Brian Rogers
Philosophical currents in the twentieth century developed and expanded the notion of hermeneutics into a full-fledged ontological description of human agency. Thinkers in these currents reenvisioned the basic structures by which human beings come to understand and interpret their world. As initially shown by Martin Heidegger in his seminal work Being and Time, our openness to the world is structured by historicity (our taking responsibility for possibilities handed down to us in a tradition) and by temporality (our ecstatic orientation to a future where we return to what we have been all along). On the basis of these insights, Heidegger opened the avenue for critically questioning the extent to which philosophy assumes the task of complete or partial escape from the conditions of our finitude.
With reference to Heidegger and his successors, I contend here that the themes of historicity and temporality grant philosophical access to truth and universality in experience without the demand for an “objective” view of things-in-themselves or of the very conditions of rationality and human agency. These themes are critical developments in hermeneutics insofar as, questioning the idea that we could ever glimpse once and for all the finite limits of our situation in “being,” they enable us to call into question the ideal of objectivity by refocusing philosophical reflection on the radically interpretive nature of this situation precisely as that which inescapably calls for a sort of decision as to the meaning of the whole of being and the place of human beings in it. Of course, the question remains as to the precise nature of this decision. I suggest at the close of this chapter that, while hermeneutics discloses the irreducibly historical and temporal nature of our existential situation as finite human beings, this disclosure indeed serves to sharpen our sense as human beings that we, perhaps paradoxically, actively construe and articulate the very truths we take to be universal. When we come to see the radical nature of our finitude, we are compelled into decision concerning the universal orientation of human experience. I begin with a reflection on Heidegger's radical appropriation of the older hermeneutic tradition.
It was Martin Heidegger who in the twentieth century radicalized the hermeneutic project of Schleiermacher and Dilthey in his philosophical account of the fundamentally interpretive nature of very “being” of the human situation itself. While these latter thinkers subscribe to a version of the epistemic ideal of knowing the subjective consciousness of the other through an examination of its textual and historical traces, Heidegger aims to eliminate from the hermeneutic project the very notion of an indeterminate subjective interiority coming to know itself and others by means of its exteriorization in historical expression (Ricoeur 1991). If the agent exists only in its expressive self-performance, then we come to understand its being as such only through this very performance, as the “historical” continuity of a life. Heidegger contends that this historical agency must also be radically temporal, as the opening of an identity that is only in its being finitely expressed in the ecstatically connected modalities of time.
After Heidegger, philosophy begins from the intuition that the human situation is immediately constituted by an agent's having to interpret itself through its ongoing projects and aims that make sense of the things it encounters (cf. Sheehan 2001). For this very reason, we as agents cannot “bend back” upon ourselves, so to speak, to investigate the ultimate origin of meaning from the very standpoint of this origin. Heidegger's ontological account of hermeneutics therefore calls into question the epistemic ideal guiding philosophical inquiry. If the agent is constituted in its meaningful engagement with the world, then there is no sense in which the forms of this engagement could be made a priori objects of knowledge. Philosophy after Heidegger therefore tasks itself with the interpretation of the interpretive situation as such and in its entirety. The task calls for the enactment of the particular, concrete situation as the freedom that it is (Heidegger 1977, 309; Heidegger 1962, 275).
Philosophy comes to see that its examination of the lived situation remains inseparably bound up with the task of an appropriation of this very situation itself. Heidegger describes this existential freedom in terms of the “hermeneutic circle,” that is, the necessity of interpreting the very interpretive situation we ourselves are. Thus, because of this hermeneutic necessity, philosophy becomes the very performance of the things it describes to be overriding features of the human situation. Like the dramatist, we must play the part to understand it, leap into the role to grasp it, not in the mode of disinterested observer, but as one for whom the meaning of this identity is wholly at stake as something radically open, as the historical-temporal moment, to decide upon the meaning of its existence.
