philosophy of loving understanding 4 post-Heideggerian 1 post-Schleiermachean 3 and poststructuralism 3–4 and poststructuralist feminism 158–9, 161, 167, 170–1 and pragmatism 3, 65–76 questioning 164–5 technological 160 thinking 94 Hermeneutics of the Subject, The (Foucault) 120, 131, 144 He Yan 195, 196 Himmel ü ber Berlin 20 historical materialism 44 historical processes, spiralling movement of 79–88 history and freedom 49–51 History of Sexuality, The (Foucault) 122, 124 ho-bal-seul 202 Hö lderlin, Friedrich 60 homicidal monomania 141, 146 Honneth, Axel 104 horizon 37–8, 59–60 hospitality 166–7 How We Think (Dewey) 80, 83 Huang Po 180, 185, 188 human animal 78, 83 humanism 13–4 human life 53, 54 and community of people 58 and education 55 and hermeneutics 59 Human Nature and Conduct (Dewey) 78, 79–80, 81–2, 83, 233 n.4 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 74 Hume 81, 233 n.7 Huntington, Patricia 4, 158–9, 166 ‘huo-chu’ 185 Husserl 28–9, 30, 36–7, 40, 49, 108, 138, 142, 145, 186 Hyperion (Hö lderlin) 60

Index I Hwang 200–2 Illich, Ivan 26, 27, 225 n.48 imagination 103–4, 107, 111 Indian thought philosophy 180 individualization 104–5 Ing, Michael 198 Inquiry and thinking 70–1 interpretation, freedom and 99 interpretive agility 94 Introduction to Metaphysics (Heidegger) 13, 16, 205 Irigaray, Luce 159–60, 161–5, 166–9, 171, 241 n.5, 242 n.37 Iser, Wolfgang 186 ‘Itinerary of a Thought, The’ 33 Ivanhoe, P. J. 206 James, William 65, 68, 69, 72, 80, 84, 109, 232–3 n.2 Jamme, Christoph 222 n.9 Jantzen, Grace 4, 158, 162, 165, 167, 168–9, 171, 241 n.5, 242 n.37 Jargon of Authenticity (Adorno) 221 n.1 Jaspers, Karl 9, 14, 76, 91, 221 n.1 Jesus 58, 170 John, Apostle 169 Kant, Immanuel 14, 17, 21, 23, 25, 27, 73, 83, 153, 205, 225 n.45, 233 n.7 Katz, Steven 160 Keiji Nishitani 177, 189, 191 Kern, Eduard 10 Kierkegaard 84, 153 Kim, C. Y. 180 kindness 198 Kitaro Nishida 177 knowledge in tranquility 217 Koegler, Hans Herbert 182 Kohelet 52, 53, 55, 61 Kyoto School of Philosophy 180 Lady Gaga 18 language 35–6, 44, 97, 132, 184, 215 dimension of 133, 138–9 and hermeneutics 94 listening and 166 and love 159, 163 male-dominated 160, 162 masculinist structures of 168

255

meaning and 165 ontology 177–8, 180, 182 philosophy and 165, 183 and speech 32 and technological 160 and thinking 136 and tradition 42–3 and understanding 84–5, 161 and words 207 Law of Moses 170 Leaves of Grass (Whitman) 92, 95 Le courage de la vé rité  (Gros) 147 Lectures on Imagination (Ricoeur) 108, 236 n.13 Leitmotifen 190 Le Nouvel Observateur 11 Le rè gne de l’homme (Brague) 152 Letter on Humanism (Heidegger) 9, 16, 25 Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (Schiller) 94 Levinas, Emmanuel 150, 151, 153, 226 n.54 Lé vi-Strauss 45, 128 Lewis, C. I. 80 L’Express 128 life 56–61 radicality 57 Solomon’s stages of 56 Liji 195, 197, 199, 200 L’imaginaire (Sartre) 107 Lin-Chi 185, 186 linguicism 134 linguistic meaning 184 listening 172 hospitality and 167 and language 166 and silence 164–5 live words. See ‘huo-chu’ Lk. 10.30-5 24 19.1-10 58 19.5 58 19.6 58 love cultivating character 163–4 and hatred 199 language and 159, 163 loving understanding, philosophy of 4

