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IN
PHENOMENOLOGY
Editorial Board:
Joseph J. Kockelmans, The Pennsylvania State University
Algis Mickunas, Ohio University
Richard M. Zmler, Vanderbilt University
Scope
The
purpose of this series is to foster the development of phenomenological philosophy
in in
culture genemlly, offer opportunities for the application of phenomenological methods that
call for creative responses. Although the work of several generations of thinkers has
provided phenomenology with
results with which to approach these challenges, a truly
successful response to them will require building on this work with new analyses and
methodological innovations.
G.
her generous and circumspect advice. Special thanks are also owed
to Pierre Kerszberg of the Philosophy Department at the
Pennsylvania State University. I am indebted as well to James M.
Edie of Northwestern University for his suggestions concerning the
organization and thematic structure of this volume, and to William
McKenna, editor of the Contributions to Phenomenology Series
at
Kluwer. For their work in preparation of the manuscript, I thank
the staff
Loyola College in
Maryland. And finally, I am appreciative of the support offered- by
the Faculty Development Committee
Loyola College.
This volume was presented to Joseph J. Kockelmans by his friends
and colleagues
Meetings of the American Philosophical Association in Atlanta,
Georgia.
SECTION I - HERMENEUTIC RATIONALITY?
Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 .
An Attempt to Determine the Logos of Hermeneutics . . . 37
CALVIN O. SCHRAG / Transversal Rationality .......... 61
HANS LENK / Towards a Systematic Interpretationism . . . . 79
SECTION II - HERMENEUTIC ORIGINS:
the Foundation of His Transcendental
Phenomenological 'First Philosophy' ............... 91
Later Philosophy ...................... ........ 113
Ego: Sartre's Critique of Husser . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
SECTION m - HERMENEUTICS AND ONTOLOGY:
HEIDEGGER
In.tuition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
vom Grund' ................................. '137
of Heidegger ................................ 255
OFSCmNCES
Empiricism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . 309
Hermeneutics of Natural Science ................. 363
LESTER EMBREE / Phenomenological Excavation of
Archaeological Cognition or How
to Hunt Mammoth. 377
MICHAEL HElM / Heidegger and
ARION L. KELKEL / The Enigma of Art: Phenomenology
of Aesthetic Experience or Archaeology
of the Work of Art?
...........................
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 469
INDEX ........................................ 491
Meerssen
in
degree
in
Angelico, Rome. Earlier on, he had earned a "Baccalaureate" and
a "Licence" from the same institution. Upon his return to the
Netherlands, he engaged in a series of post-doctoral studies. His
first subject was mathematics, which he studied under H. Busard
who
taught at the Institute of Technology at Venlo (1952-55). A
major turning-point then occurred when, from 1955 to 1962, his
post-doctoral research centered simultaneously around physics
under A.D. Fokker at the University of Leyden, and
phenomenology under H.L. Van Breda at the Husserl Archives of
the University of Louvain. Still
in
position as professor of philosophy was at the Agricultural
University of Wageningen from 1963 to 1964. Even though he had
been a Visiting Professor at Duquesne University
in
1962, the year
1964 marked the actual beginning of his career in the United
States. He
permanently at the Pennsylvania State University from 1968
onward, where he became a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy
in 1990, he also held a professorship at the University of Rittsburgh
from 1965 to 1968.
Continental European philosophy in this country. Indeed, from
1965 to 1967, not only did he create (together
with
World, he
essential tools for a generation of students of European philosophy:
these are his introductions to the works of
Edmund
Martin Heidegger. In addition, he edited a most useful anthology
of fundamental writings in phenomenology, which include both
primary and secondary sources.
©
Husserl's. Like Husserl, he
the foundations of mathematical and exact sciences. His own path
to phenomenology reflects his primary concern for the history of
these sciences. His aim is to reflect critically on the ontological
status of scientific entities. Technically speaking, this brings him
close to a position
constructive empiricism, but his
originality lies in the claim that the truth of scientific entities is
thereby not dissolved, but is still at issue. At the same time,
Kockelmans has always shown a permanent concern for the
quality of education
of himself as educator. concern is reflected in the
publication of several anthologies dealing with various aspects of
philosophy, all primarily designed for undergraduate students.
Herman Van Breda and Alphonse de Waelhens introduced
Kockelmans to the world of
phenomenology during his years at
Louvain. Kockelmans' own position can be aptly referred to as
"hermeneutic phenomenology," a position which is deeply
influenced by Heidegger. By hermeneutic phenomenology,
Kockelmans means a philosophical reflection which dwells within
a sphere prior to
Heideggerian notion of concern. Thus; all understanding of
intentionality, intuition, or temporality is to be medi,,:ted by
interpretation, but the emphasis
discharge us from a systematic attempt to master these ultimate
entities for their own sake. On this account, Kockelmans does not
associate himself with the strong current of deconstructionism now
advocated by several "post-modern" philosophers. Man's Being is
inherently temporal, which for him implies that our task is to
reflect upon what is needed in order
to
of classical metaphysics
meaning
himself: "Philosophy consists effectively
the critical reflection on our human experiences and on the
world in which we have these experiences as well as on our own
self, and this reflection is to be enacted from the perspective of the
totality of meaning of which we
can now conceive."
liThe
attempt to take stock of things.
Ours
has been a century of
extraordinary change; and change of a sort that appears only to be
accelerating as the millennium draws to a close. To have lived
through this century is to incarnate the memory of an historical
epoch unsurpassed i terms of quantitative shifts. But many today,
when speaking of this era, would hesitate to
use
so
confidently in times past, as part of the stock vocabulary of
"modernity," now signify precisely those concepts which are most
suspect when reflecting on lithe fate of the West" today. At the
core of these doubts are suspicions about that which, culturally, is
most
rationality,
about
science and technology and their respective
claims to truth and value. Is the truth of science no more than a
privilege granted the power of calculative, instrumental thinking?
How are we to characterize, then, our own philosophical
situation today? Such a question can easily be dismissed as simply
too general; any answers rejected as necessarily reductionistic. But
perhaps not unlike the Seinsfrage with which Heidegger began
Being and Time, the generality of this question is no proof
that it
need not,
To
answer might indeed prove
extremely ldifficult. Let us proceed,
then, via negative. We may not be able to agree at all on what (or,
in some of the more radical cases, on whether) philosophy is or
should be. But we
what it used to
be. Ironically from such a perspective, i f philosophy has made
"progress" in the twentieth century, i t is precisely insofar as it has
explicitly surrendered its traditional self-understanding; an
understanding
which, among other things, legitimated the ideal,
i f not the fact, of progress. The ideals of philosophy as "rigorous
science," as foundational,
groundwork,"
In describing both major camps of contemporary philosophy,
analytic and continental, Husserl's comments from the Summer of
1935 seem appropriate, and prophetic:
T.l. Stapleton (ed.), The Question o/Hermeneutics, 1-14.
© 1994 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
rigorous, science - the dream is over ...Philosophy once thought of
itself as the science of the totality of what is. Thus even i f
philosophy itself drew the distinction between the world, as the
totality of what exists finitely, and God, as the principle uniting the
infinity of finite things, it thought itself capable of knowing
scientifically the metaphysical principle and the world through the
principle. Whatever it later substituted in the way of world
transcending, metaphysical [principles], however it conceived of the
unity of the absolute, it thought all too long that scientific paths
could lead to the transcendent, the absolute, the metaphysical... But
these times are over - such is the generally reigning opinion of
such people. A powerful and constantly growing current of
philosophy which renounces scientific discipline, like
the current of
For a long time analytic philosophy, for better or worse,
seemed immune to this spectre which Husserl saw haunting
Europe. Yet the recent influential publications of Rorty and
Feyerabend, for example, have proven this to be an illusion.
The hermeneutic turn in philosophy is one strand, albeit a
very important one, in the unfolding of twentieth century
philosophy. In
begins by noting the triumph, even in America, of hermeneutic
philosophy over its competitors. Hermeneutics is meant here,
and
in this volume as a whole, not in a narrow sense, confined to any
specific school of interpretation or interpretation-theory. The
hermeneutic turn is
methodological hermeneutics of Dilthey, the phenomenological
hermeneutics of Riceour, the philosophical hermeneutics of
Gadamer, the critical hermeneutics of Apel and Habermas, and
even, perhaps, the "post-hermeneutic" deconstructionism of
Derrida. At the center of this circle (and of this volume), however,
as a kind of nodal point around which various trends converge
and then spin off again
in
Contemporary hermeneutic philosophy unfolds in the shadow
of Heidegger; of his transformation of phenomenology,
of
his re
vitalization of the question of the meanings of Being, of his
ontological critique of the privileging of Vorhandenheit and of
 
