4 On the Way to Philosophical Hermeneutics
Schleiermacher’s idea of a universal hermeneutics starts from this: that the experience of the alien and the possibility of misunderstanding is universal. (TM 179/GW1 182)
What one now calls hermeneutical philosophy is based to a large extent on a phenomenology. (HW 51/GW3 214)
Facticity refers, after all, to the fact in its being a fact, i.e., precisely the thing back of which and behind which one cannot go. In Dilthey (as early as volume XIX of the new edition of his works) we find life characterized as such an irreducible fact. (RHS 24/GW3 422)
1. A Discipline in Retrospect
The importance of the question of understanding in the aesthetic realm requires a redefinition of hermeneutics, or a critical reconstruction of its history, which in the end amounts to its actual construction. It is not an exaggeration to say that hermeneutics, in a certain sense, was constructed in the middle of the 1950s. Those are the years in which, while Heidegger inquires into the meaning of the word “hermeneutics” in his famous essay “A Dialogue on Language,” from 1953–54, Gadamer is working on his project of a philosophical hermeneutics.1 The discipline, which only from the seventeenth century on is called hermeneutica, the ancient methodical doctrine of interpretation, actually exhibits an extremely fragmented form. Especially because of this, and not simply because it is an “auxiliary discipline,” and is not very visible from without, hermeneutics lacks autonomy and unity. Only on the basis of a new self-understanding, achieved through a sort of autobiography, almost an anamnesis of its genesis, can hermeneutics present itself as an autonomous and unified discipline. The reconstruction accomplished in retrospect, or in other words the post-construction, first constructs the discipline. Thus the history of hermeneutics brings hermeneutics into the world.2 It is no wonder, then, that hermeneutics has been reconstructed according to the model of a linear and teleological process. Its birth act is Dilthey’s short essay “The Rise of Hermeneutics,” from 1900.3 Today this essay would hardly have any resonance at all if Gadamer had not returned to it in his section on “Historical Preparation” from Truth and Method and had not thereby confirmed the historiographical paradigm, in light of which the genealogy of hermeneutics is usually read (TM 173–218/ GW1 177–222).
The paradigm, which is repeated in almost all subsequent reconstructions of hermeneutics and is typically understood in a singular form, can be easily summarized according to its stages. The ancient hermeneía, which in the Greek world was the art of saying, announcing, explaining, and translating, produced only dispersed and disconnected rules. An initial turn is represented by Martin Luther (1483–1546) who, with the principle of sola scriptura, “by scripture alone,” defends a form of exegesis freed from all authorities. Sacred hermeneutics intertwines with secular hermeneutics, and above all with humanistic philology, which reopens critical access to the classics.4 The second turn, which marks the transition from the “prehistory” to the actual “history” of hermeneutics, is represented by Friedrich D. E. Schleiermacher (1768–1834), who is credited with having unified hermeneutics as the universal art of understanding. If Dilthey expands this art to a methodology of the human sciences, Heidegger frees hermeneutics from method and plants it in the ground of human facticity. Finally Gadamer establishes the foundation of a philosophical hermeneutics, which makes a claim to universality.
This paradigm not only presupposes a prehistory and a history, but also distinguishes between a “classical” and a “philosophical” hermeneutics, in Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s sense. This is certainly contradictory: on the one hand the history of hermeneutics finds its telos in philosophical hermeneutics, but on the other hand the latter takes shape only through its break with classical hermeneutics. Against this background it is easy to see why Gadamer’s reconstructions in Truth and Method—for example of Schleiermacher and Dilthey—are often deconstructions.
After criticisms were raised against him, Gadamer weakened the contrast between classical and philosophical hermeneutics.5 Even in his later works, though, he continued to follow this same paradigm, as for example in the anthology Seminar: Philosophische Hermeneutik, which he published together with Gottfried Boehm, and in the article “Hermeneutik,” written in 1974 for the Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie.6
2. The Congeniality of Understanding: Which Schleiermacher?
The dispute with classical hermeneutics begins with the reconstruction of Schleiermacher’s project (TM 184–197/GW1 188–201). It is necessary to stress two important limits of the reconstruction: on the one hand it returns to the image of the Romantic philosopher already developed by Dilthey; on the other hand it does an injustice to Schleiermacher, by criticizing him as if his approach were dominated by an “aesthetic metaphysics of individuality,” which would mean that he loses sight of the hermeneutic problem (TM 190/GW1 193). In short: the founder of modern hermeneutics would have—so to speak—failed to construct hermeneutics.
