TEN

The Hermeneutics of
(Inter)Subjectivity, or: The
Mind-Body Problem Deconstructed

Some thirteen years ago I flew down to Rio to present a paper entitled, “Mind and Body Revisited: A New Look at an Old Problem.”¹ It is time, I think, to take yet another look, a fresher one, at this old problem. If I revisit it yet again, it is, quite frankly, in the hope that the problem may be relegated to the ash heap of history once and for all. It is time that it be simply deconstructed, along with the whole tradition of metaphysics of which it is so inseparably a part.

What makes humans human is that they have an overriding concern for their being (the essence of subjectivity is, as Kierkegaard said, “interestedness”) and thus an insatiable desire to know who they are, to be themselves, truly, understandingly. (This is why, ever since humans have been humans, they have sat around the fire telling and listening to stories about themselves and other selves—many of which were fictional selves, gods, demons, demigods, heroes, and other deified humans.) It is only natural, therefore, that philosophy, that supremely human undertaking, should from its inception have concerned itself with the question of what constitutes the humanness of human beings. Traditionally and for the most part, it dealt with this question in the way in which it dealt with the others it raised—metaphysically, in terms of natures and essences. That is, it proceeded to translate the existential question, “Who am I?” into the metaphysical question, “What is ‘man’?” (“Was ist der Mensch?”). The hermeneutical question, “How does it stand with us?” became the epistemological question, “What is man’s place in nature?” (“Qu’est-ce que l’homme dans la nature?”).

To ask what something is, is to seek out its essence.² Does man have an essence then? Obviously he must, since he is not nothing (one who knows anything, knows that one is³), must therefore be something, something different from the other things that are. What then is that particular substance that we call “man”? What is it that is particular to it and differentiates it from other substances (for everything that exists is, according to metaphysics, either substance or modification of substance)? Since it is a basic and, to all appeareances, unique, characteristic of human existence that humans exist reflectively in the consciousness of their own existence (a reed exists but doesn’t know that it exists), philosophy located the differentia, or specific difference, of man in precisely this consciousness, this awareness of self. Man is a body, but unlike other bodies a body endowed with consciousness. For metaphysics, which, as I say, thinks in terms of categories, accidents, things, substance, this meant: man is an intelligence, a soul, a spirit, a mind, a psyche, a nous, an immaterial something or other somehow united, more or less, accidentally or essentially, with a material body. The overriding problem for that branch of metaphysics (metaphysica specialis) called anthropology or psychology (psychologia rationalis) became that of determining the relation that obtains between “mind” and “body.”

Like so many age-old metaphysical problems, this one is still being debated,⁴ and philosophers, on the whole, are no closer to arriving at a universally agreed upon solution to the problem today than they were when in their newly invented metaphysical language games they first started tossing it around in the schools of Athens. Like any good metaphysical problem, it continues to generate a good deal of confused discussion, if not heated debate. Privileging, as they are wont to do, seeing (theorein), thinking, consciousness, metaphysicians seek to determine exactly what it is that we are conscious of when we exist self-consciously. Is it ideas in our own mind? Or is it movements in our body? And how can we be certain that we are really conscious of what we think we are conscious of, not merely oneirically imagining the whole thing?

In this despiritualized age of ours from which the gods have flown, the suspicion seems to be growing, however, that the ongoing lack of an answer to the mind-body problem may be due to the fact that there is no real problem here at all. The problem, it is increasingly said, is a pseudoproblem. While everyone agrees that there are bodies (even though there are in fact radically different ways of conceiving of body—“body” is one of the most equivocal of terms), more and more people seem prepared to think that the terms “mind” or “psyche” (hardly anybody, apart from unrepentant Thomists, uses the word “soul” anymore) don’t refer to anything at all or, as those Antipodians who go by the name of Identity Theorists maintain, are simply roundabout ways of refering to the material body.

This is generally the view of working scientists, of hard-core behavioral psychologists, neurophysiologists, sociobiologists, and such like. The notion of mind plays no more role in their actual work than it does in that of mechanics and bridge builders, and so if they do not outrightly deny the very existence of mind, they accord it at the most some kind of vague epiphenomenal status, relegating it to the outskirts of serious discussion, a subject to be publicly discussed only when they are invited over to the other side of campus to give talks to philosophy students. This is only natural, since science seeks to provide a total explanation for observed phenomena, and the notion of a mind having some kind of existence irreducible to material body and the laws of brute physics is a notion which in this context is devoid of any explanatory usefulness. It is thus natural that science, in accordance with its innate reductionist, totalizing bent, should effectively deny the existence of mind by reducing it to something which is scientifically meaningful, such as neural activity.

But is the human person, the self, the subject, am I, are you nothing but, nothing more than a bundle of conditioned reflexes, a flow of neural impulses, a self-programming computer, a haphazard colony of selfish genes? Any decent, self-respecting human being would protest this dehumanizing reduction of the self, but even if we desire to be nothing more than good scientists, the wholesale denial of “mind” confronts us with serious problems of an epistemological sort.

In their widely read book, The Mind’s I, Hofstadter and Dennett include an article by H. Morowitz entitled “Rediscovering the Mind.” Morowitz starts his piece by observing how the trend in those sciences dealing with the human being has been decidedly reductionistic; human behavior is to be made intelligble by being reduced to its biological basis. (The very notion of a basis is, as we shall see shortly, a thoroughly metaphysical concept.) While psychologists of various persuasions have sought to reduce their science to biology, biologists have sought to reduce biology to chemistry and physics, looking to the atomic level for ultimate explanations, the net result being “a sequence of explanation going from mind to anatomy and physiology, to cell physiology, to molecular biology, to atomic physics,” all of this “knowledge” being assumed to rest “on a firm bedrock of understanding the laws of quantum mechanics.”⁵ Morowitz remarks, however, that while psychologists and biologists were pursuing this reductionist strategy, perspectives were emerging in physics which cast a whole new light on things. Relativity theory and quantum mechanics have replaced the human observer in the center of things, have involved the observer in the very establishment of physical reality. As Morowitz says: “The mind of the observer emerged as a necessary element in the structure of the theory.”⁶ Nothing in the scientific study of the world is meaningful without reference to consciousness; “the human mind enters once again. . . . ”⁷

We are lead in this way, Morowitz points out, to a strange kind of epistemological circle:

The circle leads us from the mind, back to the mind. A strange, uncanny situation. What does Morowitz conclude from all this? Not much, really. He does very rightly remark on the dangers of reductionism, “since,” as he says, “the way we respond to our fellow human beings is dependent on the way we conceptualize them in our theoretical formulations.”⁹ Very true, a most important point indeed! But what are we to make of this rediscovery, at the very heart of the scientific process, of consciousness, subjectivity? Morowitz simply concludes: “The human psyche is part of the observed data of science. We can retain it and still be good empirical biologists and psychologists.”¹⁰

Can we? What, as scientific psychologists, are we to do with it? Is the mind the ultima ratio for everything that as scientists we have been looking for? No, it can’t be quite that, since as the existence of the circle shows, it can itself be reductively explained. In his reflection on Morowitz’s article, Hofstadter remarks on how an emphasis on the nonreducibility of consciousness poses problems for a “nonquantum-mechanical computational model” of the mind which, he firmly believes, is “possible in principle.”¹¹ It poses insurmountable problems, I’m sure. Discovery of the “epistemological circle” doesn’t, therefore, seem to be of much use to psychology or what today calls itself “cognitive science,” nor does it get us any closer to a nonreductionist account of the human person. It just serves to give us scientific explainers a bad conscience—or else to send us off into wild metaphysical speculations. As a number of extracurricular writings by some scientists would seem to indicate, about the only way that scientific observers have yet found of coping with the circle, if indeed they attempt to, is by a desperate leap into some kind of oriental-style mysticism, aboriginal animism, or unrestrained Teilhardianism as a crowning metaphysics.

