Ranke answers it is through the immediacy and continuity of historical events. It is through the success of these events that we can determine the teleological structure of history, even if there is no telos.
Herder takes this and creates a reverse teleology where each particular epoch has value on its own terms which can only be understood after the fact.
(ii) Ranke’s Historical Worldview
Ranke believed history is determined by free choice at crucial moments which articulate the shape of the whole. Power in its expression (both external manifestation and inwardness) becomes the central category of historicism, which is deeply intertwined with freedom. Against freedom stands the resistance of necessity (à la Hegelian dialectic). Historical effects and powers, not individuals, determine the meaning of history. Through the category of power, the coherence of history is a given. But why do we assume there is a unity to world history if there is no goal? (Herodotus saw exempla not unity in history) A history of the interplay of forces does not justify this assumption and yet we assume the development of world history has an uninterrupted continuity. The development of Western culture is a condition for world-historical consciousness. Droysen argued that continuity is the essence of history which increases within itself. Rejecting Hegelian unity of history, historicism took a theological approach: an infinite understanding which views all things simultaneously. Thinking the thoughts of God. This form of understanding, participating in universal life, claims an immediacy without comments. It is a poetic surrender to telling a story much like Hegel’s Geist in his religion of art. In this way an event is historical if it catalyzes the progression of history.
(iii) The Relation between Historical Study and Hermeneutics in J.G. Droysen
Droysen tried to free historical understanding from Ranke’s aesthetic hermeneutics. The expression of the ego allows connection, and it is understanding individuals as elements in larger movements of moral powers that we can reach historical understanding. Moral powers are both the mode of history’s being and an access point for understanding. For Droysen, necessity is related to the unconditional moral imperative and freed to unconditional will, both expressions of the moral power in which individuals are subsumed. Power doe snot manifest universal life (Ranke) but exists in mediating the moral world. Since moral powers are the reality of history, the historian discovers them to transcend particularity. Historical understanding is an infinite, mediated process but also provides immediacy. More fully, the mystery of the person prevents us from determining laws (since the world of history depends on freedom) and the infinite mediation of tradition blocks the way. Yet, the intelligibility of the moral world allows the historian proximity to historical objects undictable(?) by a natural scientist. Through Droysen’s concept of expression, historical reality exists in a sphere of meaning requiring hermeneutics. Historical research aims to reconstruct the fragments of the text of history. This method de-emphasizes truth in favor of empathy.
2. Dilthey’s Entanglement in the Aporias of Historicism
(A) From the Epistemological Problem of History to the Hermeneutic Foundation of the Human Sciences
Dilthey is the climactic break between aesthetic hermeneutics and philosophy of history. This conflict is rooted in historicism’s intermediate position between philosophy and experience. Dilthey wanted to construct a critique of historical reason clearing away speculative metaphysics. The problem of epistemology becomes urgent in the nineteenth century with the refutation of Hegelianism and a surrender to Kantian nominalism. Dilthey tried to distinguish the historical world from dogmatic neo-Kantianism which imputes value on historical facts, examining the inner historicity of experience itself. We do not need to explore facts of external world but understand a man-made historical world (Vico), the homogeneity of subject and object. But this only conceals the real epistemological problem of history: how does individual experience become historical experience? Dilthey’s argument only applies to individual experience, hoping to use continuity in individual life to constitute historical continuity; indivisible experience is the foundation of historical knowledge. Structure then prioritizes an understanding of the totality of relationships (not causal connection). Like Ranke and Droysen, Dilthey rejected the universal subject in favor of historical life. Dilthey’s big step is transitioning from coherence of individual experience to historical coherence, not experienced by any individual.
However, Dilthey failed to transition from a psychological to a hermeneutic grounding of the human sciences: how can an unexperienced coherence be known? Drawing upon Husserl, Dilthey was able to articulate structural qualities of life as intended essence (distinguishing essence from causal continuity). It is through significance and structure that life can interpret itself. Dilthey uses the superiority of historical objects to ground universality through which we grasp the historical world, but this does not really sidestep speculative metaphysics. Dilthey, by holding to objective mind, collapses into Hegelianism. The main difference being that “[i]t is not in the speculative knowledge of the concept but in historical consciousness that spirit’s knowledge of itself is consummated.” Does not the historicity of human understanding and historical consciousness preclude objectivity?
(B) The Conflict between Science and Life Philosophy in Dilthey’s Analysis of Historical Consciousness?
Historical consciousness attempts to transcend temporality but is this infinite understanding possible for a finite human subject? Dilthey sees historical understanding expanding the mind to embrace the infinite, based on the homogeneity of human nature. But does not the comparative presuppose contemporaneity with its focus on form? But Dilthey cannot justify an unimpaired historical consciousness while rejecting absolute suprahistorical knowledge? Implicitly, he contends that it is through historical consciousness as a mode of self-knowledge. Upon reflecting on experience, we express these thoughts in the form of an objective mind. The connection between life and knowledge is a foundational datum.
