Hermeneutics and the Philosophical Tradition. István M. Fehér (Budapest)
In my paper I first propose to reconstruct the outlines of what has been called the hermeneutic turn of 20th century philosophy (1); then I will focus on some inner or more technical details of this "turn," now having become accessible through recent volumes of the edttion of Heidegger's Complete Works (Gesamtausgabe) (2). I propose to show some of the reasons why Heidegger is often claimed to have given hermeneutics an ontological dimension or interpretation--and, in particular, how in Heidegger's ontological radicalication of hermeneutics the influence of Dilthey and Husserl played a fundamental role. Finally, I will briefly follow up the consequences of this hermeneutic turn, thereby sketching my own way of conceiving hermeneutics as a philosophy of oppenness (3).
I will argue, in particular, that hermeneutics has an openly political and practical import lying in its anti-dogmatic character. What may be called the basic hermeneutic attitude or comportment, that is, openness, makes possible a new relation both to the past and present. In and by hermeneutics, as Robert Hollinger puti it,"[r]ather than some version of epistemological relativism, we get something closer to what may be dubbed ontological and cultural pluralism".
1. The hermeneutic turn of 20th century philosophy
In its traditional sense, hermeneutics has been conceived as the theory of rules which govern the interpretation of texts, and which should permit us to establish their possibly objective meaning. The problem of understanding and interpreting texts handed down by the tradition is about as old as philosophy itself. Due to a number of circumstances, such as the cultural crisis of our century, the expansion of technology and world civilization, the encounter of different cultures, the loss of sense of classical humanistic tradition, etc., problems of interpretation have come to assume an ever more important role in recent philosophy. The hermeneutic problematic has emerged as a central topic, and has been given autonomous philosophical elaboration, in the thought of at least two of the most influential philosophers of our century: Heidegger and Gadamer. The hermeneutic turn of philosophy which they carried out implies that interpretation is no more seen as an auxiliary discipline of human sciences as the rules of interpretation of classical texts. Rather, it emerges as an autonomous philosophical problem insofar as humans are viewed in all kinds of their everyday activities not only in their handling of classical texts pertaining to the compartment of human sciences__as interpreting animals. In assessing the full import and the radicality of this turn, we have reason o speak about an overall hermeneneutic reconception of philosophy. In a paper entitled “Heidegger and the Hermeneutic Turn” David Hoy put things as follows: “The closing decades of this century have been marked by a wide-ranging, multidisciplinary exploration of the theory of interpretation and its practical implications. To speak of a revolution in the history of thought is perhaps too grand, but certainly there has been a general movement that can be called the »hermeneutic turn«“. *1
The radicality of this change would be wholly misunderstood and to a considerable extent underestimated if we conceived of it in terms of a change whereby our description of one being among many others has been changed, implying that our conception of the others remains basically the same. Rather, what this change implies is that all our habitual conceptual strategies and lingusitic devices, together with the underlying comportment and worldview, are to undergo an overall reconsideration and reconception--one often called destruction or deconstruction. Thus transformed, philosophy re-defines its relation to the various human disciplines no less than to its own past, the classical tradition of hermeneutics–indeed, to philosophy itself. In order to assess the full import and the radicality of this turn, which amounts to an overall reconception of philosophy, we are to go back to its sources, i.e. to reconstruct the problem situation of German philosophy at turn turn of the century.
2. Heidegger: Hermeneutics and the Being-question
In its attempt to challenge the positivistic idea of unified science as well as to defend the autonomy of the human studies, epistemologically oriented German philosophy had come to distinguish between two autonomous kinds of scientific knowledge or cognition: the one providing knowledge of general laws and characteristic of the natural sciences, the other making us acquainted with singular events and proper to the kind of knowledge we have in human sciences [Geisteswissenschaften]. These two forms of knowledge were sometimes also distinguished terminologically as explanation [Erklärung] and understanding [Verstehen]. Dilthey defined understanding as "the process by which we know some inner content from signs received by the senses from outside" ("Vorgang, in welchem wir aus Zeichen, die von außen sinnlich gegeben sind, ein Inneres erkennen" GS 5: 318]); inter¬pretation was for him "the artistic [arts-like] understanding of life manifestations objectified in written form." ("Das kunstmäßige Verstehen von schriftlich fixierten Lebensäußerungen," ibid. 332). He conceived hermeneutics as "the methodology of the understanding of recorded expressions" (ibid.)
