I wrote an essay once on truth as rhetoric.1 It might look a little different if I were writing it today, but let’s see if we can clear the matter up once and for all. First and foremost: I am convinced that truth is not a problem of political science, or even a matter subject to scientific demonstration. Truth for me is persuasion, and when I say persuasion, I don’t mean “take it from me, sonny boy,” I mean something more like “let’s all lend a hand here.” In other words: philosophical arguments are arguments ad homines, not ad hominem. By truth I mean truth as persuasion, but persuasion in relation to, and together with, a collectivity, not the art of persuading people to part with their money or something like that. Essentially I am talking about proposals for interpreting our common situation along certain lines and starting from shared assumptions. I will try to persuade you by mentioning the kind of authors you have presumably read and experienced for yourself—not the kind whose business is proving that 2 + 2 = 4, the kind who were also seeking an interpretation of our common situation. Not just any authors, authors who have earned a permanent place on your bookshelf and who are linked to your own specific experience. So the truth to which I bring the discussion back is this: how can you still be saying that without invalidating the experience you had when you were reading Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud? Doesn’t the experience that you got from reading Nietzsche (or Kant, or Hegel) now block you from saying things you might once have said and defended?
The question arises: what kind of evidence does this furnish? I answer that differently from Richard Rorty, although he more or less shares my premises. I regard truth in philosophy as the result of a form of ad homines persuasion, but persuasion grounded in a certain faith in the history of Being, faith in our capacity to trace (interpretatively) lines of continuity in the history of Being. To me, this faith corresponds to what some might call a kind of philosophical evolutionism: the classics, the things that have held out, weren’t perhaps necessarily classics right from the outset, things destined to hold out, but the fact that they did become classics involves me, what I am is largely the fruit of their endurance … In this sense Gadamer is right to speak of prejudices and the objective spirit having a positive and foundational quality of their own. It was similar reasons that ultimately brought me back to Christianity.
There is a providence of sorts in history. And I don’t mean necessary a priori laws, or contentment on the part of the winners that history has worked out better for them than it has for the losers. It simply coincides with what might be called the sense of creaturality. I didn’t bring myself into existence all on my own, I was begotten by others, and that fact transmits heritages to me. They are the only thing I dispose of in the world, my sole patrimony, and I have to come to terms with it. I may contest them, I may go looking for histories of those who were weak and forgotten, and recuperate them instead. But even here, there’s a saying of Jesus in the Gospels that I find telling. Jesus says that every scribe is like the head of a household, pulling new things and used things out of the closet, and he says that in precisely a hermeneutic context, where it is a question of interpreting some passage in the Old Testament. Philosophy is like that: there is no objective guideline governing the tradition, you can always rethink history, pulling out new things and old.
The point of all this is that philosophy is edifying discourse, but edifying doesn’t just mean convivial or entertaining. Edifying is to be understood both in the banal sense of the term (“I exhort you”), and in the strict sense in which to edify is to erect an edifice. I have already suggested that construction as edification bears a cumulative meaning: it means bringing something new to what others have already built, and upon which others may build in turn; it is never an immutable basis. This is the famous distinction that Heidegger establishes between Tradition and Überlieferung, between Vergangen and Gewesen, between past as past and past as already-been: philosophy doesn’t relate to its past as to a definitively ascertained basis, but as to an ensemble of possibilities that always offer themselves anew to interpretation.
Science too works with stratified interpretations, with a research tradition, with results piled on results that are re-elaborated time and again, and in this sense there is a continuity between philosophy, literary hermeneutics, and science. In every case there is a tradition. Science has the element of repeatable experimental verification, verification by an experiment that can be repeated independently of time, and that makes it look like history plays no part. In reality questions of language and historically determined approaches to experimentation do play a role in the experiment. But there is no doubt that science claims a certain suprahistorical determinacy for its results.
Now one should always be alert when historicity is being emphasized: maybe what’s really going on is some sort of defense of onticity vis-à-vis ontology. When I say “Sein–nicht Seiendes,” do I mean that we should neglect things in existence and focus on Being instead? Wouldn’t that mean leaping outside history, which is ultimately the history of things in existence, not of Being? Science does indeed bring to light structures that are repeatable precisely because they transcend the history of concrete entities, so the “suprahistorical” attitude of science starts to look like an ontological stance. But if I counter with the objection that even these stable structures are discoveries arising out of historical formations, then once again I am basically promoting a history that is a history of entities and man, not Being.
