Donatella Di Cesare
Looking back at the history of philosophy, it is striking that the issue of understanding has become philosophically relevant only quite late. In fact, it is thanks to the reflections on language by Wilhelm von Humboldt and Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, that understanding, an act intimately bound up with speaking, emerges in all its problematic nature. In Wilhelm Dilthey’s thought, the concept of understanding, which characterizes the so-called humanities, is more clearly delineated in opposition to the concept of explanation, which defines the logically inductive method of the natural sciences. Taken up in philosophical hermeneutics, first by Martin Heidegger and subsequently by Hans-Georg Gadamer, the concept of understanding acquired a centrality in the twentieth century, as is also evinced in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s contributions, becoming one of the key notions in contemporary debate between different philosophical currents.
The concept of understanding appears initially at the point of intersection between the philological-hermeneutical and the theological-philosophical traditions. Akin to the Latin term intelligere, the concept of understanding already appears as a philosophical term in the language of the mystics, starting from Augustine, for whom it had a broader significance than merely seeing. For Augustine, understanding is that intuitive knowledge that catches a glimpse of what cannot be seen.1 Similarly, centuries later, Thomas Aquinas maintained that understanding is the perfect stage of knowing as the arriving ad finem in relation to what one seeks to know.2 Understanding is what enables the gauging of the knowledge of God’s self-knowing and the knowledge that neither human beings nor angels can possess.3 For Luther, who brings together the mysticism of the logos and the Pauline scriptural tradition, understanding is precisely that hermeneutical modality of knowing that embraces the entirety of human faculties (Holl 1921). Descartes, in turn, associates understanding with pure knowledge in which the knowing power acts by itself, independently of the imagination.4 Spinoza, in an original way, sees in understanding both active and passive elements, insofar as human understanding, in relation to the divine, reveals itself to be pure suffering or undergoing.5 Kant outlines the rationality of understanding by connecting it to the intellect and its limits. According to a shared conviction present in the humanistic tradition—from Nicholas of Cusa to Giambattista Vico—the human being can only understand its own actions; and nature, as created by God—for Kant the thing-in-itself—escapes the human being’s understanding. Thus, the relationship between seeing and understanding is inverted: it is possible to see quite a lot, yet without understanding anything of what appears, and only thanks to the categories is understanding made possible in the first place.6
The Kantian concept of understanding is subsequently re-appropriated quite originally by Hamann who, by stressing the limits of the human understanding of the book of nature, develops the idea of historical understanding, grasped as a situating oneself in the past that presupposes an understanding of the present and a foreseeing of the future. In such a way, the “past” can be read as “future.”7 However, it is Herder who connects understanding with history instead of nature much more forcefully by returning to the nineteenth-century debate surrounding understanding and explanation. Yet what matters most is that for Herder understanding is an act of “divination,” in which the soul of the author is grasped, and as such it is culture’s most perfect instrument.8
The reflections of Hamann, Herder, and the Romantics, which stress the divining and congenial aspects of understanding, are brought together by Schleiermacher with the tradition of theological hermeneutics and classical philology, whose major representatives were J. A. Ernesti, F. Ast, and F. A. Wolf. Following the path already opened up by Friedrich Schlegel, and followed by Humboldt, understanding was no longer taken for granted. Understanding is not guaranteed always and everywhere and misunderstanding does not only happen in the exegesis of sacred texts, written in foreign and ancient languages, which are as such difficult to interpret. Misunderstanding and not-understanding, which are experienced in these limit-situations, are a symptom of what always happens in the dialogue of daily life. Here misunderstanding happens immediately (Schleiermacher 1998, 22). Understanding appears from the very outset to be contaminated by not-understanding and misunderstanding. The idea of a universal hermeneutics outlined by Schleiermacher is born out of the realization that the experience of foreignness and the possibility of misunderstanding are themselves universal. The hermeneutical task lies in moving from not-understanding and misunderstanding to understanding, and yet this passage is never perfectly realized, and not-understanding can never be entirely done away with (Schleiermacher 1998, 141).
The exercise of critical vigilance then should always ensure that the residue of not-understanding is preserved so as to guarantee that the interpretative process is never brought to completion. Hence, Schleiermacher claims that one should “understand the utterances at first just as well and then better than its author” (Schleiermacher 1998, 23). Understanding thus appears as an interpretation that can better express what the author has already said, even if only by saying it again. However, understanding better here refers only to an understanding differently.
