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When is a phenomenologist being hermeneutical?

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Abstract

Many philosophers of science and technology who see themselves as coming “after” Husserl also claim that their phenomenology is hermeneutical. Yet they neither practice the same sort of phenomenology, nor do they all have the same understanding of hermeneutics. Moreover, their differences often seem to be more a function of different pre-selected substantive commitments—say, to take a “material” turn or to be resolutely “empirical”—than the product of any serious effort to clarify what it is be hermeneutical. In this essay, after some discussion of Dilthey’s reception among post-Husserlians (especially Patrick Heelan and Don Ihde), I consider how aspiring hermeneuts might make their own pre-possession of substantive and methodological commitments a hermeneutical topic. This is, of course, is not just a scholarly question of how post-Husserlian phenomenologists might make themselves more phenomenological. Without thoughtful self-awareness of these commitments, one’s assumptions about the use of technology, design, the place of science in the larger culture and in relation to conceptions of human flourishing—all of these assumptions are likely to pass through into technoscientific practice with insufficient critical consideration.

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Notes

  1. In reply to my earlier comments on his Expanding Hermeneutics (1998), Ihde says I misunderstand both his criticism of Dilthey and his own intentions, and Jan Kyrre Berg Olsen Friis concludes that I seem to believe an Ihdean hermeneutics can never replace the more traditional philosophies of science that even Husserl already went partway toward rejecting (Friis 2012: 267–268, 249). I don’t think any of this is true.

  2. Husserl (1983: 44, author’s italics omitted, emphasis supplied, translation altered to emphasize Husserl’s reflexive use of variants of “geben”). The trouble starts on the very next page, when he adds that regarding “every principle and every cognition of essence without exception,” the principle itself “is not itself given with insight in experience” (45). Here starts Husserl’s lifelong distrust of “staying with experience” instead of taking a proper “distance” from it...and thus also the young Heidegger’s virtually immediate recognition that he could never be Husserl’s protégé because, as he had already learned from Dilthey, this distrust is unnecessary (Scharff 2019a: 37–41, 160–161).

  3. See, e.g., Ihde (2012: esp. Ch. 4); and Rosenberger and Verbeek (2015: Ch. 1, esp. 25–30).

  4. Smith (2018: 113–118). For the sake of completeness, we should add “material,” “pragmatic,” and “terrestrial” turns (e.g., respectively, Ihde 2005; Hickman 2008; Lemmens et al. 2017).

  5. Granted, from this perspective all phenomena get “covered” in some but in some quasi-objectivist sense, but is their presence to a transcendentally trained consciousness the same as the fully “present” disclosure of themselves as themselves, in their own terms. Here, the echo of the modern magic in terms like neutral, distanced, and value-free keep all philosophers of consciousness from taking to heart the fact that “even unbiased seeing is a seeing and as such has its position of looking and indeed has it in a distinctive manner, i.e., by having explicitly appropriated it so that it has been critically purged.” The very idea of a position that is “freedom from all standpoints...is itself something historical...not a chimerical in-itself outside of time” (Heidegger 1999: 64).

  6. Good sources for this story which approach the issue from the standpoint of “expanding” the Diltheyean/Heideggerian conception of hermeneutics from its role in the natural sciences to other human practices and phenomena include Babich (2016: 492–504); Eger 2006; and Crease 1993.

  7. The relation between Husserl’s phenomenology and Dilthey’s hermeneutics is by no means a settled issue. Some, like Ricoeur, have argued that Husserl’s phenomenology, insofar as he describes it as involving Auslegung, is already hermeneutical. Others draw a sharper line between Husserl and Heidegger, given more radical construals of the importance of Dilthey and Heidegger’s explicit distancing of their work from Husserl’s. See, e.g., Figal (2012: 525–545); and de Mul (2004: 287–338).

  8. Although Heelan makes some references to Dilthey and Gadamer, his initial source appears to be Gerard Radnitzky, where Gadamer and Karl-Otto Apel are the central figures and Dilthey receives sparse mention (Radnitzky 1968: 19–40; Radnitzky 1972: 211–232). As a result, his conception of Heidegger’s Being-question remains shaped more by the Husserlian notion of regional ontologies and the modern, methodological idea of universal hermeneutics than by Heidegger’s own conception of a rethinking of the whole Western tradition’s mainstream understanding of ontology. See, e.g., Heelan (1997) and Heelan (1988).