Implicit in the epistemological dualism of explanation and understanding is a latent ontological distinction between nature and spirit/mind. With regard to nature our knowledge is explanation, concerning consciousness it is understanding. "We explain nature, and we understand spirit," says Dilthey ("Die Natur erklären wir, das Seelenleben verstehen wir," ebd., S. 144). That is also the reason why Dilthey finds something like the "understanding of nature" an improper or just approximate or "metaphorical" expression ("Verstehen der Natur - interpretatio naturae - [...] ein bildlicher Ausdruck" ebd., S. 318).
For Heidegger hermeneutics is no more wissenschaftstheoretisch-oriented (or validity-oriented). This follows from his basic tendency to challenge the priority of epistemology and theory of science in philosophy, and to reaffirm the primacy of ontology. One of his main arguments is that scientific cognition is preceded by, and derived from, man's Being-in-the-world.
In accordance with this reconception of philosophy, Heidegger no longer views understanding and interpretation as just regional concepts, confined to particular domains--to the methodology of the human sciences. Rather, he views humans in all the modes of their everyday activities as interpreting animals. This holds also with regard to the kind of activity we call philosophical research, i.e., questioning. Insofar as the human being is an interpreting animal, it interprets being as well, and Heidegger formulates his being-question specifically in terms of a question concerning the meaning (c) of being. As Ricoeur puts it: "The usage of interpretation in the historico-hermeneutic sciences is only the anchoring point for a universal concept of interpretation" (Ricoeur: "Phenomenology and Hermeneutics"). Understanding is thus no more a way of knowing, proper to the human studies, in contradistinction to explanation as the way of knowledge charac¬teristic of the natural sciences, but is rather a way of being of the being called human. Humans are understanding, so to speak, all along. What they understand are not matters of fact out there in the world, but the way they find themselves in the world, involved in it.
With regard to hermeneutics, this reconception of philosophy implies that interpretation does not presuppose "recorded expressions," but vice versa: making assertions whatsoever presupposes preliminary interpretation. Assertion is for Heidegger a derivative mode of understanding (BT '33). A hammer, e.g., is primarily encountered as a tool for pounding nails into the wall; and in this encounter it has always already been preliminarily understood, or interpreted, as such. If the hammer proves to be too heavy, "[i]nterpretation is carried out primordially not in a theoretical statement but in an action [...]--laying aside the unsuitable tool, or exchanging it, `without wasting a word'" (BT 200). To put it bluntly: for Heidegger, in order to do interpreting one need not speak or make assertions, but in order to speak one must do – or, rather, must have done – interpreting.
Brought up in the scholastic tradition, but extremely responsive to te contemporary logical-epistemological ways of philosophizing represented by neo-Kantianism and phenomenology, Heidegger had as early as his doctoral dissertation and his habilitation work hoped to pose the Being question. Studying modern logical or epistemological theories in order to use them for metaphysical purposes meant, for Heidegger, recognizing the fact that such theories are not exempt from metaphysical pre¬suppos¬itions. Nor, inversely, can metaphysical or ontological theories be exempt from logical or epistemological presuppositions; that is, from more or less explicit assumptions concerning human thinking or knowing--in short, from a theory of man as a rational animal. If you pose the question of Being you always already set a certain logic into motion; that logic reposes upon a certain attitude of the knowing subject. One of Heidegger's early insights is that the tradition from Aristotle onward had gained its access to Being from within the conceptual horizon provided by the theoretical attitude, giving thereby rise to theories of Being interms of objective presence. That this comportment was far from being the original mode of being of human existence was, however, an insight which required the prior unification of the Husserlian perspective of philosophy as a strict science with the tradition of life-philosophy. Heidegger's appropriation of the problematic of factual-historical life was conceived from the very beginning as a starting point for the renewal of the Being quation--not just as a turning away from it, as has been the case with so many anti-metaphysical thinkers in the history of philosophy.
