Pol Vandevelde
As the founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl occupies a special place in the development of hermeneutics. He provided many of the concepts hermeneutics later used even though he was not himself part of the movement. We thus have a seemingly paradoxical situation in which Husserl, as a transcendental idealist who spent his life studying logical meanings, became a key figure in a movement that emphasizes many topics he would have viewed with some suspicion, such as life (Dilthey), facticity (Heidegger), linguisticity (Sprachlichkeit), and the fusion of horizons (Gadamer) or narratives (Ricoeur). However, the paradox of Husserl’s position in hermeneutics can be solved rather easily, once we keep in mind that it was Husserl’s concern with the foundation or genesis of logical meanings that led him to introduce new concepts, such as lived experience (Erlebnis), horizon of consciousness, intersubjectivity, empathy, or lifeworld. While these concepts later became heuristic devices for hermeneutics, they were, for Husserl, the building blocks for his enterprise, though not its goal. It is, thus, because he engaged in “logical” investigations and because he was looking for the foundations of logic that Husserl had to address such issues as intersubjectivity and history.
The special relation between Husserl and hermeneutics explains why his connections to the movement have to do with how his views have been “interpreted.” Two connections are paramount. The first one is in Husserl’s own breakthrough of establishing a correlation between consciousness and object that approaches the object from within the correlation as an object “for” consciousness, that is, “grasped,” “construed,” “interpreted,” or “constituted” by consciousness. The second connection lies in how Husserl used the same notions so that they became key concepts of hermeneutics: lived experience, horizon, intersubjectivity, empathy, and lifeworld.
Husserl took the discovery of the correlation between consciousness and object to be the breakthrough performed by his phenomenology. Such a correlation avoids the traditional problem of how an external object enters into consciousness or how a mental component (consciousness) can relate to a physical matter (object). The correlation means that objects are given, they have manners of givenness, and are nothing beyond their manners of givenness. On the side of consciousness, it means that consciousness is not a substance or a preestablished epistemological device, but always has an intentional relation to something: it is always “of” or “about” something. Just as we cannot investigate objects outside the way they present themselves to consciousness, we cannot investigate consciousness as uncoupled from its relations to objects.
At a more general level, this breakthrough was a revolutionary reformulation of the relation between epistemology and ontology. Since consciousness and things cannot be approached at first as two substances in some form of external relation, whether a causality originating from things or a categorizing coming from consciousness, the being of entities becomes a matter of sense (Seinssinn) or validity (Seinsgeltung) for consciousness. However, by speaking of the sense of being or the validity of being, Husserl does not move toward idealism. Rather, for him, it is the view that entities have being insofar as they make sense to consciousness or have a validity for consciousness.
Husserl’s description of what things “are” and what consciousness “does” has a strong hermeneutic flavor. Consciousness, Husserl says, “constitutes” the meaning of entities. As described in the Logical Investigations, the first step in this constitution involves consciousness locking onto an object so that the sense data fall into a “grasping” (Auffassung) or an “interpretation” (Deutung): I immediately hear a car passing by or I immediately see a desk full of books. Sense data are never experienced as such. Rather, they are “construed as” a specific something. In the second step of constitution, because an object of perception can only give itself to consciousness through adumbration, some sides being apparent and others hidden, the hidden sides of an object are “apperceived” or “meant at the same time.” This accounts for the fact that I see “the” desk as a whole and not parts of it. The hidden sides of the desk are thus objects of intentions that are fulfillable but provisionally unfulfilled; such intentions are partial intentions of the overall act of “seeing a desk.” Moreover, these partially, provisionally unfulfilled intentions are “signitive” intentions to the extent that they are only symbolically “meant.” Hermeneutically, this means that a simple object of perception is always already permeated by “meanings” or “intentions” that inform the very content of my act of perception. It also means that my consciousness functions medias res, literally, and not transitively in a diachronic encounter, as if we would have, first, consciousness, then a thing, then hidden sides, or first, a thing, then consciousness, and then hidden sides.
Although Husserl uses the term Auffassung (construing, grasping) and Deutung (interpretation) in a weak sense as what is construed in perception, and not as a full-fledged act of interpretation, the hermeneutic overtones are hard to miss. They are even more perceptible when Husserl introduces the categorial intuition in the sixth of the Logical Investigations. While it is obvious that when I say “The paper is white,” my statement expresses a categorization, attributing “white” to paper, Husserl tells us that I can also “see” this state of affairs in a perception. Besides seeing paper and white, I can see “that” the paper is white or I can see the “being-white” of the paper. The being-white is perceptible despite the fact that no sensuous content corresponds to the “being.” For this to be possible, to the sensuous intuition of an object or a color there is added a categorial intuition of a state of affairs, the being-white of the paper or the paper being white.