So long as we remain bound to epistemology, which is to say, to metaphysics, searching for ultimate bases or “models,” sources, grounds, or origins, ultimate causal, essentialist, foundationalist explanations, we are perhaps condemned to go around in endless circles, like a dog chasing its tail in vain. Epistemologically speaking, the physical and the mental, the objective and the subjective can no more be made to inhabit one world than could Descartes’s res extensa and res cogitans be made meaningfully to communicate through the arbitrating mediation of the pineal gland. Every attempted marriage between the psychic and the physical has broken down for reason of incompatibility; inevitably one of the partners has sought to repress the other. Perhaps, if we are to make better sense of the fundamentally human question, which simply will not go away, of what it means to be a subject, a human person, we need to break out of the epistemological circle, out of the metaphysical enclosure altogether.¹²

At least one thing is certain: La subjectivité est bien indéclinable, as Merleau-Ponty would say. Subjectivity is quite simply undeniable. One can meaningfully say, à la Foucault, “Man does not exist” or “Man no longer exists,” because maybe indeed “man” dosen’t exist or no longer exists—it all depends, I suppose, on what you mean by “man.” (There can be little question that “man,” the body-mind composite, the empirico-transcendental doublet, as Foucault would say, is very much of a metaphysical construct.) Certainly, the word man exists less and less in our discourse and is used, more and more, only with a twinge of sexist bad conscience. But can one, knowingly and in good conscience, say “I do not exist”? Who would believe you if you said that to them? What would they think of you if you said that? Subjectivity is a fact, as indubitable as the fact that I exist, ego sum.

But how are we to conceive of it, of the ego, the I, the self, the subject if we are not to go around in endless epistemological circles? That is the philosophical problem that confronts us in this new, postmodern era, after the collapse of the metaphysical economy. If we wish to pursue the question of selfhood nonmetaphysically, let us be clear as to what we must not do, as to the sort of questions that are forever forbidden us if we do not wish to fall back into the aporias of metaphysics, into vicious epistemological circles.

We must not ask, as in metaphysics one naturally tends to, what the self or the subject is. For the only kind of answer to this kind of question is a metaphysical one: The self is such-and-such a kind of thing. We would then be conceiving of the self as some kind of substance (res), something which somehow underlies, supports, is the basis and cause—or else the transcendental, overarching unity—of all those kinds of activities that selves are said to engage in or, again, something that somehow emerges out of a material body in the course of its development.¹³ We would then find ourselves thrown back into the old mind-body problem: What is the relation between this fundamental, actualizing, synthesizing, substantializing something or other and those things which are observable and measurable, such as bodily movements? Since metaphysics is indeed metaphysics, it can think subjectivity only by conceiving of it as something other than objectivity, something over and beyond (meta) the physical, notwithstanding the relations it may entertain with the latter (but these relations themselves, are they physical or mental, material or immaterial?).

We might be tempted, in an attempt to extricate ourselves from the metaphysical predicament, to adopt a straightforward antimetaphysical stance and mode of discourse. Thus, to counteract the substantialist proclivity, we might say: The self, which most assuredly exists, is a primary datum, is nevertheless nothing, no-thing—as indeed it is, if substance is taken as the paradigm of being. But why should we allow ourselves to be haunted by the specter of metaphysics in this way? To speak of consciousness as nothingness (le néant), as Sartre, for instance, did, to say that while the essence of being is to be what it is, the “essence” of consciousness is not to be what it is and to be what it is not, is to speak a language which is simply that of an inverted metaphysics. And as the title itself of Sartre’s major philosophical work, Being and Nothingness, indicates, this is a language which is still metaphysical, in that it is a language which works with binary, conceptual oppositions.

As Nietzsche was the first explictly to note, the “essence” of metaphysics is that it can think only in terms of opposites, as he called them. Such as: appearance-reality, sensible-intelligible, material-immaterial, becoming-being, time-eternity, nomos-physis, contingent-necessary, fact-essence, practice-theory and, of course, matter-spirit. Metaphysics is itself made possible only by means of the metaphysical opposition mythos-logos.¹⁴“The fundamental faith of the metaphysicians,” Nietzsche said, “is the faith in opposite values.¹⁵ Depending on which side of the conceptual difference one comes down on, one will evolve either a materialist or idealist (immaterialist, spiritualist) metaphysics, or some hylomorphic combination thereof. But in any event, so long as one thinks with binary opposites, one will be thinking metaphysically.

Why should we confine ourselves to opposites, however? As Nietzsche warned us: “One may doubt . . . whether there are any opposites at all.”¹⁶ To learn how to think after metaphysics would be to learn how to think without the comforting belief in the value not only of absolutes but also of opposites, by playing one off against the other (or else by evolving some kind of grandiose Hegelian-style sublating synthesis).

Setting aside the either-ors of metaphysics, let us then say that the I is neither an underlying, unobservable substrate, the “inner” self nor, as Morowitz put it, “part of the observed data of science.” It is certain that I have never seen, observed my self, not even in my shaving mirror. The self is not an external visible. Nor have I ever encountered my self by, as Saint Augustine exhorted us in all his Christian-Platonic eagerness, going “inside,” in search of the “inner man.”¹⁷ As Merleau-Ponty said in response to this admonition of Augustine, “there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.”¹⁸ Inside-outside is yet another metaphysical opposition to be abandoned. Why can we not say that the self is simply a characteristic that we associate with those animate organisms referred to as humans? A characteristic of that most characteristic of human actions, pursued incessantly both in public and in private, in wakefulness and in sleep—I refer to speech.

Let us then, like the psychoanalyst Roy Schafer, who has made a highly noteworthy attempt to free the psychoanalytic praxis from the metaphysical (“metapsychological”) interpretation Freud imposed on it, say that the self is a manifestation of human action.”¹⁹ It is itself an action, the action of speaking about itself. When we tell stories to ourselves about ourselves we are, as Schafer says, enclosing one story within another: “This is the story that there is a self to tell something to, a someone else serving as an audience who is oneself or one’s self.”²⁰ The self is not an observable datum, since it is not any kind of thing at all, but it nonetheless is, in Schafer’s words “an experiential phenomenon, a set of more or less stable and emotionally felt ways of telling oneself about one’s being and one’s continuity through change.”²¹ In short, as he says, “the self is a kind of telling about one’s individuality. It is something one learns to conceptualize in one’s capacity as agent; it is not a doer of actions.”²² “The inner world of experience,” he appropriately remarks, “is a kind of telling, not a place.”²³ This reminds one of what Merleau-Ponty said of Descartes’s sanctum sanctorum, the inner retreat of his supposedly wordless Cogito, that it was in fact “buzzing with words.” And as he also remarked: “All inner perception is inadequate because I am not an object that can be perceived, because I make my reality and find myself only in the act.” “Your abode is your act itself,” he said, speaking with the words of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. “Your act is you. . . . You give yourself in exchange”²⁴

It is a basic principle of that form of postmodern, postmetaphysical discursivity called hermeneutics (a principle which could be labeled that of die Sprachlichkeit der Welt) that, as Gadamer expresses it, “Being that can be understood is language.”²⁵ If, like Richard Rorty, we view hermeneutics as a discipline which displaces traditional epistemology, then, in regard to the question of subjectivity, we may say: The self that can be understood is language. However it may be with so-called physical reality, in the case of social or personal reality, the reality in question is inseparable from the language we use to express it.²⁶ The self requires language in order to be told what it is, and it cannot properly be said to “be” a self outside this telling.

