THREE

Husserl’s Hermeneutical
Contribution to the
Explanation-Understanding Debate

The problem of the epistemological status of the social or human sciences is one which has been debated continuously for several decades now, especially since Wilhelm Dilthey’s famous article of 1900, “The Development of Hermeneutics.” It continues to give rise to a great deal of discussion and debate, as is evidenced by the forthcoming publication in English of K.-O. Apel’s Understanding and Explanation.¹ As the title of Apel’s book illustrates, the general effort of modern thought has been to reconcile somehow explanation and understanding, the Naturwissenschaften and the Geisteswissenschaften. The problem has generally been treated as a problem in the philosophy of science or the philosophy of knowledge, which is to say: epistemology.

Epistemology can be defined, in the words of Richard Rorty, “as the quest, initiated by Descartes, for those privileged items in the field of consciousness which are the touchstones of truth.”² Epistemology is a foundational discipline, not itself a science in the narrow sense of the term, but the theory of science which secures for each and every science its legitimacy by establishing for it its foundation and method. Like Rorty, I believe that epistemology is a supreme expression and embodiment of the spirit of modern philosophy, that it is essentially a Cartesian-Kantian enterprise, and I believe as well that the categories of modern philosophy have outlived their usefulness.³ Epistemology must give way to hermeneutics.⁴ In this paper I would like to explore some of the consequences of approaching the problem of the social sciences from a hermeneutical point of view rather than an epistemological one. Such an undertaking amounts to nothing less than an attempt to discern some of the far-reaching consequences of Husserl’s great archaeological-hermeneutical discovery: the Lebenswelt.

The epistemological problem of the status of the social sciences, that is, the problem of justifying the Geisteswissenschaften in the face of the Naturwissenschaften and of according to the former equal validity with the latter is one which we have inherited from Dilthey. We all know how Dilthey attempted to reconcile the two epistemic endeavors so as to secure for the Geisteswissenschaften a legitimate and respectable place in the academic pursuit of knowledge (science). Conceding, like Kant, to the Naturwissenchaften an exclusivity in the explanation of natural being, Dilthey sought to go beyond Kant by arguing that the Geisteswissenschaften must be accorded their own specific subject matter and their own equally specific method (whence his project Critique of Historical Reason). Basing himself on a Lebensphilosophie, Dilthey maintained that the proper object of the Geisteswissenschaften is what is specifically human, by which he meant the inner, psychic life of historical and social agents. This object dictates a specific method for the Geisteswissenschaften, which is that of understanding (Verstehen). To understand is not to explain causally but is, rather, to transport oneself into an alien or distant life experience, as this experience objectifies itself in documents, texts (“written monuments”), and other traces of inner life experiences and world views (Weltanschauungen). It is because I am a living being, a part of Life, that I can reconstructively understand other objectivations of Life. To understand is thus to interpret, and interpretation (Deutung) is the means whereby we can come to know in its own otherness what is humanly other, in effect to coincide imaginatively with it, to relive it. The goal of interpretation is to achieve a reproduction (Nachbildung) of alien life experiences. The Geisteswissenschaften become thereby respectable disciplines by being asssured their own unique epistemological status, as well as their own scientific objectivity. Dilthey viewed himself as doing for historical reason what Kant had done for pure reason; his task was to secure for the Geisteswissenschaften their epistemological “foundations.” There can be a science of the subjective as distinct from the objective, but its method must be appropriately different: Verstehen as opposed to Erklärung.

Dilthey’s solution to the problem of the social sciences (as I shall refer to it for the sake of brevity) is not of merely historical interest. It was in fact resurrected by Peter Winch in the 1950s and 1960s in the context of the well-known discussion in Anglo-Saxon, post-Wittgensteinian philosophy on “understanding other cultures.”⁵ In the wake of Dilthey, Winch drew a radical distinction between empathetic understanding and causal explanation and suggested that social science should limit itself to the former. He maintained that human or social relations are an “unsuitable subject for generalizations and theories of the scientific sort to be formulated about them.”⁶ He even went so far as to assert that “the concepts used by primitive peoples can only be interpreted in the context of the way of life of those peoples.”⁷

Winch’s solution to the problem of the relation between the Naturwissenschaften and the Geisteswissenschaften amounts therefore to a complete dichotomization between them. The Diltheyan-style attempt to make of Life a special and irreducible category and to set it up as the foundational justification for a special and irreducible sort of science is by that very fact, and by necessity, to oppose it to another distinct category, that of Nature, which generates another, opposed kind of science. Explanation and understanding are viewed as two different, and even antagonistic, modes of inquiry. To say that “the concepts used by primitive peoples can only be interpreted in the context of the way of life of those peoples” is to say that there is in fact no place at all for explanation in social science. The task of the latter is simply that of empathetically projecting oneself into an alien “form of life,” as Wittgenstein would say. When one has empathetically described in this way a particular “language game,” there is nothing more to be done.⁸ A notable consequence of this way of resolving the issue is that it leads directly into cultural relativism and the idea of incommensurable paradigms. Reason itself is thereby fragmented.

