Cristina Lafont
Martin Heidegger is considered the founder of the philosophical paradigm of hermeneutics, which had a decisive influence on twentieth-century continental philosophy (Gadamer, Apel, Habermas, Ricoeur, etc.) In Being and Time, Heidegger claims that the genuine meaning of philosophical analysis is hermeneutics.1 This claim not only refers to the kind of topics with which philosophy should be concerned (interpretation, the methodology of the human sciences, etc.) but also aims at a radical paradigm shift within philosophy itself. In an effort to bring this shift about, Heidegger generalizes hermeneutics from a traditional method for interpreting authoritative texts (mainly sacred or legal texts) to a way of understanding human beings themselves. This alternative hermeneutic paradigm offers a radically new conception of what is distinctive about human beings: to be human is not primarily to be a rational animal, but first and foremost to be a self-interpreting animal.2 It is precisely because human beings are nothing but interpretation all the way down that the activity of interpreting a meaningful text offers the most appropriate model for understanding any human experience whatsoever. This change of perspective is a major break with traditional philosophy, which has been primarily guided by the diametrically opposed project of modeling human experience on our perception of physical objects. Heidegger confronts this attempt with two major objections. First, Heidegger argues that in trying to model human experience upon the basis of categories borrowed from a realm of objects that is different from human beings (i.e., physical objects), traditional philosophy provides an entirely distorted account of human identity. To show this, Heidegger articulates an alternative, hermeneutic model that let us understand human beings as essentially self-interpreting creatures. Second, Heidegger argues that by focusing on perception as the private experience of an isolated subject, the subject–object model incorporates a methodological individualism (even solipsism) that entirely distorts human experience (giving rise to nothing but philosophical pseudo-problems such as the need to prove the existence of the external world). To defend this claim, Heidegger offers an alternative, hermeneutic account of our experience that lets us understand human beings as inhabiting a symbolically structured world in which everything they encounter is already understood as something.3
As Heidegger indicates in Being and Time, the world in which human beings grow up is essentially intersubjectively shared: “The world is always the one that I share with Others. The world of Dasein is a with-world” (BT, 155). This is a phenomenological fact, however, that can hardly be accounted for within the constraints of the methodological individualism characteristic of the subject–object model. Indeed, the specific relationship that we have with others in virtue of sharing a public world cannot be modeled on either the relationship of a subject to itself or toward objects that are different from itself. In fact, since cultural traditions precede individual subjects who grow up within them, it makes little sense to try to explain the cultural world as a result of the activities of a subject, even a “transcendental” one. Instead, it is only to the extent that Dasein first learns to adopt the intersubjective perspective of a participant in its cultural world that it may later learn to adopt the subjective perspective of an (authentic) individual self. As Heidegger explains: “We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as one takes pleasure; we read, see, and judge about literature and art as one sees and judges; likewise we shrink back from the ‘great mass’ as one shrinks back …. The one, which is nothing definite, and which all are, though not as the sum, prescribes the kind of being of everydayness” (BT, 164). But, if “the one” is prior to any individual Dasein and is neither an occurrent entity nor a “transcendental subject,”4 how is it constituted? Where it is situated? In Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy, Heidegger gives a direct answer to this question: “The primordial bearer of the one is language. The ‘one’ sustains itself, has its primordial dominance in language” (GA 18, 64; italics in the original).5 In Being and Time, Heidegger explains this “dominance” as follows:
This way in which things have been interpreted in idle talk has already established itself in Dasein. … This everyday way in which things have been interpreted is one into which Dasein has grown in the first instance, with never a possibility of extrication. In it, from out of it, and against it, all genuine understanding, interpreting and communicating, all re-discovering and appropriating anew, are performed. In no case is a Dasein, untouched and unseduced by this way in which things have been interpreted, set before the open country of a ‘world-in-itself’ so that it just beholds what it encounters. The dominance of the public way in which things have been interpreted has already been decisive even for the possibilities of having a mood … The ‘one’ prescribes one’s affectivity, and determines what and how one ‘sees’.”