fore-structure, of his "thinking" (Denken) about the origins of art,
about the essence of technology, about the ways of language.
How is it, then, with twentieth century philosophy? With
hermeneutics in particular? What is its own genuine essence, its
logos? How does hermeneutics relate to traditional philosophy? To
Kant?
To
Hegel? To Husserl? What possibilities does hermeneutics
offer for a philosophy of the future? What does it have to say
about
limits, about what
it means to be who we are? Such are the
questions that belong to those who try today to think
philosophically. Such are the questions of this volume, The Question
of Hermeneutics.
Hermeneutic Rationality
looks to hermeneutics
a possible philosophy of the future,
wondering whether it is adequate to the kinds of tasks and
problems, to the sense of things that is emerging as we move
toward
the
success of hermeneutic philosophy in establishing itself as a
dominant intellectual force,
i f
for the future of hermeneutic philosophy.
Poggeler traces the emergence of hermeneutics from a critical
consideration of Hegel'S understanding of philosophy. Do history
and time, when conceptualized and idealized from a certain
metaphysical perspective
as in
The Phenomenology
their distinctive natures? Man's complex relation to history and
time called for a "many-levelled hermeneutic" of the sort begun by
Dilthey, and these efforts were seemingly given a more radical
foundation derived from Husserlian phenomenology by
Heidegger's Being and Time. Heidegger offered, as a new "logic of
philosophy," a formal indicative hermeneutic in response to
Hegel's dialectic. Yet P6ggeler notes that Heidegger's project failed,
as testified to, for example, by his burning of the preparatory
studies to the third part of Being and Time. Later attempts on
Heidegger's part to·
point and the future of hermeneutic philosophy in doubt.
 
4 Timothy J. Stapleton
Poggeler's essay ends with a vision of the future as a task, and
with a series of concrete questions which need to be thought
through i f hermeneutic
origins and to the future.
Karl-Otto Apel's essay, as " ...an attempt to determine the logos
of hermeneutics," raises the central
question
hermeneutic starting point and the radically situated nature
of
the
act
of
or
hermeneutic which could offer the possibility of a normative,
critically oriented hermeneutics, one which
could
answer not only
the quaestio facti but also, in the Kantian sense, the quaestio iuris. A
key point in Apel's argument involves challenging one of
the most
Apel takes to
of "validity"
pre-reflective lifeworld.
This shift or turn is discussed in numerous later essays in this
collection, particularly those by Biemel, Kisiel, and Stapleton.
Calvin Schrag's "Transversal Rationality" takes up this
theme
of the plight of modern rationality as under siege. Like Poggeler
and Apel, he recognizes the depth of
the challenge posed to
of the descendants
of the hermeneutic turn. Schrag goes back to Kant and his three
separate critiques, seeing
this division of cultural spheres a
gesture which sets the stage for the drama of modernity and
beyond. But rather
philosophical reflection, Schrag suggests
notion
the
grounding or horizontal play; a transversality which seeks a
middle ground, neither affirming nor denying the
ahistorical, but
the
"trans-historical."
The last of the essays in this section, "Toward a Systematic
Interpretationism" by Hans
historicism, to that of perspectivism in a more Nietzschean sense.
Lenk's essay displays the interpretive (hermeneutic) character
of
 
for a systematic, methodological interpretationism which, on the
one hand, avoids the kind of "levelling" and skepticism of which,
for example, Nietzsche warned, without on the other hand falling
prey to a dogmatism or absolutism.
Hermeneutic Origins: Husserl and Phenomenology
Heidegger 's (and hence hermeneutics') relation to Husserl and
phenomenology is a complex and controversial one. But Poggeler
is surely right in pointing to the importance of Husserl's
phenomenology in Heidegger's attempt to give to hermeneutics a
radical foundation. The three essays in this section each indicate
a dimension of Husserl's evolving phenomenology which
would
phenomenology and fundamental ontology: (1) the evolution of
Husserl's understanding of the nature of philosophy itself, as a
foundational science, (2) the new significance given to the life-world
in its foundational capacity
(3)
non-egological in a distinctively Sartrean (existentialist) vein.
The first essay by Gerhard Funke traces
in
on his own
understanding of the nature of philosophy as a foundational science
and on the nature of transcendental foundations orgrounds as well.
This movement, Funke suggests, can be viewed as a passage "from
Brentano to Kant." A deeper appreciation of Kant's transcendental
turn, and in particular of Kant's highest principle of experience
[that the conditions for the possibility of experience are at the same
time the conditions for the possibility of the objects of experience]
allow Husserl to supplement the notion of intentionality derived
from Brentano with that of constitution. Husserl's ongoing struggle
with psychologism, naturalism, historicism, and anthropologism
provides the contours within which his understanding of the idea
of philosophy as the science of ultimate origins, of ultimate
knowledge, unfolds. The critique and "correction" of Kant
which
Husserl undertakes is guided by this idea of rigorous science as
well. As Funke notes,
Philosophy exists to represent the idea of completed knowledge, the
final telos anchored in the essence of knowledge, and to regulate all
future knowledge according to this idea. Philosophy in this old
Platonic sense is either nothing at all,
or it exists
become the most rigorous science in the most radical and
most
ultimate sense. (see below, p. 111)
At the center of Walter Biemel's piece is the consideration of
Husserl's new understanding of the lifeworld that emerged in the
years after his retirement from Freiburg. Biemel's article leads us
to ask if Husserl's relentless search for genuineness of origins, for
radical foundations, leads in a direction far beyond
that of his
understanding of the
understanding of the nature of philosophical foundations, and of
the meaning and status of theory and
of the theoretical a prioris
now "founded" in the lifeworld? The earlier article by Karl-Otto
Ape seized upon the privileging of
the lifeworld as a move which
tends to undermine both the universality and
the normative force
of theoria. Biemel focuses upon the emergence of this thematic in
Husserl's later writings. Yet we
must ask, is it really the case that
for Husserl the emergence of a new, founding significance for the
lifeworld means the surrender of the infinite, eternal ideals of
scientific rationality?
of the Thanscendental Ego: Sartre's Critique of Husserl," James
Edie turns to examine that which is usually taken to be new and
distinctive in Sartre's conception consciousness, is a
egological, non-substantial, pure intentionality.
a careful
analysis of the relevant texts of Husserl and Sartre, Edie shows
that Sartre's critique is based upon a fundamental misunder
standing, that Sartre and Husserl say virtually the same thing on
this issue of the ego, that Sartre's attack is "factitious, verbal, and
non-substantial."
(and
rather interesting consequences seem to follow. For Sartre, the non
egological nature of subjectivity provides the basis for the most
fundamental of ontological distinctions in his philosophy, that
 
