Paul Fairfield
There is no more ultimate question in philosophy than the question of reason, and it is a question to which philosophical hermeneutics proffers a radical answer. Reason is the practice of reasoning—interpreting, questioning, justifying, and criticizing—with others in a dialogical process that is without end. It is to be conceived not in exclusively logical, scientific-technological, or utilitarian terms but in a more expansive way than is customary in the Western tradition. If we would speak of reason philosophically, the question before us is what the concept signifies. Putting the question ahistorically or in any terms that remove the concept from a larger context of meaning renders the question unanswerable. Concepts, of reason or of anything, do not exist apart from an historical-linguistic context and cannot be thus analyzed. Efforts so to analyze them are inevitably truncated and typically render the concept in too technical and too epistemological a way. Reason cannot be comprehended apart from the kind of being that is the rational animal, while the latter cannot be understood apart from the capacity for linguistic communication. The human being is not only the rational animal but—inseparable from this—the speaking animal. Reason, hermeneutically conceived, must be conceptualized not solely in methodological terms but as a mode of human existence that transcends technique.
A major theme in post-Heideggerian hermeneutics is the manner in which science–technology has become a totalized view of the world while reason itself has narrowed into one or another form of rationalism, a situation that finds its social counterpart in the technological and functionalizing malaise of the twentieth century. When conditions of modern life are that bureaucracy, mass institutions and mass society, technical order, and instrumental thinking are paramount, and indeed lack an alternative (but perhaps for superstition), it is not only the concept of reason that is in peril but the existing individual itself. What is needed is a richer conception of reason, the model for which Hans-Georg Gadamer found within Platonic dialogue or the practice of informal and rhetorical conversation. Less ordered than its more epistemological counterparts, reason in this sense includes while surpassing the methodological and scientific. Not itself a technique, it is better spoken of, as Karl Jaspers (1952, 44) had maintained, as a condition of the will and a disposition of mind or what that author described as a domain of “boundless communication.” “There is,” Jaspers (1950, 47, 48) wrote, “something like a climate of reason,” the principal feature of which is a “total will to communicate.” To be rational in the preeminent sense of the word is to refuse all reticence and to open oneself to the questioning and the point of view of an interlocutor. In the spirit of Platonic dialogue, nothing is off limits to rational discussion, and all persons are drawn into a conversation in which ideas are proposed and challenged in uninhibited fashion. Reasoned communication includes an orientation toward consensus and openness to whatever our interlocutors have to say, provided only that their message is not one of intolerance or violence. The rational frame of mind is inclined to listen and to learn, to pay attention to what is alien, to anticipate validity, and in general to take others seriously—which includes demanding a justification of their views.
So conceived, reason is neither a technique, a metaphysical faculty, nor a deep core of being, but a capacity that draws us into association with others. A rational frame of mind requires that one risk oneself in the confrontation of ideas and strive for creative expression as well as agreement with other inquirers. Rational thought does not stand above the fray of assertion and reply or announce its “findings” from some pre-social location. Descartes famously announced at the outset of the Meditations that in order to engage in truly rational thought he would need to “withdraw in solitude” so that the opinions and prejudices of others would not interfere with the solitary reflection that was to ensue (Descartes 1979, 13). For modern rationalism, reasoning means thinking more geometrico, in conformity with so many a priori “rules for the direction of the mind,” an operation in which others can only be a distraction, or perhaps an audience. The truth of which hermeneutics speaks is one that is reached in common, never on a purely private basis, and the only authority that prevails is not that of a method formulated in advance but that which the participants in conversation jointly discover. If we would seek a guarantee for the validity of our position, the only guarantee that is possible is what emerges from open communication. This is not the kind of guarantee that modern epistemology sought, but it is all that is possible and all that is needed. To seek absolute assurance for our beliefs presupposes a conception of truth as an altogether stable property that simply waits for human beings to happen upon it. It presupposes as well that knowledge and reason are end states rather than the processual values that hermeneutics holds them to be. The knowledge for which philosophy has searched from the beginning is not an altogether secure possession or a set of fixed facts but is always on the way. “Philosophy,” as Jaspers (1976, 12) in a Heideggerian mood put it, “means to be on the way. Its questions are more essential than its answers, and every answer becomes a new question.”