Moreover, it is hard to see what this way of epistemologically sorting out the Naturwissenschaften and the Geisteswissenschaften has to contribute to resolving or arbitrating what Ricoeur would call “the conflict of interpretations.” In particular, it is hard to see how it can effectively counteract the persistent “naturalistic” tendencies in the social sciences, the attempt, that is, to explain “consciousness” or human life forms in purely natural, causal terms. It does not suffice simply to decree that “explanation” has no place in the social sciences. If a science of man is at all possible, it must surely attempt to explain as much as it can.⁹ The overriding hermeneutical question, which is not faced here at all, is that of determining the status of “explanation” itself and its place in the all-inclusive phenomenon of human understanding—and self-understanding. As we shall see later, this is the supreme task of hermeneutics when it functions as a critical reflection guided by an emancipatory interest.

The Dilthey-Winch solution to the problem of the social sciences is not only an unfortunate one, it is also an untenable one if the scientism, objectivism, and Cartesian dualism which it unquestioningly presupposes is itself questioned and no longer found acceptable.¹⁰ And, indeed, it is Cartesianism, the naturespirit opposition with its consequent objectivism that is the fatal victim of Husserl’s radical phenomenology.

Husserl’s great contribution to the debate as to the epistemological status of the social sciences was to have undermined the central categories of modern philosophy which make of the problem such an intractable one. The result of his far-reaching and radical reflections was in fact to have dissolved the epistemological problem itself. With Husserl the epistemological problem is dissolved because the very idea of science—the guiding ideal of modern philosophy—is called into question and discredited. To be sure, Husserl’s effective contribution to the debate is not one he intended or would, no doubt, in any way have welcomed. Let us examine a bit more closely the momentous transformation in the problem effected by Husserl—in spite of himself.

Perhaps more than any other academic, professional philosopher, Husserl contributed directly to the demise of modern philosophy, of what, after Heidegger, we might want to call “metaphysics.”¹¹ This is supremely ironic, since despite his conscientiously radical critique of the tradition, he viewed his own endeavor as an attempt to realize the inner entelechy, or telos, as he would have said, of this tradition. Husserl stated his philosophical goal quite clearly and unambiguously in his famous Logos article of 1911 (“Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft”), and he never wavered in the pursuit of it, although he did at times undergo crises of doubt, crises from which nonetheless his faith emerged stronger and purer than ever. This goal was none other than the traditional goal of philosophy from Plato through Descartes to the present: to make of philosophy a rigorous science. In his Cartesian Meditations he explictly adopted as his own guiding idea “the Cartesian idea of a science that shall be established as radically genuine ultimately an all-embracing science.”¹²

This last phrase is revealing: an all-embracing science. Husserl was at constant pains “to restore the most primoridal concept of philosophy—as all-embracing science in the ancient Platonic and again in the Cartesian sense.”¹³ In his eyes, phenomenology was to bring “to realization the Leibnizian idea of a universal ontology as the systematic unity of all conceivable a priori science.”¹⁴ He in fact defined phenomenology as “the a priori science of all conceivable existent beings, . . . the truly universal ontology.”¹⁵ Like the positivists, Husserl was obsessed by the idea of unified science. Like them he wanted to achieve a fundamental clarification and thereby an all-embracing unity of the sciences. It was not the positivistic project, the idea of universal commensuration, as Rorty would say, that Husserl objected to, only the positivist’s way of pursuing the goal, which Husserl viewed as defective. “It is we,” he said, “who are the genuine positivists.”¹⁶

Husserl’s conception of philosophy was thus fully traditional. Philosophy is the foundational discipline in regard to all of culture in that it adjudicates the claims to knowledge on the part of all the various modes of discourse, a task it assigns itself since it conceives of itself as the knowledge of the nature of knowledge and of the nature of the relation between mind and nature. If the word “representation” is appropriately qualified (to mean what in effect Husserl meant by “constitution”), the following remarks of Rorty’s apply quite well to the way Husserl conceived of philosophy: “Philosophy’s central concern is to be a general theory of representation, a theory which will divide culture up into areas which represent reality well, those which represent it less well, and those which do not represent it at all (despite their pretense of doing so).”¹⁷ In particular, Husserl viewed all the particular sciences as forming a totality—or as having to form such a totality if the idea of science is to be fully realized—organized in a hierarchical order with phenomenology, the ultimate, self-grounding science, at its head. “In other words, there is only one philosophy, one actual and genuine science; and particular genuine sciences are only non-selfsufficient members within it.”¹⁸

If, as he said in Cartesian Meditations, his goal was “to show the concrete possibility of the Cartesian idea of a philosophy as an all-embracing science grounded on an absolute foundation,”¹⁹ then what Husserl needed to discover was just such an absolute foundation, a genuine fundamentum inconcussum. This of course, as we know, he believed that he had located in transcendental subjectivity. Husserl’s relentless pursuit of “the fundamental” (to use an expression of Merleau-Ponty), his unceasing archaeological probings into the realm of transcendental life experience, led him in the end to his greatest discovery of all and one which was in fact to call into question the guiding idea of science which had led him to it: the Lebenswelt.

