Pol Vandevelde
Karl-Otto Apel entertains a relationship with hermeneutics that is both somewhat marginal, because he does not consider himself part of the movement, and somewhat fundamental, because he has been deeply influenced by it and tries to retain the key acquisitions of hermeneutics while striving toward a transcendental project.
While his first important work deals with how language has been treated in the tradition from Dante to Vico, his main work of 1973 involves, as the title states, a “transformation of philosophy” and challenges three language-centered movements: those of Wittgenstein (language as mirror of the world and the philosophy of language games), Heidegger (philosophical hermeneutics), and Peirce (American pragmatism). For the “first Wittgenstein” of the Tractatus, language represents the logical form of the world and, for the “second Wittgenstein” of the Philosophical Investigations, it is part of a game that is interwoven with forms of life. For Heidegger, language is the articulation of the being-in-the-world. As he shows in Being and Time, any human project is made possible by a pre-understanding that is anchored in discourse. This is what Apel calls a “radicalized hermeneutics,” which is the culmination of phenomenology and traditional hermeneutics. Charles Sanders Peirce represents the third movement, American pragmatism. By emphasizing the necessary semiotic mediation in any human speech or thought, Peirce opens the way for a semiotic philosophy that can, Apel argues, bridge the gap between analytic philosophy (Wittgenstein) and the continental approach (of Heidegger, for example). Richard Rorty’s and Thomas Kuhn’s views illustrate this convergence.
While he knows the philosophy of Wittgenstein remarkably well, Apel’s connection to Peirce and Heidegger may be stronger. He was among the first to introduce Peirce’s philosophy to Germany, writing lengthy introductions to the volumes of Peirce’s essays translated into German. With respect to Heidegger, Apel’s position is a bit more complicated. This is what I will focus on in what follows.
There is obviously Heidegger’s philosophical influence, but there is also a deep concern about the man Heidegger, who entangled himself in Nazi politics, became a member of the party, and assumed the rectorate of the University of Freiburg for a short period of time in 1933. This issue of Heidegger’s involvement in Nazism is quite personal for Apel, who himself volunteered in the German army as a young man after high school and fought during the war.
Apel wrote his dissertation on Heidegger, the subtitle of which was: “An Epistemological Interpretation of Martin Heidegger’s Philosophy,” which he defended in 1950. He continued his discussion of Heidegger’s philosophy in the following years, gaining recognition for his original and unusual comparisons between Wittgenstein and Heidegger as well as his innovative attempts to bridge the two traditions of analytic and continental philosophy. Heidegger’s “radicalized hermeneutics” offers him a powerful tool to question the presuppositions of early analytic philosophy: a positivistic stance that ignores the historical situation of the thinker and ends up in a methodological solipsism that allows philosophers to consider themselves as the representatives of any thinker anywhere in the world and in history. This early form of analytic philosophy also offered a naïve view of knowledge as an immediate grasp of reality by overlooking the mediation of signs.
What Apel considers to be fundamental in Being and Time is the fact that the question of being Heidegger asks is reformulated as the question of the understanding of the being that human beings have to be. Apel takes human pre-understanding of being as a hermeneutic synthesis performed by a consciousness already in a meaningful world. Heidegger’s hermeneutics offers a powerful complement to Wittgenstein’s views to the extent that we can detect in any language, especially the language game of philosophy, an interpretive moment. Wittgenstein, Apel contends, cannot account for the fact that there is already in the world in which we live an implicit interpretation of the world—what Heidegger calls a “public interpretation”—and a relationship to oneself. Without this relationship, there would be nothing that language could represent “as” something.
This dimension of language as already synthesizing and mediating our relations to things, others, and ourselves becomes for Apel an a priori dimension, a dimension behind which one cannot retrocede. It means for Apel that before I as an individual can relate to things, others, or myself, I must go through a language community that already represents a mediation for any means I may have to understand things, others, or myself. However, in opposition to Heidegger or, later on, Gadamer, this dimension of pre-understanding is not, for Apel, an opacity that can never be pierced through. Somewhat like the late Husserl, Apel sees this a priori as a condition for the possibility of knowledge and truth. Language is analogous to the measuring tool of scientists. It is necessary and it mediates, but it does not have in itself a density that can stop us from striving for truth.