Such a critical reconstruction obviously supports Gadamer’s strategic goal of lending a sharper profile to his own turn. He has two ways of reaching this goal: either make Schleiermacher into a kind of anti-Hegel, that is a philosopher of empathy, of sympathy, and of psycho-genial understanding, from whom he must take a distance; or recognize the importance Schleiermacher attributes to the grammatical aspect of interpretation, in order to point out the balanced, insightful way he describes the relationship of interdependence between language and the individual. In this last case Gadamer may have found a model for the third part of Truth and Method, where he focuses on language. Indeed, an indirect recognition of this is Schleiermacher’s sentence that Gadamer takes as a motto for his chapter on language: “Everything presupposed in hermeneutics is but language” (TM 381/GW1 187). Yet Gadamer follows the first way, and this has brought him numerous criticisms.7
In his defense it can be said that Gadamer, despite his often repeated solidarity with Romantic hermeneutics, uncovers the aporias that arise in both Schleiermacher and Dilthey from their overly methodical ways of approaching the hermeneutic question. One should also not forget that, without Gadamer’s reconstructions, hardly anyone today would be speaking about Schleiermacher’s or Dilthey’s hermeneutics. Schleiermacher would perhaps be known only as an important Protestant theologian, famous in Germany for his Plato translations; Dilthey would probably be recognized for his studies on the history of philosophy and the methodology of the human sciences. Though often unjustly critical, Gadamer’s reconstructions have in both cases been rediscoveries. In his interpretation of Schleiermacher, Gadamer connects hermeneutics with aesthetics, and not with dialectics and ethics. Hence he privileges the “psychological” over the “grammatical” interpretation, even though the one appears close to the other in Schleiermacher. How does Schleiermacher characterize the hermeneutic act? To him it seems possible to bridge the gulf between the author and the interpreter psychologically, “by feeling, by an immediate, sympathetic, and con-genial understanding” (TM 191/GW1 194). Understanding for Schleiermacher involves the imitation of an original production. Thus it became important for him to return to that “germinal decision” at the “vital moment of conception,” to that living and absolutely individual moment from which the genial product emerged (TM 187/GW1 191). The imitation should also be genial and creative, like the creation itself. For Gadamer’s Schleiermacher, understanding is an art no less than speech. In this sense “hermeneutics . . . is for Schleiermacher the inverse of an act of speech, the reconstruction of a construction” (TM 188–189/GW1 192). A text or speech is not understood on the basis of its “subject matter but as an aesthetic construct, as a work of art or ‘artistic thought’” by a singular individuality (TM 187/GW1 191). From this there arises the divinatory character of hermeneutics. The divinatory act of understanding depends for Gadamer on the immediacy of feeling—though for Schleiermacher, interpretation depends on a comparative procedure even prior to the divinatory one.8
This psychologization of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics coincides with its aestheticization, since what is understood is actually the expression of an individuality that is always free of rules.9 By casting the shadow of the Kantian aesthetics of genius on this hermeneutics, it is easy for Gadamer to charge it with subjectivism. On this reading, Schleiermacher would focus our attention on the expression of the individual subject, namely the author.
It would probably have been much more fruitful to stress another feature of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics, where his distance from philosophical hermeneutics appears more sharply. Gadamer himself points to this feature at the beginning of his reconstruction, but drops the issue and refers to the context in which he develops his own hermeneutics (TM 184–190/GW1 188–189). Schleiermacher marks a turn in the history of hermeneutics because he poses the question of understanding in its full radicality. Following the lead of Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) and Humboldt, understanding is no longer assumed to be evident, since it is compromised from the outset by misunderstanding and nonunderstanding. One does not always and everywhere understand, and misunderstanding occurs not only in borderline cases or in the obscure passages to which hermeneutics is applied. On the contrary, Schleiermacher says that “misunderstanding arises on its own and understanding must be wanted and sought after at every point.”10 Misunderstanding, which may seem inevitable in the interpretation of sacred texts written in strange, old, and difficult languages, is actually only a symptom of the much more comprehensive misunderstanding that occurs repeatedly in the conversations of everyday life. In this reversal of our conventional perspective, which unifies the specific practices of hermeneutics with the more general practices of understanding, Schleiermacher also sheds light on the universality of hermeneutics. Ever since Schleiermacher, misunderstanding and nonunderstanding, even if conceived in different forms, have remained in the constellation of hermeneutics. Understanding will never again be taken for granted. Schleiermacher begins with misunderstanding and nonunderstanding, and he sees the task of hermeneutics in the transition to understanding. But there will never be a point at which the transition will be complete and the understanding will be perfect. The hermeneutic task is infinite. There is neither empathy nor sympathetic understanding in Schleiermacher.11 Even if there were they would not be the goal of interpretation, for interpretation maintains its critical vigilance in order to go beyond every form of identification. Hence one must “understand the discourse just as well, at first, and then even better . . . than its creator.”12 With these words Schleiermacher reformulates an old hermeneutic principle—for Gadamer, “the whole history of modern hermeneutics can be read” in this formulation—which, considered closely, can be traced back to Kant (TM 192/GW1 195). In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant writes, in regard to Plato’s “idea,” that it “is not unusual at all” to understand an author better “than he understood himself, because he had not determined his concept sufficiently.”13 Schleiermacher thinks, too, that understanding is a productive reconstruction that can say better what the author had said—if only because it is being said again. To understand better, for Schleiermacher, already points to understanding differently.14
In the “Afterword” to the third edition of Truth and Method, Gadamer acknowledges “a certain one-sidedness” in his reconstruction of hermeneutics; yet he still insists that Schleiermacher’s most characteristic contribution is his psychological interpretation (TM 564/GW2 462). Even later, in his “Attempt at Self-Criticism” from 1985, which leads to a debate with Manfred Frank (b. 1945), he emphasizes again the relevance of the psychological view though he also sees that he had neglected aesthetics and dialectics in his account (RPJ 43–44/GW2 14–15). Gadamer refers to his important text from 1968, “The Problem of Language for Schleiermacher,” in which he corrects his own position by more sharply outlining the process of mediation, which is never dialectically concluded between language and the speaker.15
3. The Sickness of Historical Consciousness and Dilthey’s Aporias
Hermeneutics after Schleiermacher was expanded by the “Historical School,” whose greatest representatives were the philologist August W. Boeck (1785–1867) and the historians Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) and Gustav Droysen (1808–84). For Gadamer, who had already shown the limits of aesthetic consciousness, the debate with the Historical School and subsequently with Dilthey offered the opportunity to explore the question of historical consciousness, which had already occupied him in the years before Truth and Method. If history has a goal and an end, whether in divine or human completion, then its course runs consistently in a positive direction. This metaphysical-Christian conception has also been secularized in the Enlightenment belief in progress and the Hegelian philosophy of history. Once the metaphysical background crumbles, however, the question of historical consciousness appears in its abyssal gravity. There is neither a goal nor an end to history; there are only the finite purposes of mankind, which recognizes its own finitude in its historicity—this is the tragic truth of historical consciousness. In a few works from the 1940s, particularly in the essay on “The Limits of Historical Reason” from 1949, Gadamer lets Nietzsche unmask a “historical sickness,”16 which marks the emergence of European nihilism. Has historical consciousness taught the modern human to view the world with a hundred eyes, or has it dissolved the world into the vertigo of perspectives? And what does the world of history, in all of its infinite variety, mean to the human who now sees herself or himself as historical and finite? This question had already been asked by Herder in his text on “Another Philosophy of History for the Education of Humanity,” from 1744. The ironic title, according to Gadamer, shows his intention to take a distance from every philosophy of history that is guided by the pretension of the enlightened man to become a mirror of the past.17 Since all progress involves a loss at the same time, the idea of perfectibility wanes. Only a few years later, Humboldt will warn that being in time is merely a creating and a declining. Not at all linear, the course of history appears as a chaotic wavering, in which there is neither an overcoming on the way to harmonic perfection nor an absolute synthesis. History has “no fixed goal that can be discovered outside itself” (TM 203/GW1 207).
