István M. Fehér
What has been called the “hermeneutic turn,” conceived of in terms of a “general movement” in the philosophy of the twentieth century,1 may legitimately be seen to center around the ontological turn of hermeneutics. Indeed, the hermeneutic turn of philosophy, and, together with it, the ensuing emergence of the phenomenon of interpretation as a major philosophical theme worthy of independent discussion on its own and prior to other philosophical questions, would surely not have been possible without the ontological turn of hermeneutics, that is, without the (ontological) reinterpretation, and indeed radicalization, of the concepts of understanding and interpretation. A quick glance cast on the history of hermeneutics shows that up to and inclusive of Dilthey, hermeneutics was viewed and understood more or less as an auxiliary discipline of the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften). It thus had a predominantly epistemological import. The operation called Verstehen, proper to human sciences, was distinguished from, and put in opposition to, explanation (Erklären), held to be the characteristic mode of knowledge in natural science. It was Heidegger who raised the issue of understanding from the methodology of human sciences and made it to be an existentiale as well as the basis of an ontology of human existence (see Gadamer GW 2, 361/Gadamer 1989, 102).
The connections between hermeneutics and ontology cannot be restricted, however, to the ontological (re)conception of understanding and interpretation. This reconception is just one dimension or point of intersection of their manifold reciprocal relations, interdependence, overlapping, or even (to adopt a Gadamerian term) fusion. Understanding and interpretation as discussed in §§ 31–32 (or, more broadly, in §§ 31–34) of Heidegger's Being and Time are modes of being of the human being called Dasein, constituting part of a discipline called existential analytic. Within existential analytic, understanding and interpretation appear as structures of Dasein’s Being-in, the latter being part of the more comprehensive phenomenon of Being-in-the-world. Existential analytic, in its turn, serves as an operating ground for fundamental ontology2—namely, for the discipline called to raise anew and work out the question (of the meaning) of Being. This most primordial of all questions of philosophy can, on its part, be formulated and worked out solely because “we already live in an understanding of Being” (Heidegger 1979, 4/23). Out of this understanding grows the explicit question concerning the meaning of Being (Heidegger 1979, 5/25). This entails that it is due to our always already operating understanding of Being that the Being-question can meaningfully be formulated and set into motion at all. One implication of this state of affairs lies in the fact that without “understanding of Being” (Seinsverständnis) there is no Being-question at all, and hence no ontology whatsoever.3 Since understanding is central for hermeneutics, it follows that without hermeneutics there is no ontology, and then, obviously, there is no ontological thematization of understanding and interpretation as structures of Dasein’s Being-in as part of its Being-in-the-world either.
Understanding (of Being) has then been operating long before Heidegger's discussion comes specifically to focus and expand on it. Existential analytic, in its function as fundamental ontology, is to make the whole of human Dasein accessible—not only its modes of being as understanding and interpretation—and it has to do so precisely in terms of “verstehendes Auslegen” (Heidegger 1979, 15/36). The subject matter of “verstehendes Auslegen” can obviously be understanding and interpretation themselves, and indeed, on a closer look, this is what is being provided by Heidegger in §§ 31–32 of Being and Time. In any case, understanding of Being may be said to be an indispensable (or indeed, the first and foremost) condition of possibility of/for ontologies of any kind. And it is precisely for this reason that it is not further to be accounted for. As Heidegger says brusquely: it is a mere “fact.”4
The foundation of ontology is thus hermeneutical; it is only because we always already have a (vague, average) understanding of Being that the Seinsfrage, the question concerning being, can be meaningfully formulated as a philosophical question able to be addressed and thematized. Ontology is not possible without a prior understanding of being; it is indeed nothing else than an explicit conceptual elaboration of what is contained in that understanding. The latter, incidentally, serves also as something which the results of the ensuing explicit interpretations are checked critically against.
The ontological thematization of understanding and interpretation provided by Heidegger in Being and Time—a veritable ontological reconception and radicalization which constitutes the nucleus of the hermeneutic turn of philosophy in the twentieth century—is then preceded by another, more original, and more comprehensive interrelation between hermeneutics and ontology. The former, the ontological thematization of understanding and interpretation may be seen to be, as it were, but a “derivative” case of this more primordial interdependence or fusion of ontology and hermeneutics which has always already been operative or set into motion from the very first pages of the work in terms of a reciprocal dependence of the Being-question (ontology) and a (vague and average) “understanding of Being” (hermeneutics). What has been practiced as interpretation from the very beginning of the work finds its explicit thematization and subsequent confirmation in §§ 31–34—the procedure being fairly similar to what is the case with “truth” in § 44.5
After this schematic summary, in what follows I will attempt to reconstruct and elaborate on the emergence of this twofold relation on Heidegger's path of thinking up to and inclusive of Being and Time.
