I.

PHENOMENOLOGICAL HERMENEUTICS AND HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY

1. THE INTERPRETIVE TURN IN PHENOMENOLOGY: A PHILOSOPHICAL HISTORY1

Gary B. Madison

It is experience … still mute which weare concerned with leading to the pureexpression of its own meaning.2

Experience is the experience of human finitude.3

Phenomenology and the Overcoming of Metaphysics

Richard Rorty has said of phenomenology that it is “a form of philosophizing whose utilitycontinues to escape me” and that “hermeneutic philosophy” is a “vague and unfruitful”notion.4 Remarks such as these should be of no surprise, coming as they do from some-one who does not view philosophy as (as Hegel said) “serious business” -- i.e., as a reasonedand principled search for the truth of things -- but, rather, as a kind of “professionaldilettantism” and who, accordingly, sees no difference between philosophy and literarycriticism. It is hard to imagine two philosophers (if that’s the right term to apply to Rorty)standing in greater contrast than Richard Rorty and Edmund Husserl. Whereas in Rorty’s“neo-pragmatic” view philosophy can be nothing more than a kind of “culture chat” and,inasmuch as it may, just possibly, have some relevance to actual practice, a criterionless,unprincipled “kibitzing”and “muddling-through,”Husserl defendedphenomenologybecausehe saw it as a means at last for making of philosophy a “rigorous science,” one, moreover,which would be of supreme theoretical-critical relevance to the life of humanity.5 Onething Husserl meant by his programmatic remarks on this subject in his 1911Logosarticle,“Philosophy as Rigorous Science,”6 is that a properly phenomenological philosophywould rigorously eschew idle metaphysical speculations of the traditional sort and seek,instead, to remain in close contact with “the things themselves (die Sachen selbst),” i.e.,our actual lived experience.7 In the early twentieth century, dominated as it was by

1 This paper is dedicated to the memory of Franz Vandenbusche, S.J., of the University of Louvain(Leuven), who forty some years ago introduced me as a young graduate student to the phenomenologyof Husserl and Merleau-Ponty and who was killed in a collision with a train in 1990.

2 This is Merleau-Ponty’s own rendering of a line in Husserl; see Maurice Merleau-Ponty,TheVisible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968),129, hereafter VI, and Edmund Husserl,Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans.Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), sec. 16, 38-39.

3 Hans-Georg Gadamer,Truth and Method, 2d rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G.Marshall (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1990), 320, hereafter TM.

4 See Carlos G. Prado, “A Conversation with Richard Rorty,”Symposium7, no. 2 (Fall/Automne2003): 228.

5 For a forceful statement on Husserl’s part of the responsibility as he saw it of philosophy forhumanity, see his late, 1935 “Vienna Lecture” (“Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity,”) inEdmund Husserl,The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introductionto Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970);published also in Edmund Husserl,Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, trans. Quentin Lauer(New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965).

6 See Edmund Husserl,Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft(Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann,1965); English translation in idem,Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, hereafter PRS.

7 Cf. the following remarks of Hans-Georg Gadamer, a pupil of Husserl’s at one time: “He [Husserl]regarded himself as a master and teacher of patient, descriptive, detailed work, and all rash combinationsand clever constructions were an abomination to him. In his teaching, whenever he encountered the grand

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various forms of idealist philosophy, the phenomenological motto “Back to the thingsthemselves!” was for a great many a revolutionary call which held out the promise oftransforming philosophy into a genuinely “useful” and “fruitful” endeavor.

The “problem of cognition” was one area in which Husserl sought to demonstrate the“utility” of a phenomenological approach to traditional philosophical problems. In a seriesof lectures in 1907 at the University of Göttingen (published subsequently in 1950 byWalter Biemel under the titleDie Idee der Phänomenologie), Husserl presented aphenomenological response to the central problem which had bedeviled all of modernphilosophy and which he stated thus: “How do I, the cognizing subject, know if I can everreally know, that there exist not only my own mental processes, these acts of cognizing,but also that which they apprehend? How can I ever know that there is anything at allwhich could be set over against cognition as its object?”8 This, as any student of thehistory of philosophy will immediately recognize, is the problem Descartes bequeathed tomodernity and which came to be known as the problem of the “external world”: Is therea world “out there,” and, if so, how can I know there is? In more technical terms: Howcan I transcend (get out of) my own subjectivity so as to make contact with something“objective”? In these lectures, Husserl takes a truly radical and unprecedented approachto this traditional problem: He does not seek tosolveit, as philosophers before him had,by coming up with his own “proof” for the existence of the world, but todissolveit. Bymeans of thephenomenological reduction, which Husserl presents for the first time inthese lectures, he is able to show that the central epistemological problem of modernphilosophy rests on certainmetaphysicalassumptions, assumptions having to do with therelation that obtains between the cognizing subject and the objective world, and he shows,as well, that these assumptions are, from an experiential (i.e., phenomenological) point ofview, wholly without warrant -- and, therefore, stand in need of being deconstructed.

By putting into play the phenomenological reduction, showing thereby how the modernproblem of the “external world” is a pseudo-problem, Husserl’s phenomenology accom-plishes a decisive overcoming of modern Theory of Knowledge (Erkenntnislehre) and,indeed, the entire tradition of “epistemologically centered philosophy,” as Rorty hasreferred to it. In his account of the phenomenological movement, Gadamer wrote:

Above all, it [phenomenology] aimed its attacks at the [metaphysical] construction thatdominated epistemology, the basic discipline of the philosophy of the time. Whenepistemological inquiry sought to answer the question of how the subject, filled withits own representations, knows the external world and can be certain of its reality, thephenomenological critique showed how pointless such a question is. It saw that con-sciousness is by no means a self-enclosed sphere with its representations locked up intheir own inner world. On the contrary, consciousness is, according to its own essentialstructure, already with objects. Epistemology asserts a false priority of self-consciousness.There are no representative images of objects in consciousness, whose correspondenceto things themselves it is the real problem of epistemology to guarantee. (PH, 131)

assertions and arguments that are typical of beginning philosophers, he used to say, ‘Not always the bigbills, gentlemen; small change, small change!’ This kind of work produced a peculiar fascination. It hadthe effect of a purgation, a return to honesty, a liberation from the opaqueness of the opinions, slogans,and battle cries that circulated.” Hans-Georg Gadamer,Philosophical Hermeneutics(Berkeley, Calif.:University of California Press, 1976), 132-33, hereafter PH.

8 Edmund Husserl,The Idea of Phenomenology, trans. William P. Alson and George Nakhnikian(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), 16.

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What Gadamer is referring to in these remarks is the phenomenological doctrine ofintentionalitywhich, rejecting the standard “copy theory” of knowledge, asserts that con-sciousness is never in the first instance mere self-consciousness (conscious only of whatis “inside” it: its own cogitationes, “ideas,” sense impressions, “representations”) but isalways consciousness-of-something(i.e., somethingother than it, viz., the world). Therealization that the essence of consciousness is intentionality represents an overcoming ofthe metaphysics of modernity, viz., the metaphysical assumption that there is an onto-logical gap or chasm between subject (consciousness) and object (the world). The subject/object split is thefons et origo of modern philosophy,9 and it was this “situationphénoménale du clivage” that it is the purpose of the reduction to deconstruct.10 Whatthe reduction teaches us is, in short, that the existence of the world does not need to be“proved,” since the world is precisely that of which consciousness is conscious. The worldis a primary “datum” of consciousness, an immediate, phenomenological “given.” Sartresummed up phenomenology’s accomplishment in the following graphic way:

Consciousness has been purified. It is as clear as a strong wind. There is no longeranything in it apart from a movement to flee from itself, a slipping outside itself. If,per impossibile, you were to enter “inside” a consciousness, you would be seized bya whirlwind and thrown outside, next to the tree, in the dust. For consciousness has no“inside.” It is nothing other than the outside of itself, and it is this absolute flight, thisrefusal to be substance that constitutes it as consciousness…[E]verything is outside,even ourselves—outside, in the world, amid others. It is not in I know not what innerretreat that we discover ourselves; it is on the road, in the city, in the midst of thecrowd, thing among things, man among men.11

Once the metaphysics of modernity has been overcome, it becomes phenomenologicallyself-evident that consciousness is not a self-contained realm of “inner experiences”(subjective “states-of-mind”) but is, rather, a mode ofbeing-in-the-world, i.e., a direct ex-perience of the world itself. The world is that which consciousness intends; to experiencea world is precisely what itmeansto be conscious. Once we have performed the reductionand deconstructed the metaphysical presuppositions of modern philosophy -- the notions ofan “external world” and an “inner subject” -- we need no longer, as Merleau-Pontyremarked, “wonder whether we really perceive a world, we must instead say: the worldis what we perceive.”12 By setting aside all mere constructions, the phenomenologicalreduction opens up the field of truth, conceived of not logically or epistemologically, i.e.,as the “objective” correlation between “ideas” and “things,” but experientially, i.e., as the

9 See in this regard Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in idem,The Question Con-cerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1977).

10 See the introduction by Alexandre Lowit to his French translation of Husserl’sDie Idee derPhänomenologie(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970). Already in 1904 William James hadsought to undermine the notion that there exists a “gap” between subject and object; see William James,“A World of Pure Experience” (Essays in Radical Empiricism), in William James: Writings 1902-1910(New York: Library of America, 1984), 1165. Husserl apparently possessed a reprint of this article as agift from James himself -- see Herbert Spiegelberg,The Phenomenological Movement, 2 vols. (The Hague:Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), 1:112n2.

11 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Une idée fondamentale de la phénoménologie de Husserl: L’intentionalité,” inidem,La transcendance de l’ego(Paris: J. Vrin, 1966), 111, 113.

12 See Maurice Merleau-Ponty,Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge& Kegan Paul, 1962), xvi, hereafter PP. For Merleau-Ponty, the whole point of phenomenology as a modeof transcendental analysis was that of “re-awakening a direct and primitive contact with the world, andendowing that contact with a philosophical status.” (PP, vii)

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self-givenness (Selbstgegebenheit) of the thing (Sache) itself, its presence to consciousness“in person,” in “flesh and blood” (Evidenz) -- and thus, at the most primordial level, asthe field of livedmeaning.13

The function of the reduction is, as Sartre says, to purify consciousness; it affords usaccess to what Husserl called the “realm of pure experience,” i.e., it enables us to exploreand describe our experience of the world preciselyas we experience it, free from thedistorting lenses of metaphysical prejudice (“pure experience” was also the term favoredby William James). Husserlian phenomenology is the systematic attempt to explore thevarious ways consciousness has of “intending” objects and,correlatively(since everyactof consciousness [noesis] is always paired with anobject[noema] which it “intends”), ofthe various ways in which objects of all sorts (perceptual, imaginary, ideal) come to befor consciousness; “phenomenological research,” as Gadamer says, “transcends in principlethe opposition between object and subject and discovers the correlation of act and object asits own great field of study.” (PH, 144-45) In other words, phenomenology is, as Husserlsays, the study of “what it means that objectivity is, and manifests itself cognitively as sobeing.” (PRS, 90) This sort of “intentional analysis (intentionale Analyse)” (or “meaninganalysis” -- phenomenology, like pragmatism which is also a philosophy of experience,is in the first instance a theory of meaning and only secondarily a theory of truth --) pro-ceeds entirely by means of reflexive acts -- “phenomenological method proceeds entirelythrough acts of reflexion”14 -- and is thus a form of inquiry that is resolutelytranscen-dental.

To say that phenomenology is a form of transcendental analysis means that, as aphilosophy of experience, i.e., as a reflexive analysis of our experience of the things ofthe worldjust exactly aswe experience them, it deliberately refrains from making specul-ative, metaphysical assumptions about the ontological status of what it seeks to describe;the phenomenological reduction, as Gadamer says, is a “return to the phenomenologicallygiven as such, which renounces all [mere] theory and metaphysical construction.” (PH,146) To take the “transcendental turn” that the reduction calls for is to adopt a stance ofself-critical responsibility in the examination of one’s own experience, pursuing in amethodologically rigorous fashion Montaigne’s guiding question,Que sais-je?Whatexactly is it that I can legitimately claim to know, and how is it that I know this? Or, toput it in a less epistemological manner, What are those things of which I can say, “I haveexperienced them,” and in what exactly did this experience consist? David Michael Levinsums up the matter very nicely when he says that “the heart of phenomenology is amethodologically formulated respect for the integrity and validity of our experience justas we live it.”15

The overriding injunction of the phenomenological method -- Husserl called this “theprinciple of all principles” -- is that one must always seek to describe what one experiencespreciselyasone experiences it without importing into this description suppositions whichare not warranted by the experience (Gadamer refers to this as “the fundamentalphenomenological principle that one should avoid all theoretical constructions and get

13 See Alphonse De Waelhens,Phénoménologie et vérité, Essai sur l’évolution de l’idée de véritéchez Husserl et Heidegger(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953). Husserl first developed hisnotion of Evidenzin the sixth of hisLogical Investigations, a text which made a profound and lastingimpression on Heidegger and which was in part the basis for his own notion of truth as unconcealment(a-letheia).

14 Edmund Husserl,Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W.R. Boyce Gibson(New York: Collier Books, 1962), sec. 77, 197.

15 David Michael Levin, “Liberating Experience from the Vice of Structuralism: The Methods ofMerleau-Ponty and Nagarjuna,”Philosophy Today41, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 96.

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back ‘to the things themselves.’” [RPJ, 22]). Phenomenology is indeed nothing other thana thoroughgoing and systematic attempt to cut through the metaphysical thicket ofphilosophical misunderstandings so as to get back to our lived experience of the thingsthemselves.

One thing that Icannotlegitimately say that I know or claim to have experienced iswhat metaphysicians call “reality in itself,” reality as it exists (supposedly), apart from myconsciousness of it. Indeed, from a strictly phenomenological or experiential point of viewthe notion of a reality that would be totally “in itself,” totally “outside” of consciousness,is a notion devoid of any discernible meaning. Being devoid of any real meaning, it is,as “the distinguished Husserl” would say, “absurd.”16 The notion of an absolute “being-in-itself” is, to speak like William of Occam, a notion that, while it can besaid, is never-theless one that it is impossible tothink. The only thing that is genuinely real for us is ourown experience of reality; we live, as James said, “in a world where experience andreality come to the same thing.”17 This being so, we must “reduce,” “bracket,” or “putout of play” the metaphysical notion of a world absolutely in-itself and focus instead onthe objects of the world as we actually experience them. Phenomenologically speaking,we do indeed experience a “transcendent” world, but this “real” world does not lie on thefar side of the subject/object gap. For phenomenology, “transcendent” is not a meta-physical concept referring to something existing “beyond”our experience of it; “transcendent”is themeaningwe attach to certain objects of our experience (e.g., the maple tree outsidemy window).

Once we make this transcendental move we can no longer conceive of consciousness,metaphysically or Cartesian-wise, as a kind of substance orthing (of a “mental” sort)standing in some kind of objectivistic relation with other things (of a “material” sort) andbeing acted upon by them in a quasi-mechanical,causal fashion (this, as EmmanuelLévinas remarked, was “the great merit of the theory of the phenomenological reduc-tion”18). Since the essence of consciousness is intentionality, the relationship betweenconsciousness and the world is “sui generis”; it is not a “real” (causal) relationship butan intentional (“irreal”) one. Consciousness itself (the “mind”) is not something “real” inthe metaphysical sense of the term19; what we call “reality” is, rather, an objectfor con-sciousness, something that comes to beconstituted(as Husserl would say) as exactlywhatit is in accordance with the way in which it is “intended.” Or as James had said earlieron: “The way in which the ideas are combined is part of the inner constitution of thethought’s object or content.”20 And as later hermeneutic phenomenology, which continuesto operate under the phenomenological reduction (i.e., under the refusal to speculate onwhat anything is in any absolute sense of the term), would maintain, there can be no

16 This is something that Charles Sanders Peirce -- “the distinguished Husserl” is Peirce’s ownexpression (See Spiegelberg,The Phenomenological Movement, 1:18) -- had already pointed out in hisground-breaking article of 1878, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear.”

17 James, “A World of Pure Experience,” 1168.18 See Emmanuel Lévinas,Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl(Paris: Librairie

J. Vrin, 1963), 208.19 As William James said, “consciousness” is “the name of a nonentity” and, strictly speaking, does

not exist; see James’s 1904 article, “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?” In a subsequent article of 1905, “Lanotion de conscience,” James expressed thus the phenomenological notion of intentionality: “Nossensations ne sont pas de petits duplicats intérieurs des choses, elles sont les choses mêmes en tant queles choses nous sont présentes.” Both of these articles were subsequently published in James’sEssays inRadical Empiricism(1912).

20 William James,The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. (New York: Dover Publications, 1956[1890]), 2:286. In hisLogical Investigations, 2 vols., trans. John N. Findlay (London: Routledge andKegan Paul, 1970) Husserl expressed his indebtedness to James (1:420n).

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doubt that what humans (and realist philosophers) call “the world” is a constituted entity --although, as we shall see, hermeneutics also maintains that the constitutional activity bymeans of which the world becomes a world is not that of a sovereign, transcendentalEgo.21

As a reflexive inventory-taking of the “field of consciousness,”22 phenomenology isthus necessarily a form of transcendental analysis -- “all phenomenology is transcendental,”as Paul Ricoeur has noted23 -- such that the notion of a “realist” phenomenology is acontradiction in terms. The most insidious form of realism from a phenomenological pointof view is the one Husserl singled out for criticism in his 1911 article: naturalism. AsHusserl there notes, naturalism is a philosophical-scientific stance arising out of the waymodern, mechanistic science conceives of nature, viz., as an all-encompassing spatio-temporal whole (encompassing both the physical and the psychological), as mere matter-in-motion subject to determinable laws of a causal nature. As Husserl says,

The naturalist…sees only nature, and primarily physical nature. Whatever is is eitheritself physical, belonging to the unified totality of physical nature, or it is in factpsychical, but then merely as a variable dependent on the physical, at best a secondary“parallel accompaniment.” Whatever is belongs to psychophysical nature, which is tosay that it is univocally determined by rigid laws [of a mechanistic sort].24 (PRS, 79)

The trouble with naturalism is that it is philosophically naïve. It is naïve in that (as isfully evident in the case of logical positivism) it accepts unquestioningly (i.e., uncritically)as ontologically valid the modern scientific concept of “nature,” and modern, naturalscience is itself naïve, in the strict sense of the term, in that for it, as Husserl said, natureis “simply there.” (PRS, 85) Modern science simply presupposes the existence of nature;it does not raise the question as to how it is that there can be (for us, as knowing subjects)anything like nature at all. Only a transcendental, phenomenological analysis can hope toclarify this matter (“was besagt, daß Gegenständlichkeit sei”); only an analysis of sucha sort is capable of raising in a fully reflective, thematic manner the question as tothemeaning of the being of the world.25

21 For a detailed treatment of Husserl’s notion of constitution, see Robert Sokolowski,The Formationof Husserl’s Concept of Constitution(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970.

22 As an instance of analyses of this type, see Aron Gurwitsch,The Field of Consciousness(Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1964).

23 Paul Ricoeur,Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology, trans. Edward B. Ballard and LesterE. Embree (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Pres, 1967), 203.

24 Commenting on this passage, Quentin Lauer remarks: “According to Husserl, there is in every actof consciousness an element which is simply irreducible to nature. This we might call the basic intuitionthat set Husserl on the path to transcendental phenomenology.” (80n13)

25 Or as Eugen Fink, one of Husserl’s later assistants, would say, the question as to “the origin ofthe world” (see Eugen Fink, “The Phenomenological Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and ContemporaryCriticism,” in Roy O. Elveton, ed.,The Phenomenology of Husserl: Selected Critical Readings[Chicago:Quadrangle Books, 1970], 96). One is inclined to wonder if Richard Rorty might not have discoveredsome “utility” in phenomenology had he taken the time to make a detailed study of Husserl. Although inPhilosophy and the Mirror of Nature(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979) Rorty effecteda “hermeneutic turn” and mounted a thoroughgoing critique of modern, “epistemologically centeredphilosophy,” in the end he fell back into a crude form of materialistic behaviorism which had all theappearances of being a mere metaphysical opposite to the modernistic mentalism he had so effectivelycriticized. As Richard Bernstein, a sympathetic critic, said of this work: “There is something fundamentallywrong with where Rorty leaves us” (Richard Bernstein, “Philosophy In the Conversation of Mankind,”in Robert Hollinger, ed.,Hermeneutics and Praxis[Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press,1985], 77). It is as if, Bernstein remarked, Rorty remained a prisoner of the metaphysical foundationalism

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It should perhaps be noted that although phenomenology is inherently “antirealist” andalthough Husserl came to speak of transcendental phenomenology as being a “transcen-dental idealism,” Husserl’s phenomenology is not for all that a form of idealism in anycustomary sense. A number of Husserl’s early students (e.g., Roman Ingarden andmembers of the “Munich school”) reacted with dismay when Husserl began referring tothe study of transcendental, purified consciousness as a transcendental idealism, but, asHeidegger sought to point out, their realist objections were off the mark. For Husserl’s“idealism” amounts to no more than maintaining (the phraseology is Heidegger’s but theidea is Husserl’s26) that one can never account properly for the being of the world merelyin terms of real relations between real entities within the world (which is to say: thebeingof an entity is not itself an entity nor is it of an entitative [substantialist] nature). “If whatthe term ‘idealism’ says,” Heidegger wrote in defense of Husserl’s transcendentalism,“amounts to the understanding that Being can never be explained by entities but is alreadythat which is ‘transcendental’ for every entity, then idealism affords the only correctpossibility for a philosophical problematic. If so, Aristotle was no less an idealist thanKant.”27 Antirealist though it unquestionably is, Husserl’s “transcendental idealism” isin no way a Berkeleyan-type psychological idealism -- a form of idealism that Husserlheld to be as philosophically absurd as the naïve realism to which it stands opposed.28

Despite Husserl’s sometimes infelicitous manner of speaking (as when in theIdeashetalked about “the annihilation of the world”), the transcendental-phenomenological reductionis not, as Merleau-Ponty perceptively remarked, the hallmark of an idealist philosophy;it is, rather, that which, by enabling us to set aside metaphysical constructions of whateversort (realist or idealist), enables us to gain undistorted access to the most primordial phe-nomenon of all: our own everyday being-in-the-world.29 The only thing that is “idealist”about the phenomenological reduction is the language Husserl oftentimes used to describeit.30

of which he was otherwise such a perceptive critic and was unable to see any meaningful alternative toit. Husserl’s critique of naturalism, one may be inclined to think, might just possibly have helped him todo so. It is in any event unfortunate that Rorty, the “neo-pragmatist,” appears to have ignored the fact thatone of the founders of American pragmatism, William James, was himself an early defender of thephenomenological notion of intentionality (and actually exerted an influence on Husserl in this regard);see for instance: Hans Linschoten,On the Way Toward a Phenomenological Psychology: The Psychologyof William James(Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1968); John Wild,The Radical Empiricism ofWilliam James(New York: Anchor Books, 1970); James M. Edie,William James and Phenomenology(Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1987); and Richard Stevens,James and Husserl: TheFoundations of Meaning(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974).

26 “Sous forme de phénoménologie, elle [la philosophie de Husserl] poursuit essentiellement desintérêts ontologiques.” Emmanuel Lévinas,Théorie de l’intuition(Paris: Alcan, 1930), 178, see also 218.

27 Martin Heidegger,Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York:Harper & Row, 1962), sec. 43a, 251, hereafter BT. InAn Introduction of Metaphysics, trans. RalphManheim (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1959), hereafter IM, after stating that “Appearing[being a “phenomenon”] is the very essence of being,” Heidegger says: “This punctures the emptyconstruction of Greek philosophy as a ‘realistic’ philosophy which, unlike modern subjectivism, was adoctrine of objective being. This widespread conception is based on a superficial understanding. We mustleave aside terms like ’subjective’ and ‘objective,’ ‘realistic’ and ‘idealistic.’” (BT, 101)

28 See Husserl’s remarks on this subject in the Preface to Gibson’s translation of Husserl’sIdeas(thisbeing a translation of Husserl’s 1930Nachwort zu meinen Ideen).

29 Cf. PP, xiv: “Far from being, as has been thought, a procedure of idealistic philosophy, the pheno-menological reduction belongs to existential philosophy: Heidegger’s ‘being-in-the-world’ appears onlyagainst the background of the phenomenological reduction.”

30 For a refreshingly clear description of the reduction and Husserl’s argumentative tactic inThe Ideaof Phenomenology, see Richard Cobb-Stevens, “The Beginnings of Phenomenology: Husserl and HisPredecessors,” in Richard Kearney, ed.,Continental Philosophy in the 20th Century, Routledge History

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It must be admitted in this regard that Husserl’s way of presenting phenomenology andthe phenomenological reduction, especially in theIdeas (Ideen I) and theCartesianMeditations, and, in general, his “idealist” manner of speaking have the unfortunate effectof blurring the true significance of his work as a crucial overcoming of the metaphysicsof modernity. Unlike William James, who was much clearer on this score and who fullyrealized the postmetaphysical significance of his own phenomenological-pragmatic in-vestigations, Husserl presented his thought in a way which can easily mislead the unwaryreader (who often comes away with the impression that the phenomenological reductionis but a version of Descartes’s doubt). Paul Ricoeur very rightly speaks in this regard of“Husserl’s opaque presentation of the famous phenomenological reduction.”31 The dif-ficulty Husserl ran into in presenting the reduction in a non-idealist manner is in a wayunderstandable, nevertheless, in that Husserl, born and brought up in the conceptuality orBegrifflichkeitof modern philosophy and as is often the case with pioneering innovators,was, so to speak, never able to fully free himself from it (which is perhaps one reasonwhy he had so much difficulty understanding Heidegger who, early on, had sought towork out a strikingly different conceptual terminology32). The fact remains that it wasprecisely by means of this epistemological terminology that Husserl sought to effect adecisive break with modern epistemologism, which is to say, with modern philosophy’sbifurcational way of viewing the world and our relation to it. Husserl’s “idealist” way ofproceeding can in fact be viewed as a kind of crude anticipation of existential phenomeno-logy’s thesis to the effect that being-in-the-world is a unitary phenomenon of which selfand world are, to use Hegel’s terminology, two “moments.” What in his own “idealist”fashion Husserl, like the existential phenomenologists after him, was doing, was denyingthat there exists, between consciousness (self) and world, any kind of metaphysicaldualism(self and world exist as what they themselves are only in the form of what Gadamerwould call a reciprocal interplay).

The postmetaphysical significance of Husserl’s work is something that one of Husserl’slate assistants and the editor of hisExperience and Judgment(1939), Ludwig Landgrebe,noted in a 1962 article entitled, significantly enough, “Husserl’s Departure from Cartesian-ism.” Referring to Husserl’s 1923-24 lecture course,First Philosophy, Landgrebe speaksof how in this work “metaphysics takes its departure behind Husserl’s back.” He writes:

A retrospective glance from the historical distance we have now achieved permits usto understand that there occurs within this text a departure from those traditions whichare determinative for modern thought and a breaking into a new basis for reflection.It is a reluctant departure insofar as Husserl had wished to complete and fulfill thistradition without knowing to what extent his attempt served to break up this tradition.It is therefore a moving document of an unprecedented struggle to express a contentwithin the terminology of the traditions of modern thought that already forsakes thistradition and its alternatives and perspectives.

of Philosophy, vol. 8 (London: Routledge, 1994), 18-19. As regards the “contradictory” way in whichHusserl presents the reduction, see Merleau-Ponty’s essay on Husserl inSigns, trans. Richard C. McCleary(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 161-65, hereafter S.

31 Paul Ricoeur, “Intellectual Autobiography,” in Lewis E. Hahn, ed.,The Philosophy of PaulRicoeur, Library of Living Philosophers, vol. 22 (Chicago: Open Court, 1995), 11, hereafter IA.

32 For a detailed account of the early Heidegger’s attempt to strike out in a new direction, see JohnVan Buren,The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King(Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana UniversityPress, 1994).

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In noting how in general the novelty of Husserl’s work is obscured by his own self-interpretation of it, Landgrebe remarks:

Today, primarily as a result of Heidegger’s work, the “end of metaphysics” is spokenof as if with a certain obviousness. We shall first properly understand the sense of suchlanguage if we follow closely how, in this work, metaphysics takes its departure behindHusserl’s back. One can state quite frankly that this workis the end of metaphysics inthe sense that after it any further advance along the concepts and paths of thought fromwhich metaphysics seeks forcefully to extract the most extreme possibilities is nolonger possible. To be sure, neither Husserl nor those who were his students at the timewere explicitly aware of this, and it will still require a long and intensive struggle ofinterpretation and continuing thoughtful deliberation until we have experienced every-thing that here comes to an end.33

The interpretive turn in phenomenology, one might say, is nothing other than a longand thoughtful, interpretive reflection on the “shipwreck” (as Landgrebe referred to it) ofHusserl’s rationalist construal of the phenomenological project, and hermeneutic phenome-nology, as Ricoeur has pointed out, can be said to be a realization of Husserl’s pheno-menology -- to be, indeed, the “truth” of it -- to the exact degree that it is a “reversal” of theidealist formulation that Husserl attempted to impose on it.34

Just as in his riposte to logical positivism Husserl declared that it is “we[phenomenologists] who are the genuine positivists,”35 so likewise -- Husserl’s own idealistself-interpretation notwithstanding -- one could say that a “transcendental idealism” whichabstains from abstract theorizing and seeks to focus on the actual givenness of things isin fact the only genuine realism. For the notion of modern philosophers, that we arelocked up inside our own heads and have no direct experience of the “real” world, is not,as it is often presumed, a datum of “common sense” and is not what the “man (or woman)in the street” believes in his or her concernful dealings with a universe of things ready-to-hand (zuhanden); it is an invention, a metaphysical construct of modern philosophy.Ordinary people do not ordinarily doubt that there is a world with which they are in directcontact, and, thus, by putting out of play (“reducing”) the metaphysical notion of an in-itself, noumenal -- which is to say, inaccessible -- reality (the “reality” of modern philo-sophy), phenomenology is doing no more than attempting to bring our lived experienceto the proper expression of its own meaning. Thus, to state the matter as clearly aspossible, the reduction is a “suspension of belief,” not in “the world,” but in a particularphilosophical-scientific (“Galilean”) theory about the world. (Of course, to the degree that“common sense” supposes, in a somewhat contradictory fashion, that the experiencedworld exists altogether “independently” of our experiencing it -- what Husserl called the“natural attitude” -- it too needs to be “reduced.”)