One of Heidegger's earliest insights is that contemporary philosophy's descriptions of everyday life, the environing world, etc. stem from, and are rooted in, theoretical comportment and conceptuality. They therefore fail to do justice to factical life--its comportment and the language it speaks--precisely insofar as the theoretical attitude is a derivative mode of factical life. In 1921-22 Heidegger urges that the meaning of Descartes' "I am" should be investigated more deeply, and warns, against allowing traditional views of the "I" to infiltrate surreptitiously. If life is to be brought to self-showing, then it is the "am" rather than the "I" which must be stressed. In the third part of the course Heidegger provides the first detailed analysis of what will be called "hermeneutics of facticity" in 1923, and "existential analytic" in Being and Time--a description put under the heading of "factical life."
As part of the rethinking of the methodological devices of phenomenology and contemporary philosophy, we find sketches and outlines of a theory of understanding with its characteristic pre-structure. A result of this reconsideration is the exposition of what Heidegger calls "formal indication," which is taken to be the method proper of philosophy or phenomenology. Generally speaking, it is due to Heidegger's search for proper methodological devices for an adequate conceptual expression of "factical life" that the hermeneutic problematic emerges in the postwar lecture courses. Theoretically (and ahistorically) neutral knowledge is opposed to, and gives way to, existentially (and historically) involved understanding (or pre-understanding) and interpreting--whereby knowledge becomes at best a subdivision of understanding. All these efforts are in the service of seizing "life." The main character of the latter is concern (Sorge) rather than knowledge.
The science which is destined to provide access to life in its originality is, as should be clear from what has been reconstructed, intrinsically interpretive, i.e., hermeneutical -- an insight which explicitly crops up in a note of the 1919/20 lecture course saying: "the science of the origins is ultimately the hermeneutical science.”*2 And in Oskar Becker’s lecture note of the course SS 1919 we can read: “phenomenology, the primal science of philosophy, is an understanding science.” *3
It is in his effort to gain a new access to life, as well as to reject the theoretical conceptuality and comportment proper to transcendental philosophy, that Heidegger formulates his hermeneutic concepts and formal indication, and so comes to the elaboration of a hermeneutics of facticity. "Facticity" is a term adopted to substitute for the vague and ambiguous concept of life employed by life-philosophy, as well as for that of "existence" employed by Jaspers and Kierkegaard. "Hermeneutics," "hermeneutical," have the meaning of rival concepts to "theory," "theoretical," understood in terms of "theoretically neutral." The description of life, or "facticity," obtains an overall hermeneutic character precisely in virtue of the insight that interpretation cannot be regarded as something added, as a kind of extension or annex, as it were, to some theoretically neutral (and allegedly "objective") description of a state of affairs: rather, preliminary "interpretedness" is inherent in all kinds of description, in all kinds of seeing, saying, and experiencing. If there is no "pure" theory (for "theory" is a derivative mode of being or comportment of one particular being called human), there is no pure description. What this insight implies for an adequate description of life or facticity is that theoretical concepts, as well as the language theory speaks, should be abandoned in favor of a language growing out of everyday life and able to let things be seen in their interpretedness, that is, in exactly the way we encounter and have to do with them; a hammer, as has been said, is primarily encountered as a tool for pounding nails into the wall rather than as a neutral thing out there having the property of weight.
This re-evaluation of interpretation implies that hermeneutics cannot remain a subordinate discipline of the human sciences, but becomes, as Heidegger explicitly states, "the self-interpretation of facticity". It is important to see that this "self-interpretation of facticity" is not a kind of anthropology, simply a matter of our having to do with ourselves, implying that other beings of the world are left untouched. Insofar as humans are precisely the beings who describe the world in its entirety, hermeneutics gets linked to ontology--a major reason why in the title of the 1923 course "hermeneutics of facticity" and "ontology" occur together, clearly anticipating the correlation of fundamental ontology and existential analytic in Being and Time.
Man's fundamental mode of being, Heidegger claims in BT, is Being-in-the-world. One's original relation to things emerging in his environment is one of using, handling, employing, arranging rather than "knowing" them. His practical way of having to do with things presupposes preliminary understanding of them, in particular, of what they are for. Understanding is not something to be attained first in science--be it natural or human--but rather vice versa: the knowing relation to the world is a derivative one. Heidegger shows in a series of analyses how, in virtue of what modifications of Being-in-the-world man's knowing relation to the world springs--how, in order for a thing to become an object of knowledge or scientific research, our preliminary access to it, that is our way of having to do with it, must have undergone a specific modification. With regard to our hermeneutic problematic and the re-evaluation of the concept of understanding we may say: knowledge derives from understanding and not vice versa.
