Rudolf A. Makkreel
Interpretation becomes important when direct understanding is either lacking or inadequate. But even when we think we understand the meaning of our experience, interpretation can contextualize what is given in experience to also assess it as evidence for possible truth claims. Hermeneutics as a theory of interpretation must bring judgment to bear in explicating the tasks of understanding and consider whether they have been fulfilled. Because there are distinctive normative modes of assessing evidence, it will be useful to distinguish between an observational understanding and a reflective understanding. Observational understanding is primarily theoretical and can be aligned with the Kantian faculty of Verstand (the understanding as intellect) that legislates order and aims at explanative judgments. Reflective understanding is more encompassing in being equally theoretical and practical: it is the process of Verstehen that establishes the meaning of things by putting them in their appropriate context. For this kind of reflective understanding, as examined by hermeneutical philosophers such as Dilthey and Ricoeur, judgment will be both assertoric and evaluative in that it takes human ends into account.
Observational understanding is geared to the world conceived on the model of nature outside of us and is directed by the goals of the natural sciences. This stance is also adopted by some of the social sciences. The aim of natural scientists and many social scientists is to discover uniformities of broad scope to explain as many phenomena as possible. Whether the uniformities are lawful and universal or functional and statistical in nature, the further hope is to formulate comprehensive interpretive principles that unify theoretical inquiry. This is the sense in which Kant supplemented concepts of the understanding with ideas of reason to “interpret nature” as a systematic whole. Here, the overriding interpretive norm is theoretical completeness.
Reflective understanding by contrast conceives the world as a sphere in which we participate and is more in line with how the human sciences, which include all the humanities and some of the more critically oriented social sciences, approach their subject matter. Reflective understanding is really a situated understanding of things that takes into account the stance of both the interpreting and interpreted subjects. For this kind of understanding of the sociocultural and historical world, the challenge for interpretation is not explanative completeness, but evaluative and normative complexity. Although explanative uniformities are not ruled out when it comes to understanding the intricacies of human action and interchange, they tend to have a more restricted scope. This is because human agents participate in multiple spheres of influence, some of which intersect and may either reinforce or interfere with each other. Reflective understanding demands normative judgment to establish which of the various social and cultural contexts that intersect in a human situation are the most crucial.
The task of hermeneutics in relation to observational understanding will be primarily epistemological, but in relation to reflective understanding interpretation will be much more challenging in that both objective and subjective conditions for establishing meaningful truth claims will need to be assessed. To be sure, sometimes the epistemological analysis of objective conditions is supplemented with a consideration of subjective conditions as well. We see this in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason when, after deducing indispensable transcendental concepts such as causality for objective cognition (Erkennen) of nature, Kant goes on to discuss the subjective conviction that is needed to convert valid cognition into legitimate knowing (Wissen). Ultimately, the discursive demands of the observational understanding in the “Transcendental Analytic” are completed by the systematic interpretative demands of the “Canon of Reason.” The subjective conviction and judgmental assent that are necessary to turn discursive or serially ordered causal cognition into the kind of overall assessment that is needed for true knowing can only be achieved in communion with the “reason of every human being” (Kant 1998, A820/B848).
For reflective understanding, however, subjective conditions assert themselves from the start because when it comes to our experience of human life we are all too ready to be persuaded by our initial impressions. The local prejudices we grow up with make it difficult to appreciate the complexity of the historical world in which we live and participate. This is why reflective understanding needs to also consider less provincial perspectives and bring to bear all relevant disciplinary modes of discourse in order to properly evaluate all the factors that contribute to historical life. The pluralistic nature of reflective understanding makes it necessary to assess the extent to which Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutical ideal of a fusion of horizons is possible.
Critique, as the examination of the limits of our capacity to grasp reality and as the testing of our understanding through communication, must take into account both ordinary-language ways of making sense of things and scientific modes of discourse. The native languages that we start with are at the level of commonalities of regional scope. To overcome those limits, both the natural and the human sciences aim at more universal modes of discourse. However, hermeneutics must resist the scientistic assumption that ordinary speech can eventually be replaced with disciplinary discourse. Since scientific discourses fragment the world, integral accounts of reality will not be able to dispense with the more direct access to things provided by natural languages. Nor should the evocative and playful ways in which poets have developed and refined ordinary languages in order to transfigure the world be ignored. Hermeneutics can only be critical to the extent that it is able to find ways of negotiating among the different kinds of discourse that are relevant to the interpretation of any subject matter.