Dilthey is not able to shed accusations of relativism. This ambiguity rests in the Cartesian foundations which he struggles to wrestle out in his later writings where he articulates that reflection and be brought against life to discover truth, but he shows here he is trapped in the Enlightenment (proceeding via doubt). Through acquiring certainty and protection of the human mind, the Enlightenment reaches consummation as historical enlightenment. Drawing upon Romantic hermeneutics, Dilthey ultimately claims that the past needs to be deciphered as a text and not as historical school, thus siding against the historical school. Inductive Romantic hermeneutics prove unable to overcome the problems of Cartesianism especially in his borrowed empiricism. We must escape the methodology of modern science to uncover the objectivity of the human sciences.
3. Overcoming the Epistemological Problem through Phenomenological Research
(A) The Concept of Life in Husserl and Count Yorck
Heidegger’s use of Husserl’s phenomenology may liberate Dilthey yet. For Husserl, consciousness is not an object but an intentional experience, investigating subjective modes of givenness. Phenomenological research focuses on the unity of time consciousness, shifting experience from the ultimate phenomenological datum to a referrent, pointing to an empty horizon toward which meaning can be directed, culminating in an ultimate horizon consciousness. Horizon indicates how limited intentionality merges with continuity of the whole. The all-embracing world horizon is formed by anonymous intentionality, forming “life-world”, the antithesis of objectivism. But how can Husserl assert the validity of subjectivity? Paradoxically the transcendental “I” must be included inside the life-world, but Husserl believes this is resolved if we maintain the transcendental meaning of the reduction. “Life” is the transcendentally reduced subjectivity that is the source of all objectifications. Husserl’s “life” plays the same role as Dilthey’s coherence of experience. And the speculative import of these concepts remained undeveloped in both. Count Yorck provides a crucial bridge by providing the analysis of being alive as a self-assertion, judgment also being the essence of self-consciousness. For Yorck, the results of thinking are detached from their life comportment, philosophy must reverse this process. This highlights the origin of the concept of life. With the Hegelian correlative of life and self-consciousness, Yorck argues that the method of philosophy should be projection and abstraction. By affirming this connection between life and self-consciousness, Yorck was superior to Dilthey and Husserl, but we do not know how he planned to avoid Hegel’s dialectical metaphysicizing.
(B) Heidegger’s Project of a Hermeneutic Phenomenology
Rejecting the pure cognito present in Husserl, Heidegger constructed a phenomenology ontologically based on the factity of Dasein (existence). No matter how much Husserl clung to transcendental subjectivity, it remained a problem even for Heidegger. Husserl would have claimed that transcendental subjectivity did away with substance ontology and also the objectivity of tradition, but Heidegger would reject this extension of modern tendencies to return to Greek “being” and foregrounding the problem of history. Heidegger would argue that being itself is time, breaking modern subjectivity. Inheriting Nietzsche’s charge against Western metaphysics, Heidegger constructed a phenomenological hermeneutics of facticity so radical that it could overcome Dilthey and Husserl’s aporias. The question of being reconstructs understanding as the original form of the realization of Dasein (being-in-the-world). Heidegger’s project became a transcendental analytic of Dasein. Understanding is ultimately a knowing one’s way around. All knowing draws its significance from the particular nature of the mode of being common to both the knowing activity and the known, a mode of being of historicity. Belonging to the existential structure of our historical finitude, our thrownness belongs with the projection of historical inquiry. This is not a structure to be escaped through another ideal but the very structure of our existence. Understanding in the human sciences must be rooted in the being of Dasein as understanding, concretized in historical understanding.
II. Elements of a Theory of Hermeneutic Experience
1. The Elevation of the Historicity of Understanding to the Status of a Hermeneutic Principle
(A) The Hermeneutic Circle and the Problem of Prejudice
(i) Heidegger’s Disclosure of the Fore-Structure of Understanding
Heidegger used hermeneutics to explicate the fore-structure of understanding for the sake of ontology. Our question is how a hermeneutics liberated from claims to objectivity can do justice to the historicity of understanding. Heidegger’s hermeneutic circle possesses positive ontological significance, projecting a meaning onto the text. Linguistic differences can be uncovered when interpretation does not fit meaning. Our expectations pull up short, so to speak. At the same time, we must be open to other meanings. We must understand the tradition of the text and disclose even our own prejudices. The prejudice of the Enlightenment is against prejudice, even though it is the basis of judgment which dignifies judgment.
(ii) The Discrediting of Prejudice by the Enlightenment
The Enlightenment is grounded in exercising individual reason against dogma, freedom from superstition through the perfection of knowledge. By trying to recover the premodern, romanticism only perpetuates the myth/reason dichotomy. The false myth of romanticism is not binding because it is an act of the free imagination. Facts can only say aesthetic, not true things. Historicism, grounded in romanticism, was itself rooted in the Enlightenment. Discrediting prejudices is universalized in the historical Enlightenment. However the discrediting of prejudices is ultimately impossible for finite humans. Prejudices, more than judgments, constitute the historical reality of a human being.
