Founder: Professor Wolfe Mays

 

Suppose a situation of immediate urge to respond to it: feeling misjudged or mistreated, feeling ashamed for something you have done, feeling extreme sorrow or joy, feeling a necessity to justify or to express yourself: either by words or deeds, by adequate behaviour to explicate yourself and make the situation go on. – But you do not know how, you are unable to do so: Your immediate response seems to have no way, no space and time to be enacted, not due to ‘objective obstacles’, but due to your own incapability to make sense of what kind of response is demanded and to be accomplished
Expressing oneself does not only have an intellectual component of knowledge about the world or myself, it is not only a question of elaborate vocabulary and capability of using it eloquently, but it is grounded and inseparably bound to ourselves being embodied in the world as a medium of our life as self-sensing beings. Finding oneself in such a situation at a zero-point of expressing affections and irritations, experiencing a blockade of communicating with the world, means a rupture with intellectual logos; it means a rupture both with the world in its intelligibility, and our incarnated self which usually is the place of an ‘I can’, a dynamics oriented towards a next step, a next word, deed or activity providing possibilities for continuity and coherency of activity within a horizon of sense.
What is happening in such situations of disorganisation and disintegration of self and its being in the world? There is a whole scale of events and patterns of experience: from the everyday terrifying or joyful shock, to deep personal crises when somebody you love has died, when your whole existence or right to life as you find it meaningful and a matter of worth to you. Finally, there are the pathological ways of feeling and expression.
Such situations are tainted as being aporetic, and every step to be taken from now on as irretrievable. The world is no longer a space open to possibilities which I can take: Rather, I am taken or befallen by possibilities, which therefore only seem to be necessary and determinative. As such outward necessity, this situation is full of indeterminacy for myself as an ‘I can’, since I am withdrawn to my factual existence in this aporia as it is experienced in the here and now and as its transformation towards the future is feared in the light of this very situation. What has been altered is the structure of living and experiencing the temporal relationship I am; what has been altered is my eccentricity opening a transsubjective horizon of sense in communicating*1 with others.
Yet, in such situations there is still a self which experiences a call for integrity: the self as person experiences a claim of becoming and change; but not being able to respond to it, she tries to compensate for it in mechanical forms of expressive response: Laughing and crying, as H. Plessner termed this characteristic human way of responding to an indeterminate situation.*2 Yet, such initial ruptures are even constitutive and supporting for our being human.
This is not only achieved in rational activity giving form to one’s life plans, but in all kinds of ways to express ourselves comprehensibly, to explore and shape our horizons of sense. “Whatever is reckoned to the specific gifts of human nature has to be brought about in an individual form, again and again.” (cf. LW, 210) This applies to all kinds of expressions which rely on our incarnated existence: Existing in and with a body, always already integrated and in an eccentric position to this integration, which has to be actualized in our course of time: And this means having a proleptic relation to the time of our lived activity as ‘I can’. Such extremes of emotional expressivity transgressing our horizon of sense and our intentional ability are constitutive of human freedom.
Being a self, an I, and traditionally a subject, means to have a double relation to your lived body experienced as actively exploring the world and passively being explored by the world, by the people, things and situations occurring there in time and space: This relation we are is interlaced in ambiguity; its bodily expressions remain opaque in everyday behaviour. We have and are Körper and Leib, and in this duality we are eccentric to our integral whole of body, soul and intellect; we can transcend, judge and actively alter it. But at the same time I live rooted in the situation of a here and now which – in its ambiguity and multilaterality – I can never totally transcend to an objective point of view. Nevertheless, this ambiguity comes to self-consciousness in certain situations, in an extremity of self-awareness conquering me in its impossibility to comprehend it and to react to it.
In order to gain sense of such expressions for the range of existence, there has to be a different hermeneutical approach than the one applied to expressivity in spoken and written logos – which too easily is parted from our affective and affected sensuality. The boundaries of human behaviour expressed in embodied emotions are neither on the other side of rational intentionality nor merely a sign of anomia and dysfunction in a pathological sense: Here, our descriptive models of comprehensive sense and its boundaries too often fall short. This is a field where hermeneutics can be challenged by describing and problematizing how understanding is grounded in our human condition, and how it can be captured in its full range of individual expressions prior to a norm.