We can find support for this hermeneutical view in the work of the famous linguist Émile Benveniste. Unlike some ultra formalist students of language, Benveniste maintains: “A language without the expression of person cannot be imagined.”²⁷ A language without personal pronouns is inconceivable, even if in some societies, such as self-effacing Far Eastern ones, people go out of their way to avoid making overt use of them. What does I refer to? It refers, Benveniste says, neither to a concept nor to an individual; it refers, he says:

Benveniste’s basic thesis in this much referred to article is, therefore, that language is responsible for subjectivity in all its parts: “It is in and through language that man constitutes himself as a subject, because language alone establishes the concept of “ego” in reality. . . . ”²⁹ Who or what is “ego”? “ ‘Ego’ ” Benveniste says, “is he who says ‘ego.’ ”³⁰ The I exists in and by means of saying “I”; the I is not a subject, a subiectum, a preexistent substance, which speaks; it is, as subject, a speaking subject. To the degree that we can say that the subject exists, it exists only as a spoken subject. The subject is the subject of its own living discourse, posited in and by means of it. The “basis of subjectivity,” to use Benveniste’s expression, is not something underlying the subject’s actions; it is an action, the action of speaking.

Speaking from a hermeneutical point of view, namely, one which insists on, as Gadamer would say, the essential linguisticality of all human experience, we are obliged to say that the self is the way, through the use of indicators, shifters, and appropriately self-referential linguistic functions—what linguists refer to as “person deixis”—we relate our actions, past, present, and future. The self is the way we relate, account for, speak about our actions.³¹ The self is the story we tell ourselves and others, weaving together into a single fabric, as any good storyteller does, actions and events; it is the autobiography we are constantly writing and rewriting.

The problem of “personal identity,” of the unity and constancy of our selfhood, is nothing other than the problem of maintaining coherence and continuity in our stories, and of following up and doing those things that we tell ourselves and others that we will do. This hermeneutical, antifoundationalist view finds welcome confirmation in the observations of an analytic philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre, who speaks of human beings “as characters in enacted narratives” and who says: “There is no way of founding my identity—or lack of it—on the psychological continuity or discontinuity of the self. The self inhabits a character whose unity is given as the unity of a character. . . . personal identity is just that identity presupposed by the unity of the character which the unity of a narrative requires.”³² Thus we may say that the self is the unity of an ongoing narrative, a narrative which lasts a thousand and one nights and more—until, as Proust might say, that night arrives which is followed by no dawn.³³

Thus the self is not something given. It is something that is acquired, achieved, by means of language, quelque chose qui se constitue en langage, pour ainsi dire. It is, so to speak, the significant effect of language. All the multitudinous ways in which people make sense of the world by means of their various language games are ways in which, ultimately, they make sense of themselves (all understanding, hermeneutics maintains, is a form of self-understanding), give themselves form, constitute themselves as self.³⁴ We must, as Rorty says, “see human beings as generators of new descriptions rather than beings one hopes to be able to describe accurately.”³⁵

It must not be thought that the grammatical self-referential discourse in which the self constitutes itself for itself as a self is a free-floating monologue, that the self is whatever it fancifully tells itself it is. In his article Benveniste emphasizes a most important feature of what he calls the instance of discourse. He says:

This has to do with what, in traditional metaphysics, is referred to as the problem of “solipsism” and “other minds”—the whole problem of intersubjectivity. I shall return to the issue under another, less metaphysical guise. Here I shall simply say that when the self pursues a conversation with itself, this conversation is itself not a monologue but a dialogue. Who is the self the self is addressing when it “talks to itself”? It is, as Peirce (who was among the first to stress the linguistic, semiotic nature of thought) said, “that other self that is just coming into life in the flow of time.”³⁷ Thought or self-consciousness is an intrapersonal dialogue, and the individual self is, in the words of Josiah Royce, “a Community of Interpretation, in which the present, with an endless fecundity of invention, interprets the past to the future.”³⁸

At this point, though, I can anticipate the objection that the metaphysician will no doubt raise. “Your hermeneutical reconstruction of the self,” he or she will say, “amounts in fact to its very deconstruction. Your position is nothing but a kind of linguistic idealism and is every bit as reductionist as those you criticize. For you the self is nothing but a matter of words, something purely ephemeral. You are emptying the self of all “reality.”³⁹ In reply I would first ask what the metaphysician means by “reality”—even though I already know what he means. “Reality” for him or her is simply another word for “substance.” Thus, the metaphysician’s objection is well taken. The self is in no way a “reality” in the metaphysical sense of the term (nothing, for that matter, is a reality in the metaphysical sense of the term—the metaphysician’s “reality” or “substance” is simply, to paraphrase Nietzsche, the last evaporating vapors of our actual experience of things).⁴⁰ It is high time that we realized that.

In reply to the more serious charge of reductionism, I must admit that a “linguistic” account of the self could be such. But I do not believe that the hermeneutical (as opposed to a purely semiological, i.e., Saussurian-structuralist) emphasis on linguisticality lands us in any kind of reductionism—or nihilism. It is a fact, in my opinion, that certain other forms of postmodern thought do fail in this regard. While, like hermeneutics, they are essentially an attempt to deconstruct metaphysics and to overcome modern objectivism,⁴¹ they nevertheless do not succeed in avoiding the pitfalls of relativism, using this term in Richard Bernstein’s sense.⁴²

Consider, for instance, the position of Roland Barthes in his famous article, “The Death of the Author.” Barthes says, for instance: “ . . . the whole of the enunciation is an empty process, functioning perfectly without there being any need for it to be filled with the person of the interlocutors.”⁴³ This is a kind of nihilistic stance, but it can find no support in linguistic considerations such as those put forward by Benveniste. Discourse, as we have seen, cannot be understood without reference to an “I” and a “you.” But Barthes does not stop there; he goes on to say, in a very revealing passage: “Linguistically, the author is never more than the instance of writing, just as I is nothing other than the instance saying I: language knows a ‘subject’, not a ‘person’, and this subject, empty outside of the very enunciation which defines it, suffices to make language ‘hold together’, suffices, that is to say, to exhaust it.” To say that the I is never more than . . ., nothing other than . . . is reductionism of the most classic, metaphysical sort. Structuralists and poststructuralists like Barthes were able to appreciate the absolute centrality of language, but they were not able, in their treatment of the phenomenon, to free themselves from the long arm of the metaphysical law. Their contestatory, antibourgeois pronouncements remain firmly attached to a metaphysical leash.⁴⁴ One can almost hear, in much of the poststructuralist, anarchistic exuberance and fixated obsession with childish play and unfettered jouissance the continued reverberation of the nom (ou non) of the metaphysical père.