2.1. The Relevance of Husserl's Phenomenology
Heidegger's use of hermeneutics for ontological purposes is hardly conceivable without his appropriation of phenomenology. In its turn, Husserlian phenomenology was open to a hermeneutic reinterpreation or radicalization from the very beginning. Characters that show this tendency:
- The proclamation of returning to "the things themselves" (e.g. in Husserl's programatic Logos-essay).
- The reconception of philosophy in terms of a "science of true beginnings, or origins," a science that is "concerned with what is radical," and therefore is "radical itself in its procedure".
- The ideal of a scientificity sui generis for philosophy; the insistence on a specifically philosophical, i.e. phenomenological method; the preference of description over construction; the emphasis laid on "experience," "essence," and "meaning."
- The dismissal of the authorities, the quest for an "unprejudiced," "presuppositionless" research, and the urge to return to the original sources of intuition as the only legitimizing source for concepts in philosophy (see e.g. Husserl's "principle of all principles", Ideas I, ' 24).
Heidegger's radicalization of the innermost claims of phenomenology in his postwar lectures made phenomenology turn against Husserl. Against phenomenology in the name of phenomenology itself! Insights deriving from his intense confrontation and hermeneutic reconception of phenomenology:
- The "thing itself," if viewed "presuppositionless" enough, is not transcendental consciousness, but being.
- Similarly, the "origin" or "source" in Husserl's claim of philosophy as "science of true beginnings, or origins," is not transcendental consciousness and its reflective acts. Rather, the origin is historical. The historical ego precedes the transcendental. The transcendental ego emerges by virtue of a de-historization [Entgeschichtlichung] of the historical ego, suppressing its primordial, i.e. "original," historicity.
- Husserl's delimitation of the specific research field of phenomenology itself (transcendental consciousness) is "unphenomenological," i.e. dogmatic, affected with metaphysical bias. It is carried out not so much by returning to "the things themselves," to the true "origins"--as the maxim of phenomenology would require--as under the influence of a pre-conceived idea of what should consitute the business of philosophy. The Cartesian-Kantian orientation is traditionally and therefore dogmatically assumed rather than phenomenologically discussed and delimited. While prohibiting the making of assertions about being, Husserl tacitly commits himself to certain ontological positions without thematizing the access to those positions phenomenologically (see Ideas, I, '76; GA20 155ff., 178).
- Husserl's allegedly "pure" description is "theoretically" biased. His "natural attitude" is not natural enough; it is indeed "artificial" or "theoretical". The "experience" he conceptualizes is affected with "naturalism"--a view against which Husserl conceives himself as fighting as firmly as possible. In the "natural" attitude, Husserl tends to "experience" the reality in a naturalistic way. What is needed is an attempt to experience the intentional being more originally, i.e., in a more unprejudiced way, in its "natural" setting--something that precisely BT will provide with the title of "existential analytic."
Heidegger shows further the logos of phenomenological description to be interpretive, i.e. hermeneutical. Ricoeur calls it "the hermeneutical presupposition of phenomenology", consisting in "the necessity for phenomenology to conceive of its method as an Auslegung." Phenomenomology, thus viewed, can also be called a kind of "proto-hermeneutics" (John D. Caputo).
2.2. Phenomenology and Life-Philosophy
Heidegger frequently spoke of Dilthey's appreciation of Husserl; this may have prompted him to assume the task of uniting the impulses of both thinkers. His strategic move is, in this regard, a double one. His hermeneutic reshaping of phenomenology draws on Dilthey precisely by shifting the accent from "consciousness" to "life," and, while in approaching Dilthey's theme, "life," he employs phenomenological descriptive strategies, transforming it into a "hermeneutics of facticity." (Roughly, the theme is provided by Dilthey, the method by Husserl.) By doing this, he thinks he is doing justice not only to Husserl's innermost efforts in a more original and "unprejudiced" way than Husserl himself ever did, but, incidentally, also to Dilthey's own. Heidegger interpreted Dilthey as having striven to get access to historical reality, historical life, rather than historical knowledge. Dilthey wanted to interpret life out of itself, but this tendency--deviated and indeed distorted by the wissenschaftstheoretisch climate of the age--ended up in an attempt at an epistemological foundation of the human studies. The suggestion is that Dilthey interpreted life not from itself, but from an epistemological, i.e. distanced, perspective--one major reason why Dilthey's whole conceptuality was to undergo a hermeneutic purification. What mattered to Heidegger was access to historical being, rather than to historical knowledge with its alleged objectivity (and the difference between transforming our historical knowledge and transforming our historical being is all too apparent). But Heidegger thinks this was also Dilthey's original impulse before it became obscured and misunderstood by himself, undergoing as it did a considerable limitation. In any case, it was Dilthey's program, as Heidegger understood it, that Heidegger brought to bear on Husserl's phenomenology, that let him perceive its inadequacies, and, finally, transform it hermeneutically.