256 L’usage des plaisirs (Foucault) Lu Xun 198

Index 144

McGee, Eileen M. 225 n.46 McIntosh, Mark A. 188 MacIntyre, Alasdair 13 Madison, Gary 66 man, ethics and 11–3 Mangold, Otto 10 ‘Man with the Blue Guitar, The’ (Stevens) 109 Marcel, Gabriel 74, 91 Marcus Aurelius 52 Marcuse, Herbert 241 n.17 Margolis, Joseph 66 Marx, Karl 65, 153, 161 Mead, George Herbert 80 Meaning of Truth, The (James) 72 mediate factor 67–8 meditation 189 Meditations (Marcus Aurelius) 52 meditative thinking 209, 212, 228 n.4 Mencius 194, 195, 197, 201, 202 Mencius (book) 199, 200 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 91 metaphysics, violence of 149–51 ‘Metaphysics and Violence’ (Vattimo) 150 Metz, Friedrich 10 Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Dreyfus and Rabinow) 129 Miller, James 128 Mił osz, Czesł aw 53 Mö llendorf, Wilhelm von 221 n.5 monadic subjectivism 177 moods, emotions and 203–4 moral codes 123 moral elements 13 moral life 81 moral psychology 194–5, 246 n.5 Moses 170 music, emotions in 199 natality 169 Natorp, Paul 65 Nature Originates from the Mandate (Guodian text) 193 Nazism 9, 11, 12, 13

negative emotions 197–9, 200 Nelson, Eric 5 Nicholson, Graeme 10 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle) 18 Nielson, Kai 114 Nietzsche, Friedrich 11–2, 17, 18, 23, 65, 109, 129–30, 131, 149, 151, 153, 178, 198, 226 n.49, 244 n.21 Beyond Good and Evil 178, 243 n.7 and ethics 122 historical association 12 lectures during war 14 pity 22, 24 Untimely Considerations 144 nihilism 12, 14, 151 Nikam, N. A. 180 Nollman, J. 191 non-words 209–12, 214–18 Nothingness: Foundations for a Buddhist-Christian Dialogue (Waldenfells) 179 Nursing Philosophy 15 Occidental and Oriental tradition 178 ‘Old Guitarist, The’ (Picasso) 108–9, 110 One-Dimensional Man (Marcuse) 241 n.17 On Liberty (Mill) 91 On the Essence of Truth (Heidegger) 213 ontological freedom 48 Order of Things, The (Foucault) 120, 128, 131, 139, 140 ‘Origin of the Work of Art, The’ (Heidegger) 72 Other, The 15 Pai-Chang 185 Paley, John 15, 224 n.40 participatory epistemology 182–3 Peirce, Charles Sanders 65, 68, 69, 72, 80 personalization 36, 37 phenomenological studies 29 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel) 154 ‘Philologie der Weltliteratur’ (Auerbach) 243 n.4 philosophy Buddhist conceptions of 180 contemporary 66 as 'criticism of criticism’ 78

Index as dramaturgy of event 144–8 and education 71 of existence 2 of grammar 179 hermeneutics 1–2, 96, 119, 132, 180 and language 165, 183 of loving understanding 4 pragmatism in America 65 tropes 77 ‘Philosophy and Poetry’ (Gadamer) 91 Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Rorty) 66 photography 109–10 Piaget, Jean 19 Pian 208–9 Picasso 108–9, 110 Picasso’s blue period 108 pity 22, 24 ‘placeholder’ concepts 186 Plato 10, 26, 67, 71, 73, 77, 105, 137, 140, 153, 205 poems/poetry 92, 100, 234 n.27 language of 94 meaning of 101 power of 90 risk of 95 poetic imagination 107 poets democracy’s demand for 90–1 readers as 92–5 Polemarchus 11 polemic 147 Politics (Aristotle) 58 Politics Without Vision (Strong) 223 n.20 positive solicitude 21, 24 post-Heideggerian hermeneutics 1 post-Schleiermachean hermeneutics 3 poststructuralism 1, 4, 119–20, 129 poststructuralist feminist hermeneutics 158–9, 161, 167–8, 170–1 practice, theory and 80–1 Prado, C. G. 4 pragmatic inquiry 69, 71, 74, 75 pragmatism 231 n.28 and hermeneutics 3, 65–76 prophetic 91 and spiral 77–88