The ontological reconception of hermeneutics runs in the young Heidegger parallel with the hermeneutic reconception of ontology, and they together constitute a comprehensive reconception of the whole of philosophy, something that may be called Heidegger's postwar hermeneutic turn. This is an attempt at a critical (destructive) reappropriation and renewal of the Western philosophical tradition in its entirety. The reciprocal fusion of ontology and hermeneutics finds one of its best expressions in the very title of his famous 1923 course: “Ontology (Hermeneutics of Facticity).” “Facticity” serves here as a designation of our factical human life. Title and subtitle refer reciprocally to each other; what the title means is explicated by the subtitle. Ontology without a (hermeneutic) explication of human life (ontology as “that epigonic treatment of traditional questions about being which proliferates on the soil of classical Greek philosophy” [GA 63, 1f./1]) makes no more sense than does a description of the human being confining itself to pure anthropology, or a pure methodological hermeneutics in terms of a “doctrine about interpretation” (GA 63, 14/11).
As a matter of fact, rather than a twofold, we find in Heidegger a threefold fusion by merging or joining not only hermeneutics and ontology, but adding to both phenomenology. Put otherwise: phenomenology is the soil on which the encounter and fusion of hermeneutics and ontology come about and take place. Heidegger's ontology is at the same time both a phenomenological and a hermeneutical ontology, or, an ontology based on hermeneutical phenomenology. Heidegger's hermeneutic turn consists in his transformation of Husserl's phenomenology into his own project of fundamental ontology conceived in terms of an existential analytic as a hermeneutic of human existence.
It will be useful to develop this point in somewhat more detail. The philosophical position which Heidegger preliminarily adhered to when setting out on his own after the war was phenomenology. It was Husserl's phenomenology that provided him with the “method” and the “devices” for reappropriating the very concept of philosophy—which means that the rethinking of philosophy became for him inseparable from coming to grips with phenomenology. In fact, for Heidegger, phenomenology became identical with philosophy.6 It was phenomenology that provided him with the device and strategy of reexamining and reappropriating contemporary tendencies as well as the whole philosophical tradition, inclusive of phenomenology itself. His course held in 1919–1920, bearing the title Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, begins with the following characteristic statement: “For phenomenology, the fundamental problem of phenomenology—its most acute problem, a problem that can never be extinguished, its most original and decisive problem—is phenomenology itself” (GA 58, 1). Phenomenology should, for Heidegger, not just occasionally be concerned with itself. On the contrary: if it is to be radical enough, it should bring to bear its criticism also upon itself—indeed, primarily against itself (see GA 58, 6, 145, 237).
Heidegger's new password sounds: back to life in its originality!7 This in turn implies a twofold claim: to go back to original experience (i.e., to gain a new access to life) on the one hand, and—together with it—to find appropriate means for its description, that is, to develop a conceptuality adequate to it, on the other. One basic insight of Heidegger's is that all kinds of description that contemporary philosophy including phenomenology provides of everyday life, the environing world, etc., stem from, and are rooted in, theoretical comportment and conceptuality, and thereby fail to do justice to factical life—its comportment and the language it speaks—precisely to the extent to which theoretical attitude represents a derivative mode of factical life.
This endeavor bears in itself some basic characters of phenomenology. The proclamation of returning to “the things themselves” was Husserl's password in his programmatic Logos-essay, and this implied the suspending of traditional philosophical strategies, the dismissal of the authorities, and, more specifically, with regard to method, the preference of description over construction.8 Heidegger heartily welcomed this innermost effort of phenomenology, and it was under its spell that he soon proceeded to radicalize it in such a way as to turn it against itself. It was precisely its character of open possibility, characteristic of and indeed indispensable for any kind of serious and autonomous philosophical inquiry, that Heidegger found fascinating in adhering to Husserl's phenomenology after the war. By contrast, from the very beginning he had serious doubts and made frequent critical remarks about the transcendental concretization of it carried out by Husserl. His course during the so-called War Emergency Semester 1919 already shows some important reservations about Husserl's actual phenomenology (and together with it the outlines of another possible phenomenology). These remarks are woven into his criticism of epistemologically oriented Neo-Kantian philosophy as such, and appear in the form of an attack against the primacy of the theoretical—an attack motivated by Dilthey, life-philosophy, and historicism, and brought to bear far beyond Husserl upon the whole metaphysical-ontological tradition going back to Aristotle. Heidegger observes that the distortive representations of life and the environing world are due not simply to the prevalence of naturalism, as Husserl thinks they are, but to the domination of the theoretical in general (see GA 56/57, 87).