(B) Prejudices as Conditions of Understanding
(i) The Rehabilitation of Authority and Tradition
One question is what grounds legitimate prejudice. The Enlightenment surrenders all authority to reason, shedding dogma and partiality. However, this precludes the potential truthfulness of tradition and prejudice, where judgment may be superior to one’s own. Romanticism rehabilitated tradition as the ground of valid, suprarational morals. But both wrongly antithesize reason and tradition, the latter is a preservation of the former. Understanding in the human sciences must be addressed by tradition. Elements of tradition can affect natural science, but it does not affect the object of its investigation. The same cannot be said for the human sciences whose great achievements can never be outdated. Historical research is motivated by present concerns.
(ii) The Example of the Classical
Historical consciousness created self-criticism and reflection but never quite shedding the normative classical. The classical is not the concept of a suprahistorical value but is the historical process of preservation that through constantly proving itself allows something true to come into being. The classical resists criticism because its binding validity is preserved and precedes reflection, a timeless present contemporaneous with every other present. The classical is considered the culmination of the genre and is extended to other eras and cultures. The classical, through its constant mediation, overcomes historical distance by itself; its duration is unlimited. Understanding is to be thought of less as a subjective act than as participating in an event of tradition.
(iii) The Hermeneutic Significance of Temporal Distance
Trying to reach shared understanding about subject matter, Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics moved past Ast’s to formal universality. Heidegger moves the circle to articulate the interplay between interpreter and tradition, which is not fully a precondition but something we help imbue. Our fore-conception of completeness is determined by the context; understanding is (1) understanding of what is being said and (2) to isolate author’s meaning as such. Hermeneutics proceeds in between a text’s familiarity and strangeness; it should clarify the conditions that create understanding. What must be emphasized for hermeneutics is the significance of temporal distance which is not a gulf but a bridge that conditions understanding. Only with time can the present disappear and art be made authoritative and universal, emerging in its true being. Temporal distance can also help distinguish true prejudices from false ones as we suspend our own prejudices through the structure of the question (giving full play to other’s claim to truth). The true historical object is a unity of the reality of history and historical understanding, the latter being an essentially historically effected event.
(iv) The Principle of History of Effect (Wirkungsgeschichte)
We must become aware of the history of effect (traditionary effects) to effect historical understanding. To be historical means self-knowledge can never be complete; we must explore and trace the substance in its historical development. Horizon represents all we can see from our vantage point, significant for hermeneutics and historical thought. At a certain point, historical understanding stops trying to agree with the other but understand what has been handed down, transitioning from means to ends by also making one’s own standpoint historically unassailable. Historical transposition does not involve the two horizons of subject and object but the larger shared, moving horizon. An understanding of foregrounding and prejudices can help us avoid assimilating the past to our meaning. The prejudices of a particular present undergo constant testing and evaluation, understanding coming about with the fusion of these horizons. Hermeneutics must present a historical horizon different from the present. Creating the fusion of horizons is the task of historically effected consciousness, and it is the central problem of hermeneutics. The fusion of horizons is not a cumulative understanding of an object only an expansion.
2. The Recovery of the Fundamental Hermeneutic Problem
(A) The Hermeneutic Problem of Application
Early hermeneutics was dependent on (1) understanding, (2) interpretation, and (3) application all of which are talents one must develop. Romanticism fused interpretation and understanding, excluding application. Theological and legal hermeneutics always seek understanding as application. We must redefine the hermeneutics of the human sciences in terms of legal and theological hermeneutics, because historical hermeneutics has to apply the meaning of the text to bridge the temporal gap.
(B) The Hermeneutic Relevance of Aristotle
Understanding is an application of the universal to the particular (cf. Aristotelian ethics). Discussion of phronesis where the problem of method has moral relevance. The hermeneutic problem is too distinct from pure objectivity to have no being. Aristotle wrestles with whether or not moral action falls under techne; this particular knowledge is not theoretical or technical but self-knowledge. A few important implications for hermeneutics:
- Application is highly problematic because the world of law is more ordered than imperfect human reality. We must adapt with the changeability of natural law. Ideas, though bearing some universal consistency, can only be understood in a concretized situation.
- Knowledge can be treated either as a means or ends. Moral knowledge requires both general understanding and particular familiarity with a situation.
- Self-knowledge of moral reflection has a unique relation to itself through its concrete instantiation; insight is related to the particular. The interpreter likewise should seek to apply the universal text to their own particularity.