33 Ludwig Landgrebe, “Husserl’s Departure from Cartesianism,” in Elveton, ed.,The Phenomenologyof Husserl, 260-61. For further remarks by Landgrebe on “the contradiction between [Husserl’s] ‘program’and that which is revealed unintentionally in his analyses,” see Ludwig Landgrebe,Major Problems inContemporary European Philosophy: From Dilthey to Heidegger, trans. Kurt F. Reinhardt (New York:Frederick Ungar, 1966), 27ff.

34 PaulRicoeur, “On Interpretation,” inAlanMontefiore,ed.,Philosophy inFranceToday(Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1983), 191, hereafter OI. In the view of some commentators (Ricoeur tendingto be one of them), Husserl’s idealist-logicist way of dealing with phenomenological issues began, as itwere, to self-destruct in his own later writings.

35 See Husserl,Ideas, sec. 20, 78.

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It is crucial in this regard always to keep in mind that phenomenology is not aphenomenalism and that what phenomenology understands by “phenomenon” (“thephenomenon in the phenomenological sense of the word,” as Gérard Granel always madea point of saying36) is nothing other thanthe thing itselfas it shows itself, reality itselfinsofar as it appears to us, as Heidegger sought to make clear in the second introductorychapter of hisBeing and Time. By “bracketing” the so-called external world, Husserl’stranscendental idealism effects a decisive break with the most basic -- and, as Nietzschemaintained, the most pernicious -- of metaphysical oppositions: that ofreality versusappearance. It is not transcendental phenomenology that is idealist; it is the “realism” ofmodernist philosophers that is actually idealist. For what could be more idealist than tomaintain that we never have direct experience of the real world but only of “ideas” (senseimpressions, etc.) existing in (as Locke said) the “cabinet” of our minds? Husserl’s“difficult and original setting up of the problem of reality is,” as Paul Ricoeur remarks,“phenomenology’s essential philosophical contribution.”37

To those critics of his who, reluctant to follow him on his philosophical journey, fellback into an uncritical realism and who feared that a concern to explore the field oftranscendental subjectivity must necessarily result in an outright subjectivism, Husserlreplied with the following words of admonition:

For children in philosophy, this may be the dark corner haunted by the spectres ofsolipsism and, perhaps, of psychologism, of relativism. The true philosopher, insteadof running away, will prefer to fill the dark corner with light.38

Taking as their object of investigation the “I am” reflexive self-consciousness, whichHusserl called the “wonder of wonders,” and filling the dark corner of subjectivity withlight was the task that Husserl’s existential and hermeneutic successors were to undertake --albeit in a manner that Husserl barely envisaged and certainly would never have endorsed.

From Transcendental to “Existential” Phenomenology

Despite his aversion to speculative metaphysics and despite his resolute attempt to focus(by means of the phenomenological reduction) not on metaphysical constructions but onour lived experience, Husserl was unable to jettison one of the traditionally mostmetaphysical (or rationalist) of notions: the notion that philosophy, to be true to itself,must culminate in an absolute, apodictic science of reality, a kind ofmathesis universalisor “science of the universe, of the all-encompassing unity of all that is,” “the completeuniverse of thea priori.”39 Husserl believed that the only way of achieving such an all-embracing science of thea priori, of apodictically certain truths, a “science which is alone[truly] science in the ancient Platonic and again in the Cartesian sense,”40 was by

36 See Gérard Granel,Le Sens du temps et de la perception chez E. Husserl(Paris: ÉditionsGallimard, 1968).

37 Ricoeur,Husserl, 9.38 Edmund Husserl,Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus

Nijhoff, 1969), sec. 95, 237.39 Edmund Husserl, “Phenomenology,” inEncyclopaedia Britannica, 4th ed. (1927), 17:67; reprinted

(in a different translation) in Richard Zaner and Don Ihde, ed.,Phenomenology and Existentialism(NewYork: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973). For a detailed discussion of this matter, see my “‘Phenomenology andExistentialism’: Husserl and the End of Idealism,” in Frederick A. Elliston and Peter McCormick, ed.,Husserl: Expositions and Appraisals(Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977).

40 Husserl, “Phenomenology,” 68.

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discovering an absolute, unshakable grounding for all the evidences given to us in ourexperience (which is the task of a descriptive phenomenology to catalogue). In a time-honored fashion, Husserl looked for thisfundamentum inconcussum, this absolutefoundation, in something standing behind, as it were, our immediate consciousness of theworld: the transcendental Ego. Accordingly, for Husserl the being (or “origin”) of theworld was to be accounted for in terms of the immanent and invariant structures of thetranscendental Ego, structures which prescribe in advance (a priori) the conditions ofobjectivity of any object whatsoever. From this point of view the world is a “subjectiveachievement” (Leistung) on the part of the transcendental Ego. Husserl’s “transcendentalidealism” may not, as I have argued, be an idealism in any usual, metaphysical sense, butto a large extent it is, in both its conceptuality and its methodology, an “egology,” a“philosophy of consciousness” focused on the description of “mental processes.”

From a purely phenomenological or descriptive point of view, however, it is not at allclear just what exactly this transcendental Ego is and what relation obtains between it andthe philosophizing, reflecting subject. Is there, as Averroës (Ibn Rochd) said of Aristotle’sagent intellect (nous poetikos, intellectus agens), just one transcendental Ego for allconscious beings, or, as St Thomas subsequently argued, is each and every one of us atranscendental Ego (agent intellect) in our own right -- such that each of us is guaranteedour own personal immortality? These kinds of obtuse -- and forever unresolvable --questions have all the appearance of being the sort of metaphysical questions that a suit-ably thoroughgoing phenomenological reduction should be able to free us from. As Jameshad said in this connection, in order properly to describe our lived experience, “we neednot be metaphysical at all. The phenomena are enough.”41

Most of Husserl’s phenomenological disciples42 would no doubt have preferred thathe had been more faithful to the phenomenological “principle of all principles” and hadstuck with what, following James, he had said of the traditional notion of a transcendental(or “pure”) Ego (as the subjective center of relations for everything that is “in” con-sciousness but is not itself an object “for” consciousness) in the first (1900-01) edition ofhis Logical Investigations. “I must frankly confess,” he there said, “that I am quite unableto find this ego, this primitive, necessary center of relations.”43 Although Husserl sub-sequently chose to disregard James’s precept about not “going metaphysical” and claimedto have found this “central ego,” later phenomenologists like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty remained unconvinced. For them the notion of a transcendental Ego as the linchpinof a Cartesian-like absolute science had no “phenomenological credentials.”44 In this, andwithout knowing it, they were following in the footsteps of James who had argued thatthe unity of consciousness is not the product of a substantial and perduring Ego but is amatter, instead, of a dynamic, on-going, retrospective self-appropriation on the part of abodily subject, in other words: temporality (lived time). “Transcendental subjectivity” isnothing other than a name for the way the “stream of consciousness” (Husserl’s renderingof James’s “stream of thought”), in its on-flowingness, “hangs together” (der Zusammen-hang eines Lebens).

41 James,The Principles of Psychology, 1:346.42 See, in particular, Aron Gurwitsch, who studied with Husserl in the 1920s,Studies in Phenomenology

and Psychology(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1966).43 Husserl,Logical Investigations, 2:549. In the second, revised edition (1913) of this work, Husserl

added to this sentence a footnote: “I have since managed to find it, i.e., have learnt not to be led astrayfrom a pure grasp of the given through corrupt forms of ego-metaphysic.”

44 This apt expression is that of John D. Caputo; see his “Husserl, Heidegger and the Question ofa ‘Hermeneutic’ Phenomenology,”Husserl Studies, vol. 1 (1984): 177.

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Although Husserl, by means of the phenomenological reduction, may have “purified”consciousness of its naturalistic misportrayal, he did not question the priority ofconsciousness in the constitution of the world, and, as the existentialists knew, there ismore to our Being (Sein) than our being-conscious (Bewusstsein). Accordingly, Heideggerand Merleau-Ponty sought to overcome not just ego-metaphysics (“corrupt” or no) but alsothe overarching framework that dominated Husserl’s philosophizing, viz., the philosophyof consciousness itself. However, both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty in their earlywritings did so without abandoning the transcendental turn and without falling back intoany kind of naïve realism (which is why, in the title of this section of my paper, I haveplaced “existential” in scare quotes: existential phenomenology is still a form of transcen-dental phenomenology).45 The crucial point to note in this regard is that a transcendentalphenomenology need in no way be a “constitutive” phenomenology in the idealist or neo-Kantian sense of the term, i.e., according to which consciousness is conceived of as“producing” meanings (the meaning “sensuous object,” for instance) out of itself or, other-wise expressed, which bestows meaning on the world through a sovereign act of meaning-giving (Sinngebung). “Transcendental” must not be taken to mean “primary” (as whenHusserl speaks of consciousness as constituting, as being “prior to” or primary over againstthe world as constituted). To express the matter in yet another way, there are not, asHusserl tended to say, two kinds of “consciousnesses” or egos, viz., a transcendental orpure consciousness and a mundane or worldly consciousness; there is, as Aron Gurwitschfor one argued, only one consciousness (or, better said, self): a thoroughly worldlyconsciousness, but one which may nevertheless adopt a transcendental or reflexive attitudetoward its own worldliness -- and whose essential (eidetic) understanding of things isalways hemmed in and limited by its worldliness or facticity.

The two most important notions that later phenomenologists took over from Husserland which they sought to extricate from a questionable philosophy of consciousness arethose of intentionality and the lifeworld.46 As regards intentionality, Heidegger, concernedwith “the beingof intentionality,” sought to reconceptualize this notion in terms not of“consciousness” but of “existence.” According to Heidegger, “knowing” or “cognizing”(“intuiting”) the world is not the most basic relation we have to the world; “knowing” isin fact a derivative or “founded” mode of something more basic, viz., ourbeing-in-the-world. “Knowing is grounded beforehand in a Being-already-alongside-the-world, whichis essentially constitutive for Dasein’s Being.” (BT, sec. 23, 88) To speak of “Dasein(existence)” and “being-already-alongside-the-world” is Heidegger’s way of articulatingHusserl’s notion of intentionality while avoiding the terminology of a philosophy of con-sciousness. It in fact represents, as Ricoeur says, an “overthrow” of the primacy Husserl

45 See PH, 138, 148: “Being and Time…preserved the external form of an affiliation with thetranscendental philosophy of his [Heidegger’s] master [Husserl]…. Heidegger’s critique of Husserl…hasnothing to do with ‘realistic’ softenings. Rather, it presupposes the consistent carrying out of thetranscendental thought in Husserl’s phenomenology — admittedly, in order to make it the object of anontological reflection and critique that takes an entirely different direction.” For his part, Lévinas, a studentof both Husserl and Heidegger, observed that “malgré tout l’abîme qui la sépare de Husserl,” Heidegger’sphilosophy inBeing and Time“demeure tributaire de la phénoménologie de Husserl.” Emmanuel Lévinas,En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger(Paris: Librairie J. Vrin, 1967), 52. On Merleau-Ponty’s continued adherence to Husserl’s transcendentalism, see myLa phénoménologie de Merleau-Ponty, une recherche des limites de la conscience(Paris: Editions Klincksieck, 1973); English trans.:ThePhenomenology of Merleau-Ponty: A Search for the Limits of Consciousness, Preface by Paul Ricoeur(Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1981), chap. 1.

46 Cf. Ricoeur: “it was through the theme of intentionality that Husserlian phenomenology becamerecognized in France.” (IA, 7); and cf. Gadamer who refers to the notion of the lifeworld as “the mostpowerful conceptual creation of the later Husserl.” (PH, 147)

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accorded to consciousness47 and a “deepening” of the notion of intentionality: “being-in”is a more primordial phenomenon that the subject-object (noesis-noema) relation, andHeidegger’s “existence” is something decidedly more than Husserl’s “intuitional con-sciousness.”

Thus, while Husserl spoke of consciousness “intending” objects, Heidegger, in hisreformulation of the notion of intentionality, stated: “When Dasein directs itself towardssomething and grasps it, it does not somehow first get out of an inner sphere in which ithas been proximally encapsulated [Husserl’s egological “sphere of ownness”], but itsprimary kind of Being is such that it is always ‘outside’ alongside entities which itencounters and which belong to a world already discovered.”48 (BT, 89) This worldwhich is “always already there,” into which, as it were, Dasein is simply “thrown,” iswhat the later Husserl called the lifeworld (Lebenswelt) -- a “magic word,” as Gadamersaid of it, that Husserl himself invented.49 The notion of the lifeworld is one Husserlcame upon in the course of the investigations he undertook later in his life into the originsof modern science. By means of this “archeology” of Western consciousness, Husserl wasable to flesh out his earlier critique of naturalism by showing how the lifeworld is “theforgotten meaning-fundament [Sinnesfundament] of natural science.” The lifeworld is theprescientific world of lived experience on which all (natural) scientific constructs arebased and which they necessarily presuppose. Indeed, as Husserl again and again insisted,scientific constructs are mere idealizations,abstractions fromand interpretations ofthisprereflective world of immediate life (“a garb of ideas [Ideenkleid]” thrown over thelifeworld). Although this is hermeneutically incontestable, Husserl nevertheless went onto insist that the natural sciences could be placed on a rigorous footing (and surmounttheir supposed “crisis”) only if the lifeworld itself could be scientifically accounted for.This, of course, was to be the task of the most ultimate of all sciences, “a science withoutbounds,”50 i.e., a transcendental phenomenology which relates everything back to theconstituting activity of a transcendental Ego.

For Heidegger, the significance of the notion of what Husserl was to call the lifeworldlay elsewhere. What the “pregivenness” (as Husserl would say) of the lifeworld means isthat, by virtue of our very existence, we possess what Heidegger called a “pre-ontologicalunderstanding” of the world (of “Being”). This was not, however, the formula for anultimate science of Being in Husserl’s sense, since what the discovery of the lifeworldsignified for Heidegger was thatall explicit understandings or theorizings, even those oftranscendental phenomenology, do no more than build on, and are interpretations of, thisalways presupposed, and thus never fully thematizable, “ground.” This is what Heideggercalled the “hermeneutic situation.” (Cf. BT, sec. 45, 275) Everything comes to us, as itwere, pre-interpreted (or pre-articulated). To see or deal with something, for instance, isalways to see or deal with itas this or that thing (this is what Heidegger referred to as the“existential-hermeneutic as.” [BT, sec. 33, 201]) For Heidegger all Being is in effectinterpreted Being; as later hermeneuticians would say, “interpretation goes all the way

47 Paul Ricoeur,Main Trends in Philosophy(New York: Holmes and Meier, 1978), 129, hereafterMTP.

48 Compare this formulation of the notion of intentionality with that of Sartre quoted above. Thesentence in BT, sec. 43a, 251 beginning thus, “Only because Being is ‘in consciousness’ — that is to say,only because it is understandable in Dasein…” clearly indicates that the term “Dasein” is Heidegger’sfunctional equivalent of Husserl’s “consciousness.”

49 See Hans-Georg Gadamer,Praise of Theory: Speeches and Essays, trans. Chris Dawson (NewHaven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), 55.

50 As Husserl said in his entry on “Phenomenology” in theEncyclopaedia Britannica.

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down and all the way back.”51 For Heidegger, interpretation is not just one mode ofbeing-conscious, as it was for Husserl; it is the all-embracing form of our awareness ofthe world (being). The “given” is always aninterpretedgiven, such that there is, and canbe, no such thing as a “pure” seeing. Unlike Husserl, therefore, Heidegger did not believethat the lifeworld could ever be transformed into the fully transparent object of anabsolute, presuppositionless (voraussetzungslos) science.

For Heidegger, the ultimate discovery of the reflecting subject (the ultimate pheno-menological “given”) is not a transparent, luminous transcendental Ego but, rather, the“opacity of the fact,” as Merleau-Ponty was later to say. Heidegger’s notion ofBefind-lichkeit (disposition) is meant to express a primordial characteristic of the lifeworld: thefact that we simply “find” ourselves in a world, “thrown” (geworfen) into it. We discoverourselves as “already there,” and the sheer, brute facticity of our being-there blots out anyapparent “why” or “wherefore” for this factual state-of-affairs: “The pure ‘that it is’ showsitself, but the ‘whence’ and the ‘wither’ remain in darkness.” (BT, sec. 29, 173) Or asHeidegger also says: “Even if Dasein is ‘assured’ in its belief about its ‘whither,’ or if,in rational enlightenment, it supposes itself to know about its ‘whence,’ all this counts fornothing as against the phenomenal facts of the case: for the mood [of attunedness toDasein’s factual situation] brings Dasein before the ‘that-it-is’ of its ‘there,’ which, assuch, stares it in the face with the inexorability of an enigma.” (BT, sec. 29, 175)

These remarks of Heidegger’s are thoroughly “un-Husserlian” and are in fact fully inline with what that earlier critic of the Cartesian ideal, Blaise Pascal, had written in hisreflections on what, like subsequent existential writers, he referred to as the “humancondition”:

When I consider the brief span of my life absorbed into the eternity which comesbefore and after,…the small space I occupy and which I see swallowed up in theinfinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me,I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there: there is no reason forme to be here rather than there, now rather than then. Who put me here?

When I see the blind and wretched state of man, when I survey the whole universe inits dumbness and man left to himself with no light [no “science” of being], as thoughlost in this corner of the universe, without knowing who put him there, what he hascome to do, what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything,I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desertisland, who wakes up quite lost and with no means of escape.52

The kind of existential anxiety (Angst) Pascal is describing was one of the major topicsof Being and Time. In Heidegger’s treatment of anxiety (which owed more toKierkegaard, and Kierkegaard’s morbid individualism and irrational decisionism, than toPascal’s more sober assessment of the human condition), the function of anxiety or dreadand the “call of conscience” is to lead the individual Dasein to “wrest” itself away, in aviolent-like act of resolve (“anticipatory resoluteness”), from its “fallenness” in the

51 The phraseology is that of Schrag; see Calvin O. Schrag, “Traces of Meaning and Reference:Phenomenological and Hermeneutical Explorations,”Current Issues in Linguistic Theory73 (1992): 26.For a discussion of Schrag’s contributions to phenomenology, see Martin Beck Matustik and William L.McBride, ed., Calvin O. Schrag and the Task of Philosophy after Postmodernity(Evanston, Ill.:Northwestern University Press, 2002).

52 Blaise Pascal,Pensées, trans. Alban John Krailsheimer (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966),nos. 68, 198.

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impersonal, average everydayness of anonymous mass man, the “they” (das Man), so asto set itself on the path of authentic selfhood. For Heidegger, the “authentic” self was akind of heroic, radically individualized, and guilt-ridden “solus ipse” capable of achievinggenuine selfhood only in a kind of voluntaristic, self-assertive, quasi-Promethean mannerand for whom “the Dasein-with of Others” had nothing to offer. (Cf. BT, sec. 40) Thisparticular view of selfhood or subjectivity (which was to become greatly accentuated inthe 1930s) was, in the eyes of many subsequent phenomenologists, extremely one-sided(and thus phenomenologically unsound53), and it was indeed one which would later comeback to haunt Heidegger in such a way as to lead him, in a kind of compensatory over-reaction, to turn away (in his famous “turning” orKehre) from the human subject (Dasein)to concentrate more directly on Being itself, “Being-as-such (des Seins als solchen),”abandoning in the process the very notion of subjectivity (which he came to equate withthe unbridled, modernistic Will to Power extolled by Nietzsche). Later phenomenologistswould not follow Heidegger down this path but would, instead, attempt to conceptualize“authentic selfhood” in a less “subjectivistic” manner and would seek to view the pheno-menon of intersubjectivity (ourMiteinandersein, our being-in-the-world-with-others) in amuch more positive light -- discarding in the process not only Husserl’s “transcendentalsolipsism” but also Heidegger’s “existential ‘solipsism.’”

For all that, Being and Timewas the crowning work of Heidegger’sExistenz-philosophieand a foundational work for interpretive phenomenology. In this book,Heidegger sought to pursue further, with the “necessary tools” provided by Husserl (cf.BT, sec. 10, 75n.x), but in a more radical way, one might say, the overcoming of meta-physics and modern epistemologism that Husserl had inaugurated (the book, one shouldnot forget, was dedicated to Husserl “in friendship and admiration”).54 However, in goingbeyond the framework of Husserl’s philosophy of consciousness and in abandoning alltalk of a transcendental Ego, Heidegger was not, contrary to what many have said andwhat, indeed, Husserl himself seems to have thought, turning away from transcendentalphilosophy and lapsing into a crude form of empiricism, into “anthropologism” and“irrationalism.”55 As John D. Caputo rightly observed:

If Being and Timepractices a hermeneutic phenomenology, this is because Heideggerhas acted upon certain suggestions of Husserl, exploited certain resources in Husserl’sown method, moved phenomenology in a direction which Husserl himself made possible.If the phenomenology of Heidegger is explicitly hermeneutic, Husserl’s phenomenologyis already in an important sense a “proto-hermeneutics.”56

53 Some phenomenologists would argue that (appreciative)wonderis as basic (“equiprimordial”) areaction to the “thrownness” of our existence as is Heidegger’s (dreadful) guilt. In any event, Heidegger’s“resolve,” focused exclusively as it is on Non-Being (Nichts), has no praxial relevance to the question ofhow we shouldact in the world of everyday existence (which Heidegger equated with inauthentic being).(Interesting in this connection is the story told by Karl Löwith of one of Heidegger’s students who, uponemerging from a lecture of his, exclaimed: “I am resolved! Only I am not sure on what” [see Spiegelberg,The Phenomenological Movement, 1:309n].)

54 That Husserl was unable to appreciate the genuinelyphenomenologicalsignificance of Heidegger’swork is another matter: see, in this regard, Husserl’s 1931 Frankfurt lecture “Phänomenologie und Anthropo-logie” and Husserl to Alexander Pfänder (Jan. 6, 1935).

55 According to Lévinas, what Heidegger essentially did was to draw out the deeper, concrete, orexistential “consequences” of Husserl’s intellectualistic “theory of knowledge”; in so doing, Heideggercontinued along the way traced out by his teacher (maître). (See Lévinas,Théorie de l’intuition, 187, 218.

56 Caputo, “Husserl, Heidegger and the Question of a ‘Hermeneutic’ Phenomenology,” 158.However, as Caputo also points out in this article, Husserl betrayed his own phenomenological-hermeneutic insights by subordinating them in the end to the Cartesian ideal of an absolute science.

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Heidegger characterized his own project inBeing and Timeas that of a “fundamentalontology” and, while ignoring Husserl’s transcendental Ego, yet maintained, in line withHusserl, that ontology can responsibly be pursued only in the mode of phenomenology,i.e., transcendentally (“Phenomenological truth [the disclosedness of Being] isveritastranscendentalis” [BT, sec. 7, 62]). Thus, as Heidegger said, if we wish to raise thequestion of the meaning of being, we must first of all (“a priori”) conduct a thoroughgoinganalysis of that being, which itself raises the question of what it means to be (and withoutwhom there would -- obviously -- be no question), viz., that being for whom its ownbeing is itself a question.57 That being is of course the human being, Dasein. AsHeidegger the phenomenologist states:

To work out the question of Being adequately, we must make an entity—theinquirer—transparent in his own Being. The very asking of this question is an entity’smode ofBeing…. This entity which each of us is himself and which includes inquiringas one of the possibilities of its Being, we shall denote by the term “Dasein”. If we areto formulate our question explicitly and transparently, we must first give a properexplication of an entity (Dasein) with regard to its Being. (BT, sec. 2, 27)

The phenomenological analysis of human being that Heidegger undertook inBeing andTimewas meant to furnish the “transcendental horizon” for raising the question as to themeaning of being, but, as Heidegger said in his 1935 lectures on metaphysics, “the‘transcendental’ there [inBeing and Time] is not that of the subjective consciousness;rather, it defines itself in terms of the existential-ecstatic temporality of human being-there[Dasein].” (IM, 18) The purpose of Heidegger’s “existential analytic” inBeing and Time,which was directed at “conceptualizing existentially [ontologically] what has already beendisclosed in an ontico-existentiell [prereflective or “factical”] manner” (see BT, sec. 41,241), was to reveal, by means of an eidetic analysis, the essential structures or basic traits,“existentialia (Existenzialien),” of human being-in-the-world. What this “phenomenologicalhermeneutics of facticity,” this phenomenological explication (interpretation,Auslegung)of the lifeworld disclosed, was that the most basic meaning, the essence of human beingis temporality (“der Sinn des Daseins ist die Zeitlichkeit” 58).

The human subject constitutes itself as a subject by means of its being essentially(“ecstatically”) related to futurity. It exists, not in the static mode of athing (which isnever more than what, as a matter of fact, it is), but in the dynamic mode of possibilityor potentiality, of continual self-transcendence. The human being is a being which isalways morethan what it ever actually is; it exists (ex-sists, stands out from itself) as anon-going process of self-interpretation and reinterpretation.

Since the human being is that being for whom its being is always in question (until theday it is no more), the basic relation of the self (Selbst) to itself and to the world is thatof an concernful or “circumspective” understanding of itself. The name Heidegger gaveto this existentially-ontologically fundamental, future-oriented (“ek-static”) relatedness ofself to self and to world (the “intentional” relation), a relation in which Dasein’s “own-most potentiality-for-Being is an issue” (see BT, sec. 39, 275), iscareor concern(Sorge).

57 See BT, sec. 43, 244: “The question of the meaning of Being becomes possible at all only if thereis something like an understanding of Being. Understanding of Being belongs to the kind of Being whichthe entity called ‘Dasein’ possesses. The more appropriately and primordially we have succeeded inexplicating this entity, the surer we are to attain our goal in the further course of working out the problemof fundamental ontology.”

58 See Martin Heidegger,Sein und Zeit(Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1967), sec. 65, 331, cf.BT, 380.

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Unlike knowledge, which is something we may or may not have, understanding -- anunderstanding of what it means to be (Seinsverständnis) -- is what we most essentially andalwaysare. This tacit (pre-ontological) understanding which is constitutive of our being-in-the-world is of a “horizonal” nature -- existing, as James would say, on the “fringes”of consciousness -- in that it is an undefined or under-determined understanding of thepossible ways in which wecouldbe (of our “potentiality-for-being”). Since the concernfulunderstanding that we are is always future-oriented, temporally “already ahead of itself,”it is essentially “projective” in nature (entwerfendes Verstehen).

“The phenomenology of Dasein,” Heidegger states, “is ahermeneuticin the primordialsignificance of the word, where it designates [the] business of interpreting.” (BT, sec. 7, 62)As regards the exigencies of philosophicalmethod, to maintain that understanding isprojective in nature means that the hermeneutic task of ontological interpretation, of phe-nomenological research, cannot be that of metaphysical, free-floating speculation but mustbe, and can only be, that of a patient and care-taking working-out and “appropriating” ofthe meaning-structures (“fore-structures,” as Heidegger calls them) of our pre-ontological,“projective” understanding of things -- an understanding which, being “projective,” is itselfinterpretive in nature. Or as Heidegger says: “The Interpretation by which such an under-standing gets developed [i.e., phenomenology] will let that which is to be interpretedputitself into words for the very first time.”59 (BT, sec. 63, 362) The relation between theunderstanding that we are and the various ways in which this understanding, which isalready interpretive (in a pre-ontological sort of way), itself gets interpreted (“developed,”“worked-out”) in an articulated (philosophical or ontological) fashion is, therefore, aninescapablycircular relation.

Indeed, one of the most significant accomplishments ofBeing and Timeis the way inwhich, in this work, Heidegger transformed what traditional hermeneutics had called the“hermeneutic circle” which, as a purely methodological rule, meant that when interpretinga text one ought continually to interpret the parts in terms of the whole and the whole interms of the parts. What Heidegger did was to have “ontologized” the hermeneutic circle.He showed how the “circle of understanding” is in fact rooted in the existential con-stitution of human being itself. All understanding is of a circular nature in that all explicitunderstandings always presuppose a pregiven world of meaning, this being the everyday,historically conditioned lifeworld into which we find ourselves “thrown.” This was adecisive move on Heidegger’s part in that it represented a truly radical break with modernmetaphysics, with, that is, the Cartesian ideal that dominated all of modern philosophy,the notion, namely, that genuine, scientific knowledge must be presuppositionless or“foundational,” grounded upon some ultimate foundation -- this search for apodicticcertainty being expressive of what Pascal called the “[burning] desire to find a firmfooting, an ultimate, lasting base on which to build a tower rising up to infinity.”60 This,of course, was an ideal (or idol) that Husserl, a “kind of super-rationalist”61 ever con-cerned to discover a solid, scientific foundation for all human knowing and doing, couldnot bring himself to relinquish.

59 See also BT, sec. 29, 179: “Phenomenological Interpretation must make it possible for Daseinitself to disclose things primordially; it must, as it were, let Dasein interpret itself. Such Interpretationtakes part in this disclosure only in order to raise to a conceptual level the phenomenal content of whathas been disclosed, and to do so existentially [ontologically].”

60 Pascal,Pensées, no. 199. Pascal went on to say: “but our whole foundation cracks and the earthopens up into the depth of the abyss.”

61 See Husserl to Lévy-Bruhl, March 11, 1935; cited in Spiegelberg,The PhenomenologicalMovement, 1:84.

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Heidegger’s transcendental-existential analytic, which he considered to be “a morefaithful adherence to the principle of phenomenology” than Husserl’s own would-bescience of being,62 provided the crucial impetus for the subsequent interpretive turn inphenomenology that was to come to fruition with Gadamer and Ricoeur, and it did so byreason of the way in which it managed to “existentialize” Husserl’s transcendentalphenomenology, as well as in the way in which it managed to overcome the rationalist-foundational project of modernity running from Descartes through Husserl. In this way itlaid the groundwork not only for hermeneutic phenomenology but also for thephenomenological philosophy of human finitude that Maurice Merleau-Ponty was todevelop some fifteen years later.