It should be clear from all of the foregoing that hermeneutics as reflection about the tasks of interpretation must encompass more than the traditional techniques and skills of exegesis. The original exegetical role of hermeneutics was to serve the religious need to bring what is believed to be supernatural closer to us by deciphering oracles and sacred texts. The more secular task of preserving the significance of monuments of the past and testing their authenticity was gradually added so that all human manifestations could be regarded as textual material whose meaning needs to be re-cognized. But all of this only does justice to the philological task that August Boeckh called “cognizing what has been cognized.” Philological critical methods that recover what has already been established must be expanded into a philosophical critique that can establish for itself what counts as evidence for legitimate understanding. This more open-ended approach to hermeneutics will have to supplement the ways we are directed from without by our heritage with ways of orienting ourselves from within to what has not yet been fully explored. Such an orientational hermeneutics must address the question of what it means for anyone to attain an adequate understanding of a multifaceted world.
So far we have aligned observational understanding with the intellectual faculty of Verstand and reflective understanding with the power of Verstehen that draws on more than our intellectual powers. To attain a truly critical hermeneutics, we must be able to account for both kinds of understanding by considering them as part of a more full-fledged theory of judgment. We can initiate this by developing what Kant has to say about a whole range of judgments and prejudgments whereby we orient ourselves to the world.
To orient oneself is to locate oneself and any objects of interest within the context of the world. In the Introduction to Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant points out that when a concept is referred to an object, this object can be located in the world as part of either (1) a field (Feld), (2) a territory (Boden, territorium), (3) a domain (Gebiet, ditio), or (4) a habitat (Aufenthalt, domicilium) (Kant 2000, 61; Ak 5:174). This is the only place where this kind of contextualizing imagery often found in Kant’s writings is brought together to allow us to delineate the regional scope of each term. The way these four orientational spheres are defined can be used to specify the referential scope of judgments and to begin to differentiate the kinds of meaning contexts that a critical hermeneutics must come to terms with.
Kant begins his sketch of these worldly contexts by giving the following characterization of a field: “Insofar as we refer concepts to objects without considering whether or not cognition of these objects is possible, they have their field, and this field is determined merely by the relation that the objects of these concepts have to our cognitive powers in general” (Kant 2000, 5:174). To merely think of an object without determining whether we can actually experience it is to judge it as part of a field. A field frames what is logically possible for thought prior to the transcendental consideration of its being actualizable for experience. A field turns out to be the most neutral of horizons.
The second judgmental context is called a territory and denotes that part of a field “in which cognition is possible for us” (Kant 2000, 5: 174). A concept locates an object in a territory when it refers to or means (bedeutet) an actual sensible object. A territory (territorium) provides the base (Boden) of what can be sensed or felt by human beings. Here the force of what is claimed relies on what is experienceable by us.
The third context represents a domain and is constituted by the legislative function of concepts. A domain is that part of either a logical field or the territory of what is experienceable through sense (not feeling) in which concepts can provide laws that govern it. Since there are two sources of such legislation—theoretical and practical reason—we can judge the world as the domain of either natural law or moral law. Judgments oriented by the laws of a domain can be said to test experience and behavior by universally accepted standards.
The fourth context, a habitat, designates a locality in our territory of experience that presents us with a more limited order. Habitats are spheres of familiarity where we rely on empirical observation to discern habitual patterns of behavior without being able to explain them through laws. Here, judgments apply mere empirical concepts: “They are not legislative, rather the rules grounded on them are … contingent” (Kant 2000, 5: 174). The contingent and transient order of this fourth context make it more difficult to define and name. The usual translation of Aufenthalt as “residence” misses the sense of contingency associated with this context. The term “habitat” will be used instead to refer to the place where one happens to be and its habitual surroundings. Here, the particular situatedness of a judging subject is most obvious and can be contrasted with how the initial worldly context of a logical field was related to the cognitive powers of any potential thinking being. Further elaborating the scope of these four judgmental contexts, we can roughly correlate field with the logically possible, territory with what is humanly actualizable, domain with objective and necessary order, and habitat with subjective and contingent order. These and other meaning contexts can be developed hermeneutically (see Makkreel 2015).