The Lebenswelt is nothing other than the immediate flow of unreflective life, the ground out of which arises all scientific thematization and theorizing. It is the world as we actually live it, a world, therefore, which precedes the Galilean and modern distinction between subjective and objective (primary and secondary qualities). The life-world is “the forgotten meaning-fundament [Sinnesfundament] of natural science.”²⁰ It is the prescientific world of lived experience on which all scientific constructs are based and which they necessarily presuppose. Indeed, as Husserl again and again insisted, all scientific constructs are mere idealizations, abstractions from and interpretations of this prereflective world of immediate life. As David Carr remarks: “The scientific conception must be regarded as a view of the world, a certain way of looking at it and dealing with it which serves certain purposes.”²¹ The “objective” world of science is but an interpretation of the world of our immediate experience, the life-world, which transcends, or precedes, all objectivistic as well as all subjectivistic categories.²²

The notion of the life-world, as that which is presupposed by all scientific theorizing, undermines the very claims of science to a mode of knowing which is truly presuppositionless and foundational. And yet Husserl seems clearly not to have wanted to accept this conclusion. Had death not put an end to his philosophical endeavors, he would undoubtedly have gone on to attempt to show how the life-world is itself something constituted in and by transcendental subjectivity. As Gadamer has remarked:

The conclusion that Husserl was not prepared to accept is precisely the one that his successors were to draw from his work. From Husserl they learned something more than Husserl was prepared to teach. The ultimate lesson of Husserl’s attempt to make of philosophy a rigorous science has been well summed up by Gadamer: “Philosophical thinking is not science at all. . . . There is no claim of definitive knowledge with the exception of one: the acknowledgement of the finitude of human being in itself.”²⁴ This is pretty much what Merleau-Ponty, with the notion of the life-world in mind, meant earlier on by his somewhat cryptic assertion: “The most important lesson which the [phenomenological] reduction teaches us is the impossibility of a complete reduction.”²⁵

The consequence of philosophy’s failure, its inability to make of itself a genuine and rigorous science is something we are still struggling to think today. If all scientific theorizing is but a matter of idealizing and interpreting a prescientific experience which does not contain within itself, and thereby neither dictates nor conclusively legitimates, any theories about it, what becomes of the philosophical-scientific attempt to express the “objective truth of things”? Does not everything become a matter of interpretation? Are we not obliged to agree with Nietzsche when he proclaimed that all being is interpreted being?²⁶ Certainly epistemology, as the foundational discipline guaranteeing to each particular science and mode of human discourse its quota of objective truth, would appear to be decisively discredited.

Since I cannot, here, possibly hope to put to rest once and for all the claims of epistemology, I shall simply ignore them, trusting that the moribund body of philosophical science will sooner or later be buried with the respect it deserves. Supposing, simply for the sake of argument, that in what we continue to call “philosophy” we have to do not with “objective realities and truths” but with idealizing interpretations and creative language games, there would still remain a great deal for “philosophers” to do. The name for this activity is hermeneutics. I shall attempt to indicate how hermeneutics may in fact have something to contribute to the problem of reason as it is instanced in the conflict between explanation and understanding, the Naturwissenschaften and the Geisteswissenschaften.

For the sake of the present discussion I shall understand hermeneutics to mean, very broadly, that reflective inquiry which is concerned with, in the words of Gadamer, “our entire understanding of the world and thus . . . all the various forms in which this understanding manifests itself.”²⁷ Moreover, I accept here Gadamer’s thesis as to “the essential linguisticality of all human experience of the world.”²⁸ “Language,” as he says, “is the fundamental mode of operation of our being-in-the-world and the all-embracing form of the constitution of the world.”²⁹ If one accepts this, then it is clear that the proper object of hermeneutics is all the various language games by means of which people come to some understanding of the world and of themselves.³⁰

When hermeneutics is defined in this way it is obvious that the natural sciences fall within the scope of hermeneutics, which is truly universal. It is obvious that science, whatever epistemological pretensions it may harbor, is one particular language game that humans engage in. It is, to be sure, a most momentous one, since it is not, like much of speculative metaphysics, an idle game but one that has extremely far-reaching consequences for the organization of our collective lives and for the mode of our being-in-the-world, which is to say, for our self-understanding. One of the concerns of hermeneutics in its emancipatory function is in fact to bring to consciousness those possibilities of being that the scientific-technological project, by reason of its necessary methodological abstraction from lived experience, necessarily conceals and closes off.

The hermeneutics of science is in no way a rival discipline to the traditional philosophy or epistemology of science. The latter is simply a metascientific, ancillary discipline which, for rhetorical or argumentative purposes, seeks to specify the supposed conditions under which utterances of a scientific sort can lay claim to “truth.” Unlike traditional “philosophy of science,” hermeneutics is not concerned with the so-called truth-value of science, but seeks simply to determine the actual mode in which scientific understanding occurs, the ways in which scientific theories (interpretations and idealizations of experience) are in fact put forward, defended, and believed in.