In contrast to Husserl who insisted that “science is a title standing for absolute, timelessvalues” (PRS, 136), who as a philosopher lived in and for the Absolute, and who held thathumanity’s own highest vocation was to live in and for the Infinite (“For the sake of timewe must not sacrifice eternity” [PRS, 141]), Merleau-Ponty flatly stated: “No philosophycan afford to be ignorant of the problem of finitude under pain of failing to understanditself as philosophy.” (PP, 38) As would be the case with his hermeneutic successors,Merleau-Ponty insisted that, as reflecting subjects, we have no access to the absolute, andhis phenomenology was nothing other than a sustained attempt to draw out the far-rangingphilosophical implications that follow upon an unflinching recognition of human finitude.

Also in response to Husserl who, in his customary way, had presented the phenomeno-logical reduction as a means by which the reflecting subject could beled back(reducere=to lead back) to some kind of “inner” realm of pure experience, and who in the very lastlines of hisCartesian Meditationshad stated, quoting St Augustine, “Do not wish to goout; go back into yourself; truth inhabits the inner man,” Merleau-Ponty declared:

Truth does not ‘inhabit’ only ‘the inner man,’ or more accurately, there is no innerman, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself. When I returnto myself from an excursion into the realm of dogmatic common sense or of science[“naturalism”], I find, not a source of intrinsic truth, but a subject destined to be in theworld [voué au monde]. (PP, ix)

In saying this, Merleau-Ponty was reacting against the convoluted, round-about wayin which Husserl, struggling to work out his positionvis-à-visDescartes and Kant, hadsought to overcome the subject/object dichotomy of modern philosophy in such a way asto effect a return to lived experience. Husserl’s general tactic in this regard was to presentthe reduction not only as a “bracketing” of the nonsensical (unsinnlich) notion of traditionalrealism of a “being-in-itself” (the phenomenological reduction is a “transcendental” reduc-tion to the precise degree that it does this), but, beyond that, as a reduction of everythingthat is to the “concrete ego” conceived of as the constituting source of all meaning andthus asomnitudo realitatis, as the sum total of reality, as a system ofabsolute being, thetranscendental, self-enclosed field of all possible acts and objects outside of which (as hesometimes said) there is quite literally nothing (since for Husserl to be is to-be-an-object,i.e., a meaning, and being exists onlyfor a consciousness which “intends” it). Along theway, Husserl adopted the Leibnizian term “monad” to refer to this “inner man.” In order,however, to counteract the manifestly idealistic and solipsistic implications of such a move(a move dictated by Husserl’s Cartesian quest for an absolute, presuppositionless startingpoint), Husserl would then typically go on to argue that this monad was not altogether

62 See Heidegger’s 1962 letter to Richardson in William J. Richardson,Heidegger: ThroughPhenomenology to Thought(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963), xiv.

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self-enclosed but had “windows” through which it could make empathetic contact withother such monadic egos. Eventually -- but only eventually and as a kind of filling-in ofthe blanks -- this “universal self-knowledge -- first of all monadic, and then intermonadic”was supposed to get around to dealing with the concrete, existential “problems ofaccidental factualness, of death, of fate, of the possibility of a ‘genuine’ human life,” andthe “problem of the ‘meaning’ of history.”63 Such was the complex manner -- workingto get at our experience of the world from, as it were, the top down and the inside out --in which Husserl sought to subvert or deconstruct the metaphysics of modernity. AlthoughMerleau-Ponty always tried to present Husserl in the best possible light, he was not pre-pared to grant any validity to this typically modernist way of proceeding (this “methodicidealism,” as Ricoeur has called it), since the most important thing for him was to effecta decisive overcoming of that most basic conceptual opposition of the metaphysics ofmodernity, the opposition between “inside” and “outside.” “Inside and outside are insepar-able,” he stated categorically and without hesitation. “The world is wholly inside and I amwholly outside myself.” (PP, 407) Such, for Merleau-Ponty, was the true meaning ofphenomenology’s great discovery: intentionality.

In the Preface to his major work,Phenomenology of Perception, in which he soughtto respond to the question (put to him by his thesis supervisor, Émile Bréhier) “What isPhenomenology?” and in the course of which he presented his own existential reading ofsome of the major themes in Husserl’s phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty stated what hehimself saw to be the most important lesson to be learned from putting into play thephenomenological reduction. “The most important lesson which the reduction teaches us,”he said, “is the impossibility of a complete reduction.” (PP, xiv) In this much remarked-upon phrase, Merleau-Ponty was not calling into question the need for the reduction, i.e.,for a conscientiously transcendental approach to the question as to the meaning of thebeing of the world. He was not advocating any form of “realist” phenomenology but was,instead, objecting to the way in which Husserl had presented the reduction (as describedin the preceding paragraph). While, for Merleau-Ponty, the reduction was indispensablefor overcoming the metaphysics of modernity and leading us back to our lived experienceof the world, it does not, and cannot, afford us access to a “pure,” monadic ego whichwould be the absolute source of all that is, and can be for us, an absolute consciousnesswhich would be coextensive with being itself.

And in rejecting Husserl’s “idealist” presentation of the reduction, Merleau-Ponty wasalso thereby ruling out the possibility of our ever achieving the kind of apodictically certainscienceof being that Husserl had dreamed of. Like Heidegger,64 Merleau-Ponty believedthat the ultimate discovery of the reflecting subject is that of his or her own “thrownness”into the world, or, as Merleau-Ponty put it, “the unmotivated upsurge of the world.”65

(PP, xiv) Accordingly, what a genuinely transcendental or “radical” reflection amounts to,he said, is “a consciousness of its own dependence on an unreflective life which is itsinitial situation, unchanging, given once and for all.” (PP, xiv)

The greater part of thePhenomenology of Perceptionwas devoted to an explorationof this unreflective or prereflective life which underlies and supports that of the reflectingsubject, i.e., perception. In this work, which was intended as a kind of “inventory of the

63 See Husserl,Cartesian Meditations, sec. 64, 156. It is obvious that Husserl, in a kind of after-thought, as it were, is here trying to find a place in his own transcendental-idealist conceptual frameworkfor Heidegger’s existential concerns.

64 As Ricoeur observes, the “horizon” of thePhenomenology of Perceptionis “nothing other thanHeideggerian care and being-in-the-world.” IA, 11.

65 This is what elsewhere Merleau-Ponty refers to ascontingency, which was for him the most basicof all phenomenological facts.

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perceived world” (PP, 25), Merleau-Ponty, contrary to what is commonly thought, soughtnot so much to put forward a theory of his own as to the nature of perception, as tocriticize various objectivist theories of perception characteristic of the metaphysics ofmodernity.66 These theories were of two different sorts, realist (empiricist or materialist)and idealist (intellectualist or spiritualist), but they both rested on the same assumption,viz., that there are “two senses, and two only, of the word ‘exist’: one exists as a thingor else one exists as a consciousness.”67 (PP, 198) This is, of course, the metaphysicalassumptionpar excellenceof modern philosophy constitutive of the subject/object split,and in attempting to deconstruct this metaphysical assumption, Merleau-Ponty’s goal wasto effect a “return to the phenomena,” to our actual lived experience (“the phenomenalfield”). This “reduction” to lived experience was meant, in turn, to serve as the means forelucidating the unique mode of being of that being which, in our everyday, unreflective,perceptual lives we ourselves are.

This particular being -- the perceiving subject -- is not a mere thing-like object, asnaturalistic realism or materialist neuroscience would have it, but it is also not the self-conscious, transparent subject of idealist philosophy (the pure spectator of its own bodilyexperiences). Asubjectit most definitely is, but a unique, philosophically ambiguous sortof subject whose mode of being is neither that of the “in itself” (mere object) nor that of the“for itself” (pure subject). Far from being a pure Ego, the perceiving subject is anembodiedsubject, abody-subject, so to speak. Inasmuch, therefore, as I am aware of the world, Ido not merely “have” a body (as modernist philosophers tend to say), Iam a body -- anoften overlooked yet, as regards the overcoming of modern epistemologism, crucial insightthat Merleau-Ponty took over from Gabriel Marcel’s existential phenomenology of em-bodiment (for his part, William James had said that our bodies are not simply “ours,” theyareus68). The perceiving subject is one’s own body,le corps propre. This is not the purelyobjective body that appears in the pages of anatomy textbooks and which is the body ofnobody in particular; it is, as it were, a “subjective” or “lived” body. As Sartre said, Iexistmy body; my body is my unique point of view on the world, one on which I cannotmyself take a point of view as an outsider might. The subject which perceives a world --and which is capable of perceiving a world only to the degree that it is capable of actingand moving about bodily in this world (in lived space) -- is that body which, as humansubjects, each and every one of us is. While the notions of the lived body (Leib) andaction (motility -- “I can”) were not absent from Husserl’s work, Merleau-Ponty felt thatthe true significance of those notions was obscured by Husserl’s overarching “mentalism”(or “psychism”), i.e., Husserl’s habitual way of viewing intentionality from within theframework of a philosophy of consciousness, as essentially a kind of psychic phenomenonor “mental process” (a feature of Husserl’s way of approaching issues that Charles SandersPeirce had objected to earlier on).

Following up on clues provided by Husserl,69 Heidegger had already pointed out thatall higher-level knowledge of the world is founded on our “prepredicative” being-in-the-world, but, in showing in a thoroughgoing way how all reflective consciousness rests upon

66 See in this regard my “Did Merleau-Ponty Have a Theory of Perception,” in Thomas W. Buschand Shaun Gallagher, ed.,Merleau-Ponty, Hermeneutics, and Postmodernism(Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press,1992). In this essay I maintain that “if ‘perception’ is understood in its traditional sense, as referring tosome kind of reproductive, mirroring process, whereby what is ‘outside’ is duplicated ‘inside,’ the concept‘perception' does not figure in thePhenomenology.” Ibid., 93-94.

67 See also PP, 37: “Everything that exists exists as a thing or as a consciousness, and there is nohalf-way house.”

68 See James,The Principles of Psychology, 1:291.69 Cf. Caputo, “Husserl, Heidegger and the Question of a ’Hermeneutic” Phenomenology.”

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and presupposes the unreflective life of our bodily or corporeal being, Merleau-Ponty wentconsiderably beyond Heidegger in spelling out what it actually means to be in a world, tohave a world (a “world,” Merleau-Ponty said, is “a collection of things which emerge froma background of formlessness by presenting themselves to our body as ‘to be touched,’‘to be taken,’ ‘to be climbed over.’” [PP, 441]) As Alphonse De Waelhens, one of Merleau-Ponty’s early defenders, observed:

Heidegger always situates himself at a level of complexity which permits imaginingthat the problem which concerns us here is resolved. For it is at the level of perceptionand the sensible that the problem must receive its decisive treatment…. But inBeingand Timeone does not find thirty lines concerning the problem of perception; one doesnot find ten concerning that of the body.70

Indeed, one of the outstanding merits of Merleau-Ponty’s work on perception was how,with the aid of Gestalt psychology and the biological and behavioral sciences, he was ableto elucidate in a concrete way the interpretive nature of perception and to show how thereare no “pure sensations” (“Pure sensation…, this notion corresponds to nothing in ourexperience.” [PP, 3]), and how all seeing is a hermeneutic seeing-as. (Like other Frenchphenomenologists, Merleau-Ponty had no sympathy whatsoever for Husserl’s attempt tosalvage modern, epistemological philosophy’s notion of “sense data” [“sensualism”] byarguing that the meaningful objects of consciousness [noemata] are arrived at by meansof intentional acts “animating” hyletic data existing within consciousness [as real, i.e.,non-intentional parts thereof] and which are themselves uninterpreted and unmeaningful.)

In pointing to the essentiallyambiguousmode of being of the body-subject,71

Merleau-Ponty was attempting to take seriously something that the mainline tradition inphilosophy had always passed over in silence.72 Contrary to the impression created insome early readers of his, however, Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to show how the personal,self-conscious subject is dependent “on an unreflective life which is its initial situation,unchanging, given once and for all” was in no way intended as a celebration of the un-reflected life. He was most certainly not advocating -- as others have -- that we renouncethe reflective or philosophical life and seek to coincide with immediate experience;“without reflection,” he insisted, “life would probably dissipate itself in ignorance of itselfor in chaos.”73 Indeed, Merleau-Ponty, as a philosopher, was not particularly interested

70 Alphonse De Waelhens, “A Philosophy of the Ambiguous,” in Maurice Merleau-Ponty,TheStructure of Behavior, trans. Alden L. Fisher (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), xviii-xix, hereafter SB. Oneof the earliest published studies of Merleau-Ponty’s “philosophy of ambiguity” was De Waelhens’sUnephilosophie de l'ambiguïté, L’existentialisme de M. Merleau-Ponty(Louvain: Bibliothèque philosophiquede Louvain, 1951).

71 Cf. PP, 169: “Ambiguity is of the essence of human existence”; and PP, 123: “This ambiguity isnot some imperfection of consciousness or existence, but the definition of them.”

72 See in this regard my “Merleau-Ponty’s Deconstruction of Logocentrism,” in Martin C. Dillon,ed.,Merleau-Ponty Vivant(Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1991). See also my “Between Phenomenologyand (Post)Structuralism: Rereading Merleau-Ponty,” in Busch and Gallagher, ed.,Merleau-Ponty,Hermeneutics, and Postmodernism, 123: “If Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is rightly referred to as a‘philosophy of ambiguity,’ it is because the central thrust of his thinking, from beginning to end, lay inhis attempt to overcome the discrete, oppositional categories of modern philosophy and, indeed, of theentire metaphysical tradition.”

73 See Merleau-Ponty’s reply to his critics in his “The Primacy of Perception and Its PhilosophicalConsequences,” in Maurice Merleau-Ponty,The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomeno-logical Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston, Ill.: North-western University Press, 1964), 19, hereafter PriP.

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in the unreflected, in “perception,” purely as such; his overriding concern was, rather, withreflective consciousness itself, with what, in line with the tradition of French reflexivephilosophy, he called theCogito (the presence or “proximity” of the self to itself). Thewhole point of effecting a “return” to perception was, for Merleau-Ponty, to discern its“philosophical consequences” and to show how this “genealogy” of the conscious subject(“une généalogie de la vérité”) necessitates, on the part of a phenomenological philo-sophy, a resolute abandonment of the philosophy of consciousness and a thoroughgoingreconceptualization orrefonteof what it means to be a self-conscious, rational subject.Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception and the body-subject was, as Ricoeurnoted, “entirely in the service of a philosophy of finitude.”74 It is important to note, how-ever, that in criticizing Husserl’s transcendental idealism, Merleau-Ponty was not in anyway (contrary to what is sometimes thought) endorsing traditional realist philosophy.75

Rather, as he stated in his first book,The Structure of Behavior, his goal was “to definetranscendental philosophy anew.” (SB, 3)

In this he was not altogether successful, for, as he subsequently realized, thePhenomenology of Perceptionretains significant (residual, so to speak) traces of the philo-sophy of consciousness. In his later writings, therefore, Merleau-Ponty sought to “deepenand rectify” (VI, 168) his earlier phenomenological investigations into our bodily being-in-the-world and to reconfigure the notion of subjectivity in a much more radical way.76 Inthis regard, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical development was quite different from that ofHeidegger.77 Unlike Heidegger who, afterBeing and Time(in his famous “turning” orKehre), sought to overcome the “dominance of subjectivity” by “leaving behind” not onlymodern subjectivism but also the very notion of subjectivity (“des metaphysischen Subjek-tivismus”), Merleau-Ponty remained committed to the notion of the subject and thetradition of Western humanism that Heidegger criticized in hisLetter on Humanism(acriticism that was part of his attempt to come to terms with his earlier embrace ofNazism78).

Heidegger’s attempt to overcome the very notion of subjectivity (as well as, it may benoted, philosophy itself, which Heidegger came to equate with metaphysics pure andsimple, i.e., the “forgetfulness” of Being), was, in fact, something Merleau-Ponty cri-ticized; in his political philosophy,79 Merleau-Ponty reaffirmed those basic principles ofthe Enlightenment tradition of liberal democratic humanism --civilization, Zivilisation--that Heidegger had rejected (he realized full well that if humanism and the notion of the

74 Ricoeur,Husserl, 209.75 Cf. PP, 47: “The return to perceptual experience, in so far as it is a consequential and radical

reform, puts out of court all forms of realism, that is to say, all philosophies which leave consciousnessand take as their datum one of its results.”

76 For a study of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical development and his attempt to escape from theconfines of a philosophy of consciousness, see myThe Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty: A Search forthe Limits of Consciousness.

77 For an overview of Heidegger’s work, see my “Heidegger’s Dialectic,”Reflections1, no. 1(Summer 1980).

78 As regards Heidegger’s Nazism and his hostility to liberal democracy and the values of theEnlightenment, see Tom Rockmore,On Heidegger’s Nazism and Philosophy(Berkeley, Calif.: Universityof California Press, 1992), as well as Michael E. Zimmerman,Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity:Technology, Politics, Art(Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1990).

79 For a discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s political philosophy see the following articles of mine:“Merleau-Ponty Alive,”Man and World26 (1993): 19-44, and “The Ethics and Politics of the Flesh,” inGary B. Madison and Marty Fairbairn, ed.,The Ethics of Postmodernity: Current Trends in ContinentalThinking(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1999) (reprised in Duane H. Davis, ed.,Merleau-Ponty’s Later Works and Their Practical Implications: The Dehiscence of Responsibility[Amherst, N.Y.:Humanity Books, 2001]).

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subject cannot be defended philosophically, neither can the idea of democracy80) andadhered to the age-old cosmopolitan ideal ofhumanitas-- an ideal that, in contrast withHeidegger also, Gadamer was to take up and defend in his philosophical hermeneutics(despite Heidegger’s criticizing him for so doing). To the end, Merleau-Ponty’s goal wasto overcome modern metaphysics by reconceptualizing or reconstructing in a resolutelypostmetaphysical and non-foundationalist fashion the modern notion of subjectivity.Merleau-Ponty’s work was, in fact, a life-long attempt to explore subjectivity to itsdeepest depths, in search of what, in his late work, he referred to as the foundational (“lefondemental,” a “transcendence within immanence”). Unlike the later Heidegger, he didnot think that modern subjectivism (“anthropocentrism”) could be overcome simply bydissolving subjectivity and returning to a pre-Socratic age of ontological innocence beforethe advent of self-consciousness, and in this Merleau-Ponty anticipated both Gadamer’sguiding notion of effective-history and Paul Ricoeur’s conscientious attempt at effectinga hermeneutic decentering and non-idealist retrieval of the notion of the subject.

Throughout his work Merleau-Ponty anticipated the interpretive turn in phenomenologyin a number of ways, not the least of which had to do with the emphasis he placed on theissues oflinguality and intersubjectivity. In his on-going battle with the philosophy ofconsciousness, Merleau-Ponty argued that both language and intersubjectivity are not, asmodern philosophy had generally assumed, secondary phenomena but are, instead, abso-lutely central to what it means to be a thinking, personal subject. Against Husserl who,like Frege and others at the time, was fixated on the logic of signification (Bedeutungs-lehre) and who maintained in a very traditional manner that language (speaking) is amerely secondary phenomenon in relation to thought (the “stratum of expression—and thisconstitutes its peculiarity—…is not productive”),81 Merleau-Ponty insisted in thePheno-menologyon what Gadamer would later refer to as “the indissoluble connection betweenthinking and speaking.” (RPJ, 25) Rejecting Husserl’s “mentalism” (or “logicism”) andHusserl’s modernist way of separating off thought from expression (redolent of the meta-physical opposition between mind and body), Merleau-Ponty maintained that expressionis productive of meaning.82 The thinking subject, he insisted, is none other than the speak-ing subject (there is no thought, properly speaking, without speech; “inner experience…ismeaningless.” [PP, 276]), and, in his later work, he went so far as to maintain that lan-guage is coextensive with our very being (“Language is a life, is our life and the life ofthings…. [W]hat is lived is lived-spoken…. [V]ision itself, thought itself, are, as has beensaid, ‘structured as a language.’”). The later Merleau-Ponty would have had no objectionsto Gadamer’s famous dictum: “Being that can be understood is language.”

80 Given Heidegger’s one-sided view of modernity as the rise to prominence of instrumental-calculative reason (the Will to Power or Will to Will)and nothing more, he rejected both Western liberaldemocracy and Eastern communism in favor of an idealized Nazism, since in his eyes both liberalism andtotalitarianism were part and parcel of the modernist metaphysics of unbridled subjectivity and its projectaiming at the technological domination of the earth.

81 Husserl,Ideas, sec. 124, 321; as Jacques Derrida observed in his translation of Husserl’sL'originede la géométrie[Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962], 61): “Aux yeux de Husserl, il seraitabsurde que le sens ne précède pas…l'acte de langage dont la valeur propre sera toujours celle del'expression.”

82 Nothing could be further from Husserl’s logicist approach to language -- according to which wordsor “verbal expressions” are “signs” whose referential function or “signification” is bestowed on them bymental acts of “intending” -- than Merleau-Ponty’s maintaining that speaking (signifying) is in the natureof a bodilygesture. (PP, 183-84) Both Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer insisted, against both Husserl and thelogicians (logikous), that words are not mere “signs”; for a discussion of the phenomenological-hermeneutic view of language, see my “Being and Speaking,” in John Stewart, ed.,Beyond the SymbolModel: Reflections on the Representational Nature of Language(Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1996).

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Nor would Merleau-Ponty have had any trouble endorsing Gadamer’s assertion: “Onlythrough others do we gain true knowledge of ourselves.”83 For Merleau-Ponty, the issueof intersubjectivity (“other minds,” as modern philosophy referred to it) was never, as itwas in modern philosophy, just a marginal issue, a kind of after-thought as regards theconstituting activity of a pure Ego. In contrast with Husserl who, in the fifth of hisCartesian Meditations, had experienced great procedural difficulties in dispelling thenotion that his transcendentalism, like that of his Cartesian predecessor, leads to solipsismby trying to give an account of how, within the realm of transcendental subjectivity (the“sphere of ownness”), we come upon a knowledge of the “Other,” for Merleau-Ponty theOther was from the outset a primordial given. From a Merleau-Pontyan point of view,what Husserl’s way of portraying the reduction as a reduction to one’s own ego (the“sphere of ownness,” the “primordial sphere”) overlooks, is that what is “properly” one’sown is never just “one’s own”: “We are mixed up with [mêlés au] the world and othersin an inextricable confusion.” (PP, 454) Merleau-Ponty always insisted that subjectivityis, at its most primordial level, an intersubjectivity, and in his later work, with his notionof the “flesh,” he was able to show how the reflecting subject is already, as it were, anOther for itself and how, accordingly, the Other is inscribed in, is woven into, the veryfabric of the subject’s own selfhood -- is part of its own flesh.84 The title of Ricoeur’s1990 revised Gifford lectures,Oneself As Another, has a distinctly Merleau-Pontyan ringto it (not surprisingly, perhaps, since for Ricoeur Merleau-Ponty was “the greatest ofFrench phenomenologists”).

Hermeneutic Phenomenology

If Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology was already to a great extent hermeneutic, as itundoubtedly was,85 the accomplishment of Hans-Georg Gadamer was to have trans-formed phenomenology into an explicitly hermeneutic discipline. Although Gadamer wasnot familiar with Merleau-Ponty’s work at the time he was preparing hismagnum opus,Truth and Method(first published in its original German version 1960), his own workwas, like Merleau-Ponty’s, solidly grounded in the phenomenology of Husserl andHeidegger. What Gadamer learned from Husserl and Husserl’s aversion to idle meta-physical speculation -- from, in a word, Husserl’s praxis -- was, he said, a sense for the“concrete,” i.e., the “phenomenological art of description” (“the fundamental phenomeno-logical principle that one should avoid all theoretical constructions and get back ‘to thethings themselves.’” [RPJ, 105, 113]). And it was this concern for the concrete, as wellas for the practical issue (one that Heidegger ignored86) of phronesisor prudentia(“thesense of what is feasible, what is possible, what is correct, here and now.” [TM, xxxviii]),that led him, as he also said, to “bypass” Heidegger’s ever more pronounced preoccupa-tion with the Being-question (die Seinsfrage) (PHC, 106) -- culminating, as many have

83 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Problem of Historical Consciousness,” in Paul Rabinow and WilliamM. Sullivan, ed.,Interpretive Social Science: A Reader(Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press,1979), 107, hereafter PHC.

84 See in this regard my “Flesh As Otherness,” in Galen A. Johnson and Michael B. Smith, ed.,Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1990).

85 See in this regard my “Merleau-Ponty In Retrospect,” in Patrick Burke and Jan Van Der Veken,ed.,Merleau-Ponty In Contemporary Perspective(Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1993).

86 In Gadamer’s opinion Heidegger “disregardedphronesisand raised the question of being in itsplace.” Hans-Georg Gadamer,A Century of Philosophy: A Conversation with Riccardo Dottori, trans. RodColtman (New York: Continuum, 2004), 127.

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alleged, in a kind ofSeinsmystik-- and to focus directly on human understanding itself,explicating just exactly what it means to maintain, as Heidegger had in his existentialanalytic inBeing and Time, that, as existing beings, an understanding of being is what wemost essentially are.

With Gadamer, phenomenology fully accomplishes its interpretive turn and also withhim the long tradition of hermeneutic thought dating from the seventeenth century (and,in some ways, even before) becomes phenomenological. With regard to hermeneutics,Gadamer’s accomplishment was, indeed, to have brought a phenomenological turn to thisold discipline. He did, so, as Husserl had earlier on, by breaking with the preoccupationsof the modern “era of epistemology [l’ère de la théorie de la connaissance]),” ones whichhad set the parameters for earlier hermeneuticians like Schleiermacher and Dilthey.87 AsGadamer stated in the Foreword to the second edition (1965) ofTruth and Method, “I didnot intend to produce an art or technique of understanding, in the manner of the earlierhermeneutics…. My real concern was and is philosophic.” (TM, xxviii) Gadamer’shermeneutics is indeed “philosophic” in that he was concerned not with technical issueshaving to do with correctness (“objectivity”) in matters of text-interpretation, but withclarifying “the conditions in which understanding [itself] takes place.” (TM, 295) Hisintent, in Truth and Method, was not epistemological (prescriptive, in the manner oflogical positivism) but phenomenological (descriptive),88 in that he was concerned withascertaining what, in actual fact, has occurred whenever we claim to have arrived at anunderstanding of things, other people, ourselves (“what always happens whenever an inter-pretation is convincing and successful.” [RAS, 111]).

Truth and Methodis in this sense a transcendental (reflective) inquiry, not into thelogical “conditions of possibility” of understanding, but into its actual, phenomenal make-up(its “conditions of actuality,” so to speak). Gadamer’s transcendentalism is not a speculative-deductive transcendentalism à la Kant (transcendental-logical), but a reflective andinterpretive transcendentalism (transcendental-phenomenological). Because Gadamer’shermeneutics is a reflective inquiry concerned with “our entire understanding of the worldand thus all the various forms in which this understanding manifests itself” (PH, 18), itis not so much a theory of text-interpretation, as was the case with Romantic herme-neutics, as it is a general, all-inclusive philosophy or ontology of human existence. Sinceit is an attempt to elucidate the nature of that understanding which, at bottom, we are,Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics could appropriately be described as an exercise infundamental phenomenological ontology.

Because Gadamer’s concern was with the human lifeworld, with “all human experienceof the world and human living,” and because he wanted “to discover what is common toall modes of understanding” (TM, xxx, xxxi), he could rightly claim that the scope ofhermeneutics so conceived is genuinelyuniversal.89 Faithful to his mentor Heidegger,Gadamer’s main thesis in this regard is that all human experience of the world isessentiallylingual in nature; language “is the fundamental mode of operation of our being-in-the-world and the all-embracing form of the constitution of the world.” (PH, 3) -- whence

87 See Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Le défi herméneutique,”Revue internationale de philosophie151(1984): 334.

88 See TM, 465: “Fundamentally I amnot proposing a method, but I am describingwhat is thecase.”

89 See in this regard my “Hermeneutics' Claim to Universality,” in Hahn, ed.,The Philosophy ofHans-Georg Gadamer; and PH, 25: “The phenomenon of understanding…shows the universality of humanlinguisticality as a limitless medium that carrieseverythingwithin it—not only the 'culture' that has beenhanded down to us through language, but absolutely everything—because everything (in the world andout of it) is included in the realm of ‘understandings' and understandability in which we move.”

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Gadamer’s oft-cited remark: “Being that can be understood is language.” (TM, xxxiv) Inputting forward this claim, Gadamer was opening himself up to the criticism (coming fromHabermas) that he was falling into a kind of linguistic idealism (Sprachidealismus) or was(as Rorty was, approvingly, to think) defending a version of linguistic relativism. Neitherof these interpretations hold, however, for the relation between language and the worldin Gadamer’s thought is of the same “intentional” nature as is the relation between con-sciousness and the world in classical phenomenology. Just as the world is not “outside”of consciousness, so also is it not “outside” of language; being what language “means”(intends), the world is the “inner” meaning (verbum interius) of language itself. That isto say, language is not something of a “subjectivist” nature standing over against theworld and barring us from access to it; language is the world itself insofar as it is presentto us and inasmuch as we have meaningful experience of it (“what the world is is notdifferent from the views [language] in which it presents itself.” [TM, 406]). As Gadamerremarks, “language has no independent life apart from the world that comes to languagewithin it” (TM, 401); and, as he also says, “things bring themselves to expression inlanguage.”90 (PH, 81) To speak of “the nature of things” and of “the language of things”is, for Gadamer, to use two expressions “that for all intents and purposes mean the samething.” (PH, 69) In short, language is the means by which our mute experience of theworld is brought to the proper expression of its own meaning.