Philosophy invariably strives after a knowledge that in some measure eludes its grasp while reason itself is a process that drives us into communicative engagements without the possibility of a final terminus. Socratic ignorance belongs as much at the end of the process as at the beginning, and where there is no true end at all. Bringing communication to a halt—either because we believe we have discovered the truth or because we despair of ever doing so—is antithetical to reason in this sense of the word. Positions here are not fixed but contingent in every case upon the ongoing course of hermeneutical inquiry.
Too often, reason has been conceived as a technique while truth similarly becomes narrowed and hypostasized. Always incomplete and subject to a dialogue that is ongoing, truth is what brings human beings into solidarity while its value is measured by the kind of union that it brings into being. The mortal enemy of truth is therefore the sheer insistence that one is correct and the refusal to entertain competing views. The value of freedom does not belong to morality alone, but is inseparable from rationality itself. Its connection with reason consists in its inseparability from authentic communication. For thinking to be rational, it must allow itself to be drawn into incessant communication, and by a free act of decision. The fundamental choice here is whether to open oneself to the clash of viewpoints or to retreat into a dogmatic system of thought. So closely did Jaspers (1961, 218), in particular, view the connection between reason and freedom that what he called anti-reason is in its essence the renunciation of free debate. Anti-reason is “the supposed right of reticence,” the refusal to allow our point of view to be criticized, and the sheer insistence that we are right. What does not promote communication, for Jaspers, is false by definition. No truth is incapable of supporting its claim to truth with reasons in which others can see the merit. The central point in Jaspers’ conception of reason is that ideas invariably remain subject to a discussion that is without end, including the rules that govern such discussion. Reason's antithesis is not passion or contradictory thinking but violence, and where violence is more often concealed than overt. While it partakes of transcendence, reason does not sever connection with its historical, cultural, and existential situation but seeks to elucidate the condition in which we find ourselves.
What philosophical hermeneutics would render more explicit is the phenomenological dimension of such communication, and in a spirit that complements Jaspers’ account. Rationality, as both Jaspers and Gadamer would speak of it, crucially bears on the practice of dialogue and is not merely a method of inference or calculation. The logos that in some sense constitutes our humanity is no metaphysical essence but is the possibility of uninhibited communication. The structure of such communication was aptly described by Gadamer as a back-and-forth of question and answer, assertion and reply, where the orientation of speakers is toward a truth that is held in common and where we anticipate the possible correctness of what our interlocutor has to say. In his words, “Conversation is a process of coming to an understanding. Thus it belongs to every true conversation that each person opens himself to the other, truly accepts his point of view as valid and transposes himself into the other to such an extent that he understands not the particular individual but what he says. What is to be grasped is the substantive rightness of his opinion, so that we can be at one with each other on the subject. Thus we do not relate the other's opinion to him but to our own opinions and views.” Reason is the social practice of reasoning together and coming to an understanding with others about a disputed question. It is a practice in which none may proclaim themselves above the fray by virtue of special expertise. The claim of the interlocutor or the text does not confront one as an object in opposition to sovereign subjectivity but is a truth claim in which one is immediately caught up. Gadamer likened dialogue to the dialectical structure of play, where what is essential is the movement back and forth rather than any final conclusion. “Knowledge,” as he would write, “is dialectical from the ground up,” while the actions of the players “should not be considered subjective actions, since it is, rather, the game itself that plays, for it draws the players into itself and thus itself becomes the actual subjectum of the playing” (Gadamer 1989, 365, 385, 490).