(C) The Exemplary Significance of Legal Hermeneutics
From here, we must answer if there is an unequivocal distrinction between dogmatic and historical interest. There is a distinction; but the dogmatic jurist does not need an understanding of the historical evolution of law. Both historian and jurist must reflect on changes in meaning. What we learn from legal hermeneutics is that tradition always speaks into the present through mediating itself. Interpretation concretizes the law through application.
For theology, the text (Scripture) has complete priority over us; we do not add to the text. The historian cannot become the audience of the text, btu they can ideally perform the same act in receiving the text as the original audience. We must understand a text in terms of the specific situation. While hermeneutics and historical study much in common, the latter does not grant the text self-sufficiency as philology does. For the historian it is a principle that tradition is to be interpreted in a sense different from the texts. When we cannot immediately understand, we must interpret through traditionary material. Criticism and philology must be reoriented along these principles. Historical understanding proves to be a kind of literary criticism writ large. Both deal with application in differing degrees and both find their true ground in historically effected consciousness. Application does not mean first understand a given universal to apply it to a concrete; it is the understanding of the universal text itself.
3. Analysis of Historically Effected Consciousness
This section was used for a paper, and so the notes are more extensive with direct citations of the text.
(A) The Hermeneutic Problem of Application
“We must now ask how knowledge and effect belong together” (341). Fusion of horizons should describe how historically effected consciousness operates, but what is it? Historically effected consciousness belongs to historical effect but does not consciousness rise above it? It seems that Hegel is right: hermeneutics is the absolute mediation of history and truth which destroys historically effected consciousness through “the omnipresence of the historically knowing spirit” (342). “Understanding only finds its fulfillment only in an infinite consciousness” (Ibid.). Does not historical hermeneutics fall into speculative, reflective philosophy? Immediacy of the work must not dissipate through reflection, “we are concerned to conceive a reality that limits and exceeds the omnipotence of reflection” (342). Hegel argues that Kant cannot use reason to set noumenal limits as a limit requires knowledge of both sides. Attacks against Hegel cannot be launched from reflection because all such reflection is subsumed in consciousness coming to itself. But “there is some truth in the critique of speculative thought based on the standpoint of finite human consciousness” (344). Truth-dissolving relativism is too hollow to provide an alternative, superior position. Plato refuted dialectical sophism on these grounds through the myth of a divinely-endowed knowledge seeking soul. Plato’s myth cannot be imported as a cornerstone for Hegel; “myth is pedagogy. Ultimately, reason is its own foundation” (345). “We will haev to define the structure of historically effected consciousness with an eye to Hegel” (346).
(B) The Concept of Experience (Erfahrung) and the Essence of Hermeneutic Experience
Historically effected consciousness has the structure of experience. Scientific schematization has truncated experience’s original meaning. Because science demands that experience be repeatable in order to be valid, but this means “experience abolishes its history and thus itself” (347). Husserl attempted to critique this one-sidedness of experience in how it is teleologically idealized toward truth, but he still projects one-sided exactitude of science as perception becomes the basis of experience. Husserl’s project struggles because the pure transcendental subjectivity of the ego is not given but is constituted through a particular linguistic community.
Modern science is rooted in this problem: the use of pure reason with a methodology freed from prejudices. Bacon’s contribution was moving past accidental daily experience to move from the particular to the universal. Experiment means careful direction of the mind to find axioms in the most diverse circumstances. Bacon’s methodological contributions are not very substantial but he directed attention to prejudice and the distortion of languages and idols (e.g. hope). But it is “certain that language is at the same time a positive condition of, and guide to, experience itself” (350). Experience should not be confined to a teleological view, rather inductive experience is valid until it is contradicted by newer experience. For Aristotle, “various perceptions unite to form the unity of experience” (Ibid). This united experience exists between universal science and particular sensation. “Experience is not science itself, but it is a necessary condition of it” (Ibid.) “Experience is always actually present only in the individual observation. It is not known in a previous universality” (351). For Aristotle, we lose these experiences until we have confirmation otherwise, “the unprincipled universality of experience (its accretion) eventually leads to the unity of the arche” (352).
But Aristotle preupposes that the universality of the concept is ontologically prior, oversimplifying the contradictions of experience. Rather, experience is a negative, dialectical process through which we come to know things better. Hegel recognized by arguing that one’s experience changes one’s whole body of knowledge. The experienced person gains a horizon through which they receive the new unexpected experience. For Hegel, experience is the reversal of consciousness through dialectical movement. Experience negates what we thought we knew; Hegel describes this as the experience consciousness has of itself. The consummation of experience is self-knowledge where one overcomes self-alienation. Because it corrects knowledge, experience cannot be a science and must ultimately be surpassed. Consequently, the experienced person is open to new experiences. “The dialectic of experience has its proper fulfillment not in definitive knowledge but in the openness to experience that is made possible by experience itself” (355). Experience is acquired by all, and thus in this sense belongs to the historical nature of man. Experience is the negative to expectations, bringing us self-knowledge through insights. Sufferings helps us realize our finitude recognizing the real. “Real experience is that whereby man becomes aware of his finiteness” (357). Learning individual historicity and the limits to knowledge and planning reason.