257

pratityasamutpada 179 praxis and practico inert 34–5 pre-decisions 137 preservation 41–2 Preussicher Kultur Besitz 178 productive imagination 106–8, 109–10, 113–14 prophetic pragmatism 91 Proverbs (King Solomon) 56 Psalm 44.10 61 psychiatry 141 psycho-physical nature 202 Public and Its Problems, The (Dewey) 91 Pyrrhus and Ciné as (Beauvoir) 47 Quest for Certainty, The (Dewey) 80 Question Concerning Technology, The (Heidegger) 14, 213 questioning, hermeneutic 164–5 Rabinow, Paul 129, 130 radical empiricism 67 radical freedom 30, 32 Ramsey, Ramsey Eric 3, 171 Rand, Ayn 18 rationalism 152–3, 205–9, 213, 215, 218 reading and text 56 reality 59 reckoning 97–8 reductive individualism 177 referential 140 reflective and pre-reflective consciousnesses 29 reflective critique 78 rehabilitation hearings 9–10, 13 reproductive imagination 106–8, 109–10 Republic (Plato) 11, 105, 205 resoluteness 27 Richardson, William J. 10 Ricoeur, Paul 1, 15, 78, 107–11, 119, 236 nn.13, 15 right and good 78–9, 80 Rilke, Rainer Maria 57 Rodin, August 57 Rohde, Erwin 178 Rorty, Richard 66, 67 Rosenblatt, Louise 88 rupture, strategy of 143

258 Russell, Bertrand 233 n.5 Said, Edward 177, 243 n.4 St. Genet: Actor and Martyr (Sartre) 33 Salon (Baudelaire) 110 Sartre, Jean-Paul 2, 18, 49, 107, 110, 236 n.20 Being and Nothingness 28, 29–30, 32–5 Cartesianism 30 coefficient of adversity 135 and consciousness 28, 30–1 Critique of Dialectical Reasoning 34 existential approach to language 32 hyperbolic expressions 32 internalizing external 37 L’imaginaire 107 personalization 36, 37–8 phenomenological studies 29 radical freedom 30 St. Genet: Actor and Martyr 33 Search for a Method 34 self 29–30 The Transcendence of the Ego 29, 30–1 understanding of freedom 35 Schiller, Friedrich 94 Schleirmacher 119 Schopenhauer 11 Schrag, Calvin 127, 128, 158, 242 n.29 Schü rmann, Reiner 10 Search for a Method (Sartre) 34 Second Sex, The (Beauvoir) 39, 44, 51 Second World War 13 self 29–30, 58, 121 Cartesian conception of 127 creation 121, 122, 125, 127–8, 130 ego and 103–4, 127 Freudian conception of 127 implied in self-realization 113–14 and others 106 self-cultivation, education and 193–4 self-education 60 self-identity 30 self-realization 3 Dewey’s analysis of 112–14 ethics of 111–12 horizontal dimension of 103 objective condition of 104–5 subjective condition of 104–5

Index as temporal appropriation 114–15 vertical dimension of 103 Self-Realization as the Moral Ideal 112 shakkei 191 shame 198, 200 She Came to Stay (Beauvoir) 50 Sheehan, Tom 15 Shen-Tsan 185 Shmueli, Efraim 114 Shuzo Kuki 28 silence, listening and 164 Silesius, Angelus 22 Singleton, Bronwyn 122 situation, concept of 37 Slote, Michael 246 n.7 ‘Social Pathologies of Self-Realization, The’ 104 sociopolitical imagination 107 Socrates 10–1 solicitude, ethics and 15–27 solipsism 150 Solomon, King 56 'Song of Myself ’ (Whitman) 100 Song of Songs (King Solomon) 56 'Song of the Statue, The' (Rilke) 57 Sophocles 15, 25 Souls of Black Folks (Du Bois) 91 Specimen Days 234 n.10 speech, language and 32 speech act theory 132 spiral and pragmatism 77–88 Sprachlichkeit 133, 134, 136 ‘ssu-chu’ 185 Standish, Paul 180 Stevens, Wallace 109 Strong, Tracy B. 10, 11–2, 223 n.20 structuralism 120, 128–9 subject-based epistemology 182 subjectivist assimilation 177 subjectivity 35, 37, 177 and objectivity 33 ontological 34 ‘Sun-Down Poem’ (Whitman) 99–100 Sü ss, Wilhelm 10 Taminiaux, Jacques 224 n.32 Tan Twan Eng 191 taste 85–6 Taylor, Charles 4, 78, 149, 153, 155, 156 Taylor, George 14, 236 nn.13, 14

