Abstract
The following paper is an attempt to draft an outline of the meaning and aim of a hermeneutical ontology, based upon a critical appropriation of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. In the first part of this paper I sketch aspects of Husserl’s phenomenological ontology insofar as it forms a central historical presupposition of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. In the second part I review Heidegger’s criticisms of Husserl’s project and present the basic contours of the hermeneutical phenomenology that Heidegger regards as the method proper to a fundamental ontology. In the third and final part, drawing on Heidegger’s hermeneutics and plan of a fundamental ontology, I sketch the project of hermeneutic ontology, conceived as, at once, an ontology of interpretation and an interpretation of ontology – where the historical character of both interpretation and ontology underlies their mutual entailment. Hermeneutic ontology, so conceived, is a fundamental ontology inasmuch as every ontology is an interpretation and hermeneutic ontology interprets interpretation’s distinctive manner of being. However, hermeneutic ontology, while fundamental in this sense, far from ruling out ontological pluralism, supposes the relative autonomy of ontological investigations distinct from it. Interpretation, after all, is only one manner of being among others, even though the determination of the latter remains a matter of interpretation. In conclusion I indicate basic parallels with Gadamer’s ‘hermeneutical ontology’ and the distinctive role he assigns to language in elaborating the notion.
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Notes
- 1.
Though the coinage of the term ‘ontology’ is relatively modern, investigation of this sort is akin to medieval philosophers’ preoccupation with determining the basic categories or predicates (praedicamenta) of things, the basic ways of being able to predicate one thing of another (praedicabilia), as well as those terms like ‘thing’ or ‘being’ itself that are predicated across the basic categories, the so-called ‘transcendentals’. The discipline of ontology also has obvious roots in Aristotle’s metaphysics or, more precisely, in disambiguating Aristotle’s sometimes confusing remarks about the subject matter of metaphysics. This confusion led Islamic philosophers, at least as they were read by Latin authors, to differing accounts of that subject matter, depending upon whether theology or what was subsequently deemed ‘ontology’ is its center of gravity. Telling in this connection is the question with which Duns Scotus opens his commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics: “Utrum subiectum metaphysicae sit ens inquantum ens, sicut posuit Avicenna, vel Deus et intelligentiae sicut posuit Commentator Averroes?” See Scotus (1893, p. 11). In this traditional context, ontology corresponds to the sort of discipline entailed by the metaphysical investigation of on he on (ens inquantum ens) which might be translated ‘being as being’ or, perhaps more clearly, ‘beings insofar as they exist.’ This translation, for which I am indebted to John Tomarchio, complements Aristotle’s differentiation of metaphysics from other disciplines, including mathematics, that study only parts of beings, in detachment from their existence; see Metaphysics Γ, 1 (1003a21-31).
- 2.
Insofar as a description is made with a view to possible explanation, the description has an explanatory bias.
- 3.
Husserl (1980, 115ff, 139ff). As the cited sections make clear, the essences described in transcendental phenomenology are fundamentally distinct from those of other eidetic disciplines, such as mathematics.
- 4.
Husserl in effect follows Aristotle’s advice that the subject matter dictates the method and mode of knowing it. See Smith and Smith (1995, p. 32): “In the three books of the Ideas, Husserl argued that to every domain of objects there is correlated a form of ‘intuition’ (Anschauung) through which we come to know the given objects in the most adequate achievable way. Observations in nature are known through perception, acts of consciousness are known through phenomenological reflection, values are known through emotions, other people’s experiences are known through empathy, ideal species or essences are known through ‘eidetic variation,’ and so on.”
- 5.
Husserl (1980, p. 323). Robert Poli advances a related but more comprehensive distinction between domain-dependent and domain-independent as well as between descriptive and formal ontologies. Poli also helpfully distinguishes a formalized ontology from formal ontologies, labeling the latter ‘categorial’ ontologies in order to avoid confusion of them with formalized ontologies; see Poli (2003).
- 6.
This criticism is interesting given the fact that Husserl does take pains to demonstrate how one would proceed to arrive at essential features (namely, the method of free variation) and given the paucity of argumentation provided by Heidegger for his own choice of the themes relevant to his fundamental ontology.
- 7.
This is a recurrent theme of Heidegger’s first Marburg lectures where he criticizes Husserl’s appropriation of the Cartesian tradition and a concern with securing “already known knowledge” (Heidegger 1994, pp. 56–59). By contrast, Heidegger attempts to link his own version of phenomenology to the “productive logic” of Plato and Aristotle (Heidegger 1972, p. 10).
- 8.
While there is much to recommend this critique, it is in some respects disingenuous inasmuch as Husserl himself emphasizes the horizonal, never fully adequate character of perception, an emphasis upon which Heidegger undoubtedly draws when he insists that being is not to be equated with presence; see Husserl (1950, p. 62); for a balanced treatment of Heidegger’s critique of Husserl in this connection, see Gadamer (1972, pp. 241–250).
- 9.
In other words, if ontology is the study of what is, it presupposes not only an account of what there is and the various ways of approaching the subject matter, but also an understanding of what it means to say that something is or exists. Precisely at this juncture Heidegger introduces his notion of fundamental ontology, the path to which is an existential analysis conducted as a hermeneutic phenomenology. In the 1930s Heidegger makes this distinction more perspicuous, distinguishing Western metaphysics’ leading question of what there is from the basic question of what being is.
- 10.
