Part Three. Body and Methodology
6. From Schlichte Wahrnehmung to Hermeneutical Sehen als…
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6. From Schlichte Wahrnehmung to Hermeneutical Sehen als…
What are the philosophical rationales of the hermeneutical method of Auslegung practiced by Gadamer?
In the previous chapter, we saw how Gadamer openly follows Augustine in elaborating his hermeneutically reflected concept of language (Sprache). One customary way of presenting this legacy is to say that Gadamer follows Heidegger in doing so. According to Grondin (and Gadamer518), Heidegger discovered in Augustine the hermeneutical dimension of the Sinn des Daseins. Augustine becomes for Heidegger the first real Vollzugdenker of hermeneutics. In Augustine, writes Grondin, citing Heidegger's Ontologie der Faktizität (1923), "gibt die erste 'Hermeneutik' großen Stils".519 Augustine offers the first existential and all‐embracing hermeneutics: Dasein comes to care for its being in and through the reading of the scripture (in contrast to, for instance, Schleiermacher's subsequent hermeneutics wherein hermeneutics is reduced to a "Kunst (Kunstlehre) des Verstehens".520) Citing Augustine (On Christian Doctrine), Heidegger writes:
"'A man fearing God diligently seeks His will in the Holy Scriptures. And lest he should love controversy, he is made gently in piety. He is prepared with a knowledge of languages lest he be impeded by unknown words and locutions. He is also prepared with an acquaintance with certain necessary things lest he be unaware of their force and nature when they are used for purposes of similarity."521 In line with our hermeneutical reading of Augustine's The Trinity, Heidegger saw the Wie des Faktizität here evolving in the Vollzug of the Word.522 Reading, in the form of a committed engagement with a text of ontological value (cf. the Bible) is what makes the existential Wie of Dasein emerge. "Dieses Wie," Grondin explains,
"dieses Sein‐können läßt sich nur als Vollzug ansprechen, denn es geht nicht um eine feststellbare Tatsache, um ein 'Objekt', das mir gegenüberstünde, sondern um eine Aufgabe, die ich aufzunehmen habe, die ich aber auch verfehlen kann, indem ich mich von anderen Beschäftigungen ablenken lasse, ablenken nämlich von der zentralen Frage, die ich für mich selbst bin."523 The Wie of facticity is not a positive fact, but the enigma of self‐understanding.
Grondin tracks down the Augustinian impact into the famous opening of Sein und Zeit, wherein Heidegger takes recourse to the Seinendes of which "in seinem Sein um dieses Sein geht".524 Entailed in Heidegger's recourse to the Frage, Grondin demonstrates, is a revitalized turn towards the Augustinian
518 Gadamer, "Erinnerungen an Heideggers Anfänge (1986)." 21.
519 Heidegger, Ontologie der Faktizität. 12.
520 Ibid. 13.
521 Ibid. 12. Heidegger cites Augustine in Latin – the current English translation is from Jean Grondin, Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1994). 33.
522 Point taken from Jean Grondin, Von Heidegger zu Gadamer (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2001).
73.
523 Ibid. 73.
524 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2006). 12.
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enigma of humans.525 Gadamer, according to Grondin's reading, follows Heidegger in the opening of his magnum opus of 1960. The very first sentence of Wahrheit und Methode, wherein Gadamer calls for the
"hermeneutische Problem",526 is a re‐evoking of Heidegger‐Augustine. The Wie of Gadamer's hermeneutical phenomenon – how it is handed over by tradition as a methodological crisis within the Geisteswissenschaften – is Gadamer's version of the Heidegger‐Augustinian Seinendes of which "in seinem Sein um dieses Sein geht." In what we saw in Part Two, Sprache comes to harbor the ultimate Wie of understanding. The Sinn of language is the all‐encompassing structure which motivates and accomplishes the understanding of the individual. Accordingly, by the logic included here, describing the eidetic aspects of Sprache is indirectly to describe the moments necessarily involved in any act of understanding – the embodied experiences as well as anything else.
We recognize from Subsection 4c how Gadamer's Text concept is entangled with the hermeneutical narrative thus indicated by Grondin.527 Gadamer emphasizes in numerous works how the hermeneutical Text concept is a reflected concept occuring out of tradition. Not only are Plato and Augustine echoed here.