Being and Time (1927) and the lecture courses surrounding it are the sources in which Heidegger first establishes and elaborates the themes of historicity and temporality. Heidegger sets out in these writings to dismantle and clear away obstacles in the tradition of Western thought to our being able to appropriate what this tradition both hands down to us and yet tends also to obscure (Heidegger 1977, 29; Heidegger 1962, 43). Such is our situation, our Dasein (literally being-open but also our openness to “being”), as agents who must retrieve what has been passed down to us and what we have been all along (Caputo 1987, 60–61).1 Being and Time calls into question the very opening of the existential horizons by which meaning becomes possible in the first place. What does it mean, Heidegger asks, to come to be as we are and find ourselves as situated agents thrown open to a world of possible meanings? The inquiry enjoins us to understand our situation as agents, not abstractly, but out of response to the very situation we ourselves are and find ourselves having to be. The “being” of this situation always and already takes shape in the modalities of time and history, as I shall now explain.
The radical nature of Heidegger's question is such that the thinker is compelled to regard the object, the situation itself, according to its basically hermeneutic character as an already active unfolding or laying-out (Auslegen) of its being as such. Heidegger therefore also recognizes that the point of entry into the philosophical problem of being and our openness to it must be some preliminary notion that guides us in our unfolding of this theme (Heidegger 1977, 10–11; Heidegger 1962, 27–28). Heidegger takes the fact that we as agents are already oriented by a basic sense of history as the continuity of a tradition as clue to the “historicality” (Geschichtlichkeit) by which our openness to possibilities for being is already shaped. Heidegger surmises in the second division of Being and Time that we are the sorts of agents who are able to have a sense of history as the events which are happening or have happened in the unfolding of a tradition only because we are already, so to speak, “stretched along” between the absolute points of non-presence, namely, our own birth and death, as “historicizing” (Geschehen) (Heidegger 1977, 495; Heidegger 1962, 426). This hermeneutic laying-out which stretches, as it were, “between” birth and death cannot ever constitute a point at which one is fully present to oneself. Philosophical retrieval of this object must therefore belong to the very opening or movement toward which it points, that is, as the possibility of entering this situation and laying it out in a genuine way. Ontologically understood, then, historicizing is the continual return of the agent's situation to itself in further retrievals (Heidegger 1977, 495; Heidegger 1962, 427). Heidegger reasons that the hermeneutic laying-out that we already are and toward which philosophy (as completion of this self-interpretation) points signals also the temporal character of the hermeneutic circle.
The paradox of death supplies Heidegger with the interpretive clue to primordial temporality: Since death remains the possibility we ourselves can never actualize, it becomes evident that this non-present liminal condition constitutes the very opening of an anticipatory structure that makes possible the agent's being able to look toward and respond to itself as a whole. The agent comes anxiously to see itself in the very freedom of its radically open and thus ungraspable nature (Heidegger 1977, 353; Heidegger 1962, 311). Heidegger interprets this freedom as the historicizing by which human agency takes up possibilities handed down to it in tradition. Historicizing has an “ecstatic” (outside-of-itself) temporal structure, since one is thrown open to possibilities always in the process of having been, that is, of reinterpreting, rearticulating this past out of the future. The decisive term in this dynamic is the “moment of vision” (Augenblick) or moment where one is resolved to the freedom of decision emerging out of the “care” (Sorge) for one's own being definitive of the hermeneutic circle of understanding. As care, we are agents who exist by standing out toward ourselves, notwithstanding our tendency to “fall” into complacent unresponsiveness (Heidegger 1977, 377; Heidegger 1962, 329). Awakened to our finitude, we are simultaneously enjoined to take up the unique call of our time as that of our very own “being” (Heidegger 1977, 509; Heidegger 1962, 437).
We ourselves are this very repetition of our “being” cast in the modes of ecstatic temporality. Accordingly, Heidegger argues that our everyday understanding of time in relation to the fleeting moment “now” depends upon our reckoning with the interrelated horizons earlier, later-on, and present (Heidegger 1982, 261). These exhibit the ecstatic structure where that which is already ahead of itself in the future comes toward itself presently precisely as what has been (Heidegger 1982, 265–267). Heidegger hoped by way of this analysis of the primordial time-structure of existence to find a clue to an interpretation of the very phenomenon of our being-thrown-open to being as such (Heidegger 1977, 576; Heidegger 1962, 487). Heidegger himself never explicitly finished Being and Time, and in his later work he deepens the moorings of his original hermeneutic investigation, further upsetting the idea of an originary transcendental horizon—even that of temporality—for the disclosure of being as such (cf. Polt 2006, 47–48).