By way of forestalling a possible misunderstanding (a rather common one, actually),it should be noted that Gadamer’s linguality-thesis does notdenythe meaningfulness ofnon-lingual modes of experience; rather, itaffirms that meaningfulness, by maintainingthat such experience can always, in principle, be brought to expression (can be interpreted)in language. Indeed, if the pre- or non-lingual could not be so interpreted, it would bemeaningless to speak of it as having any meaning at all. The important thing to note inthis regard is that, as Ricoeur says, the language of phenomenology “is a language whichexpresses that which precedes language.” (MTP, 126)

Thus, unlike the structuralists and poststructuralists who came upon the scene a shorttime later and who set themselves up as implacable foes of phenomenology and thephenomenological approach to language (and whose views on language Ricoeur would sethimself the task of contesting), Gadamer was most definitely not maintaining that lan-guage is a kind of “prison,” as Derrida would imply (“Il n’y a rien hors du texte”), or some-thing we cannot “break out of,” as Rorty would say. Unlike them, he was not seeking tocall into question the very notions of “knowledge” and “truth” but was simply seeking,as Merleau-Ponty would say (see PriP, 13), to divest these notions of their metaphysicaltrappings by bringing them down to earth.91

What Gadamer’s emphasis on the linguality of our experience of the world clearly didcontest is the modernist metaphysics of referentialist-representationalism, i.e., the notionthat understanding (“knowledge”) consists in forming “inner representations,” mentalcopies of an “external” in-itself reality (“philosophy as the mirror of nature”). To maintainthat “language is the universal medium in which understanding occurs” (TM, 389),amounts to maintaining that understanding is not “representational” butinterpretive innature: “All understanding is interpretation.” (TM, 389) And interpretation itself is nevera merely reproductive activity but is always transformative of that which is to be inter-preted: “[U]nderstanding is not merely reproductive but always a productive activity aswell.” (TM, 296)

90 See also PH, 77: “Is not language more the language of things than the language of man?”91 For a more detailed treatment of Gadamer’s position in this regardvis-à-vis both Rorty and

Derrida, see my “Coping with Nietzsche’s Legacy: Rorty, Derrida, Gadamer,” in Gary B. Madison,ThePolitics of Postmodernity: Essays in Applied Hermeneutics(Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2001).

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In regard to the more specific area of text-interpretation, and in opposition to theobjectivistic assumptions of traditional, Romantic hermeneutics (and to contemporaryrepresentatives of it like Emilio Betti and E.D. Hirsch, Jr.92), Gadamer insisted that“understanding” (subtilitas intelligendi, subtilitas explicandi) and “application” (subtilitasapplicandi) cannot be separated. The text is not an “absolute object” (as if it were some-thing existing “in itself,” like the “external world” of modern philosophy), whose meaningone first grasps and then only subsequently “applies” to the situation at hand, for it is onlyin applying what the text says to our own situation that we can be said to understand it.Understanding is always of an “applicational” nature93; it “always involves somethinglike applying the text to be understood to the interpreter’s present situation.” (TM, 308)As Ricoeur would later show, on the basis of his detailed studies of textuality (Schrift-lichkeit), it is only in the act of reading that the meaning of the text itself is actualized.94

The “meaning” of what is to be understood is inseparable from its “significance” for thesubject in search of understanding, and this is because, as Merleau-Ponty had already ob-served, anticipating one of the main tenets of the hermeneutic theory of text-interpretation,the true meaning of a work is not necessarily the one intended by its author. (See S, 24)

Gadamer’s rearticulation of the relation between understanding and application amountsto an overcoming of an age-old metaphysical opposition, one as pernicious as theopposition between mind and body or between reality and appearance, viz., the oppositionbetween theuniversal(the timeless and invariant) and theparticular (the local and merelycontingent). In opposition to this traditional, dichotomous way of viewing the matter,Gadamer insisted that the universal (e.g., the meaning of a text) never exists fully definedin its own right but always only in its varying instanciations -- which is not to say thatin the matter of text-interpretation “anything goes” (this is what Gadamer referred to as“hermeneutic nihilism”). When Gadamer said, somewhat paradoxically, that it is the(universally)sametext that we necessarily always understand indifferentways, he wasseeking to move beyond both objectivism and relativism. From a strictly phenomeno-logical point of view, the universal cannot in fact be separated from the particular; “it’ssimply the case,” Shaun Gallagher observes (invoking Gadamer’s notion ofphronesis),“that we have no way to understand the universal except from within the particularsituation in which we happen to find ourselves.”95

Gadamer’s way of reconceptualizing the age-old philosophical problem of the relationbetween universality and particularity by means of his notion of “application” (“applica-tion—that is, …bringing the universal and the individual together.”96), has, it may benoted, a great deal of relevance to the global lifeworld that is now everywhere emerging.Speaking of the phenomenon of globalization (“the world-wide interwovenness ofeconomies”), Gadamer highlighted the challenge confronting humanity when he stated:“Humanity today is sitting in a rowboat, as it were, and we must steer this boat in such

92 For a critique of Hirsch’s positivist-style version of hermeneutics from a Gadamerian point ofview, see my “Eine Kritik an Hirschs Begriff der ‘Richtigkeit,’” in Hans-Georg Gadamer and GottfriedBoehm, ed.,Seminar: Die Hermeneutik und die Wissenschaften(Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1978); Englishversion in myThe Hermeneutics of Postmodernity: Figures and Themes(Bloomington, Ind.: IndianaUniversity Press, 1988).

93 For a discussion of the hermeneutic notion of application, see my “Hermeneutics, the Lifeworld,and the Universality of Reason (The Case of China),” in Madison,The Politics of Postmodernity.

94 For both Gadamer and Ricoeur, the act of reading is not, as the earlier Heidegger claimed, an actof “violence” but presupposes “good will” aiming at genuine dialogue.

95 Shaun Gallagher, “Hegel, Foucault, and Critical Hermeneutics,” in idem, ed.,Hegel, History, andInterpretation(Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1997), 161.

96 Gadamer,In Praise of Theory, 61.

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a way that we do not all crash into the rocks.”97 This challenge -- that of avoiding whatsome have referred to as a global “clash of civilizations” -- is to a large extent a herme-neutic one, having to do with reconciling universality and particularity, that is to say, thelifeworld reality of cultural diversity, with a philosophical need for a common, globalethic of human values (human rights, in particular), an ethic which, while being universal,would nevertheless be respectful of cultural/historical differences.98 One of the chieflegacies of Gadamer’s “philosophy of conversation” undoubtedly lies in the way it canserve to promote, in the realm of human finitude, the hermeneutic-universalist ideals of“global dialogue (Weltgespräch)” and cross-cultural understanding, in other words:“solidarity,” i.e., “rational identification with a universal interest”99 -- and can do so in away which is decidedly “non-hegemonic.” Ricoeur, it should be noted, has also been keenlyaware of the interpretive need to reconcile ethical universalism (universal human rights)with cultural particularity. “How can we attain some kind of universalism of reflection,”he asks, “if cultural roots are so different? No doubt this is one of the greatest problemsof the end of this century and the next century.”100

In stressing the role of “application,” Gadamer was emphasizing the inescapable“situatedness” (as Marcel would say101) of understanding and the unavoidable role thatpresuppositions or prejudgments (“prejudices”) play in understanding, and thus also ourunavoidable “belogingness” (Zugehörigkeit) to our own particular cultural/historical tradi-tions -- all of which is summed up in his key notion of historically-effective consciousness(das wirkungsgeschichliche Bewusstsein). As Ricoeur would later point out, effective-history (Wirkungsgeschichte) is “the massive and global fact whereby consciousness, evenbefore its awakening as such, belongs to and depends on that which affects it.”102

Effective-history, it could be said, is the action of cultural/historical tradition (“historicality”or what Ricoeur calls “traditionalité”) and is that which provides us with our “enabling”presuppositions -- these presuppositions being what Alfred Schütz had called the “typicalconstructs” that are “the unquestioned but always questionable sum total of things takenfor granted until further notice.”103 Like language itself, effective-history is the onto-

97 Hans-Georg Gadamer,Gadamer in Conversation: Reflections and Commentary, trans. Richard E.Palmer (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001), 81, hereafter GOC.

98 See in this regard my paper presented to the Chinese National Academy of Social Sciences,“China in a Globalizing World: Reconciling the Universal with the Particular,”Dialogue and Humanism(Polish Academy of Sciences) 12, no. 11-12/2002.

99 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Power of Reason,”Man and World3, no. 1 (1970): 13; for a furtherdiscussion of this matter, see my “Gadamer’s Legacy,”Symposium6, no. 2 (Fall, 2002). It should be notedthat Gadamer’s attempt to revise the notions of “universal” and “particular” has been greatly expandedupon by Calvin Schrag, who, in this context, speaks, perhaps wisely, not of “universalism,” but, more“postmetaphysically,” of “transversalism.” Both Gadamer’s defense of universalism and Schrag’s notionof transversalism are meant to contest the notion (promoted by Rorty and other relativistic postmodernists)that the various cultures of the world are “incommensurable.”

100 See Tamás Tóth, “The Graft, the Residue, and Memory: Two Conversations with Paul Ricoeur,”in Andrzej Wiercinski, ed.,Between Suspicion and Sympathy: Paul Ricoeur’s Unstable Equilibrium(Toronto: The Hermeneutic Press, 2003), 647, hereafter BSS; and, for a discussion of Ricoeur’s positionin this matter, see also in this volume my “Paul Ricoeur: Philosopher of Being-Human (Zuoren).”

101 As Thomas Busch has pointed out, Marcel’s notion of situatedness anticipates Gadamer’shermeneutic theory; see Busch’s entry “Marcel,” inEncyclopedia of Phenomenology, ed. Lester Embreeet al. (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1997).

102 Paul Ricoeur,Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1981), 74, hereafter HHS.

103 Alfred Schütz, “Common-Sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human Action,” in Richard M.Zaner and Don Ihde, ed.,Phenomenology and Existentialism(New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973), 299.

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logical milieu in which, as understanding, socially constituted beings, we “live, move, andhave our being.”

Gadamer’s hermeneutics is grounded in Heidegger’s notion of “thrownness” (Geworfen-heit),104 and thus, as Ricoeur also makes clear, the notion of effective-history means thatwe can never achieve a bird’s-eye overview of our historical situatedness in such a wayas to realize the metaphysical ideal of an all-encompassing science -- “To exist historicallymeans that knowledge of oneself can never be complete.” (TM, 269) “Between finitudeand absolute knowledge,” Ricoeur observes, “it is necessary to choose; the concept ofeffective history belongs to an ontology of finitude.” (HHS, 74) Gadamer’s ontology offinitude is not, however, a version of relativism, as I mentioned above. To say thatunderstanding is finite or situated, is to say that it is always bounded by horizons(“essential to the concept of situation is the concept of horizon.” [TM, 304]), but a horizonis not a wall or a barrier (an absolute limit) that closes us off from what is “other.” Onthe contrary, horizons, being mobile, invite exploration and allow us to move about in theworld and make contact with what is distant and alien (the world itself being, as Husserlsaid, the “horizon of all horizons”). What lies beyond one’s horizon at any given time is,by definition, unknown, but it is not in principle unknowable; a horizon always pointsbeyond itself to, as Husserl would say, a vast realm of “determinable indeterminacy.”Indeed, from a phenomenological point of view the very notion of a “closed horizon” (andthus also the notion that different cultural lifeworlds are “incommensurable”) is, asGadamer says, “artificial” (see TM, 304), a metaphysical construction without any basis inlived experience. Thus, as Gadamer accordingly insisted, “Precisely through our finitude,the particularity of our being, which is evident even in the variety of languages, the in-finite dialogue is opened in the direction of the truth that we are.” (PH, 16)

Just as Merleau-Ponty maintained that truth is nothing other than the experience of a“concordance” between ourselves and others, so likewise for Gadamer, truth is not amatter of “adequation” between an isolated, cognizing subject and an objective, in-itselfworld (adaequatio intellectus et res), but is a matter of mutual agreement between actualhuman subjects freely engaged in dialogue, and seeking -- oftentimes painfully -- a com-mon understanding of things. We are “in the truth” when, through a “merging of horizons(Horizontverschmelzung),” the “hermeneutic experience”par excellence, we are able toencounter other people and other ways of life and to arrive in this way at mutual under-standings and common agreements as to what is or ought to be the case.105

Gadamer’s crucial insight, one which dominates all of his work, is that there is, or needbe, no contradiction between “openness” and “belongingness” (between tradition andemancipation) -- which is what allowed him to assert that there is “no higher principle ofreason” with which to think our effective-history than that offreedom.106

In maintaining that the locus of truth -- of reason (thelogos) -- is not the isolated,monological subject of modern philosophy but the dialogical encounter between situatedhuman beings, Gadamer’s hermeneutics effected a decisive break not only with modernepistemologism but also with the quasi-solipsism of Husserl’s philosophy of conscious-ness. Merleau-Ponty had said that the “germ of universality” lies not in a transcendental

104 See Gadamer,A Century of Philosophy, 130.105 For a discussion of this matter, as well as of other basic themes in philosophical hermeneutics,

see my “Hermeneutics: Gadamer and Ricoeur,” in Kearney, ed.,Continental Philosophy in the 20thCentury; for a more succinct overview of philosophical hermeneutics, see my “Hermeneutics: Gadamerand Ricoeur,” in Richard H. Popkin, ed.,The Columbia History of Western Philosophy(New York:Columbia University Press, 1999).

106 See Hans-Georg Gadamer,Reason in the Age of Science, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), 9, hereafter RAS.

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“I think” but in “the dialogue into which our experience of other people throws us.”107

Like Merleau-Ponty who equated rationality with communication and whose focus wason the speaking subject, for Gadamer, too, language lives only in speech, such that, whatas lingual, rational beings we most essentially are, is, as he always liked to say, a con-versation (Gespräch). Because Gadamer’s hermeneutics is a “philosophy of conversation”(RPJ, 36) and is animated by an ethics of communicative rationality,108 he could rightlysay that “there is no higher principle than this: holding oneself open to the conversation.”(RPJ, 26) Insofar as we hold ourselves open in this way (cf. Marcel’s notion ofdis-ponibilité), we are open to the truth of things, for truth, as something universal, is of a“horizonal” nature; like the world itself, truth is the realm of unrestricted openness (of“boundless communication,” as Karl Jaspers referred to it), and its locus is the trans-subjective and transcultural community of all reasonable beings.

Paul Ricoeur (who discovered Gadamer in somewhat the same belated way thatGadamer discovered Merleau-Ponty) was no less sensitive to the finitude of the humancondition than was Gadamer, as is amply attested to by his early work in the 1940s and1950s on human fallibility, frailty, suffering, passivity, and the mystery of evil in theworld. Ricoeur’s early writings on philosophical anthropology (the kind of philosophicalanthropology that Heidegger dismissed but that Gadamer thought was called for byHusserl’s discovery of the lifeworld, and that, in Ricoeur’s case, was part of a larger,never completed “grand project” on the Philosophy of the Will) were inspired by Merleau-Ponty’s magisterial work on perception, and in them he sought to extend the Husserlianmethod of eidetic analysis to a dimension of human existence that Husserl, given his“cognitivist” preoccupations (or what Ricoeur calls “Husserl’s logicist prejudice”109), hadlargely passed over in silence: the whole non-cognitive domain of affectivity and volition.Husserl’s “intellectualism” (as Lévinas referred to it) notwithstanding, it was Husserl’stranscendental philosophy of the subject which furnished Ricoeur with, as he says, his“starting point.”110 (BSS, 643) What in this regard Ricoeur sought to do was to separatethe phenomenological method from Husserl’s idealist interpretation of this method (“Iattempted to dissociate what appeared to me to be the descriptive core of phenomenologyfromthe idealist interpretation inwhich this corewas wrapped.” [IA,11]). Subsequently, andin conjunction with his “lingual turn” in the 1960s, he attempted to “graft hermeneuticsonto phenomenology” and entered into an on-going debate with various disciplines orintellectual trends such as Freudianism and structuralism which -- functioning as a kindof “hermeneutics of suspicion” -- seem to undermine the primacy that a reflexive philo-sophy such as Ricoeur’s accords to the subject (“A reflexive philosophy considers themost radical problems to be those which concern the possibility ofself-understandingasthe subject of the operations of knowing, willing, evaluating, etc.” [OI, 188]).

107 Maurice Merleau-Ponty,Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 93, hereafter SNS.

108 For a detailed discussion of the hermeneutic notion of communicative rationality, see myTheLogic of Liberty(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986), chap. 10; and, for an analysis of the notionsof communicative rationality and practical reasoning in both Gadamer and Ricoeur, see Paul Fairfield,“Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, and Practical Judgment,” in Wiercinski, ed.,Between Suspicion andSympathy.

109 Ricoeur,Husserl, 221.110 It would be a bit more correct to say that Ricoeur’s “starting point” was Gabriel Marcel’s

existential philosophy of embodiment (Ricoeur dedicated hisPhilosophy of the Willto Marcel) asreinterpreted through the lens of Husserlian phenomenology; for an insightful discussion of Ricoeur’srelationship with Marcel, see Boyd Blundell, “Creative Fidelity: Gabriel Marcel’s Influence on PaulRicoeur,” in Wiercinski, ed.,Between Suspicion and Sympathy.

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Ricoeur’s overall work follows a rather complicated trajectory and undergoes numerousshifts in direction, all nevertheless “nesting one within the other.” (IA, 38) Subsequent tohis early writings on the will, there is a gradual progression in his work from ahermeneutics of the symbol through a confrontation with Freudian psychoanalysis andstructural linguistics to a hermeneutics of the text, and from there to a hermeneutics ofaction and intersubjectivity (passing by way of an analysis of metaphor, time, and nar-rativity) and culminating (at the time of this writing) in a renewed concern with ethics andpolitics (with issues such as justice, responsibility, remembrance, andphronesisorpractical wisdom) -- Ricoeur’s overriding concern throughout all of this having been theacting person (l’homme agissant), a concern which reflects his indebtedness to the per-sonalist philosophy of Emmanuel Mounier, a philosophy, in Ricoeur’s words, “of man’srecurrent protest against being reduced to the level of ideas and things.”111 (MTP, 356)Although Ricoeur, like his phenomenological predecessors, was always highly critical ofHusserl’s philosophy of consciousness or what he generally refers to as Husserl’s“idealism” (“transcendental subjectivism” might be a more appropriate term), he never-theless always considered the heritage of Husserlian phenomenology to be “the unsurpas-sable presupposition of hermeneutics.” (IA, 36; it was, indeed, Ricoeur’s early work asa translator and interpreter of Husserl that firmly established his academic creden-tials.112)

Because the particular shape Ricoeur’s work has taken is the result of the debates hehas engaged in on numerous different occasions with proponents of other views withwhich he felt he had to come to terms, his philosophical development is extremelycomplex with many twists and turns along the way (one might say that Ricoeur’s“method” [methodos, the way he followed in his thinking] is essentially one that proceedscontinually by way of detours).113 There is nonetheless a kind of Ariadne’s threadrunning through it all, an underlying continuity in terms of both method and motivation.Methodologically speaking, Ricoeur’s basic concern, like that of other phenomenologists,has always been the reflexive-transcendental one of bringing our lived experience to theproper expression of its own meaning. As he stated in an early work, the vocation ofphilosophy, as he sees it, is “to clarify existence itself by use of concepts.”114 Ricoeur’sphilosophical motivation in this regard is his fundamental belief that our existence isindeed meaningful, and thus expressible (dicible) -- this belief in the expressibility or“sayability” (dicibilité) of experience corresponding to Gadamer’s thesis as to thelinguality or “speakability” of the world (die Sprachlichkeit der Welt). “There is no humanexperience that is not structured by language” (BSS, 680), Ricoeur maintains, echoing asit were Merleau-Ponty.

Ricoeur’s philosophizing has in this way always been a search for meaning and hasthroughout been guided by a “central intuition,” or basic conviction, viz., that, notwith-standing the very real existence of unmeaning, necessity (unfreedom), and evil, there is

111 For an excellent survey of Ricoeur’s philosophical writings, see Mark Muldoon,On Ricoeur(Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning, 2002).

112 See Ricoeur’s translation of, and commentary on, Husserl’sIdeen I: Ideés directrices pour unephénoménologie(Paris: Gallimard, 1950), a work that Merleau-Ponty used and cited in his lectures at theSorbonne in the early 1950s.

113 For an account by Ricoeur of the piecemeal way in which he has handled philosophical problems,see Paul Ricoeur,Critique and Conviction: Conversations with François Azouvi and Marc de Launay,trans. Kathleen Blamey (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 81-82, hereafter CC; for a thematicoverview of Ricoeur’s work, see Domenico Jervolino, “The Unity of Paul Ricoeur’s Work,” in Wiercinski,ed.,Between Suspicion and Sympathy.

114 Paul Ricoeur,Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary, trans. Erazim V. Kohak(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1966), 17.

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in existence a “super-abundance of meaning to the abundance of non-sense.”115 Theunderlying presupposition in Ricoeur’s work is his “presupposition of meaning” (or“postulate of meaningfulness”), which he formulates thus:

It must be supposed that experience in all its fullness…has an expressibility (dicibilité)in principle. Experience can be said, it demands to be said. To bring it to language isnot to change it into something else, but, in articulating and developing it, to make itbecome itself. (HHS, 115)

In connection with his work on metaphor and narrative, he has stated that “theseanalyses continuallypresupposethe conviction that discourse never existsfor its own sake,for its own glory, but that in all of its uses it seeks to bring into language an experience,a way of living in and of being-in-the-world which precedes it and which demands to besaid.” There is always, Ricoeur asserts, “abeing-demanding-to-be-said(un être-à-dire)which precedes our actual saying.” (OI, 196)

Ricoeur’s dual concern withmeaningand existence116 makes for an overarchingthematic unity to his work; as “a hermeneutics of the ‘I am,’” its focus has consistentlybeen on the issues of subjectivity and self-understanding. “[I]t is indeed the fate of humansubjectivity,” he has said, “that is at stake throughout the whole of my work.”117

In pursuing his inquiry into the nature of selfhood, Ricoeur was acutely aware of the“idealist” pitfalls that menace any reflexive philosophy of the subject, for the traditionalidea of reflection, as he remarks, “carries with it the desire for absolute transparence, aperfect coincidence of the self with itself, which would make consciousness of selfindubitable knowledge.” (OI, 188) And as he freely admits, with regard to his presup-position of meaning, “It is difficult, admittedly, to formulate this presupposition in a non-idealist language.” (HHS, 115) It was, accordingly, in order to counteract the idealisttendencies of reflexive philosophy that Ricoeur insisted that “a philosophy of reflectionmust be just the opposite of a philosophy of consciousness.” (CI, 18) For the phenomeno-logical fact of the matter is that the consciousness of self is, proximally and for the mostpart, a distorted, false consciousness. This is why, as he says, he rejected Heidegger’s“short cut (voie courte)” to an ontology of understanding and insisted that reflection mustbe “indirect” and that the passage from misunderstanding (“inauthenticity”) to understand-ing is not just a matter of willful self-assertion but must necessarily follow an arduous,roundabout detour through a painstaking decipherment of the various cultural/historicalsigns, symbols, and texts in which get expressed the human “effort to exist and desire tobe.” (CI, 18) The reflecting subject is a subject that is lost in the world and that must“recapture” itself “in the mirror of its objects, of its works, and, finally, of its acts.” (CI, 18)It is only in this painstaking way that what at the outset is a bareego can become agenuine, humanself.

In attempting to effect a “qualitative transformation” of reflexive consciousness,Ricoeur insisted that there is no “originary” presence of the self to itself and that thenotion of intuitive self-knowledge is an illusion (for Ricoeur, the truth of theCogito -- “Ithink-I am” -- is a truth that is as empty as it is certain). The phenomenological subject

115 Paul Ricoeur,The Conflict of Interpretations, ed. Don Ihde (Evanston, Ill.: NorthwesternUniversity Press, 1974), 411, hereafter CI.

116 These two terms are ones that Ricoeur himself suggested as the title for the Festschrift in hishonor that I edited on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday:Sens et existence, en hommage à Paul Ricoeur(Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975).

117 Paul Ricoeur, “Reply to G. B. Madison,” in Hahn, ed.,The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, 93; seealso in this volume my “Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of the Subject.”

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is not a transcendental Ego that would be an absolute creator or dispenser of meaning; itis not a subject that is, as Descartes would say,maître de soi, but a speaking/listening,questioning, story-telling subject that is itself “given” to itself by means of a long drawn-out process of semiosis, a “reappropriated” subject that is both interpretive and interpreted.Being of a “mediated” nature, genuine self-understanding always involves a correctivecritique of misunderstanding and can only be envisaged as a kind of “distant horizon”: “Ahermeneutic philosophy is a philosophy which accepts all the demands of this long detourand which gives up the dream of a total mediation, at the end of which reflection wouldonce again amount to intellectual intuition in the transparence to itself of an absolutesubject.” (OI, 194)

In his attempt to work out a hermeneutics of self-understanding, Ricoeur always hadto do battle on two fronts. On the one hand, and in the name of a phenomenology ofhuman finitude and “fallible man,” he had to resist the idealist tendencies in traditionalreflexive philosophy and in Husserl’s transcendentalism by, so to speak, “desubjectivizing”subjectivity (“phenomenology is always in danger of reducing itself to a transcendentalsubjectivism.” [HHS, 112]) “Subjectivity,” he said in this regard, “must be lost as radicalorigin if it is to be recovered in a more modest role.” (HHS, 113) On the other hand, andin order to defend the very notion of the subject, he had to contest all those disciplinesand intellectual trends of an objectivistic or naturalistic sort which would make ofsubjectivity an illusion pure and simple. Subjectivism and objectivism were alwaysRicoeur’s twin foes. Typical of his polemic with the latter was his dispute with thestructuralist anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss, the stated goal of which (anticipatingthe “death of ‘man’” theme in French philosophy) was not to understand better that entitywe call “man” but, quite simply, to “dissolve” him, to reduce him to his “physical-chemical conditions.”118 Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist reductionism (wanting to “study menas if they were ants”) extended even to the very notion of meaning. As he said to Ricoeurin the course of a famous debate:

Meaning (le sens) is always the result of the combination of elements which are notmeaningful (signifiant) in themselves…. In my perspective, meaning is never a first-order phenomenon; meaning is always reducible. In other words, behind all meaningthere is non-sense (un non-sens), and the contrary is not true. For me, meaning(signification) is always just a mere phenomenon (est toujours phénoménal).

To remarks such as these Ricoeur repeatedly objected: “If meaning is not an element inself-understanding, I don’t know what it is.” (What in that case it is, as Ricoeur himselfsaid, is “the admirable syntactical arrangement of a discourse which says nothing at all[qui ne dit rien].”) 119

As an existential-phenomenological hermeneutician, Ricoeur has always insisted thatthe point of all attempts at understanding the world around us (such as those evinced inLévi-Strauss’s own anthropological research) is, ultimately, to understand ourselves better,and what it means for us to be (the “human condition,” as Pascal called it). His mostpowerful insight in this regard is that self-understanding is never a given but always atask, and that, moreover, our own selves which we seek to understand, are, as it were,themselves products of our encounter with what is “outside” and what is “other.” A

118 See Claude Lévi-Strauss,The Savage Mind(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 246-47.119 See the text of the debate inEsprit 31, no. 322 (Novembre, 1963); Ricoeur’s frustration with this

sort of objectivistic reductionism came to the fore when he said to Lévi-Strauss: “You despair of meaning,but you save yourself by thinking that if people have nothing to say, at least they say it so well that theirdiscourse can be subjected to a structuralist analysis.”

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crucial “other” in our becoming who we are is the textual other, which is to say, theportrayal of other ways of being-in-the-world that we encounter in our reading of texts,the function of texts being that of calling into being or projecting “virtual” worlds, i.e.,alternative, imaginative ways of being-in-the-world. Through its encounter with that“higher order referent” or “new reality” that Ricoeur calls “the world of the work” (anotion that he shares with Gadamer), the subject is exposed to other possible selves andways of being -- “imaginative variations of the ego” (HHS, 94) -- and is able to emerge witha “refigured,” enlarged, more meaningful self: “To understand oneself is to understandoneself as one confronts the text and to receive from it the conditions for a self other thanthat which first undertakes the reading.” (OI, 193) The great lesson of Ricoeur’s herme-neutic phenomenology is that what we as human subjects most essentially are is what wecan become, the being-otherwise and being-more that are the objects of the effort to existand the desire to be.

Ricoeur’s vital contribution to an interpretive, postmetaphysical phenomenology is tohave shown how -- Heidegger’s belief to the contrary notwithstanding -- it is indeed pos-sible to overcome modern subjectivism (i.e., what has since become known as the“metaphysics of presence”), while at the same time upholding a renewed, non-idealist ornon-substantialist notion of subjectivity itself -- a notion which Merleau-Ponty viewed asone of the great discoveries of modern philosophy (albeit, as he acknowledged, one thatwas of a decidedly creative nature, Montaigne being a key figure in this regard) andwhich, flawed though it may have been in its modernist version, he thought it wouldnevertheless be folly to attempt simply to abolish (as if the notion of the subject [“man”]were nothing more than “a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea,” destined to beerased by it). By means of his work on selfhood, narrativity, and creative expression (lapoétique du possible), Paul Ricoeur has managed to provide a properly hermeneutic,which is to say, non-idealist and non-metaphysical account of the “origin of the world,”i.e., of how, through the creative work of interpretation, the world, and we ourselves,come to be “constituted” as that which it, and we, are. Viewed as a whole, Ricoeur’swork, by fully accomplishing the interpretive turn in phenomenology, provides an out-standing example of how post-Husserlian phenomenologists have struggled not only tobreak out of the philosophy of consciousness but also to overcome, in a decisive manner,the classical opposition between realism and idealism that continued to the end to plagueHusserl’s presentation of phenomenology.

Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences

If, as philosophical hermeneutics maintains (akin in this way to Jamesian pragmatism), themeaning of any philosophical doctrine or theory lies in its “consequences,” in the way it“applies” to concrete situations and practical affairs -- i.e., to the realm ofpraxis -- thedomain of the human sciences could be said to reveal the true meaning of hermeneuticswhich, as Gadamer always insisted, is itself ascientia practica(“hermeneutics is philo-sophy, and as philosophy it is practical philosophy.” [RAS, 111]) To employ a Husserlianexpression, the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) can be viewed, to a great extent,as being so many “regional” hermeneutics; as interpretive sciences (die verstehendenWissenschaften), it is the function of the human sciences to bring general hermeneutictheory to bear on the different realms of human action and endeavor in an interpretiveattempt to discern the meaning of human being-in-the-world that transpires in thesevarious lifeworlds. To a significant extent, the various human sciences are nothing otherthan “applied hermeneutics,” “extensions” of hermeneutics to the domain of practice(philosophical hermeneutics, from this point of view, being not a regional but a

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transcendental discipline). As Gadamer stated in this regard, “The human sciences are notonly a problemfor philosophy, on the contrary, they represent a problemof philosophy.”(PHC, 112) As the philosophical-theoretical “science” of the human lifeworld, hermeneutics,one might say, is in its very essence a philosophy of the human sciences. Hermeneuticsis nothing other than, as Gadamer says, thetheoryof the practiceof interpretation, thereflective analysis of what is “at play in the practical experience of understanding.” (RAS,112) And thus, as he also says, “as the theory of interpretation or explication, it is not justa theory.” (RAS, 93) Hermeneutics, one might say, is theory “with practical intent.” Inthe last analysis, the ultimate justification of hermeneutic theory, as a theoryof practice,is its significancefor practice.

Just as Merleau-Ponty went further than Heidegger in the exploration of the bodilynature of our being-in-the-world, so likewise Ricoeur has gone further than Gadamer indealing with methodological issues confronting the human sciences and in entering intoa full-fledged debate with various human disciplines such as psychoanalysis, linguistics,historiography, and literary studies. He has always held the conviction that “philosophycannot exist on its own” (BSS, 653) and that, in fact, it “perishes if its dialogue with thesciences…were to be interrupted.” (IA, 39) He has in this regard voiced a criticism ofGadamer’s stance in relation to which, as he says, he has “taken a certain distance.” (CC,73) According to Ricoeur, Gadamer’s way of opposing truth and method (the “and” in thetitle of Gadamer’smagnum opusfunctioning in fact as a kind of disjunctive) seemed toRicoeur to have the unfortunate effect of continuing the “anti-methodological conclusionsof Heideggerian philosophy.”120 Thus, Ricoeur viewed his own endeavors as fallingmore under the heading of “methodological hermeneutics” than that of “ontologicalhermeneutics” and defined his own approachvis-à-visboth Heidegger and Gadamer aswanting to contribute “to this ontological vehemence an analytical precision which itwould otherwise lack.” (OI, 196) Although Ricoeur fully subscribed to the basic onto-logical concerns of Heidegger and Gadamer, he nonetheless felt that their preoccupationwith fundamental ontology tended to hinder philosophical hermeneutics from entering intoa productive dialogue with the more empirically oriented sciences. While, as he once said,ontology may be the “promised land” of phenomenological reflection, “like Moses, thespeaking and reflecting subject can only glimpse this land before dying.” (CI, 24)

In attempting to work out a methodological hermeneutics in dialogue with the empiricalsciences, Ricoeur was here also, as it were, following in the footsteps of Merleau-Ponty,whose way of thinking represented a methodological alternative to Heidegger’s “onto-logism.” Whereas Heidegger’s religious-like preoccupation with “Being”121 effectivelyprecluded him from taking much of an interest in the social sciences and the moremundane realm of human affairs, Merleau-Ponty’s concern to explore the bodily natureof our being-in-the-world with the aid of the empirical sciences led him to devote a greatdeal of attention to the relation between phenomenology and the human sciences in hislectures at the Sorbonne in the early 1950s.122 And when, in his later work, Merleau-Ponty turned his attention to explicitly ontological issues (under, in part, the influence ofthe later Heidegger), his way of doing so again contrasted with that of Heidegger. Unlikethe later Heidegger who wanted to think Being directly, to “think Being without regard

120 See Paul Ricoeur, “Langage (Philosophie),” inEncyclopaedia Universalis(1971), 9:780; see alsoRicoeur,Main Trends in Philosophy, 268-69.

121 As Gadamer observes, Heidegger’s preoccupation with “Being,” with theSeinof Da-Sein, “meantthe search for God. He was a seeker of God his entire life.” Gadamer,A Century of Philosophy, 122, 127.

122 See, for instance, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “Les sciences de l’homme et la phénoménologie,”trans. John Wild, as “Phenomenology and the Sciences of Man,” in PriP.

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to its being grounded in terms of beings,” to “think Being without beings,”123 Merleau-Ponty thought that the only appropriate way of pursuing the Being-question was by meansof a “methodological” ontology or what he called an “intra-ontology.” (VI, 179) Remin-iscent in a way of Marcel’s “concrete approaches” to ontology, Merleau-Ponty sought tothink Being indirectly and only insofar as it manifests itself in beings -- in Nature and inthe various realms of human expressivity conceived of as various “regions of Being” (“themirrors of Being,”124 “the topology of being.” [S, 22]).

Central to Ricoeur’s own endeavors to develop a methodological hermeneutics was theway, starting in the late 1960s,125 he sought to overcome the classical hermeneuticdistinction between “explanation” (Erklärung) and “understanding” (das Verstehen). Thisdistinction was the centerpiece of the earlier hermeneutics of Wilhelm Dilthey, and, in-asmuch as it paralleled the clear-cut distinction he made between the natural sciences(Naturwissenschaften) and the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften), it reflected themodern, Cartesian split between mind and nature (Gadamer speaks in this regard ofDilthey’s “latent Cartesianism.” [PHC, 124]). Ever the dialectical thinker, Ricoeur soughtto overcome Dilthey’s dichotomous distinction between explanation and understanding byarguing that “objective” explanation is not something purely and simply antithetical to“subjective” understanding, and that, as the science of linguistics clearly demonstrates, itssphere of validity is not limited to the natural sciences. While for Ricoeur (as forGadamer) self-understanding is the ultimate goal of all attempts at understanding,126 itnevertheless remains, Ricoeur argued, that objective-type “explanation” has an importantrole to play in the overall understanding process.127

In the case of text-interpretation, for instance, the ultimate goal is that of appreciativelyentering into the particular world projected by the text in search of a meaning that we can“appropriate” for ourselves in such a way as to better understand ourselves, but along theway it can be quite helpful to treat the text as a “worldless and authorless” object and toengage in a purely objective, semiotic analysis of the text’s linguistic and structuralfeatures, or to analyze the text in a strictly empirical manner by focusing on historical andphilological factors (Ricoeur refers to this as “the statics of the text”). For Ricoeur, purelyexplanatory procedures, although “secondary in relation to understanding” (OI, 185), havenonetheless an altogether legitimate role to play in the overall interpretive process (in the“recovery of meaning”); one must, as Ricoeur says, explain more in order to understandbetter. “Explanation” forms one segment, the initial cornerstone, of what he calls the“hermeneutic arc,” which is ultimately grounded in our own lived experience. (See HHS,161-64) Not only, therefore, should “explanation” and “understanding” not be set at oddswith one another, the “detour by way of objectification” (IA, 48) can -- most importantly --help a reflexive-transcendental phenomenology to circumvent the pitfalls of a merephilosophy of consciousness, i.e., one animated by the naïve desire for absolute trans-

123 See Martin Heidegger,On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row,1972), 2.

124 See Maurice Merleau-Ponty,Themes from the Lectures at the Collège de France 1952-1960, trans.John O’Neill (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 112.

125 Ricoeur’s key essay in this regard is his “What is a Text? Explanation and Understanding”(reprinted in HHS).

126 Cf. PH, 55: “In the last analysis,all understanding is self-understanding, but not in the sense ofa preliminary self-possession or of one finally and definitively achieved.”

127 Ricoeur’s position contrasts in this regard with that of a disciple of the later Wittgenstein, PeterWinch, who, round about the same time, attempted to revive in an Anglo-Saxon format the Diltheyan di-chotomy between the natural sciences and the social sciences, between (causal) explanation and (empa-thetic) understanding; see Peter Winch,The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958).

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parency and a perfect coincidence of the self with itself in the form of immediate andindubitable knowledge (Ricoeur refers to this as “the narcissistic ego.” [HHS, 192]). Thedetour by way of methodic “distantiation” is the key to overcoming what William Jamescalled “vicious intellectualism” and is the means, as Ricoeur sees it, for achieving a lessdistorted self-understanding than the one we invariably start out with.

Richard Rorty notwithstanding, the hermeneutic theory of Ricoeur and Gadamer hasproven, in the eyes of numerous practitioners of the human sciences, to be anything but“unfruitful.” Human scientists as diverse as ethnographers, historians, communicologists,psychologists, and nursing specialists have found in hermeneutic phenomenology animportant source of support in their struggle to overcome the stifling and dehumanizinglegacy of logical positivism in the human sciences. In this connection, hermeneutics couldbe said to constitute the most recent, the “third wave,” of influence and inspiration thatphenomenology has had or visited upon on the human sciences, the “second wave” havingcome several decades earlier, pursuant to the existential phenomenology of Heidegger andMerleau-Ponty, and the “first wave” having originated in Husserl’s own phenomenologyand the influences this exerted in the fields of psychology and sociology.

By drawing out the methodological implications of Gadamer’s ontology of humanunderstanding, Ricoeur was able to extend the scope of hermeneutics from its traditionalbase in text-interpretation to the wider, overall realm of the social sciences, i.e., to thosesciences, such as sociology or economics, which are concerned primarily not with textsbut with humanaction.128 (Heidegger’s preoccupation with “Being” -- his “ontologicalvehemence” -- and the quietist position he adopted in this regard [“Gelassenheit”] led himto ignore completely the notion of action [or practical thinking], which he tended toreduce to mere technological busy-ness [“calculative thinking”], while at the same timeasserting that the only “true” action [das Tun] is something that is not action at all, viz.,the “meditative thinking” of Being.) Ricoeur’s key thesis in regard to the issue of actionis that to the degree the social sciences seek, interpretively, to discern themeaningofhuman action, action itself can be viewed “on the model of the text,” as a kind of “quasi-text” or “text analogue.” The reason for this -- in terms of the hermeneutic theory of bothGadamer and Ricoeur -- is that, in the case of both text and action, meaning cannot bereduced to the psychological intentions of the author/actor; meaning must, so to speak,always be “desubjectivized.” This is obviously the case as regards human agency, sinceindividual action takes place in a cultural/institutional context and thus has an irreduciblysocialdimension to it. As Hannah Arendt, who, unlike her mentor, Heidegger, was greatlyconcerned with the issue of action (thevita activa) said, “no man can act alone, eventhough his motives for action may be certain designs, desires, passions, and goals of hisown.”129

To the degree that human action is social in nature, it cannot properly be understoodin terms of individual psychology alone (actors’s intentions), since in the social realm “ourdeeds escape us and have effects which we did not intend.” (HHS, 206) The meaning ofour deeds escapes us in the same way that, as Ricoeur has argued in his theory of text-interpretation, “the text’s career escapes the finite horizon lived by its author” and em-bodies a meaning “that has broken its moorings to the psychology of the author.” (HHS,201) In going beyond the finite horizon of individual agents, human acting and doingopens up a public space in which its meaning or significance (its significative effects, asit were) gets “sedimented” or “inscribed,” this “place” being what we call “history.”

128 A key work of Ricoeur’s in this regard was his 1971 essay, “The Model of the Text: MeaningfulAction Considered As a Text” (reprinted in HHS).

129 Hannah Arendt,The Life of the Mind, 2 vols. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1978),2:180.

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(“History is this quasi-‘thing’on which human action leaves a ‘trace,’ puts its mark.”HHS, 207.) For phenomenology, history is the history of human agency (according toMerleau-Ponty, only humans, strictly speaking, have a history; history, as Alfred Schützsaid, is the “sediment” of human action), and, as the “record” of human actions andtransactions, history is, effectively speaking, a text to be interpreted. As one commentatorsums up the matter: “Hermeneutics is concerned with the interpretation of any expressionof existence which can be preserved in a structure analogous to the structure of the text….Taking it to the limit, the entirety of human existence becomes a text to beinterpreted.”130 Thus, in his application of Ricoeur’s reflections on the relation betweentextuality and action to the field of anthropology, Clifford Geertz states: “Doing ethno-graphy is like trying to read (in the sense of ‘construct a reading of’) a manuscript --foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentiouscommentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transientexamples of shaped behavior.”131

One “reads” the traces of human agency and behavior in much the same way as onereads a text, for, as both Geertz and Ricoeur maintain, the realm of social action isthoroughly “symbolic” in its make-up.132 Now, what makes a text a text in the propersense of the term is that it has a certain logic or “inner dynamic,” as Ricoeur calls it (OI,193), which it is the business of text-interpretation to make evident. History likewise hasa certain logic to it, as Merleau-Ponty ever insisted (there is, as he said, a “logic immanentin human experience.” [SNS, 65]). The phenomenological fact of the matter is that historyis not, as the empirically-minded English like to say, “just one damn thing after another”(nor is it, as Rorty would say, “mere contingency”). Although history unfolds chrono-logically, and although events in the lifeworld are not, in the scientistic sense of the term,predictable, history itself is not a mere chronology, nothing more than a haphazard listingof disparate events.133 As Ricoeur says, history (“social time”) is “the place of durableeffects, or persisting patterns,” these patterns becoming “thedocumentsof human action.”(HHS, 206) Hermeneutics, conceived of as the interpretation of history, is nothing otherthan the attempt to discern -- amid what Kant called the seemingly “idiotic course ofthings human”134 -- various patterns of action, and to interpret these as to theirsignificance.

This sort of pattern-analysis (the discernment of what Geertz calls “structures ofsignificance”) is a form of eidetic analysis. Patterns are “essences” of a sort, and, whenwe attempt to understand anything, we must have recourse to essences or universals(individuum ineffabile est). This is something Merleau-Ponty fully realized; speaking ofHusserl’s notion of essences, he stated that the need to proceed by way of essences (eidè)is simply a recognition of the fact that “our existence is too tightly held in the world to

130 David Pellauer, “The Significance of the Text in Paul Ricoeur’s Hermeneutical Theory,” in CharlesE. Reagan, ed.,Studies in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur(Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1979),112, 109.

131 Clifford Geertz,The Interpretation of Cultures(New York: Basic Books, 1973), 10.132 Paul Ricoeur discusses Geertz’s notion of “symbolic action” in hisLectures on Ideology and

Utopia, ed. George H. Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), chap. 15, hereafter LIU. Foran exposition of what he calls “semiotic anthropology,” which is in effect fully hermeneutic, see MiltonSinger, Man’s Glassy Essence: Explorations in Semiotic Anthropology(Bloomington, Ind.: IndianaUniversity Press, 1984).

133 See in this regard Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” inW.J. Thomas Mitchell, ed.,On Narrative(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

134 Immanuel Kant,Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View, Preface.

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be able to know itself as such at the moment of its involvement, and that it requires thefield of ideality in order to become acquainted with and to prevail over its facticity.”135

One must not, to be sure, misconstrue the nature of this “ideality.” Essences are not“metaphysical entities” (see PriP, 10); they do not exist, Platonic-wise,in rem, nor, forthat matter, are they, as Husserl thought in his quasi-Platonism, things (of a quasi-sort)that can be directly intuited by means of an “eidetic insight” (Wesenschau). Everythingis always, inextricably, part of a larger process, and the essence of any historical courseof events is simply the way (Sosein) in which, in retrospective hindsight, i.e., narration orstory-telling, it appears to the story-teller to have unfolded:Wesen ist was gewesen ist, asHegel remarked. Essences are not things that can be “seen” or,faute de mieux, deduced;they are not mentalistica priori (valid for all time) but are, rather, things of an “ideal”sort, which is to say (using the term “ideal” in a decidedly non-Husserlian sense) that theyare semantic, interpretive -- which is to say, also, imaginative --constructsof what hasbeen and what, in light of a discernible pattern, is quite likely to be in the future.136 Inshort, the essence of anything is not an object (of whatever sort) that can be “referred to”or “intuited”; an essence is nothing more than a function of the interpretive-definitionalstatements we may make in order to appease our desire for intelligibility by saying “what”something or other is. The “whatness” (quidditas) of things is thus a function of the wayin which, by means of language, we interpret them (for whatever purpose), and the“essential relationships” (Wesenszusammenhänge) between things (that metaphysiciansbelieve are simply “there,” waiting to be discovered) are a function of the particularpointof viewwith which we approach them. (The “correctness” of these points of view -- which,as Alfred Schütz observed, are never absolute but are always expressive of particularinterests, theoretical or practical, on our part -- is always a function of their usefulness,as James would say, in leading us profitably from one resting-place in the stream ofexperience to another.)

The point I wish to stress in all this is that essences, so conceived, are the only meansby which we can prevail over our facticity (our lostness in the everyday world) so as tothink our own history; as Hannah Arendt, a student of both Heidegger and Karl Jaspers,would say, they are the means for revealing “the meaning of what otherwise would remainan unbearable sequence of sheer happenings.”137 To allude to an ancient maxim (sapientiaest ordinare), the function of interpretation is precisely that of discerning, amid what isoften a welter of confusing detail, the non-apparent, yet essential, order or logic in things.It should of course go without saying that, being interpretive constructs, the “essences”we arrive at in this way are always (to use a Husserlian term) “inexact,” and are thusalways revisable in the light of further experience. It should also be noted that, althoughthese essences oreidèare not “metaphysical entities,” they are also not (as Husserl rightlyobserved) mere generalizations or “inductions,” in the empiricistic sense of the term, andthat, moreover, statistical analyses can never provide us with the essence of anything,since such analyses, in order to be meaningful, must always be interpreted in a suitable

135 See also Merleau-Ponty’s remarks on Husserl’s notion of eidetic insight in his “Phenomenologyand the Sciences of Man.” (PriP, 54-55 and passim) In this lecture course Merleau-Ponty states that “aknowledge of facts always implies a knowledge of essences.” (PriP, 67)

136 Being semantic constructs, “essences,” like all concepts, have (as Gadamer pointed out [TM,428ff]), their origin in the metaphorizing-analogizing imagination, and they are “validated” not by logicaldemonstration but by rhetorical persuasion (on the intimate relation between hermeneutics and rhetoric,see myThe Politics of Postmodernity, chap. 4; on the heuristic and cognitive function of metaphor, seemy Understanding: A Phenomenological-Pragmatic Analysis[Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982]).

137 Hannah Arendt,Men in Dark Times(New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Jovanovich, 1968), 104.

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manner (statistical or regression analyses can of course alert us to the existence of patternsthat we might not otherwise have noticed).138

One could equally well in this context speak of “ideal types,” a key notion in thephenomenology of the social lifeworld of Alfred Schütz that he took over from MaxWeber.139 For Schütz, who remained faithful to Husserl’s transcendental turn and forwhom the social world was essentially a “nexus of significance,” a “texture of meaning”(Sinnzusammenhang), the only way, by means of which we can grasp the logic of humanaffairs or discern meaningful patterns of human action (“the logic of everyday thinking,”or, as Geertz calls it, “the informal logic of actual life”), is by means of what he called“typification.” In attempting to understand the significance of what people do, the socialhermeneut must view the results of human agency through the lens of “ideal types,” thesebeing “constructs of the second degree, namely constructs of the constructs made by actorson the social scene, whose behavior the scientist observes and tries to explain inaccordance with the procedural rules of his science”140 -- the assumption being that thefunction of the social sciences is that of attaining “objective,” i.e., intersubjectively verifi-able, knowledge of the “subjective” meaning structures that guide and inform the actionof individual agents.

The reason why the social scientist must have recourse to second-order constructs, suchas these, is because, as Ricoeur would say, the consciousness actors have of themselvesis often a false consciousness, and the meaningful consequences of human action are oftennot the ones consciously intended by these actors. Because we are not sovereign con-sciousnesses (“a pure consciousness is capable of anything except being ignorant of itsintentions,” as Merleau-Ponty said [PP, 440]), we do not have full control over themeaning of what we do and are liable to be surprised (often unpleasantly so) by theconsequences of our own actions. In any event, depth psychology has sensitized us to thefact that we can never be altogether certain as to what our “real” intentions actually are.“To imagine that one might ever attain full illumination as to his motives or his interests,”Gadamer insists, “is to imagine something impossible.” (RAS, 108) As any number of ob-servers of the human condition (or folly, as Erasmus called it) have remarked, humanbeings seem to have an undeniable talent for duplicity -- even, and perhaps especially, asregards themselves. Genuine self-understanding isalwaysan arduous undertaking, as GabrielMarcel indicated, when he stated: “The task of the profoundest philosophic speculationis perhaps that of discovering the conditions (almost always disconcerting) under whichthe real balance-sheet [of one’s life] may occasionally emerge in a partial and temporaryfashion from underneath the crooked figures that mask it.”141

138 As economists Deirdre McCloskey and Stephen Zilich have shown, “statistical significance” inpattern-analysis is no guarantee of real-world relevance and is not a reliable substitute for economic(interpretive) significance; see Deirdre McCloskey and Stephen Zilich, “The Standard Error of Regres-sions,”Journal of Economic Literature34, no. 1 (March 1996), and idem, “Size Matters: The StandardError of Regressions in the American Economic Review,”Journal of Socio-Economics(forthcoming).

139 For a discussion of Schütz’s attempt to extend Husserlian phenomenology to economic scienceand to work out a phenomenological grounding for Austrian economics, the most prominent school ofeconomics at the time, see my entry “Economics” in theEncyclopedia of Phenomenology; see also my“Phenomenology and Economics,” in Peter J. Boettke, ed.,The Elgar Companion to Austrian Economics(Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1994).

140 Alfred Schütz, “Common Sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human Action,” in Richard M.Zaner and Don Ihde, ed.,Phenomenology and Existentialism(New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973), 293.In his discussion of “the typicality of the world of daily life,” Schütz was building on Husserl’s analysisthereof inExperience and Judgment, secs. 18-21 and 82-85.

141 Gabriel Marcel,The Mystery of Being, 2 vols. (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1960), 1:207.

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However great the difficulties of achieving a genuine understanding of things may be,the nature of the hermeneutic task as regards any historical/cultural community was none-theless clearly stated by Merleau-Ponty. “It is a matter, in the case of each civilization,”he said, “of finding the Idea in the Hegelian sense, that is, not a law of the physico-mathematical type, discoverable by objective [objectivistic] thought, but that formulawhich sums up some unique manner of behaviour towards others, towards Nature, timeand death: a certain way of patterning the world which the historian should be capable ofseizing upon and making his own.” (PP, xviii)

Given the hermeneutic difficulties alluded to above, Ricoeur was assuredly right whenhe said that there is “nothing…more obscure than the present in which we live.”142

(BSS, 648) Because of the “effectivity” of history, “we are located so completely in it,” asGadamer says, “that we can in a certain sense always say, We don’t know what is happeningto us.” (RAS, 36) But this is precisely why something like Schütz’s “typification” isindispensable if we are to understand anything at all. And although Ricoeur was also right,when he remarked that “every periodization is problematic” (BSS, 665), periodization,though always a legitimate subject for debate, is nevertheless indispensable when we seekto provide a properly narrative (“emplotted,” as Ricoeur would say) account of the past.In the various spontaneous orders of human endeavor -- and to the degree that, as in thecase of the evolution of language or morals (moeurs), these orders are indeed spontaneousand not consciously designed and technocratically maintained -- an “invisible hand” orstructural logic is always at work and (for better or worse) produces its effects independ-ently of actors’s intentions.143 It is always a matter, as Merleau-Ponty said, of discovering“in this unrolling of facts a spontaneous order, a meaning, an intrinsic truth, an orientationof such a kind that the different events do not appear as a mere succession.” (PriP, 52)

Despite Ricoeur’s aversion to terms like “modern” and “postmodern” (see BSS, 648,660-61, 690), these periodizing terms (whatever might be the personal reasons forRicoeur’s aversion to them) are highly useful ways of viewing cultural and intellectualhistory, i.e., historical and sociologicalprocesses, for, as Ricoeur does recognize, there are“certain trends in the history of philosophy.” (BSS, 665) It is the function of ideal-typeanalysis to identify these trends. Thus, although Ricoeur says that he doesn’t “know what‘modernity’ is” (BSS, 648), it is not really all that difficult to know what the term“modern philosophy” means, as I sought to indicate in the first part of this paper. Like-wise, in sociology and developmental studies, “modernization” has a well-defined meaning;we also know perfectly well what we mean when, in regard to architecture, we speak of“modernist” and “postmodern.” The case is no different with regard to philosophy. If onedidn’t know that one of the essential characteristics of mainstream modern philosophy wasits preoccupation with, as Gadamer would say, the “epistemology problem,” one could neverappreciate the true significance of phenomenology (and Ricoeur’s own place within it).Indeed, to the degree that phenomenology effects a break with what Gadamer called themodern “era of epistemology,” phenomenology can, in this precise sense of the term,rightly be said to be “postmodern.”

In opposition to the anti-theory movement in recent philosophy (and to the stance takenby Richard Rorty in this regard), hermeneutics staunchly defends the exercise of theory asdescribed above.144 Human beings are, after all, “theoretical beings,” as Gadamer put it,

142 See also BSS, 690: “We do not know in what time we live. The darkness, the opaqueness of thepresent to itself seems to me completely fundamental.”

143 For a discussion of spontaneous orders and the “invisible hand,” from an hermeneutic point of view,see myThe Political Economy of Civil Society and Human Rights(London: Routledge, 1998).

144 See in this regard my “The Practice of Theory/The Theory of Practice,” in Madison,The Politicsof Postmodernity.

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and they are such, precisely because “humans are the beings who have thelogos,” i.e.,language/reason.145 The hermeneutic fact of the matter is that we cannot make sense ofour practices, or what Geertz calls our “shaped behavior,” without having recourse totheory (to typifications, periodizations, pattern-analyses, etc.) Without theory (the “fieldof ideality,” as Merleau-Ponty referred to it), experience would be meaningless. Withouttheory, we would have no well-formulated questions to put to our own mute experiencethat would allow us to bring it to the proper expression of its own meaning (“We cannothave experiences without asking questions” [TM, 362]), and thus, without leading questions,there would be nothing for us to learn. Moreover, without theory, without an interpretivegrasp of the structural logic of the various realms or orders of human agency, we couldnot intervene -- in a responsible manner, that is -- in the empirical arrangement of thingsin such a way as, on the one hand, to enhance the likelihood of achieving the beneficialresults we desire and, on the other hand, of decreasing the chances of inadvertently pro-ducing undesirable, counter-productive results. Without theory, there would be no socialscience and thus no means for bringing reason to bear on human affairs in such a way asto ameliorate the life conditions of humanity. Were there no eidetic-type laws (“formulae,”as Merleau-Ponty would say) discernible by means of theory in the way in which humanevents seem to unfold, we could never have any realistic hope of successfully making thekind of structural or institutional changes that are likely (subject, of course to the vicis-situdes ofFortuna) to make for genuine progress and the greater freedom of all.146

As the preceding remarks indicate, the operant presupposition of hermeneutic reflectionis that there is always a kind of objective logic at work in human affairs -- “objective” in thesense that this logic is not the result of mere human willing and wanting, and is, in thisway, expressive of an element of “necessity” (necessità, as Machiavelli called it) in humanaffairs. This logic is, as it were, a logic that is the result of human action but not ofhuman design. The logic at work in human affairs (Hegel referred to this as “objectivespirit,” a notion that greatly fascinated Merleau-Ponty147) is objective in the sense alsothat the patterns of meaning with which the social sciences are concerned are not merely“subjective”; they exist, not in people’s heads, but, as Charles Taylor aptly remarks, “outthere” in theintersubjectiverealm of social practices and cultural/political/economic in-stitutions (the social/historicalintermonde, as Merleau-Ponty called it).148

The fact that various such logics exist, renders vain the modernist, utopian idea thathumans can arrange things however they see fit, so as to achieve total mastery over theirown destiny (Ricoeur refers to this pathological form of utopianism as “the magic ofthought”). Even Kant, that great believer in the ability of enlightened humans to take theirdestiny in hand and better their condition, recognized that “from such crooked wood ashumanity is made of nothing perfectly straight can be built.”149 Although hermeneuticsis fully in agreement with Kant on this score, it would, nevertheless, amount to a gross

145 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “In Praise of Theory,”Ellipsis 1, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 88.146 Laws of human behavior of the social-scientific sort can be formulated once the essence of any

particular category, or its sub-types, has been (as Merleau-Ponty would say) “seized upon.” Lord Acton’ssaying, that power tends to corrupt and that absolute power corrupts absolutely, counts as a universal lawof a particular type (echoing Montesquieu, Gadamer observed that “every form of power, not just that ofa tyrant or an absolute ruler, is dedicated to increasing its own power” [In Praise of Theory, 94]). For adiscussion of the role of hermeneutic theory in the understanding of social practices, see my “BetweenTheory and Practice: Hayek on the Logic of Cultural Dynamics,”Cultural Dynamics3, no. 1 (1990).

147 A key factor in the development of French phenomenology was the “existentialized” Hegel of JeanWahl and Alexandre Kojève.

148 See Charles Taylor, “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” in idem,Philosophy and the HumanSciences, Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 36.

149 Kant, Idea for a Universal History, Sixth Thesis.

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misunderstanding of the hermeneutic position to think that it implies some kind ofdeterminism and undermines the reality of human freedom.