It bears emphasizing that addressing this question, far from ruling out traditional ontological considerations of what there is, entails considerations of this sort, a point that Heidegger comes to concede, at least in lectures, in the years immediately following the publication of Sein und Zeit; see his discussion of ‘metontology’ in his 1928 lectures (Heidegger 1990, p. 199). I return to this issue which concerns the precise nature of a fundamental ontology, relative to other ontologies, in the final paragraph of this study.
- 11.
For Heidegger, these different senses correspond to his differentiation of a primary, existentially pre-ontological sense of ‘understanding’ from derivative, existentielly ontic (practical and theoretical) senses and a derivative, existentially ontological sense (the formal ontology to be derived from the existential analysis of Sein und Zeit).
- 12.
In Heidegger’s eyes, one of Husserl’s central ‘mistakes,’ a mistake that he shares with most traditional ontologists in the history of philosophy, consists precisely in privileging this derivative sense of understanding over the practical understanding of entities and the primary preontological understanding of being that it supposes. Theoretical understanding, nevertheless, has, in Heidegger’s eyes, “the legitimate task of grasping what is on hand” (Heidegger 1972, p. 153).
- 13.
Since it is an understanding that coincides with how being matters to us as existing in a world, it also discloses and even expresses senses of being of various entities within the world and, indeed, does so in terms of how we relate to them. But here, too, they are senses of being that cannot be equated with the presence or accessibility of things. For example, being pre-disposed to one’s environment we find things fearful, accommodating, alluring and the like, precisely inasmuch as they are not fully present or on hand. Something is ominous only as long as it remains impending; something is desirable only as long as the desire for it is not fulfilled.
- 14.
To translate this characteristic into the framework of modalities: Possibility in the existential sense of the term is more fundamental than actuality or necessity. Death itself has a singular, existential significance for us, not as something actual, but as the possibility of the end our possibilities.
- 15.
The sort of individual discernment, expert knowledge, and intuitive insight so fundamental to Husserl’s phenomenological method is not discarded but reinscribed in an emotive, shared understanding, in Heidegger’s analysis. Intuitions, observations, discernments are part of a process by which human beings, like other animals, orient themselves in their environments with one another for the sake of certain aims; so the intuitions of individuals are always derivative of an emotive process of coping with the environment and understanding how (having the know-how) to do so as a member of a family or group. Heidegger accordingly urges this sort of reinterpretation of intuition, removing it and its variants from a foundational position and placing it in the historical lived experience of human beings.
- 16.
In keeping with the history of the term, I take ‘hermeneutics’ to designate a theory, practice, and art of interpretation. Theoretical hermeneutics (the ontology of interpretation) provides an account of what constitutes an interpretation, while ‘hermeneutical practice’ designates a mode of interpreting informed by some conception of what constitutes an interpretation, and ‘hermeneutical art’ the mastery of a hermeneutical practice.
- 17.
According to Gadamer, Heidegger recognizes that the thrownness and facticity of one’s being form the bedrock of all understanding, a recognition that accounts for his break with Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology (Gadamer 1972, 249f).
- 18.
The activity is an attempt to disclose or unpack what is understood more or less vaguely or, at least, inattentively and unthematically, perhaps even improperly. A great deal of our everyday behavior is, as has already been stressed, rote, marked by a tacit understanding of what we are doing, the things of which we avail ourselves in order to do it, and the setting within which we do it. We understand what we are doing in the course of doing it precisely by way of projecting possibilities realized and realizable by the actions. The respective possibilities, like the actions themselves, are typically ordered in some purposive way (e.g., I pick the hammer up by the handle, lifting it at a certain angle, relative to the nail between my fingers, and the wood beneath them, and so on) and, of course, they can turn out to be quite harmful or inappropriate. To paraphrase Kant’s old saw, interpretation without understanding is empty, understanding without interpretation is blind.
- 19.
The forward movement of interpretation is not the same as either a teleological or a teleonomic movement.
- 20.
For this reason, this account of the ontology of interpretation, as noted earlier, does not exclude the ascertainment of covering laws of explanation and other iterable patterns, but entails the notion that their measure of validity is tied to a convention-driven abstractness and ideality relative to the helical character of interpretation.
- 21.
There is a sense in which, given the historicity of interpretation and the interpretive helix, hermeneutic ontology – much like Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology of human existence – is a distinctive form of possibilism, where the possibilities that are fundamental are existential.
- 22.
Hermeneutic ontology does address a phenomenon that contains in some sense the conditions of the possibility of explanation, including scientific explanation. These conditions are historical, i.e., they are received but precisely in the course of being enacted and this enactment (projection of received possibilities as one’s own) can but need not take the form of a theoretical reflection. Hermeneutic ontology cannot be conceived in a purely theoretical manner if theory is presumed to be able to abstract from traditions received or from the aims of the theory, i.e., the extra-theoretical purposes that the theory serves and, indeed, perhaps is meant to serve. For this reason hermeneutic ontology also views suspiciously conceptions of ontology as a purely descriptive not explanatory enterprise, at least inasmuch as those descriptions are designed to serve the purposes of explanation, purposes typically but not exclusively attributable to the conscious or unconscious intentions of the theoreticians themselves. See Heidegger’s critique of Husserl along these lines; descriptions for the sake of explanation are no more pure descriptions of things than description for the sake of persuasion.
- 23.
While disputing talk about the ‘world in itself’ (including scientific claims to objectivity), Gadamer’s hermeneutical ontology espouses the fundamental character of “the linguistic character of our experience of the world, prior to everything that is recognized and articulated as being” (Gadamer 1972, p. 426).
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Dahlstrom, D.O. (2010). Hermeneutic Ontology. In: Poli, R., Seibt, J. (eds) Theory and Applications of Ontology: Philosophical Perspectives. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8845-1_17
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