From this we must locate these general elements of experience in hermeneutical experience as we explore historically effected consciousness. Hermeneutical experience focuses on tradition which experience does not teach us to know but is langauge that “express itself like a Thou” (358). The Thou is not another person’s opinion but it relates itself to us through the dialogue of experience. One can take the thou as sharing in human nature and will make the Thou to one’s own ends. Alternatively, relating the I-Thou relation to the hermeneutical problems falls into naive objecitivity, following the inductive teleology of the sciences. A better way of understanding this relation is acknowledging the Thou, but still living in self-relatedness. “This relation is not immediate but reflective” (359). Both parties try to understand the other better than the other understands themselves, striving for mutual recognition. Consequently, “the claim to understand the other person in advance functions to keep the other person’s claim at a distance” (360). In hermeneutics, historical consciousness is the parallel experience of the Thou. We cannot live without prejudices because “[a] person who reflects himself out of a living relationship to tradition destroys the true meaning of this tradition within historicity” (Ibid).
This leads to the third hermeneutical experience: the openness to tradition which makes the human bond possible—in hermeneutics, “I must allow tradition’s claim to validity, not in the sense of simply acknowledging the past in its otherness, but in such a way that it has something to say to me” (361). Historically effected consciousness readily lets itself experience tradition by keeping itself to the truth claim encountered.
(C) The Hermeneutical Priority of the Question
(i) The Model of the Platonic Dialectic
Examining the logical structure of openness in hermeneutical consciousness, we realize the structure of the question is present in all experience, turning us to explore the essence of the question: to have a sense of direction. The question frames the direction of the answer by “break[ing] open the being of the object” (362). Plato shows how “there is a profound recognition of the priority of the question in all knowledge and discourse that really reveals something of an object” (363). Dialectic proceeds through question and answer by bringing something into the open, leaving it in a state of indeterminacy which creates openness. This openness “is limited by the horizon of the question” (363). Bad questions do not create this openness but maintain false assumptions. The slanted question is not wrong becasue there is an obscured truthful openness, but they correspond to no meaningful question. A question is open when it contains positive and negative judgment, in order to know the true and exclude the wrong. Consequently, “[d]eciding the question is the path to knowledge” (364). Furthermore, medieval disputation shows us the connection between knowledge and dialectic. Aristotle’s dialectic is the power to investigate contraries, to see if one and the same science can be concerned with contraries. “Knowledge always means, precisely, considering opposites. Its superiority over preconceived opinion consists in the fact that it is able to conceive of possibilities as possibilities” (365). Thus, idea of method (the foundation of this work) is limited for knowledge since we cannot have a method of the question.
Socrates teaches us how to ask the right question once we realize we do not know, a step made difficult by the resilience of opinion to admit ignorance. But, like the negation of experience, the question presses itself upon us and unseats our opinion.
Socratic-Platonic dialectic raises questioning to an art, not art that can be taught like techne, but the ability to conduct real dialogue. This requires (1) all parties moving together along the subject matter, (2) an art of testing the other’s opinion through drawing out the right question, and (3) dialectic tries to bring out the strength of what is said rather than merely dissecting it and tearing it apart. The logos emerges in the truth of dialectic and “transcends the interlocutors’ subjective opinions that even the person leading the conversation knows that he does not know” (368). The task of hermeneutics is dialoguing with the text. Conversation also avoids dogmatic abuse of the written, canonized word. Even Hegel’s dialectic embodies this dialogue through the dissolution and reconstruction of concepts and thoughts.
(ii) The Logic of Question and Answer
If hermeneutics recognizes the primacy of question and answer, then interpreters must understand the questions answered by the text by attaining the hermeneutical horizon of the question. This horizon must “go back behind what is said, [and] ask questions beyond what is said” (370). Collingwood puts it this way, “We can understand a text only when we have understood the question to which it is an answer” (cited by Gadamer, 370). We must also discover the question it is answering, taking a text seriously on its own grounds like a work of art applied to a historical tradition. The logic of question and answer possesses two distinct questions with two different answers: (1) what was the meaning of a great event? (2) did this event go according to plan? This undertaking is only legitimate if Hegel is right that there is a correlation to world-historical events and the planning of great figures. But the multiplicities of subjectivities cannot be applied to hemeneutics which makes Collingwood’s extrapolation problematic, suggesting that meaning goes beyond authorial intent as we reconstruct the meaning of the text itself. Collingwood is wrong to ignore the distinction between the question which the text is supposed to answer and the one it does answer, but we also cannot reduce hermeneutics to understanding an author’s meaning. This is because, “[b]y being re-actualized in understanding, texts are drawn into a genuine course of events in exactly the same way as are events themselves. This is what we described as the history of effect as an element in hermeneutical experience” (373).