seminal nature of Husserl's phenomenology, the full force of his
discovery and explorations
be
given
no
himself explicitly consider the ontological questions raised by
Heidegger and Sartre, the grounds for such a phenomenological
ontology have clearly been laid.
Hermeneutics and Ontology: Heidegger
The publication of Being and Time in 1927 can be considered
the pivotal event in the emergence of hermeneutic philosophy.
Despite the abruptness of its appearance, and of the text's own
beginning, it
meditations on
the background of Being
thinking evolve and move toward that radicality of spirit and
substance which ushered in, among other things, the hermeneutic
revolution in philosophy?
Breakthrough," Theodore Kisiel turns to this early lecture course,
along with habilitation work of 1915-16 ("The Doctrine of Meaning
and Being in Duns Scotus") to cast light on Heidegger's path to
Being and Time. Kisiel provides a detailed explication of the
emergence
hermeneutic" of which Poggeler spoke earlier. He also points to
the importance of Lask in Heidegger's development, as Heidegger
takes up the problem of establishing philosophy as the primal
or
the emergence of the theoretical from the pre-theoretical shows
itself, along with the network of questions concerning access to,
language for, and the significance of, such. a primal, founding
sphere of origins, of Ur-doxa. Kisiel suggests that such a move, for
Heidegger, involves a certain "proximity" to Husserl, but one
which transforms the latter's "principle
of
than understanding
at, sees,
or inspects].
section, "Heidegger and Categorial
Intuition," also takes up
and Time. Heidegger's lecture course from the summer semester of
1925, The
History of the Concept of Time, is the focus and occasion
for a reflection upon the often noted significance of Husserl's
Logical
phenom
in
possibilities so radical
superfluous the central methodological moves of Husserl's
transcendental turn. Yet at the same time the author hesitates to
embrace Heidegger's use of categorial intuition and his critique of
Husseri, and instead poses the question of the nature of "first
philosophy." How would
which question is more originary, which provides the ultimate
point of departure: the question of being or the question of (the
critique of) reason?
With the essays by Thomas Seebohm and Richard Palmer, we
move from a consideration of the
very early, "pre-Being and Time"
Heidegger to reflections on
much
lectures of 1955/56, Satz vom Grund; Palmer to Gadamer and
Derrida as interpreters of Heidegger, with the emphasis decidedly
on Heidegger's later thinking [for example, The Origins of the Work
of Art, the Letter on Humanism, and the two-volume Nietzsche
work].
Seebohm begins by noting the transitional nature of Satz vom
Grund,
he called the "preliminary
and clumsy" language of Being and Time to "other forms of
presentation." In this regard Seebohm's essay reminds us
of the
point made by Kisiel, that from the very beginning the problem of
a formal indicative hermeneutics, the problem of a pre-theoretical
science " ..ultimately becomes a problem of language: how to
approach and elucidate the dynamic, and thus elusive, facticity of
1 £
In "Considerations of 'Satz vom Grund'" Seebohm spells out
what he takes to be a few of the implicit presuppositions and
implications of this work by Heidegger. Seebohm sees in
to Ab-grund,
in
Heidegger's development, but rather the continuation of a line of
thinking begun much earlier, in Heidegger's critique of Kant and
of Husserl's transcendental phenomenology. His suggestion,
however, is that
critique of Husserl, has shifted by the time of
Satz vom Grund. In
the 20's, Heidegger had taken Husserl to task for failing to ask the
question of Being, a question which he
thought
to
be
phenomenological question. The question of phenomenological
origins leads to the question of Being. From the perspective of
Satz
vom Grund, however, Husserl's approach is faulted in asking for
ultimate
puts
into
in it echoes of Schelling's attempt to think the Absolute
in
its
Richard Palmer provides a valuable overview of hermeneutics via
a comparative study of these two influential thinkers who, in their
own independent and autonomous ways, inherit the Heideggerean
legacy. Palmer chooses four texts from each of their works, texts
which not only are particularly revealing in terms of the respective
authors' own thinking, but which also focus on interpreting
Heidegger. Hence central Heideggerean themes, many of which
have been discussed in earlier essays, are now made visible in
terms of their fruition in the ongoing development of philosophical
hermeneutics.
The essays found in the final
two
explore hermeneutics in practice. How does the hermeneutic turn
work itself out, what is its cash value, when reflectively directed
toward the natural and social sciences, toward art and ethics?
What new insights, alternative approaches, fresh and original
I f
is this challenge
manifested with regard
IAgainst Transcendental
up one specific
empirical philosophy of
Philosophical Association, Joseph Kockelmans questioned the
metaphysics implicit in empiricism. Van Fraassen takes up that
challenge. "Against Transcendental Empiricism" provides the
occasion for an interesting dialogue between hermeneutics and the
empiricism to which van Fraassen himself subscribes. He argues
that
position) cannot be understood essentially
in
terms
articulated or merely presupposed. As an alternative, van Fraassen
introduces the notion qf
of particular interest emerge
here. First, van Fraassen insists upon the epistemic autonomy and
priority of such stances or attitudes over beliefs or doctrines.
Secondly, in articulating and justifying this autonomy, he turns to
Husserl's distinction between the
Transcendental Empiricism" goes a long way in building bridges
between the more analytically oriented and the hermeneutic and
phenomenological philosophies of science.
and significance of immediate intuition in an attempt to throw
light upon the nature of the gap separating familiar, everyday
experience from symbolic experience. One of the basic claims of
modem physics is that appearances of ordinary life should be
corrected because they may be deceiving. Thus, every major
advance made in physics seems to have been responsible for
mutilating what
we understand by intuitive knowledge
independent of all theory. Yet, in the case of time, physics has
always relied on a supposedly immutable type
of ordinary
experience, namely, the irreversible passage of time from past to
future. Kerszberg follows the development of ideas in relativity
and post-relativity physics concerning immediate intuition,
employing insights and suggestions from Husserl's transcendental
phenomenology.
Introduction
11
The two essays which follow take up the task of a hermeneutic
philosophy of science. Patrick Heelan, in "Galileo, Luther, and the
Hermeneutics of Natural Science," displays the depths to which
hermeneutics is implicated in the process of science. He draws the
distinction between methodological or weak hermeneutics
(textually oriented) and strong hermeneutics (in the context of
perception and pre-perception), the latter being hermeneutic
phenomenology. After exhibiting and justifying this distinction via
the choice of exemplary instances (Luther and Galileo), he
concludes with a sketch of what a hermeneutic philosophy of
natural science would
be like. The "phenomena" of this
hermeneutic would lie not in theory, nor in data gathering, nor in
the importance
experiential, laboratory research programs.
Archaeological Cognition" practices what Heelan might call a
strong hermeneutics. Embree notes, for example, that while
archaeology is indeed a human science it is unique due to its
central reliance on non-verbal data; that is, on remains rather than
artifacts. Archaeological cognition may indeed involve, Embree
shows, a "hermeneutics of traces," but this sort of indicational
awareness is not a reading
of texts. Embree's carefully practiced
hermeneutic phenomenology also displays the level
at
logic-oriented theories of induction but on that prior evidencing
which lies at the bottom of archaeological cognition, on the unique
nature of "indicationally representational awareness."
Finally, in "Heidegger and Computers," Michael Heim uses
Heidegger's reflections on technology for carrying on the task of
thinking. Heidegger did not live to see
what
the vehicle for the most powerful technological revolution of our
century: the proliferation of the microcomputer. Heim draws not
only upon Heidegger, but also on the writings of Marshall
McLuhan and Eric Havelock in
an attempt to shift philosophical
reflection on computers beyond the constraining confines of the
often combative questions concerning artificial intelligence (mind
as computer, mind versus computer, etc.). Rather than computer as
opponent, he suggests the notion of computer as component in the
activity
or
event
worlds of science and technology to the worlds of art
and
morality.
Arion Kelkel, in "'The Enigma of Art: Phenomenology of Aesthetic
Experience or Archaeology of the Work of Art?" brings together,
under the heading of a question, different strands of the
hermeneutic project which may stand
in
tension
with
liThe Origirl of
he
eidos, its origin, in aesthetic experience (a kind of "aesthetic
cognition," in the language of Embree's essay), even when that
experience is understood
essential noetic-noematic correlations involved therein,
do
justice
to the autonomy, the mystery, the power, the truth of the artwork?
Heidegger's analysis of the work of art, which played such a
powerful role
Palmer's essay), is emblematic of the turn from his earlier
phenomenological approach. Kelkel's question, therefore,
articulates the question not only of the enigma of the work of art,
but also the enigma of the relationship between phenomenology
and hermeneutics.
The final essay, "Ethics in Our Tune" by Adriaan Peperzak,
represents a return to our beginning point, a closure of the
hermeneutic circle.
questions about the future of hermeneutics, about the adequacy of
its origins, and about the relation between hermeneutic and
practical philosophy. The sense and the urgency of these same
questions animate Peperzak's essay.
"continental philosophy" today has,
ethics at the center of its concerns. In this regard
phenomenology and hermeneutics continue the traditionbegun by
Descartes' deferral of moral reflection. In terms of modernity,
Kant's project is "the great exception," his entire philosophy being
dominated by the moral perspective. Why, Peperzak wonders, are
virtually all contemporary moral philosophies merely re-worked,
refined versions of 18th century theories?
In
museum
of
cultures" in which we live, with the formalistic attitude which
accompanies it. But can form and content, theory
and
practice,
so
easily separated? Peperzak ends with a call for a sort of
hermeneutic renewal.
importance,
are not converted into building material for
new manners of existence and thought on the verge of being
born." Such a moral, existential"de-struction" of the past remains
as a task for a hermeneutics which is to be a philosophy of the
future.
Loyola
Sciences and Transcendental
Appendix IX, pp. 389-90.
by Otto Poggeler
(Translated by Dale Snow)
The future, according to Hegel, is a yielding element in which
a variety
of
and desire
to build
hermeneutic
even in America
triumphed over competing
understand.
Nothing
has
of
future
of
hermeneutic philosophy which is in question, because
this philosophy has yet to arrive at a point of departure
which
not to fall prey o
the
insufficiency of the previous
Therefore as a first step I would like to show
how i t came to
pass
that
discussion
of
the
Hegel's
philosophy. The third
by
the
articulated.
that
the
Fall
of
was also intended to serve as the
preface to
© 1994
Otto Poggeler
a reminder that philosophy bears a Greek name. However, it also
contained a demand that philosophy ought to discard the name of
mere love of wisdom and become genuine [wirkliches] wisdom.
Plato had already made the distinction: the gods may possess
wisdom; among men only the sophists pretend to posses it and sell
it as commodity. Philosophy remains the striving after wisdom
which emerges out of ignorance and remains always threatened by
it. Thus a distinction has to be made between what one knows and
does not know. Philosophy, therefore, is one of the products of
Eros who is not a god but rather negotiates as a daimon between
gods and human beings. Through Eros, by means of conception
and birth, men still seek in the mortality of each individual
something like an immortality; they also seek the power of the law
against the constant decay of the social order, and seek in
philosophy a standard of wisdom with which to define these laws.
This love of wisdom, which according
to
with the philosophically inclined, always comes only "suddenly"
to its target, is, according to Hegel, to become real wisdom. The
preface therefore also says that [for this reason] that which is
regarded
as
"scientifically worthless myths." The times known as times of
fanaticism (such as the Neoplatonism of late antiquity and
medieval philosophy) held the late dialogue "Parmenides" to be
the highest artistic achievement of ancient dialectic and at the same
time the positive expression
concepts such as ''being-non-being,'' which "suddenly" trans
formed into each other produced ever more complicated
conceptual structures (such as substance-accident), so that the
conceptual process finally succeeds
in overtaking and becoming
reflective about itself or speculative. This logic or dialectic can
grasp what God is - that thinking of thinking, which is at the
same time life and reality.
From the perspective of this Platonic tradition a speculative
philosophizing could claim that man can become one with God
[eine Teilhabe gewinne an Gott] who has made things as he comes to
know them. "Formerly," says Hegel in his preface, "men would
connect all things by a single guiding thread to heaven; philosophy
extracts from things that spark of light with which God invested
all created things."
modem
function without transcendent presuppositions and to build
themselves up out of their own critically tested experience. Yet
already in his
presuppositions and all connections; it is also prepared to subsume
the free subjectivity which thereby arises in an all-encompassing
object-subject of the absolute. In the passage through this nihilism
or as true nihilism and skepticism, the love of wisdom becomes
genuine wisdom. Philosophy returns to the reality which is
expressed by men in deeds and wisdom, and thereby requires and
reappropriates that free experience for itself. What is historically
constructed as wisdom achieves its binding connection and
becomes genuine wisdom or a system.
The conclusion
the Phenomenology of Spirit returns this work
to its place in the total system. In this connection the relationship
of time and concept must be separately mentioned. In the
"Timaeus" Plato has described time as an "image" of eternity:
man, who cannot join the end of his life with its beginning,
belongs in time; there he is capable only of incompletely taking the
self-sufficient eternal into himself. For Hegel human temporality is
however (above all in Christian religiosity) experienced as an
absolute negativity: the finite as the negative is negatively posited
and rescued out of the infinite; thus does time contain in itself the
power to elevate itself to eternity. Philosophy completes this
elevation when
concept becomes one-sided and dispersed in time and thereby
experienced as fateful [schicksalhaft]. I t
was precisely this
completion of spirit in absolute knowing which Hegel reclaimed
for his system. Within this absolute knowing the concept is capable
of obliterating [tilgen] time, that is, to annul [aufzuheben] the
dispersion in the
Phenomenology of Spirit organizes
which is conceptually possible. If contingent history is
conceptualized in terms of this ideal history, then one arrives at
that conceptualized history with which Hegel closes the
philosophy
of
spirit.1
 