The revolutionary approach to science instituted above all by Thomas Kuhn typifies this kind of inquiry. Kuhn is representative of a current movement of thought which, as Richard Bernstein observes, can be seen “as contributing to the demise of the Cartesianism that has dominated and infected so much of modern thought.”³¹ What in particular Kuhn succeeded in undermining is the Cartesian view which has blinded philosophers of science to the way in which science is actually practiced (philosophers of science have traditionally ignored the hermeneutical question as to what scientists are actually doing, concentrating instead on the epistemological question as to what the criteria are which must be met if science is to count as a genuine “representation” of reality, “justified belief”).³² Kuhn’s work, which he subsequently came to realize merits the label “hermeneutics,” has had for its effect to throw open the whole question as to what “reason” in the case of science actually amounts to. Kuhn has drawn our attention to the essentially judgmental quality of scientific rationality. Scientific reasoning is not a matter of induction or deduction or demonstrative reasoning culminating in the adequate theoretical representation of “objective” reality but is, instead, in terms of actual scientific praxis, a matter of interpretation and persuasion.

This means, for one thing, that scientific reason is finally understandable only in terms of a speaking and writing community of people who are bound together and informed (in the literal sense of the term) by a particular historical and cultural tradition in terms of which alone their collective, conversational endeavor has meaning. Science is one particular way in which humans tell stories and refigure the world of lived experience, and the rules of this particular narrative genre or language game are determined not by nature but by culture. Now since the diverse ways in which people narrate the world is the proper object of hermeneutics, it follows that the inquiry into science is ultimately not a scientific or even epistemological undertaking but is, above all, a hermeneutical one.

This has important implications for the status of the social sciences, for, that is, their status vis-à-vis the natural sciences. When we take up a hermeneutical point of view, it becomes apparent that the human sciences are not only not reducible or even subordinate to the natural sciences but that the latter are in fact a proper object for the former, that the former in a sense encompass the latter. The passage from epistemology to hermeneutics, which in the discussion regarding science is what Kuhn in effect accomplished, has for one of its consequences to subvert the relation of dependency customarily supposed to exist between the two kinds of science. While from a merely epistemological point of view, the social sciences are indeed less methodologically secure, less well grounded, and less “scientific” than the natural sciences, from a hermeneutical point of view it is precisely the human sciences which enable us better to understand the exact significance of the natural sciences. If our ultimate goal is not simply to construct theoretical-instrumental interpretive theories about the natural world—whose ultimate “validity” lies in the enhanced power they confer on us to control the course of natural events—but if what we desire above all is to understand better what kind of self-understanding we may hope to achieve in this way, then the human sciences prove to be indispensable tools for attaining greater understanding.

What, for instance, the sociology of science can teach us is the actual meaning of “explanation” (scientific rationality) and its relation to “understanding.” Simply by way of indicating what is at stake here, let me quote Rom Harré:

To realize that ‘logic’ is not involved in the primary cognitive activity of ‘doing science’ is to realize something very important. It discredits completely the prehermeneutical, epistemological account of science, typified, for instance, by R. B. Braithwaite, who defined science as “a deductive system . . . which is arranged in such a way that from some of the hypotheses or premises all the other hypotheses logically follow.”³⁴ This epistemological account of science has been exposed for the myth it is by the physicist Gerald Holton of Harvard University in his investigations into the history of modern science, investigations which are themselves neither scientific nor epistemological but Geisteswissenschaftlich. As in the work Harré refers to, Holton, on the basis of his distinction between private science and public science, has sought to show how “scientific rationality” is in fact something imposed upon the results of individual research at the moment when a scientist addresses himself to the community of scientists, seeking their approval. As Holton says: “ . . . in formalizing an individual contribution for publication, it is part of the game to cover up the transition from the private stage, to make the results in retrospect appear neatly derived from clear fundamentals.”³⁵

Hermeneutical inquiries such as these into the natural sciences on the part of the social sciences have a potentially very important lesson to teach regarding the status of the social sciences themselves, the relation between “understanding” and “explanation.” It would be the task of philosophical hermeneutics to articulate what manifests itself here. The lesson seems to be something like this: Scientific “explanation” is not something opposed to, or more basic than, understanding. Scientific, causal, naturalistic explanations are simply one way of narrating the world, of ordering the chaotic flow of experience. Explanation is one particular language game, with its own rhetorical rules of genre, that humans have invented in order to achieve a sense of understanding. Scientific explanations are themselves interpretations of a sort, ones, however, which have the peculiar characteristic that in them the human subject or the author of the discourse does not show through.

On the face of it, explanation does appear to pose a threat to understanding. For a purely explanatory approach to human affairs is—whatever form it may take (physicalistic, structuralist, and so on)—inevitably reductionistic. To “explain” the human or the personal is to give an account of it in terms which are neither human nor personal (there are a great variety of subpersonal ways of accounting for personhood to choose from: materialist, physiological, environmental, behavioristic, cybernetic, logico-structuralist, functionalist, and so on). The curious fact about seeking understanding solely by means of explanation is that such an attempt makes it absolutely impossible to achieve any kind of genuine self-understanding, since the self is precisely that which eludes all explanation. As Husserl very pointedly observed in his famous Vienna lecture: “ . . . the working subject is himself forgotten; the scientist does not become a subject of investigation.”³⁶ As he also said:

Given the methodological naiveté of what Husserl calls “naturalism,” it is understandable why Winch, for instance, should resist attempts to incorporate explanation into the social sciences and should maintain that we can hope to understand what is human only if we resist all attempts to explain it.