According to Gadamer's overviews,528 the hermeneutical Text concept is an accomplishment [Vollzug] of a development occuring in the fuller tradition of Bible exegesis, the practice of jurisdiction, as well as the contribution of numerous other philosophers of which Heidegger represents the apex. It was Heidegger's achievement, writes Gadamer, to draw out the existential dimension latent in the text conceptions inherited from tradition. Heidegger saw the latent path of reading in writers like Augustine and accomplished it in the fuller existential explications of phenomenology and hermeneutics.529
However, there is at least one complicating factor occurring in the middle of Grondin's, Gadamer's, and Heidegger's shared narrative. Without thereby questioning the legitimacy of their hermeneutical reasoning, their ways of conceiving the hermeneutical recourse to Augustine and Text can hardly be said to be the whole story. As we will come to see in the current section, when Heidegger, in 1923, approaches Augustine and discovers here, as Grondin put it, the hermeneutical Wie der Faktizität, Heidegger does so (among the multiple other analyses undertaken in these early years) by a certain analysis of perception.
Heidegger's recourse to texts and tradition is entangled with a specific way of conceiving Wahrnehmung.
The hermeneutical way of reading (for instance) Augustine is permeated with a premise established in a distinctive way of conceiving embodied experience. To understand how and why, we need to begin with the beginning, which in the context of the nearer phenomenological traditions means Husserl's Logische Untersuchungen.
525 Grondin, Von Heidegger zu Gadamer. Chapter III Heidegger und Augustine zur hermeneutischen Wahrheit. The current
point is taken from 72.
526 Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode. Einleitung. 1.
527 Grondin discusses and nuances Gadamer's quasi‐teleological narrative of accomplishment. Grondin, Introduction to
Philosophical Hermeneutics. 3 ff. Grondin does not scrutinize the phenomenological premises involved in the narrative the way we intend to do here, however. On Grondin's reading of Gadamer, see Subsection 13a below.
528 Cf. Gadamer, "Text und Interpretation (1983)." 330–333.
529 Ibid. 333.
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aa. Kategoriale Anschauung (Husserl 1900‐1901)
We turn to Book II, Chapter Six of Husserl's Logische Untersuchungen, entitled Sinnliche und Kategoriale Anschauungen, and read some pages of pivotal value in our context. Initially, Husserl investigates the relationship between meaning‐intentionality [Bedeutungsintention] of linguistic expressions and what is meant with the word, the designated object [Gegenstand]. What, Husserl asks, does it imply to express [Ausdrücken] that one sees something: for instance, a white paper? Observing that the word white surely expresses the fact that the paper is white, Husserl rejects the idea that there exists a complete covering [bloße Deckung530] or parallelism531 between the meaning‐intentionality and object.532 Recognizing [Erkennen] the fact that the white paper is white, the intentionality necessarily contains something more than a direct covering of intention and the object. "Gewiß kann man verständlich und für den Hörenden eindeutig sagen, ich sehe, daß dieses Papier weiß ist", Husserl writes; "aber die Meinung dieser Rede muß es nicht sein, daß die Bedeutung des ausgesprochenen Satzes einem bloßen Sehen Ausdruck gebe."533 White paper does not mean – exclusively – "white paper",: "Weißes, d.h. weiß seiendes Papier."534 The being of the white paper is also implied in the meaning‐intentionality expressing that the paper is white.
This phenomenological observation leads Husserl to the conclusion that the intentional act in question implies a certain surplus (Überschuss) of intentions. Hidden (Verborgen535) in the in the Bedeutungsintention is more than what we strictly speaking see. "Die Intention das Wortes weiß deckt sich nur partiell mit dem Farbenmoment des erscheinenden Gegenstandes, es bleibt ein Überschuss in der Bedeutung, eine Form, die in der Erscheinung selbst nicht findet, sich darin zu bestätigen."536 In other words, both in the initial perceptual intentionality of the white paper, and in the expression of this fact, is something more than what can be confirmed in direct reference to the object.