Otto Poggeler
moral and political realm or in the areas of art and religion.
Philosophy itself understood itself as
an
together with nature to the absolute
and thus
this metaphysical perspective, still retains its distinctive nature. Is
it not tied to a teleology which misrepresents its character,
and
isn't
it
the case that the idea of the good is placed
in
too close a
connection with the idea of life, for which within certain limits the
teleological must be taken into account [beansprucht]? Since
it
of
sufficient. With insignificant modifications of this tradition, Hegel
is able to refute Voltaire's contention
that
fictitious greater length, exceeds these limits. Historical research
has, however, managed, after all, in many ways to go beyond
these limits in that it revealed the thousands of years of pre- and
early history. The
and one-half million years which are today
understood as the time of the existence of human or human-like
creatures are only two or three seconds
in
the
hour
of life which
has unfolded in the past four billion years on this planet. Hegel
still completely denied that life had in the evolution of species
undergone numerous accidents and catastrophes and thus had
something like a history. With
the
a problem.
through exact measurement? As much as 3500 years ago sundials
and water-clocks existed; the wheel-clocks of the Middle Ages
introduced a new mechanization of time. Now we can come to
realize that the overly precise contemporary instruments of time
in
which
Newton spoke seems
to be called into question. Doesn't man have only one definite,
completely subjective relation
Ernst von Baer started his work within the limits of
an
idealistic
romantic philosophy of nature; in the end he developed his well
known time-fictions [Zeitfiktionen]: the human being has, in fact,
ten to eighteen impressions
heartbeat. I f he
experienced things a thousand times faster, then he would be able
 
21
case be as a single person unable to detect the change of the
seasons, but he could follow the flight of a musket ball
[Flintenkugel]
with
the
naked
eye. On the other hand, i f he were to
experience everything a thousand times more slowly than normal,
then the change of the seasons would be a pulsation completed in
a few hours, etc.
and
wholly conditioned
by our form of life? In this case it is difficult
to
time by means of a generally binding
concept, as Hegel does In general, must we not give up the
metaphysic which approaches time, evolution and history with
ideas such as "life," lithe True," and lithe Good"?
Henri Bergson has come to this conclusion at least with
respect to traditional metaphysics. He no longer proceeds from
metaphysical definitions of the soul, world and God, and their
interrelationships to ideas; the most basic given,
upon
showed that lived and experienced time as duration cannot be
grasped in terms of static representations of space. Since this time
contains
in
[Verknupft] with freedom. Thus in both German and English
translations Bergson's book is entitled Time and Freedom [Zeit und
Freiheit].
in subsequent publications, for example in the evolutionary theory
of Creative Evolution [in which] the objective time of this
development is recovered as the presupposition of lived or
subjective time.
in Paris
it
contained as an intuition or subjective experience a metaphysics
which had long ago been dismissed by science. But does the
metaphysical position being criticized belong only to Bergson's
philosophizing? Einstein himself represses probabilistic positions
in his physics; the irreversibility of time suggested by thermo
dynamic theory, and with it the subjective time of the living
creature were never really taken seriously. When his Swiss friend
Besso died, Einstein wrote shortly before his own death that to be
preceded
in
believers, the division between past, present and future has only
the significance
of an
 
lived time in favor of the desired eternity.3
The philosophy which no longer wants to decide its
metaphysical problems dogmatically must discuss all the various
languages that have been developed in physics,
but
example, the language of the mystic, in which, according to
Bergson, life in its uniqueness apprehends itself in the moving life
of the godhead (Gottheit). Won't this make philosophy becoIIl£ a
many-leveled hermeneutic? WIlhelm Dilthey began, in his philo
sophizing, from the work of the
human
sciences
and
humanistic
studies; but he was well aware that this starting-point was one
sided and required supplementation by other points of view.
Could these different viewpoints be brought together in a single
philosophy of self-reflection? This self-reflection contains the
understanding of a situation which must be distinguished from
that kind of explanation which in the
end would
whom
we
is radical, constituted
and
determined.
4
Thus the move
which Dilthey himself never made lies close at hand: from this
hermeneutic to construct the adjective "hermeneutical" as the
designation of a new way of philosophizing.
II. Dialectic and Formal Indicative Hermeneutics
Martin Heidegger has attempted to give the many tentative
efforts of Dilthey a radical foundation derived from Edmund
Husserl's phenomenology; thus on his way to Being and
Time he
had spoken of a hermeneutical philosophy. Still i t was Soren
Kierkegaard who forced the departure from Hegel's dialectic and
sought in a formal indicative hermeneutic a
new
logic for
philosophy. In one of the crises of this view, in the lecture
The
Fundamental
Concepts
Heidegger presupposed that philosophizing
·fallen under the
 