How should one orient oneself in this chaos? How should one still find meaning in the drama of glittering victories and sad ruins? The Historical School tries to answer these questions by contrasting Herder’s and Humboldt’s conceptions to Hegel’s philosophy of history, since Hegel’s model, with its a priori teleology, does violence to historical facts. It is hence no wonder that hermeneutics becomes the path of orientation for historicism. But historicism is, according to Gadamer, an aestheticizing hermeneutics that takes on positivistic connotations, not only because it commits to facts, but also because it seeks objectivity. The criterion of interpretation that it applies is the relation between the parts and the whole. In secret it postulates that history is like a great book that must be deciphered. Yet only the text of the philologists encompasses a self-enclosed whole. By contrast, “the book of history is a fragment that, so far as any particular present time is concerned, breaks off in the dark” (TM 199/GW1 203). How could the interpreter have the entire book before them without distorting their own historicity? And how could the interpreter, on the other hand, renounce the whole that is ultimately the whole of world history?
These are the two aporias that the Historical School cannot overcome. The great question of world history must therefore remain open. Nevertheless it becomes clear that it may not be a question of whether and how humans understand history, but whether and how humans see themselves historically, each time modifying one’s understanding of history.
What becomes decisive at this point for Gadamer is the confrontation with Dilthey, though Gadamer’s interpretation is itself debatable.18 It is important from the outset to distinguish Gadamer’s reading from Heidegger’s reading of Dilthey. Whereas Heidegger breaks with the tradition of the human sciences and also with Dilthey, Gadamer prefers dialogue. Gadamer’s works from the 1950s bears witness to this, as well as the lectures he gave in Leuven in 1957.19 It is no accident that the confrontation with Dilthey opens the text of Truth and Method.20 It is just as true, however, that over the following decades the figure of Dilthey becomes increasingly less present in Gadamer’s work. Gadamer did not devote many essays to him: apart from the first, which he had written in 1933 for Dilthey’s one-hundredth birthday, all the others go back to the 1980s and are mostly reworkings of the chapter in Truth and Method.21 An exception is the essay on “Hermeneutics and the Dilthey School” from 1991, in which Gadamer answers the criticisms from Frithjof Rodi and partially modifies his own interpretation.22
The word “hermeneutics” appears very rarely in Dilthey’s writings. From the outset it is his aim to free himself from the impasses that had stranded the Historical School, halfway “between philosophy and experience” (TM 219/GW1 222). Dilthey’s era is marked by the collision between Romantic culture and the rise of positivism. The rejection of Hegel’s philosophy enabled a return to Kant. Just as Kant had grounded the natural sciences in the Critique of Pure Reason, Dilthey plans to ground the human sciences through a “Critique of Historical Reason”—a promising formulation as a possible title for a book that, however, he was unable to publish because, according to Gadamer, he was never able to reconcile the particular aporias that cripple his thought.23
The question that occupies Dilthey is one of historical consciousness in the form it takes after Nietzsche. If every person, every epoch, and every manifestation of spirit is to be conceived historically, how is it possible to guarantee a universally valid knowledge of history? To give universal validity to historical knowledge means to measure history in terms of scientific knowledge. Dilthey’s intention—already in the Introduction to the Human Sciences from 1883—is to use hermeneutics to raise the human sciences to the status of the natural sciences. Though he wavers between a unified and a complementary model, Dilthey ultimately tends toward the latter, which reserves the hermeneutic approach for the humanities. Gadamer’s critical interpretation begins at this point. He shows how Dilthey’s oscillation derives from an inner contradiction in his thought: the contradiction between positivism and Romanticism, between the methodological claim to objective knowledge and the Romantic insight into the historicity of thought. If we are historical beings, how could we ever reach a universal knowledge that reaches beyond our historicity? Isn’t any fixed certainty, the fundamentum inconcussum that Dilthey wants to reclaim for the human sciences, already compromised by their fundamental historicity? And isn’t there a danger in projecting the model of the natural sciences onto the human sciences?