Initially, the reflective understanding of human life was delimited from observational understanding by noting that it appeals to specific socio-historical contexts. But on the basis of the above judgmental topology for orienting us to the world at large, room can be made for observational understanding as well. Since a field is the most neutral context projected by thought, it could frame both kinds of understanding. A territory has the more limited scope of what we human beings can sense or feel and provides the main sphere for reflective understanding. A domain is a part of a territory that is subject to a priori legislation and projects the ideal context for the determinant explanative goals of observational understanding. Finally, a habitat as the context of empirical concepts represents a part of the world for which a judging subject can find order only a posteriori. In terms of their hermeneutical import, fields and domains provide horizons that allow for judgments that have a timeless objective validity, whereas habitats and territories make room for judging what is transient and of existential concern. Whenever discourses stemming from different spheres are brought to bear on a particular subject matter, it becomes the task of a critical hermeneutics to prioritize their order of relevance. The different kinds of evidence provided by these intersecting contexts must be judged and evaluated just as the various witnesses in a trial must be cross-examined to find a basis for comparison.
To further explicate the role of judgment in hermeneutics, the distinction between determinant and reflective judgment needs to be considered. A determinant judgment proceeds from a given universal concept and subsumes particulars under it. A reflective judgment starts with a given particular and seeks to ascend to a higher universal. This determinant–reflective distinction corresponds roughly with Dilthey’s explanation–understanding distinction. Determinant judgments provide the kind of top-down subsumptive explanations that can most readily be attained in the spheres of inquiry geared to logical fields and lawful domains. Here, thought aims at universal truths based on scientific evidence. Reflective judgments by contrast work from the ground up and must make sense of what happens in the habitats and territories that frame ordinary life. Here, discourse will be more focused on understanding the meaning of regional commonalities. In Kant’s Jäsche Logic, inferences of the reflective power of judgment are said to be either inductive or analogical, which allows them to also contribute to observational understanding by finding more empirical uniformities. In the third Critique, however, the reflective power of judgment is assigned the transcendental function of specifying general principles. This would give reflective judgment the capacity to orient us to the most appropriate interpretive contexts for understanding the world as a whole. And as it negotiates among these various contexts, reflective judgment may also be able to establish cross-references among them whereby intuitable relations within a familiar habitat can be analogically transferred to a less familiar territory through symbolism (See Kant 2000, 5: 351–352).
But, when making such comparisons, we should be careful to avoid what Kant calls an “amphiboly of reflection.” An amphiboly points to a confusion and was used as a warning to rationalists like Leibniz that when it comes to reflective contrasts such as the inner–outer and content–form distinctions, which side takes precedence will depend on the context. From the perspective of pure reason, inner content precedes outer form, but for observational understanding, outer form is primordial. Cognitively, the interest of sense focuses on the surfaces of things and their external relations; any interested desires aroused by inner sense must be ignored. But if cognitive and practical interests are suspended to allow us to focus disinterestedly on the felt aspect of what is sensed, as in the appreciation of beauty, we are recalled to ourselves and our specific habitat in the territory of the lived world—here the inner will be equiprimordial with the outer.
From the standpoint of observational understanding and determinant judgment, every event in the domain of nature should be subsumable under some law. But as long as many of the actual empirical laws needed to explain particular natural events remain undiscovered, nature as a whole will remain a contingent aggregate for us. Because the overall systematic unity demanded by reason cannot be legislated to nature, Kant allows reflective judgment to “presume [it] of nature … only for its own advantage” as a formal purposiveness (Kant, 2000, 20: 204). Kant makes it evident that his reflective sense of a purposiveness of nature is a subjective mode of judging nature that is valid “for us (human beings in general)” (Kant 2000, 5: 462) and therefore interpretive in a provisional way. We can prescribe it to ourselves to find as much meaningful coherence as is humanly possible, but in this we cannot speak for all rational beings, according to Kant. If, in fact, humans are the only rational beings, then we can recharacterize the appeal to purposive order as addressing a reflective concern to assess reality in a way that goes beyond our intellectual need for explanation. Thus, when Kant ascribes the function of “being self-organizing” to living beings, the idea of purposiveness is used to “elucidate” their behavior in functional rather than in mechanical causal terms. And in the search for the overall organization of the world, reflective judgment is allowed to offer an “expositional” worldview rather than an explanative rational system. The reflective alternatives to Erklärung (explanation) proposed by Kant are Erörterung (elucidation) and Exposition (see Kant 2000, 5: 412). In sum, reflective judgment aims to fill the gaps in our capacity to explain what occurs in the world with meaningful interpretations.