Freedom and necessity (le volontaire et l’involontaire, to allude to the title of one ofRicoeur’s early works) should not be viewed as metaphysical opposites. In actuality,eidetic, ideal-type analysis, by enabling us to realize what is “necessary” in human affairs,also, by the same token, enables us to realize what is genuinely possible. For, the utopian,revolutionist impulse notwithstanding, the not unhappy fact of the matter is that not justanything is possible at any moment. Since we are not pure consciousnesses fully awareof our motives and intentions, and thus fully in control of the meaning of what we do,there is a kind of objective logic or necessity at work in the various human lifeworlds.Through interpretation, it is possible to become reflexively aware of these logics -- but neverin such a way as to be able to change them, just in any way we please. Just as, in replyto Habermas, Gadamer argued against the possibility of a total critique of “tradition”while, at the same time, maintaining that there is no inherited presupposition that cannot,in a piecemeal sort of way, be subjected to critique and revision, so likewise, although thelogic of things is beyond the ability of humans deliberately to control, it is neverthelessalways possible, through the creative power of the imagination, to introduce into this orthat order of human behavior new structural/institutional constraints or incentives (in theeconomic sense of the term) which operate not in a moralistic (“subjectivistic”) waythrough an appeal to people’s “good intentions” but in a thoroughlypraxial manner, bydirectly affecting people’sbehavior. The same thing is true on the personal level. In bothinstances, social and personal, human freedom is the freedom to create new habits andnew constraints, thereby alteringla force des chosesand opening up new directions forour being-in-the-world.150 As Merleau-Ponty pointed out in this regard, “Our freedomdoes not destroy our situation, but gears itself to it.” (PP, 442)

Human freedom is never absolute, nor is it merely “necessity understood,” freelysubmitted to. Or again, for hermeneutics, human freedom is not the libertarian or anarchic(criterionless, unprincipled) freedom extolled by some poststructuralists (la liberté sauvage),pure, unconstrained spontaneity. Human freedom is a function of the ability humans have,as beings who have thelogos (language/reason),151 of intervening judiciously in thecourse of events by interpreting necessity in a transformative way, thereby, on occasion,by means of a certain “power of initiative,” as Merleau-Ponty called it (PP, 439), bringingabout new beginnings. The “gift of freedom,” as Arendt observed, is “the mental endowmentwe have for beginning something new, of which we know that it could just as well notbe.”152

The crucial thing is that we exercise our limited freedom in a reflexively enlightenedway.153 As Heidegger said, in response to Marx’s saying that philosophers have only

150 See in this regard James’s superb chapter on habit, inThe Principles of Psychology.151 Cf. Merleau-Ponty: “We are born into reason as into language.” (SNS, 3)152 Arendt,The Life of the Mind, 2:195.153 In this regard, it should be noted that the dynamics of social orders can be, and often are,

transformed or “short-circuited” in a totally unintended manner by human agents. By acting on what isseemingly predictable, given the dynamics of a given state-of-affairs, humans can, by that very fact, alterthe course of events in unanticipated ways. Predicting the behavior of the stock market, for instance, cansignificantly affect what that behavior turns out to be. This has to do with what financier-philosopherGeorge Soros calls the “reflexivity” of human behavior (George Soros,Soros on Soros: Staying Aheadof the Curve[New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1995], 72, 209-220), a phenomenon that Ricoeur also talksabout under the heading of the “self-fulfilling prophecy” (Ricoeur,Main Trends in Philosophy, 147-48).From a hermeneutic point of view, this is an extremely interesting phenomenon, in that it highlights anessential difference between the human order of symbolic interaction and the natural order of deterministiccause and effect.

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interpreted the world, and that the point is to change it, the fact is that if we want tochange the world for the better, we must first interpret it in the appropriate way. Thereinlies the essence of human freedom. History is never rigidly determined, but neither is itever simply invented -- “out of whole cloth,” as Marx would say. Historical forces(necessity) are something to be interpreted, and, in being so interpreted, transformed. Theimportant thing is to think well. As Pascal said in his famouspenséeon “man, the think-ing reed, the weakest thing in nature,” the uniqueness (grandeur) of human beings inregard to nature is that they are reflective, thinking beings who, as such, know full wellthe great, crushing advantage that natural forces have over them, whereas nature knowsnothing of this -- from which he concluded that “all our dignity consists in thought” andthat, accordingly, “to strive to think well; that is the basic principle of morality.”154

Because, as Heidegger said, the essence of Dasein lies in its existence (ex-sistence, i.e.,transcendence), the essence of the human being -- the speaking, story-telling, self-interpreting, questioning animal -- is in fact nothing other than freedom itself. Necessitynotwithstanding, we are, ultimately, as Dostoyevski said, responsible for everything wedo. The fact, however, that our freedom, though real, is finite and that we are not pureconsciousnesses, fully aware of our own intentions and thus fully in control of themeaning of what we do, introduces an element of tragedy into the human condition. It isespecially tragic when we have no other option but to choose, freely but with heavyresponsibility, not between the good and the not-quite-so-good, but between what aremanifest evils, in the hope that the evil we do choose is a lesser evil than the others.Because we are free, we are also necessarily guilty, to one degree or another.

Hermeneutics and the Limits of Meaning

Hermeneutic phenomenology is the philosophical search for meaning, understanding. Assuch, and as is the case with all attempts at understanding, it is guided by certain presup-positions. The most important of these is what Ricoeur calls the “postulate of meaningful-ness.” That our lived experience is indeed meaningful and can, accordingly, be broughtto the proper expression of its own meaning, is a “prejudice” or, as Merleau-Ponty calledit, a “presumption on the part of reason,” but this presumption is not at all of an idealistnature (having to do with an “idealism of meaning”) and does not presume that thereexists some kind of pre-established harmony between the rational and the real, or eventhat the notion of total intelligibility is at all meaningful. Hermeneutics’s postulate ofmeaningfulness is not metaphysical but phenomenological in nature, in that it is groundedin our own lived experience and is nothing other than the articulation, on the level ofreason or reflection, of what Merleau-Ponty called our “primordial faith” (Urdoxa) in theexistence of the world, a “faith” which is constitutive of what, as perceiving beings, weessentially and inescapably are. As Merleau-Ponty said in this regard, the “ever-reiteratedassertion” in our lives is: “‘There is a world,’ or rather, ‘There is the world.’” (PP, xvii)

The postulate of meaningfulness, one might say, is a “working hypothesis” of herme-neutic reflection -- one, moreover, that is borne out or “validated” in actual experience,for it is a fact that we are always able, to some degree or other, to discern meaningfulpatterns in the traces of human life. It is, of course, also a fact that no interpretation canever legitimately claim to be “final,” to be the definitive truth of things, the one and onlycorrect interpretation, for, as we also know from experience, there is no interpretation that

154 Pascal,Pensées. no. 200; see alsopenséeno. 620: “Man is obviously made for thinking. Thereinlies all his dignity and his merit; and his whole duty is to think as he ought.”

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cannot be challenged and is not susceptible of being displaced by subsequent, moredeveloped and sophisticated interpretations. Any given interpretation, no matter how satis-fying, is only, as James said, a provisional resting-place. “The very idea of a definitiveinterpretation,” Gadamer insists, “seems to be intrinsically contradictory. Interpretation,”as he goes on to say, “is always on the way” -- such that “the wordinterpretationpointsto the finitude of human being and the finitude of human knowing.” (RAS, 105) It is, inshort, the nature of experience and interpretation that there can be no such thing as “thelast word.” (Cf. GOC, 60). As the phenomenological psychologist Eugene Gendlin hasshown in a revealing study of the relation between experience and expression (based on hisown clinical experience as a practicing psychologist), it is the very nature of experiencethat the “felt meaning” of any experience can always be articulated in ever more refinedways; one “vital characteristic of experiencing,” as Gendlin points out, is that “any datumof experiencing—any aspect of it, no matter how finely specified—can be symbolized andinterpretedfurther and further.”155 Adding to Gendlin’s observations on this matter,David Michael Levin points out that “the relation between experience and the languageof its articulation is an ongoing process of hermeneutic disclosure, whereby (1) languageforms the experience it is articulating in the process of articulating it and (2) experiencecontinues to talk back to the words that have been used to render it articulate.”156

The unavoidable incompleteness, of any attempt at bringing our lived experience to theproper expression of its own meaning, that Gendlin has highlighted, is itself, as it were,empirical confirmation of Ricoeur’s basic conviction that in human existence there is asuper-abundance of meaning to the abundance of non-sense (there is no experience thatcannot be interpreted and reinterpreted productively, “further and further”). In any event,what the phenomenology of perception -- that of both Merleau-Ponty and William James --has shown is that, at its most basic level, the “stream of consciousness” is not the chaoticjumble of discrete “sense data” that British empiricism took it to be (or as James said ofKant’s metaphysical epistemology, “There is no originally chaotic manifold to be reducedto order”157) but is, rather, from the very beginning, the lived experience of an ordered,meaningful world. And as Merleau-Ponty said, “Because we are in the world, we arecondemned to meaning.” (PP, xix) “The sensible,” as he also said, “is, like life, a treasuryever full of things to say.” (VI, 252) This is, of course, something that poets and greatnovelists like Marcel Proust have always known.158

In an arresting image, Merleau-Ponty once provided this description of the humansituation: “Instead of an intelligible world there are radiant nebulae separated by expansesof darkness.” (SNS, 4) And thus, as he also said: “The highest form of reason borders on(est voisine avec) unreason.” (SNS, 4) Hermeneutics’s postulate of meaningfulness does notpreclude it from recognizing the existence of a kind of radical ignorance and uncertaintyin human existence; there is, as Jean Grondin rightly observes, “no triumphalism ofreason” to be found here.159 Hermeneutics’s presumption of meaning, though rational,

155 Eugene T. Gendlin,Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning: A Philosophical and Psycho-logical Approach to the Subjective(Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1962), 16; see also idem,“Experiential Phenomenology,” in Maurice Natanson, ed.,Phenomenology and the Social Sciences(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973).

156 Levin, “Liberating Experience from the Vice of Structuralism,” 96-7.157 James,The Principles of Psychology, 1:363.158 In his Recherche, Proust describes many experiences of this sort, such as the one occasioned by

the church towers of Martinville which he glimpsed in the course of an automobile ride, or the three treesnear Balbec that he once sighted; see Marcel Proust,À la recherche du temps perdu, 3 vols. (Paris:Éditions Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1954), 1:180 and 1:717-19.

159 See Jean Grondin, “Gadamer on Humanism,” in Hahn, ed.,The Philosophy of Hans-GeorgGadamer, 167.

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is not rationalist or idealist in that it is not simply a version of Leibniz’s “principle ofsufficient reason” (nihil est sine ratione). In human affairs there are many things whichare without reason or are resistant to reason, such that there is, and can be, noultima ratioto which human beings could have access and which would bring their search for meaningto a happy conclusion. Apart from the absolute or “apodictic,” but empty, certainty of theEgo cogitotype, the only kind of certainty available to humans is of a strictly relative andconditional sort, the kind of certainty Husserl called “empirical” or “presumptive.”160

Hermeneutics, as Ricoeur says, echoing Merleau-Ponty, is thus “a philosophy without anyabsolute.” (IA, 13) The highest knowledge we can attain to is the knowledge that thereare many things we do not know and likely cannot ever know, or even know that wedon’t know. As Pascal remarked, reason is nothing if it does not go as far as to recognizethat.161 At some point or another, reason always runs up against the “opacity of the fact”which, as such, stares it in the face “with the inexorability of an enigma.” Hermeneuticenlightenment is not philosophicalgnosis; it is, rather, as Gadamer said, “sophia, aconsciousness of not knowing…. [H]uman wisdom is…the awareness of not-knowing [dasWissen des Nichtwissens], docta ignorantia.” (RPJ, 31, 33) “There is,” as Gadamer alsostated, “no claim of definitive knowledge with the exception of one: the acknowledgmentof the finitude of human being in itself.”162 To be reasonable is “to know the limits ofone’s own understanding.”163

To emphasize, as hermeneutic phenomenology does, the unsurpassable finitude ofhuman being is not, for all that, to issue a call for resignation in the face of the unknown;it is, rather, a recognition of the need for, as Merleau-Ponty would say, “unremittingvirtù(la virtù sans aucune résignation).” (S, 35) The search for meaning can never be anythingother than a constantstrugglefor meaning, a struggle against our inveterate tendency tomisunderstand things -- as well as against what James called “a certain blindness” asregards the Other, and to which we are all prone -- by keeping ourselves open to new ex-periences, to further expansions in our horizons. When Gadamer said that “Being that canbe understood is language,” he was not making a metaphysical statement and was notclaiming that being could ever be made fully intelligible or that our life-experience couldever be fully explicated. He was, rather, pointing to what is morally incumbent on anyreflecting subject: “The principle of hermeneutics simply means that we should try tounderstand everything that can be understood.” (PH, 31) “A hermeneutically informednotion of truth,” as Calvin Schrag observes, is one “liberated from its traditionalepistemological paradigm,”164 which is to say that, for hermeneutics, “truth” is not so mucha cognitivist-epistemological concept as it is an existential-moral concept and refers to away of living, a resolutely communicative mode of being-in-the-world. Truth, for herme-neutics, is always of a “processual” nature and is a matter of “openness.” “The truth,” asRicoeur says, “is…the lighted place in which it is possible to continue to live and tothink.”165 Or, as Gadamer said, “The truth of experience always implies an orientationtoward new experience…. The dialectic of experience has its proper fulfillment not in

160 See Edmund Husserl,Experience and Judgment, trans. James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), sec. 77.

161 See Pascal,Pensées, no. 188: “Reason’s last step is the recognition that there are an infinitenumber of things which are beyond it. It is merely feeble if it does not go as far as to realize that.”

162 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Science of the Life-World,”Analecta Husserliana2 (1972): 184.163 Gadamer, “The Power of Reason,” 14.164 See Calvin O. Schrag,Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity(Bloomington, Ind.:

Indiana University Press, 1986), 187.165 Paul Ricoeur, “Reply to My Friends and Critics,” in Reagan, ed.,Studies in the Philosophy of Paul

Ricoeur, no page no.

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definitive knowledge but in that openness to experience that is made possible byexperience itself.” (TM, 355) As a young Lithuanian phenomenologist has correctlyobserved, “while for Hegel experience is overcome in the closure of absolute knowledge,for Gadamer it is fulfilled in the openness to new experiences.”166

All language, even that of philosophy, Merleau-Ponty maintained, is indirect, and inwhatever comes to understanding in our speaking of it there are always many things thatnecessarily remain unsaid. The most profound insight of Heidegger, who pursued withdetermination always the same question, the question as to the “meaning of being” -- or,as he preferred later to say, the “truth of being” -- was that the truth-process, the adventof truth (unconcealment,a-letheia), always has the dual character of both revealing andconcealing. That being so, the self in search of self-understanding never experiences a“full” presence of itself to itself. Being in the nature of aprocess, human understandingis always only “on the way.” The important thing, that which allows for a certaincoherence and meaning in our lives, is persistence in the asking of questions, for asMerleau-Ponty remarked, “Every question, even that of simple cognition, is part of thecentral question that is ourselves.” (VI, 104) Or, as Ricoeur’s mentor, Gabriel Marcel, hadsaid earlier on, the question concerning the self is the question on which “all otherquestions hang.”167

An ancient Chinese sage once said: “The various artisans dwell in their workshops inorder to perfect their craft, just as thejunzi [the “gentleman” or wise person] keeps onlearning in order to discover the truth [to reach the utmost of the Way].”168 Thispersistence -- “To know how to question,” Heidegger said, “means to know how to wait,even a whole lifetime.” (IM, 206) -- is what the Confucians called virtue (de), whichconsists in “awaiting one’s destiny (ming)” in “steadfastness of purpose.”169 This is theWay (Dao) of understanding and the basis of humanness (ren; humanitas) and the morallife.170

Postscript

In this paper I have sought to cast a retrospective glance over some one hundred years ofphenomenology, taking as my theme the interpretive turn in phenomenology. Despitesignificant differences between the leading figures I have considered (and despite the factthat some of them branched off in directions others declined to follow), there are,nonetheless, many commonalties binding them together. There is, indeed, as I hope tohave shown in this “phenomenology of phenomenology” (limited, as it necessarily hasbeen, to a select number of general themes), a certain logic -- dictated by the thingsthemselves -- in the way in which phenomenology has unfolded over the last manydecades and during which time new themes and concerns have appeared at this or thatmoment and some older ones have faded away.

Given the protean way in which phenomenology has developed, it would undoubtedlybe best to avoid speaking, as is often done, of “the Phenomenological Movement” (the

166 Saulius Genusias, “Analysis of Historically Effected Consciousness,” manuscript (2003).167 See Marcel,The Mystery of Being, 1:130.168 Confucius,Analects, 19.7.169 See Mencius,The Mencius, 7A1 and 7B33.170 The Dao to which I have here alluded is theDao of humanistic self-cultivation (Bildung) of the

early Confucians and should not be confused with the mystical and anti-humanistDao of Laozi, i.e., of“Daoism,” which was, not surprisingly, theDao invoked by Heidegger (see Martin Heidegger,On the Wayto Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz [New York: Harper and Row, 1971], 92).

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title Herbert Spiegelberg gave to his monumental history of phenomenology). Not onlywas phenomenology never a “school” of philosophy (as Spiegelberg readily allowed), itwas not even a Movement in Spiegelberg’s (capital-M) sense of the term, i.e., a general,multifaceted trend of thought but one having a well-defined “common core” (this, as onemight say, “hard core” being for Spiegelberg the disciplined, disinterested, and patientsearch for “essences” by means of a direct, intuitive grasp or “seeing” (Wesenschau) andfaithful description of phenomena and their “modes of givenness” [to, as Spiegelberg says,“our inner eye”]). Husserl, as we know, hoped that his attempt at working out an ultimatescience of being would be carried on after him by a dedicated group of researchers whowould, in concerted teamwork, penetrate ever deeper into the field of pure subjectivity,mapping out ever more completely its essential,a priori, necessarily determined configura-tions. But this was not to be. In contrast to certain other trends in philosophy, there wasnever anything like a phenomenological orthodoxy -- or even a phenomenological ortho-praxy. Certainly, there is a particular way of doing philosophy which is recognizably“phenomenological” and which makes for a definite set of “family resemblances” amongits practitioners, but this is not to say that there is anything like a specific and commonlyaccepted “phenomenological method.” Perhaps the most that can be said in a general wayabout phenomenology as it has unfolded over the course of the last century is that, to usea term of Merleau-Ponty’s, phenomenology is a certain “style” of thinking (expressive ofa “phenomenological attitude”), the “essentials” of which are an unremitting aversion toall forms of metaphysical reductionism and an abiding concern for the integrity of ourown lived experience of things both human and natural. Whether this particular style ofthinking -- this tradition -- can be expected to survive or even to flourish in this new centuryis another question. In the realm of human affairs, nothing is certain, but, given the recentrenewed interest in the leading figures of classical phenomenology, and given also thesignificant number of new phenomenological organizations continually springing up, thereare grounds for being, if not optimistic, at least hopeful in this regard.171

One thing that can be safely said, I believe, is that there exists no better conceptualapparatus than that of existential-hermeneutic phenomenology for counteracting the ever-present and seemingly ineradicable, naturalistic tendency on the part of humans to reducehuman beings to that which is purely objectifiable (and thus manipulable) about them. Thetask of contesting this scientific-technocratic, anti-humanist, or “engineering” approach tothings human, and recalling humans to their own humanness remains the indispensabletask of any phenomenologically-inspired philosophy, both as a “pure” or general philosophyand in its “applications” to the different realms of the socio-cultural, the political, and theeconomic lifeworlds. In all these domains the supreme theoretical/practical task must bethat of defending the claims of communicative or dialogical rationality (Vernüftigkeit) overthe imperious demands and one-sidedness or “monologic” (as Gadamer called it) of merelyinstrumental or calculative rationality (Rationalität).172 In this respect, “phenomenology”is not just the name for a twentieth-century school of philosophy which may or may nothave passed its zenith, but indicates, rather, what remains one of the most crucial tasksof thinking and which, as such, is something that, as Merleau-Ponty would say, still hasall of its life before it (see PriP, 190). By its very nature, the truth of the phenomeno-logical project can never be a “completed” truth (une vérité accomplie) but must remainalways what Merleau-Ponty calledvérité à faire.

171 At the present time, there exist some 117 phenomenological organizations world-wide. Forinformation on developments in phenomenology, contact the web site of the Center for AdvancedResearch in Phenomenology (CARP) directed by Lester Embree <http://www.phenomenologycenter.org>.

172 See in this regard my “Critical Theory and Hermeneutics: Some Outstanding Issues in the Debate,”in Lewis E. Hahn, ed.,Perspectives on Habermas(Chicago: Open Court, 2000).

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I shall, however, leave the last word to Heidegger, who was particularly attuned towhat Marcel referred to as the “mystery of being” and who, however errant he may havebeen in some respects and however one-sided his “thinking of Being” may have been,nevertheless pursued the task of thinking with an uncommon steadfastness of purpose.After remarking how in the last century phenomenology determined the spirit of an age,Heidegger, in a late text, went on to say:

And today? The age of phenomenological philosophy seems to be over. It is alreadytaken as something past which is only recorded historically along with other schoolsof philosophy. But in what is most its own phenomenology is not a school. It is thepossibility of thinking, at times changing and only thus persisting, of corresponding tothe claim of what is to be thought. If phenomenology is thus experienced and retained,it can disappear as a designation in favor of the matter of thinking whose manifestnessremains a mystery.173

173 Heidegger,On Time and Being, 82.

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II.

TOWARD A TELOS OF SIGNIFYING COMPLETENESS:

GABRIEL MARCEL AND PAUL RICOEUR

1. “IF THERE IS A PLOT”: GABRIEL MARCEL AND SECOND DEGREE REFLECTION

Paolo Diego Bubbio

Introduction

The thought of Gabriel Marcel presents an ambiguous but interesting philosophicalchallenge. On the one hand, its importance for the development of the Existentialistmovement is undeniable: the first edition of theMetaphysical Journalis published in1927, the same year in which Heidegger publishedSein und Zeiton Husserl’s reviewJahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, but the early notes ofMarcel’sJournalare dated 1914. Thanks to his hosting of the famous “Friday evenings,”he associated with many of the prominent philosophers of his day: Paul Ricoeur,Emmanuel Levinas, Jean Wahl, and Jean-Paul Sartre were among the many noted philo-sophers who attended these gatherings at one time or another. On the other hand, althoughhe did not like to be labeled as an “existentialist,” referring to his own way of thinkingas “Christian socratism,” the label of “Christian existentialist” which was attributed to himdid not help his fame. His philosophy was considered merely as a “religious philosophy”(and this was a mistake, because his thought does not imply a preceding Christian profes-sion of faith; thus it is rather a “philosophy of religion,” because his thought opens ontotranscendence); other kinds of “existentialist” thought were preferred, and his thought hasbeen almost forgotten.1

In our opinion, it is instead particularly interesting to focus on Gabriel Marcel’s thought,also for a reason of “topicality.” The epoch in which we live, characterized by a loss ofshared values and by the confrontation (if not conflict) between different cultures, seemsto issue to philosophy the challenge of expressing itself on the possibility of a thoughtable to be shared and “usable.”2 Nevertheless, the space granted to philosophy seems to be,at first sight, not very wide, particularly if we accept a hermeneutic point of view whichexcludes the possibility of a return to traditional metaphysics (which cannot be easilyconsidered as shareable by different cultures and which, moreover, always hides withinitself the risk of the assumption of a “violent” point of view) and the secular possibilityof an absolute relativism (which renounces the search of a truly shareable sense, andwhich always hides the risk of a fall into complete aphasia). I think that a re-examinationof some aspects of Marcel’s thought can help contemporary philosophy in setting out theboundary markers of this space.

In what follows, I will try to make the point about the relationship between Marcel andphenomenology. Then, I will focus my attention on some central nuclei of Marcel’s thought:the notion of body, the notion of existence and the notion of “secondary reflection” (or“second degree reflection”). These themes are reciprocally connected, and I hope that theconnection will be clear at the end of this paper, when I will treat the problem of univer-sality. Finally, I will try to answer a question: is it possible to speak of a “Marcellianhermeneutics”?

1 Acknowledgment: part of this paper was written when I enjoyed the hospitality of HeythropCollege, University of London, UK, and has been presented -- together with a previous version -- at thePhilosophy Research Seminar (Heythrop College). Helpful comments from Peter Gallagher, MichaelKirwan, and seminar participants are gratefully acknowledged. I would like also to thank Tom Michaudand Brendan Sweetman for their suggestions.

2 See Maurizio Pagano, “La dimensione dell’universalità e l’esperienza ermeneutica,” in GiuseppeNicolaci and Leonardo Samonà, ed.,L’universale ermeneutico(Genova: Tilgher, 2003), 47.

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Phenomenology and Method

In Marcel’s philosophical education we can note three interesting points of reference. Thefirst one is Henri Bergson, who was Marcel’s teacher.3 The second is British andAmerican Idealism: Marcel studied deeply the thoughts of Coleridge, Bradley, Royce, andhe often cited them in his works. The possibility of an influence of the phenomenologicalschool of Edmund Husserl could be considered a problem, but this problem has beenalready solved, partially thanks to some explicit considerations formulated by Marcelhimself, and partially thanks to the monumental work by Herbert Spiegelberg,ThePhenomenological Movement,4 and the fundamental article by Paul Ricoeur,GabrielMarcel and Phenomenology.5

Marcel “never claimed to be a phenomenologist.”6 On the contrary, in hisReply toPaul Ricoeur, he wrote: “I am barely acquainted with Husserl’s philosophy. I rememberreading theIdeensome months before the beginning of the First World War and not under-standing a word of it. I had not yet read theLogical Investigations. Much later I listenedto the first Cartesian Meditations, when Husserl himself came to deliver them at the Sor-bonne. At first I found them interesting, then tiresome.”7 The year of Husserl’s Sorbonnelectures was 1929; on August 5 of the same year, he wrote an entry of his secondJournal,later published with the titleEtre et avoir, which clearly shows his awareness of Germanphenomenology.8 And in The Mystery of Being, which contains the two series of GiffordLectures given by Marcel in 1949 and 1950 at the University of Aberdeen, “he remarkedtwice with approval that Husserlian phenomenology had developed the conception of con-sciousness as intentional, i.e., as referring to something other than itself.”9 But we cannotspeak of an “influence” in any case: “the truth seems to be that he is a largely underivativethinker.”10 Jean Heing, in his pioneering work entitledPhénoménologie et philosophiereligieuse, wrote: “We believe we may affirm that, even if German phenomenology (tosuppose the impossible) had remained unknown in France, nevertheless a phenomenologywould have been constituted there; and this, to a large extent, would be due to the in-fluence of Gabriel Marcel.”11

Thus, where can we find a similarity between Marcel and phenomenology? We canfind it in the philosophical approach and in the method of research. It is not by chance thatMarcel uses the wordphenomenologyin the title of a lecture given to the PhilosophicalSociety of Lyon in November 1933, “Outlines of a Phenomenology of Having,” later

3 “Indeed, I think I can say that, among all those whose courses I took, Henri Bergson was the onlyone whose thought and words took a sure and lasting hold on me.” Gabriel Marcel, “An AutobiographicalEssay,” in Paul Arthur Schilpp and Lewis Edwin Hahn, ed.,The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel(La Salle,Ill.: Open Court, 1984), 17.

4 Herbert Spiegelberg,The Phenomenological Movement(The Hague/Boston/London: MartinusNijhoff Publishers, 1982), 446-469.

5 Paul Ricoeur, “Gabriel Marcel and Phenomenology,” in Schilpp and Hahn, ed.,The Philosophyof Gabriel Marcel, 471-494.

6 Spiegelberg,The Phenomenological Movement, 448.7 Gabriel Marcel, “Reply to Paul Ricoeur,” in Schilpp and Hahn, ed.,The Philosophy of Gabriel

Marcel, 495.8 Spiegelberg,The Phenomenological Movement, 450.9 Ibid., 448.10 Kenneth T. Gallagher,The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel(New York: Fordham University Press,

1962), X.11 Jean Heing,Phénoménologie et philosophie religieuse: étude sur la théorie de la connaissance

religieuse(Paris: Alcan, 1926), quoted in Spiegelberg,The Phenomenological Movement, 448.

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published inBeing and Having.12 This work is cited by Ricoeur as evidence for the factthat “The refusal of system . . . is . . . what places Husserl and Marcel in the same philo-sophical light. I find no other explanation for Marcel’s use of the word.”13 In other words,there is an undeniable similarity between “Marcel’s refusal of system and his avowal ofdiscursivity” and the famous “‘zu den Sachen selbst’ of Husserl.”14

The refusal of the system led Marcel to become an unsystematic thinker. But even anunsystematic philosopher needs a method -- maybe he needs a method more than a sys-tematic thinker. Thus, the problem of a proper method became “more and more urgent forMarcel.”15

Marcel’s philosophical approach deals with the attention to the concrete experiencerather than abstractions. In order to ground the philosophical ideas he is investigating,Marcel makes constant use of examples. He writes:

I would like to make the point that for a philosophical approach like ours, which isessentially a concrete rather than an abstract approach, the use of examples is notmerely an auxiliary process but, on the contrary, an essential part of our method ofprogressing. An example, for us, is not merely an illustration of an idea which wasfully in being even before it was illustrated.16

The definition of his own thought as a “Christian socratism” is in fact linked with theattention to concrete experience and to the proceeding through examples. The use ofexamples is considered by Ricoeur as a point of contact between the Marcellian and thephenomenological method: “Again like Husserl, Marcel strives to decipher meanings onthe basis of well-chosen examples and significant cases, and this implies that the essence-example relationship is irreducible to any inductive generalization and consists in a directreading of meaning in a singular fact.”17 This approach explains the skeptical attitudewhich Ricoeur always assumes when he examines the attempts of the abstract reason toexpress itself about the concreteness of existence: the objective constitutesfor me (witha meaningfuloverturning) what is onlyapparent, thus unreal, and which constitutes forMarcel the sphere of the problematic.18 From this point of view, “His stake in phenome-nology . . . represented a stage in his search for a concrete philosophy and for concreteapproaches to it and to the ‘ontological mystery.’”19

Nevertheless, in order to analyze deeply the relationship between Marcel andphenomenology and, above all, in order to understand whether his thought can reallyrepresent a fruitful contribution to contemporary hermeneutic philosophy and to the ques-tion of universality, it is necessary to focus our attention on the notion of body and thenon the notion of existence.

12 Gabriel Marcel, “Esquisse d’une phénoménologie de l’avoir,” in idem,Être et avoir(Paris: Aubier,1935), 223-55; idem, “Sketch of a Phenomenology of Having,” in idem,Being and Having(Westminster:Dacre Press, 1949).