In contrast to the Neo-Kantians, Dilthey distinguishes clearly between historical knowledge and knowledge in the natural sciences. For this he returns to the principle of verum-factum, or truth and fact, which Vico had applied to the “civilized world”: the human being recognizes as true only what he has made in history, not in nature. In such a way the possibility of historical knowledge is justified (TM 222/GW1 226). Just like in Romantic hermeneutics, the solution lies in the congeniality of the subject and the object. For Gadamer, however, this is precisely the problem. How can the transition from the individual historical experience to the general experience of history be explained? Doesn’t Vico’s principle simply transpose an experience from the world of art onto the world of history? Does it make sense, with regard to the human conditions within the course of history, to speak of a “making”? These questions reveal one of Gadamer’s most important objections to Dilthey. Historical consciousness is, for Dilthey, consciousness conditioned by history, and on the other hand it is also consciousness of history, the consciousness of the historical character of everything human. This consciousness distinguishes our epoch from all preceding ones. Historical consciousness would amount to a remedy for its own, self-created, ills. Since we are conscious of our historicity, we should be able to take that distance which allows us to know it an objective way. Consciousness crosses over into knowledge, self-consciousness into wisdom. But with this transition it is taken as self-evident that consciousness is “a mode of self-knowledge” in the Cartesian sense (TM 235/GW1 239). In short, Dilthey’s historical consciousness deceives itself—no differently than aesthetic consciousness—about its own possibilities. In contrast to this historical consciousness, which is confident of its ability to reach a transparent knowledge of itself, Gadamer proposes a “historically effected consciousness.”24
Yet Dilthey made several attempts to anchor consciousness to its historical being. To do this he introduced the concept of “life,” which he advanced as the cornerstone of his hermeneutics. Even before one realizes it, he or she already understands the lifeworld by articulating connections or structures of sense that can, as a result, be understood again. The process by which sense arises is life articulating itself: “Here life grasps life.”25 Or, in Gadamer’s words: “Life interprets itself. Life itself has a hermeneutical structure” (TM 226/GW1 230). Understanding represents the opposite process to that in which the lived experience expresses itself in understandable figures of sense. Life, by articulating itself, returns to itself in reflection; this becomes the hermeneutic principle that would clarify the transition from individual to general experience, ultimately from psychology to hermeneutics. It should then be able to specify the way the individual is bound to the objective spirit (TM 224/GW1 228–229). On the one hand the life of each individual has the character of historicity; on the other hand history is nothing other than life viewed from the standpoint of all humanity. Life proves to be the a priori that guarantees the possibility of understanding all individual and historical manifestations, whereby history structures itself as a text. Through hermeneutic circularity, which moves from the whole to the parts and from the parts to the whole, always broader connections in the direction of universal history are achieved with a movement that can never complete itself in the absolute (TM 236/GW1 240–241).
Nevertheless for Gadamer this concept of life, in which the moment of self-reflection is sharply accentuated, is still burdened with Cartesian presuppositions—beginning with the proximity of methodical doubt to the doubt that torments human existence. Dilthey does not see that the search for certainty in science, and in life, goes two very different ways. The doubt of the first, Cartesian kind, doubts in order to reach an unassailable certainty; the latter, existential doubt, doubts the very possibility of such certainty. Far from being an extension of existential doubt, the methodological doubt of scientific reflection is “a movement that is directed against life” (TM 238/GW1 242). Here Gadamer polarizes the opposition between science and life in Dilthey: scientific knowledge offers certainty in the sense of protection against the “incomprehensibility” of life (TM 239/GW1 244). But the certainty that life seeks is not the certainty that can be derived from a final principle; more than a foundation, life seeks forms of belonging and community. The program of a philosophy of life remains active, though it must be freed from the epistemological impasse in which Dilthey remains entangled. This liberation happens through phenomenology.
4. Husserl and the Hermeneutic Turn in Phenomenology
Contrary to the conventional view, the relation between Gadamer and Husserl should not be underestimated. In the first place, their relation should be valued because of the theoretical relevance that phenomenology obviously had for hermeneutics, which Gadamer frequently emphasized. His encounter with Husserl was not decided in the few months that he spent in Freiburg in 1923. In addition to the passages in Truth and Method, Gadamer wrote two essays on Husserl in the 1970s: “The Science of the Life-World” in 1972, and “On the Relevance of Husserl’s Phenomenology,” in 1974 (TM 242–254/GW1 246–258).26 Particularly important, however, is the essay already published in 1963, “The Phenomenological Movement,” in which he took stock of the debate over phenomenology and at the same time clarified and defined his own position (PH 130–181/GW3 105–146).