The hermeneutic transformation of Husserl's phenomenology is inspired to a considerable extent by Heidegger's effort to develop an original, "unprejudiced" approach to life. In the course of various devastating criticisms, Heidegger more often than not takes great pains to note that there is a positive and original impulse inherent in life-philosophy, that he indeed appreciates the impulse very much, while what he rejects is just its insufficient (because parasitic) realization. We should note that, when Heidegger, for all his criticism, emphasizes the positive tendencies of life-philosophy the philosopher he most frequently has in mind is Dilthey. And we can hardly conceive of Heidegger's historicist opposition to Husserl's transcendental ego, the stress upon "das Historische" without Dilthey's influence. Heidegger seems to suggest that the basic effort of life-philosophy is correct. He seems even to share the view of contemporary philosophy that the object primarily to be approached and investigated is "life." But rather than developing conceptual means adequate to its ownmost object, "life," life-philosophy relies upon the tools of the adversary for its own concepts, tends to borrow them from there. That is also the reason why, having realized that their tools are not equal to the task, life-philosophers tend to come inevitably to the conclusion that life, history, and existence are irrational.
The point Heidegger makes could be put as follows: irrationalist philosophy is really too rational, for in claiming its objects to be irrational it uncritically borrows the measure or concept of rationality from the adversary rather than developing or elaborating a rationality or conceptuality of its own that conforms to its object.
A good example of Heidegger's modified outlook is that, by adopting a hermeneutic way of seeing, traditional empiricism can be shown to be insufficiently "empirical"--indeed, laden with dogmatic "theoretical" presuppositions. Understandably enough, if Heidegger turns back to "factical life," he might be expected to heartily embrace empiricism--but the "experience" Heidegger has in mind is something entirely different from the concept of experience applied in empirical philosophy. "Experience" is a key word of the young Heidegger, but, as he elucidates it at the very beginning, "experience is not understood here in a theoretical sense, as empiricist perceiving in contradistinction to something like rational thinking. What we perceive in the first place are, hermeneutically seen, by no means something such as "sense data." "What we +first* hear," writes Heidegger in Being and Time, "is never noises or complexes of sounds, but the creaking wagon, the motor cycle. We hear the column on the march, the north wind, the woodpecker tapping, the fire crackling." And he adds significantly: "It requires a very artificial and complicated comportment [Einstellung] to `hear' a `pure noise'." In other words: to claim we first perceive a "pure noise" requires having changed comportment, having assumed a theoretical attitude. In like manner, what we do see in the first place is not something like colored surfaces, or, still less, "sense data," but e.g. the professor's chair, a ready-to-hand object in our surrounding world. What is immediate¬ly given is not acts of consciousness; an immediate, unprejudiced experiencing knows of no acts of consciousness, sense data, pure sounds or noises, complexes of colors and surfaces, and the like.
3. Gadamer’s re-elaboration of and contribution to hermeneutics:
hermeneutics as a philosophy of oppenness
Heidegger's hermeneutic way of philosophizing has been re-elaborated and thereby transformed into a philosophical hermeneneutics by Hans-Georg Gadamer. The reason for Heidegger's doing hermeneutics rather than reflecting upon it is, presumably, his self-conscious choice to be concerned with the subject matter rather than with the method applied. When Gadamer set out elaborating his hermeneutics he thereby shifted the focus on the sort of understanding going on in the human sciences, i.e. he again restricted the scope of his reflection, even though he remained Heideggerian enough to claim the main message of his Truth and Method to be anti-methodological; as one of the first American commentators, Richard E. Palmer put it, "the title of Gadamer's book contains an irony: method is not the way to truth". In fact, Gadamer is not concerned "with the practical problems of formulating right principles for interpretation"--this is what hermen¬eutics was traditionally assumed to provide--; "he wishes rather to bring the phenomenon of understanding itself to light".