Heidegger and Gadamer have downgraded judgmental understanding in hermeneutics in favor of ontological pre-understanding and traditional prejudices. They assume judgments to be ontically fixed and final. However, only determinant judgments manifest such finality. An orientational hermeneutics allows for other types of judgment that can be placed in a spectrum that ranges from prejudices at one extreme and determinant judgments at the other. Gadamer has shown that prejudices may be broad tradition-laden repositories of accumulating wisdom. But most prejudices are not of that kind; they arise from provinciality and manifest a restricted point of view. The hope of eighteenth-century thinkers such as Hume, Kant, and Schiller that the cultivation of judgment in matters of taste could lead us to move beyond the prejudices and limited fashions of our local habitat to educate feeling to embrace universal standards now seems unrealistic. In today’s multicultural world, the very idea of a universally shared taste is no longer regarded as being broadminded enough. We should be able to tolerate the fact that many values may never be shared as long as certain basic ones such as fairness, truthfulness, and respect for others are not violated. But allowing prejudices to play themselves out against each other may not produce a reflective balance. There are, to be sure, truths embedded in many inherited prejudices, but they must be appropriated by judgmental reflection to retain their value. It is not widely noted that Kant suggests in his Blomberg Logic that we should not have a prejudice against prejudices and reject them out of hand. Instead, we should suspend them and transform them into preliminary judgments that can be tested (Kant 1992, 24: 162–169).
This allows us to distinguish two kinds of prejudgment: prejudices (Vorurtheile) that are pre-reflective and preliminary judgments (vorläufige Urtheile) that introduce reflection. The reflection of a preliminary judgment neutralizes the uncritical acceptance of the thesis of a prejudice and transforms it into a hypo-thesis that can instigate investigation. It is important to not confuse the reflection involved in preliminary judgment with reflective judgment. Kant describes the reflection of preliminary judgment as a withholding of judgment rather than a real judgment. It is like an epoché that focuses on exploring the meaning of a claim prior to determining its truth. There is no mention of reflective judgment in this context, and it is made clear that what a preliminary judgment prepares for is an empirical investigation aiming at a determinant judgment (Kant 1992, 9: 74).
Whereas preliminary judgments are pre-determinant, reflective judgments are post-determinant in projecting an overall orientation. The real hallmark of reflective judgments is their provisionality, for in being interpretive they are still subject to revision. If, as Heidegger and Gadamer suggest, determinant judgments are marked by a narrow finality that cannot plumb the richness of tradition, reflective judgments may be considered as broadly orientational and open ended enough to examine traditional values fairly.
Reflective judgment would not have the hermeneutical import that is here ascribed to it for historical understanding if it could not relate the elementary or commonsense familiarity of a local habitat to the disciplinary contexts delineated by the human and social sciences. These may not be the universal lawful domains established by the classical natural sciences, but they can point to organizational and institutional systems that articulate functional regularities. The theoretical horizon provided by what Husserl called a “lifeworld” already involves at least a partial overlap of a local habitat and surrounding territorial systems. This overlap allows us to reassess the linguistic and cultural medium of commonality in which we are immersed from birth in light of the more general perspectives of the human sciences. But these disciplines must themselves be tested for how much they can deepen our first-hand understanding of real-life situations. The hermeneutic circle must allow for reciprocity not only between parts and wholes, but also between levels of understanding.
Orientation provides the initial markers to help us chart our own bearings and keep us from straying beyond the bounds of what is communally or historically reasonable. The further task of interpretation is to diagnose the most appropriate points of reference and to specify indeterminate horizons into more differentiated reflective contexts among which a priority of relevance can be established. In today’s world, which simultaneously manifests cultural diversity and global standardization, many contexts will intersect in ways that produce tensions rather than harmonies. This makes it all the more important to use judgment to critically analyze the various discourses associated with these contexts and to assess their relative merits.