My three points of approach to these questions will be:
• The quest for an anthropological hermeneutics – The crisis of the human subject and the ground of understanding human existence in its eccentric nature. This draws from H. Plessner’s essay on Laughing and Crying (1941)
• The Self as an individual structure of becoming in a crisis. This is developed from Victor v. Weizsäcker’s anthropology of Gestaltkreis and a subject comprehended by what Weizsäcker calls the ‘pathic categories’.
• An ethically grounded outlook on a ‘Hermeneutics of expressivity’ in mutual partnership gaining an awareness of a transsubjective structure of lived time and sense: As such they are not only a way to interpret sense, but as ‘proleptic hermeneutics’ a praxis of opening, deepening and enlarging horizons of sense in personal intercourse (therapeutic, pedagogical etc.).


I. The crisis of the subject and its quest for anthropological hermeneutics

Human existence has its course in time and in history: Ways of life constitute themselves in historical changes. Also ‘the human’ as a category of understanding is part of this temporal and historic movement. Yet, the ways of speaking, acting, and the forms of their institutional structures have their continuity in this flux: Understanding has only its due if there is change and the necessity to find coherence in it: coherence of sense and coherence of frameworks for its expressivity in living, in words and deeds.
The ‘endangered subject’ or the ‘subject in a crisis’ is not just a deconstructive figure of speech, but both an anthropological and a pathological reality; in its temporal structure of becoming and change it is even a constitutive principle of ourselves as persons being and becoming: being transformed and called for a task of accomplishing a form, a personality with desires, ends, values and horizons of sense. Experiencing limits of sense, we compensate loss and disintegration of world and ourselves, we discover different perspectives and possibilities, we experience new faculties to act, exist and express our horizon of personal life: This all is due to this ambivalent and fragile subjectivity.
For Plessner, these fundamental forms of expressive subjectivity are rooted in the double-faced relation towards our body; they are rooted in our eccentric positionality we are not free about, but always already find ourselves bound by; and this in a double way: both in openness and in a dependency to enact it. Thus, a comprehensive concept of human nature has to comprise (1) an understanding of its expressivity in the full range of possibility. (2) It has to take into account how these various forms are interwoven with each other in their intellectual, psychic and physiological aspects and dimensions (cf. LW, 215). As such, these expressive forms close to bodily behaviour in its ambiguity provide fundamental ways of human existence (Grundmöglichkeiten des allgemein Menschlichen, allem geschichtlichen Wandel … zum Trotz): as the most immediate and fundamental situation where a person is challenged as both her integrity threatened and her response being called for. This, Plessner develops along the phenomena of laughing and crying. *3
What does characterize laughing and crying as especially and only human forms of expressivity is their response to a loss of self-containment. Yet, this response to situations of such kinds I have just sketched out before, gains a value of expression in so far as disorganisation of personal relation between self and its physical existence indeed is not willed; yet, when it is taking place, it is not simply accepted and suffered but transferred to a gesture of this loss: In these gestures we still can display our personal, our human integrity as a whole of body, psyche and intellect. In laughing and crying we capitulate as a self-governed psychophysical unity, but we do not capitulate as persons, since we still attest a relation to our body, we confirm ourselves in withdrawing to laughter and tears.
Laughing and crying are different from other forms of expressivity insofar they respond to situations undetermined as to their horizon of sense. They are not merely functions of our nervous system as blushing, sneezing or vomiting; yet, on the other hand, they do not have a symbolical imprint since our composure in culturally shaped roles fails: Rather, they are motivated by our incarnated self in order to compensate the lack of conscious and intentional behaviour, but they are formed neither by our will or habit nor by an organic setting. There is no causal relation to nervous or bio-chemical origins. Quite the opposite: Their origin and release lie in the concealment of our personal system, as Plessner emphasizes. As such, bodily expressions become independent in laughing and crying, rather than being set: Man falls into laughing and tears; he answers to a limit of the eccentric ability to transcend situations; he answers to his finitude, experienced as impotence and incapability.