What hermeneutics strives to articulate, as Jean Grondin (2003, 140) has put it, is “a more reasonable conception of rationality” than what has long prevailed in the Western tradition through to the present—more reasonable in the sense of phenomenologically sound, mindful of its historical conditions and finitude, and intellectually modest, particularly in comparison with the various forms of rationalist thought that we have witnessed since the seventeenth century. Modern rationalism constitutes at once an artificial narrowing of reason, an absurd overestimation of it, and a forgetfulness of the conditions in which rational thought invariably occurs. In Gadamer's (1989, 276) words, “Reason exists for us only in concrete, historical terms—i.e., it is not its own master but remains constantly dependent on the given circumstances in which it operates.” These circumstances include language and culture, tradition and rhetoric (in the classical sense of the art of persuasion), and a context of existing beliefs and questions. There is no reasoning in a vacuum, no cognition that occurs apart from a complex historical heritage. It begins not at the beginning but always in midstream, on the model of joining a conversation that began long ago and that it falls to us to carry forward.
This much is clear from Gadamer's work and in the literature of post-Heideggerian hermeneutics more generally. It is clear as well that hermeneutics opposes the reduction of reason to scientific, calculative, or instrumental rationality. The general orientation of contemporary hermeneutics is decidedly non-subjectivist and non-foundationalist. Gadamer and many other hermeneutical philosophers after Heidegger have lamented what has become of “reason in the age of science,” further extending Heidegger's interpretation of modernity as an age in which science–technology has become a totalizing system of thought. Reason has indeed been narrowed to the order of the calculative and instrumental. Reason and anti-reason must be conceived in connection with the fate of human beings in their historical circumstances. The human being in the twenty-first century remains a part of the technological and utilitarian apparatus that Nietzsche, Heidegger, Jaspers, and various other figures described, and ever more so. The salient fact regarding communication today and indeed of social life generally is the fact of technology. Science–technology appears no longer as a perspective on the world but as an inescapable and total system of thought. We have become adapted in every facet of our existence to modern technology, as is reflected, for instance, in modern communications technology. The rationality that is hermeneutical dialogue or boundless communication does not happen via technology of this order but is distorted by an apparatus that stimulates, informs, forms, and confines us. The iron cage of rationality is still with us; its dimensions have changed but its effect has not. It has us still, and indeed more than ever. Its outward signs are bureaucracy, instrumentality, impersonality, and gadgetry without end, but at bottom it is a way of appearing and being that increasingly lacks an alternative.
Reason, if it is a concept that we can still speak of, must transcend the order of the useful and the methodological. There is more to rationality than what rationalism knows, more to the human being than what science knows. Anti-reason in our time remains the violence and self-certainty that refuses communication, but it is also characterized by the reign of technique beyond which we can no longer see, that is efficient and “natural,” that reduces all to order and administers our needs. The life of reason is still found in the free communication of one human being with another, unmediated by technique and uninhibited by intellectual orthodoxy. It is found where individuals encounter one another in face-to-face interaction and account to each other for what they believe and how they conduct themselves. It is found in the search for a truth that is pursued in common and that is no one's possession. The fate of humanity is the fate of communication, while the latter is impossible to disentangle any longer from technology. From the symbols and metaphors within which we think to the means of communication that we increasingly prefer, from the vocabularies we speak to our ways of knowing and controlling the world, technology is the regime of truth in which we live and the order from which reason must seek transcendence. The question this raises, of course, is how this is done. How, as the current expression has it, do we think “outside the box” when the box itself has formed us so completely or, to use a more suitable metaphor, when the net that we must in some fashion think beyond is one in which we are all so thoroughly caught? Are we still waiting for being to reveal itself anew, or for a god to save us? Perhaps not, but if we are awaiting a new Age of Reason—this time one of boundless communication rather than rationalist orthodoxy—we had better be patient. A great new era of dialogue is not upon us, but on this possibility, or something like it, the fate of communication and humanity alike rest. What has become increasingly imperative is to think beyond the confines of technology while the prospects of doing so have become increasingly unlikely.