Let me now turn to a more global view of hermeneutics and try to spell out some aspects of its significance. The general (and traditional) philosophical significance of hermeneutics may be seen to lie in the fact that philosophy has been handed down in texts; wherever we look we have to do with texts which require interpreting, appropriating, and handing overbut even refutation and criticism are not productive unless based upon preliminary understanding of what the texts to be refuted or criticized have to say. The relevance which hermeneutics has for the sciences is provided, second, by the fact that hermeneutical thinking illuminates some wider horizons of life, or of the life-world into which the sciences themselves as particular forms of socio-historical human activity are embedded. Last but not least, hermeneutics has also some considerable practical relevance: hermeneutic openness, as an attitude essential to this thinking, may help educate and bring up people to be critical and self-critical citizens, able to understand and respect alien conceptions and cultureslife-worlds other than their own. In a pluralistic universe, what Gadamer calls a “logic of questioning and answering” *4 becomes particularly important in helping us work out a mutual understanding (Verständigung). Understanding a text is, on a hermeneutical view, understanding it together with its truth claims, on the one hand, and letting the text challenge our own criteria of judging it on the other. The main hermeneutic error one may commit in interpreting philosophical texts lies, from a Gadamerian viewpoint, not so much in applying false or bizarre criteria, but, rather, in making the viewpoints and the criteria of our confrontation with the text inaccessible to critical scrutiny.*5 Hermeneutics may thus be claimed to have an openly political and practical import lying in its anti-dogmatic character.
Let me now try to spell out some of the consequences of Heideggerian and Gadamerian hermeneutics with regard to the relation of philosophy and history of philosophy. The problem of authority and tradition have always played an important role in hermeneutics. Heideggerian and Gadamerian hermeneutics provides a new approach to the relation between philosophy and history of philosophy. Usually, philosophy is held to be competent as to validity and truth, and the history of philosophy is assigned the role of reconstructing how things really were. History of philosophy is supposed to establish the precise tenets particular philosophers of the past held, whereas systematic philosophy is claimed to be competent to decide whether the tenets so reconstructed are true. This view is epitomized by Quine's quip "that people go into philosophy for one of two reasons: some are interested in the history of philosophy, and some in philosophy." On this view, however, as Alaisdair MacIntyre put it:
"The past will have become the realm of the de facto. The present alone will be the realm of the de jure. The study of the past will have been defined so as to exclude any consideration of what is true or good or rationally warranted [...] Enquiries into what actually is true, good or rational will be reserved for the present."
It is not simply reverence for the past whose absence may be complained here. More importantly, this conception involves a serious self-contradiction which MacIntyre sums up as follows:
"Quine has joked that there are two sorts of people interested in philosophy. On the view that I have just sketched, the counter-joke is: the people interested in philosophy now are doomed to become those whom only those interested in the history of philosophy are going to be interested in in a hundred years' time. So the philosophical nullifying of the past by this conception of the relationship of past and present turns out to be a way of nullifying ourselves in advance."
What is at issue for hermeneutic philosophy is the concept and practice of understanding. Central to it is the insight that past philosophies address us together with their claims to knowledge and truth, and that unless we read them with regard to their truth claims we carry out no real understanding of them. To neglect truth claims of past philosophies amounts to closing ourselves off from the past, to giving them no chance to participate in our discussion of them. Detachment from the past turns out, as Gadamer has convincingly shown in his critique of historicism, to be detachment from the present, from one's own contemporaries. In Macintyre's eyes this amounts to "a way of nullify¬ing ourselves in advance." Understanding a text should then be, as has been stated, understanding it together with its truth claims, on the one hand, and letting the text challenge our own criteria of judging it on the other. The main hermeneutic deficiency in interpreting philosophical texts lies, on a Gadamerian view, not so much in applying false or bizarre criteria. Rather, at a closer look, it lies in making the criteria of our evaluation of, or confrontation with, the text inaccessible to critical scrutiny (see, Truth and Method, p. 270: "The text that is understood historically is forced to abandon its claim that it is uttering something true"). This could be called a kind of preliminary neutralization of critique and may be considered as a latent threat to openness and liberal thinking. Conversely, the autonomous elaboration and self-conscious practice of hermeneutic may well contribute to the development and strengthening of a self-critical thinking, to a better cross cultural understanding, and also to a better relation to the past.