Index technological hermeneutics 160 technological literalism 161 theory and practice 80–1 Theunissen, Michael 15 Tiisala, Tuomo 239 n.42 Tillich, Paul 160 time, transformational character of 52–6 Toegye. See I Hwang tones 199 Tø nnesvang, Jan 104, 106 Tools for Conviviality (Illich) 225–6 n.48 totalization 36, 37 tradition 42–3 culture and 68 as Democracy’s poetic dwelling 95–8 hermeneutic concept of 91 learning to read and 101–2 traditional education 71 traditional ethics 121, 123 tragic ethics 25 Trajan 228 n.2 Transcendence of the Ego, The 29, 30–1 transcendental consciousness 31, 36 transformation 37–8 Trawny, Peter 11 tropes, philosophical 77 truth 72, 146, 153, 168, 240 n.69 art and 109 and experience 73 pragmatic 76 Truth and Method (Gadamer) 72–3, 133, 153, 154 turning word, Buddhist conception of 183, 185–7 Twitter 18 understanding 69–70 Being and 159 finitude of 156–7 hermeneutical experience of 153–5 and language 84–5, 161 of others 155–6 violence of 154, 160 Understanding: A PhenomenologicalPragmatic Analysis (Gary) 66 ‘Understanding the Other: A Gadamerian View on Conceptual Schemes’ (Taylor) 155 'universality of the hermeneutical problem’ 75

259

University of Chicago 107 Untimely Considerations (Nietzsche) 144 Use of Pleasure, The (Foucault) 120, 121, 122, 124, 126 Valé ry, Paul 105 Vallé e, Marc-Antoine 4 value 14–5 Vandevelde, Pol 4, 120, 121, 124 Van Gogh 109 Varga, Somogy 106 Vattimo, Gianni 150, 151, 243 n.2 veridiction 147 Very Easy Death and Adieux, A (Beauvoir) 49 Vespasian 228 n.2 violence of metaphysics 149–51 physical 152 of thought 151–2 of understanding 154, 160 ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ (Derrida) 150 Von der Erlö sung (Nietzsche) 22 von Trotta, Margarethe 20 vulgar learning 208 Waldenfells, Hans 179, 189, 191 Wang Bi 195, 202 Watrous, Lisa 4 Watson, Jean 15 Weissman, David 233 n.3 Wen, King 200 Wenders, Wim 20 West, Cornel 91 Western philosophy 4, 66, 177, 201, 205, 244 n.11 Whitman, Walt 90, 91, 92–5, 97–102, 233 n.2, 234 n.10 Wiercinski, Andrzej 2 Wilde, Oscar 101 Wisdom of the World, The (Brague) 152 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 66, 127 women freedom 45, 46 in historical time 51 relationship with men 45 sexuality and reproduction 44–5, 46 word made flesh 167–72 words

260 language and 207 Zhuangzi on 206–9 world-historical anti-Semitism 9, 10 Wright, D. S. 180, 185, 187, 189 Xu Gan 196, 202 Xunzi 195, 197, 199 Yulgok 200 Zacchaeus 58 Zarathustra 22–3, 109

Index Zender, Hans 243 n.3 Zen philosophy 185, 189 Zhongyong 196, 201 Zhuangzi 205, 212, 214, 216, 248 n.3 as antirationalist 206 and foundational thought 209–12 on words 206–9 Zhuangzi 196, 206–8, 209–12, 214, 215, 217, 248 n.3 Zhu Xi 202 Zigong 198