How do we think beyond the confines of technology—if we can agree, that is, to the possibility and necessity of doing so? The question seems already to call for a technique: what is the model to be followed, what rules shall now direct the mind? Or is it poetic thinking that is called for? There are no simple answers here, as if the question of reason were a scientific or technical problem to be solved. There is no model to be found. Reason is boundless communication—except that even this is an oversimplification. It is also, as Jaspers insisted, a mood, a climate, a disposition of mind, a will to unity, a practice, and an art; it is a source of order and also of disorder, logical and a-logical, something that cannot be divorced from its context and held aloft for us to analyze. It is not a technical term but a word in ordinary language, which, like so many such words, functions in a bewildering array of ways. We speak of something standing to reason, of having good reasons, of being reasonable or unreasonable. What unifies the phenomena of this word's disparate uses? Likely no single value accomplishes this apart from the orientation and abiding imperative toward transcending the established boundaries of thought, to throw off inflexible systems of belief and to be continually “on the way” this way or that. Reason must be thought of processually and non-methodologically, perhaps as a certain kind of poetizing, but not only this. It is oriented toward persuasion, the ordinary offering of accounts for why one speaks and acts as one does. It exists where human beings agree to explain themselves and to inquire in common into some disputed matter, in a spirit of reciprocity and with a modicum of goodwill. It exists where no party claims certainty for its position or special insight that others lack. It exists not where violence or manipulation is reduced to zero—for this is likely impossible—but where there is a commitment to let the stronger argument prevail, and where narrowness of mind gives way to its opposite.
Human beings can still be defined in terms of rationality, where this carries no metaphysical connotation and refers specifically to our freedom to speak and to listen, and to the imperative of communication that governs our existence. When human reason becomes narrowed in meaning, something more is at stake than the philosophical analysis of a concept or the definition of a technical term. We ourselves and our fundamental mode of existence are in question. How we think and interact, how we understand ourselves and our world, is who we are. The search for a human essence that underlies our modes of communication is pointless. If our existence is properly to be one of free creativity then we must find ways to think and act beyond the narrowing influences of modernity. The contradiction that we face is that free communication, difference, and authenticity, are possible as never before, if we judge matters by their appearances, while at a deeper level of analysis sameness of thinking, valuing, acting, communicating, and being are as prevalent as ever they were. The former alone is readily visible, and one easily mistakes a possibility for an attained reality. Thus, many today proclaim a new era of dialogue which has been made possible by advances in communications technology, or a social order that finally throws off uniformity and celebrates difference and empowerment, an order that is brought about by utilitarian rationality and bureaucracy. Boundless freedom of communication and thought is not upon us. Its conditions of possibility are many, and include the hermeneutical and epistemological, the scientific and technological, the educational and political, and some others. Our constant hermeneutical task is to cultivate the will not only to communicate but to push continually the frontiers of what is sayable and imaginable that is reason's essence.
Throughout our Western tradition, the will to reason has tended to become its opposite—some more or less dogmatic form of rationalism, in which the tolerance of uncertainty and the patience for process give way to an insistence on incontrovertible knowledge and the reduction to technique. Perhaps it is a permanent tendency of thought to seek deliverance from the processual and to postulate what is fixed, often in the name of reason itself. If we are to be intellectually responsible, an old story goes, we must tie our judgments and the conversation as a whole to the secure post of reason. This we can still believe, but how secure do we imagine the post to be? When this tendency manifests itself, it falls to philosophy to remind us of reason's limits, of what reason can still be in the modern world, and of the obligation of boundless communication under which it places us. If the speaking animal is what we most fundamentally are, we are called upon to risk ourselves and our point of view in a dialogue that does not end. It is the beginning of wisdom as well as sound phenomenology to recognize that nothing human is unassailable or without limits. Nothing in our intellectual life is above the fray of dialogue. If reasoned persuasion sometimes makes use of techniques, as in many areas of inquiry it clearly does, in others it does not. The imperative of reason in any case is to refuse the closing off of discussion and to allow the process to unfold as it will.