It might be noted in passing that the present postmodern situation bears some important resemblances to at least one feature of the early modern period. Just as today we see, in reaction to metaphysics and scientism, a proliferation of antimetaphysical stances, a simple substitution of relativism for objectivism, of nihilism for rationalist absolutism, so Giambattista Vico saw his times as being characterized by a divorce between “science” and rhetoric. What Vico most deplored was the antithetical choice proposed to his contemporaries between, on the one hand, a Cartesianism which disparaged and knew nothing (at least on the level of its own theory) of the art of communication and, on the other, a Mannerism which played games with language and which sought to be clever, not true.⁴⁵ It is no accident, of course, that Vico’s endeavors to overcome this situation met with no success and were not decisive in shaping his age and that it is really only today that we have begun to appreciate his countertraditional significance. In the spirit of Vico, hermeneutics does not simply seek to substitute “rhetoric” for “philosophy”; it seeks, rather, to emphasize the rhetorical nature of philosophy and the philosophical status of rhetoric.

In regard to the question of subjectivity, the phenomenological hermeneuticist, unlike certain other postmodernists, does not say that the I is nothing but a linguistic construct. Rather, he or she says that the I—which, as Kierkegaard stressed, is essentially a process of becoming and thus never fully is—constructs or, to say it better, constitutes itself in and by means of language, by, as I said above, narrating itself. In a very profound remark, Husserl said: “The ego constitutes himself for himself in, so to speak, the unity of a ‘Geschichte’.”⁴⁶ In German Geschichte means both “history” and “story.” So while there would be no subject without language, and while there most assuredly is no subject before language, the subject which does exist thanks to language is not merely a linguistic fabrication.⁴⁷ (This is because, as we shall see in a moment, language is not merely “language.”)

In one of his (to all appearances) more outlandish pronouncements, or énoncés, Derrida said: Il n’y a pas de hors-texte. There is nothing outside the text, there is nothing but text and language, the implication being that language is some kind of vast prison from which we can never legitimately hope to escape.⁴⁸ No doubt the entryway into language, wherein, as a matter of fact, humans for the first time become human, bears on it the inscription: “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.” After all, don’t novelists such as Sartre and others tell us that life is a living hell? But to maintain that everything is nothing but language, and, accordingly, unending différance (avec-un-a), or, as Dante might say, pénitence, is simply to show that one has not successfully carried through with the ritual murder of the metaphysical father, that, even in one’s revolt against it, one is still perhaps, like some errant, Diasporatic, disseminating son of Abraham, ever deferred from a return to the promised land of a true origin, a victim of the “metaphysics of presence.”

Language does not make sense, is literally meaningless, apart from what phenomenologists call “lived experience.”⁴⁹ There is “something more” than mere texts and language; there is experience. It is our lived experience that gets expressed in language and which confers on language whatever hermeneutical-existential meaning it can be said to have. However, the relation between language and experience must not be misconstrued, i.e., must not be understood metaphysically (as, unfortunately, Husserl still did so understand it). Experience is not a metaphysical “other”; it is not something other than language that language merely “refers” to. This means, naturally, that it is not something “outside” language (let us not fall back into the inside-outside opposition). Language is the meaning of experience, in the mode of the genitivus subjectivus; between language and experience, an emotion, for instance, there is a mutual belonging, une appartenance,⁵⁰ or, as Gadamer might say, an “affiliation.” Language is not just the “expression” of experience; it is experience; it is experience which comes to know, acknowledge itself, to be this or that specific experience (subject, naturally, under the pressure of ongoing lived experience, to future linguistic revisions and rewritings—we will have ceased to rewrite our autobiographies only when we will have ceased to be [we don’t merely add on to them as the years go by]). When we achieve a more refined way of expressing an emotion, it is our emotional life itself which becomes more refined, not just our description of it. If it is true, as Heidegger said, that language is das Haus des Seins, it is even truer that it is the home of meaningful experience. Expressed experience is experience which has settled down and become something “of substance.” Experience is not really meaningful until it has found a home in language, and without lived experience to inhabit it, language is an empty, lifeless shell. The language that we speak is neither, as the structuralist and poststructuralist types would maintain, a formal system of pure “signs,” closed in upon itself and expressing nothing other than itself, nor is it, as various analytic philosophers of language would have it, a mere means for “expressing” something completely other than itself, Thoughts (as Frege would say) or Things—language neither “refers” to “extra”-linguistic reality nor does it merely “express itself”; language is the way in which, as humans, we experience what we call reality, that is, the way in which reality exists for us.

So we come to experience as the “raison d’être” of expression, language, discourse. And what is the heart of experience, its “inner” dynamis? It is—and here I admit I am speaking in a cautiously hypothetical mode, letting in fact my heart speak itself—desire. What, you ask, is desire? As Hegel very profoundly observed, desire is the desire of the desire of another consciousness. It is, when all is said and done, because we are creatures of desire that we speak. If we speak, if we break the dark, murky silence of our formless, amorphous, polymorphous inner lives, it is not primarily with the insignificant aim of, as the cyberneticians would say, “communicating information.” If we communicate, use as grist for our mill, so-called facts and figures, it is, ultimately, to captivate the attention of our interlocutors; we use these things as bait for the catch, which is, as Hegel realized, Anerkennung, recognition, reconnaissance de soi. “How can the eye see itself?” Plato asked in the Alcibiades. Not in a mirror, he answered, but in another eye which mirrors one’s eye, the eye of another I. In order to fascinate, captivate, seduce that other regard, that other desire, to make it desire our desire, we make of our living body a speaking body. As Merleau-Ponty said: “in the patient and silent labor of desire, begins the paradox of expression.”⁵¹ Discourse, conversation is, as he would say, one piece of the flesh of the world addressing itself to another, seeking, in this chiasmic exchange, this accouplement, as Husserl called it, the mutual confirmation of its communal being. Perhaps, to paraphrase a line from the late Italo Calvino’s recent novel, Mr. Palomar, the constituted I, the de facto ego, the persona is simply the window through which one desire interfaces with another.

Desire is the desire to be more and to be otherwise than one merely is; desire is not simply the desire to be, the wish for continuance or the mere instinct for survival (as Nietzsche pointed out). It is the désire d’un plus être, not just self-preservation but self-enhancement. The self, which desires to be itself, desires to become itself, to realize what it imaginatively can be, to realize its ownmost possibilities of being. And this means: The self is the desire of other selves, those selves which are other selves, to be sure, but also those other selves which are itself. It is only through that conversation that we are constantly pursuing and constantly desiring with other selves that we can become the self we desire to be and can be who we are. What then is the self? It is a function of the conversation with other similar, desiring selves, a function of the self-reinforcing narratives they pursue together in their occasional, casual conversations as well as those more serious ones which last to all hours of the night.

And so it is literally true, as Benveniste said, that the I is an I only when addressing itself to a you, that in dialogue, conversation, the I reciprocally becomes a you and the you an I, an I and a you which is what each one is only as intertwining, self-confirming halves of a conversational we—“an I which is a we and a we which is an I,” in Hegel’s words. Our own personal narratives are inextricably intermeshed with the narratives of others. As MacIntyre aptly puts it, “we are never more . . . than the co-authors of our own narrative.”⁵²

To deconstruct the metaphysical image of “man” is to deconstruct the very image of man as, essentially, an imager, a detached spectator of the cosmos, of so-called objective reality, a kosmotheoros, as Merleau-Ponty would say, engaged in the epistemological business of forming inner likenesses of things. When, to use Rorty’s words, the great mirror of nature is dismantled, so also is man’s glassy, specular essence.⁵³ From a postobjectivistic, hermeneutical point of view, understanding is not so much a reproductive activity as it is a productive one. Understanding is in fact misinterpreted when it is taken to involve, as Gadamer says, “the reproduction of an original production.”⁵⁴ To understand an experience, to reconstruct the past, is not to “represent” it to ourselves; it is to transform it. This is why Gadamer says that to understand is to understand differently: “It is enough to say that we understand in a different way, if we understand at all.”⁵⁵

To understand is, in short, to interpret.⁵⁶ This has important implications for the understanding of self that occurs in the dialogical, conversational exchange between desiring selves.