There can be no doubt that at the present time there are conflicting tendencies within the social sciences. While the anthropologist Clifford Geertz has attempted to work out what he calls an “interpretive theory of culture,”³⁸ other social scientists, who would like to approximate in their disciplines the “rigor” and “exactitude” that they imagine characterize the natural sciences, have continued to elaborate various purely naturalistic, reductionist strategies of an epistemological sort. The ongoing attempt to formulate a coherent cybernetic account of human consciousness and agency is a case in point.

And yet hermeneutical reflection clearly reveals the ultimate absurdity of all such attempts to conceive of understanding in purely explanatory terms. Can the scientist who attempts to explain everything that is in the world for him explain in this way his own attempt to explain everything? Can the neurophysiologist explain neurophysiology neurophysiologically? What is always left out in all attempts at total explanation is the self who does the explaining, the living discourse out of which are generated these explanations. Explanation, then, cannot explain understanding. It is simply one way in which people attain to a partial understanding of what it means for them to be, what it means that they are beings who exist in the mode of discourse and understanding.

From a hermeneutical point of view, therefore, explanation is not something purely and simply opposed to understanding nor is it something that could ever substitute completely for understanding. It is, rather, a legitimate, and no doubt necessary, stage in understanding whose ultimate goal is nevertheless always self-understanding. That branch of the Geisteswissenschaften known as interpretation theory or, more generally, literary criticism provides a useful model of what is involved here.

From the point of view of phenomenological hermeneutics, the task of textual interpretation is not to discover the psychological intentions of an author³⁹ but to explicate the type of being-in-the-world unfolded in and through the text. The ultimate goal of textual interpretation is the appropriation (Aneignung) of the text in the reading experience.⁴⁰ That is, it is that of actualizing the meaning of the text as it is addressed to a reader; the ultimate significance of the text is the heightened self-understanding that the reader acquires by means of his or her dialogical encounter with the text.

While the ultimate goal of interpretation is, therefore, “understanding,” there is nevertheless, for phenomenological hermeneutics, a legitimate place for “explanation” in the reading process. For the initial stage in textual interpretation is precisely that of analyzing the text in terms of its formal organization, its internal relations, its structure. At this level of reading one will engage in a semiotic analysis of the text’s linguistic and structural features and will, as well, take account of historical and philological, i.e., empirical, data. In short, one will will attempt to “explain” it as much as is possible.⁴¹

“Explanation” never furnishes us with the decisive “truth” about the text, however. Indeed, once epistemology is called into question, it becomes obvious that the traditional notion of truth is bound up with the modern subject-object dichotomy that epistemology, as well as all attempts at explanation, presuppose. When, as in hermeneutics, the modern conception of subjectivity (and objectivity) is abandoned and when, accordingly, the reader is viewed as a knowing player in the game of refiguration of the world that is occurring in the text, it becomes clear that, as Mario Valdés of the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto says, “understanding must be self-understanding, that the truth of the text is in fact the truth of ourselves, or to put it in critical terms, the truth of the literary text is the world which it unfolds in the reader’s appropriation.”⁴²

From a hermeneutical point of view, therefore, interpretation [Deutung], which Dilthey subsumed wholly under “understanding” (and which he thereby opposed to explanation), is not in fact something opposed to explanation. While it is true that the ultimate goal of all interpretation (whether of texts or lived experience) is self-understanding, and while it is true that such understanding irremediably transcends all forms of explanation, it is nevertheless clear, from the example of literary criticism, that explanatory procedures have their legitimate place in the overall interpretive process. They form one segment of what Ricoeur calls the hermeneutical arc.⁴³

Over and above its crucial role in instituting universal mastery over nature, scientific explanation which, as Nietzsche observed, “may be the right imperative for a tough, industrious race of machinists and bridge-builders,”⁴⁴ is simply a limited and, ultimately, deficient way in which humans attempt to understand their place in nature (“Qu’est-ce que l’homme dans la nature?” as Pascal asked, is the overriding question for man). Explanation poses no problems for understanding when it is recognized for the partial, nontotalizable mode of understanding it is. The human sciences enjoy a unique and irreducible status vis-à-vis the natural sciences, not because they deal with a different object—“man” or “mind” as opposed to “nature”—but because in them the self, which is both the origin and the goal of all interpretations and all attempts at understanding, which is to say also, of all explanation, is no longer dissimulated behind the veil of methodological abstractions and “objective truths,” behind the “garb of ideas” [Ideenkleid, Kleid der Symbole] that, as Husserl said, science throws over the life-world.