Heidegger's main endeavor—to find a new access to life in its originality—was his way of taking up and translating Husserl's password—back to the things themselves—into his own conceptuality. However, the thing to which philosophy had to find its way back, and which was the origin of all meaning, was, for Heidegger, for the aforementioned reasons, not transcendental consciousness, but life in its originality. In the course of his lecture course 1919–1920, he kept designating life as the “primal phenomenon” (Urphänomen) for phenomenology in general (see GA 59, 15, 18, 23, 39, 40, 176). Phenomenology thus conceived, centering around life as being both the origin and the subject matter of philosophy, was repeatedly called pre-theoretical “primal science” or “science of the origins” (Urwissenschaft, Ursprungswissenschaft).
Since the tendency to gain a new access to life was widespread at the time and reflected the efforts of the age,9 Heidegger may be seen to have just taken seriously and to have radicalized this urge coming from thinkers such as Natorp, Dilthey, Bergson, Simmel, Jaspers, Scheler, and James.10 In the midst of various devastating criticisms, more often than not he took great pains to note that there is a positive, an original impulse inherent in life-philosophy—that he does indeed appreciate the impulse, while what he declines is just its insufficient (because parasitic) realization. Heidegger suggests that the basic effort of life-philosophy is correct, he seems even to share the view of contemporary philosophy that the object primarily to be approached and investigated is “life.”11 What he objects to and disapproves of is that, rather than developing conceptual means adequate to its ownmost object, that is, “life,” life-philosophy relies upon the tools of the adversary for its own concepts.12 That is also the reason why, having realized that the tools are not equal to the task, life-philosophers tend to come inevitably to the conclusion that life, history, and existence are irrational (see, e.g., GA 58, 231f). The point Heidegger makes could be put as follows: irrationalist philosophy is really too rational. In claiming its objects to be irrational, it uncritically borrows the measure or concept of rationality from the adversary rather than elaborating a rationality or conceptuality of its own, one that conforms to its object.13
On this view, the traditional concept of rationality stems from a theoretical attitude, based in its turn on a conception of humans as rational beings—one more reason why Heidegger strives to disengage himself from the traditional (and apparently self-evident) view of man as a rational animal, and together with it from the rational–irrational distinction, so as to explore dimensions of man's being underlying theoretical comportment. Phenomenologically, theoretical comportment has indeed gained mastery over the entire Western philosophical tradition. The domination of it has been undisputed even where it has been bitterly opposed. One of Heidegger's earliest watchwords cries out therefore: “This hegemony of the theoretical must be broken.”14
It is in the course of his destructive efforts to penetrate behind theoretical comportment and conceptuality in an attempt to gain a new and fresh (so to speak “unprejudiced”) access to life that the hermeneutic perspective emerges in Heidegger's postwar lecture courses. This constitutes also the background of his hermeneutical appropriation and hermeneutic-ontological transformation of Husserl's phenomenology. As early as in the immediate postwar years, Heidegger offers, as an alternative to rational concepts and theoretical knowing, what he calls “hermeneutical concepts” (GA 9, 32) or—over against pure or theoretical intuition—“hermeneutical intuition” (GA 56/57, 117). The implication is this: it is not sufficient simply to see—one must also understand. In other words, what we need is a seeing that understands. And as a matter of fact, this kind of seeing operates always already in factical life. “Hermeneutics,” “hermeneutical,” emerge as rival concepts to “theory,” “theoretical,” understood in terms of “theoretically neutral” (see, e.g., GA 61, 86f.). In several important respects, Heidegger's hermeneutical turn may be viewed as centering around the insight that interpretation cannot be regarded as something added, as a kind of extension or annex, as it were, to some theoretically neutral (and, as such, allegedly “objective”) description of a state of affairs: rather, preliminary “interpretedness” is inherent in all kinds of description, in all kinds of seeing, saying, and experiencing.15 If there is no “pure” theory (for “theory” is a derivative mode of being or comportment of one particular being called human), there is no pure description either. Any naive attempt at a mere description of how things are with the help of theoretical concepts and linguistic means—the way traditional ontology was going about its business—becomes thereby ruled out. What this insight implies for an adequate description of life or facticity is that theoretical concepts, as well as the language that theory speaks, should be abandoned in favor of a language growing out of everyday life and able to let things be seen (and letting see is an eminently phenomenological claim16) in their interpretedness, that is, exactly the way we encounter and have to do with them—in life, and not purely in consciousness. A hammer, for example, is primarily encountered as a tool for hitting nails into the wall rather than as a neutral thing out there having the property of weight. If the hammer proves to be too heavy, “[i]nterpretation is carried out primordially not in a theoretical statement but in an action …–laying aside the unsuitable tool, or exchanging it, ‘without wasting a word’” (Heidegger 1979, 157/200). To put it bluntly: for Heidegger, in order to do interpreting one need not speak or make assertions, but in order to speak one must have done interpreting. Interpretation does not presuppose “recorded expressions,” as with Dilthey,17 but vice versa: making assertions of whatever kind presupposes preliminary interpretation. Assertion is thus, for Heidegger, a derivative mode of understanding (Heidegger 1979 § 33). Traditional ontologies comprising theoretical assertions about things lying out there can therefore in no way justify their claim to originality.