As it is for Schleiermacher, so too for Humboldt, understanding is a linguistic act. Not only does it take place in language, but also derives its condition and limit from language. It is thus outlined as the encounter between two different perspectives, those of the speakers, between which there can never be an absolute foreignness in virtue of that initial consonance which is guaranteed by the shared language. Yet this condition of understanding does not in any way guarantee its success. As von Humboldt writes,
Men do not understand one another by actually exchanging signs for things, nor by mutually occasioning one another to produce exactly and completely the same concept; they do it by touching in one another the same link in the chain of their sensory ideas and internal conceptualizations, by striking the same note on their mental instrument, whereupon matching but not identical concepts are engendered in each. (von Humboldt 1996, 152)
Thus, the incomprehensibility of the foreign language and the comprehensibility of one’s own language are not absolute, but rather relative, and “thus all understanding is always at the same time a not-understanding, all concurrence in thought and feeling at the same time a divergence” (von Humboldt 1996, 56). The limit of understanding that foreignness, which is never fully overcome or left behind, should be seen as a positive characteristic or determination, as that opening by virtue of which understanding is an infinite process.
Hegel returns to a rationalistic optimism which, by placing understanding within the system of absolute idealism, deems possible the identification of the I with the object, not as a mere psychological identification, but rather as the self-understanding of the concept, which is spirit’s return to itself after all of its necessary estrangement (Hegel 1998, .473). The historical school of L. von Ranke, J.G. Droysen, and finally Dilthey, takes up again the hermeneutical reflection by clarifying the distinction between understanding (Verstehen) and explaining (Erklären) (Wach 1933). Dilthey claims that we “explain” nature, but we “understand” the life of the soul.9 While explaining is a proceeding by way of causal connections, understanding moves from the structure that underlies each sentence, each gesture, and each action. Even self-understanding is not given immediately in lived-experience (Erleben), but is always mediated through the expression of life. Hence, self-understanding always goes via the byways of the understanding of the other, and in such a way Dilthey overcomes every solipsistic conception of empathy. In the hermeneutic circle between lived-experience and understanding, it is possible to extend the limits of humanity.10 Max Scheler emphasizes that understanding is not an empathic act of identification, but rather a movement of participation.11 In his General Psychopathology, Karl Jaspers redefines the borders between explanation, which is the discovery of the objective cause and effect connection, ascertained from without thanks to the methods of natural science, and understanding, which instead concerns the empirical psychological process (Jaspers .1963, 25).
Martin Heidegger opens up a new reflection on understanding by bringing together Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological approach, which attributes to understanding a fundamental role in the constitution of the meaning of the world, with Dilthey’s hermeneutic contribution, and with Kierkegaard’s meditation on the individual’s self-understanding on the basis of his or her own possibilities. Once relegated to mere textual exegesis, for Heidegger, understanding takes on an original existential significance. Understanding is the originary mode of Dasein’s actualization, it is that circular movement through which Dasein is there, that is, exists, simply because it understands, in that understanding makes it possible that each being, even Dasein’s own being, comes to be insofar as it is understood. The circularity is outlined in the manner in which Dasein understands itself and in so doing exists. Thrown into the world, Dasein projects itself on the basis of its anticipatory pre-understanding. In this way, Dasein cares for the future by opening itself to its own possibilities, and Heidegger (1962, 188) calls this “development” of understanding, “interpretation.” Interpreting means articulating and unfolding what is understood. The hermeneutical circle takes place between understanding and interpreting: there is no interpretation without a pre-understanding that anticipates it. Even with regard to Romantic hermeneutics, Heidegger’s breakthrough is constituted by the discovery of pre-understanding. If Schleiermacher moves from the prius of not-understanding and misunderstanding, and conceives understanding in a negative way as an overcoming which is destined each and every time to run aground, philosophical hermeneutics, first with Heidegger and then with Gadamer, overturns such premises. In Being and Time, the prius from which Heidegger takes his start is understanding, which, far from being a state of privation, is the originary phenomenon from which not-understanding and misunderstanding derive (Heidegger 1962, 190). Understanding is always already given, while not-understanding and misunderstanding always take place in the space of understanding and not outside of it. Only insofar as we understand, can we also not-understand or misunderstand. In such a way, Heidegger reclaims the originality and circularity of understanding of which the epistemological linearity of explicated knowledge is a secondary phenomenon.12
Consequently, it is understanding and not knowledge which is at stake in philosophical hermeneutics, insofar as the latter, knowledge, is a derivative mode of understanding. Understanding is a capacity more than an activity, and it is more an undergoing than a deed. Understanding is not a grasping, dominating, or controlling, but is rather like breathing, in that one cannot decide to stop breathing. It is not a question of knowing, but rather of being, and understanding supports and grounds existence. Thus, Gadamer in turn stresses the intimate rapport between understanding and language, insofar as “language is the universal medium in which understanding occurs” (Gadamer 2004, 390). By inheriting Heidegger’s hypothesis that understanding is the originary mode of Dasein’s actualization, Gadamer asserts that agreeing is more originary than disagreeing (Gadamer 2004, 389; Gadamer 2000, 16). What is at stake here is not a superficial optimism, and even less so a commitment to an ethical task, but rather the phenomenological description of the practice of speaking and understanding, mainly because originary understanding is nothing but the agreement of the shared language that brings and binds together. Those who speak a historical language—and speak for the other and with the other—even prior to giving their consent, assent (Zustimmung) by readying themselves to attune their voice (Stimme) to that of the other, articulating themselves in the meaningful sounds of the shared language. In short, those who speak have already agreed to share what is held in common and communicable with the speakers of that language; they have already agreed with the other even prior to agreeing with themselves. Their speaking is hence a “mutual agreement” (Übereinkommen) (Gadamer 2000, 12).