23
(Augenblick)."
Kierkegaard had "for the first time in [the history of]
philosophy really grasped" that which is called the "moment
(Augenblick);" thereby inaugurating "the possibility of a completely
new
epoch of philosophy."s In a long footnote in his The Concept
of Dread
which, according to Plato, the basic concepts became transformed
into one another, as the moment (Augenblick); at the same time he
reproached Hegel with having seen the connection of the dialectic
to the moment (Augenblick) and to history, but then misrep
resenting it. Kierkegaard was not able to oppose the Hegelian
dialectic with another fully developed philosophical logic. I t was
this task which Heidegger set himself, especially since
he
wanted
to be a philosopher and not remain a mere "inspirational"
[erbaulicher] writer like Kierkegaard.
mental philosophical problem of the One and
the Many. The
young Socrates encounters the old Parmenides. The latter held
Being to be one. Is the One the one Being or the one Existent [ein
Seiendes], which belongs to the many? Here it was essential, not
just to sense, but also to think. It was for this reason that Zeno
developed the dialectic of the One and the Many out of the
breakdown
of
sensible intuition. Thinking, according to Plato, now
seeks that idea with respect to which the Many participates in the
One. Only the dialectic itself can succeed in grounding this
participation: that self-directed movement of the concept in which
the basic concepts, "in a blink of an eye," are transformed into one
another. This "blink of an eye" (the exaiphnes) remained for Plato
an atopon - one which touches the eternal.
This is where Kierkegaard goes beyond Plato: this ' 'blink of an
eye" [is to
our
moment (Augenblick) in which time and
eternity intersect. TIme in itself is an empty succession; but when
it takes the eternal into itself, qualitative differences and the leap
to the new become possible, future and past differentiate
themselves. The Greeks were not able to see this relation so clearly,
since they excluded nothingness from Being. Certainly
philosophers have battled against deception, but as something
which does not actually exist. In contrast to this, the Christians
assumed that
and sin. [A sense
most fleeting experiences of which we are aware -
in an atom
and in the blink of an eye, as Kierkegaard says with the apostle
Paul
(I
Cor. 15, 25). Therefore the life of man remains defined by
fear and trembling; by that
dread, in which existence in itself
trembles. Inasmuch as Hegel seeks to obliterate time through
the
concept, he has suppressed the tension between the moment and
the inaccessible eternity. In contrast to this, Kierkegaard wants, by
means of an "indirect message," to inform humanity of the stages
of life, but not
preempt the decisions (such as the decision to
believe) which it will be necessary to make in a human life.
This indirect message, in which
even the non-believer can refer
to the dimension of belief, was formed by Heidegger into a formal
indicative hermeneutic. What an indicative sign is was, not
coincidentally, explained most persuasively in his lecture
Introduction to
as
a
the theologians yet again to a metaphysical theology. In opposition
to this, Heidegger believed that he had to give up that which from
Plato and Aristotle up to Hegel and Troeltsch had been the end
point of philosophy and the beginning of the sphere of religion.
Philosophy knows nothing of God; perhaps it is not
even
permitted to know anything of God when He freely shows and
reveals himself. Heidegger refers in the second part of his lecture
with concrete exegeses to the epistles of St. Paul, n which i t is
stated in the first epistle to the Thessalonians that the last things
will reveal themselves in
or kairos philosophy cannot anything decree. However, a
phenomenology that wants to be true to human experience both
can and will gain access to the religious dimension of life. It must
present the many-facetedness of life in a formal indicative method
(manner) in order for us to be able to move in an appropriate way
through the different dimensions. To exhibit this, philosophy itself
needs an appropriate logic or theory of concept-building, which
has yet to be worked out.
Edmund Husserl distinguished between generalization and
in of his
 
25
levels of commonality - f rom the blue of this piece of clothing to
the color blue, from one color to colors in general, then to the
qualities, etc. Formalization, on the other hand, goes back to the
logical and categorial forms [Formungen] of which generalization
has always made use. Here the truth of the old saying that Being
is
not a genus (which one can approach by generalization) is to be
seen. In Heidegger's formal indicative concepts, on the other hand,
it is to be carefully taken into account that the interaction of
and in
ways. The region to which something belongs must be taken into
account in the construction of the concept. Thus the human being,
who is "existence," is not to be taken as merely present
[Vorhandenes] or at hand [Zuhandenes]. In theoretical work or in my
daily routine I take a thing as an random instance of the
realization of a general type: I am familiar with what a table is,
and take the table before me as a helpful, but arbitrarily chosen
case of a general type, as a That [Dass] to a familiar What [Was]. It
is in this fashion that the human may not
grasp himself or his
fellow man. In his existential being there can be moments in which
his being or essence determines itself in a
new
in
his
"That" his "What" manifests itself in a new way. That further
means that the indicated essence of the human being is not given
in a theoretical experience of evidence such that this experience of
evidence is grounded in itself. It is rather the case that the formal
indication leads into a decision, for example, the decision to
believe, which cannot be prescribed by thought. The formally
indicated concepts extend themselves toward a consummation
which from the point of view of thought itself remains in
uncertainty. Heidegger, in his lecture on phenomenology and
theology, points out that philosophy, considered in itself, has no
relationship to theology, but that despite this theology can use the
work of philosophy, not
about belief, but in formally indicated correction[s] philosophy
refers theology to the arena [SpieZraum]
of understandable belief
resurrection,
etc).6
How the formal indicative hermeneutic could be the logic of
philosophy itself was what Heidegger wanted to demonstrate in
the third section of Being
and Time. However, this part was never
 
categories a path: the different dimensions of time (proper and
improper future, past, and present) were ordered in terms of
schemata; the differing interactions of these schemata make
it
[Vorhandensein], at hand [Zuhandensein], and existential Being.
Aristotle, in his hermeneutic, had placed special emphasis
on
the
proposition, because it had not only a possible relation to the truth,
as do the question or the exclamation, but also is subject to the
alternatives of "true or false." [In contrast to] the apophantic "as"
of the proposition, which in its theoretical use takes something as
something, i.e. to be something, and thereby attributes a predicate
to a subject, Heidegger presents the hermeneutic "as," which
makes present to me out of the disclosure of my surroundings a
table or hammer prior to any more theoretical comprehension. Is
there
not
which
an existential being can exist as himself? To explain this existence
the analysis must also set forth the schema of the future: that "for
the sake of itself" in which he who exists understands himself
from an open Future. Were this actual schema of the future to be
faded into the unreal schema of the given"for-which" [Wozu], then
the surroundings thrust themselves into the foreground, in which
a manual laborer unselfconsciously pursues the practices peculiar
to his work. I f this "for-which" is also suppressed and the
apophantic "as" given precedence over the hermeneutic lias," then
the theoretical attitude can emancipate itself from the merely
present. This temporal interpretation, which distinguishes the
different kinds of being in terms of their temporal status, in no
way leads to a radical historicism or relativism;
i t
is after all
intended to make clear why, for a mathematician, two times two
is always equal to four whenever he does mathematics. However,
with respect to the constellation of the different determinations of
time as a whole, it is maintained that they
must
part
of
Being and Time, the systematic construction, ought for that reason
to be brought into connection with a second part, the historical
destruction.
burned
the
part
 