Understanding is, for Gadamer no less than for Heidegger, always basically self-understanding. Strictly speaking, in a Gadamerian sense we can be said to have understood something only if, in it and by it, we have come to understand ourselves--what we are and have become. Also for Heidegger, understanding is related to how one always already finds oneself in the world involved in existence. Self-understanding is, therefore, self-transformation, self-formation. At this point, hermeneutics becomes practical philosophy.
Self-understanding as self-formation is clearly also edification. Gadamer claims, in a provocative manner, that the specific scientificity of human sciences [Geisteswissenschaften] lies in Bildung.*6 Since Bildung is a central concept to his hermenutics as well, Gadamer thereby recuperates--in opposition to the attempt of modern philosophy to conceive philosophy in terms of science--the notion of philosophy as wisdom. This notion was not only pushed into the background by modern philosophy, but also swept away as something old-fashioned and worn out And in his influential book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Richard Rorty contrasts analogously "systematic philosophy" and "edifying philosophy".
Rorty views Gadamer as "substituting the notion of Bildung (education, self-formation) for that of `knowledge' as the goal of thinking. [...] In this attitude getting the facts right (about the atoms and the void, or about the history of Europe) is merely propaedeutic to finding a new and more interesting way of expressing ourselves, and thus of coping with the world". "[...] the quest for truth is just one among many ways in which we might be edified", even though, Rorty admits, for the positivist this "may seem little more than the reiteration of the commonplace that even when we know all the objectively true descriptions of ourselves, we still may not know what to do with ourselves." Edifying philosophy is characterized by the "protest against attempts to close off the conversation". It tries to avert the danger that "some given vocabulary, some way in which people might come to think of themselves, will deceive them into thinking that from now on all discourse could be, or should be, normal discourse"--thus it tries to avert "the freezing over of culture".
At this point we have to do – to adopt a Gadamerian term – with a merging or fusion of horizons: hermeneutics and pragmatism are merged. One way of spelling out the common concerns is provided by Robert Hollinger as follows: "For both hermeneutics and pragmatism, the social practices and traditions of a specific historical or cultural world are the horizons of existence. There are no `free floating' universal truths, although the hope always exists that there will be some consensus among cultures about say, moral ideas, e.g., through what Gadamer dubs `the fusion of horizons': the merging of different outlooks through dialogue and interpretation. But dialogue rests upon the willingness and ability of people in different traditions, or different people within the same tradition, to work toward mutual understanding and cooperation through continued dialogue. This gives rise to a communicative model of community."
Let me finally add a further contribution to the practical import of hermeneutics. To illustrate one of many ways to conceive positively, i.e. not purely extrinsically, the relationship of philosophy to politics, viz., to the life of a community in general, I wish to make reference to a significant book of hermeneutic literature written by the Italian philosopher Luigi Pareyson Verità e interpretazione. Pareyson argues that philosophy, conceived in terms of remaining true to truth both in thinking and acting, does not require being extrinsically and complementarily applied to praxis. In order for a philosopher to have political relevance it is enough for him to be really a philosopher. That is to say, he ought not to become a politician; it is precisely as a philosopher that he may assume political and public importance--provided he ever does. (This view comes pretty much close to Rorty's rejection of the notion that "if a philosopher is any good at all, he is good for political purposes".) Philosophy, understood in such comprehensive terms, is, not only "thinking correctly", but also "acting correctly". The conception of philosophy as embracing both "thinking" and "doing" points apparently to something like a social role--a suggestion confirmed by a quick glance upon the relationship of philosophy to science. Indeed, while the distinction between laymen and experts is painstakingly preserved by science, (biologists cannot engage in dialogue with non-biologists), philosophy adresses everybody, i.e. questions of common interest. Philosophy is not a science, but rather love of science, and perhaps even the science of love.