In Husserl's analysis, the intentional surplus becomes an indication of a categorial level [Stufe] of perception. Husserl observes that the intentional act of being cannot be fulfilled [erfüllt] in what he calls schlichte [mere or simple] Wahrnehmung.537 "Sein sei schlechthin nichts Wahrnehmbares,"538 he writes.539
"Die Farbe kann ich sehen, nicht aber das Farbig‐sein. Die Glätte kann ich fühlen, nicht aber das Glatt‐sein.
Den Ton kann ich hören, nicht aber das Tönend‐sein."540 The categorial reality of being is in the meaning
530 Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen. 659.
531 Ibid. 661.
532 Ibid. 659.
533 Ibid. 660. Italics original.
534 Ibid. 660.
535 Ibid. 660.
536 Ibid. 660. Italics added.
537 "Die Erfüllungsform der schlichten Wahrnehmung kann als solche Formen offenbar nicht hinanreichen." ibid. 660.
538 Ibid. 666.
539 Cf. Heidegger, Prolegomena. 79 ff.
540 Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen. 666. Cf. "Hier erinnern wir uns an den Kantschen Satz: Das Sein ist kein reales Prädikat." ibid. 665.
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intentionality, and apparently it says something true regarding the object, yet it cannot be accomplished in mere perception.
What is the status of the categorial level exemplified with being? Husserl rejects the idea that being is located somewhere in or by the object. "[Sein ist] keine Qualität oder Intensivität, aber auch keine Figur, keine innere Form überhaupt, kein wie immer zu fassendes konstitutives Merkmal", he writes. "Das Sein ist aber auch nichts an einem Gegenstande, es ist wie kein reales inneres, so auch kein reales äußeres Merkmal und darum im realen Sinne überhaupt kein 'Merkmal'."541 That is, although contained in the expression of meaning, the categorial level of being lacks an objective [real] correlate in the perceived object. "[E]ine Bedeutung wie die des Wortes Sein [findet] kein mögliches objektives Korrelat und darum in den Akten solcher Wahrnehmung keine mögliche Erfüllung."542 Despite the fact that one certainly can see and express in words or in meaning‐intentionality that the paper is white, there simply is no objective correlate for the percept and the expression.
Husserl generalizes the relevance of the current observation. What counts for the general concept of being must by necessity count also for any other mode of experiencing categorial dimensions in perception, he writes.543 Language, Husserl adds, has many words designating levels [Stufe] of percepts not strictly perceived. Form words [Formworte] like for instance das, ein, einige, viele, wenige, zwei, ist, nicht, welches, und, oder544 bear witness to a perceptual situation wherein expressed does not answer to aspects directly perceivable. What these words express have no possible objective correlate in perception.545 The same holds for cases of Kollektiva and Disjunktiva. Husserl observes. When we for instance perceive two objects either of the same kind or of different kinds, we do strictly speaking not conceive any isolated Sachverhalte546 but rather a "Zusammenhang von Sachverhalte":
Das, was den Worten und und oder, beides und eins von beides anschaulich entspricht, das läßt sich, so drücken wir es oben in etwas roher Weise aus, nicht mit Händen greifen, mit irgendeinem Sinn erfassen; wie es sich ja auch nicht eigentlich im Bilde darstellen, etwa malen läßt. Ich kann A malen und B malen, kann beide auch im selben Bildraume malen; aber das beide, das A und B kann ich nicht malen. 547
The complex Sachverhalte of the Sachlage "A und B" as well as what is expressed in the "oder, beides und eins von beides" can be meant but not seen, touched, or painted. The complex relationship between the objects548 evolves not on a level of Schlichte Wahrnehmung but on the level Kategoriale Wahrnehmung.
541 Ibid. 666.
542 Ibid. 667.
543 Ibid. 667.
544 Ibid.658.
545 Ibid.667.
546 Sachverhalte is usually translated into state of affairs. We use the German expression to preserve the meaning of Sache which of course has a reference to Gadamer's Sachlichkeit of understanding.
547 Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen. 688.