  9. Heelan (1983a: esp. Chs. 13 and 16); and Heelan (1989). As Babich notes, it is especially in relation to the fact that scientific practice involves a real, embodied, technology-dependent being-with-things that both Cartesian philosophy of science and the traditional hermeneutics of texts fail to be phenomenological (Babich 2016).

  10. Heelan (2014: 109); also, e.g., Heelan (1989); and Heelan (1983a). And of course, once “consciousness” is placed back into the lifeworld, there is nothing to stop philosophical hermeneutics from studying its “mediating role” in non-scientific practices as well (Heelan 2009).

  11. There was a time, however, when he was willing to say that hermeneutic phenomenology not only enriches the epistemologies of late modem hermeneutics but must also show how scientific knowledge and cultural knowledge are both derived from (human) ontology (Ihde 1999: 345–351).

  12. I have discussed elsewhere the connection between the ahistorical bias of mainstream philosophy of science and the analytic tradition’s self-deceptive assumption that one can get over its long-standing division between “interesting” history and real philosophy by simply praising both (Scharff 2015: 4–14).

  13. Ihde (1998: 39–49, 143). The issues are more complicated here than Ihde lays out, and I will come back to this. His aim is to work out a “return to the lifeworld” that is, contra Husserl, existential and pragmatic, and that has, contra “modern” philosophy (in either the empiricist or rationalist sense), a basically trusting regard for our capacity to thrive without the production of external-causal explanations of the nature of human life or normative-theoretical judgments about how to make it healthy. Karl-Otto Apel, one of the “older” hermeneuts against whom Ihde contrasts his own outlook, argues that this trust is naïve and unjustified and calls for a social science that interprets human affairs in the same way natural science does natural things. This sociological extension of “the rationality of reconstructive understanding” appears to Apel as “the only possible way of continuing and expanding the Enlightenment beyond its natural scientific orientation into the sociocultural domain to which natural science itself, as a human activity, belongs” (Apel 1984: 249). Hence in spite of his denials, this leaves Apel—albeit with much greater sophistication—in the same basic structural position as neo-positivists. To be sure, instead of demoting Verstehen to a merely “motivational” tool that prepares social scientists for research on thoughts and feelings (Abel 1948, 1975), he wants to give social science and social “critique” an epistemologically equal role. But this leaves him, as it does the neo-positivists, reflectively facing toward the task of hermeneutics from an explanatory-scientific perspective—only in his case with the addition of a social to the natural kind of “science”—and arguing that “social scientific explanation of action is [im]possible without the...heuristic understanding of grounds, maxims, etc.” that hermeneutic research provides (Apel 1984: 261n.5). Hence, where Ihde sees the main issue as modern philosophy’s “theoretical” refusal to be “concrete” enough about technological life, Apel is concerned primarily about the ethical and political relativism that Ihde’s turning away from [real, explanatory] science appears to make inevitable.

  14. For his evidence, Ihde usually cites Kuhnian historians, “non-Mertonian” sociologists, feminist philosophers of science, strong-program social constructivists like Bloor, and the laboratory-life studies of Knorr-Cetina and Latour and Woolgar (Ihde 1998: 143–150; Crease 1997: 111–123); but it is not always easy to determine from his discussions which sources were Ihde’s influences and which were added later as providing more evidence for the conclusions he has already drawn.

  15. In Ihde 1998, as in much of his other work until very recently, his primary focus has been on visual perception, especially in laboratory practices and everyday work and play, but he warns readers that even if his pan-scientific outlook shows all science to be a “visual praxis,” this does not mean that he was ever an ocularcentrist about life, or that the time has now come to switch to “otocentrism” instead (Ihde 1998: 4; Ihde 2016a:, xiii)

  16. Ihde (1998, esp. Chs. 13 & 14, cited, 40). The subtitle of a forthcoming book shows how deeply his critique of Dilthey’s hermeneutics as fundamentally “textual” goes: Material Hermeneutics: Reversing the Linguistic Turn. Those familiar with Ihde’s career will know that my necessarily condensed account of his position draws primarily from later works that presuppose a thoroughly post-Husserlian outlook, where criticism overwhelms earlier praise for Heidegger, gestures toward Dewey are stronger and more frequent, and the “materiality” of technoscientific life receives ever-greater emphasis.

  17. Heelan (1983a, b: 20–21, 244–245, 264–266). Just how close this puts him to pragmatists like Dewey on the one side or operationalists like Bridgman on the other is not clear.