This phenomenological reevaluation of interpretation implies that hermeneutics cannot remain a subordinate discipline of the human sciences, but becomes, as Heidegger explicitly states, “the self-interpretation of facticity” (GA 63, 14). Generally speaking, it is due to Heidegger's search for proper methodological devices for an adequate conceptual expression of “factical life” that the hermeneutic problematic takes shape in the postwar lecture courses. Theoretically (and ahistorically), neutral knowledge becomes thereby opposed to, and gives way to, existentially (and historically) involved understanding (or pre-understanding) and interpreting—whereby knowledge becomes at best a subdivision of understanding.18 All these efforts are in the service of seizing upon “life”—a term to be replaced soon by “being.” The main character of the latter is claimed to be concern (Sorge) rather than knowledge (see GA 61, 89ff.; GA 62, 352).
Understanding is, on this view, much more than one way of knowing, proper to humane studies, in contrast to explanation made use of by the natural sciences. (“We explain nature, and we understand spirit,” Dilthey said.19) It is, rather, a way of being of the human Dasein. Humans exist in such a way as to have an understanding of (their) being all along. What they understand are not matters of fact out there, but the way they find themselves in the world, involved in it and coping with it. Understanding is not something to be attained first in science—be it natural or human—but rather vice versa: the knowing relation to the world is a derivative one. In his main work, Heidegger shows in a series of analyses how, by virtue of what modifications of Being-in-the-world man's knowing relation to the world springs—how, in order for a thing to become an object of knowledge or scientific research, our preliminary access to it, that is our way of having to do with it, must have undergone a specific modification. With regard to our hermeneutic problematic and the reevaluation of the concept of understanding, we may say: knowledge derives from understanding and not vice versa. The hermeneutic perspective cannot remain restricted to a domain of beings and their correlative sciences; it becomes all-comprehensive, it embraces the whole of being. Conversely, Being, for its part, discloses itself only through and in an understanding that human Dasein has of it. Hermeneutics stretches itself over and comprehends being, while, vice versa, the whole of being becomes the “object” of interpretation. Ontology can no longer do without hermeneutics; it is only through hermeneutics that ontology becomes accessible.
Heidegger's new ontological concept of understanding is thoroughly phenomenological: we are invited to take understanding in precisely the way in which it offers itself to us or as we encounter it in everyday life, rather than drawing on its traditional character of scholarly work done in the humanities or in the Geisteswissenschaften, which it is customary to oppose to the work done in natural science identified and accounted for epistemologically in terms of “explanation,” explanation being done in natural sciences. Indeed, what we today tend legitimately to call the (or Heidegger's) specific hermeneutical concept of understanding (namely, as a way of being of the being called human) presented itself for Heidegger through a phenomenological access to it—a major reason why he denoted it by the term “phenomenological understanding.”20 As a matter of fact, it is an original, unprejudiced phenomenological access to the phenomenon of understanding that does most of the work in Heidegger's hermeneutical transformation of Husserl's phenomenology, and, in general, in the hermeneutical turn of phenomenology itself.
The science which is destined to provide access to life as it offers itself in its originality is, as should be clear from what has been reconstructed, intrinsically interpretive, that is, hermeneutical—an insight which explicitly crops up in a note of the 1919/20 lecture course stating that “the science of the origins is ultimately the hermeneutical science” (GA 58, 55).