To sum up the meaning of this for our condition humaine: In laughing and crying, the transparency of our everyday self-relation in an intrigue of objective and subjective body (Körper and Leib) with our intellectual dimension, or for short: our eccentric positionality, comes to its low: Bodily functions emancipate themselves (this v. Weizsäcker will analyze on the field of pathological disorder; yet, ‘the pathological’ not opposed to an abstract norm but as individual transformation of our pathic existence).
What does happen then is that affections experienced in bodily immediacy as laughing and crying result into mechanical compulsions both shattering and resituating our eccentric relationality to our body. We separate ourselves from situation, leave ourselves to the expressive value of laughing and crying: Think of laughing being ashamed or unsteady due to predicament or despair; think of crying being offended in our self-esteem or of crying in remorse: We let go our conscious and intentional activity which grounds are offended, threatened and powerless.
This is a specific form of self-awareness when our habitual roles cannot longer be performed: Laughing and crying become a kind of deferment and dénouement for decision about further actions: in this deferment of decision we can call it a crisis. But ‘awareness’ does not mean an intentional consciousness, but rather a negative experience of indeterminacy: Our giving way to bodily expressions unveils the signum of an undetermined space to go on. In laughing we still might have our feeling of ability to go on, it just is not in our focus, but we feel elated, sometimes overestimating ourselves; in crying, on the other hand, we feel the loss of this ability of ‘I can go on’ as a lowered self-esteem and in a fit of dizziness and flee into weakness of crying.*4
We feel the tension of the loose bondage of body and our self, and thus we passively become aware of the dual relation of incarnation as being both ‘in a body’ and ‘to our body’. Laughing and crying mark this ambiguity of the person as temporal and becoming being: By this, the body displays a possibility between person and her body, which usually stays hidden and latent (cf. LW, 237), but now gains an expressive value with an individual content: as disorganization and disintegration comprehended in a gesture of our ‘endangered subjectivity and personality’. *5
Laughing and crying demarcate two extremes and limits of intentional behaviour – neither planned nor at random, whereas the ‚everyday situation’ of our relation is characterized by orientation and a range for a playful, experimental and inventive attitude towards possibilities. Here we handle situations without the danger of disaccord, but relying on their stability and elasticity. This is less due to rational planning than due to horizons of sense and their coherency. The medium of life expressively unfolding and developing itself is neither fixed and finished nor totally fluent and undetermined. Rather, it has a rhythm of itself, has articulations providing points of rest and support as well as friction points. And this is gained only in a world as a place of encounter with others, a place where ends and means, our desires, wishes, fears, our courses of life materialize, find institutions.
This is the field of incarnated persons not only in relation to their intimate self, but also to other selves via expressive exposure, activity and sensibility towards others. This constitutive process in an intersubjective field of a response of both open and blocked range first has to ‘discover’ the aforementioned points of friction and rest. Here, the body itself creates a space for further activity in concord with or against its spectators responding to laughing and crying in understanding, help, mockery or shock; and this can be taken up in ways to solve such ‘blocked’ and ‘autistic situations’.
As there still is integrity in disorganization, it might serve as a sign to find a way around the limits of a situation. In spite of their ambivalence or multilaterality, such situations hold a person in a way she cannot withdraw from them, but on the contrary she remains entangled in these multilaterality and its diverse meanings: A tension remains, but also has an openness towards a disbandment of their coercive character, towards a plasticity, characteristic for the dissolution – more in laughing, less in crying. – We will come back to this in the end.
What is gained by this look on our incarnated being in its range of expressivity? Intentional activity and ‘pathic’ situation of personal existence are two basic directions of understanding behaviour, on the one hand as an action, on the other hand as an expressive motion of life’s activity. In the first case, as action, the movement gains its sense in relation to an end motivating it; in the second case, as expression, it becomes comprehensible as an image, a symbolic whole of sense. (cf. LW, 89f.) *6 Whereas actions gain their unity and wholeness only in consummation of an end, activity and especially expressions have their end in themselves, they are not intentionally directed to something beyond themselves as an end (otherwise they are only roles applied strategically). Thus, in each point of an expression in its temporal gestalt there is an image of sense displayed as a whole: Thus, it has to be read or better: re-experienced in its genesis. Here, the way how sense is given to us, or put negatively; how the givenness is troubled, comes to our awareness.*7
In this genesis re-curred and re-enacted, expressions, not yet explicit and unresolved, get transformed: This means a task for an ethical practice of understanding, an understanding not only interpreting but working with expressions in an encounter of face-to-face, person-to-person, self-to-other. This is an aspect Plessner’s quasi-transcendental self-relation by incarnated eccentricity, the double-faced relation to our being in and with a body does not elucidate in its practical prerequisites: How transformation of situations does come about, how the plasticity of situation, either harmless as in laughing or threatening as in tearful disintegration, does not only remain in ambivalence but does gain an active potency, does regain a positive claim to the disintegrated person to find a balance in comprehension.