The question of relativism is posed so often in discussions of hermeneutics and other areas of continental thought that I should like to conclude with a few remarks on the issue. A great many hermeneutical, phenomenological, existential, and poststructuralist thinkers are regularly accused of defending some sort of relativist or historicist position by philosophers with more objectivist leanings. What does the charge of relativism amount to and how seriously should we take it? Gadamer himself—and a great many other philosophers who are accused of this—did not regard the accusation with great seriousness, and he is not to be faulted for this. Like irrationalism, relativism is primarily an epithet of condemnation rather than a position that a philosopher might actually defend. It is a word, as Grondin (2003, 112) correctly notes, that “intends to cause fear”; “For Gadamer and Heidegger, relativism is only … a spectre, a bugbear that intends to create fear by depicting the infamous consequences which are to be upheld by ‘everything is relative.’” Most often, the charge is a sophism that is meant to maneuver its addressee into taking seriously some form of objectivist or essentialist thinking by arguing that the only alternative is the road to perdition.
What is the meaning of relativism, in the minority of cases at any rate in which it is not an empty term of abuse? Richard Rorty discerned three meanings of the term in articulating his own reply to the charge: first, every statement is as true and every judgment as just as any other; second, “true” and “just” are equivocal terms; and third, there is nothing substantive to be said about truth or justice but for historically specific procedures of justification. Rorty (1991, 23) himself defended the third view while rejecting the first two. The second view, he believed, is “eccentric,” while the first is self-refuting—a charge sometimes directed at the third view as well. It is not obvious in the case of hermeneutics which of the three views allegedly applies; however, let us first consider the claim that it is logically self-refuting. Does Gadamer's argument that interpretations are justified with reference to other interpretations rather than ahistorical touchstones—or similar arguments offered by Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Rorty, and so on—refute itself? To see that it does not, as Gadamer noted, “we must ask whether the two propositions—‘all knowledge is historically conditioned’ and ‘this piece of knowledge is true unconditionally’—are on the same level, so that they could contradict each other.” A statement can contradict another only if the two are “on the same level” in this sense or if they belong to the same language game. In the case of the two statements Gadamer cited, they are not. A phenomenological statement about understanding or judgment is on a different level of discourse than a statement about statements, or in Gadamer's words, “what men say about themselves is not to be understood as objective assertions concerning a particular being” (Gadamer 1989, 534, 449 n85). Reflexive statements and descriptions of the world are separate language games played by separate rules. A statement in one can no more contradict a statement in the other than a move in baseball can counter a move in hockey. We do not have a contradiction when the political judgment “This should not be” is countered with the descriptive utterance “It is.” The second statement neither contradicts nor refutes the first but jumps to a separate language game and so misses the point. The same kind of jump occurs from the first proposition cited by Gadamer above to the second.
It is an aporia of reason that reason itself has no rational foundation. The principle of sufficient reason itself no more admits of rational proof than the rules of logic admit of logical demonstration, yet the existence of an aporia does not mean that we are at a standstill or that we have refuted ourselves. As John Caputo (1987, 225) states, “If we ask the principle of reason for its own reason, if we ask what is the reason for the principle of reason, if we ask about the reasonableness of reason, we get no answer. The silence is very embarrassing. Under pain of infinite regress, the buck of reason stops with the principle of reason itself. The principle cannot itself have a reason. It must be its own authority, speak with its own voice. It cannot call the police; it is the police.” Pure reflection, were it to exist, would be no privileged route to the things themselves, and what passes for it are typically empty formalisms from which nothing substantive follows. To cite Truth and Method once more:
What does [the thesis that relativism refutes itself] achieve? The reflective argument that proves successful here rebounds against the arguer, for it renders the truth-value of reflection suspect. It is not the reality of skepticism or of truth-dissolving relativism but the truth claim of all formal argument that is affected. Thus the formalism of such reflective argument is of specious philosophical legitimacy. In fact it tells us nothing. We are familiar with this kind of thing from the Greek Sophists, whose inner hollowness Plato demonstrated. It was also he who saw clearly that there is no argumentatively adequate criterion by which to distinguish between truly philosophical and sophistic discourse. In particular, he shows in his Seventh Letter that the formal refutability of a proposition does not necessarily exclude its being true.