With this caveat about the alleged opacity that language is supposed to mediate, Apel shares Heidegger’s belief in an oblivion of being in traditional metaphysics and in scientific mentality. The privileging of the presence or the metaphysics of presence, in which “to be” means “to be present to consciousness,” overlooks the dimension of pre-understanding or the mediation of language—what Heidegger calls Zuhandenheit—that is, the disclosure of things as useful before becoming objects of investigation. Apel understands this disclosure of things as a pragmatic dimension in the non-crude sense of the phrase: it is the praxis of human beings that makes available to them entities susceptible of becoming objects of theoretical concerns. Apel uses this pre-understanding, pragmatic dimension, or a priori of language in order to show the limits of logical atomism or logical positivism, when they envisage the world as a set of objects transparent to the subject’s gaze and the nature of such objects as nothing else than a sum of properties. This view of things as merely present and available to us allows, Apel contends, technology to thrive and impose its technical grip on anything, human beings included.
Apel uses Heidegger’s additional distinction between things, which can be subjected to categories, and human beings, whose existence escapes the purview of categories. Human existence is, in fact, the basis for things to manifest themselves in their meaning “as” such. As a consequence, the meaning of things is radically historical and anchored in the life and life history of human beings, in human pre-understanding, and in the way human beings understand and have understood themselves. Heidegger succeeded, Apel argues, in integrating history into the understanding of things, something that neither Wittgenstein nor American pragmatism could do.
Despite Apel’s deep agreement with philosophical hermeneutics in general and Heidegger in particular, he sees three fundamental weaknesses in a philosophy that understands itself as a radicalized hermeneutics. The first one concerns the historical situation of the one who does the investigation. Heidegger sees this “being-in-the-world” as a contingent a priori that cannot be transcended and remains opaque to further investigation, preventing any transcendental perspective. This historical situation itself, in fact, functions as a quasi-transcendental in Heidegger’s philosophy. The second issue concerns the impossibility in Heidegger’s framework of addressing separately and distinctly the two questions of the constitution of meaning and the validity of such a meaning. For Heidegger, the question of validity is itself inscribed in the historical situation of the interpreter and is another form of the constitution of meaning. This is analogous to Wittgenstein’s refusal to grant philosophy a special status as a language game, maintaining instead that philosophy is at the same level as other language games. The third problem Apel has with Heidegger’s hermeneutic philosophy concerns truth. Although Heidegger recognized the dual synthesis in our grasp of things—a hermeneutic synthesis as a pre-understanding and a predicative synthesis as a propositional content—he considers the latter as a surface effect of the former, thus depriving it of any real autonomy. The propositional truth of judgments is subservient to the unveiling proper to the situation of Dasein as a clearing, what Heidegger calls aletheia or unconcealing. For Apel, this move is not only unwarranted, but also politically and morally disastrous. If truth is subservient to some event of disclosure, there are no means to assess the validity of the pre-understanding.
It is in great measure in order to respond to these three Heideggerean challenges, which are the challenges of hermeneutics in general, that Apel develops what he calls his transcendental semiotics and its accompanying ethics of discourse. If we do not distinguish the question of how meaning is constituted in always empirical, historically situated, and contingent circumstances, from the question of how meaning is assessed in its validity, there is, Apel is convinced, no possibility for different subjects to reach an intersubjective meaningful agreement on the understanding of anything. The criteria for the validity of understanding are themselves objects of understanding. Apel calls Heidegger’s stance an oblivion of the logos (Logosvergessenheit), analogous to the oblivion of being that Heidegger lamented. Just as Wittgenstein does, Heidegger leads philosophy to an impasse: a “paralysis” of philosophical reason.
In order to compensate for the weaknesses of Heidegger and Wittgenstein with respect to the question of validity or the status of philosophy, Apel takes their notion of language and attempts to make it more robust, not only as a contingent a priori, but also as a transcendental one. He uses for this purpose the way American pragmatism has described the mediation of signs and “transforms” this pragmatic use of signs into a practice of argumentation that includes its own validity claims. Although argumentation with its validity claims is performed in language, and thus in concrete situations of discourse, the validity claims themselves transcend the empirical circumstances of discourse and make the speakers accountable beyond the contingent situation of utterance. Let us see how hermeneutics is transformed into argumentation and an ethics of discourse.
Replacing the Kantian union of apperception with intersubjectivity as a community of speakers, Apel combines the historical perspective of Heidegger with the mediation of signs of Wittgenstein and Peirce while also retaining a transcendental aspect. Natural language is thereby ascribed a dual function. First, through a natural language, a world of meaning or a meaningful world is opened, which is spontaneously endowed with an objective and intersubjective validity as a common world. This is the “hermeneutic synthesis.” Second, language assumes a transcendental function in the sense that, besides disclosing entities, it also guarantees the conditions of possibility (or the foundation) and validity (or criteria) of meaning (or truth). After Habermas, Apel distinguishes two competences. While we start by acquiring a linguistic competence in learning a language that is the language “of others,” we also acquire through it a communicative competence that transcends the limits of any natural language: through language, we can communicate with people speaking a foreign language, we can learn other languages, and translate one language into another. Intersubjective communication is thus what allows us to reach an understanding about the very use of words and thus about the meaning of things that is mediated by these words. While the hermeneutic synthesis made possible by the linguistic synthesis represents the “public interpretation” (Heidegger), the hermeneutic synthesis through the communicative competence represents the public validity of knowledge. In other words, the hermeneutic synthesis that is always already performed in the lifeworld in the way we relate to things, others, and ourselves is dependent on the communication between the members of the linguistic community. The praxis can thus transcend the hermeneutic synthesis even though the praxis needs such a synthesis in order to be communicative.