And here, I am turning to Victor von Weizsäcker’s concept of Gestaltkreis: Here, the constitutive structure of existence is captured by ‘becoming’, and this is both due to a person’s gnostic eccentric being and to a pathic aspect of being related to time forming myself. Here, we find both structure and practical dynamics of understanding our ambiguous incarnated existence as eccentric and personal selves due to a certain structure of lived time (temps vécu) only to be actualized in a transsubjective manner: Being transformed in encounter with others and responding to this transformation in a Gestaltkreis.

II. Victor von Weizsäcker’s medical (and thus therapeutical and ethical) anthropology: Hermeneutics of becoming

V. v. Weizsäcker (1886-1957) developed his ‚theory of Gestaltkreis’ in 1932*8 , setting out from the problem, how we can both explain and understand the transformation of physical movements into apperceptive impressions, meaningful stimuli and emotions self-induced by a living being: How does a unity of movement and perception of and for a living being come about? How is this unity understood as self-movement and self-affection?
This is not only a theoretical approach to our lived life as a dialectical movement: I myself opening a time-structure in moving, acting, speaking, thinking and by this being accessible for impressions outside my own range, being accessible for becoming grace to and for the sake of others. Rather, this means facing our facticity in comprehending ruptures, deviations, pathologies of our expressive existence as a task: an ethical task of self-accomplishment in personal intercourse and an ethical task for encountering and sustaining a mutual becoming in a lifeworld with other fellow-man; a task of comprehending possibilities and impossibilities in becoming – yet directing this comprehension to a free range for transformation.
Lived time expressed in our relation towards the world is not only taking place in a straight line, not only in an eccentric move going back and forth from a self, but it is time developing in circles, or rather: spirals, between persons each of them living, having and experiencing their temporal horizons: And this movement of Gestaltkreis gains its individual life in encountering and merging of my horizons with those of others.
Originally being an observation of physiology and of psychopathology that one can substitute bodily movements by perceiving a movement or vice versa (think of the delusion sitting in a waiting train and watching another train pass by: Aren’t you being moved in your own train carriage?), Gestaltkreis unveils that movement and perception can compensate, transform and transfer each other. But we are not interested in this physiological and biological theory now. Rather, this concept can be generalized to an anthropological sphere: the concept of the subject as a person becoming in the interchange between self and world, self and other.
V. Weizsäcker calls this ‘encounter’ (Begegnung) and ‘acquaintance’ (Umgang: not to be equated with a neutral ‘contact’). Here, v. Weizsäcker especially is interested in psychopathology, in how something unbearably befalling me – affects, emotions – is lived out in motoric fits and habits, is transformed into psychic symptoms; there is not only a change of functions, but a transformation into something grounding a new line of events. By this notion of non-causal temporality or historicity, something unpredictable, something impossible, comes to realization in the course of the (pathological) deviations in human life: The impossible actualizing itself is no longer derived from the real as a basic figure of calculation and planning, but gains a value of its own: as something individually unique in course of a life-order in transformation.
Setting out from pathology does not only have a medical dimension but gains a view on human existence as constituted by deviation, to which illness is only a key opening a door. As an example: A pathological over-sensitivity or over-irritability might not necessarily be understood as a disorder of a ‚ normal’ psychophysical state: This insofar as this‚ pathology’ might be its own new way, new form – let us say: an own gestalt – of expressing a person. And even, this gestalt might be known better, we might be acquainted better with it and ourselves than by an ‘abstract norm’ (we might be better acquainted with our fears than with any statistic figure of possibility that fear coming true).