27
flawed by aporias. On the one hand, time as "temporality" was
supposed to produce in the schemata of its different dimensions a
structure of principles, from which philosophy as interpretation or
hermeneutic could grasp the multiplicity of Being and thus ground
itself. But then on the other hand, time itself in this sense is
supposed to be grasped as temporal and thereby as something
which can only be wrested out of history. Heidegger had sought
to avoid this aporia in that he assumed on the basis of the so
called turn [Kehre] that the differentiation of Being into distinctive
determinations in general itself only took place as
an
historical
event and belongs in every case in the appropriate historical
constellation. Philosophical thinking must also place itself in
history
in
in which it, in other endeavors - for example,
in a poetic or literary work of art, has a partner whose task can in
turn be influenced by thought. Only this temporal-historical view
seems to lead to a hermeneutic as a logic of philosophy. Still
Heidegger himself
in his latest writings referred to the fact that the
understanding of Being or the truth of Being as history presses
history itself into the foreground in
an inadmissible fashion.
History is only one of the dimensions of Dasein and is therefore
usually distinguished from nature, for example, or ideal being.
History therefore ought not to be presented without further ado as
[the] fundamental dimension.
relativization of the historical when, for example, the historicity of
Dasein is juxtaposed with the "within-time-ness" which is of the
same origin. However, can
level where Hegel's speculative and self
reflective dialectic has made its home? I t could be doubted
whether Heidegger was able, in his different ways, to hold fast to
the universality as well as the radicality of the phenomenological
starting-point. Thus hermeneutic philosophy, as it has unfolded in
the last thirty years, faces an unconquered task.
ITI. The Future as a Task
One can attribute a future to hermeneutic philosophy, it
seems, because it has asserted itself world-wide as one of the
competing philosophical directions. Certainly one cannot
comprehend that which calls itself "hermeneutical philosophy"
 
hermeneutic and Hegel's dialectic alone. (It
is
much more likely to
be the case that one must fear that the significance of this
opposition would
Heidegger
and
standing
in
Dilthey,
of
philosophy represented as hermeneutics.
human sciences, such as theology or jurisprudence, but also
medicine, for example, seem to be
bound
and
speculative-hermeneutical traditions of the Continent. A typical
author, such as Richard Rorty, places hermeneutic philosophy [in
the context of] the opposition of existential knowledge and the
rational discussion of public affairs. Thus do life and history,
which have led to the specifically "Western" distinction between
private existence and the public realm, appear to have subjected
philosophy to their given [ausgebildeten] forms.
The French philosophy of today, on the other hand, tends to
exaggerate the hermeneutical starting point so
much
and
introduced suspicion into hermeneutics: that which is held to be
knowledge is perhaps only the mere reflection of a particular
unconscious form of life. However, Ricoeur wanted
to
combine
as a return to pre-conscious life, a teleology,
which
with
possible form of life
is
historical
and
and
with
HOlderlin, wanted
to hold fast to at least the "trace" [Spur] which would in leaner
times lead to other beginnings. However, Emmanuel
Levinas
sought to show that this searching for that which is essential holds
fast to the metaphysical orientation on identity (even though it is
a historical identity). In truth we are not, or are not exclusively,
on
the trace which is proper to the self, but rather always also
on
the
us
left on the unconscious as the
result of a traumatic injury. Doesn't the existence of those
references in thought to
are absent lead beyond a hermeneutic which seeks an all
encompassing whole, even if only for just this historical moment?8
Or does philosophy lose in this radical destruction and
deconstruction
"the
shown
that a philosophy more geometrico is not possible; but has it
also been exhibited that geometries are possible and
[that] Euclidean geometry perhaps
with
the introduction to the different approaches to these "matters," and
so
to
the
also to Rudolf Bultmann's new theological view. The future
of
various forms and variations of the hermeneutical view and its
self-dissolution, but rather in the appropriate transformation of the
radicality and universality of phenomenology and philosophy in
general.
9
It was Hans-Georg Gadamer, who with his major work Truth
and Method produced world-wide interest in hermeneutics. His
philosophical hermeneutic maintains the universality of under
standing and interpretation in
two directions. In one respect it is
claimed as valid that the interpretation which is set in opposition
to the universality of understanding, must be
taken back
in
the
process of understanding and is in every case a limited case of
understanding. In the ontological sense this means, for example,
that we must indeed
Plato's connection
then we
must agree that Plato's universality makes his the stronger
position: the idea [Idee] can be thought both from the viewpoint
of
Then
Gadamer
an open
by the
other[ness]
of our origins or out of a dialogue. However, this
Other
in
each instance be based upon itself. It is for this reason that it is
said that the idealism of a Kant or Fichte must, in the end, triumph
over Schelling's allusion to nature or even to nature as the dark
origin in God. Hussed's account ought, given his hermeneutic
transmutation through Heidegger, to remain superior to, for
example, the unrest of a Max Scheler, who with Nietzsche and
Freud took the will to live [Lebensdrang] as antagonistic to spirit.10
Isn't it, however, the case
that
harmonizing integration, must be converted into a hermeneutic
philosophy, which would like to do more justice to contradictions
and differentiations? Then explanation need not
become the
understanding will be distinguished by an exposition [Erortern],
that ought not to be grasped one-sidedly from the viewpoint of
understanding. Explanation governs phenomena according to
determinate aspects,
formations (for instance, a mathematical formalism) based on their
own consistency [Konsitenz].
An immediate "understandability" of
these indicating or exploring accounts is not always given and is
also not required (Maxwell's equations are cleverer than their
author). Understanding, in contrast, finds itself in a particular
situation and
is, for example, itself influenced in a historical
connection by that with which it is concerned; thus it must
examine and differentiate a pre-understanding [Vorverstandnis],
without being able to escape its immersion in its situation and the
effects thereof. Philosophizing is not a universalized hermeneutic,
but set apart from explanation and
understanding as an exposition
through
a
delimitation from the traditional hermeneutics. Its radicality is
breached, in that it is connected to life, which surges past it,
limiting it. Philosophy must self-critically take into account that it
can be interwoven with life and its mysterious currents
[Tendenzen ].
Following Descartes, Neo-Kantianism took physics on the one
side and history on the other as model sciences. However, we
must ask ourselves today whether this dogmatic opposition of
explanation and understanding exhausts the necessary
 
differentiation of knowledge. For example, can this opposition
provide access to the living? Certainly man has, in the meantime,
also found here the key to the structure of living things and
therewith the possibility of a technical exploitation. Still technically
supported
unimaginably long eras of evolution, its
forms and niches. The technical exploitation of life which has
become possible is as dangerous as it is useful. The physicists'
discovery
of
drama
struggle to rule the world and of industrial competition. However,
one ought not to overlook the fact that it is the enormous
machinery of atomic technology, and only that, which allows men
to discover the depths of things and to see the cosmos itself with
new eyes. For the first time in his history, knows more
definitely that life in the cosmos presupposes unlikely conditions
and in any case will
endure
for only a limited time. At the same
time, our earlier consolation has been taken from us; namely that
the decline of one culture can be the rise of another; the entirety of
life on this planet is in question. One may indeed admire the
wisdom with which life in its evolution has adjusted itself to its
surroundings. Today, however, man can no longer trust the play
of
an
evolution beyond good and evil or any history. We must
take on a responsibility which is new.
A philosophy which provided orientation would be needed
today as never before. However, the task which has been set for
philosophy today
determine our time - science and technology, even a counter
movement such as art - expect no help from philosophy. For
philosophy takes it as self-evident that it must fundamentally alter
itself. Since Dilthey, one recapitulates the classic development of
Western philosophy under the rubric of "metaphysics" and speaks
then of an end to metaphysics (one may follow Heidegger, who
championed this way of
himself as still contained in the metaphysical striving for identity).
But this end of metaphysics does not mean that those questions
which used to be called "metaphysical" no longer come up: but
rather that these questions have been re-released as unsolved and
insoluble.
we
live
or
 
universe would decidedly alter man's self-understanding. Still we
know nothing about the possibility of
such an encounter. Perhaps
we are altogether too new to this world to be able to discuss
questions such as these. Is there a tendency toward the spiritual
[Geistege] in living things in general, or has this only been achieved
on our planet in the most extraordinary of circumstances, [or] is it
unlikeliness itself? Philosophy can
however, it is only returning
to
Socrates' questions, Socrates who wanted to know
what
not
by
This philosophizing comes to itself in
that
This
to place itself as the origin - for example, "fundamental
ontology" prior to an application to particular questions. Only
from the various different points on a periphery, thus from a
scientific or humanistic starting-point, or out of an encounter
with
presents
and
or even
super-historicism, since
history, for it, is only one main feature among others belonging to
the speculative mid-point. The discussion must first of all clarify
whether it is concerned with a priori elements of our knowledge,
with constants of our being-in-the-world, with historical structures,
or metaphysical suppositions and considerations. One also ought
not to assume that European philosophy, as metaphysics, prepared
the ground of science and technology
and
unique historical development, today's world civilization. It might
be the case that there is something in technology itself which
belongs to humanity as an ever-present possibility, and that
therefore could have been developed even without the above
mentioned European contribution. The so-called "anarchy of
systems" or the incommensurability of world-outlooks and
Weltanschauungen cannot
 