Although the psychoanalytic situation is a special one and is atypical of interpersonal relations in general in that it is characterized by a constitutional inequality between the interlocutors, between analyst or doctor and analysand or patient—and should not, for this reason, be taken as paradigmatic of human communication⁵⁷—it is, nonetheless—as a form of conversation in extremis, conversation sought after in desperation and the breakdown of self-identity—a highly instructive mode of human intercourse. For what occurs in this conversation in which transference and countertransference play such an important role is precisely a transformation of the narrating self. As Schafer says: “By means of this [psychoanalytic] strategy one also makes of psychic reality something more than, and something different from, what it has been.”⁵⁸ In the psychoanalytic situation insight IS transformation:

In sum: “Increased intelligibility of persons and situations implies the transformation of agents and their situations.”⁶⁰

Lest it be thought that I am overworking the psycholanalytic model, let us consider what is uncontestably the hermeneutical situation par excellence, the act of reading. There is no need for us to enter into the details of that literary critical position known as Reader Reception Theory⁶¹ in order to see what is crucial here and in this regard. Not only is it the case that the meaning of the text is what it only is in the reader’s appropriation of it, but also, and more important from our present point of view, this creative appropriation of the text is at one and the same time a transformation of the very self of the reader. As a result of his or her encounter with the textual Other, the reader emerges as a renewed, different person, however minimally so. In our relation to what Ricoeur calls the “world of the text,” “the subjectivity of the reader,” as he says, “is displaced.” He writes:

What can be said of the transformation of the self involved in our reading of texts can be said with all the greater force of our conversational encounters with other persons, since for someone such as Gadamer the reading of texts is itself understood on the model of interpersonal dialogue. In the conversational exchange, we ourselves are changed; in ex-changing themselves, the I and the you are reciprocally changed. The self which emerges from a fruitful dialogical exchange is one which is freed to become something more than it was. What we receive makes us different from what we were before. We thereby become truly who we are—for better or worse. Here one person becomes a genuine scoundrel; there another becomes a bit more humane. Some conversations, such as a bad marriage or family situation, hinder us from becoming ourselves and sometimes even lead to our self-destruction; others are the “that without which” we would not be the selves who fortunately we are. “Only through others,” Gadamer says, “do we gain true knowledge of ourselves.”⁶³

Metaphysicians are constantly talking of “the truth,” of “the true reality.” To conclude this foray into the hermeneutics of subjectivity, we might ask ourselves what it could possibly mean in a postmetaphysical context to speak, as everyone tends to, of our stories, narratives, histories as being “true,” or “not true.” One thing it most obviously cannot mean is that they have truth value by conforming to, representing (as Foucault might say) some “objective,” extralinguistic reality which simply is what it is. The aim of history, for instance, cannot possibly be simply to portray the past wie es eigentlich gewesen ist. That chimerical project has no meaning in a postobjectivistic situation when the Great Mirror of Nature no longer exists.⁶⁴ Nor is it the function of la chose littéraire, “that thing called literature,” to “imitate reality.” As the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes has said:

The truth about what objectivists call “the truth” is, as Nietzsche declared with uncompromising honesty, that there is no such thing. Does this mean that everything is up for grabs, that we have fallen back—О horror of horrors!—into the dreadful abyss of nihilistic relativism? Most assuredly not. For we are certainly seeking to be truthful when we say that there is no such thing as “the truth.” There is no good reason why we should allow ourselves to fall prey to the Cartesian anxiety, the metaphysical either-or (either there is meaning, in which case it is objectively determinate, or everything is meaningless). (This is an either-or to which Derrida seems still to be subjugated when he says that since a text does not have a fixed, unique meaning that it would be the goal of interpretation [reading] simply to reproduce or double [a point actually insisted upon, utterly contrary to what Derrida implies, by hermeneutics], the act of reading is therefore pure, inventive play and clever parody where the very notion of a true or appropriate meaning is meaningless and everything is reduced to indecision.)⁶⁶

Rather than speaking, nominally, of “the truth” (as if to imply that the word designates some kind of static, objective correlation obtaining between the “inner” and the “outer”), it would be better for us as hermeneuticists concerned with what people do, with human action (storytelling being the most noteworthy form of action), to speak, adverbially, of “being in the truth”—or “in the untruth.” We are in the truth when we are true to ourselves. That means: when our narratives are such as to contain a significant amount of ongoing coherence (no narrative is perfectly coherent, nor ought it to be, for that, what in literary terms is called closure, would spell stagnation and rigidity), when in our rewritings and retellings we are able to preserve and to take up, in a more meaning-giving way, with greater subtlety of narrative, the “truth” of our past, i.e., all the “data” that we have already made use of and their interpretations. It is the same for nations as it is for persons. There is no set, universal exemplar, valid for all alike, by conforming to which they could be said to be authentic, true to themselves, to be what they ought to be. Rather, they are in the truth when, in their ongoing self-transformations they are able to incorporate in their even sometimes revolutionary projects their own specific traditions or personal histories.⁶⁷ They are in the untruth, are inauthentic, when they are unable to do so. Failure in this regard spells the dissolution of the body politic, the loss of national or personal identity, the fragmentation of the self. Untruth is repression, political or personal. Just as when, in the breakdown of its identity, the nation must seek it afresh in—if it is to have a healthy political life—renewed contractarian discussions (which are not to be confused with negotiations and which have a dialogical logic of their own), so also must the individual seek his or her identity afresh, in, for instance, the psychoanalytic encounter which, if successful, will enable the individual to overcome the fracturedness of his or her narratizing activity, to achieve a radical realignment or expansion of narratives.⁶⁸

We are in the truth when we are able to overcome the distortions, systematic or otherwise, that constantly menace our conversations, the ones we pursue with our own selves as well as those we pursue with others, when we can maintain the openness of the conversation and keep it going. For what we most truly are in our ownmost inner self is a conversation.

Notes

This paper was originally composed for presentation at a symposium organized by Jeff Mitscherling at McGill University, “Contemporary Issues in Phenomenology and Hermeneutics,” November 11-12, 1985. It was subsequently published in Man and World 21: 3-33 (1988).

1. The paper was presented to the VIII Congresso Interamericano de Filosofia, held in Brasilia, October-November, 1972, and was published in the proceedings of the congress, Filosofia (Sāo Paulo: Instituto Brasileiro de Filosofia, 1974), vol. II, pp. 151-59. A somewhat revised version of this paper was subsequently published under the title “The Possibility and Limits of a Science of Man,” Philosophy Forum, vol. 14, 1976, pp. 351-66.

2. As Seotus Erigena knew when he said that one cannot or should not ask what God is, since God is not a what.

3. This was basically the argument Augustine used to refute Academic scepticism (see, for instance, De Civitate Dei, XI, 26), thereby providing himself with a epistemological springboard for attaining immutable truths and “divine illumination.” Since I cannot doubt that I exist, this proves that there are truths that I can attain to; it proves the existence not only of a substantial soul but also, ultimately, that of a metaphysical or ontotheological God which, as pure being, is also absolute, immutable substance.