The ultimate significance of the discovery of the life-world for the social sciences is that it thoroughly discredits the natural-science model that for so long captivated the attention of social scientists and that, indeed, still continues to do so to a certain extent. The proper object of the social sciences is not primarily the validation and testing of hypotheses and theories designed to explain and predict social phenomena. Indeed, the proper object of the social sciences are not facts, in the scientific-positivistic sense of the term, but interpretations, the various means by which human beings achieve for themselves an understanding of what it means for them to be. The essential vocation of anthropology, for instance, is, as Clifford Geertz has said, “not to answer our deepest questions [the existential dilemmas of life], but to make available to us answers that others, guarding other sheep in other valleys, have given, and thus to include them in the consultable record of what man has said.”⁴⁵

Hermeneutics is not a science, and it is not epistemology, if by science one means, as the modern epistemē meant, the “correct” representation of “objective” reality and if by epistemology one means, as one usually does, a theoretical discipline whose function is to determine the epistemic conditions that must be met if any given discipline is to lay claim to truthful statements about reality. Hermeneutics is, rather, the reflective recognition of the finitude of all human claims to knowledge, of the historical and cultural relativity of all forms of human discourse. It is the rejection, the deconstruction, of what Rorty calls “the idea of universal commensuration.” It is thus a rejection of the age-old metaphysical prejudice of “science.”

Hermeneutics, it can therefore be seen, is part of the postmodern rejection of philosophy in the traditional metaphysical-epistemological sense of the term. However, unlike certain other forms of postmodern thought, such as poststructuralism or deconstruction, hermeneutics seeks to overcome not only objectivism but (to use Richard Berstein’s term) relativism as well, including the nihilism that seems to accompany inevitably the latter. For hermeneutics, relativism is only the obverse, indeed the perverse, side of modern objectivism. Hermeneutics seeks not so much to reject the notion of reason and its universalist pretensions as it seeks to reconstruct radically our idea of what it means to be rational. For hermeneutics, to speak of “rationality” is simply an indirect way of referring to “the essential linguisticality of all human experience, ” which means: the fact that, when they so desire, humans can mediate their unending differences through conversation and dialogue aiming at agreement and common understanding.

Because of its essential linguisticality, that is, because there is no such thing as an ideal language which could ensure the commensurability of all partial discourses, human understanding is necessarily finite and pluralist. However, a hermeneuticist such as Gadamer does not see in this inescapable fact a justification for cultural relativism and the idea that human understanding is irremediably fragmented into a multitude of incommensurable, uncommunceating paradigms. In contrast to the cultural and epistemological relativists, Gadamer reminds us that although understanding is language-bound, “this assertion does not lead us into any kind of linguistic relativism.”⁴⁶ As he goes on to say:

The supreme task of hermeneutics as a critical, emancipatory endeavor is precisely that of maintaining this openness of human discourse. “The primary human reality is persons in conversation,” as Rom Harré says.⁴⁸ It is only through this ongoing conversation that anything like self-understanding is at all possible. Conversation, as Rorty says, is “the ultimate context in which knowledge is to be understood.”⁴⁹ The overriding task of philosophy conceived of as hermeneutics is, therefore, as Rorty would say, that of sustaining and furthering “the conversation of mankind.”

Here hermeneutics joins up with, and reveals itself to be a continuation of, the ancient, countertraditional tradition of dialectics. Ever since Protagoras and the Greek sophists and rhetoricians, dialectics (in a strictly non-Platonic sense) has amounted to the rejection of philosophy conceived of as a monological enterprise, as the Platonic communion of the private, solitary soul with objective essences, of the frozen and authoritarian discourse of metaphysics. In the place of monologue it seeks always and everywhere to institute dialogue, which is precisely that which liberates us from the authoritarian claims of those-who-are-in-the-know, who believe that they have somehow transcended the merely human “realm of opinion.” To conclude this paper I can do no better than to quote the fine words of Pierre Aubenque in his article “Évolution et constantes de la pensée dialectique”:

Notes

This paper was originally composed at the request of Klaus Nellen of the Institut für die Wissenschaften von Menschen in Vienna, for inclusion in a projected volume on the relevance of the notion of the life-world for the social sciences. Before being sent off to Vienna, it was presented as a talk to the Philosophy Colloquium of Queen’s University (Kingston, Ontario), Fall 1985.

1. Karl-Otto Apel, Understanding and Explanation (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984).

2. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), 210.

3. Rorty asks “whether there still remains something for epistemology to be” and says, “I want to urge that there does not” (ibid., p. 210).

4. Or, as Rorty says: “ ‘Hermeneutics,’ as a polemical term in contemporary philosophy, is a name for the attempt to do so [to set aside epistemologically centered philosophy]” (ibid., p. 357). He says of his own position: “I am not putting hermeneutics forward as a ‘successor subject’ to epistemology, as an activity which fills the cultural vacancy once filled by epistemologically centered philosophy. . . . ‘hermeneutics’ is not the name for a discipline, nor for a method of achieving the sort of results which epistemology failed to achieve, nor for a program of research. On the contrary, hermeneutics is an expression of hope that the cultural space left by the demise of epistemology will not be filled” (ibid., p. 315). With this I fully agree (my expression “give way to” should not be read as “be replaced by”).

5. See, for instance, the following writings of Winch: The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958); and “The Idea of a Social Science” and “Understanding a Primitive Society,” both in Rationality, ed. B. R. Wilson (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1971). Richard Bernstein writes: “ . . . Winch’s arguments about the logical gap between the social and the natural can be understood as a linguistic version of the dichotomy between the Naturwissenschaften and the Geisteswissenschaften. Even the arguments that he uses to justify his claims sometimes read like a translation, in the new linguistic idiom, of those advanced by Dilthey” (Beyond Objectivism and Relativism [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983], p. 30).