Such observation might lead us to a different notion of the pathological and the normal: this in order to understand phenomena as individual expressions or deviations with their own histories of becoming their individual shape; in order to gain an idea of a norm by the range of individual expressions. Affections*9 and actions are phenomena in becoming; they are not finalized products or achievements of subjects but encounters of a Self with her surroundings continuously taking place. In becoming visible as phenomena, as symptoms, affections and expressions transform; there is not a causal relation of something bringing forth something else, but an initial occurrence gets transformed and gains a different shape – as in the expressive state of laughing and crying for a totally undetermined or overdetermined situation of experiencing.
In our incarnated being-in-the-world subjects encounter objects being subjects for each other, altering each other in their acquaintance and thereby becoming and accomplishing themselves: Here, there is the need for a short deviation: What is meant by ‚subject’? – A whole range of implications from ‘I’, ‘individual’, ‘person’, ‘living being’, ‘ensouled body’: All of this bears the notion of being centred; yet, subjectivity also indicates a counterpoint towards something different, something surrounding it. Subject means a pole against and linked with another, yet it might not be the more prominent of these two.
Subjects are in opposite to other subjects. All objectivity demands a subject, but also all objects hold a subject in themselves: “Within a world with subjective objects, I get into a flux. I encounter other things, other person, I do not only touch or contact them, since they have an own dynamic in themselves, they move themselves and affect myself. Thus, each encounter continues, gains a dynamic of its own. If we want to maintain this encounter or if we want to leave it, we – I for myself and the other subject – have to become acquainted with each other. Encounter is always a way of becoming and being acquainted. “(cf. Pathosophie, 362)
The symbol of ‚circle’ in Gestaltkreis means movement running back into itself, yet altering the ways of executing this activity: There is an acquaintance which by preclusion of possibilities in reciprocal claim and response, in reciprocal activity gains in its dynamics something persevering despite of change: this is closeness (Geschlossenheit) and a unity. The circle is a symbol not to be translated into an objectified fact; it is an image or an idea, symbolically expressed by a movement going on by mutual references: What I am doing to you is formed and limited by the meaning it gains for you and the ways you react to it and actively shape your behaviour towards myself. In the course of this, also both of us alter, gain insights, transform our point of views, our intentions etc. Gestalt is always in becoming; it is movement running back into itself, yet a movement to be enacted between persons.
Such a ‘Philosophy of pathology and therapy’ (for v. Weizsäcker not medical ethics, but an ethics of personal conduct between therapist and patient!) can be enlarged to a ‘Philosophy of personal encounter’ which bears hermeneutical relevance: it is not objectivity but joint and mutual participation that becomes an epistemological prerequisite. ‘Objectivity’ and its logos are not only realized in intentional understanding, in sensual observation or rational comprehension, but always also in representation, in our individual embodied exposure: it has to be depicted in personal intercourse, since only in transformation such expressions become meaningful again and open to a horizon of sense where there is further becoming.

For such a concept of relationality between self, world and others in form of Gestaltkreis, the difference between pathic vs. ontic categories becomes prominent both in a theoretical and then a practical and ethical aspect: The ‘pathic moment’ of sensing vs. its gnostic aspect of perceiving has prominently been discussed by E. Straus: The gnostic moment is related to the qualitative side of perceiving objects or the what of sense being displayed in perception; the pathic moment is related to the how of the givenness of our world.
V. Weizsäcker applies this to the distinction ‘ontic’ vs. ‘pathic categories’: Life is not simply an activity, but life is incurred, is sustained in an immediate communication with the world due to its change of givenness experienced by us. This is its pathic aspect in difference to the terms of the ontic categories: like causality, reciprocal action and effect, means and ends, quantity and quality. Comprehension of life as becoming – not as this or that, but as its individual gestalt – is gained by a situation of crisis where and when a subject actually is nothing, but all and only potentially*10. The pathic categories display our relation to the world in the way it is given to experience, the way it is given to us in becoming, not as in the light of the ‘what’ we aim at: There is not a last telos as a horizon of this becoming, but there is a telos in variations: A telos in variability, a telos as a range for individual existence leads to the task to assist, encourage and enhance encounters and acquaintance practically (therapeutically, pedagogically) and ethically by the five ‘pathic categories’: Dürfen, Müssen, Sollen, Können, Wollen.