What connects Gadamer to Husserl, and what separates them? Husserl’s maxim “Back to the things themselves!” had a liberating function. With these words he showed philosophy the way to escape the impasse of formulas and theories, precisely by returning to the “things themselves.”27 In short, for Husserl philosophy should no longer merely occupy itself with scientific theories, establishing itself as “meta-theory” or a secondary science. Nor should philosophy limit itself to the history of philosophy. Rather, Husserl recommended a return to “things themselves,” in order to begin philosophizing from that point. Erudition has little to do with the practice of philosophy. What is necessary is philosophical conversion, a suspension or epoché of the natural attitude. This should be conceived as a phenomenological “reduction,” which would provide an “entirely new point of departure” for philosophy.28 The first effect of this approach, which had an immediate fascination for both Heidegger and Gadamer, is the liberation from the technical vocabulary of Neo-Kantianism and more generally the paradigm of scientific objectivism. The hermeneutic significance of Husserl’s appeal should not be unacknowledged. Philosophy should leave behind all theories that are not grounded on a visible phenomenality shared by all, and proceed from things as they make themselves known through “intuition.” This resonates as a call to philosophy to be vigilant against all metaphysical constructions and to hold fast to what is given through intuition—a call that points from the beginning to the possibility of overcoming metaphysics. The “things” Husserl wants to return to are not things in themselves, independent from consciousness; rather they are only given thanks to the intentionality of consciousness. “Intentionality” in this sense means that every object has the way of being of consciousness. It is intentionality that allows the real to appear to consciousness, and it can therefore be understood as a hermeneutic category: there is no objectivity without the constitutive intentionality of consciousness. But it is Husserl’s great merit to have seen that this “constitution” is not simply to be attributed to the accomplishment of a transcendental subject. Considered more closely, the subject contributes to the constitution of sense that arises together with the subject itself—without ever being fully able to control this sense. The constitution is the “movement of reconstruction” of intentionality, which unfolds in a horizon of sense that always lies beyond the limits of the subject (PH 165/GW3 135).
In Truth and Method, Gadamer returns to this concept of “horizon.” By inscribing itself into a horizon, intentionality is destined to move as the horizon moves.29 On the other hand, Gadamer also refers to the implicit horizon of understanding, which emerges from the subterranean temporality of conscious life that Husserl had spoken of as “absolute historicity”—an expression Gadamer mentions twice (TM 243, 255/GW1 248, 259). Even more important for Gadamer is the “lifeworld.” Gadamer repeatedly returns to this concept, in order to emphasize its productivity and its “astounding resonance” in the philosophy of the twentieth century (PH 151/GW3 123). The “lifeworld” is an expression that Husserl had probably coined in contrast to the “world of science.”30 Intentionality itself needs the lifeworld, because the ego is no longer the source of the constitution of sense and so it becomes necessary to return to another source, indeed to the anonymous but intersubjectively understood source of the lifeworld.
Yet for Gadamer, Husserl was not radical enough. In the lifeworld thus conceived, it appears as if one might recognize the finitude of the ego. But Husserl still seeks to ground the lifeworld by tracing it back to the transcendental subjectivity of “the Ur-Ich (‘the primal I’)” (TM 248/GW1 252). This means that, in spite of everything, Husserl remains caught in a Cartesian conception of philosophy, which as an apodictic science aims for an ultimate foundation (letzte Begründung).
This is the point where hermeneutics is furthest from phenomenology, or where the hermeneutic turn takes place within phenomenology. In phenomenology—as in large parts of the philosophical tradition—language has played only a secondary role; though it is precisely with language that a critique of Neo-Kantianism could have developed. Although it marked a turn from the “facts” of science to the lifeworld, phenomenology did not go further, since it did not recognize the role of language in the lifeworld. Phenomenology never relinquished the idea of an ultimate foundation. But one motive points to another: the idea of a ultimate foundation leads to forgetting language, whereas language puts all foundations into question (GW8 401, 418, 435). On the contrary, hermeneutics tries to find a place in philosophy for the mysterious proximity of language and reason. The hermeneutic turn in phenomenology is a turn toward language.
5. The Hermeneutics of Facticity: Beyond Heidegger
It was only with the turn Heidegger took in phenomenology that the ontological presuppositions of any ultimate foundation were first uncovered. Heidegger’s work makes clear that the fundamentum inconcussum is actually, if considered more closely, concussum, namely temporal and finite. It is “the whole idea of grounding itself” that “underwent a total reversal” (TM 257/GW1 261). Gadamer’s hermeneutics in Truth and Method begins after a long section dedicated to Heidegger’s project (TM 254–264/GW1 258–269). In spite of all the inspiration from Schleiermacher, from Dilthey, and finally also from Husserl, it was after all Heidegger who provided the decisive impulse for Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics.
Yet which Heidegger? This question is of considerable importance. With the answer one can not only clarify the section devoted to Heidegger in Truth and Method, but also illuminate Gadamer’s entire interpretation of Heidegger. To begin it must be emphasized that the Heidegger to whom Gadamer refers is not the one from Being and Time, but rather the one from the Hermeneutics of Facticity. This is the “early” Heidegger, whose lectures Gadamer had heard in the 1920s—even though, according to Gadamer, it is misleading to speak of the “early” and the “late” Heidegger, because it risks obscuring the continuity of his thought. This continuity should be seen precisely between the hermeneutics of facticity and the “turn” of the late Heidegger; it was simply interrupted by the interlude of Being and Time (TM 257–258/GW1 261–262). Later, in an essay from 1986 with the telling title “Martin Heidegger’s One Path,” Gadamer will speak of “the turning before the turning” in order to underline Heidegger’s coherent development (RHS 26/GW3 423). Gadamer saw, from very early on, a unity in Heidegger’s path and was able to stress such a continuity in both his interpretation of Heidegger and his own philosophy. Since he continued to speak of hermeneutics, even when other interpreters had long ceased to do so, Gadamer was able to rejoin the end of Heidegger’s path back to its beginnings.