33
pluralism of starting-points belongs to it. On the other hand, the
conversation among the starting-points which have different
historical origins, thus for example between East and West,
remains to be achieved and developed as a positive possibility for
philosophy. Thus the radicality and universality of philosophizing
can only be preserved in a truncated form within a hermeneutic
philosophy. This philosophy dares not reject a question;
it
also
cannot break off the open process of questioning. Rather, every
must and
its limitedness. A hermeneutic philosophy which attempts to
 
undifferentiated anthropogenesis
in
learning process the fundamental moments of speculative logic and must
therefore raise the question of the relationship of the concept and time.
Concerning the various connections between system and history, see my
discussion in Hegels Idee einer Phiinornenologie des Geistes (Freiburg/Miinchen:
Verlag Karl Alber, 1993).
2. Erich Rothacker has called upon Baer's fictions; see for example
Geschichtsphilosophie
88ff.
Rothacker has developed a differentiated philosophical reflection on the work of
the human sciences, but has failed to pose the fundamental questions radically
enough. See in this connection my remarks in "Rothackers Begriff der
Geisteswissenschaften," in Kulturwissenschaften: Festgabe jUr W. Perpeet, ed. H.
Liitzeler (Bonn: Bouvier-Verlag, 1980), p. 306ff.
3.
Dya
Natur (Miinchen/Ziirich: R. Piper & Co., 1980), above all p.
286. See also my
Zeit," in:
Aratro Corona
Messoria: Festgabe jUr Gunther Pflug, ed. B. Adams et. al. (Bonn: Bouvier-Verlag,
1988),
p.
153ff.
4. On Dilthey and hermeneutic philosophy see my introduction to Wilhelm
Dilthey: Das Wesen
in the Dilthey-Jahrbuch, volumes 3 and 4 (1985 and 1987).
5.
(Frankfurt a. M.:
Vittorio Klostermann, 1983), p. 225f. See p. 421ff on formally indicative concepts.
Unfortunately Heidegger's lecture "Introduction to the Phenomenology of
Religion" of winter 1920-21 with the detailed explication
of
in
a.
Theologie (Frankfurt a. M.:
7.
In remarks late in life Heidegger distinguished among three phases of his
essential intellectual development, see in this connection
my
Alber, 1983), p. 139ff.
8. Concerning the conception of the "trace" as an answer to Hegel's
connection of time and concept see, O. Poggeler, Neue Wege mit Heidegger
(Freiburg u. Miinchen: Verlag Karl Alber, 1992), p. 31Sff.
9. See in this connection Phenomenology and
the
Natural Sciences, ed. Joseph J.
Kockelmans and T. J. Kisiel (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1970). On the
following see Joseph J. Kockelmans, ''Hermeneutik und Ethik" in:
Kommunikation
und
(Frankfurt a.
10. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, Band 4 (Tiibingen: J.CB.
Mohr, 1987); Oskar Becker, Grosse und
Grenze der mathematischen Denkweise
(Freiburg/Miinchen: Verlag Karl Alber, 1959), p. 161ff. See also in this connection
my essay "Hermeneutische und mantische Phanomenologie," in Heidegger:
Perspektiven zur Deutung
1984), p. 321ff.
by Karl-Otto Apel
practical philosophy is
contemporary philosophical situation. This way of posing the
problem provides one of the two stimuli for my attempt to
determine the logos of hermeneutics. The other resides in the fact
that in contemporary philosophy, a tendency has persisted for
quite some time to define the internal relationship between
hermeneutics and practical reason in such a way that one is no
longer able to identify [the element of] practical reason therein.
The difficulty is already apparent, for example, in view of the
following suggestion: on the one hand the hermeneutic
understanding is to be grasped from the pre-scientific connection of
communicative agreement in dialogue, on the other hand as a
"sense-event" that is "transmitted by tradition" through "fusion of
horizons," which "plays itself out" like a cosmic event in nature in
such a way that, in the end, there will be no more point to
assuming a regulative principle of a deeper or better understanding.
Instead one must come to terms with the fact that, especially when
the interpreter can use the "temporal distance" between himself
and the interpretandum in the sense of a "historically effective
consciousness," one can always achieve only a "different
understanding.,,2 This is supposed to be the case because the
existential
pre-understanding
of the world and hence by "prejudices" which can
never be fully taken into account by the critical consciousness of
the interpreter, For in the
end,
interpreter, is more powerful that his critical consciousness. So
argues, as is well known, Hans-Georg Gadamer in his grounding
of hermeneutics, inspired by Heidegger,
in Truth
and Method.
Already in view of this surrender of the regulative idea of a
possible progress in understanding -and that means also in the
judgment of related validity-claims in communicative agreement-it
is difficult to establish the simultaneously maintained internal
37
© 1994 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
connection of hermeneutics to practical philosophy and thus to ethics
and to an ethically understood politics. For is i t then supposed to be
possible to uncouple ethics from the claim,
indeed
responsibility to a binding judgment, for example, of normative claims
to
validity?
of
this
uncoupling
imply
that progress in understanding a judgment's claims to truth and of
normative, finally moral, claims to rightness must be held to
be
possible in principle?
I t should be emphasized that of course it is not necessary to
hold that the history of the world
or
path" or must be conceived of or
prophesied
(Lyotard) in the sense it is
employed by
3
of reason arose, Kant had
i n t r o d u ~ ~ c : L a n e n t i r e l y i f f e r e n t
concept
the
subject at hand, already
established that i t is ourinoral duty to hold a morally relevant
progress
an
attitude resisting, so to speak, frustration, to again and again
reconstruct history such that its practical continuation from a moral
perspective can appear to be possible.
4
idea
of
be internally related to a
progress in understanding, also to be a "meta recit" of
modernity
which, in the meantime, has died What would then still remain?
Gadamer at least does not wish to give
up
obligation. For him and his German followers there still remains
a
and
Wittgensteinian
undertones. In its name one could explain how there still can
be an
say: the "practices" of a "form of life," which determine
respectively the language game and to that extent also the fore
structure
be no ethic
a claim to
understanding for us (for
so to speak, whose internal connection with practical reason
should
be uncoupled from the regulative idea of a universally valid
progress in understanding and judgments of claims to validity.
 