6. Winch, “The Idea of a Social Science,” p. 15.

7. Winch, “Understanding a Primitive Society,” p. 95 (emphasis added).

8. According to Wittgenstein, when one is confronted with a form of life, all that one can say is: “This language-game is played” (Philosophical Investigations [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963], par. 64). As he also says: “The question is not one of explaining a language-game by means of our experiences, but of noting a language-game” (ibid., par. 655).

9. The famous English anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard, who clearly did not advocate reductionist explanations, nonetheless observed: “Even in a single ethnographic study the anthropologist seeks to do more than understand the thought and values of a primitive people and translate them into his own culture. He seeks also to discover the structural order of the society, the patterns which, once established, enable him to see it as a whole, as a set of interrelated abstractions. Then the society is not only culturally intelligible, as it is, at the level of consciousness and action, for one of its members or for the foreigner who has learnt its mores and participates in its life, but becomes sociologically intelligible. . . . the social anthropologist discovers in a native society what no native can explain to him and what no layman, however conversant with the culture, can perceive—its basic structure. This structure cannot be seen. It is a set of abstractions, each of which, though derived, it is true, from analysis of observed behaviour, is fundamentally an imaginative construct of the anthropologist himself. By relating these abstractions to one another logically so that they present a pattern he can see the society in its essentials and as a single whole” (Social Anthropology and Other Essays [New York: Free Press, 1971], pp. 148-49; see also ibid., pp. 61-62). For a further discussion of this and related issues, see G. B. Madison, Understanding: A Phenomenological-Pragmatic Analysis (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982).

10. Gadamer speaks of an “inconsistency at the heart of Dilthey’s thought” and attributes this to “his latent Сartesianism” (“The Problem of Historical Consciousness,” sec. II: The Importance and Limits of Wilhelm Dilthey’s Work, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, New School for Social Research, Fall 1975, p. 20). At the end of his discussion of Dilthey, Gadamer remarks: “Dilthey’s effort to understand the human sciences through life, beginning from lived experience, is never really reconciled with the Cartesian concept of science which he did not know how to throw off. Emphasize as he might the contemplative tendencies of life itself, the attractions of something “solid ” that life involves, his concept of “objectivity, ” as he reduced it to the objectivity of “results, ” remains attached to an origin very different from lived experience. This is why he was unable to resolve the problem he had chosen: to justify the human sciences with the express purpose of making them equal to the natural sciences” (ibid., p. 23). This text has been reprinted in Interpretive Social Science: A Reader, ed. P. Rainbow and W. Sullivan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).

11. Ludwig Landgrebe, Husserl’s late assistant and the compiler of Husserl’s Experience and Judgment, says in this regard: “ . . . in the later Crisis Husserl found himself forced to strike out on a new path (whose novelty is once again partially obscured by the self-interpretation he gave it); . . . here, before the eyes of the reader, occurs the shipwreck of transcendental subjectivism, as both a nonhistorical apriorism and as the consummation of modern rationalism. Today primarily as a result of Heidegger’s work, the “end of metaphysics” is spoken of as if with a certain obviousness. We shall first properly understand the sense of such language if we follow closely how, in this work, metaphysics takes its departure behind Husserl’s back. One can state quite frankly that this work is the end of metaphysics in the sense that after it any further advance along the concepts and paths of thought from which metaphysics seeks forcefully to extract the most extreme possibilities is no longer possible. To be sure, neither Husserl nor those who were his students at that time were explicitly aware of this, and it will still require a long and intensive struggle of interpretation and continuing thoughtful deliberation until we have experienced everything that here comes to an end” (“Husserl’s Departure from Cartesianism,” in The Phenomenology of Husserl, ed. R. O. Elveton [Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970], p. 261 [“Husserls Abschied vom Cartesianismus,” Philosophische Rundschau IX, 1962]).

12. Husserl, Cartesian Meditiations, trans. D. Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), § 3, p. 7.

13. Husserl, “Phenomenology” (Encyclopaedia Britannica article), reprinted in Phenomenology and Existentialism, ed. R. Zaner and D. Ihde (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973), p. 68.

14. Ibid., p. 66.

15. Ibid.

16. Husserl, Ideas, trans. W. R. B. Gibson (New York: Collier Books, 1962), § 20, p. 78.

17. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p. 3.

18. Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic (The Hague: Martinus Nijhof, 1969), § 103, p. 272.

19. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, § 64, p. 152 [p. 178].

20. See Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. D. Carr (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970), § 9.

21. David Carr, Phenomenology and the Problem of History (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974), p. 131.