Heidegger's later work concerns itself with the very “giving” of relational contexts of meaning as such and to our essential belonging to these open contexts of possible meaning. Thus, in this later work, Heidegger articulates our relation as interpretive agents to the networks of significance disclosed by us in terms of a deeper belonging together (Zusammengehören) of things and world. The human being belongs essentially to the articulation of meaning that opens up as the very difference between the relational contexts that allow something to “show up” as a thing and the manifestation of “thingliness” that continues to bear forth these very relational contexts (Heidegger 1971a). The human being emerges with and remains in the articulation to which it must correspond in its own way.
On Heidegger's view, the interpretive horizons that constitute human experience, including the ecstatic-temporal horizon itself, emerge as the result of a nonconstituted “event” (das Ereignis). This event is, in other words, the utterly contingent arrival of being and time as such. Only the radical contingency of an uncaused event, of the very differentiation of world and things inherent to all actualization of possibility, occasions both the emergence of possibility as such and our concrete enactment of possibilities in historical-temporal finitude (Heidegger 1998, 252–253). This event is thus the very emergence, both of the horizons of self-referential finitude and of integral structures of meaning to which human beings find themselves bound. There remains no sense in which one could speak of such an event as cause or effect, since the concept of causation rests on the presupposition of things already given; that is, it takes for granted the prior event by which things and the relational patterns among them emerge into being (Heidegger 1969, 36). Of course, one might still inquire as to how such a “possibilizing” event constitutes a phenomenon to be studied and interpreted by philosophy and of the relation of human historicity and temporality to such an event.
Heidegger reasons that this event is repeated precisely by showing up as the concealment of the ground of our relation to things. We as agents certainly play an active role in the manifestation of things in the context of worldly meanings; but we do so by virtue of the fact that we belong to and open up with an original manifestation that, in virtue of its originative character, remains in essence partially hidden from us. But there is a sense in which this event can be said to appear to us, insofar as we are given to thinking upon or holding in question the way in which human beings belong together with the very opening of world and emerging presence of things (Heidegger 1969, 39). Such belonging together is the profound mystery of our existence that provokes the sort of astonishment that questioningly pursues it, thus opening the way for all human pursuits in the arts, religion, and science (Heidegger 1959, 26–29).2 Human beings are in essence the sign or “telling word” of this emergence of all intelligibility as such. We are as stretched out across the difference of world and things, repeatedly (though never exhaustively) giving it voice, articulating it as difference (Heidegger 1968, 10–11). The work of art, and especially the poetic word, is according to Heidegger that particular “thingly” manifestation that enables human beings to anticipate and realize a meaningful world in which to “dwell” (Heidegger 1971b).
The temporal horizon by itself thus no longer accounts for the opening of world. Rather, world is (as the poet discloses to thought) the “gathering” into significant relations among things of the “fourfold” (das Geviert) of sky, earth, mortals, and divinities. These are neither things nor world but constitute irreducible facets of the opening play of meaning itself. Things of historical or momentous significance (the Greek temple; ceremonial emblems; sacraments; etc.) are those that constitute the nexus of a gathering together of these (given) aspects of meaning into the fabric of worldly involvements, establishing hierarchical orders of meaning, including the orderings of time. To be sure, as mortals (i.e. as those who inhabit traditions, who are bound by the vicissitudes of time, and who die), human beings play a crucial role in the holding together and unfolding of meaning. But mortals are bound to the “earthly” necessities of place and of the rhythms of growth and decay, to the cyclic cosmic and seasonal patterns of “sky,” and to the “divine” insistence of binding meanings that transcend mere human interest (Heidegger 1971c; cf. Mitchell 2010, 208–218; cf. Taylor 2007, 558–559).