Assenting is the prelude of language that gives way to each further play of agreement and disagreement, and it is impossible to withdraw from such a prelude. Each speaker must play by the game of the language, must accept the preceding commonality that language ensures. Speaking thus rearticulates the commonality of the world that is articulated in language. This is the reality of human communication, of dialogue.
However, the flow of dialogue can be interrupted and agreement turned into disagreement when the encounter with the foreign takes place. That is to say, it is the encounter with the incomprehensible that undermines the apparent familiarity of language and pushes the movement of understanding to seek agreement ever anew. In this infinite movement understanding is an understanding of oneself and the other simultaneously, insofar as self-understanding can only be articulated through the understanding of the other. The distinction at stake here is not between self and other, but between the already understood and the not yet understood. Thus, Gadamer, following Heidegger, begins from understanding and bypasses that unbridgeable gap between not-understanding and understanding. And still, following Schleiermacher, Gadamer welcomes the foreign from the very beginning.
In a different context from philosophical hermeneutics, Wittgenstein also interrogates the question of understanding. Initially in the Tractatus, the issue concerns the logical distinction between meaningful and meaningless propositions (Wittgenstein 1961). Understanding a proposition thus means acknowledging its truth conditions, in such a way that understanding is brought back and reduced to knowledge. The analytic theories of meaning further develop such a thesis by explicating this type of knowledge. In particular, Michael Dummett, also focusing on the pragmatic implications, puts forward the claim that a philosophical theory of meaning is also a theory of understanding (Dummett 1975).
As is well known, things are quite different for the later Wittgenstein. While in the Tractatus the understanding of a meaningful sentence is afforded by the logical form of the proposition, already from the late 1920s—starting with the Big Typescript—understanding is made possible by the “rules” of the “language game,” which is instituted in a “form of life” (Wittgenstein 2005, 5–30). In the Philosophical Investigations, for instance, understanding, as the ability to follow a linguistic rule, becomes the condition of possibility of each further process of knowing, or as Wittgenstein puts it: “To understand a sentence means to understand a language. To understand a language means to be master of a technique” (Wittgenstein 2009). Here the convergence between the later Wittgenstein and Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics becomes evident (Apel 1996). This convergence has had interesting developments in the work of Peter Winch, who claims that understanding is not to be grasped in behavioral terms, but rather as participation in common or shared rule following (Winch 1958; 1972).
Against the backdrop of such a convergence, the debates surrounding the issue of understanding have been developed in the last decades of the twentieth century and continue to this day. The questions generated by philosophical hermeneutics have significantly contributed to such a development.
At the end of the 1960s, proponents of ideology-critique objected to Gadamer’s notion of understanding. Jürgen Habermas maintained the thesis according to which “Language is also a medium of domination and social power” (Habermas 1988, 172). In order to unmask power relations, and in order to show that consent is imposed, it is also necessary, according to Habermas, to mobilize and utilize, in addition to the Marxist critique, Freudian psychoanalysis, which indicates the possibility of an understanding capable of getting behind the back of language and to social and individual false consciousness, in order to submit it to critical reflection in the name of free and undistorted communication (Habermas 1988, 174). However, the assent of language does not for Gadamer mean consent, and understanding does not necessarily signify approval.
One of the most relevant philosophical problems that remains after Wittgenstein and Gadamer is that of the relation between understanding and interpretation. If it is true that philosophical hermeneutics, by following Schleiermacher in showing that not-understanding and misunderstanding always already undermine the understanding of every discourse, connects understanding and interpreting, it is also true that it does not reduce one to the other. Not all understanding is interpreting, and where there is understanding, there is not interpreting and translating, but simply “speech” (Gadamer 2004, 386). Hence, understanding a language does not involve a process of interpretation, but is rather “the accomplishment of life” (Gadamer 2004, 386). Therefore, there can be understanding without interpreting—which is what happens in every dialogue. Yet since not-understanding and misunderstanding are always lying in wait, it is possible that understanding is interrupted and in need of interpretation, which is not something different from it, but the development of understanding, its mode of actualization, if you will (Gadamer 2004, 447). In turn, interpretation unfolds in the medium of language and should be understood as the further linguistic articulation of understanding.