This means that ‘pathic’ is not a category of essential quality, but indicates a range of possibility, possibilities outside the range of our everyday experience: As such, they cannot be explored in an intentional, not in a gnostic, way, but they ‘befall’ us, they rupture our horizon of intentional sense we experience as ‘I can’. In the terms of every day’s acquaintance with our world, it is rather the impossible befalling us – therefore pathic: time occurring, but the content of this occurring is indeterminate: Think of the empty space in your life after a dear person has died, how the rhythm of your day you shared with this other person does not make sense any longer, there is no longer this horizon of shared time that would be a prerequisite to find a new way to structure your activity. It is not a matter of willing or inventing new tasks, new habits to get up in the morning, to leave your house, to spent your evenings, but you have to respond to this time in the span of a day that has to bear possibilities offered to you by somebody. All of sudden, the impossible as something not thought about, becomes a possibility you join in: The impossible becomes actualized, determined by a past, yet nevertheless unforeseeably open to a future of modes of realization, either pathologically driven or in a regained integration of self and world to a personal relation of sense in a horizon of our world with others.
The generic preconditions of such kind of pathic possibility are the ‘can’ and the ‘cannot’, the ‘ought’ and the ‘may’ (‘might’), finally willing: as in the statement: ‘I experience that I can or I cannot’; ‘I feel a constraint that I ought to do’; ‘I find myself in the state, that I will do and want to do’: In a reciprocal determination within the ‘pathic pentagram’, they shape a willing, whether I can will (Könnenwollen) and thus should do and even have to do (Sollen and Müssen) or I want to favour something I can (Wollenkönnen) and thus am entitled to do (Dürfen).
Here, at the decisive point of crisis these pathic variations become an origin and a seminal point for something beginning with no last and ultimate sufficient reason: This seminal point cannot be explained, but further developments gain meaning by it. Their necessitating gestalt is and can be expressed only post festum. Then, they comprise the person, but the person being nothing for herself and for others without a lived expression, hindered in crisis and resolved in crisis. Thus, “the pathic can be defined as the origin of willing and of the ought “ (Gestaltkreis, 270) – origin of responsible actions.
Here, again we encounter the problem already found in the horizon of everyday sense ruptured by laughing and crying: How can we realize and understand meaning in such new becoming of phenomena? It is not from a third-person-perspective on ‘objective facticity’ but in self-awareness of lived and experienced life and in interpersonal acquaintance. Such dynamic compounds of affective and motive expressions, perceptions etc. bring forth certain structures of the Self and its surroundings. This begs the question: Which order does become and how does it become? And: How do we perceive structures in our world in such pathic crises?
We cannot explain, why things in these structures are, but we can comprehend their temporal order of becoming, of their genesis of form: Thus, they are always not yet finished, they are deviations, since their form is (1) the place of encounter with self and world in becoming and (2) the genesis of a specific presence where and from which our awareness arises and experience is accomplished, yet only in continuous becoming. Such is the intersubjective space and its mutually experienced time, reciprocally brought about by the persons encountering each other in this space.
Dürfen, Müssen, Sollen, Können, Wollen: These five modes of experiencing myself structure a framework for the ambivalent subject to manifest, and they gain their expressive value in its crisis: In a crisis not only taking place, but also experienced as a transformation:*11 It is experienced (1) as crisis of a subject in the way of a subject experiencing the loss of its comprehensive horizon of becoming. (2) This crisis is not only passage from one order to another. It is not simply conveying a present state of disorder at one point of this very passage, but it indicates the antagonism of continuity and identity of the person suffering this crisis: calling and urging for a rupture to resolve dissolution. Thus, (3) even in disorder this person remains related to herself and the world, and exactly this brings about the experience of being at or beyond the boundaries of comprehensive sense due to indeterminacy. This relation is not objectifiable, it is a negation expressed in phenomena of disorder, the person herself is in a way such a negation, and it is the idea (Inbegriff) of the threatened and remaining integrity of the psychophysical unity.*12 Finally (4): Unity is only constituted in a continuous rehabilitation beyond unsteadiness and crises.