548 Ibid. 688–689.
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In other words, side by side with the sensory intuition of Schlichte Wahrnehmung, there entails another form of intuition: a Kategoriale Anschauung.549 The categorial level is angeschaut, it is fulfilled [erfüllt] in the intentional act [Akt] of meaning‐intention, and it can be expressed in words, yet it is not perceptually given as such. In cases of concrete perception, the categorial intuition is a form of abstraction which is founded on the Schlichte Wahrnehmung yet which fulfils a level in the situation. "Der Gegenstand erscheint nicht mit neuen realen Bestimmtheiten, er steht aber dieser selbe, aber in neuer Weise da."550 In other words, the Kategoriale Anschauung does not alter anything in the objects; it just set an order already given in perception. "Die Wahrnehmung bleibt Wahrnehmung, der Gegenstand ist, so wie er war, gegeben, 'nur' daß er eben 'in Beziehung gesetzt' wird."551 Cases of ideal intuition of general ideas, such the idea red or an ideal triangle,552 are both analogous and different from the perception of objects. Though lacking a level of Schlichte Wahrnehmung, intuited is nevertheless a determined and abstract object. "[W]ir erfassen es, wir erschauen es",553 writes Husserl. The ideal object is given in intuition: "Der allgemeine Gegenstand ist dann nicht bloß vorgestellt und gesetzt, sondern er ist selbst gegeben."554
In contrasting the Schlichte Wahrnehmung and the Kategoriale Anschauung, Husserl evokes what he calls a "ganz allgemein" differentiation between the "'sinnlichen'" and "'übersinnlichen'"555 ways of intuition. Here, the schlichte perception pertains to the sinnlichen form of intuition, whereas the Kategoriale Anschauung pertains to the Übersinnlichen. Now, what is not meant with the differentiation, we should note, is that the Kategoriale Anschauung is a mere intra‐mental form of fulfilment in the Lockian sense of reflection.556 That is, the complex level being intuited is not the result of a process where the perceiving subject first gains a sum of isolated impressions in the Schlichte Wahrnehmung, and then, subsequently, manipulates these input sense data into a complex.557 Nor does the categorial level emerge as a result of a specific psychic acts (psychische Akte),558 or in the domain of an apparent "inner perception"
["'inneren Wahrnehmung'"].559
According to Husserl, the mere idea of locating the categorial in the instance wherein the intentional act evolves is wrong. In the complex Sachverhalte exemplified above, the expression "A und B"
expresses an abstraction given with the intentional object itself. "[N]icht in diesen Akten als Gegenständen,
549 The German word Anschauung can be translated as to see, to watch, or to look, in analogy to the English intuition,
which stems from Latin word intuire. The word Anschauung has a longer history in philosophy, first and foremost from the impact of Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Cf. Gadamer, "Anschauung und Anschaulichkeit (1980)." We soon evoke some points from this essay shortly.
550 Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen. 686. Italics original.
551 Ibid. 668.
552 Ibid. 691.
553 Ibid. 692.
554 Ibid. 693.
555 Ibid. 673.
556 Explanation borrowed from Heidegger, Prolegomena. 78.
557 Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen. 677.
558 Ibid. 688.
559 Ibid. 688.
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sondern in den Gegenständen dieser Akte finden wir das Abstraktionsfundament für die Realisierung der besagten Begriffe,"560 writes Husserl. In other words, the categorial intuition fulfils the categorial level occurring in the object, not in itself as an instance intuiting the categorial level. The fact that the categorial level lacks an objective correlate in perception does not make it self‐invented or subjective in the relativist sense of the word. The foundation of the expressed is there, so to speak. The act of intentionality only accomplishes it into an adequate form of expression.
Husserl's analyses are very detailed, moving, for instance, into close investigations on how the intentional syntheses of the Kategoriale Anschauung are distinct from the sinnliche, and how they involve various forms of intunition implying various forms of foundations [Fundierungen]. In our context, we leave these investigations out, instead interested in the series of philosophical achievements happening after Husserl. In this respect, we already have the information we need from Logische Untersuchungen. Now, if we were to start directly with Gadamer, and comparing Husserl's Wahrnehmung‐analysis with the analysis of Wahrheit und Methode's,561 we would soon see the a conceptual distance is as striking as essential.