Heidegger, who dedicated Being and Time to Husserl, will exploit this “surplus of meaning” in a hermeneutic manner when he argues that, according to Husserl’s phenomenology, we do not say what we see as in a mere expression, but we see what can be said about the matter: our perception is already interpretive in the strong sense because the objects of perception have in their ontological makeup layers of signitive intentions in the form of cultural and historical sedimentation in the ways people have related to them, used them, classified them, etc. This is Heidegger’s hermeneutical transformation of Husserl’s phenomenology. The intentionality of consciousness becomes a being-in-the-world that is characterized by an “understanding” (Verstehen), always “situated” (Befindlichkeit) and directed toward entities, thus also concerned by them. Both facticity and understanding are of a configuring nature (Rede).
Ricoeur, who translated Ideas I into French with a lengthy and detailed set of notes that constitutes a full running commentary, offers another “interpretation” of the correlation between consciousness and object. He extends this view to actions and events, which he sees as inchoate or potential narratives. Because actions and events have a categorial makeup, their retelling in a narrative only makes explicit what was implicit in the action or event itself. Ricoeur also uses Husserl’s couple noesis–noema in order to delineate the scope of his theory of narratives. The narrative of an action is the noema, the rendering of its meaning content. Ricoeur’s narrativity continues the Heideggerean reformulation and broadening of consciousness, which is not just a stream of acts (Husserl) nor an existential being-in-the-world (Heidegger), but also a narrative configuration, both in the relation to the world and in the relation to the self—as described in Oneself as Another, the self is narrative.
While the correlation between consciousness and object is probably the most decisive phenomenological element in hermeneutics, many other Husserlian concepts have a hermeneutic flavor and lend themselves to a hermeneutic reformulation.
In contrast with Frege, Husserl does not want to separate the logical meanings from the acts that instantiate them, as if they are autonomous or belonging to a third realm. Meanings, including logical ones, are species of acts. Husserl calls the act in question erleben, living through, or Erlebnis, lived experience. This follows from the correlation between consciousness and object: if the object is linked to consciousness, it has a manner of givenness, and consciousness is a stream made up of acts directed at objects. The object is what is lived through by consciousness, and it is from within this “living through acts” that objects are assessed in their sense of being as really existing (as in perception), fictitious (as in imagination), past (as in memory), etc. This “life” that instantiates acts is thus captured in meanings that are repeatable.
This combination of lived experience (the acts of consciousness) and repeatability is crucial for hermeneutics, the task of which since Schleiermacher has always been to identify the specificity and uniqueness of what an author expressed, but in a manner that can repeat a meaning and make it intelligible to different new audiences. Dilthey also saw the tremendous potential of these Husserlian concepts and considered the Logical Investigations to be “epoch-making in the utilization of description for epistemology” (2002, 34). The connection between lived experience (Erlebnis), meaning, and expression gave him the means to articulate the role of understanding in the human sciences.
The concept of horizon is directly linked to the notion of the act of consciousness as an experience. Because consciousness does not consist of states as in most of philosophy of mind, but in acts, these acts unfold in time and are connected to other acts of the past and the future as well as the acts of other consciousnesses. Husserl distinguishes an internal horizon—as a series of acts linked together in a stream directed at the same object—and an external horizon, intending an object itself already linked to other objects. In The Crisis of European Sciences, Husserl also speaks of an intersubjective horizon in order to account for the genetic aspect of intentional acts. The harmony of my experience is a criterion of its validity, but there is also a harmony between my experiences and the experiences of others, impelling me to adjust my perception to what others perceive. Furthermore, for my experiences of cultural objects, such as scissors, I even learned as a child what scissors are and how to use them.
In Husserl’s scenario of seeing immediately a Roman milestone, the internal horizon keeps together the different partial acts of consciousness that are part of my perception of a Roman milestone, when I see it, walk toward it, try to decipher the markings, etc. At any moment in the duration of my perception, what I have seen while hiking is kept in retention so that, when I move closer, what may disclose itself later as a milestone is already part of the protention of my consciousness. Husserl also uses the notion of “pattern” or “style” for designating this link between retention and protention: as soon as my perception has started, something “as” a Roman milestone is given to me, and my perception continues on this first “as.” At the same time, the external horizon allows my consciousness to link the stone with an environment of other objects so that, on the one hand, the stone facilitates the perception of other things, like old worn-out pavements, and, on the other hand, the other things around it prime the further perception of the stone—the old worn-out pavements strengthen the pattern of perceiving an ancient Roman milestone. In addition to these two horizons, given that the Roman milestone is a cultural object, I also make use of an intersubjective horizon at the very level of perception. This horizon is connected to the notion of intersubjectivity, which Husserl introduces in his Cartesian Meditations.