13 Ricoeur, “Gabriel Marcel and Phenomenology,” 472.14 Ibid.15 Spiegelberg,The Phenomenological Movement, 457.16 Gabriel Marcel,Le mystère de l’être(Aubier: éd. Montaigne, 1951); idem,Mystery of Being, trans.

Georg S. Fraser (London: The Harvill Press, 1950), I, 116.17 Ricoeur, “Gabriel Marcel and Phenomenology,” 472-473.18 See Pietro Prini,Gabriel Marcel e la filosofia del concreto, introduction to Gabriel Marcel,Dal

rifiuto all’invocazione. Saggio di filosofia concreta(Roma: Città Nuova Editrice, 1976).19 Spiegelberg,The Phenomenological Movement, 460.

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Body and Coenaesthesis

The starting point of Marcel’s way of thinking, broadly conceived, is a reflection aboutbody. In fact, if we want to beconcrete, we cannot leave this out of consideration. Inorder to clarify the relationship between me and my body, we have to use the notion ofCoenaesthesis.Coenaesthesisis the common sensation of general and immediate perceptionof our body, an elementary form of bodily awareness.Coenaesthesisis the internal sen-sation of one’s body: in fact, the body is continuously perceived as one’s body by theperson who lives it.20

What does constitute my identity? In other words, it seems necessary to understand“what connection my being – and by ‘my being’ I mean here just what I would mean by‘my way of existence’ – has with what I call my body.”21

This connection is, according to Marcel,incarnation. If “I am my body,” as Marcelwrites, “then existence is first of allincarnation.” Marcel explains: “the term ‘incarnation’. . . applies solely and exclusively in our present context to the situation of a being whoappears to himself to be linked fundamentally and not accidentally tohis or her body.”22

If Coenaesthesisis the perception of my body as mine,incarnation is the conscious-ness that I cannot see the world but with my eyes, through my eyes. I can never “jumpout of what I am.”23 My body is the insuperable border which distinguishes me and therest of the world.

It is clear that the starting point of Marcel’s way of thinking is very different from thephenomenological approach. As Ricoeur stresses, “Husserl’s first philosophical gesture isreduction. Marcel’s is diametrically opposed. . . . Marcel embarks on his itinerary by intro-ducing the idea of ‘situation.’ . . . First and fundamentally, being implied or involvedexcluded both the distance characteristic of reduction and the promotion of a ‘disinterestedspectator,’ the very subject of phenomenology.”24

The next step should be to analyze our consciousness. But this is not possible, accordingto Marcel, because to develop a real analysis, our consciousness should bemorethan whatit wants to analyze. This is not the case, because the subject of this analysis is conscious-ness, and the object is consciousness itself. Marcel writes: “we must be wary of the ten-dency that leads us to place ourselves as it were outside consciousness in order torepresent it to ourselves (here, as a mirror), for all this can only be an illusory advance,since it is an intrinsic quality of consciousness that it cannot be detached, contemplated,and considered in this way.”25

If on one hand we cannot understand our consciousness -- or, better, we cannot use our“objective reason” to grasp it -- and on the other hand we develop consciousness, it is afact indeed. So, how do we develop it? We develop it as we perceive that there is some-thing outside us. In other words, I understand that there is an “inside us” because thereis an “outside us.”26 It is the perception of the “rest of the world,” of all which is beyondmy body -- the body which I am -- that allows me to understand that there is something

20 Franco Riva, “Dall’autonomia alla disponibilità. Paul Ricoeur e Gabriel Marcel,” in Franco Riva,ed.,Per un’etica dell’alterità. Sei colloqui(Roma: Edizioni Lavoro, 1998).

21 Marcel,The Mystery of Being, I, 103.22 Ibid., 101.23 Gabriel Marcel,Journal métaphysique(Paris: Gallimard, 1927, 1935); idem,Metaphysical Journal,

trans. Bernard Wall (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1952), December 8, 1921.24 Ricoeur, “Gabriel Marcel and Phenomenology,” 476.25 Marcel,The Mystery of Being, 1: 51.26 “The existence of the other appears then as that which transgresses the sphere of personal

belonging, like an irruption of otherness within the circle of sameness, constituted by the insular relationthat I form with myvécu, my experience, my world.” Ricoeur, “Gabriel Marcel and Phenomenology,” 482.

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inside me which makes me able to relate to the world around me. “Consciousness is aboveall consciousnessof something which is other than itself, what we call self-consciousness,being on the contrary a derivative act whose essential nature is, indeed, rather uncertain;for we shall see in the sequel how difficult it is to succeed in getting a direct glimpse ofwhatever it is that we mean byself.”27

It is important to note that to understand that there is something outside me and that I canbe related to it only through my eyes does not yet mean that I perceive other “selves”provided with a consciousness. First I perceive a world outside me, an indistinctive wholeto which I am related but which is separate from me; I see nothing but other bodiesaround me. Only subsequently, once I have developed my consciousness, and thanks tothe perception of this indistinctive world, I can, so to speak, “argue from analogy” and graspthat the bodies of the other human beings hide a consciousness in the same wayI hide itto their eyes. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that a difference between the way inwhich I perceive myself as consciousness and the way in which I perceive other humanbeings as consciousnesses, always remains. This happens just because the perception ofmyself as a consciousness isimmediate, whereas the perception of other human beings asconsciousnesses ismediate; I distinguish them by analogy. This is also the reason why ahuman being always runs the risk of considering others simply as bodies, as tools whichI can use.28

This conception of body is very important within Marcel’s thought and has a lot ofconsequences within his way of thinking. In this regard, Paul Ricoeur has spoken aboutan absolute “Copernican revolution” which “returns to the subjectivity its privilege.”29

This is, in fact, a quite unique conception within Existentialism and within that Continen-tal thought which Existentialism has generated. Let us sum up: “The body that I call mybody is in fact only one body among many others, in relation to these other bodies, it hasbeen endowed with no special privileges whatsoever. It is not enough to say that this isobjectively true, it is the precondition of any sort of objectivity whatsoever, it is thefoundation of all scientific knowledge (in the case [sic] we are thinking of anatomy, ofphysiology, and all their connected disciplines).”30

From the other side: “The purely private self is an abstraction: the ego given in experienceis a being-by-participation. . . . we cannot effectively divorce the self from that in which itparticipates, because it is only the participation which allows there to be a self. Participa-tion, in other words, is the foundation -- the only foundation -- for my experience of exist-ence.”31 In other words, as Ricoeur emphasizes, “the first ontological position is neitherI existing nor thou existing but theco-esse.”32

At this point, the question is: how can I conceive myself as a unique and unrepeatableexistent and, at the same time, aim at a real sharing of judgment with other existents?33

Even if the first ontological position is theco-esse, how does this position legitimate thepossibility of any universality whatsoever?

27 Marcel,The Mystery of Being, 1: 52.28 It is interesting to note that in the Foreword to the English translation of hisLa Métaphysique de

Josiah Royce, as Royce’s Metaphysics, trans. Virginia and Gordon Ringer (Chicago: Regnery, 1956),Marcel gave Royce credit for having helped him in the “discovery” of the “Thou” as the necessary cor-relate of the “I.” See Spiegelberg,The Phenomenological Movement, 454.

29 Paul Ricoeur,Philosophie de la volonté. I. Le volontaire et l’involontaire(Paris: Aubier, 1950), 33.30 Marcel,The Mystery of Being, 1: 93.31 Gallagher,The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, XI.32 Ricoeur, “Gabriel Marcel and Phenomenology,” 484.33 Marcel,Journal, 127.

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We have seen that we do not originally perceive our body as “a body among manyothers.” The analysis of the notion of body seems to demonstrate, according to Marcel,that it is necessary to use two different approaches, two different kinds of reflection. Thefirst one argues that “this body has just some properties, that it is liable to suffer the samedisorders, that it is fated in the end to undergo the same destruction, as any other bodywhatsoever”34; the second “does not set out flatly to give the lie to these propositions;it manifests itself rather by a refusal to treat primary reflection’s separation of this body,considered as just a body, a sample body, some body or other, from the self that I am, asfinal.”35 According to Marcel, the “fulcrum,” or the “springboard,” of this different kindof reflection is a “massive, indistinct sense of one’s total existence.” And here we can notethe profound difference between Marcel’s and Husserl’s philosophical approaches: “itconcerns the very relation of human beings and the world. For Husserl this relation maybe raised to the rank of spectacle for the disinterested eye of the meditating ego. ForMarcel the questions of suicide and of death impose on the human relation to the worldthe fundamental characteristic of concern. On this point Marcel is incontestably closer toHeidegger than to Husserl.”36

Our existence isincarnation. We cannot “define” it (“for, as the condition which makesthe defining activity possible, it seems to be prior to all definition”); we only try to giveit a name and to locate it “as an existential center.” The name given by Marcel to thiskind of reasoning is “secondary reflection,” or “second degree reflection” (réflexionseconde). But, before we consider this kind of reflection as such, we have to clarify firstwhat exactly Marcel means by “existence.”

Existence

Approaching the notion of existence, we cannot forget theCoenaesthesisand the bondwith my body. It is difficult, because we always have the temptation to keep outside theproblem, but we cannot in any way: this problem, in fact, inevitably invades the wholescenario. In a certain sense, I am part of the problem that I am trying to analyze.37 It isimportant to resist this temptation, because to forget the bond with my body, whichgrounds my view of the world, means to surrender to the “spirit of abstraction.”

In order to answer the question “What is existence?,” therefore, we have to begin fromthat existent the existence of which I cannot deny in any sense. Marcel writes: “This cen-trally significant existence, my denial of which entails the inconceivability of my assertingany other existence, is simply, of course, myself, in so far as I feel sure that I exist.”38

However, one could say that the fact that I exist is not so clear. It is evident that, withthe expression “I exist,” Marcel means something more than the simple presence of abiologically alive body. Thus, one could say that we have firstly to answer the question:“Do I exist? And if I do, in which sense do I use the verb ‘to exist’?” Marcel argues thatthe question is badly put. We read:

If, in the question, ‘DoI exist?’ I take the ‘I’ separately and treat it as a sort of mentalobject that can be isolated, a sort of ‘that’, and if I take the question as meaning ‘is’

34 Marcel,The Mystery of Being, 1: 92.35 Ibid.36 Ricoeur, “Gabriel Marcel and Phenomenology,” 488.37 See Gabriel Marcel,Position et approches concrètes du mystère ontologique(Paris: Jean-Michel

Place, 1977).38 Marcel,The Mystery of Being, 1: 88.

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or is not existence something that can be predicated of this ‘that’? the question doesnot seem to suggest any answer to itself, not even a negative answer. But this wouldprove simply that the question had been badly put, that it was, if I may say so, a viciousquestion. It was vicious for two reasons: because the ‘I’ cannot in any case whatsoeverbe treated as a ‘that’, because the ‘I’ is the very negation of the ‘that’ whatsoever andalso because existence is not a predicate, as Kant seems to have established once andfor all, in theCritique of Pure Reason.39

Marcel stresses two points here. The first one is that theI is not a that, it is not a“mental object.” Of course, Marcel is not denying the possibility of thinking the I andtreating it as an object, as a psychologist could do, when writing an essay about “psycho-logical disorders of the I,” for example. To be honest, we are talking about the I as a men-tal object even in this moment. What Marcel wants to emphasize is that if I ask the ques-tion “Do I exist?,” I cannot considermy I as an object and, if I do this, what I am doingis a mere fiction. In other words, if I consider the I as an object within this question, I amnot talking aboutmy I, in fact, rather, I am talking about aconcept.

The second point stressed by Marcel is that existence is not a predicate. I cannot conceivethe existence without the I -- or, better, withoutmy I -- in any case.

This is also the reason why Marcel strongly criticizes Descartes and the argument ofcogito. Marcel sees, in this argument, the danger of a dissociation between the gnoseo-logical subject, as an organ of an objective knowledge, and the vital element in our being.In other words, Marcel emphasizes thesumrather than thecogito; we cannot dissect theaffirmation “I am,” because it refers to existence, and we argued that it is impossible totreat it correctly when using the traditional rational categories.40

Therefore, we established that “I exist” and that existence is, so to say, an “opaquedatum.” The reason why, according to Marcel, we cannot use the rational in a scientificsense instrument to analyze it, is that existence is not aproblem: it is a mystery. In Beingand Having, Marcel explains: “A problem is something which I meet, which I find com-pletely before me, but which I can therefore lay siege to and reduce. But a mystery issomething in which I am myself involved, and it can therefore only be thought of as asphere where the distinction between what is in me and what is before me loses its mean-ing and initial validity.”41

Thus,Having is the way to solve the problems I find in the world. But what isBeing?We could answer, in a speculative way, that it is the way to treat the mysteries I find inlife, but this does not seem to help very much. First of all, we have to say that Being issomething which deals with the notion of existence. In which sense? As a matter of factwe cannot use a rational, analyzing, dissecting, isolating language, we have to resort toa metaphor, so we can say that Being is the light and beings are illuminated by thislight.42

It is interesting to note that Marcel adopts a “simpler” and “more concrete” solutionthan Heidegger’s one, about the relationship between Being and beings.43 One could also

39 Ibid., 90.40 Marcel,Position et approches concrètes, 264-5. See also Luigi Pareyson,Studi sull’esistenzialismo

(Milano: Mursia, 2002), 184.41 Marcel,Being and Having, 117.42 SeeEntretiens Paul Ricoeur Gabriel Marcel(Paris: Éditions Aubier-Montaigne, 1968).43 The relationship between Marcel and Heidegger is a very interesting topic, and it would deserve

a larger treatment. According to Marcel, “this difficult philosopher, [i.e., Heidegger] is without doubt themost profound of our time, but the least capable of formulating anything resembling clear directions whichcould orient effectively the youth that turns to him as a guide.” Gabriel Marcel,L’Homme problématique,

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say that Marcel’s solution is more simplistic than Heidegger’s. It is true that the metaphorof Light is classic within the Western philosophical tradition, from Plato onwards. Never-theless, there is an element distinguishing Marcel’s use and the classic use of this meta-phor. This metaphor is used by classic metaphysical philosophers to explain that beingsexist only because there is a Being conferring an ontological status on them. On thecontrary, according to Marcel, “There is no way in which we can conceive of being assomething cut off from existence.”44 Continuing to use our metaphor, we can say that wecan see the light only in beings, which are illuminated by it. In other words, Being is akind of horizon formed by the existences of all beings, of all individuals. Marcel does notdistinguish between Existence and Being. Being is “being in a situation,” and thus isalways changing. Our own mode of Being is being-in-the-world.45

In passing, it is interesting to note that Marcel’s thought is similar to Heidegger’s fromthis point of view, but is different if we consider existence itself. According to Heidegger,my existence is singular and unique because I am an historical being (Dasein), whereasin Marcel’s view my historical collocation is important, but not fundamental: my existenceis singular and unique becauseI am I, thanks to my self-consciousness, because I see theworld with my eyes.

It is clear that, since the beginning of his philosophical work, Marcel confers onexistence and consciousness a value which transcends the mere biological life and eventhe most complex psychic activity. Existence which deals with Being is something more,but Marcel does not demonstrate it; on the contrary, he affirms that it cannot be demon-strated, just because it is not aproblem, in the meaning of the word that we have seenbefore; it is not something which deals with the scenario of Having.

Is this anact of faith? The answer depends on the point of view. A materialist surelywill answer that it is. For his part, Marcel probably retorts that the materialist is simplyguilty of naivety, as he wants to apply to the sphere of Being a method of survey whichis instead valid only within the sphere of Having. Moreover, scientific thought is univer-sally valid just because -- Marcel says -- “science does not speak about the real, but in thethird person.”46 whereas the thought on Being does not speak but in the first person.47

In this sense, what Marcel demands of his hypothetical materialist interlocutor is towonder if there are not concrete experiences which can lead one to consider the plausib-ility of a speech on Being. It is not an act of faith: it is, rather, awager.

But if existence becomes, within Marcel’s thought, the indispensabledatumof everyconcrete philosophical reflection, it cannot constitute the backbone of this reflection --otherwise philosophy could fall into vitalism or intuitionism. Therefore, it is necessary tofind a philosophical strategy in order to formulate a thought which is concrete and never-theless shareable, not merely subjective.

(Paris: Aubier, 1955), 147; quoted in Spiegelberg,The Phenomenological Movement, 449. About therelationship between Marcel and Heidegger, seeDialogue sur l’espérance, in Gabriel Marcel et la penséeallemande. Nietzsche, Heidegger, Ernst Bloch(Paris: Présence de Gabriel Marcel, 1979).

44 Marcel,The Mystery of Being, 2: 33.45 “Gabriel Marcel seems to have been the first to use the phraseêtre-au-mondein this sense, i.e.,

of “having business with the world” (“avoir affaire au monde”), while expressing his reservations aboutHeidegger’s too “spatializing” conception ofêtre-dans-le-monde(in-der-Welt-sein).” Spiegelberg,ThePhenomenological Movement, 581, note 10.

46 Marcel,Journal, July 23, 1918.47 “Three ideas are condensed here. First, speech in the third person is powerless to say «thou».

Second, the recognition of the other is not a second step preceded by the certitude of thecogito, but rathercommunication is constitutive of my very existence. Finally, attesting to the presence of the other dependson my degree of ‘defensiveness’ and therefore on my «unreadiness» or my ‘openness.’” Ricoeur, “GabrielMarcel and Phenomenology,” 484.

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Reflection

Philosophical thought is reflective. Reflection is the recall or re-examination of experiencein order to understand or to comprehend it. Experience transforms itself into reflection.

Reflection, according to Marcel, operates on more than one level. Marcel writes: “thereis primary reflection, and there is also what I shall call secondary reflection.”48

What is first degree reflection? A problem is something I meet, which I find completebefore me, but which I can reduce. Each problem can, in principle, produce verifiable solu-tions. We have to get sufficient distance from our own, subjective selves, in order to posean objective problem, and thus we can get a verifiable answer. This is basically a pheno-menological method, and Marcel believes that it will drive man to the right position. Butit must also be emphasized that this kind of reflection -- first degree reflection -- “breaks theunity of experience,” as the subject does not enter into the object investigated. It is clearthat Marcel, here, for “subject,” does not mean the body, but the I. When an experiencedeals with my I, I necessarily enter into the object investigated. But first degree reflectiontends to ignore this. If we treat these experiences as problems, first degree reflection tendsto analyze them, dissolving the unity of experience.49 “Reflection, because it is critical,is cold: it not only puts a bridle on the vital impulses, it freezes them.”50

Second degree reflection occurs when we recognize a break in the continuity of ourexperience: “To reflect, in this kind of case, is to ask oneself how such a break can haveoccurred.”51 Second degree reflection intervenes when I look back and realize that the“fixity” of the experience (derived from the work of first degree reflection) does not cor-respond anymore to the real, to the concrete. In this act, akeeping distance from the im-mediatehappens; and this is the essence of the second degree reflection, and constitutes thecondition of the possibility of thinking aconceptual universalitywhich concedes nothingto the “spirit of abstraction,” but which on the contrary remains anchored to the concrete.

Marcel gives a very concrete example of these dynamics: “A man who has been travelingon foot arrives at the edge of a river where the bridge has been carried away by a flood.He has no option but to call a ferryman. In an example such as that which I have just cited,reflection does really play the part of the ferryman. . . . I cannot go on just as if nothinghad happened: there really is something that necessitates an act of readjustment on mypart.”52 First degree reflection tends to break down the unity of experience, whereas seconddegree reflection tends to restore it: “Roughly, we can say that where primary reflection

48 Marcel, The Mystery of Being, 1: 83. It is convenient to say something, in passing, about thestandard English translation of the two levels of reflection we are talking about. In French, Marcel callsthem réflexion primaire and réflexion seconde. He does not usesecondaire, which would translateperfectly into the English term secondary but means “subordinate,” “dependent.” These are not the mean-ings in the French termseconde; in fact, theréflexion secondeis not subordinate to theréflexion primaire:it is sufficient to note that Marcel sometimes defines theréflexion secondeas “reflection to the power oftwo,” which is very far from being “subordinate” or “dependent.” This is the reason why I prefer to trans-late réflexion primaireand réflexion secondewith “first degree” or “first level” reflection and “seconddegree” or “second level” reflection. I will continue to use “primary” and “secondary reflection” in thequotations. It is interesting to note that Marcel himself, who often used English words or phrasal verbsin order to explain his thought better, considering the English language more “concrete” and more closeto the real, often complained about English translations of his works.

49 Marcel,The Mystery of Being, 1: 83.50 Ibid., 1: 81.51 Ibid., 1: 78.52 Ibid., 1: 79.

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tends to dissolve the unity of experience which is first put before it, the function ofsecondary reflection is essentially recuperative; it reconquers that unity.”53

It is important to note that second degree reflection does not goagainstthe data of firstdegree reflection, but goesbeyondit by refusing to accept the data of first degree reflec-tion as final. According to Marcel, the level of second degree reflection is the area ofmystery because here we enter into the realm of the personal. In second degree reflection,a person has to ask a question regarding his own existence. We have already seen anexample of second degree reflection in Marcel’s discussion of man’s relationship to hisbody. According to first degree reflection, “the body that I call my body is only one bodyamong others.” We have also already seen that the second degree reflection “does not setout flatly to give the lie to these propositions; it manifests itself rather by a refusal to treatprimary reflection’s separation of this body, considered as just a body, a sample body,some body or other, from the self that I am.”54 In the same way, if first degree reflectionconsiders existence aproblemto be solved, secondary reflection considers it amysterytobe revealed.

Before continuing, it would be worthwhile emphasizing two points about second degreereflection. First of all, it is important to underline that first degree reflection is a legitimateand very useful reasoning. We have to use it; but we cannot use it to treat a “mystery”as a “problem.” Marcel explains:

To arrive at this or that determinate result, we properly make use of abstract thought,but there is nothing in the method of abstraction itself that has any note of the absoluteabout it. One might assert indeed, taking one’s stand against that mirage of abstract,absolute truth that has been thrown up by a certain type of intellectualism, that fromthe moment when we seek to transcend abstract thought’s proper limits and to arriveat a global abstraction, we topple over into the gulf of nonsense – of nonsense in thestrict philosophical sense, that is, of words without assignable meaning. There is not,and there cannot be, any global abstraction, any final high terrace to which we canclimb by means of abstract thought, there to rest for ever; for our condition in thisworld does remain, in the last analysis, that of a wanderer, an itinerant being, whocannot come to absolute rest except by a fiction, a fiction which it is the duty ofphilosophic reflection to oppose with its strength.

But let us notice also that our itinerant condition is in no sense separable from thegiven circumstances, from which in the case of each of us that condition borrows itsspecial character; we have thus reached a point where we can lay it down that to bein a situation and to be on the move are modes of being that cannot be dissociatedfrom each other; are, in fact, two complementary aspects of our condition.55

First degree reflection, we have seen, “freezes” experiences: it has to do this, in orderto use them. But I cannot “freeze” the experience dealing with my existence, because Iam “on the move.”

The second point: it is also important to emphasize that second degree reflection isindeed a reflection and does make use of concepts, but it is embedded in the concrete.Second degree reflection “can only get to work on the processes to which primary reflec-tion has itself had recourse; seeking, as it were, to restore a semblance of unity to theelements which primary reflection has first severed. However, even when engaged in this

53 Ibid., 1: 83.54 Ibid., 1: 92-93.55 Ibid., 1: 133-134.

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attempt at unification, the reflective process would in reality still remain at the primarystage, since it would remain a prisoner in the hands of the very oppositions which it,itself, had in the first instance postulated, instead of calling the ultimate validity of theseoppositions into question.”56 Therefore, second degree reflection does not represent aflight into a kind of irrationalism or mysticism.57 Second degree reflection makes use ofconcepts, but these concepts are expressions of concrete experience and are not formulatedas abstract solution strategies to problems. Problems are indeed problematic preciselybecause they arose from and remain within the “spirit of abstraction.”

According to Marcel, existence should be seen in this way, because life is a mystery,not a problem. But what does it mean, in the concrete? It means that men have the taskof going beyond the problematic. And it means, at the same time, “a return to the im-mediacy of lived experience, though on a higher level.”58 Therefore, if first degreereflection can partially be identified with the phenomenological method, second degreereflection can also be seen, in this light, as an attempt to develop second degree reflectionitself. Nevertheless, “Marcel never identified phenomenology with his second reflection,which is essentially a metaphysical or ontological approach.”59

Second degree reflection is indeed a return to the immediacy of lived experience ona higher level; but it is also an ontological approach, because the concepts used in the firstdegree reflection are still there in the second degree reflection, but they are transformed.They are not weakened; on the contrary, they aremore concrete. From the instant inwhich first degree reflection applied to the real, to the instant in which Ilook backre-flecting on that reflection,timehas passed; and time has, paradoxically, made the conceptmore concrete, exactly as it has revealed its substantial fiction and fallibility.60 In otherwords, time has produced anoverturning of concept, eliminating its abstractness andrecovering its concreteness.

Time and Universality

The conceptual space granted to second degree reflection is therefore a borderland,between the thoughts which practice solely and exclusively first degree reflection andignore the essence of man as a “being on the move,” an existent who lives in time, andthose nihilistic thoughts which, even if they recognize theGeworfenheit, in one way oranother, turn out in identifying the most authentic dimension of time in the future. ForMarcel, the dimension ofplan (Entwurf) must not be rejected; nevertheless, favoring thefuture always implies the risk that the plan “devours,” so to say, the existence which itshould address. In this case, the plan becomes the “postponement of existence to later”:

56 Ibid., 1: 93.57 Evidence of the fact that Marcel never renounced the use of reason and of concepts is this: “he

considered the very term ‘intuition’ too dangerous and too loaded to call his metaphysical reflection‘reflective intuition,’ as he once contemplated doing.” Spiegelberg,The Phenomenological Movement, 460.Nevertheless, the “reflective intuition” does not overlap, at a deeper sight, with the “second degreereflection.”

58 Ibid., 460.59 Ibid.60 A confirmation of this interpretation, based on the centrality of the notion of time in the dynamic

of second-degree reflection, can be found in the first part ofBeing and Having, and particularly in the notedated March 6, 1929. In this regard, see also John V. Vigorito, “On Time in the Philosophy of Marcel,”in Schilpp and Hahn, ed.,The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, 391-420. About the notion of time, broadlyconceived, see the recent and illuminating work of Ugo Perone,Il presente possibile(Napoli: Guida,2005).

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it means inviting a being to planinstead ofliving. In this sense, the “prevalence of thefuture” is always a sign of nihilism.61

Marcel addresses his preferences to the past rather than to the future. In this preferencethere are, obviously, no Romantic tones, but there is a consideration of the past as thewhole of the existential experiences which constitute the being who, here and now, I am.The profound memory of the past also allows a grasp, through the confrontation with mypresent, of my “being on the move.” Therefore, such dynamics constitute the starting pointof second degree reflection.62

Nevertheless, according to Marcel, neither the future nor the past are the truly authenticexistential dimension. The past, in fact, can always be “immobilized” and “frozen,” andthe more we immobilize the past, the more the future appears as a pastante litteram, apast for anticipation. The past can be grasped in its profoundness only by linking it to thepresent, to that I, who, thanks to that past, is ‘I am’hic et nunc. The present is, therefore,the most authentic temporal dimension: “There is not and there cannot be other origin oftime if not the present.”63 Only the present owns, in fact, that feature of concreteness whichallows me to plan myself authentically, whereas the past and the future have to be con-sidered simply as a support and a reinforcement of it. Of course, also the present must notbe “frozen,” but rather lived like “time on the move.” Only by planning a sense thatbegins from the present can we avoid the risk of nihilism.

Such a process, in its ambiguity, constantly happens in the personal intimacy of everyone.The memories (i.e., everythingI have been) represent the object which mypresent Iinterprets, while addressing them to myfuture I. It is the “being on the move” of thepresent which allows second degree reflection; and it is always atime lagwhich allowsfor a reflection, a reflection which can be considered a process ofinterpretation.

At this point, it is important to note the relevance of Josiah Royce’s thought inMarcel’s development of this dynamic. An interpretation is real, according to Royce, onlyif the interpreters, i.e., the communicating subjects, constitute a real and concrete com-munity, that is, only if the object does not remain extraneous, but is participated in by theinterpreters. And it is important that this happen, especially if the interpretative processoccurs in the intimacy of my I, because if the I who I amhic et nuncremains un-connected with everything which I have been and which leads me to be what I am, if itdoes not really participate in that heritage of memories, then myfuture I will also beexcluded from it, outlining a process of totalalienation.64

Marcel makes use of Royce’s theory of interpretation, but transfers it into a pureexistentialist context. By using another notion introduced by Royce,65 he emphasizes thatwhat is demanded, in the exercise of second degree reflection and in the interpretiveprocess, is an act ofloyalty to thisconcreteness. The penalty for a lack of loyalty to con-creteness is the relapse into first degree reflection: the concept will “get cold” and willbecome again an “empty container,” without any concrete relationship with reality. To be“witness of concreteness” means precisely to recognize the second degree reflection andthe fallibility of any concept which it shows, and to accept it consciously.66

The freedom of accepting or refusing second degree reflection presents two inseparableaspects. Anontologicalaspect: as it is a relationship with Being, my existence is a part

61 See Gabriel Marcel,Homo Viator(Paris: Aubier, éd. Montaigne, 1945). The “prevalence of future”is one of Marcel’s criticisms of Heidegger.

62 Marcel,The Mystery of Being, 1: 194-195.63 Marcel,Journal, September 15, 1915.64 See Josiah Royce,The World and the Individual(New York: MacMillan, 1900).65 See Josiah Royce,Philosophy of Loyalty(Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1999).66 See Marcel,The Mystery of Being, 1: 170.