Too much attention to history does in effect carry one far from ontology. This is the classic objection that structuralists make against hermeneutics, and it is also the critique we hear from the analytic ontologists today: how does consideration of the modes in which Being has been and is being thought help one to address questions about what is and might be? On another level, and starting from hermeneutic and Heideggerian premises: if I emphasize historicity to excess, I end up focusing too much on entities and neglecting Being. (This, taken to extremes, is the reasoning that impels Emanuele Severino toward a refusal of historicity and time.) So however you look at it, there appears to be an incompatibility between history and ontology.
But at this point the Heideggerian notion of Being as event reveals its force: if Being is really event, then it is Being itself that “is” history, time, eventuation. And at this point the polarity is reversed. It is true that history is properly about entities; but paradoxically, excessive attention to entities causes them to be seen atemporally, with the atemporality proper to science that guarantees the abstract repeatability of experiments and all that follows. To think that historicity menaces, so to speak, the vision of Being amounts once more to thinking Being in the form of entities, and as a function of entities.
If we translate all this into a question of philosophical method or style, we are brought face to face with the reasons for preferring a hermeneutic conception of philosophy. The most illuminating way to explain this mode of argumentation is Nietzsche’s announcement of the death of God. Nietzsche doesn’t mean to say that God is dead because we finally perceived with clarity that “objectively he doesn’t exist,” that reality is constituted in such a way as to exclude him. Nietzsche could not, coherently with his own theory of interpretation—there are no facts, only interpretations, and if this too is only an interpretation, so what?2—enunciate a thesis of that kind. So the announcement of the death of God is rather a way of registering awareness of the course of events in which we are all involved, and which we do not describe objectively but interpret riskily as leading to the recognition that God is no longer necessary. The announcement is the shared acknowledgment of God’s inessentiality in a world in which science and technology allow us to live without the terror felt by primitive mankind.
But in the Nietzschean interpretation, God is no longer necessary, he is revealed as a superfluous untruth, on account of the transformations in our individual and social existence that have been induced precisely by belief in him. The God who always functioned as a principle of stabilization and reassurance was also the God who always forbade lying: so it’s in order to obey him that his followers also give the lie to the fiction that he himself is. Who could present this complex and vertiginous argument as a poetic declaration of the (metaphysical) nonexistence of God? Suppose the faithful do finally dispatch God by recognizing that he is a fiction: in denying him they also deny the power of truth, and so strip their own deed of any truth. That is why the real world that has become myth doesn’t simply give myths credit, or assign them the task of substituting for truth. What it does is make room for the play of interpretations—which in turn presents itself philosophically as just another interpretation.
On this view, philosophy arises out of the perennial conflict or play of interpretations, but it cannot consist of a free-floating gaze from everywhere and nowhere at this play or conflict. And it cannot consist in some form of artistic-literary praxis either, since its specific goal is persuasion ad homines. So any assimilation of philosophy to literature is excluded: in a certain sense, and counterintuitively, the experience of the mythization of the world strips legitimacy away from any sort of aestheticism in philosophy. There isn’t any real artistic or aesthetic arbitrium in the kind of philosophy that inhabits the play of interpretations. Rather, there is adequation to a “logic,” the logic proper to Nietzsche’s hermeneutics, where recognition of the essential interpretativity of the experience of what is true is recognized in turn as an interpretation, and where the theory of the historicity (of the horizons) of truth is received as a truth itself historical.
The expression “anything goes” is sometimes used as a shorthand caricature of where it is you ultimately wind up if you dare to adopt the hermeneutic stance in philosophy. But if you think about it, “anything goes” is just part of going, and doesn’t affirm any kind of relativism: the expression “anything goes” is going too, along with everything else. And I regard this as an indication of Hegel’s superiority over Kant. It amounts to stating that when I am conscious of what I am, I’ve already changed, because I am what I am plus the awareness of what I am, and that is the fundamental element in phenomenology, dialectic, everything there has been in philosophy since Kant.
It is also the premise of hermeneutics: there is not just a situation that discourse describes or depicts as though it were a mirror external to the situation itself. There is a situation composed of the situation plus its description and interpretation, and so on. Likewise, the moment I realize that the expression “anything goes” is one of the things that are going, there is a shift of viewpoint, and perhaps there is a nonrelativizable dominance of “anything goes,” because you could say that the idea of an ensemble comprising the things that are going and the very expression that incompletely describes it “goes better” than the others.