Wittgenstein expressed the same thing by holding that in normal linguistic exchanges speakers understand one another immediately. Hence, his oft-quoted example: “If someone asks me: ‘What time is it?’ then no work of interpretation goes on inside me. I react immediately to what I see and hear” (Wittgenstein 2005, 24) Only when not-understanding and misunderstanding unsettle understanding does interpretation become necessary. That understanding is immediate does not imply that it is intuitive. Thanks to the linguistic turn, twentieth-century philosophy definitively calls into question the idea that understanding is an intuitive act. Understanding is not an intuitive and instantaneous act (Wittgenstein 2005, 164). On the contrary, understanding is discursive and is the ability to take up the discourse of another. Yet, as Wittgenstein makes abundantly clear, “knowing-how-to-go-on is discursive (not intuitive)” (Wittgenstein 2005, 165). What is more, discursivity does not necessarily have anything to do with calculation.
No less philosophically relevant is the debate between hermeneutics and deconstruction, which has not ceased to enliven contemporary debate in its most recent expressions. In criticizing the hermeneutic zeal that lies beneath the will to understand, Derrida takes up an argument already put forward by Nietzsche (Derrida 1986). In his genealogy, Nietzsche (2003) aimed to unmask understanding as a dangerous leveler: “comprendre c’est égaler.” Understanding is seen as an attack on individuality and its ineffable irreducibility. However, the right of the individual cannot founder understanding, and Nietzsche himself refers to an understanding differently, which without giving in to tragic renunciation, grants leeway to the alterity of the other (Nietzsche 2003). Nietzsche’s suspicion has, however, cast a long shadow on understanding by negatively influencing the debate. This has especially damaged hermeneutics, which has been accused of conceiving understanding as the appropriation or assimilation of the other. This is surprising because if it had not put forward the problem of understanding, hermeneutics would have had no reason to exist in the first place. On the other hand, precisely because it calls into question the issue of understanding, hermeneutics recognizes the right of the other in philosophy. Looked at more closely, the two issues are strictly connected. Understanding is the background against which the alterity of the other becomes uncircumventable.13
The position of the German phenomenologist Bernhard Waldenfels is in this respect quite paradigmatic. The question he puts to Gadamer is the following: “Is it possible to come to terms with [bewaltigen] the foreign within the field of hermeneutics, or does the foreign call the field of hermeneutics into question?” (Waldenfels 1999). The German term bewaltigen is ambiguous. It implies that if hermeneutics does ask the question concerning the foreign, it is only in order overcome it, include it, or assimilate it. Waldenfels sets out to establish an opposing force to hermeneutics that would emerge out of the interruption of the incomprehensible. Without this opposing force, hermeneutics would simply circle around itself (Waldenfels 1998). Yet the reproach to hermeneutics here, that it subordinates the foreign to the own, is not justified (Bertram 2002). What Waldenfels says about the incomprehensible, that it is an insurmountable limit, which can be moved but not removed, has already been said in an incisive way by the entire hermeneutic tradition, which also has not neglected the role of language. Hence, it is language and not experience that discloses the possibility of access to the foreign—which becomes accessible even in its inaccessibility. Here one cannot but agree with Levinas, who writes, “The Other remains infinitely transcendent, infinitely foreign” (Levinas 1969).
The issue at stake here is what one should mean when one speaks of the foreign. If it were absolutely foreign, it would remain inarticulate and inarticulable, beyond language and hermeneutics, shrouded in silence. Hermeneutics does not prohibit the understanding of the foreign; it rather moves in the direction of the foreign, starting from the shared language, from the shared linguisticality of understanding. The foreign stands out against the background of this communality, otherwise it could not even emerge as such. This means precisely that the foreign is always given in relation to what is shared, and this correlated foreign is, for hermeneutics, the incomprehensibility of the other.
Shared here does not mean stacking one thing upon another; what is at stake is not necessarily a third and superior instance, but a commonality such as that of the word, which does not hover above, but rather exists between speakers. It is not by chance that the most recent contributions to the question of understanding come from hermeneutic philosophers who are attentive to phenomenology, to Jewish thinking on alterity, and to the philosophical reflection on language (Risser 2012; Di Cesare 2012). In its open movement between familiarity and foreignness, between understanding and not-understanding, language seems to offer the paradigm for an ethics, a politics, and a theory of right, which can be thought anew, starting from this hospitable between, this Zwischen which is shared and yet distinct. This between is the leeway for the other and with the other, it is the unconditioned of hermeneutic truth, it is the finite meeting point for the shared word which time and again discloses our participation in infinite dialogue.