(BT, 213; my italics)
As hinted at in the last remark, recognizing the linguistically articulated intelligibility that Dasein shares with others by virtue of sharing a natural language leads to the crucial hermeneutic claim of Being and Time, namely, the priority of understanding over perception. As Heidegger expresses it, “Any mere prepredicative seeing … is, in itself, something which already understands and interprets” (BT, 189). If this claim is right, if every seeing something is already a seeing-as, the possibility of a neutral perception of merely occurrent objects that the subject–object model assumes can be unmasked as just a myth—as Sellar’s puts it: the Myth of the Given. The goal behind Heidegger’s critique of traditional philosophy—the collapse of the mentalist paradigm—is partially realized in this unmasking. However, this goal cannot be achieved by merely pointing to the fact that subjects have a language at their disposal. This would not be news for traditional philosophy. So long as language is understood in the traditional sense, namely, as a tool for expressing prelinguistic thoughts about objects that exist independently of language, it is not at all clear why it would be wrong to assume that subjects are set before the open country of a “world-in-itself” so that they just behold what they encounter. Under the traditional conception of language as a bunch of names used to designate independently existing objects, subjects were supposed to do precisely that: to merely behold objects in themselves and use an arbitrary sign to name them. To be successful with his overall strategy, Heidegger first has to break with the traditional conception of language as a tool. This is what he does in Section 32, where he questions the possibility of a neutral perception of “objects in themselves” precisely by questioning the possibility of a neutral designation of such objects. His argument runs as follows:
The circumspective question as to what this particular available thing may be, receives the circumspectively interpretative answer that it is for such and such a purpose. If we tell what it is for, we are not simply designating something; but that which is designated is understood as that as which we are to take the thing in question … The ‘as’ makes up the structure of the explicitness of something that is understood. It constitutes the interpretation. In dealing with what is environmentally available by interpreting it circumspectively, we ‘see’ it as a table, a door, a carriage or a bridge … Any mere pre-predicative seeing of the available is, in itself, something which already understands and interprets.”
(BT, 189)
Here, Heidegger questions the traditional view of designation as a neutral pointing at an object, but he does not offer a specific argument to support his own view of designation. There is, however, an argument to which Heidegger alludes to repeatedly.6 The idea behind it could be made explicit in the following way: communication requires speakers to identify which entities they want to talk about so that they can be distinguished from others. And this cannot be done unless the terms used to designate those entities provide the resources to identify entities as what they are, that is, in their being. To the extent that it is meaningless to purport to refer to entities whose conditions of identity one cannot possibly indicate, our understanding of the being of entities must determine in advance which entities we are referring to, that is, meaning must determine reference. This constraint on communication explains why with the terms we use to designate entities “we are not simply designating something; but that which is designated is understood as that as which we are to take the thing in question.” And to the extent that the meaning of a designative term provides an understanding of the being of the entities it refers to, it determines at the same time as what these entities are accessible to us, it determines our experience with those entities. By designating entities as tables, doors, carriages, or bridges, we are at the same time answering the ontological question of what can be in our world (namely, tables, doors, carriages, and bridges). As Heidegger explains in his History of the Concept of Time: “It is not so much that we see the objects and things but rather that we first talk about them. To put it more precisely: we do not say what we see, but rather the reverse, we see what one says about things” (GA 20, 56). If this view is right, if linguistic signs such as general names provide the individuating criteria of identity for the objects they refer to, without which we could not identify objects as something or other in the first place, then language can no longer be seen as merely a system of arbitrary signs. The essential contribution of language lies in its world-disclosing function.7 Language makes it possible for Dasein to share the same world with others by articulating a common understanding of the being of entities that can show up in their world.
So far, we have focused on the central feature of Heidegger’s hermeneutic model, namely, the view of human beings as inhabiting a linguistically articulated world in which everything that might show up within the world is already understood as something or other. As already mentioned, this change of perspective makes it possible to claim that the hermeneutic model of understanding a text is the most appropriate model for giving an account of human experience in general. Now we need to know what the implications and consequences of adopting that model are.
If Heidegger is right and human experience does not primarily arise through perception (of entities) and its conditions, but rather through a prior understanding (of the being of entities) and their conditions, the existential analytic of Dasein must provide an analysis of the conditions of possibility of understanding. This is what Heidegger calls the fore-structure of understanding. Here again, a crucial goal of the analysis is critical. For nothing would be achieved by arguing that understanding has explanatory priority over perception if understanding could in turn be explained on the basis of the model of a neutral perception, as traditional philosophy has always done. Thus, in the same way that Heidegger had to first show that there can be no neutral perception of something like a “world-in-itself,” he now has to show that there can be no neutral understanding of something like a “literal meaning,” no “presuppositionless apprehending of something merely presented to us” (BT, 191–92). It has to be shown that understanding is always interpretation or, as Heidegger puts it, that “in interpretation understanding does not become something different. It becomes itself” (BT, 188).
At this point in the argument, Heidegger takes recourse to the hermeneutic model of textual interpretation in order to show that understanding is necessarily both projective and presuppositional. He does so by appealing to a well-known feature of the holistic activity of textual interpretation: the circle of understanding. In order to understand the meaning of a text, we need to understand the meaning of its parts. But we can only understand its parts by anticipating the meaning of the text as a whole. Thus, as Heidegger puts it, “any interpretation, which is to contribute understanding, must already have understood what is to be interpreted” (BT, 194). Without a projection of meaning, no activity of interpretation can get off the ground. But for this very same reason, understanding is always presuppositional. There is no such thing as a presuppositionless grasping of a literal meaning (BT, 152) Consequently, an analysis of the conditions of possibility of understanding must provide an answer to the question of where our anticipations or projections of meaning come from.