(Gadamer 1989, 344–345)
Were relativism a tenable philosophical position, the fundamental problem with it, hermeneutically speaking, would not be that it creates a logical problem but that it brings intelligent conversation to a halt. If it did result in a genuine logical problem, it would still need to be asked what follows from a priori arguments of this kind. Unless we wish to assert (as many who express this argument appear to believe) that the rules of our logic are a philosophical counterpart to the word of God, we must concede that they are conventions, useful fictions which, like the rules of any language game, are subject to the ongoing agreement of the players. Jaspers had a point when he spoke of a “rational a-logic”; his point was that when we forget the limits of logic or of any system of thought we enclose ourselves in a worldview that is narrowing and dogmatic. If any kind of forward movement is possible in our ways of thinking, it happens precisely when we do not regard established rules of the game as sacrosanct but hazard a move that brings these into question. A recurring theme in contemporary continental thought is that we must change or otherwise limber up the rules of the game and think in more experimental ways than philosophical modernity deemed permissible.
But what if our critics were to persist, and indeed were correct, that there is a logical problem here and that the rules of our logic are utterly sacrosanct? What would follow? If the position that knowledge is finite and conditioned—by language, culture, power, perspective, or what have you—refutes itself, have we proven in cogito-like fashion that absolute knowledge is possible after all? What is the content of such knowledge and what is the method? It will be a form of pure reflection which, escaping all finitude, beholds the world as it is in itself and perhaps some other things: the Form of the Good, the realm of essences, the thing-in-itself, and the Moral Law as well. Could we ask the possessors of this knowledge to describe what they see, and in pure terms? The project has been tried since Plato, and the track record is not good. At last the idea dawned on Nietzsche that this was a project in security seeking not unlike religion and that the preoccupation with pure forms and pure reflection caused us to lose sight of the phenomena. It was “an attempt,” as Rorty (1991, 23) said, “to avoid facing up to contingency, to escape from time and chance.” Philosophers from the beginning have dreamed of being gods, and reminding us that we are not is neither a contradiction nor an invitation to relativism.
The position that hermeneutics defends would better go under the name of anti-essentialism than relativism, as Rorty said of his own version of pragmatism. It is a serious misinterpretation of either view to regard it as claiming that truth or justice is relative to anything at all. They are denying that truth, knowledge, or justice have essences, and, as Rorty (1991, 27) also remarked, “I do not see how a claim that something does not exist can be construed as a claim that something is relative to something else.” The problem for our critics is that they cannot imagine how one could deny this without ending up in equivocation. The answer is that we avoid the implication by denying the underlying duality. Philosophers who reject ancient dichotomies—reality/appearance, knowledge/opinion, rationalism/irrationalism, absolutism/relativism, objectivism/subjectivism—appear as relativists to those who accept those dichotomies and cannot imagine how philosophy could proceed without them. Thinking without dichotomies is precisely what hermeneutics endeavors to do. An incredulity toward false oppositions is no less imperative, and no less postmodern, than an incredulity toward metanarratives. There is no more point in speaking of Heidegger or Gadamer as relativists than in speaking of them as heretics or infidels. It is only within a certain worldview that these terms hold meaning, and when the quest for certainty is given up, the fear of relativism vanishes into air.