But how does one not only state this from outside or experience it helplessly from within a pathological state, but where lies a constitutive ground in disorder to resolve it in understanding? – In understanding ourselves and our individual historicity of finitude as incarnated and thus expressive beings?

III. The ethical quest of hermeneutics: Comprehension at boundaries of sense in mutual partnership

Explaining, understanding and comprehending – Erklären, Verstehen, Begreifen: this is the hermeneutic compound, v. Weizsäcker tries to sketch out; doing this, he bridges a gap belonging to our all too well known hermeneutical standards: Erklären und Verstehen. Explanation distances myself from another as something or somebody in an ‘objective’ facticity, understanding aims at a sympathetic comprehension: but the pathos still relies on a static model of theoretical imagination of somebody disclosed in front of me, it too often leaves another in her state without altering her; and this is also setting her back to a status quo, unable to respond to her becoming or to open ways to transform her lived time towards a becoming in an open time.
Thus, besides these two diagnostic modes, there is comprehension as a third hermeneutical (a therapeutical, an ethical) mode: in an encounter within a personal relationship, gaining for, becoming towards an acquaintance with the other in a mutual process. Thus, acquaintance takes myself into a dynamics of becoming, forming and transforming myself together with the other. Explaining and understanding should not be separated but they should be joined and applied both for the sake of comprehension: comprehension in mutual partnership, acting with others, helping each other: This is the acquaintance in encounter that has a proleptic structure of becoming transformed: not only going on under coercion of ‘empty’ and thus ‘mechanical habits’ for myself, but in being taken up by the time of an other, the time of a partner: Becoming in time seems no longer alienated from myself, but becomes my own again.
Yet, what is comprehended in encounter and acquaintance? V. Weizsäcker formulates this as a therapist and anthropologist: A loss of openness we discover in our being in and towards the world – may it be pathological or more general in our dealing with critical situations at the boundaries of comprehensive sense – can never be comprehended as an objective deviation from a norm, but it is always a transformation of an individual order of life within living and existing itself.
The loss of an adequate expressivity is substituted by deviating forms of expressing our suffering, our pathic nature: indicating that things, situations, and we in our state as ‘selfsame Selves’, should not be as we ‘factically’are, but that they should find a suspense of the here and now and a way towards change, open for possibilities of further and continuing accomplishment. Thus, comprehending is both a praxis and an ethos of understanding due to the fact that I am always with others who gain their horizon of sense, of time, of becoming in encounter with myself and vice versa: due to the fact, that we can not only express and explicate ourselves in temporal and spatial horizons being set, but that they are part of becoming in our being with others, acting and speaking with them, helping them as partners.
What is this individual order of life and how can it be understood in its range of possibilities? These questions cannot be answered on an ontic or factual level, but only in personal encounter where already the mutual dealing with each other changes the situation, initiating a new phase of becoming time, a new phase of our lived biography: It might be comprehended in the history or story of our life, told to other, told by others, found together and with others, all ‘entangled in histories’ (Wilhelm Schapp): What lies in the potency of proleptic time can be taken up in lived lives.*13
Existing as an incarnated being, exploring the world not only by perception but much more by the way we express ourselves and sense ourselves in these expressions (in the style of perceiving) is related to time in becoming. To open, shape and explore an adequate space for its evolvement are the dimensions of comprehension that have to form a whole in a hermeneutical acquaintance with each other: Both response and responsibility in mutual encounter rely on other persons opening again a sphere and situations which are no longer over- or underdetermined. The other as a partner steps in the breach of indeterminacy: He conveys his time, he lifts up my (self-induced) constraints to transcend the factual situation of a here and now in order to discover different possibilities from those having been disclosed. Thus, there is no longer only compensation of the indeterminate – e.g. by mechanical expressive activity –, but really a new situation in its openness and yet shaped by possibilities of comprehension.
Other prerequisites are trust and hope in and sincerity about each other – we might call this the ‘virtues of comprehensive hermeneutics’. They keep up such partnership in mutuality. Such partnership means a space and a time (the time of being altered in and by this dyad, triad etc.) of possibilities for further and new disclosure; it means a space for mutual becoming, transformation and alterations never happening for one subject alone, but only to the intrigue of partnership and the subjects standing within: not in a theoretic and rationalizing distance, but in encounter starting from our affectivity.