The specifically ontological transformation of phenomenology is provided by Heidegger in his critique of Husserl during the 1925 course. His main question concerns the delimitation of the specific research field of phenomenology itself, that is to say, the self-concretization of phenomenological philosophy out of its own initial principle or maxim (“back to the things themselves”). The basic issue is related to whether and how phenomenology gets access to (comes to delimit) its own research field, whether the procedure thereby employed is phenomenologically coherent or not. If, for phenomenology, the basic structure of consciousness lies in intentionality (being directed toward), and if contemporary critics, such as, for example, Rickert, charge phenomenology with dogmatism, then it is important for Heidegger to realize that it is not intentionality as such that may legitimately be claimed to be dogmatic, but rather that to which intentionality gets tacitly linked, or bound, or tied, that which is built under this structure—in other words, that of which it is claimed to be the specific structure. In fact, intentionality is held to be the specific structure of the psyche, reason, consciousness, etc. (rather than, say, nature), all of which are ontological regions that are naively, that is, traditionally and therefore dogmatically, assumed rather than phenomenologically discussed and delimited. The linking of intentionality to pure consciousness, or to the transcendental ego, is carried out not so much in a phenomenological way as simply by taking over the leading idea of modern Cartesian–Kantian philosophy (GA 20, 147).
That phenomenology may be shown to be intrinsically incoherent or inconsistent, that is, as Heidegger puts it, “unphenomenological,”21 affected with metaphysical bias, is significant enough; however, it is not yet clear whether the posing of the Being-question is really inevitable, that is, if and why phenomenology is to be radicalized ontologically. Cannot the Being-question be dispensed with? The inevitability of this question follows for Heidegger from the fact that, although Husserl fails to pose it, claiming to suspend, put into brackets, “assertions concerning being,” although he leaves the being of intentionality obscure, he nevertheless answers it tacitly by linking it to an ontological region called transcendental consciousness. In addition, which is even more relevant, he explicitly makes distinctions of Being such as the one between Being as consciousness and transcendent being—which he himself called, symptomatically, “the most radical of all distinctions of being.”22 Remarkably enough, while prohibiting making assertions concerning being, phenomenology tacitly commits itself to certain ontological positions—that is, without thematizing the access to those positions in a phenomenological way (GA 20, 140, 157ff., 178).
Heidegger's critique of Husserl implies that the Being-question simply cannot be dispensed with, all ontologies presuppose it, and even make use of it whether they thematize it or not (GA 20, 124/91; see ibid., 158/115). We are not free to formulate it or just to put it aside and turn away from it. The real alternative lies in either formulating it explicitly and elaborating it accordingly, or answering it (having always already answered it) tacitly and therefore dogmatically, without thematizing it first in an adequate manner. The immanent reexamination and renewal of phenomenology points to the necessity of an ontological transformation or radicalization. Phenomenology points to ontology, whereas ontology in its turn and inversely—as the basic formulation of Being and Time runs—is “possible only as phenomenology” (Heidegger 1979, 35/ 60). If the Being-question is to be thematized in a non-dogmatic, that is, philosophically adequate, manner then phenomenology opens up the only way to do so. Phenomenology thus reaches over and covers ontology, that is, the Being-question, while the latter can be approached or accessed only with the help of phenomenology. This kind of phenomenology—the sort able to embrace ontological claims or meet ontological requirements—is, however, a hermeneutically transformed phenomenology in which the concepts of understanding and interpretation are no more restricted to the realm of human sciences but have in their turn also extended to the whole domain of being. If the business of phenomenology is to let us see, then “see” means here, equiprimordially, “understand” (roughly, in a way analogous to the everyday question “Can you see it?” which comes most frequently down to meaning something like “Can you understand it?”).
The phenomenology of human existence is thus, for Heidegger, no less hermeneutics (and it is hermeneutics in “a primordial sense of the word where it designates the business of interpreting” (Heidegger 1979, 37/62)), and both are at the service or for the benefit of the Being-question. If, as has been said earlier, phenomenology is the soil on which the encounter and fusion of hermeneutics and ontology take place, it is equally true that the reciprocal fusion of phenomenology and ontology becomes integrated by hermeneutics.
This research was supported by the European Union and the Hungarian State, co-financed by the European Social Fund in the framework of TÁMOP 4.2.4. A/1-11-1-2012-0001 National Excellence Program, as well as by the Herder Foundation.
Bibliographical Remark: The volumes of Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe and of Gadamer's Gesammelte Werke are cited with the abbreviations GA and GW, respectively, followed by the volume number, comma, and page numbers. If there are references to both the original German text and the corresponding English translation, the German pagination and the English pagination are separated by a slash. For example: “GA 20: 417/301f.,” the number before the slash indicating the German edition, the one after the slash the English edition.