The notion of the fourfold helps resolve the tension in Heidegger's earlier thinking between the historical-temporal horizons of finite human existence and the integrity of the nonhuman world without reference to things-in-themselves or mediating principles of nature or rationality. The earth, for example, bears itself forth in the cultivated fruit that generates wine for human ceremonies, but in its very mode of manifestation remains also the unreachable and unconquerable “ground” of all our activities. The truth of “what is” may thus have a momentous or event-like character, as the very disclosure or manifestation of something true, without reducing to specifically historical and temporal horizons of disclosure. Yet we might still ask, as do later thinkers in philosophical hermeneutics, as to the intersubjective dimensions of these worldly horizons and to the possibility of holding a particular interpretation of the human situation open to critical reflection.
Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur appropriate and extend Heidegger's hermeneutic ontology to an understanding of the development and continuity of traditions and human disclosure of the universal. The themes of historicity and temporality remain at the heart of these reflections.
In Truth and Method, Gadamer describes the hermeneutic circle in terms of historical belongingness to a tradition. Against Dilthey's Baconian fixation on method as the “objective” placing of the historical situation under a universal rule, Gadamer appropriates the German Idealist notion of Bildung or “cultivation” to describe the basic presupposition of both the natural and historical sciences (Gadamer 1989, 5, 7–8, 14–17). Bildung is the idea that consciousness of the world is historically enacted through the agent's participation in inherited language, culture, customs, and institutions, and that the task of the agent is to understand itself through its openness to the viewpoints of possible others (Gadamer 1989, 14–17). According to Gadamer, the universal is itself radically historical in that it is the sense guiding “cultivated consciousness” into a deeper, more wide-ranging understanding of the truth of its situation. This implicit sense of the universal working itself out historically is itself irreducibly shared by the historical community. Gadamer thus fleshes out Heidegger's notion of the hermeneutic situation to account for the manner in which individual consciousness is enacted historically in the context of shared horizons of concern, the sensus communis (Gadamer 1989, 19–30; cf. Arendt 1998, 208–209).
Gadamer's hermeneutic project is decisively philosophical in that it aims to account for the universal in human experience by way of the notion of historically enacted consciousness (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein). Gadamer argues that Heidegger's interpretive disclosure of the temporality of our being opened new possibilities for understanding truth apart from the subjectivism of modern aesthetics and epistemology (Gadamer 1989, 99). Gadamer takes the hermeneutic “play” at the heart of a tradition and its understanding of truth as a clue to the deep continuity of the historical self-understanding at play in a tradition which opens every subjective standpoint within it. Interpretive agents play a part in the open “conversation” of the tradition passed down to them which they must appropriate (Gadamer 1989, 103–106). The radical nature of Gadamer's thesis thus lies in its claim, not just that tradition facilitates us with an interpretive lens through which to “see” the world, but that tradition is itself the irreducible condition of the very reality we receive and interpret, such that the “being” of the thing itself is essentially bound up with the “word” of the tradition by which it is articulated (Gadamer 1989, 374).3 The object of interpretation thus “finds its concretion in the linguistic experience of the world” (Gadamer 1976, 78). The “prejudice” of our situatedness in tradition is thus the very condition of the historical unfolding and raising-to-consciousness of the universal. Historically enacted consciousness opens up with and depends upon the historicizing “play” of tradition itself, a thesis already anticipated in Being and Time (Ricoeur 1988, 220–221).