4. Very often the metaphysical problem of subjectivity (“the metaphysical problem concerning any and all organisms capable of subjective experience”) is posed, as both metaphysicians and scientists have a special proclivity for doing, in genetic terms: How does that mysterious thing called “subjectivity” come to adhere to what, initially at least, is a mere material body? The distinguished metaphysician, a philosopher of international repute, my cherished friend and esteemed colleague, Albert Shalom writes: “In terms of the problem at issue here, what this means is the necessity of finding a set of concepts which can make sense of the emergence of subjective experience, including conceptualization itself [“conceptualization,” I take it, in the metaphorical, not biological, sense], in organisms which start off as embryos to which no tinge of subjective experience can possibly be attributed” (“Subjectivity,” Review of Metaphysics, vol. XXXVIII, no. 2, December 1984, p. 229). Or, as he says a bit further on in this article, what he is in search of “are those concepts which might be able to lead us to understand how subjectivity itself emerged from the mud and slime of physical reality itself” (p. 245).

The question of origins is the supremely metaphysical question. Shalom’s solution to the mind-body problem amounts to putting forward “a conception of physical reality which, while not contravening any established truths belonging to the sciences, will nevertheless account for the emergence of subjective experience” (p. 248). Taking what he calls “doggy subjectivity” as an example, Shalom, or as I shall henceforth refer to him with a suitably worthy metaphysical name, Albertus, says, in a most time-honored metaphysical way: “ . . . we are in search of something which is actually present in the dog ovum, and which is potentially what will actualize itself as the dog’s subjectivity, in the course of time” (p. 251). If the reader believes he detects here the reverberating echo of the old Thomistic-Aristotelian hylomorphism, he would not be mistaken. Albertus immediately goes on to say that the only “philosophically explanatory model” for dealing with the problem “is the Aristotelian model of potentiality and actuality” (p. 252). All of our conceptual problems come down to the simple fact that we have forgotten the principles of Aristotelianism (see ibid.).

Since it obviously takes time for the fertilized ovum to develop into an entity endowed with “subjectivity” (I don’t know exactly how long this is supposed to take, and Albertus doesn’t say, but I do know that human organisms only become rational on their seventh birthday), Albertus conveniently latches onto time or temporality as the metaphysical essence of personhood, viewing it as a “real or actual factor” (p. 264): “ . . . temporality is to be used as the basic or key concept in a conceptual framework designed to explain the emergence of subjective manifestations from an initial cell not possessing such manifestations . . . ” (p. 258). “ . . . in place of Aristotle’s key-terms of ‘matter’ and ‘form’, we must appeal, to begin with, to one of the essential components of physical reality itself, namely time” (p. 260). So Albertus even manages to substantialize time, no mean metaphysical feat, you must admit. Time, he says, is “a reality which is itself a constituent element of physical existence” (p. 268). What he is in search of is “ . . . a locus of permanence at the root of a sentient organism,” and this, he says, is “a very concrete reality” (ibid.). We seem suddenly to find ourselves right back in the company of the old presocratics and their foundational “roots,” rhizomata, and “elements.” With, let it be noted, a fair amount of solid, old-fashioned ontotheology thrown in for good measure. He says at the end of his paper that the emergence of various “loci of permanence or identity” in “the course of evolution points both to the necessity of evolution, and also to the necessity of interpreting evolution in terms of a God who appears to have created this evolutionary process as a stage on which have appeared a succession of entities endowed with increasingly greater capacities of subjective internaliztion” (p. 273). We are well on our evolutionary way, no doubt, to Teilhard de Chardin’s cosmic “noosphere” and “omega point.”

All in all, Albertus’s paper would appear to be a good illustration of how hopeless the metaphysical quest is and how barren it is when it comes to enabling us better to understand—and cope with—the mystery of our human existence. What, when all is said and done, does it really mean to speak of moments of self-awareness being “centered on a personal identity which is what each of us primarily is” (p. 261; emphasis added)? How is that supposed to enlighten us about ourselves? Perhaps it does; I just don’t see how. It sounds like yet another variation on the metaphysical “explanation” of why sleeping powder causes sleep—because it possesses that thing called a vis dormativa, which is what each individual portion of it primarily is. Albertus’s paper is undoubtedly to be recommended to any serious-minded person who has a taste for pure and unadulterated metaphysics in the grand old style.

5. Harold J. Morowitz, “Rediscovering the Mind,” in D. Hofstadterand D. Dennett, The Mind’s I (New York: Basic Books, 1981), p. 36.

6. Ibid., p. 37.

7. Ibid., p. 39.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid., p. 41.

10. Ibid., p. 42.

11. Ibid., p. 43.

12. If that form of epistemological thinking known as positivism is a hermeneutical absurdity, it is because it is hopelessly entangled in the “epistemological circle.” As Jürgen Habermas has effectively pointed out, if, as positivism maintains, sensations are the elements out of which reality is constructed, it is hard to see how it could “deny the function of consciousness, in whose horizon sensations are always given” (Knowledge and Human Interests [Boston: Beacon Press, 1971], p. 83). And yet since positivism asserts that the real is the factual, consciousness or the knowing subject must be reduced to the factual. The ego is inconsistently given the same status as the external facts it seeks to describe. The positivist thinker does himself in as a thinker, commits epistemological hari-kari: “The only reflection admissible serves the self-abolition of reflection or the knowing subject” (ibid., p. 85).

13. As the metaphysician Albertus so conceives it.

14. A distinction which I have attempted to deconstruct genealogically in my paper “Metaphysics as Myth,” presented at the Guelph-McMaster Philosophy Colloquium, “Metaphysical Thinking: Foundational or Empty?” May 7-9, 1984 (included in this volume as essay 8).

15. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, n.d.), § 2. For a discussion of binary opposites (philosophical “couples”) from the point of view of contemporary rhetorical theory, see Chaim Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, Traîté de l’argumentation: La nouvelle rhétorique (Bruxelles: Éditions de l’Institut de Sociologie, Université Libre de Bruxelles, 1970, 2d ed.), §§ 89-96. Among other things, Perelman points out how in the appearance-reality opposition, for instance, the second term has meaning only in regard to the first and how it does not merely designate something given but is in fact a construction (§ 90). When Perelman remarks how, from the point of view of argumentation, the positing of the second term serves the argumentative or rhetorical tactic of devalorizing what thenceforth is opposed to it (appearance becomes illusion and error), one thinks immediately of Nietzsche’s critique of Platonism (that it is in fact a devalorization of this world). Rhetorical theory (the Theory of Argumentation) shows, in effect, how metaphysics cannot but result in nihilism.

16. Ibid. Perelman notes: “La pensée contemporaine s’efforce, dans beaucoup de domaines, à abolir des couples. C’est au prix d’un grand effort . . . ” (ibid., § 92, p. (569).

17. “Noli foras ire, in te redi, in interiore homine habitat Veritas” (St. Augustine, De vera religione, 39, n. 72).

18. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), p. xi.

19. Roy Schafer, Language and Insight (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1978), p. 86.

20. Schafer, “Narration in the Psychoanalytic Dialogue,” in On Narrative, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 31.

21. Schafer, Language and Insight, p. 84.

22. Ibid., p. 86.

23. Ibid., p. 197.

24. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 456.

25. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), p. 432.