This encounter of partnership has the dynamics of Gestaltkreis, and in these dynamics it gains a hermeneutical form of (self-)interpretation in (self-)formation of our original relation in transparency. It is not necessarily going back to the unconscious, pre-personal layers of depth psychology’s genealogy: Opening a horizon of sense also demands to turn our view to an openness of be-coming time(s): A view on what has been and what presently is, yet in a dimension of how it will or might be continued, how it has been and will be transformed to possibilities of sense.
This would be a hermeneutical task, and the task for a phenomenology of comprehension: to sharpen our awareness about the boundaries and ambivalences of our horizons of sense. And here, there is at stake to gain a practice – being both hermeneutical and phenomenological – about the acquaintance with expressivity and its constitutive range between pathic and ontic dimensions of the self; the range where we encounter ourselves and each other, for the sake of our becoming in time; and this takes its hold both on crisis as part of being human and on shared practises of encounter and acquaintance.

1 - Communication is – according to E. Straus’ definition – the sympathetically being with the world, comprising both sympathic and antipathic relations of the type striving for… or fleeing from…: Sympathetic relationship is due to our sensing, prior to the gnostic intentional mode of perceiving.
2 - In his essay with its full title: Lachen und Weinen. Eine Untersuchung der Grenzen menschlichen Verhaltens. Plessner undertook his analyses in collaboration with the biologist and physiologist F.J.J. Buytendijk at the University of Groningen. Cited as LW from H. Plessner, Gesammelte Schriften VII. Frankfurt 1980
3 - Unfortunally, there is not enough time to appreciate Plessner’s thoughtful analyses in an own interpretation: I only use them as a vantage point for my further steps
4 - Yet, we have to stay aware of the fact that such descriptions of situations come close to types of anamnesis which indicate severe psychopathological problems as to the ways how to transform and to rebuild this coercive habitude. But right now, we are not at the point of chronical emancipation of bodily functions substituting other ways of coping with situations, but we are dealing with laughing and crying.
5 - This is of anthropological importance, since personhood is no longer founded metaphysically and speculatively, here.
6 - Expression is instantaneous, is temps durée, and contains its value in itself; action has a linear, spatial character, has its temps espace, gains value of function for the sake of something else.
7 - For the distinction between the ‘what’ and the ‘how of givenness’, see the gnostic and pathic categories in the next section.
8 - See for the different aspect Der Gestaltkreis. Theorie der Einheit von Wahrnehmen und Bewegen. Frankfurt 1973; Pathosophie. Göttingen 1956; Der kranke Mensch. Eine Einführung in die medizinische Anthropologie. Stuttgart 1951; Begegnungen und Entscheidungen. Stuttgart 1949.
9 - Comprising emotions, self-perceptive and perceptive states
10 - To cite v. Weizsäcker in his original German description: „Das Ontische ist, das Pathische leidet; das Ontische ist ein Sein, hat Dasein, das Pathische ist überall, wo der Wortstamm des Leidens vorkommt, Leid, Leidenschaft, Pathos, Pathetik, Sympathie, Pathologie, Pathogenese. Die Krankheit, das Kranksein gehört dazu. Der Begriff des Pathischen ist nur ein viel weiterer als der der Krankheit, Nicht nur sie, aber auch sie ist ein Treffpunkt der großen, zentralen Negativität in unserem Lebensgefühl, oder … in unserer Existenz.“ (Begegnungen und Entscheidungen, 108)
11 - You might hear here the constitutive correlation of ‘Leben’ und ‘Erleben’, of temps vécu and temps espace.
12 - “We only realize a subject adequately, when it is imminent to disappear.” (Gestaltkreis, 253f.)
13 - There is not an objective depiction, but a lived and experienced expression (gelebter und erlebter Ausdruck). In order to regain a relation open to the world and our incarnated eccentricity, in order to regain an expressivity ready to act in the mode of the ‘I can’, a claim has to be directed to a person by another person: this relation of mutuality is important. The claim might be possible or impossible in its accomplishment, yet it is a prerequisite for a return to time and space not only bound to a self drawn back to her inwardness.