I do indeed appear to be in search of greater descriptive completeness, capable of including myself as well; but there is an aspect to bear in mind. This drive to be complete (to include awareness and reflection; to include the expression “anything goes” in the ensemble of the things that are going) actually translates into the discovery of an inevitable incompleteness (I myself plus the awareness of myself together constitute something different, which must once again always be aware). So it doesn’t ever add up to an adequate description of the situation, because the very concept of adequacy in play here has changed: it is not the same concept as that held by those who think truth in terms of adequation. “Adequate” here does not mean “mirroring,” but if anything, “satisfying” at a certain point in the discussion. It means “persuasive,” but with a fundamental reserve or liberty. Fallibilism, for example, the statement that “everything may be falsifiable,” is not a description of objective states, it simply conveys the impression that what I was saying might be mistaken, that someone might turn up tomorrow to contradict what I’ve said. In this light, the best thing is complete nihilism, the position that “everything is interpretation, including this,” which we may regard as equivalent to the version of relativism that says “everything is relative, and the expression ‘everything is relative’ is relative too.” It is better because it disquiets me more, it means there is one less answer, and one more question out there to be answered.
In other words, self-awareness is never an adequate description, because it is always comprised in the game. Only the hermeneutic notion of interpretation manages somehow to take this into account, whereas it seems to me that other philosophical stances are always struggling to relay everything in descriptive and objective terms, and in so doing, letting things elude them, or refusing to see them. Indeed, depending on one’s viewpoint, and better still, one could say that what tracks this movement most “adequately” (again, with a heap of quotation marks) is the interpretation of a certain notion of descriptive objectivity, not the rejection of descriptive objectivity as such.
This also gives rise, I believe, to a different outlook on the sciences. When we speak of objectivity in science, what we really mean is post-Kantian science, which no longer sees cognizance in terms of the pure mirroring of things as they are. The use of the word “objectivity” after Kant no longer implies pure adequative descriptivity. Now as I see it, objectivity is hard to separate from the availability of criteria of verification, and this availability is what specifically concerns philosophical discourse. In other words, it’s not governable by science, it’s not an object of scientific discourse. It is what you might call a second-order question.
The meaning isn’t properly that “science doesn’t think,” but that the use of the technologies that are made possible by scientific research “isn’t a technological question,” as Heidegger always says. The essence of technology is not a technological question—the word “essence” here meaning the way technology is “in force” or “applies” its validity, and its “spread” as a general human effect. Now this validity and this spread aren’t questions that technology either may or could decide. Does this mean reviving the distinction between the sciences of nature and the sciences of the spirit, with philosophy naturally sharing the point of view of the sciences of the spirit?3 I think not, insofar as the difference between the sciences of nature and the sciences of the spirit, as it was formulated in neo-Kantian terms, was still conceived as a difference between the world of nature and the world of liberty: as if the world of nature possessed a necessity of its own, absolutely undeniable, hence absolute tout court. So the fundamental prejudice went like this: in the determinism of natural events, what science establishes (stabilizes) ceases to move. Ethics, on the contrary, naturally does move, it comes and goes, in other words it’s free, and in the realm of freedom there is the noumenon that is ungraspable other than regulatively, as an ideal of reason.
I don’t see that I can take my stance within that frame. From where I stand, that which occurs in the domain of the hard, experimental sciences is also the history of Being. And the history of Being has to do with the passing on of linguistic messages, cultural messages. Therefore the hardness of the sciences is not threatened in the least by my perspective, but nor is it taken to undergird an immutable natural order. I accept that it is grounded in a much slower pace of transformation of the criteria of objectivity: in the case of science, the criteria alter gradually, over long scientific eras, whereas in everyday life the criteria that guide me today might change radically overnight, through some further acquisition of understanding.
Philosophy is the self-consciousness (and self-conscience) of common language, more precisely the self-consciousness of the metalanguage within which all the specific languages are situated, define their stability, and eventually undergo transformation. So it is not even placeable within the traditional distinction between the sciences of nature and the sciences of the spirit, it is something markedly different that is implicated in both, because the “hard” sciences are interpretative sciences too, an interpretative way of knowing, not purely descriptive knowledge. The difference is that they interpret according to norms that, since they belong to specialized languages, are stabilized within the metalanguage and are not subjected to constant probing, the way reflection on values or on the meaning of life is. It may be a bit difficult to put this into words, but I think it is intuitively easy to grasp.
This doesn’t signify in the least that physicists have it wrong, or that science doesn’t possess a rock-solid objectivity. It only means that this objectivity is placed in, situated within, belongs to the history of Being as well. This morning my water heater wasn’t working, and I had to check the water pressure, so this gets thrown at me: you too stand within the objectivity of the criteria established by science, because if science hadn’t conceived of water heaters, and instruments for checking the water pressure, you wouldn’t have home heating. True enough, all this is objective, but it is an objectivity constructed within a configuration in which there exist tubes and boilers, and in which objects of this kind are made into instruments for warming residences. In other words, every “natural” objectivity is also “cultural,” in the sense that it is not objectivity given once and for all, that is either there or not, exists or doesn’t, but is the result of a configuration given and constructed, and only within that configuration do certain events come about or not come about, and the yes/no alternative have force.