26. In regard to social reality, see Charles Taylor, “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” in Interpretive Social Science: A Reader, ed. P. Rabinow and W. Sullivan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). Taylor says, for instance: “The language is constitutive of the reality, is essential to its being the kind of reality it is” (p. 45). To insist on the relation between social reality and language is to maintain, as Taylor does in this article, that the social sciences are not primarily explanatory disciplines (as the natural sciences are thought to be) but interpretive or hermeneutical disciplines.

27. Émile Benveniste, “Subjectivity in Language,” in Problems in General Linguistics, trans. M. Meek (Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1971), p. 225.

28. Ibid., p. 226.

29. Ibid., p. 224.

30. Ibid.

31. It could reasonably be argued that only those entities which are capable of narrating their actions, making sense of them by telling stories about them (i.e., humans), can be said to perform actions and, accordingly, to be moral agents. Animals don’t act, even if they do do many interesting things, none of which, of course, are either moral or immoral even though, as is the case with pets, they may sometimes be bad. To be a moral agent is to be responsible, which means to be able to respond, to discuss, and to give an account (un récit, a narrative) of one’s doings, assuming thereby the authorship of one’s deeds (for action is, as Ricoeur might say, a kind of text). A hermeneutical approach to subjectivity dispenses us, when we attempt to account for responsibility, of having to have recourse to the metaphysical concept of “free will.”

32. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), pp. 217-18.

33. See Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu (Paris: Gallimard, “Pléiade” ed., 1954) vol. III, p. 1035.

34. As I mentioned in a previous paper, the self which gets constituted in certain kinds of language games is a very peculiar kind of self. It is a characteristic of scientific language games, for instance, that in them the narrating self does not show through as such, is, in fact, denied as a self (by, for example, being interpreted as the mere vehicle for genes getting about and meeting other genes). See “Husserl’s Hermeneutical Contribution to the Explanation-Understanding Debate” (included in this volume as essay 3).

35. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 378.

36. Benveniste, “Subjectivity in Language,” pp. 224-25.

37. C. S. Peirce, “The Essentials of Pragmatism,” in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. J. Buchler (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), p. 258.

38. Royce to Mary W. Calkins, March 20, 1916, quoted in Milton Singer, Man’s Glassy Essence: Explorations in Semiotic Anthropology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 94 (chs. 3 and 4 of this book present an excellent account of Peirce’s views on the semiotic nature of the self).

39. Frankly, it seems to us that it is the metaphysician who loses us in mere words. Albertus’s article (see note 4 above) is no doubt as good an example as any of empty metaphysical talk, ontotheological Gerede. (Metaphysics, we may note, is described thus: “The purpose of a metaphysical analysis in this domain is to formulate key-concepts designed to make sense of the actual existence and evolution or organisms, which the sciences can only describe in terms of their specific framework” [p. 266]). For instance, it is hard to resist asking what it really means to speak of subjectivity as being essentially “a locus of permanence which then explicates itself spatio-temporally as the development of ‘that specific particular’ ” (p. 265).

Here are some more nice metaphysical insights: “ . . . it is the locus of permanence which, by virtue of its fundamental role of determining a particular to be that specific particular, thereby determines those reactions which the biochemist describes as the multiple functionings of the genetic code, the brain code, and all the other elements which cooperatively combine to actualize or deploy the potentiality of the initial fertilized ovum” (p. 265); “Activity of this determining sort implies that this locus of permanence is a center of power. The power of which it is the center is the power of bringing into actualization the unitary particular or individual which is potentially implicit in the initial fertilized ovum” (pp. 265-66); “Such a conception can only make sense if we conceive the locus of permanence as an actually existing timeless potentiality indefinitely actualizable as a result of actions which refer back to it, or which stem from it” (pp. 268-69).

The self, we are told on a later page, is “the internalization within the locus of permanence of its own processes as identity” (p. 273). What in the world, you may wonder is this “locus of permanence”? Albertus tells us: “ . . . this locus of permanence is not to be conceived as a separate entity, an entity apart from the physical entity as a whole, but as the permanent locus of that physical entity as a whole determining the entity to be and to become what it potentially is . . . ” (p. 269). Albertus tells us even more: “ . . . ‘experiencing’ is a particular mode of the reflecting, or internalizing, of specific spatio-temporal energy transactions of particular identities or loci of permanence. That is to say, from this standpoint, ‘experiencing’ is a derivative reality from the more fundamental principles of the constant dialectic within living and sentient organisms and actualized by means of their particular identities or loci of permanence” (p. 270). “ . . . this identity,” he says, “is conceived as a timeless moment [sic], determining and defining the specific sort of identity itself. . . ,” which means: “ . . . the transformation of incessant and complex physical processes into a quasi-timeless analogue of the constant repetitions of these physical processes themselves. . . . In other words, the varied mass of bodily processes, as they are internalized in the locus of permanence or identity, constitute the emergence within that identity of a sense or a feel of that identity itself. Sensations are part of that sense or feel of identity. The sense of selfness is the organism’s identity reflected or internalized in the locus of permanence, through and by means of the mass of specific processes which define that locus as a ‘self’ or identity of a specific kind. The locus of permanence operates, so to speak, a fixating and therefore a transforming, of pure physical process. Sensation, that is to say, is physical process rendered temporarily motionless—temporarily, because it is constantly succeeded by fresh physical processes” (p. 271).

What real, existential, experiential meaning do these nice-sounding words have? It is hard to shake off the nagging suspicion that what we have here is really nothing more than an erudite word game. Metaphysics is undoubtedly one of the more fascinating of such games that humans have come up with, and it cannot be denied that it does afford some kind of vicarious understanding of ourselves, a simulacrum of understanding. (But then, of course, what, one might well ask, does metaphysics deal with, if it be not simulacra, ghostly figures flitting across the inner surface of man’s glassy essence?)

Albertus’s text is one which cries out for a deconstructive reading. The aim of deconstruction, as “deconstructionists” practice it, is to show how a given text undermines its own claims to truth-value and logical consistency. It is, in the words of Christopher Norris, “ . . . a textual activity, a putting-into-question of the root metaphysical prejudice which posits self-identical concepts outside and above the disseminating play of language” (The Deconstructive Turn [London: Methuen, 1983], p. 6). A deconstructive reading of a metaphysical text will reveal how its key-concepts, to use Albertus’s expression, are not the pure, transparent, semantically exact, homogeneous idealities the metaphysician takes them to be but are in fact disguised, unawoved metaphors and rhetorical tropes and topoi; it makes visible the conceptual blind spots in a text which claims to be no more than a straightforward representation of some supposedly determinate reality.

Now, Albertus’s text would lend itself magnificently to this kind of reading. It would be quite instructive to see how, for instance, although he inveighs against any kind of Cartesian reification of the “mind” and Descartes’s taking of extension and spatiality as paradigmatic of worldly being, he himself does much the same with his “key-concepts” of internalization and loci of permanence; temporality is here curiously spatialized. Albertus’s “locus of permanence” is perhaps but a locus communis or commonplace, a worn-out figura verborum of classical metaphysical rhetoric.

40. For a nonmetaphysical account of reality, see G. B. Madison, Understanding: A Phenomenological-Pragmatic Analysis (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982).