The most important thing here is how the text’s historical self-mediation poses a question out of its tradition to us in the present. Thus, “[r]econstructing the question which the text is presumed to be the answer itself takes place within a process of questioning through which we try to answer the question that the text asks us” (374). Hermeneutics must move beyond reconstruction, not toward arbitrary interpretation, but to set the reconstructed question in light of what the word of tradition means for us. “The close relation between questioning and understanding is what gives the hermeneutic experience its true dimension” (Ibid). We question through the testing of possibilities, and “[t]o understand a question means to ask it. To understand meaning is to understand it as the answer to a question” (375).
Thus we cannot transcendentally discuss a history of problems from within our own historicity. The concept of the problem is an unmotivated abstraction removed from its context of questioning and thus becomes insoluble. Rhetoric properly understands problems as dialectical alternatives rather than something Kant (and later historicists would argue) cannot be solved on the basis of reason. “A sign of the fact that an immediate relation to the questions of philosophy no longer exists” (377). In relation to historically effected consciousness, the dialectic of question and answer shows us the reciprocal relationship of understanding. The text does not speak as a Thou, as we must make it speak and question it according to the answer expected in the text. “Anticipating an answer itself presupposes that the questioner is part of the tradition and regards himself as being addressed by it. This is the truth of historically effected consciousness” (377).
Looking ahead, we will unpack how language achieves the fusion of horizons in understanding. Language is so easily concealed, but we can trust it to guide us. Shared understanding can only be reached through language and dialogue where “[tt] is the coming-into-language of the thing itself” (378). Moving from an analysis of the question we must analyze the linguisticality of dialogue. The first point here is the shared centeredness of language as something “both [dialogue partners] come under the influence of the truth” (379).
Part Three: The Ontological Shift of Hermeneutics Guided by Language
1. Language as the Medium of Hermeneutic Experience
We do not conduct conversation; it has a spirit of its own. To understand a person is a verbal phenomenon. As translation shows, we must be aware of mediation reacting shared understanding through common interpretation. One must not only live in the language they use but come to a proper understanding of the subject matter too. Translators must constantly renounce the comprehensiveness of their work and the limitations of translation: they participate in a hermeneutical conversation. The measuring of the text is not fixed but is shaped by the horizon of its interpreter. Furthermore, “language is the universal medium in which understanding occurs. Understanding occurs in interpreting.” The linguisticality of understanding is the concretion of historically effected consciousness.
(A) Language as Determination of the Hermeneutic Object
Because of this, the understanding of verbal tradition retains priority. We only receive tradition through its verbal handing down. This language transcends more speaking through its presence in writing. A written tradition preserves a cohesive whole which is why written texts present the real hermeneutic task. Overcoming the self-alienation of writing is the highest task of understanding. It is in writing that language gains its true ideality. Literature does not require us to reason our way into the past but acquires a contemporaneity with our present. Writing is not secondary to speech but is the abstract ideality of language. As Plato points out, both writing and speech have two arts: sophistry (appearance) and dialectic (true thought). Writing has no defensive aid like the speech act does but needs to be interpreted according to the norm of the subject matter which makes the reader the arbiter. We cannot limit understanding to psychological transposition of original intent because the temporal delimitations of an audience are too blurry.
(B) Language as Determination of the Hermeneutic Act
Not only is the object of understanding verbal, but understanding is fundamentally connected to language. The historian must question the historicity of concept and disclose their origins. “To think historically means, in fact, the transposition that the concepts of the past undergo when we try to think in them.” Every interpretation must adapt to hermeneutical particularity. Because interpretation is verbal it includes the possibility for relating to others, concreting meaning itself. When an interpretation is right, it disappears behind what is said. Demonstration is a shortcut but possesses the double hermeneutical fold that translation has in relation to interpretation. Interpretation and reading also create artistic reproduction in bringing the art into being. Performative interpretation is fundamentally accidental. We may feel language fails us but this does not refute its priority. We should not see ourselves as imprisoned in a language because reason and the hermeneutical experience is the corrective which surpasses language but is itself verbally constituted.
How is there unity of thought through all these different languages? Starting with the linguistic foundation in the unity of language and thought, we will move the opposite direction, seeing the unity of thought, understanding, and interpretation. We must explore the conceptual character of understanding since it is the realization of hermeneutical experience and becomes the latent prejudices of the interpreter. The situation is complicated by the inadequacy of the modern concept of language, which through its fixation of form devalues language of its content through consciousness. We must explore the thinking and interpretation bound up in language.