Although my perspective on the Roman milestone is “subjective” because it is aspectual and depends on my position and my cultural awareness, the sense that is grasped by my consciousness is “objective” as something that is repeatable or portable both within my conscious life—from one state of my consciousness to another later state when I can recall that I saw a Roman milestone—and from one subject to another—another hiker would see the “same” Roman milestone, though from a different perspective. The intersubjective horizon yields the ideality of the object. As a consequence, the object, paradoxically but of necessity, consists of what is actually given to me and an idea of how it was given in the past and how it will continue to be given in the future. Thus, the intersubjective horizon shows how some of my intentional capacities are mental, but not bound to my psychological sphere, as, for example, when I immediately perceive some stuff “as” an ancient Roman milestone. It is “I” who see the milestone directly as such, but, as Husserl says, through the eyes of others. Those “borrowed eyes” are mental in a nonpsychological sense. They are mental in the sense of “spiritual.”
This is a rather striking hermeneutic point. The “sameness” of an object remarkably does not depend on the physical properties of the thing being the same throughout time. Rather, the sameness of identity of the object depends on the synthesis of acts of consciousness at three levels: first, in the unfolding of my particular act of perception in time; second, in the unfolding of my perception along with the perceptions of others, and, third, in the unfolding of my perception in a diachrony, along with the ancient Roman perceptions and uses of milestones.
Gadamer generalizes and radicalizes this view that consciousness is always horizontal. He reformulates the correlation between consciousness and object as a fusion of horizons of both consciousness, anchored in a particular life history, and object, as it is situated in a particular context. Building upon the work of Heidegger, who had transformed phenomenology into what Apel calls a radicalized hermeneutics, Gadamer uses many Husserlian notions that Dilthey already used (lived experience, repeatability of meaning) in order to turn the traditional Romantic hermeneutics of Schleiermacher and Dilthey into a philosophical discipline in its own right.
By empathy, Husserl refers to how I can know what others perceive and even think, and thus to explain how intersubjectivity works. He claims that the subject, who can transcend his own empirical sphere and thereby become transcendental, is itself intersubjectivity. Though Schleiermacher and Dilthey do not appeal to empathy as such, their notion of “re-experiencing” (nacherleben) or putting oneself in the position of the author is what Husserl has in mind when he speaks of empathy. I can re-effectuate the acts of consciousness of others and thus understand what they meant by re-experiencing the meaning they entertained. This is precisely what the hermeneutic task consists of: repeating such acts in their ideality, without confining oneself to the psychological sphere of an individual, but instead opening up the re-experiencing to a universal audience. Through re-experiencing or empathy, I can, as Husserl says, transport myself across centuries.
It is again in reference to logical meanings that Husserl introduces his notion of lifeworld in his late works. This notion is linked to the notion of horizon, by extending the intersubjective horizon to history, and to the lived experience, which is now situated in a “life”-world. Yet, it is still part of an investigation into the foundation of logic, this time the mathematization of nature by the sciences. There are many interpretations of what the lifeworld is or can be, and Husserl did not offer a sustained and systematic treatment of it. At a very general level, it is the set of historical and cultural conditions of possibility for any scientific idealization. Just as in the beginning of his career, Husserl wants to keep together consciousness and the idealities it produces. However, scientists, beginning already with Galileo, forgot the subject, as Husserl says in Ideas II: they provided what was, in fact, a product of consciousness, but instead of being mindful of this, they saw their formalization as an absolute starting point and created a framework of reference that was no longer accountable to anyone other than those sharing the same framework. By forgetting the subject who performs the act of formalization, such scientists have also forgotten the world in which such a subject lives.
Husserl’s description of the lifeworld as what always precedes empirical consciousness, as made of previous acts of consciousness sedimented through time, makes it sound like a historical and cultural situatedness or context that represents an opacity that consciousness can never pierce through. It sounds like Heidegger’s facticity and was used by Gadamer as a fundamental feature of hermeneutics in the form of a consciousness that is exposed to the effects of history (Wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein). For, this sedimentation of history and tradition in consciousness gives a thickness to consciousness that affects both its self-understanding and its functioning. Regarding the former—self-understanding—it means that consciousness cannot become transparent to itself and can never recover its own ground, as it were. Regarding the latter—the functioning of consciousness—it means not only that the correlation between consciousness and its object has horizons, but that the very correlation can only take the form of a fusion between consciousness’s own horizons and those of the object. Schleiermacher’s goal of understanding better has to be replaced by an acknowledgment that, as Gadamer states, we can only understand differently.
Although the phenomenological concepts discussed earlier have been significantly reformulated by the different figures in the hermeneutic movement, they remain fundamentally phenomenological, which explains why phenomenology and hermeneutics tend to be conceptually associated. Through Husserl’s fundamental insights, which gave hermeneutics the means to find its own philosophical foundation and self-justification, and through his complex conceptual apparatus, philosophical hermeneutics could move beyond a reflection on interpretation and become a full-fledged discipline that sees human existence as anchored in understanding and interpretation.