  18. As far as I can tell, e.g., most of Heelan’s discussions of Gadamer’s “hermeneutical circle” of interpretation are later rather than earlier, and even there it is in a combination of Husserlian and traditionalist language that he draws on it. Each circle, he says, occurs as a “sequence of four phases—a. experiencing/observing , b. theory-making , c. theory-testing , and d. deciding— each phase giving access to new insights; each cycle leading to a partially transformed beginning of a new cycle in which further development is made. Each cycle revises and improves the previous cycles of inquiry until the basic queries have been sufficiently explored dialogically” (Heelan 2014: 95).

  19. Some may find it surprising that I stay with Dilthey here, instead of moving directly to Gadamer’s idea of the “universality of the hermeneutical problem” (Gadamer 1976: 3–17). To my knowledge, a careful and extended study of Gadamer’s relation to Dilthey is still to be written. Here I mention just two reasons why I prefer to proceed through Dilthey rather than Gadamer for present purposes. First, I don’t agree with Gadamer that the philosophical task of the modern age is “to reconnect the objective world of technology, which the sciences place at our disposal and discretion, with those fundamental orders of our being that are neither arbitrary nor manipulable by us, but rather simply demand our respect (Gadamer 1976: 3–4). Second, I don’t agree that Dilthey’s most basic ideas are grounded in a “commitment to an encyclopedia of the science of the human being, which, so to speak, would be an anthropology based on empirical and historical foundations” (Gadamer 2016: 77). The first statement sets up a dualistic model of inquiry that proceeds from thinking of scientific and non-scientific “orders of our being” without first asking how they can both be considered “orders of our being” at all. The second speaks of a commitment in which a “completed science of history would [still] be the exposition and explanation of the complex of human culture,” which leaves the status of science and technology in our technoscientific age problematic. The Dilthey I am analyzing here is, as I think Heidegger saw, not well-represented by either statement.

  20. There is some evidence that Dilthey himself was beginning to raise this question in his later years, especially in relation to his consideration of the “standpoint of life” from which not only the human sciences but the natural sciences both appear as expressions of life (Lebensäuβerungen). For discussion see Scharff 2019a, b: 49–73, which I draw on in the following paragraphs.

  21. Letter to Georg Misch, November 11, 1930; quoted in Sandmeyer 2009: 169.

  22. For Dilthey, says Heidegger, “life in history was itself an existential possibility that he himself lived, albeit a possibility that did not become totally clear to him since he himself is still caught up in the traditional consideration of history” (Heidegger 2005: 66–67, my emphasis).

  23. In other words, he lived this possibility mainly through the creative rearticulation of an epistemologically inspired task, and this was not enough to prompt him to explicitly consider “the question of what historical existence as such looks like.” As the determinate historical being he was, “he did not have any possibilities of even posing this question” (Heidegger 2005: 66–67; cf., Heidegger 1999: 11).

  24. Dilthey (2010: 2–3), my emphasis. The young Heidegger calls this “dominant impulse” Dilthey’s “basic philosophical [or motivational] tendency” (Scharff 2019a, b: xvii–xix, 133–140).

  25. Dilthey (2002: 226–227). What Dilthey here calls reasoning in its “diluted” form, he elsewhere identifies as the source of only one of three sorts of life expression—namely, “expressions of cognition,” which consists of “concepts, judgments, and larger thought-formations” designed to process logical and mathematical ideas and to represent the reality that appears to technologically enhanced observation. The main feature of these expressions, he says, is their studied remoteness from life. Cognitive expressions are deliberately and systematically “detached from the experience in which they arose, and…adapted to logical norms,” in order to ensure that their decontextualized meaning “is the same for the one who formulates them and the one who understands them” (Dilthey 2002: 222–228; 338–342).

  26. This account of explanation does not make Dilthey a social constructivist. In his defense of the possibility of a human scientific understanding of natural scientific practice, he neither (a) substitutes a socio-historical account for the positivists’ formal-logical one, nor (b) regards his account of this practice as fundamentally causal.

  27. Dilthey’s idea of a reflective self-awareness (Selbstbesinnung) that seeks “the foundation for action as well as for thought” by cultivating an explicit concern for “differentiating among the facts of consciousness as well as the articulations based on this differentiation” can be found very early in his writings—e.g., in the “Breslau Draft” (circa 1880), intended as Book Four, Section One, of volume two of the Introduction (Dilthey 1989: 268). For background—and a strong reminder that Dilthey never thought of himself as primarily just an epistemologist of a second kind of science—see Makkreel 1992: 423–434.