Ricoeur reflects more persistently on the problem of the relation between history and temporality in his famous three-volume work Time and Narrative. Here, he argues that the immense breakthrough of Heidegger's thinking was to disclose the need for “attestation” of structural concepts of experience by way of particular, historically bound conceptions (Ricoeur 1988, 64–67). Ricoeur argues, thus, that while the structure of existential “possibilizing” (i.e., as care coming toward, enacting itself) is primordial temporality, Heidegger shows that this phenomenon is meaningful only insofar as it is intertwined with history and world-time. The “time” of history and the everyday is derived from primordial time, but as possibilizing the latter has significance only in terms of these derived modes (Ricoeur 1988, 80–81). The agent is thus constituted in the spanning of the gap between temporality as passive opening to world and time-constitution as active repetition of an identity in the “moment” of vision (Augenblick) (Ricoeur 1988, 83). But Heidegger's work serves here only to sharpen the aporia of constitution, “between a time without a present and a time with a present … the fundamental distinction between the anonymous instant and the self-referential present,” argues Ricoeur, since primordial temporality fails by itself to account for the origin of the cosmic time—“astronomical, physical, and biological time”—upon whose sense it depends for its productive articulation of meaning (Ricoeur 1988, 93–95). Each aspect of temporality presupposes the other.
Ricoeur contends that the fracturing of the phenomenological analysis of time admits only of narrative resolution in the intertwining modes of historical and fictional or imaginative production. Here, the hermeneutic situation, wherein we find ourselves actively unfolding an understanding of ourselves as a whole in light of the factical contexts opened up to us, has an irreducibly “poetic” dimension, in the sense of Aristotelian mimesis or productive imitation, and a corresponding “mythic” dimension, in the sense of discursive reordering and retelling of actions and events (Ricoeur 1984, 32–39). Ricoeur generalizes these functions under his category of “emplotment,” the configurative function of understanding that brings the structural features of temporality (prefigured time) into the historical time of human action (configured time) which is always immediately the refiguring of itself as an experience of time through the mediation of symbolic and literary forms (Ricoeur 1984, 53–58). Human time is thus the articulation of temporal structures in the productive mode of a kind of lived narrative, where fictive or imaginative variations on life in fact become integrated into the very way in which agents come to experience time as something humanly meaningful (Ricoeur 1984, 52–53). The task of hermeneutics is then to bring the narrative structures of the understanding to light so that agents can take action, that is, can achieve something of a genuine relation to the concrete process of configuration itself (Ricoeur 1984, 53).
Ricoeur thus acknowledges and affirms something like Gadamer's notion of the fusion of horizons with the added notion of a sense that our traditions can be profoundly distortive insofar as they ignore the irreducible “trace” (i.e., of the nonhuman real) inherent to their “totalizing” projects (Ricoeur 1988, 202–203). The idea of the trace allows Ricoeur (1992) to integrate into his hermeneutics (following the Frankfurt school) the notion of reflective equilibrium between the demands of universalization and the historical situation. Ricoeur argues that the ideal of critical dialogue with other traditions in search of the universal is necessarily implied in the very communicative structures that organize around a tradition's inherent sense of time and history (Ricoeur 1988, 225–226).
In returning to more radical impulses in Heidegger's thinking, we might still ask whether the “closure” of tradition upon itself can account for the irreducible difference of that which appears from its appearing that opens with the “event” of human agency (cf. Gadamer 1976). Derrida argues that such an event, that is, of radical difference, manifests in the endless destabilizing of unifying systems of meaning, taking place in/as the emergence of language itself.
In his landmark early treatise Of Grammatology, Derrida radicalizes the hermeneutic question as that of the possibility of any meaning or presence at all prior even to any metaphysical distinction of nature from culture. Derrida exposes and underwrites the “logic” of the natural sign, that is, the structure of meaning relating immediate sense to its embodied reference which bears out as history the absolute interiority of reflexive presence. According to Derrida, Western metaphysics embodies attempts to disclose and return to this interiority by way of the linguistic sign. The interiority is thus the unspoken word (logos) of an absolute relation of unbroken presence, the “transcendental signified” (Derrida 1997, 13, 15, 20; Derrida 1981, 77). This tradition must therefore simultaneously exteriorize the written sign as the unnatural and arbitrary reversal of the order of sense and referent and nevertheless appropriate it as the necessary apparatus for the return of this sense to itself (Derrida 1997, 34–35). Derrida argues thus that the interiority of meaning is always already “contaminated” by the play of representation, marking an unavoidable relation to the exteriority of writing at the very origin of language and meaning as such. The “trace” is thus precisely that irreducible and conspicuous absence of any transcendental presence at the origin, or the endless dissimulation of the referent of language within the play of signifiers (Derrida 1997, 47).