According to Heidegger, interpretation is always relative to a particular context, perspective, and conceptual framework (fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception) that jointly constitute what he calls the “hermeneutic situation” out of which interpretation evolves and which we cannot transcend at will. This projective view of interpretation presents a clear challenge to the traditional aspirations of absolute objectivity even within the narrow circle of the activity of interpreting a meaningful text. If interpretation is essentially contextual and perspectival, the hermeneutic ideal of getting the single right interpretation of what a text says, its “literal meaning,” makes no sense whatsoever.8 However, as decades of philosophical hermeneutics have made abundantly clear, recognizing that we are always interpreting out of a contingent, historical, hermeneutic situation may have constructive rather than merely destructive consequences. This recognition makes it possible for us to discover a different hermeneutic ideal that on reflection may be seen as superior to the traditional ideal. Precisely by discovering that interpretation entails a moment of application to our own hermeneutic situation, we finally realize what we wanted to know all along: the point of interpreting a text is not so much to find out what its author literally said at the time, but first and foremost what she may have to say to us now, that is, in our current situation.9 From this perspective, Heidegger’s projective (and thus applicative) view of interpretation offers the basis for a positive contribution to the intricate issues that surround the activity of textual interpretation, as Gadamer has convincingly shown in Truth and Method.
However, these issues are by no means the target of Heidegger’s analysis in Being and Time. As already mentioned, Heidegger’s underlying strategy is to generalize the model of textual interpretation in order to provide a new account of human identity in terms of “thrown projection,” one that should be able to undermine the entirely distorted account of the self that results from the subject–object model. Following this strategy, Heidegger claims that the hermeneutic circle characteristic of the activity of textual interpretation is just a special case of what is, in fact, a much broader phenomenon, namely, the necessarily circular structure of all human understanding: “The circle of understanding … is the expression of the existential fore-structure of Dasein itself” (BT, 195). It is Dasein itself who “has ontologically a circular structure” (ibid.) These claims point to the task that will be accomplished in Division II of Being and Time, namely, to show that the circular structure of understanding derives from the temporality of Dasein. I cannot discuss here all aspects of Heidegger’s genuinely fascinating account of human identity as “thrown projection” that gets developed throughout Division II of Being and Time on the basis of his projective view of interpretation.10 Instead, I will briefly focus on the consequences that his view of interpretation has for a specific element of his account of human experience, namely, our knowledge of the empirical world.
The most challenging feature of Heidegger’s application of his projective view of interpretation to cognition is the transformation of the traditional conception of a priori knowledge that follows from it. This transformation lies behind Heidegger’s choice of the term “fore-structure of understanding” to explicitly mark the presuppositional character of all interpretation. As Heidegger announces in Section 32, the traditional conception of this phenomenon in terms of “a priori knowledge” is entirely unsatisfactory, for it does not recognize its internal connection with the phenomenon of projection. In Section 69 of Division II, Heidegger shows how his projective conception of interpretation applies to the specific case of cognition by analyzing the historical transformation of science from the ancient conception of nature into modern natural science. In his opinion, the key to this transformation lies in a change of “projection” or, to use contemporary terminology, in a paradigm shift. In an astonishing anticipation of Thomas Kuhn’s conception of scientific revolutions, Heidegger explains that this shift does not simply consist in the increasing emphasis on observation or experimentation, but also in the projection of an entirely different understanding of the being of entities, a new world-disclosure brought about through the establishment and definition of new basic concepts by modern scientists such as Galileo and Newton. To the extent that these new concepts organize all possible experience in advance, the grounding postulates or axioms of the modern theories through which these concepts are defined are at the same time responsible for the constitution of objects. Insofar as they serve this organizing function, these new concepts have the status of synthetic a priori knowledge in the traditional sense. However—and here lies the challenge to the traditional conception—this is a feature of any projection whatsoever. For this is simply a consequence of a general constraint upon meaningful concept use, namely, that meaning must determine reference. As we have already seen, in order to use concepts meaningfully, the realm of objects to which these concepts apply must be determined in advance. And this determination requires establishing the criteria of identity of those objects in advance or, as Heidegger puts it, it requires a prior projection of their being. Therefore, this is something that any projection of the being of entities does.