2. The Development of the Concept of Langauge in the History of Western Thought
(A) Language and Logos
The Greek expression for word also means “name” which belongs to its bearer and has a rightness to it, seemingly belonging to its referent’s being. Greek philosophy began with the insight that a name does not represent true being; it is only a substitute. This problem is must thoroughly explored in Plato’s Cratylus. On one hand, conventionalist theory articulates language’s meaning is reached by agreement and practice while on the other hand, there is a natural agreement between word and thing through the idea of correctness. The mode of being in language limits both theories because of customary usage. Modern interpreters of Plato believe he is arguing no truth can be achieved through language, and being must be known purely from itself in how the word can only refer to knowledge itself. The pure thought of ideas is a silent dialogue with one’s soul; language is only the external manifestation of this dialogue. Dialectic becomes a provisional method until knowing is achieved. Plato’s claim of nonlinguistic ideas conceals the true nature of language. Socrates clearly refutes the conventionalist view and then the oppose view. The conventional principle can make use of the similarity principle without being bound to it. The word is correct if it brings the thing to presentation through representation. The question of the degree of similarity does not seem appropriate here because a word is a word if it fits correctly. The schema of original and copy does not fit for thing and word. The word is not true in its correctness but in its perfect intellectuality to disclose meaning. The truth of things resides in discourse, intending a unitary meaning, and not individual words. Number, not word, is the paradigm of the noetic as it is a pure structure of intelligibility. In this case, since the word is a sign, we must start from the word as a means to diclose the “Other” being. The word must be foregrounded from its context as a sign before it can dissolve into its meaning. The sign is still an immediate being, and it is only because of its immediacy that it is referential and ideal. “The difference between why it means and what it is is absolute. Rejecting image in favor of sign, discussion of language tries to bring forth nameless ideas, superceding the historicity of linguistic variation, a universal, Enlightenment metalanguage. This gives rise to universal, technical language which Humboldt argues is a violence against language. Mathematical logic comes closest to a universal language in (as Leibniz articulated) creating a whole system of true concepts. Gadamer believes his trajectory is misleading because he sees the identity of meaning bound up in the word itself. The Greek orientation to eidos as determining logos provided Cratylus with a framework to set the stage for the modern instrumental theory of language.
(B) Language and Vision
The Christian idea of incarnation prevented Western thought from forgetting language. The Word becomes flesh in a historical event, freeing logos from pure ideality. Early theologians used the Stoic distinction between inner and outer logos, a positive contrary through the incarnating (externalizing) of the Word. Augustine devalued the external word in Platonic fashion, claiming the inner word is independent of appearance. But how can an inner word precede insuperable language? Thomas and the Scholastics drew upon Greek logos philosophy by claiming that understanding draws what it thinks out of itself and present it to self for inner dialogue (Plato). How does discursive inner word relate to intuited Trinitarian language? Neoplatonic language provides a solution for Thomas by discussing emanation and production in a non-depleting sense; the word is formed not after the process of knowing but during. From here we follow three of Thomas’ specified differences between human word and Trinity. (1) The human word is potential before it is actualized. (2) The human word is essentially incomplete. (3) Every thought is a mere accident of the mind. It should be noted that inner mental word is not formed when the mind reflects on itself but when the substantive content fits the mind’s thought. Furthermore, the unity of the divine word and the multiplicity of human words exist in infinite dialectical relationship. A word’s meaning cannot be detached from its event of proclamation but is bound up in the event itself. The character of language as event includes the process of concept formation.
(C) Language and Concept Formation
When invoked, general concepts share in the particularities of their use in speech. Concept formation is thus a constant process even if not through verbal consciousness. The formation of classificatory concepts rests not in verbal consciousness but looking for metaphoric similarities. Plato himself wanted to rise above names, not to dispense with language, but to develop better categories for expressing the truth of being. Aristotle believed categories had the utmost importance for concept formation. Furthermore the sign is agreed upon by human convention as something harmoniously fitting with its object. However, even though he recognized the undogmatic freedom of concept formation, Aristotle still privileged the logical ordering of concepts over living metaphoricity. Only a grammar from logic distinguishing between proper and metaphorical meaning. Meaning is detached from thing in the Stoic divorce of speech and thought. So while technical languages develop on the one hand, we still have living language on the other. However, Nicholas of Cusa introduce a positive commonality to human and divine word through the notion of the creative. Nicholas speaks of the verbum as unfolding to our finite minds, and how discursive multiplicity is not merely conceptual but extends into the verbal as well. Concepts follow and develop the concerns of a linguistic community. Striving for conceptual universality and pragmatic meaning can never be universalized which is why we cannot discern the contingency of natural concept formation when trying to uncover the true order of things. Concepts expressed in words, according to Cusa, still retain a connection to the natural word. Human knowledge and language are both inexact but still can possess a sense of aptness. Only in the infinite mind of God can exactitude be reached. All human speech is related to the true thing despite linguistic variation.