This argument reminds us of one of the central concerns of Gadamer's main work--presented in a short chapter dedicated to the interpretation of Aristotle's concept of phronesis. Practical knowledge, Gadamer reconstructs Aristotetle as saying, refers to the changing situation in the sublunar world. What it comes down to is to find the right way to act from time to time, to realize the good in this changing world. As opposed to technical knowledge, here the question is no more one of applying some kind of a pre-existing universal knowledge--phronesis is not the application of general knowledge to the singular case. It is not learnt and cannot be forgotten. The fact that it cannot be forgotten shows our uneasiness to accept as an excuse for somebody's behaving improperly, say for lying, an answer like this: " The reason for having behaved the way I did is that I have forgotten (or I have failed to learn) that lying is bad.”
Philosophy thus conceived has then a specific community-constituting function, perhaps also such a mode of being. Philosophy, conceived in terms of hermeneutics, seems to be destined to provide the cultural context and element for the continuing dialogue, debate and discussion of the essential issues, pertaining to the normal public and political life of a community. To claim this is not to claim that the life of a community is exhausted, or absorbed, by such a dialogue. But it is to say that dialogue and debate on the essential issues constitute one important aspect of the life of a community--a recognition which regrettably becomes ever more compelling nowadays against the background of what is going on in our world of globalization.
The concept of Bildung and edification brings us back to the past. It shows that one part of contemporary philosophy, in several important respects, turns back to the Greeks. Philosophy, thus conceived, is not science, but rather a way of living, a form of lfe, that is to say, as Heidegger put it in one of his early lecture courses, it is the self-reflecting, self-illuminating, self-modifying enactment of life itself. Philosophy relates eo ipso to the life of a community, has ethical-political character in itself, therefore it does not require being complemented, as a kind of annex or appendix, by a kind of political or social philosophy.
This view about the practical import of hermeneutic philosophy is confirmed in another context by Michael Oakeshott who calls philosophy the abbreviation of a tradition, which provides the occasion for immanent critique and discussion of common heritage. And that might be one way of making sense of the claim I quoted from Robert Hollinger at the beginning of my paper, namely that hermeneutics is a philosophy of "ontological and cultural pluralism."
1 - David C. Hoy: “Heidegger and the Hermeneutic Turn“, in: The Cambridge Companion to Hei¬degger, ed. Ch. Guignon, Cambridge 1993, p. 170.
2 - GA58, 55: ". . . Ursprungswissenschaft letztlich die hermeneutische ist."
3 - GA56/57, 216.
4 - See Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1, pp. 375ff.
5 - On a phenomenological-hermeneutic view, the criteria of philosophical criticism are also redefined. The only reasonable phenomenological criterion of critique is claimed to rest on situational or motivational grounds; purely free-foating, “conceptual” questions are to be avoided (GA 56/57: 125ff., see GA 63: 71). See in this regard also the Heideggerian-Gadamerian distinction between “questions,” “questioning,” and “problems” (in the sense of free-floating Neo-Kantian “Problemgeschichte”): GA 63: 5; Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 26, ed. by K. Held (Frank¬furt/Main: Kloster¬mann, 1978), p. 197; Grundfragen der Philosophie. Ausgewählte »Probleme« der »Logik«, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 45, ed. by F.-W. von Herrmann (Frankfurt/¬Main: Klostermann, 1984), p. 7f; Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1, pp. 381ff. It is not indifferent to note that, on this hermeneutic view, the “conceptual” question of what hermeneutics “really” is turns out to be no less meaningless. For more on this point, see my paper “Gibt es die Hermeneutik? Zur Selbst¬reflexion und Aktualität der Hermeneutik Gadamerscher Prägung” (in Internationale Zeitschrift für Philosophie V, 1996).
6 - What makes the human sciences into sciences can be understood more easily from the tradition of the concept of Bildung than from the concept of method in modern science. [...] In view of the claims this new science [the natural science] made to exclusivity the question was raised with increased urgency of whether in the humanistic concept of Bildung there was not a special source of truth. In fact we shall see that it is from the survival of the humanistic idea of Bildung that the human sciences of the nineteenth century draw, without admitting it, their own life.” „The idea of self formation or cultivation (Bildung) [...] was perhaps the greatest idea of the eighteenth century, and it is this idea which is the atmosphere breathed by the human sciences of the nineteenth century, even if they are unable to offer any epistemological justification for it.”