Of course such a claim is really possible only today, on the basis of Heidegger’s more recently published manuscripts from his lectures and seminars. In 1960, at the time of Truth and Method, the Heidegger of Being and Time was still seen as the early Heidegger, from whom the later one, the thinker of poetic thought, had distanced himself. This way of reading Heidegger’s work was shared by most of his interpreters. The “hermeneutics of facticity” was for the most part unknown, though traces of it remained in Gadamer’s memory, in his notes, and in Heidegger’s manuscripts. After these had been published, Gadamer had not only the texts but also the necessary distance to be able to write. The collection Heidegger’s Ways from 1983 was the result. In addition to these essays, which had been revised for publication, more than ten later ones appeared. Seven of these are in the tenth volume of the Collected Works, which was published in 1995.
It is clear that if Heidegger’s lectures had been published earlier, the section in Truth and Method would have had a different content and perhaps even a different character. But when Gadamer wrote this section he could rely on only Being and Time to underline the significance of Heidegger’s thought for hermeneutics. In order to make his argumentation more convincing, and to show the radical change made to the conception of understanding, Gadamer appeals, perhaps surprisingly, to Count von Yorck (1835–97). Yorck had become known both because of his critical letters to Dilthey and because Heidegger had reproduced a part of this correspondence in paragraph #77 of Being and Time. For Gadamer, Yorck becomes a key figure in overcoming the epistemological paradigm represented by Dilthey. Yorck not only points to Dilthey’s aestheticism, which falls prey to an objectivist world view, but also shows that Dilthey is not aware that the interpreter belongs to what is interpreted, and that he had not understood the historicity of life, but thought of it only in a very Cartesian way (TM 248–254/GW1 255–258). Yorck’s alternative model remains a bit obscure, however, as do Gadamer’s own remarks. In any case, Gadamer later no longer refers to Yorck.
The concept of “belonging” first is clarified by Heidegger and then becomes decisive for hermeneutics in Truth and Method (TM 262/GW1 266). Yet this is only possible thanks to a completely new way of conceptualizing understanding. Although he did not have access to the published materials, Gadamer explicitly refers to the “hermeneutics of facticity” (TM 254/GW1 259).31 What does the hermeneutics of facticity mean? At first it should be said that “facticity” does not mean an ultimate given, or a new positivity. According to Heidegger in his 1923 lecture, facticity must be understood as the ontological character of our Dasein, which gives itself differently than any other being; for “Da-sein” means to fulfill this facticity.32 To put it differently, in this facticity that I am, what is at stake is me, what I make of myself. So why should one speak of “hermeneutics?” It is because hermeneutics, according to Heidegger, is understood as a way of gaining access to facticity.33 Even more: Dasein is or it exists only insofar as it understands. Hermeneutics attributes facticity to the body and articulates it, expresses it, understands it. Without hermeneutics, there would be no facticity of Dasein and Dasein would not exist in the first place. Facticity can only be hermeneutic. For the first time hermeneutics dealt not only with texts, but also with existence.34 The break Heidegger accomplishes here is radical. It means that one has no choice whether to understand or not to understand. To exist is to understand—to understand is to exist. Gadamer expresses the point effectively: “Understanding is . . . the original form of the realization of Dasein” (TM 259/GW1 264).
This fundamental transition carries many philosophical implications with it. Dasein, with its way of realization, or its understanding that is also always a self-understanding, reveals its ineluctable temporality, its inescapable finitude. The idea of an ultimate foundation seems more doubtful and problematic than ever. Because the unshakable ground proves to be shakable, this shows that it had been the dream of metaphysics to overcome finitude with a secure, fixed, and unchanging position: an absolute foundation on which everything else could be grounded, a subjectum or hypokéimenon to which humans had elevated themselves in modern thought. But is this Dasein really the foundation of all that is, or is it not for its part “thrown” into being, and only for a brief period of time? The hermeneutics of facticity cannot retreat from the “thrownness” of Dasein. Precisely because our thrownness indicates the nonavailability of the “there” in which our Dasein always exists, one would have to speak of a hermeneutics of thrownness or, with Gadamer, even of a hermeneutics of finitude.35
If one considers not only Truth and Method, however, but also the collection Heidegger’s Ways as well as the many later essays, including the book about Heidegger that Gadamer never wrote, then it is not an exaggeration to say that Gadamer did pay his debt to his teacher, above all in the new way that understanding is brought into connection with the finitude of existence. Thus it is much easier to say what connects the two thinkers than what divides them. But the image of Gadamer limiting himself to the “urbanization of the Heideggerian province” would have to be revised.36 Certainly Gadamer himself contributed to this picture, by suggesting to many inattentive readers that his thought is a continuation of, rather than a break from, Heidegger’s. Perhaps he himself did not want to recognize this break entirely, let alone emphasize it. Nevertheless, the filiation is much less direct than has often been thought.37
Gadamer does not share the radical as well as solipsistic disquiet of Heidegger, his concerns about existence, his striving for authenticity. Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein is foreign to Gadamer, for it contains a “transcendental” residue (TM 257, 263/GW1 261, 268). Above all Gadamer does not follow the development in Being and Time, where the hermeneutics of facticity is in the service of the question of Being. Today this is no longer a question for hermeneutics, since hermeneutics makes no claim to found any ontology. This explains why Gadamer is not concerned with the “overcoming” of metaphysics, and why he shows so little interest in the “history of metaphysics” or, even less, in a new “beginning.”38 But what should be said about the way in which Gadamer, through a phenomenology of understanding, interprets finitude and the limit that is always the beyond of the other? What about his attempt to put all ultimate foundations into question, through the dialectics of language and dialogue? At the watershed of the hermeneutics of facticity, one must finally follow Gadamer on the path of his philosophical hermeneutics.