  28. In this direction, says Heidegger, lies the possibility of turning hermeneutics from an epistemic possibility taken up by the human sciences into an ontological characteristic of human practice in all its modes.

  29. See my discussion of Ihde’s recent attempts to infuse postphenomenology with Deweyan pragmatism and vice versa (Scharff 2020).

  30. Although I cannot discuss it here, both Dilthey’s conception of Besinnung and Merleau-Ponty’s idea of philosophical self-understanding must be sharply distinguished from the traditional theory for Reflexion. The latter depends upon the imagery of distancing one’s thinking from lived experience for the sake of developing an epistemological standpoint from which to judge it, and the understanding of “who” does this is thoroughly Cartesian (as is the companion notion of introspection, which varies the imagery of this theory by supposing that self-awareness is a kind of “inner” perception that runs parallel to external observation and reports on the all the aspects of subjective life that are of no interest to Reflexion). The sort of self-awareness that Dilthey and Merleau-Ponty are cultivating is, like the young Heidegger’s “following along with environmental life as it is lived,” something more like a beefed-up version of the awareness that commonly accompanies thought and action in ordinary life, which has no fixed intentions regarding what to think or do in relation to that life. See also n. 32; and Scharff 2019a, b: 60–62, 123–124, 141–143, 156–157).

  31. Merleau-Ponty (1968: 3). There is a remarkable similarity here between Merleau-Ponty’s conception of phenomenology’s need to “ceaselessly...reinspect and refine” its outlook, and the young Heidegger’s idea that a hermeneutic phenomenologist as forever “sinking back down into environmental life” in order to “experientially go along with experience in various ways” and avoid theoretically “assaulting” this experience with a pre-established method—as one endeavors at the same time to give phenomenological accounts of life’s own movement toward “conceptually intensified” articulations, without “losing touch” with the experience that motivates these intensifications (e.g., Heidegger 2000: 98–99, 188; Heidegger 2013: 192; and Scharff 2019a, b: 101–104).

  32. In The Visible and the Invisible, “how to philosophize phenomenologically” is called “philosophical interrogation.” Its finished portion considers everywhere how even the “conscientious rejection” of a Cartesian (or otherwise un-phenomenological) outlook is by itself unlikely to prevent its continuation. His much earlier Phenomenology of Perception (2012), which he sometimes said later was not yet a philosophical book, is a good example. It is, as everyone knows, filled with beautiful phenomenological descriptions of this and that; but the book is still structured like a Cartesian treatise—sensation, association, judgment, the body, perception, world, cogito, time, freedom, all ordered (as the table of contents says) as a response to the modern tradition and its “classical prejudices.” If, e.g., one were to have structured the book in terms of what is disclosed when one starts with the experience of being-in-the-world, would there still be no systematic description of the socio-cultural dimension of “perception”? Is this silence the sign of an inherited individualist tradition or the true condition of the lifeworld? This is what the later works suggest.

  33. This idea is wonderfully spelled out in Gendlin (2018), where the concept of “agreement” is displaced by an image of phenomenological conversation that is much more appropriate to the relation between experience and its conceptualizations than the representationalist one. Two phenomenologists can be “right” in giving different accounts of the same “matter,” precisely because phenomenologists do not have a standpoint from nowhere.

  34. In Heidegger’s hyperbole, then, every deliberate, guideline-directed “taking-up of a standpoint is a sin against [phenomenology’s] ownmost spirit” (Heidegger 2000: 110).

  35. In the young Heidegger’s language, “the very idea of phenomenology, of an original science, and thereby of its guiding tendency is not [something that can be] thought up or posited through some [allegedly] illuminating discovery” from a certain “standpoint” (Heidegger 2013: 66, translation altered). Indeed, in the end, it is this insight that brought Heidegger to the recognition of what’s wrong with calling phenomenology an Urwissenschaft.

  36. Heidegger (2013: 192; cf., Heidegger 2000: 116–17). Diltheyan phrases like “staying with life,” “understanding life from out of its own origin,” “going along with factical life” are common expressions in several of Heidegger’s early lecture courses—in a significant number of places, clearly being utilized to highlight his non-Husserlian understanding of hermeneutics.

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    Robert C. Scharff

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Scharff, R.C. When is a phenomenologist being hermeneutical?. AI & Soc 38, 2279–2293 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-020-00990-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-020-00990-4

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