3. Language as Horizon of a Hermeneutic Ontology
(A) Language as Experience of the World
Humboldt uses the individuality of linguistic phenomena as a means of insight into human language as a whole, abstracting down to form through the individuality of language. But Humboldt’s abstraction must be reversed for us since “verbal form and traditionary content cannot be separated in the hermeneutic experience.” Language and worldview are bound up in each other. Therefore we must explore their relationship to understand verbal hermeneutic experience. In contrast to a social environment, a world denotes orientation and how one is oriented toward the world. Language grants man a freedom from environment in order to move throughout traditions. Matters of fact arise in the relation of language and world. At the same time, language has its true being only in dialogue, the coming to an understanding which is part of the life process, hence why artificial communication is not language. Because our world picture is open to expansion through dialogue with others, we do not have a holistic world-in-itself but something that can always expand. Language offers a gateway beyond one’s individual experience. So, world is not the object of language but the object of knowledge is enclosed in the world horizon of language. Because of this, we cannot have absolute objects as natural science would claim. The distance of language does not give the knower power as in natural science. Science only regards the prejudice of language as an obstruction. Thus modern theory is instrumental for dominating experience unlike ancient theory in the Greek sense which sought the highest manner of being human. Despite similarities between the two, their primary separation comes in their orientation to verbal experience of the world. Correcting Theory (as Heidegger did), we see that verbally constituted experience does not express the present at hand but the thing itself. Because language characterizes human experience, we can say that historically effected consciousness is realized in language.
(B) Language as Medium and Its Speculative Structure
Greek metaphysics saw nous, the highest being, as gathering within itself the being of all beings through thought. Logos gives structure to being by presencing it in truth, a premise of Western philosophy all the way through Hegel. Not following this strain, we can place ourselves in historical finitude. Unlike the metaphysical sense of belonging as the transcendental relationship of being and truth, knowledge as an element of being itself, our sense of belonging is different as interpreter belongs to the text. Earlier thought acknowledged the relation of conscious being and world by giving teleological purposiveness of means towards ends a universal ontological function. Modern science rejects that the knowing subject belongs to the object of knowledge. But modern science is forced to revisit the problems of classical Greek metaphysics as we see with the resurgence of dialectic. Hegel resurrected the total mediation of thought and being which is crucial for the hermeneutical interconnection of event and understanding. This concept of belonging does not refute modern science to lapse into Greek thought or German idealism but looking at the consequences of language as a medium. The hermeneutical experience is the encounter and play of tradition from which emerges true dialogue. Just as a hearer cannot choose what he hears so too does a reader belong to the voice of the text, how the tradition addresses us. Method is not alien to the thing but an action of the thing itself: this is the dialectic. Looking at dialectic with a focus on language, we see a mirror “speculative element” which is common to metaphysical and hermeneutical dialectic. Speculation lies on the opposite end from dogmatism of everyday experience. Definition is not tied to a fixed subject but is a dynamic concept informed by the predicate. The subject passes into the predicate and is superseded. Speculation is the abandonment of the proposition to regard concepts in new ways. Hegel wants to represent expressly the inner block of thought when the habit of pursuing ideas is interrupted by a concept. “Dialectic is truly experienced when thought undergoes the incomprehensible reversal into its opposite.” The dialectical is an expression of the speculative, but this direction between the two is superseded.
The Platonic and Hegelian drive toward the culminating statement contradicts hermeneutical experience. Language is speculative not only in an “instinctive pre-figuring of logical reflection” but as the realization of meaning. Statements in their exactitude reduce meaning. Rather we see speculative reflection of being in everyday speech. Speculative reflection is epitomized in the poetic word which uses no same language of everyday life; it intensifies everyday speech. Interpretation like speculative philosophy, has the dialectical, discursive structure of finite, historical being. But the hermeneutical dialectic of responding to the text through question and answer precedes interpretation. The simultaneous one and many-ness of tradition shows that all interpretation is speculation. We also see the intimate unity of understanding and interpretation through how interpretation brings meaning through language. The language of the interpreter is secondary but is also the comprehensive manifestation of language.
(C) The Universal Aspect of Hermeneutics
We can now see that “Being that can be understood is language” because the hermeneutical phenomenon projects its ontology onto what is understood. The speculative mode of being of language has a fundamental relation to the world. The concept of the beautiful plays a key role in understanding the universality of hermeneutics. For Plato the good and the beautiful are interchangeable because they transcend the changeable. In this premodern conception, nature and art were not contrasted but both exemplified the order of the universe. Modern science rejects inherent natural order but seeks to impose it on the universe. Name becomes a non-I without the dignity of the cosmos. Plato does not the anagogical tangibility of beauty mediating appearance and the being of the good. The radiance of the wholeness of the beautiful constitutes its being. “Beauty has the mode of being of light” which discloses reality. Light is also reflective, and this concept of light extends to the Christian doctrine of the Word. The metaphysics of the beautiful illuminates two points relating radiance with the evidentness of the intelligible. (1) Both the beautiful and understanding have the mode of being of an event. (2) Experience of traditionary meaning and beauty are both immediate. Evidentness […]
(Notes break off here. This is however the closing section of the book.)