Notes
1. Heidegger, “A Dialogue on Language,” in On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1971), 1–54 at 28–34; “Aus einem Gespräch von der Sprache,” in Unterwegs zur Sprache, GA13, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt/M: Klostermann, 1985), 85–155 at 90–94.
2. See Jean Grondin, Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. Joel Weinsheimer (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994, 1–15; Einführung in die philosophische Hermeneutik (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1991), 1–20. For the break in the tradition of hermeneutics and its questionable “identity,” see John Wrae Stanley, Die gebrochene Tradition. Zur Genese der philosophischen Hermeneutik Hans-Georg Gadamers (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005), 11–112. See especially Günter Figal, “Die Komplexität philosophischer Hermeneutik,” in Der Sinn des Verstehens (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1996), 11–31.
3. Wilhelm Dilthey, “The Rise of Hermeneutics,” in Hermeneutics and the Study of History, vol. 4 of Selected Works, ed. R. A. Makkreel and F. Rodi (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996); “Die Entstehung der Hermeneutik” (1900), in Gesammelte Schriften (hereafter GS), vol. 5, ed. Georg Misch, 4th ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1964), 317–338.
4. It is important to note that hermeneutics has in the past often proven to be antidogmatic and antitraditional. It frequently played a role when religious, cultural, or political conflicts arose.
5. See in particular Emilio Betti, Allgemeine Auslegungslehre als Methodik der Geisteswissenschaften (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1967) (in Italian, Theoria generale dell’interpretazione, 1955); Eric D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967); Thomas M. Seebohm, Zur Kritik der hermeneutischen Vernunft (Bonn: Bouvier, 1972).
6. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Hermeneutik,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, ed. Joachim Ritter and Karl Gründer (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1974), 3:1061–1973. See also “Klassische und philosophische Hermeneutik” (1968), GW2 92–117.
7. Szondi initiated these critiques: Peter Szondi, Einführung in die literarische Hermeneutik (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1975). There followed Manfred Frank, Das individuelle Allgemeine. Textstrukturierung und –interpretation nach Schleiermacher (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1977); Ron Bontekoe, “A Fusion of Horizons: Gadamer and Schleiermacher,” International Philosophical Quarterly 27 (1987): 3–16; Christian Berner, La philosophie de Schleiermacher (Paris: Edition du CERF, 1995). See also the more recent critical account by Andrea Arndt, “Schleiermachers Hermeneutik im Horizont Gadamers,” in Mirko Wischke and Michael Hofer, eds., Gadamer verstehen/Understanding Gadamer (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2003), 157–168. The book by Gianni Vattimo, Schleiermacher filosofo dell’interpretazione (Milan: Mursia, 1986), is by contrast very influenced by Gadamer, but also by Heidegger’s existential hermeneutics. This is also the first book on Schleiermacher’s philosophy, however, that leaves hidden the connection between hermeneutics on the one hand and on the other hand dialectics and ethics.
8. See Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, Hermeneutik und Kritik, ed. Manfred Frank (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1977), 325–327.
9. Gadamer developed his critique of the psychological conception of the expression in an appendix that he added to Truth and Method. His argument is that the expression relies on the experience of the subject, without however considering its rhetorical-linguistic emergence. See Gadamer, TM 494–505 at 503–505; “Exkurse I–VI” (1960), GW2 375–386, especially at 384–386.
10. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutik und Kritik, 92.
11. Jung asks, correctly, whether there has ever been “such a naïve hermeneutics of empathy.” Matthias Jung, Hermeneutik zur Einführung. Auslegung, Interpretation, Verstehen, Deutung (Hamburg: Junius, 2001), 63.
12. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutik und Kritik, 94.
13. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, edited, according to the first and second original editions, by Jens Timmermann (Hamburg: Meiner, 1998), B 370/A 314.
14. See in this volume, chapter 5, part 2.
15. See Gadamer, “The Problem of Language in Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutic,” trans. David Linge, Journal for Theology and Church 7 (1970): 68–84; “Das Problem der Sprache bei Schleiermacher” (1968), GW4 361–373.
16. Gadamer, “Die Grenzen der historischen Vernunft” (1949), GW10 175–178.
17. See Gadamer, “Herder und die geschichtliche Welt” (1967), GW4 318–335.
18. As in the case of his Schleiermacher interpretation, Gadamer’s view of Dilthey has received criticism, especially from the figures in the “Dilthey School,” which includes such authors as Georg Misch, Hermann Nohl, Josef König, Raymond Aaron, George Gusdorf, Otto Friedrich Bollnow, and Frithjof Rodi. The sharpest criticism has come from Frithjof Rodi. Frithjof Rodi, Die Erkenntnis des Erkannten. Zur Hermeneutik des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1990).
19. It suffices to mention the texts by Gadamer, “Truth in the Human Sciences,” in Hermeneutics and Truth, ed. Brice Wachterhauser (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1994), 25–32; “Wahrheit in den Geisteswissenschaften” (1953), GW2 37–43, and “What Is Truth?” in Hermeneutics and Truth, 33–46; “Was ist Wahrheit?” (1957), GW2 44–56. See also Gadamer, “The Problem of Historical Consciousness,” in Interpretive Social Science, ed. Paul Rabinow and W. Sullivan (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), 103–160; 2nd ed. (1987), 82–140; Das Problem des historischen Bewusstseins, trans. from the French by Tobias Nikolaus Klass (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001); Le problème de la conscience historique (Leuven/Paris: Publications Universitaires de Louvain/Beatrice-Nauwelaerts, 1963); new ed. by Pierre Fruchon (Paris: Seuil, 1996).