pragmatic" turn that something of a liberal- conservative synthesis
seems to be emerging
Anglo-Saxon countries today.5 For me this synthesis would be, as
I have already indicated, no longer acceptable either as a basis for
a hermeneutic
as a basis for an ethic. The reasons for this
disapproval will be
can already
What is their situation with respect to the intemal relationship
between hermeneutics and practical philosophy?
The first thing
who
rely
upon Heidegger and Nietzsche is a subversive style which cannot
be rendered compatible with Gadamer's conservativism which ties
hermeneutics to the received tradition - and to that extent also to
Plato and Kant. This becomes clear in the latest discussion between
Gadamer and Derrida in Paris in 1981.
6
give up ties to the received tradition of western
metaphysics and also the connection to "logos" and therewith,
consistently, even ties to the discipline of "hermeneutics." Here,
apparently, the concern is no longer with "interpretation" at all, let
alone
with
but rather with "deconstruction" in an extension of that which
Heidegger - still in the name of an existential hermeneutics -
called "destruction" of traditional ontology?
But, even according to Heidegger's demand to "think" the
meaning of Being that, due to the ontic-ontological difference,
escapes from us in the "event" of the "clearing-concealing"
[lichtend-verbergenden] disclosure of world-meaning - finally
thinking this meaning of temporal Being in its difference from the
entity
[Seienden]
even this demand of a hermeneutic of
Being
Derrida's deconstruction
would like to question as still being a product of the concealedwill
to "logocentric metaphysics," the will to the "presence" of the
"signifie." This is supposed to be achieved with the help, so to
speak, of a post-structuralist semiotic of the infinite "play" of
"differance," which sets free the symbolic sense, but at the same
time "displaces", so that only the infinite play of the
"dissemination" of the significants remains for us - the always
fruitless attempt, as it were, to discover and root
out
the transcendental significatum - in search of the "archi-ecriture"
in the "ecriture" that for its part takes the place of the presence of
the world.
Where, in this case, could the normative obligationof symbolic
sense and its internal connection to practical philosophy lie - i f
we assume that this question or its formulation were not also to be
deconstructed? It would seem that according to Derrida there
remains only the leap, the "rupture," in the attempt to understand
the claim of a foreign symbolic sense and - as an equivalent for
the intersubjectively binding character of meaning - the aesthetic
suggestion of the "grand style," which manifests itself
in
Nietzsche
"event," the "consignment" [Zuschickung] of Being in "the fate of
Being" [Seingeschick], once he distanced himself from the brutality
of the will to power as being itself grounded in the metaphysics of
subjectivity. However, we can no more here of normative
bindingness in the sense of practical reason than we can for
Nietzsche's posing of values through the will to power. And
through even more careful consideration,
it
the
Being and Time, the logos of an inter
subjectively valid understanding and claims to validity of
normative judgments are replaced by
the immediate connection of
the "conscience" to the "silent voice of Being." Essential to this
thought from the beginning is the questioning of the logos
of
man must "correspond" to,
is in the project [Entwurj] of one's own Being or
in
the
grasping of the kairos- thus 1933 - or finally in "devotion" with
respect to the "fate of Being." The ultimate result of this kind of
thinking is the suspicion that the logos of philosophy, reason, is to
be thought of as itself an epochal event in the history of Being -
that is, in the revealing-concealing temporalization
[Zeitigung] of
as
valid, or even be able to understand the claim that reason,
as
principle of validity, is itself a contingent historical product, a
function of time?
 
41
a critique, not from the standpoint of the will to power, but rather
from the standpoint, so to speak, of temporal Being. And this
paradox of a radical critique of reason,
in which reason functions
has in the
acteristics of post-modem thought.
In the light of these obvious paradoxes i t can be seen that even
Gadamer's apparently moderate hermeneutic has, regardless of its
conservative attitude
crossed the Rubicon of post-rational "thought" - whatever
that
may be. For Gadamer too, along with the late Heidegger, wants
the condition for the possibility of understanding - and the
Kantian formulation suggests, the condition also
for the validity of
in
that is, in the context-dependency of the always "other [different]
understanding." Precisely in the admission of
this
dependency on
history, not as a hindrance to objectivity but rather simply as a
condition of
the overcoming of historicism, the overcoming of the difficulties in
which Dilthey remained entangled because he held fast to the
methodological ideal of
nature of the solution to the historicity problem which he
champions. On the contrary, he explicitly discusses this in Truth
and Method,
- or rather, from the provocatively stylistically employed -
irrationalism of the "deconstruceurs." Gadamer takes on Hegel at
a decisive point in his
work,
even emphasizes, had thoroughly recognized the historicity of our
thinking, but still wanted at the same time to "mediate" it with the
claim to the universal validity of thought. The uniqueness of
Gadamer's assessment of Hegel consists, on the one hand, in his
holding Hegel's "absolute mediation of history and truth" for the
unsurpassable
is
which
from the standpoint of reflection is "not to be overturned." Yet
the other hand
he is convinced that the actual truth is against it,
that
Feuerbach and the young Marx, for a self-overcoming of the
philosophy which found its completion in Hegel was somehow
justified. o
of Hegel as the absolute mediator of logos
and
Gadamer no longer holds a paradox-free solution to the historicity
problem to be possible or even necessary on the level of
argumentation. Since he sees the "dialectical superiority of
reflective philosophy" in Hegel as unsurpassable and formally
irrefutable, he seeks a way
out
by hacking through the Gordian knot. He explains the dialectical
superiority of reflective philosophy in general as simply a "formal
(false) appearance.',ll This means that Gadamer now employs the
reproach of "sophistical" not only against Hegel,
but
rather against
all reflective philosophy and at the same time employs mere hints
about the factual success of the refuted opposing positions in history
as, so to speak, arguments against the validity of arguments. With
respect to the problem of historicity, that reads as follows:
Heinrich Rickert, who in 1920 thoroughly refuted "life philosophy"
through argument, was unable to come anywhere near the influence
of Nietzsche and Dilthey, which was beginning to grow at that time.
However clearly one demonstrates
has
suggests that they are
attempting to bowl one over. However cogent they may seem, they
still miss the main point. In making use of them one is proved right,
yet they do not express any superior insight of any value. That the
thesis of skepticism or relativism ":futes itself to the extent that it claims
to be true is an irrefutable
argument. But what does it achieve? The
reflective argument that proves successful here falls back
on
the
arguer, in that it renders the truthfulness of all reflection suspect. It
is not the reality of skepticism
or
of truth-dissolving relativism, but
the claim to truth of all formal argument that is affected.
U
This appears to be, I must confess, a very peculiar argument
for many reasons, of which I will mention here only the most
important in the following order:
1. First, I wish to ask in general:
how
could one as a philosopher show that "irrefutable arguments" fail
to address the "real problem"? Perhaps by a reference to thefactual
success
of the refuted position; for example, by reference to the
"reality of skepticism or truth-dissolving relativism"? But this
 
43
seems to end in the capitulation ofargumentative reason and to open
the door to purely rhetorical suggestion and dogmatic assertion.
Who
that bring
uncriticizeable?
2. However, I would like to return from this general position
to the concrete
How does Gadamer know that the refutation ofrelativism-historicism
as a position that one cannot hold without self-contradiction must
remain unfruitful and without
this questionable verdict because he absolutizes certain historical
paradigms of an apparently "dialectically victorious" philosophy
reflection; for example, on the one hand the Hegelian paradigm, not
at all uncriticizable, of a speculative-dialectical, total or absolute
mediation of history and truth, and on the other, that of the neo
Kantians, a merely formal reflective
philosophy which
take into account the moment of the historicity of knowledge
recognized
by
Hegel.
Is
i t then the case, especially from the viewpoint of a
philosophical hermeneutic, that
there can be no alternative to these
two versions of a "reflective philosophy"? Is i t settled that for us
today only three alternatives are conceivable? Either:
(1) the attempt, with Hegel, to "suspend" the historical
relativity of knowledge by calling upon "absolute knowledge," the
divine standpoint,
standpoint of the end of history); or
(2) the attempt, with Kant, in purely formal reflection to
maintain the claim to validity of knowledge,
without
and "prejudices" into account at all; or
(3) the capitulation o self-consistent argumentation, which makes
a virtue of the aporia of historicism-relativism and gives up all
claims of philosophical arguments to universal validity,
in
that
logos itself is understood as a contingent product of the history of
Being?
The following will be an attempt to show that these three
positions do not exhaust the possibilities of determination (or
abandonment) of the logos of philosophy and especially of
 
do
justice
to
universal claim to validity of knowledge in general and especially
the claim to a progressively better or
deeper understanding in
sense of a normative hermeneutic. Therewith would also be indicated
- a t least sketchily- that only a normatively oriented hermeneutic,
one which holds a progress
of understanding
others, has maintained - to the
internal
relationship
Transformed Transcendental Philosophy
Before undertaking to answer the questions which have been
raised by these theses, a few remarks will be made about what
should now be seen as uncontestable insights of the
hermeneutic
philosophical limitation of its scope.
To
and
the
program of a transformation of the
transcendental
philosophy
sense of a "transcendental hermeneutic."13 In the beginning the
emphasis on historicity,
in this sense the concrete dependence
of thought on language, was entirely in the foreground, as for
example in
in der Tradition des
14
After reading Gadamer's Truth
and Method, however, I underwent a gradual shift of emphasis in
favor o