With such distinctions and a transcendental pragmatic perspective, Apel shows the limits of some trends in hermeneutics and postmodernism, on the one hand, and some trends in the sciences, on the other. The former trends tend to overemphasize the mediation of the semantic component of a language and to believe that a natural language has such a degree of opacity from the layers of meanings it accrues across time that the references to things can never really reach those things. With regard to some trends in the sciences, there is so much faith put in their abstract semantic systems and theories that they forget the necessary antecedent pragmatic understanding that takes place in the scientific community with respect to the use of the signs involved. This leads scientists to believe that they have direct access to nature and can tell us what is actually the case. These two extreme positions overlook what Apel calls the “corporeal a priori” (Leibapriori) of knowledge, which is language itself.
The transcendental dimension of language as a corporeal a priori manifests itself in validity claims. After Habermas, Apel lists four validity claims present in any act of speech: a claim to intelligibility, a claim to truth, a claim to truthfulness, and a claim to normative rightness. The first claim is obvious: anybody who speaks must want to say something, have something relevant to say and be intelligible to others, without which a speaker could not be taken as a speaker. The second claim is about saying something true. Whenever someone says something, we take that individual to be telling the truth. This is the basis for any communication and any community. To fail to satisfy this claim amounts to saying something false or absurd. The third claim is about being truthful or sincere. To fail to satisfy this claim amounts to lying, manipulating, seducing, etc. The fourth and final claim involved in any act of speech is a claim to normative rightness. Anybody who says something implicitly claims that what is said or done fits the circumstances, is appropriate, etc. Not fulfilling this claim means saying something improper, out of line, morally reprehensible, etc. As for the other claims, people can decide to break the claims and shake up the establishment, start a revolution, break taboos, or speak about the unspeakable. Thus, whether it is by abiding by these claims or violating them willingly, these validity claims represent a level in argumentation and speech that is quasi-transcendental for the very reason that these claims transcend the contexts of speech and make it the case that speakers commit themselves, whether fully realizing it or not, to the intelligibility of what is said, to its truth, to their truthfulness in saying it, and to the normative rightness of saying it. This commitment is, for Apel, a commitment toward an ideal community of speech that would perfectly understand what the speaker says (Habermas calls it the ideal speech situation). These validity claims represent moments in the real community where there is a link to the ideal community.
This ideal of communication represents a significant complement to Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s hermeneutics, adding a normative component to hermeneutics or showing that hermeneutics is normative. Through such validity claims, and especially the fourth one, a claim to normative rightness, the hermeneutic synthesis at work in the lifeworld (Heidegger, Apel) has a normative component, so that hermeneutics is a form of ethics of discussion. It is not the view that hermeneutics becomes ethics by asking and framing ethical questions or that traditional ethics includes an interpretive “hermeneutic” component. Rather, the claim is much broader: in interpreting, there is an ethical component linked to the status and commitment of the interpreter. The act of interpreting is ethical, because it includes validity claims that go beyond the context of utterance. It engages not only the speaker but also the same person as an agent in a community. The speech act theory taught us that speaking is doing; transcendental pragmatics teaches us that speaking is acting in a community toward other fellow partners of communication and action, and is, to this extent, ethical.
Apel then shows the link between his pragmatic take on hermeneutics—to think and speak means to argue—and his ethics of discussion: to argue means to be ethical. Because any speech act or action or action accompanied by speech structurally anticipates the ideal community that would understand such an act or action perfectly, the anticipation of an ideal community functions as a regulative principle and commits the speaker or agent toward elementary ethical norms.
The transformation of philosophy Apel initiated was in large part a rethinking of hermeneutic philosophy along the lines of Anglo-American philosophy. By maintaining both kinds of philosophy at arm’s length, Apel could bring out the transcendental aspect already inscribed in hermeneutic philosophy—through the dual role of language—and show its ethical import. A transformed hermeneutics is a critical philosophy in which language is a medium for understanding and a process of argumentation, so that the subject is both an empirical individual thrown into the world and a participating member of a transcendental community of communication.