20. This text corresponds to the first lecture in Leuven. Gadamer included it in order to prepare the lectures for publication. A shortened version of the original document from 1955–56 is in the archive of the university library in Heidelberg (Heid. Hs. 3913). The opening section has recently been published and edited by Jean Grondin in the Dilthey-Jahrbuch (1992–1993): 131–142.
21. See Gadamer, “Wilhelm Dilthey zu seinem 100. Geburtstag” (1933), GW4 425–428. See Gadamer, WM, GW1 222–246; TM 218–242. For later essays see Gadamer, “Das Problem Diltheys. Zwischen Romantik und Positivismus” (1984), GW4 406–424; “Der Unvollendete und das Unvollendbare. Zum 150. Geburtstag von Wilhelm Dilthey” (1983), GW4 429–435; “Wilhelm Dilthey und Ortega. Philosophie des Lebens” (1985), GW4 436–447.
22. See Gadamer, “Die Hermeneutik und die Dilthey-Schule” (1991), GW10 185–205.
23. See Gadamer, “Der Unvollendete und das Unvollendbare,” GW4 431. Dilthey’s formulation already appears in a diary entry from 1860. See Der junge Dilthey. Ein Lebensbild in Briefen und Tagebüchern 1852–1870, ed. Clara Dilthey Misch (Leipzig: Teubner, 1933; 2nd ed. 1960).
24. See in this volume, chapter 5, part 6.
25. Wilhelm Dilthey, “Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften,” GS 7, ed. Bernhard Groethuysen, 2nd ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1958), 136.
26. See Gadamer, “The Science of the Life-World” (1969), in Philosophical Hermeneutics, ed. and trans. David E. Linge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 182–197; “Die Wissenschaft von der Lebenswelt” (1972), GW3 147–169; “Zur Aktualität der Husserlschen Phänomenologie” (1974) GW3 160–171. See Jérôme Porée, “Phénoménologie, herméneutique et discours philosophique,” Archives de Philosophie 56 (1993): 389–415; on Husserl and Gadamer, see Guy Deniau, “L’héritage husserlienne de l’herméneutique gadamerienne,” Epokhé 14 (1994): 211–226, as well as David Vessey, “Who Was Gadamer’s Husserl?” in New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 7 (2007): 1–23.
27. Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, vol. 1, “Foreword,” ed. Elmar Holenstein, Husserliana 18 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1975), 9.
28. Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, trans. William P. Alston and George Nakhnikian (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), 19; Die Idee der Phänomenologie, ed. Walter Biemel, Husserliana 2 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1950), 44.
29. See in this volume, chapter 5, part 6.
30. It is interesting to note that Gadamer understood the concept of the lifeworld as the result of Husserl’s late thought, and at the same time as an answer to Heidegger, whereas the publications from Husserl’s posthumous writings have shown that the concept appears very early and that it was rather Heidegger who had made the most of it.
31. But Gadamer had already spoken of the “hermeneutics of facticity” in relation to Heidegger in the essay from 1957, “The Problem of Historical Consciousness” (PHC 33).
32. Heidegger, Ontologie (Hermeneutik der Faktizität), 7; Ontology (Hermeneutics of Facticity), trans. John van Buren (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 13.
33. Heidegger, Ontologie (Hermeneutik der Faktizität), 14; Ontology (Hermeneutics of Facticity), 14.
34. On this topic, see Ben Vedder, Was ist Hermeneutik? Ein Weg von der Textdeutung zur Interpretation der Wirklichkeit (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2000).
35. See in this volume chapter 9, part 3.
36. See Jürgen Habermas, “Hans-Georg Gadamer: Urbanizing the Heideggerian Province,” in Philosophical-Political Profiles, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), 189–198; “Urbanisierung der Heideggerschen Provinz,” in Habermas, Philosophisch-politische Profile, 3rd. expanded ed. (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1981), 392–401.
37. Bernasconi had already written on the continuity and discontinuity between Heidegger and Gadamer: see Robert Bernasconi, “Bridging the Abyss: Heidegger and Gadamer,” Research in Phenomenology 16 (1986): 1–24. But most works on this topic have appeared only in recent years. The relationship of both philosophers to Plato, Aristotle, Hölderlin, and Hegel has been investigated by Coltman. See Rod Coltman, The Language of Hermeneutics: Gadamer and Heidegger in Dialogue (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998). See also Walter Lammi, “Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Platonic ‘Destruktion’ of the Later Heidegger,” Philosophy Today 41 (1997): 394–404; Sayed Tawfik, “The Phenomenological Motives of Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s Hermeneutics of the Literary Text,” Analecta Husserliana 53 (1998): 181–207; Ingrid Scheibler, Gadamer: Between Heidegger and Habermas (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000); Jean Grondin, Von Heidegger zu Gadamer. Unterwegs zur Hermeneutik (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2001); James Risser, “From Phenomenology to Hermeneutics and Beyond: The Transformation of Hermeneutics after Phenomenology,” in István M. Fehér, ed., Kunst, Hermeneutik, Philosophie, 75–88; see Damir Barbaric, Aneignung der Welt. Heidegger—Gadamer—Fink (Frankfurt/M: Lang, 2007).
38. See in this volume chapter 7, 2; chapter 9, part 2. See also Robert J. Dostal, “Gadamer’s Relation to Heidegger and Phenomenology,” in Robert J. Dostal, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 247–266 at 260–261.