This hermeneutic discovery has very challenging consequences for the traditional conception of a priori knowledge.11 Whereas for Kant the special status of a priori knowledge was due to the (alleged) fact that no human experience would be possible without such knowledge, according to Heidegger the fact that scientific knowledge is based on an understanding of being as occurrentness (and its corresponding concepts such as motion, force, space, time, etc.), far from guaranteeing its absolute validity, as Kant thought, merely indicates the particular fore-sight and fore-conception on which such knowledge is based. The scientific understanding of being as occurrentness is as contextual and perspectival as any understanding always is. Within the parameters of its own fore-having, fore-sight and fore-conception it is a perfectly acceptable kind of interpretation. What is unacceptable is its invasive attempt to monopolize the right to define reality in general and human reality in particular. Thus, the projective view of interpretation leads to conceptual pluralism, that is, to the claim that there are many equally acceptable interpretations of reality. From this perspective, Heidegger’s projective view of interpretation definitively challenges one element of the traditional ideal of objectivity, namely, the assumption that there is only one true description of the way the world is. However, there is another consequence of the projective view of interpretation that challenges the ideal of objectivity even within the limits of the scientific knowledge of the empirical world, however narrowly conceived. It is the strong incommensurability thesis that Heidegger’s conception of interpretation contains. This thesis challenges the assumption that it is possible to compare and evaluate different scientific theories with regard to a single standard of objective truth.
Heidegger illustrates the impossibility of a comparison among different scientific projections by appealing to the holistic structure of understanding. Drawing on what is now called confirmation holism (i.e., the underdetermination of theory choice by evidence) in What is a Thing? he tries to render the immunity from revision based on experience that he ascribes to the basic principles and axioms of scientific theories plausible. Heidegger appeals to the example of different explanations for “one and the same fact” within both the Aristotelian and Galilean paradigms, namely, the fact that under normal conditions in the earth’s field of gravitation, heavy bodies pass through a determinate distance faster than lighter bodies do. He comments: “Both Galileo and his opponents saw the same ‘fact’. But they made the same fact or the same happening visible to themselves in different ways, interpreted it in different ways. Indeed, what appeared to them in each case as the authentic fact and truth was something different” (GA 41, 90). From this incommensurability among different projections, Heidegger infers the impossibility of interpreting their historical change as a process of rational revision based on experience. As Heidegger claims in Basic Questions of Philosophy: “It is simply pointless to measure the Aristotelian doctrine of motion against that of Galileo with respect to results, judging the former as backward and the latter as advanced. For in each case, nature means something completely different” (GA 45, 52–53; my italics).
Here, Heidegger offers only the outline of an argument. A factual difference in meaning becomes a normative argument against the legitimacy of the comparison only under the assumption that meaning determines reference (and thus that a difference in meaning implies ipso facto a difference in reference). Given the assumption that what “nature” in each case means determines that to which the respective theories refer, it follows that theories with entirely different conceptions of natural entities cannot be about the same entities. But only if they were would it make sense to think of one as a correction of the other. Consequently, a scientific projection cannot be disproved by a new projection and, conversely, from the point of view of an old projection, the new one cannot be seen as better or worse but simply as meaningless. In What is a thing? Heidegger explains this claim with the following remark: “[Newton's First Law of Motion] was up until the 17th century not at all self-evident. During the preceding fifteen hundred years it was not only unknown; rather, nature and entities in general were experienced in a way with respect to which this law would have been meaningless” (GA 41, 78–79; my italics). For this reason, Heidegger claims in Being and Time that “before Newton his laws were neither true nor false” (BT, 269). From this view, it follows that there is no absolute truth across incommensurable understandings of being. They are unrevisable from within and inaccessible (meaningless) from without.
In view of these relativist consequences, it seems doubtful that Heidegger’s conception of interpretation can make sense of our scientific activity as giving us anything like objective knowledge of the empirical world. But precisely these consequences open up a further question, namely, whether the assumption that meaning determines reference is the trivial constraint on concept use that Heidegger assumes it is. As mentioned earlier, this assumption is supposed to follow from a seemingly trivial hermeneutic fact, namely, that our understanding of what entities are determines what these entities are for us. However, this claim is not as trivial as it seems. For an essential component of our understanding of what entities are is precisely that they may be different from what and how we understand them to be. This fallibilist insight can be anchored in our practices of concept use without denying the interpretative dimension of these practices if it is possible to use designating expressions in a directly referential way; that is, if contrary to Heidegger’s assumption, the meaning of these expressions does not determine their reference.12 This issue has been the focus of many contemporary debates in the philosophy of language that I cannot discuss here. But whatever the outcome of these debates, it should at least be clear that Heidegger’s claim is far from being trivially correct. This opens up an important question for those interested in hermeneutics, namely, to what extent the insights of Heidegger’s hermeneutic turn can be defended without giving up on the possibility of objective knowledge.13