22. As Carr observes: “Husserl’s actual descriptions of the life-world at this stage in his argument proceed primarily by way of contrast to the mathematized world of the scientist. The scientific method is not an instrument for improivng our sight, something invented during the Renaissance along with the telescope, which enables us to put aside the world of appearances for good. It was and remains an idealizing construction based upon what is seen, and what is seen remains ever the same whether or not we are scientists who are engaged in such idealization. Above all, the life-world is a world of objects having both primary and secondary qualities, a world whose spatial features fall into vague and approximate types, not a world of geometrical idealities. While science operates with abstractions, the life-world is the concrete fullness from which these abstractions are derived; science constructs, and the life-world provides the materials of construction; the ideal character of scientific entities precludes their availability to sense-intuition, while the life-world is the field of intuition itself, the ‘universe of what is intuitable in principle,’ the ‘realm of original self-evidences,’ to which the scientist must return in order to verify his theories. Science interprets and explains what is given; the life-world is the locus of all givenness. The emphasis here is on the immediacy of life-world experience in contrast to the mediated character of scientific thought. The life-world is prior to science, prior to theory, not only historically but also epistemologically, even after the advent and rich development of scientific theory in the West” (ibid., pp. 136-37).

23. Gadamer, “The Science of the the Life-World,” in Analecta Husserliana, ed. Tymieniecka (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1972), vol. 2: pp. 183-84.

24. Ibid., p. 185.

25. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), p. xiv.

26. In Beyond Good and Evil (trans. W. Kaufmann [New York: Vintage Books, 1966], § 14), Nietzsche remarked: “It is perhaps just dawning on five or six minds that physics, too, is only an interpretation and exegesis of the world (to suit us, if I may say so!) and not a world-explanation; but insofar as it is based on belief in the senses, it is regarded as more, and for a long time to come must be regarded as more—namely, as an expianation.”

27. Gadamer, “On the Scope and Function of Hermeneutical Reflection,” in Philosophical Hermeneutics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976, p. 18.

28. Ibid., p. 19.

29. Gadamer, “The Universality of the Hermeneutical Problem,” in ibid., p. 3.

30. I use the word understanding, not knowledge, since understanding is a word which is phenomenologically intelligible in that it refers to a phenomenon in lived experience with which we are all familiar, whereas the word knowledge is a metaphysical-epistemological concept of dubious reference and usefulness.

31. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, p. 71.

32. Kuhn’s approach to science reflects the shift in hermeneutical theory as a whole away from the Enlightenment-Romantic tradition represented by Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Betti, and Hirsch, which is epistemological in the traditional sense to the movement of phenomenological hermeneutics represented by Gadamer, which is not a de jure inquiry into transcendental conditions of possibility but which seeks instead to determine what actually is the case and what has actually occurred when we claim to have understood.

33. Rom Harré, Personal Being (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 120. The works alluded to by Harré are B. Latour and S. Woolgar, Laboratory Life (Los Angeles: Sage, 1979) and K. Knorr-Cetina, The Manufacture of Knowledge (Oxford: Pergamon, 1981).

34. R. B. Braithwaite, Scientific Explanation (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1968), p. 12.

35. Gerald Holton, Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), p. 388.

36. Husserl, The Crisis, p. 295.

37. Ibid., pp. 272-73.

38. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973).

39. See my article, “Eine Kritik an Hirschs Begriff der ‘Richtigkeit,’ ” in Seminar: Die Hermeneutik und die Wissenschaften, ed. H.-.G. Gadamer and G. Boehm. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1978) (reprinted in this volume as essay 1).

40. See Paul Ricoeur, “Appropriation,” in Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. J. B. Thompson (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

41. See Ricoeur, “What Is a Text? Explanation and Understanding,” in ibid., p. 152, where Ricoeur says: “What we have called the eclipse of the surrounding world by the quasi-world of texts engenders two possibilities. We can, as readers, remain in the suspense of the text, treating it as a worldless and authorless object; in this case, we explain the text in terms of its internal relations, its structure. On the other hand, we can lift the suspense and fulfil the text in speech, restoring it to living communication; in this case, we interpret the text. These two possibilities both belong to reading, and reading is the dialectic of these two attitudes.” See also ibid., p. 158, where Ricoeur says that the goal of “interpretation” is appropriation, by which he means “that the interpretation of a text culminates in the self-interpretation of a subject who thenceforth understands himself better, understands himself differently, or simply begins to understand himself.”

42. Mario Valdés, “The Phenomenological Hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur as a Basis for Literary Criticism,” unpublished paper (subsequently published in Revue de l’Université d‘Ottawa/University of Ottawa Quarterly, vol. 55, no. 4, 1985; see p. 124; this issue of the Revue comprises papers presented at the international conference held in honor of Ricoeur, “À la recherche du sens/In Search of Meaning,” University of Ottawa, October 1983). As Ricoeur himself says: “ . . . explanation is nothing if it is not incorporated as an intermediary stage in the process of self-understanding” (“What Is a Text?” p. 159).

43. See ibid., p. 161.

44. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, § 14.

45. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, p. 30. In regard to the matter of “facts,” Geertz says: “ . . . what we call our data are really our own constructions of other peoples constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to” (ibid., p. 9). Geertz explicity compares the task of the ethnographer with that of the literary critic and says: “Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of ‘construct a reading of’) a manuscript . . . ” (ibid., p. 10). Geertz acknowledges his indebtedness to the work of Ricoeur.

46. Gadamer, “The Universality of the Hermeneutical Problem,” p. 15.

47. Ibid., pp. 15-16.

48. Harré, Personal Being, p. 58.

49. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p. 389.

50. Pierre Aubenque, “Évolution et constantes de la pensée dialectique,” Les Études philosophiques, juillet-septembre 1970, p. 301.