Husserl's Wahrnehmung‐intentionality of the Logische Untersuchungen is not situated in ways analogous to Gadamer's Verstehen, as we know, and Husserl's parlance of Akte and Erfüllung is largely foreign to Gadamer's way of describing experience. Thus, although both philosophers are Sinn oriented, we must not confuse Husserl's Sinn with Gadamer's philosophical‐hermeneutical Sinn. Sinn does not mean the same in the two contexts.562 As has Figal stated, between Husserl and Gadamer, a philosophical revision occurs which brings Husserl's phenomenology radically into question. In many ways, Husserl's phenomenology and Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics represent more counter‐positions than a shared conceptual ground.563
Gadamer articulates important differences between him and Husserl in the essay Anschauung und Anschaulichkeit (1980). Explicitly drawing out a critique of Husserl's Anschauung, Gadamer criticizes what he outlines as an inadequate premise in Husserl's concept, namely the paradigmatic recourse to an
"Unmittelbarkeit sinnlicher Gegebenheit".564 Husserl conceives of Anschauung as a direct intuition of something given, Gadamer writes. Sensual [sinnliche] and intellectual modes of emergence are modeled around paradigmatic but also a hyperbolic model of perceptual givenness.565 What Husserl conceives to be the intuitive fulfilment of intuition [anschauliche Erfüllung der Intention] is a pure border concept [Grenzbegriff], writes Gadamer.566 Husserl's Anschauung is an abstraction of the mediated character of all
560 Ibid. 670. Cf. Heidegger, Prolegomena. 79.
561 Cf. Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode. 95 ff. We look into this in Subsection 5c below.
562 Figal, "Hermeneutik und Phänomenologie." 180.
563 Ibid. 177.
564 Gadamer, "Anschauung und Anschaulichkeit (1980)." 192.
565 Husserl is not alone in this, according to Gadamer. "Der Ausgangspunkt von der sinnlichen Gegebenheit führt das moderne Denken in die Irre ". Ibid. 192.
566 Ibid. 191.
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experience.567 Husserl fails to recognize adequately how every Anschaaung is thoroughly mediated, not direct, Gadamer writes. Anschauung is a linguistic feature, the hermeneutist underlines; it evolves in der Sprache. In other words, not this or that perceptual gaze of the perceiver, but Sprache is the prime locus of Anschaulichkeit. Thus, fully in accordance with what we have seen, Gadamer's prime example of experience is not perception as such (as it was in Husserl) but the encounters with written or spoken texts.
"Dort, im Gebrach von Sprache, in der Rede‐ und in Dichtkunst, ist ja das Wort 'anschaulich' zu Hause,"
writes Gadamer; "und zwar als eine besondere Qualität des Beschreibens und Erzählens, so daß man das, was man nicht selber sieht, sondern was einem nur erzählt wird, sozusagen 'vor sich' sieht."568 Language makes the perceiver intuit what is not given in the moment. Language raises into intuition objects that do not correlate with any object given to immediate perception, but which nevertheless are there.569
We have insinuated an unquestioned line of impact from Husserl's Wahrnehmung‐analysis to Wahrheit und Methode. Given the differences between the two thinkers, what is the basis of such a claim?
bb. Sinn als Geltung. Wie der Gegebenheit (Heidegger 1914 and 1923)
To understand the impact in question, we need to take a longer detour into the early works of Heidegger.
Heidegger revises and expands on Husserl's analysis of the Kategoriale Anschauung, in many ways making the Kategoriale Anschauung a key to the hermeneutically oriented phenomenology. Heidegger's perhaps most famous encounter with Husserl's Kategoriale Anschauung occurs in a lecture held in 1923 (probably attended by Gadamer), later included in the Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs.570 In this lecture, Heidegger appraises Husserl for initiating a path of concrete phenomenological description by expanding the idea of objectivity [Objektivität].571 With Husserl's discovery of the kateoriale Anschauung, writes Heidegger, "ist zum erstenmal der konkrete Weg einer ausweisenden und echten Kategorienforschung gewonnen."572 Husserl opens a path of abstraction and ideation in ways revealing, as Heidegger puts it,
"den Boden für die Hebung der Strukturen dieser idealen Gegenstände."573 The crux of Husserl's discovery, according to Heidegger, is the definitive discovery of the nonsubjective, categorial intentionality. "Es gibt
"den Boden für die Hebung der Strukturen dieser idealen Gegenstände."573 The crux of Husserl's discovery, according to Heidegger, is the definitive discovery of the nonsubjective, categorial intentionality. "Es gibt