41. Actually, deconstructionism, as Derrida practices it, apparently does not seek the overcoming of metaphysics, given his conviction as to the inescapable closure of metaphysical thinking. If there is any basis for charging Derrida with nihilism, it lies perhaps in the fact that for him what is beyond or exterior to metaphysics is “unnamable by philosophy” (see Positions, trans. Alan Bass [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981], p. 6). Derrida’s position would be nihilistic in that on this same page he appears to equate philosophy with metaphysics, which it is, of course, his goal to deconstruct. The inevitable question is: What does this leave us with? Here we run into the “end of philosophy” theme.

42. See Richard Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983).

43. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1984), p. 145.

44. Much the same point is made by Barbara Herrnstein Smith in her excellent article, “Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories,” in On Narrative, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell. In opposition to structuralists (who, as she says, continue to operate with metaphysical dualities), she presents an alternative conception of discourse which emphasizes its act character and situatedness and says: “ . . . this sort of alternative conception of discourse and symbolic behavior generally may help clarify why traditional assumptions and latterday affirmations of a correspondence between ‘language’ and ‘the world’ [what in hermeneutics is called objectivism] are untenable and thus move us beyond the mere denial of such a correspondence [i.e., beyond mere nihilistic relativism] (as in the Heideggerian and post-structuralist insistence on ‘discrepancies,’ ‘failures,’ ‘ruptures,’ and ‘absences’)—in short, beyond the whole ‘problematic of language,’ ” (p. 222).

45. See Michael Mooney, Vico in the Tradition of Rhetoric (Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 85.

46. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), § 37.

47. In a recent work (Personal Being [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984]), Rom Harré defends a linguistic interpretation of the self (“The primary human reality is persons in conversation” [p. 58]). Unfortunately, Harré veers toward a kind of relativistic reductionism, maintaining that the self is but a convenient fiction, a theoretical, hypothetical entity or construct as this term is understood in the philosophy of science (see, for instance, pp. 82, 100, 145, 147, 160, 162, 167, 193, 212-14, 265). People devise all kinds of theories about themselves, but the self which does this devising is hardly just a theory.

48. Or a padded cell. Derrida speaks of “the padded interior of the ‘symbolic’ ” (see Positions, trans. Alan Bass [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981], p. 86).

49. This is why a structuralist such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, who rejects the phenomenological notion of experience, maintains that language is indeed meaningless, that words refer only to themselves and that, accordingly, meaning is a mere linguistic illusion. In a famous interchange with Paul Ricoeur, he was led to say: “ . . . le sens résulte toujours de la combinaison d’éléments qui ne sont pas eux-mêmes signifiants. . . . dans ma perspective, le sens n’est jamais un phénomène premier: le sens est toujours réductible. Autrement dit, derrière tout sens il y a un non-sens, et le contraire n’est pas vrai. Pour moi, la signification est toujours phénoménale” (“Réponses à quelques questions,” Esprit, November 1983, p. 637). In opposition to this view, Ricoeur stated, twice-over: “Si le sens n’est pas un segment de la compréhension de soi, je ne sais pas ce que c’est”(ibid., pp. 636, 641). He fittingly summed up his reaction to Lévi-Strauss’s position by saying: “Vous êtes dans le désespoir du sens; mais vous vous sauvez par la pensée que, si les gens n’ont rien à dire, du moins ils le disent si bien qu’on peut soumettre leur discours au structuralisme. Vous sauvez le sens, mais c’est le sens du non-sens, l’admirable arrangement syntactique d’un discours qui ne dit rien” (ibid., pp. 652-53).

50. See Merleau-Ponty, Signs (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 18: “There is not thought and language. . . . There is an inarticulate thought . . . and an accomplished thought, which suddenly and unaware discovers itself surrounded by words. Expressive operations take place between thinking language and speaking thought; not, as we thoughtlessly say, between thought and language. It is not because they are parallel that we speak; it is because we speak that they are parallel.”

51. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 144; see also G. B. Madison, The Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1981), pp. 180-81.

52. A. Maclntyre, After Virtue, p. 213.

53. Also, we divest ourselves of the entire metaphysical problem of solipsism and “other minds” and leave it decisively behind when we realize the speaking (or spoken) nature of the self, for we realize then that it is only in the linguistic exchange that there is a self and an other. To suppose that what is initially given are two specific, welldefined subjectivities or “minds” which must then find a means of “communicating” with each other (as metaphysicians are prone to do) is the height of hermeneutical absurdity. Benveniste makes the following very pertinent remark: “We are always inclined to that naive concept of a primordial period in which a complete man discovered another one, equally complete, and between the two of them language was worked out little by little. This is pure fiction. We can never get back to man separated from language and we shall never see him inventing it. We shall never get back to man reduced to himself and exercising his wits to conceive of the existence of another. It is a speaking man whom we find in the world, a man speaking to another man, and language provides the very definition of man” (“Subjectivity in Language,” p. 224).

54. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 263.

55. Ibid., p. 264.

56. “All understanding is interpretation” (ibid., p. 350).

57. See, in this regard, Gadamer’s remarks in Philosophical Hermeneutics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 41-42.

58. Schafer, Language and Insight, p. 15.

59. Ibid., p. 18.

60. Ibid., p. 26.

61. See, for instance, Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); and S. R. Suleiman and I. Crosman, eds., The Reader in the Text (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980).

62. P. Ricoeur, “Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology,” in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. J. B. Thompson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 94. It should be noted that although for (phenomenological) hermeneutics the goal of interpretation is not to reproduce or to reconstruct (as E. D. Hirsch would say) a meaning supposed to exist objectively in the text (such as the authorial intention) and although it maintains that the act of reading is productive of meaning, it does insist, nevertheless, that the meaning which emerges through interpretation (and only through interpretation) is not a matter of mere virtuosity or improvisation (as it sometimes seems to be for the “deconstructionists”) but is the meaning of the text itself.

63. Gadamer, “The Problem of Historical Consciousness,” in Interpretive Social Science: A Reader, eds. P. Rabinow and W. Sullivan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), p. 107.

64. See Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, 3d essay, § 26: “Its [modern histonography’s] noblest claim nowadays is that it is a mirror.”

65. Carlos Fuentes, “The Novel Always Says: The World Is Unfinished,” New York Times Book Review, March 31, 1985, p. 25.

66. Derrida does say that, although “reading is transformation,” “this transformation cannot be executed however one wishes” and that it requires “protocols of reading” (Positions, p. 63). He does not tell us what this is supposed to mean. If Derrida can so totally mis“represent” the basic hermeneutical position (see his vague remarks on the subject in Spurs, trans. Barbara Harlow [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978], and in “La question du style,” in Nietzsche Aujourd’hui [Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1973]; what he says here about hermeneutics does not in any way whatsoever apply to phenomenological hermeneutics, which is, after all, what today people generally have in mind when they talk about hermeneutics), one wonders what usefulness these unspecified “protocols” might have.

67. The notion of tradition is absolutely fundamental to philosophical hermeneutics. MacIntyre also makes some very pertinent remarks on the subject (see After Virtue, p. 220ff.).

68. It is in fact a hermeneutical (transformational) understanding of “truth” that Schafer expresses when he says: “Under the influence of the psychoanalytic perspective, the analysand not only begins to live in another world but learns how to go on constructing it. It is a transformed world, a world with systematically interrelated vantage points or rules of understanding. It is a world of greater personal authority and acknowledge responsibility. It is more coherent and includes a greater range of constructed experience. It is more socialized and intelligible” (Language and Insight, p. 25).

For a discussion of truth, as it applies, hermeneutically, to the political realm, see G. B. Madison, The Logic of Liberty (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986).