Derrida gives his own version of historicity through his radicalization of Saussure's thesis of the arbitrariness of the sign and his notion of an originary dissimulation, where the “instituted trace,” the symbolic artifice, already excludes and displaces or usurps its origin, which must, therefore, remain absent (Derrida 1997, 37–40). Both the “signatory” and the “referent” of sense and meaning remain absent in the “play” of signification (Derrida 1997, 40, 50, 69). Thus, “The self-identity of the signified conceals itself unceasingly and is always on the move (Derrida 1997, 49).” The unceasing play of the signifier cannot be confined to the mechanisms of any particular linguistic artifact but indeed constitutes the very opening of world in the Heideggerian sense (Derrida 1978). Writing or the instituted trace bears out phenomenologically the structure of the announcement within the “here and now” of an absent perspective, of an “other.” This originary dissimulation of perspectives is the opening of history, taking place in the proliferation of perspectives on the world (Derrida 1997, 47). Similarly, the thing itself or the signified referent is already and endlessly caught up in the chain of signification without the “evidence” of simple intuition (Derrida 1997, 49).
Instead of calling for the hermeneutic resolution of the aporias of tradition and human experience, Derrida calls for a kind of thought which attends to the breaks and ruptures in meaning which announce the absence of an excluded other and which open the very horizon of time itself. He refers to these breaks with the term différance: “The unheard difference between the appearing and the appearance (between the “world” and “lived experience”) is the condition of all other differences, of all other traces, and it is already a trace” (Derrida 1997, 65). The difference between appearing and appearance takes place as the differing/deferral essential to the very opening of time itself. The movement of “temporalizing” opens with an originary differing, that is, with the emergence of every particular sense of “now” that is aware of other temporal perspectives it does not share. Every present “now” is thus already displaced by an “absolute past” that cannot be recollected (Derrida 1997, 66). Because the temporal moment is inseparable from the play of signs, that is, from its exteriorization in shared public expressions, it follows that its full meaning is always deferred to moments of further expression, to that which is always-yet-to-come (Derrida 1997, 86). In one sense Derrida returns to Heidegger's thought of an absent founding event, the “meaning-giving powers over which we cannot claim authority,” to which human culture—and so also philosophy—must nevertheless give voice (cf. Russon 2006).4
Thought can attend to the contours of the Western story of linear development (i.e., of the human being and of knowledge) in order to enact the very destructuring or deconstruction of this historical self-interpretation from within, holding traditions and institutions open to the “other” they both presuppose and systematically exclude. Disclosure of truth is nothing besides this radical openness of institutions to the disruptive force of difference/deferral in the announcement of the “other” or others they systematically exclude. Yet, as many have argued, if we are compelled to decide in favor of a privileged “site” of hermeneutic disclosure of truth (i.e., institutions, traditions, even religious rites), we might ask whether such a decision is inevitably violent and exclusionary or (following Gadamer) whether it might otherwise prove peaceful (Derrida 1989; Derrida 1992; cf. Milbank 2006; Smith 1998). A more persistently hermeneutic philosophy will question every modal inference from historical/temporal enactment to rational/ontological necessity in favor of a more radical attunement to the situation itself.
Hermeneutics in the twentieth century opened the way for thought of history and time in terms of the very emergence of meaning or the “interpretation” of being as such. I have argued that the core themes of hermeneutics—historicity and temporality—open the way for rethinking our relation to truth and universality without the idea of an independent and objectively certain relation to reality or to the conditions of our being. After Heidegger, thinkers loosely falling within this tradition argue that such an ideal profoundly distorts the hermeneutic circle and thus also the task of philosophy as an appropriation of the ontological necessity of interpretation. If to be human is already to be expressed in historical and temporal finitude, then the nature of our being and indeed being as such remains radically open to question.