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thereof. And anethical aspect: that relationship is also, especially in its failures, theoriginal interpretation of the truth. Moreover, such an ethical aspect of second degreereflection is linked with a constant attention to a theme which Marcel, in theJournal,labeled “the question of totality” and which, later, can be identified with the pursuit of atheoretic space where it can be possible to conceive an universal clearly personal but notexclusively subjective. In this sense, theprivilege of universalityis peculiar also tophilosophy, and springs from an element which precedes every experience and which isat the origin of it: that “new immediate” which, for Marcel, is existence. This is whyMarcel introduces second degree reflection: whereas first degree reflection tends to“freeze” the universal beyond every concreteness deriving from existence, theconcreteuniversal, which constitutes the aim of Marcel, restores the connection between existenceand concept, returning concreteness to concept. Precisely for this reason, this universal canbecome visible only in these intersubjective, historical and concrete experiences whichactualize it.67 This is a clearly personal universal, as it roots in “my” concrete and par-ticular existence, in “my” unique and unrepeatable look at the world; at the same time,this universal is not exclusively subjective, as it has not an unique “center” -- we can say, in-stead, that there are as many centers as “existent looks.” Therefore, only intersubjectivity --a term which, without doubt, Marcel assumes from Husserl or, in any case, from thephenomenological movement -- guarantees that “convergence of looks” which constitutesthe concrete universality.68

In his paperGabriel Marcel and Phenomenology, Ricoeur writes:

Thus for Husserl the concept of subjectivity is divided between ade jureuniversality,which fulfills its epistemological function of final justification, and a de facto singularityresulting from its thoroughly temporal constitution. It is the paradox that gave rise tothe question of intersubjectivity. If the subject must be the final foundation and if thesubject must be singular, there remains only one possibility: a kind of collegial or ecu-menical foundation in which the virtually unlimited community of subjects carries theweight of universality.

Less concerned with founding the sciences than with justifying human existence,Marcellian thinking attempts to escape from the choice between the universal and theparticular by adopting an “intermediary level,” which is illustrated by aesthetic ex-perience.69

Clearly, theaesthetic experienceis not limited to what is usually considered a “workof art.” In some way, the experience of second degree reflectionis an aesthetic experience,precisely because it is, essentially, an interpretative act. There is, in Marcel, an attemptof neither renouncing the concept -- though, as we said, this concept is an “overturned”concept, to the point that it loses every abstractness and reconquers the concreteness lostin the abstraction -- nor the possibility of the universality connected with the concept.Through a keeping distance from the immediate, where time plays a fundamental role,second degree reflection succeeds in grasping, or at least in having a look at what eludesfirst degree reflection: second degree reflection reaches its aim precisely when it showsus the failure of reason.

67 For a general introduction of this topic, see Pagano,La dimensione dell’universalità e l’esperienzaermeneutica, 67-68.

68 See theConclusionof Marcel,The Mystery of Being, particularly 171-172.69 Ricoeur, “Gabriel Marcel and Phenomenology,” 480-481.

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Conclusion

A reference to religion appears only at the end of Marcel’s typical way of thinking.Second degree reflection, we have seen, is basically a kind of reasoning; nevertheless, itdeals with transcendence. Using second degree reflection, it is possible to look at whatcannot be conceptualized. It happens when first degree reflection reaches its limits; thussecond degree reflection arises from the failure of first degree reflection. Marcel writes:“it may be that reflection, interrogating itself about its own essential nature, will be ledto acknowledge that it inevitably bases itself on something that is not itself, somethingfrom which it has to draw its strength.”70

According to Marcel, transcendence is not something different from, or separate fromexperiences; on the contrary, we can approach the transcendent through experiences.Moreover, Marcel thinks that there are experiences which are purer than others -- love,friendships, hope -- and that this kind of experience opens us to transcendence. Marceluses another metaphor here: “One might say, for example, that experience has varyingdegrees of purity, that in certain cases, for example, it is distilled, and it is now of waterthat I am thinking. What I ask myself, at this point, is whether the urgent inner need fortranscendence might not, in its most fundamental nature, coincide with an aspiration to-wards a purer and purer mode of experience.”71

As a conclusion, it is worth examining Ricoeur’s shrewd criticism of Marcel’s oppositionbetween mystery and problem. According to Ricoeur, this opposition “could not be estab-lished without immediately destroying the philosophical enterprise as such, threatened witha shift to a philosophico-religiousfidéisme.”72 But, as we have seen, Marcel’s thought doesnot require an “act of faith;” rather, it requires a wager. Using second degree reflectionmeans precisely to accept this wager. Marcel explains: “Thus one may see fairly clearlyhow secondary reflection while not yet being itself faith, succeeds at least in preparing orfostering what I am ready to call the spiritual setting of faith.”73 A wager is not a shiftto somefidéisme; or better, it is not an act of faith more than the opposite choice. In otherwords, at the roots of every philosophy (or, better, at the roots of every human existence)there is always a wager: we can wager for the sense or for the absence of sense, that is,the nothingness. Of course, Ricoeur is right when he argues, “If the ontological affirma-tion were in no way an intellectual act, then it could not be elevated to philosophical dis-course.”74 In fact, if Being is the “uncharacterizable,” “the unqualifiedpar excellence,”it risks becoming also “the pure indeterminate.” It is true that Marcel, in his “Reply toPaul Ricoeur,” admits his own imprecision in the use of these terms, and explains that“Instead of ‘uncharacterizable’ one should say ‘non-characterizing’”75; but this explanation,if it reduces the problem, does not solve it. And the problem was already emphasized byMarcel in Being and Havingand sounds in this way: how can something which cannotbe reduced to a problem actually be thought?

The question profoundly implies the essence of an existential philosophy which, asRicoeur stresses, “cannot . . . limit itself to a critique of objectivity, of characterization, andof the problematic; it must be supported by the determinations of thought and by concep-tual work whose resources are exhausted neither by science nor by technology.”76

70 Marcel,The Mystery of Being, 1: 38.71 Ibid., 1: 55.72 Ricoeur, “Gabriel Marcel and Phenomenology,” 489.73 Marcel,The Mystery of Being, 2: 66.74 Ricoeur, “Gabriel Marcel and Phenomenology,” 489.75 Marcel, “Reply to Paul Ricoeur,” 495.76 Ricoeur, “Gabriel Marcel and Phenomenology,” 491.

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According to Ricoeur, “It is here that Husserl’s work recovers its legitimacy.”77 As amatter of fact, second degree reflection, seen from this point of view, holds a fundamentalfeature of the phenomenological dynamics, that is, the capacity to reconquer “a secondnaïveté presupposing an initial critical revolution, an initial loss of naïveté.”78

What can be said of Ricoeur’s position, which is a criticism and, at the same time, theproposal of a solution? A possible answer can be that offered by Spiegelberg, who ex-plains: “Ricoeur makes it plain that he considers his epistemology “imperfect” . . . ThusRicoeur was clearly unprepared to go to the full length of Marcel’s “mystic” anti-rationalism and tried to supplement it by the “rationality” of the Husserlian approach.”79

But is Marcel really an “anti-rationalist,” a “mystic”? As we have said, Marcel’s seconddegree reflection seems to be very far from every form of “mystic” intuition, and Marcelhimself writes: “The incomparable merit of Kant and, I might add, of Fichte as well wasto be fully aware of the dynamic character of reason, even if they were wrong in tryingto fix it within immutable categories or within a dialectic that ultimately risks becomingtyrannical. This is sufficient to explain why I will never allow myself to be called an ir-rationalist.”80 Marcel keeps his distance from Husserl, saying that his own philosophicalthought is “essentially an opening on and toward drama and not at all, like Husserl’s thought,an opening on and toward science;”81 but this affirmation need not be considered as away to keep distance from any form of reason whatsoever. Second degree reflection is in-deed “a second naïveté”; it is not based on a phenomenological “epoché,” but on awagerwhich rises from theparadoxof existence and manifests itself asinterpretation. In thissense, we can speak of a “Marcellian hermeneutics,” but a specification is necessary.Marcel “accuses” Husserl’s phenomenological perspectiveand Heidegger’s “mystic” philo-sophy of the same gap: he does not see concrete existence at the center of their thoughts.But a real, concrete philosophy must always have, at its center, the paradox of existence.As Kenneth T. Gallagher stresses, “The paradox is that this elusiveness is an essentialconstituent of his thought.”82 And Marcel argues: “I insist very firmly that all this mustnot be interpreted in an irrational sense: or rather, that such an interpretation would pos-tulate a degraded conception of reason which would amount to identifying it with under-standing.”83

The consideration of concrete reality as paradoxical refers to another Marcellian notion:the “reflective intuition” or “blind intuition” or “blinded intuition,” a fascinating notion nevercompletely elaborated. The ‘blinded intuition,’ which depends on second degree reflection,constitutes the height of the failure of reason but, with a paradoxical movement, con-stitutes also anoverturningof reason; in fact, there is no doubt for Marcel that the analyt-ical and reducing reason, clashing with existence, inevitably fails -- but, at the same time,there is no doubt that this crisis can transform reason, rather than destroy it.84 Thepassage from the former to the latter level of reflection is therefore characterized as anoverturningof the conceptual activity, with ceases to proceed in the “traditional” and“rationalistic” way and becomesexistentialandpractical. When reason reaches its own

77 Ibid., 492.78 Ibid., 492. Ricoeur concludes: “This hard destiny is perhaps what distinguishes philosophy from

poetry and faith.”79 Spiegelberg,The Phenomenological Movement, 590.80 Marcel, “Reply to Paul Ricoeur,” 497.81 Ibid.82 Gallagher,The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, IX.83 Gabriel Marcel, “Foreword,” in Gallagher,The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, XV.84 See Xavier Tilliette, “Schelling e Gabriel Marcel: un ‘compagno esaltante,’”Annuario Filosofico

3 (1987): 243-254. Tilliette emphasizes the relationship between the Marcellian “blind intuition” with theSchellingian “ecstasy of reason.”

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limits, it paradoxically reaches also its landing place, i.e., authentic reality. This is thecritical moment in which reason stops and is overturned; while forced to acknowledge itsfailure in front of the mystery of existence, it nevertheless approaches a deeper and richerreality. Therefore, blind intuition is also the beginning, theincipit of another reason,different from the rationality which has preceded it exactly because this “new” reason hasits roots in the existential experience.

Through second degree reflection, Marcel tries to set out the boundary markers of anew philosophical proceeding, a new language -- and here, in our opinion, Marcel is notvery far from a certain part of contemporary hermeneutics.85 The “surveillance” and therigor of reason cannot consequently be detached from existence and concreteness, andthese cannot be detached from thatflickering of sensewhich we can find in the funda-mental human feelings -- those which Marcel calls “concrete approaches” -- like love orfriendship.

The very essence of Marcel’s thought, which is very topical from this point of view,is his absolute determination in the pursuit of sense. When Marcel uses the expression “Iflife has a point” inThe Mystery of Being, he adds to the French expression the Englishsentence “if there is a plot.”86 This expression is more than a metaphor: it represents theaim of his whole thought. Questioning if life has a point, not renouncing it to pursue thesense of existence, means properly to believe that there is a plot and that, though it cansometimes appear absurd, we can always choose or, better, wager on sense or on nothing-ness. But it also means that, if we wager on sense, this demands an effort -- existentialand philosophical at the same time -- in order to attempt to understand existence, startingfrom that “concrete approach” which, alone, can indicate the directions.

In the current context, dominated on the one hand by the crisis in traditional meta-physics and, on the other hand, by the constant risk of an acceptance of the absence ofsense (which is, in the last analysis, always a choice for non-sense), the perspectiveopened by Marcel’s thought can be fruitful for a philosophy which intends to re-appropriateits own speculative vocation, helping to delineate suitable limits for a space of possiblesharing (within universality), while at the same time remaining faithful to the concretenessof existence.

85 See Paul Ricoeur,Gabriel Marcel et Karl Jaspers. Philosophie du mystère et philosophie duparadoxe(Paris: Editions du Temps Présent, 1948); Marco Ravera,Introduzione alla filosofia dellareligione (Torino: UTET, 1995), 149f.

86 The French expression is “si la vie a un sens” (Marcel,Le mystère de l’être, 1: 189). It is interestingto note that the English expression has been maintained in the French edition, whereas in the English edi-tion we find an ellipse which inevitably damps the strength of the expression: “If life has a point – or aswe would say here, not to break the metaphor, a plot or a theme.” Marcel,The Mystery of Being, 1: 173.

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2. HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY AT THE BOUNDARY OF REASON:MEANINGFUL GRAFT OR SUBVERSIVE DEVIATION

Patrick L. Bourgeois

The conflation of phenomenology with the older tradition of hermeneutic produced someambiguity in what emerges as hermeneutic phenomenology. One must still question whetherthis is the product of a fruitful graft or, rather, a subversion that requires more attentiontoday. In this context there are two particularly relevant paths from phenomenologythrough hermeneutics to ontology that are of special interest, those of Martin Heideggerand Paul Ricoeur. It is the thesis of this paper that these two quite different paths to onto-logy, directed by choices of method, require that we take a position between the two ofthem. The exclusions entailed in such a choice become exacerbated in light of furthersubversions produced by deconstructive enlightenment of recent postmodern thinking, thechallenge of which is so fundamental that it threatens the entire project of any such philo-sophy.

These developments away from the pure form of early phenomenology spring fromcertain realizations, which have been reinforced by recent postmodernists: that Husserlianintuition of presence contains an absence; that the living present contains alterity (retentionsand protentions); and that the univocity of meaning gives way to the enigma and am-biguity of symbols, myths, or story. Hence, strict Husserlian intuition falls apart. Suchalterity in the actual grafting of hermeneutics onto phenomenology, however, is not a starkotherness in sense and in the living present, but, rather, allows for continuity, richness andfluidity. This grafting of hermeneutics onto phenomenology is an attempt to read the deeperdimensions of the senses of existence beyond univocity, but without making the alteritytoo alien to the full sense of existence; and without making the living present a concatena-tion of discrete moments now. Thus, rather than a regression, this graft of hermeneuticsonto the wild stock of phenomenology in the approach to existence preserves and extendsthe main gains of phenomenology: phenomenological primordiality in relation to livedexperience, the priority of the holistic living present over a reduced discreteness in relationto its retentions and protentions and the priority of the semantic over the syntactic inlanguage. Thus, I am defending the grafting of hermeneutics onto phenomenology as anextension of a method in the attempt to do greater justice to its ability to make sense outof experience, language, and Being. Rather than a subversion, this conflation of these twotraditions reveals a recognition of early phenomenology’s myopic hope and weakness inover-playing the role of intuition, the cogito and the univocity of sense, especially as thedeveloped method focuses on the complexities of human existence.

Such a graft or conflation of hermeneutics and phenomenology cannot be allowed toconfuse method and content, as Descartes and Husserl do. Anyphilosophical method, strictlyas a method, while needing to be attuned and responsive to that which it interprets andexplicates, cannot allow the very appropriation of method to predetermine the philosophicalposition. Such prejudiced appropriation of method must be considered to have forcedDescartes into a mechanistic reading of nature and Husserl into idealism. In each case,metaphysical content was allowed at a pre-critical level to infiltrate the process of appro-priating method: in Descartes’s case, presuming that nature is what the slanted perspectiveof a mathematical physicist sees -- mechanism; and in Husserl’s case, presuming that thetranscendental as method has to be assumed in any derivation of a sense of Being -- thebringing about of a closure within the brackets of transcendental phenomenological methodthat sets the stage prior to any approach to ontology.

Although it has been on the scene for some time now, hermeneutic phenomenology,as the welding and melding of two distinct traditions, can still be seen as having one of

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the most meaningful contemporary sweeps in addressing the sense of existence, evenwithin the context of the postmodern situation. Perhaps one must at this point admit that theopening of phenomenology to hermeneutics cannot constitute the entirety of philosophy, but,rather, it is merely a necessary stage through which any serious contemporary effort passesfor philosophical adequacy in any attempt to do justice to interpreting existence.

Such a stage on the way toward a fuller philosophy, allows -- even forces -- any attemptat a more far-reaching reading and writing to avoid over-simplification and to do justiceto the richness of existence without reducing it to a false unity or univocal sense. I believethat it is obvious to any serious scholar in contemporary thinking that such a grafting ofhermeneutics onto phenomenology is not only viable but necessary. Yet there is more thanone way for this to be worked out, and I believe that somewhere within the contrastingapproaches of Martin Heidegger and Paul Ricoeur lies a very viable way of actualizingthis renewed method, and one which responds well to the challenge of deconstruction inits tendency to subvert sense or meaning and the living present. I consider the subversionof such deconstruction to lie in a simplistic dichotomy between the living present and itsconstitutive elements of retention and protention, and the closure entailed in any sense ormeaning at which one arrives. While it may be the case that I am over-interpreting thisdichotomy in deference to hermeneutic phenomenology’s reading of sense and the livingpresent, it is clear from his texts that Derrida tends toward the extremes, even though thesemay be only latent. I have explored the extremes1 so that the gains of a middle way --that of hermeneutic phenomenology -- can be won, and the regressive move by decon-struction can be redirected.2

In order to prevent these extremes, the enlightening ways of such a graft by MartinHeidegger and Paul Ricoeur can be invoked. The outcome of their expansion in relationto one another pushes to the fore a path for philosophy today that is open to the traditionboth of the past as well as of the future as one aspect of the ongoing and living traditionunfolds. The stark contrast between their appropriations of hermeneutics and phenomeno-logy must be clear in the effort to work out a unified and consistent method. The reci-procity that Ricoeur admits between phenomenology and hermeneutics, in acknowledgingthe influence of Husserl and at once that of the tradition of Biblical hermeneutics, mustbe considered in contrast to Heidegger’s attempt to develop phenomenology in such a wayas to coordinate hermeneutics with the internal development of Dasein’s understanding,thus supposedly deepening the arc of hermeneutics to the point where the previously hid-den pre-comprehension of Being emerges as the guideline for focusing on human exist-ence in ontical terms. In his pivotal essay “Existence and Hermeneutics,” Ricoeur con-trasts his own “longer way” to ontology to Heidegger’s “shorter way,” contending that heremains on the level of epistemology of interpretation and its conflicts of hermeneuticmethods before moving too quickly to the ontology of understanding as Heidegger does.In doing so, he avoids a too quick move to interpreting a unity of human existence thatis, for him, more an aim than a given, as for Heidegger. In addition, he avoids the facileand prejudiced interpretation of human existence as essentially constituted by finitude atthe expense of the infinite. Thus, Ricoeur avoids the typically Heideggerian move tocollapse reason to sensibility.

1 Patrick L. Bourgeois,Philosophy at the Boundary of Reason: Ethics and Postmodernity, Vol. 1(New York: SUNY Press, 2001); idem, “Semiotics and the Deconstruction of Presence: A RicoeurianAlternative,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly(1993): 261-279; idem, “Trace, Semiotics, andthe Living Present: Derrida or Ricoeur,”Southwest Philosophy Review(1993): 43-63.

2 See Patrick L. Bourgeois, “Hermeneutics and Deconstruction: Paul Ricoeur in Postmodern Dia-logue,” in Andrzej Wiercinski, ed.,Between Suspicion and Sympathy: Paul Ricoeur’s Unstable Equi-librium (Toronto: The Hermeneutic Press, 2003), 333-350.

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Although there seems to be a wide gulf between the hermeneutics of Ricoeur andHeidegger, their views are close enough so that an encounter between them proves to bequite profitable for hermeneutics today in the postmodern situation. What will becomeclear is that each can learn a lesson from the other: the Heideggerian short way learns thatthere is an advantage to dwelling on the ontic level in order to resolve conflicts and tosolve problems often overlooked in attempting to trace the most direct route to thequestion of Being; and the Ricoeurian long way learns that the short way must be ques-tioned in terms of a vision of a certain existential neutrality. The ensuing discussion willfirst turn to Ricoeur’s critique of Heidegger’s short way in favor of his long way beforeentertaining the possibility ofinvertinga basic dimension of that criticism from Heidegger’sdirection and before somewhat dissolving the radical antithesis between these two ways,thus providing a mutual enhancement of and a reciprocal gain for each way.

One of Ricoeur’s basic objections to Heidegger’s short way is that it too quicklyreaches a unity of Dasein, which Ricoeur considers not to be forthcoming, and whichremains for him problematical in the sense that the unity of man can be considered onlyas a regulative idea rather than one which an ontology of Dasein should reveal. Heidegger,however, shows the advantage of a prior guidance from an originary level. For Heidegger,this is an ontology that provides a comprehensive and foundational unity below the tornexistence which supports the conflict of the hermeneutics of existence that have pre-occupied Ricoeur for so long. The question for us now is whether the Heideggerian shortway provides a guidance to Ricoeur’s long way, or, rather, whether it subverts Ricoeur’sefforts to read various and conflicting aspects of existence. Thus the question must be con-fronted as to whether it is necessary to take Ricoeur’s long way without the Heideggerianpre-comprehension as guide. Which is more fundamental? This inevitably leads us to thequestion of the priority of the epistemic or ontological in this context. This will be seento be a false question in that the epistemological and ontological are equi-foundational andare merely two possible methodological focuses on the same phenomenon. This point willnot be easy to establish in any Heideggerian context, but Ricoeur’s emphasis is instructivein helping us expand on both his and Heidegger’s limited view of the problem.

Ricoeur emphasizes the conflict of interpretations as revealing differing aspects ofexistence that ontically found various hermeneutic methods.3 Further, on this ontic leveland in an extended ethics, he has focused pointedly upon the problem of the place of evilin freedom within human existence and upon the ontic relation of human existence to theSacred, which is central to his whole philosophy. Thus, for Ricoeur, pausing to dwell on theontic has fostered an integration or a dialectizing of the symbols which support a pheno-menology of spirit and a psychoanalysis of desire, with their respective orientations toteleology and to archeology, both of which prepare for the relation to the Sacred withina phenomenology of religion and its eschatology. These advantages of the long way, forRicoeur, militate against Heidegger’s short way. Although his myriad writings on the her-meneutics of existence and its conflict of interpretations in a philosophy of limits withinthe boundary of reason seem to entail a lengthy detour in dwelling on this ontic level be-fore reaching the promised land of ontology, their resolution still indicates the advantageof dwelling on the ontic level further than Heidegger does.

The fundamental justification of the long way over the short way to ontology is theunderlying difference in the fore-comprehension of human existence. For Ricoeur the unityof man can only be a regulative idea, not achieved in existence and not easily accessibleto an ontology worked out too quickly. He says: “Moreover, it is only in a conflict of

3 Paul Ricoeur, “Existence and Hermeneutics,” in idem,The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays inHermeneutics, ed. Don Ihde, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 19.

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rival hermeneutics that we perceive something of the being to be interpreted: a unifiedontology is as inaccessible to our method as a separate ontology. Rather, in every instanceeach hermeneutics discovers the aspect of existence which founds it as method.”4 Thus,at the very outset, Ricoeur has challenged Heidegger’s view of care (Sorge) in afundamental ontology emerging from an existential analysis of Dasein properly graspedin fore-comprehension. In addition, his view of the fallenness of human existence, inavoiding the ontologization of fault by placing evil in the disproportionate existential syn-thesis between the infinite and the finite, militates against the quick move from the con-crete existence of man to conditions of possibility of that everyday existence.

Thus, a great contrast is evinced in the differing passages from existence to ontology byRicoeur and by Heidegger. Heidegger does not share Ricoeur’s view of existence as fallen,nor does he dwell on the founding in ontic existence of the conflicting interpretations andquestions of method, which arise from that conflict. It is here that the Heideggerian wayneeds expansion to include human existence as a synthesis of the finite and the infinite,the ontic aspects of which are far more complex than what can be revealed in a mereanalysis of the everydayness of Dasein as the starting focus of the hermeneutics of Being.Such an exclusion challenges Heidegger’s fore-comprehension of the Being of Dasein ina unity that does not see the polemical synthesis of the infinite and finite on the cognitive,practical and affective levels. This is a synthesis rather than a unity. There is a difference,and the Heideggerian pre-comprehension must be instructed to see it. It is also clear thatRicoeur’s view is in need of a partial adjustment. The adjustment, however, is demandedby the exigencies of the fore-comprehension of concrete human existence reaching towardontological understanding. Yet a delay or detour is needed before reaching it. This pause isa necessary one, and not done merely for the sake of rendering two disparate philosophiescompatible. The consequence of these adjustments is that the respective passages to onto-logy by Heidegger and Ricoeur become somewhat more compatible and reciprocally bene-ficial, and at once mitigate the distance between the hermeneutics of existence and herme-neutic ontology. This discussion will turn now to Ricoeur’s view of human existence asfallen in order to provide an adjustment which removes, in part, an unnecessary limitationto existence and hence to its interpretation.

Ricoeur’s philosophy recasts the Kantian view of the demand on the part of reason fortotality, as well as reason’s placing of a limit on experience, in terms of his own develop-ment of a view of the quasi transcending of this limit as boundary through indirect expres-sions such as symbols and metaphors. In addition, for Ricoeur, such a demand for totalityin a philosophy of boundary requires that ethics be extended beyond the Kantian formalethic of law and freedom to an ethics of the actualization of freedom in the act of existing.Such an extended ethics relocates the place of radical evil in existence, and freedom tothe synthesis between the infinite and the finite as the existential structural place for thepossibility of evil. It is from that view of evil in freedom and existence that the view ofhope emerges. It is likewise from that view that the necessity for speculative philosophyand its condition of possibility arises from the innovation of meaning engendered by theproductive imagination in affording schemata for the rules of understanding and theextension of this function.

This broadened ethics is understood as a philosophy that leads from alienation tofreedom and beatitude, attempting to grasp the “effort to exist in its desire to be,”5 andopposing any reduction of reflection to a simple critique or to a mere “justification ofscience and duty as a reappropriation of our effort to exist; epistemology is only a part

4 Ibid.5 Paul Ricoeur,Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New

Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 45.

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of this broader task: we have to recover the act of existing, the positing of the self, in allthe density of its works.”6 Hence it can be seen that Ricoeur has corrected Kant’s viewof the place of evil in freedom. He has, however, considered the locus of evil to stemfrom the disproportion in the synthesis between finitude and infinitude on the theoretical,practical, and especially affective levels which come to expression in the fullness ofsymbolic language. It is from the symbols of evil that thought reaches the notion of theservile will or the will in bondage.7

Ricoeur’s recourse, in a philosophic reflection, to religious symbols and to their under-lying meaning is not problematic in so far as a philosophic task is undertaken. He, however,does more than that by letting assumed religious content slip into the philosophical herme-neutic situation of his philosophical fore-comprehension. Thus, religious content is notsimply looked at but assumed, and precisely within his philosophy of freedom and evil.This has led him to accept, with Kant, a somewhat religious overtone to his interpretationof radical evil as a necessary and constitutive aspect of existential freedom, requiring thathuman existence be fallen. It is precisely this assumed stance, within which Ricoeurbegins his analysis of the ontic aspect of existence, which must be further examined.

The pre-comprehension of existence that Ricoeur adopts requires an adjustment in orderto liberate existencephilosophicallyfrom its prejudice of a specific faith option, withinwhich his reflection operates. Within that context radical evil must be extricated from itsnecessarily constitutive role in existential freedom. The resultant moral neutrality of exist-ence must liberate human existence from fallenness as its necessary constitution, so thatexistence as innocent, fallen, and recreated can be seen to share the same existentialstructure. Thus, while Ricoeur has avoided, in his ethical account of freedom in terms ofevil, the ontologizing of fault, he has, within the prejudice of his hermeneutic situation,made necessary to existence aspects which Heidegger has diligently avoided. The questionthen becomes whether and to what extent Ricoeur’s own long way, which initially aimsat resolving the problems which the short way ignores, must accept some prior guidancefrom the ontological level, in order to accentuate certain dimensions of human existencewhich are first encountered ontically. Failing to accept such guidance, reflection on theontic may result in exaggerating the importance of certain less essential aspects of the humancondition, but in no way mitigating the need and advantage of his long way to ontologyor his distinction between the essential and the existential dimensions of the humansynthesis of the finite and infinite in relation to evil.

By contrast, Heidegger’s hermeneutics of existence arises at the point of avoiding theoption which Ricoeur exercises, in developing a philosophical anthropology.8 Heideggerfrequently emphasizes that the definitive characteristics of the human are not at issue, butinstead the “understanding of Being” which is constitutive of it, thus showing a funda-mental prejudice toward reaching the ontological at the expense of a certain richness ofthe ontic accessible to methodological openness in another direction. This is clearly oneplace where Heidegger’s quick move to ontology precludes a certain necessary and bene-ficial investigation into concrete human being. In this context, what is so pivotal forHeidegger is the fact that the capacity for understanding Being as such emerges as thephenomenon for bringing the entirety of Dasein’s Being into question. There is, to be sure,a reciprocal implication between the inquiry into the meaning of Being and the being towhom this question is decisive, Dasein. But even within that reciprocity there is an even

6 Ibid.7 It is not our purpose here to explore the content of the symbols of evil or of the symbolics in

general.8 Martin Heidegger,Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson (New York:

Harper & Row, 1962), 74-75.

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more pronounced recoil whereby the dynamics of understanding (projection) display theconstitution of Dasein’s Being as ex-istence, and the attempt to define existence as theway Dasein enters into communion with itself and other beings entails the disclosure ofunderstanding.9

According to Heidegger, the very possession of understanding exhibits the innermostdimension of human existence, namely, the “potentiality to be” (theSeinkönnen). Yet,what comes under scrutiny as the essential unity of understanding and existence, at firstonly vaguely accessible pre-conceptually and pre-ontologically, will in the end determinethe theme of fundamental ontology, i.e., Dasein’s manner of uncoveredness. The decisivechallenge for Heidegger’s hermeneutics of existence hinges on clarifying this event of dis-coveredness in ontological terms, in such a way that the consideration of the phenomenonwhich at first seems most remote to the analysis (as a mere characteristic of understanding)will ultimately come to the forefront of the inquiry as encompassing Dasein’s Being(care), i.e., Da-sein’s fundamental disclosedness. Indeed, in gauging the interchange be-tween that which is “ontically closest” to Dasein and that which is “ontologically farthest,”hermeneutics succeeds in pealing back the successive layers of the fore-comprehensionin order to arrive at Dasein’s thrownness into the “there.”10

Heidegger’s unique contribution lies in bringing forward the unexceptional, undif-ferentiated mode of Dasein’s existence, and, by making an adjustment to accommodatethe marginally intelligible character of its “everyday” comportment, then distinguishing thestructures that make everydayness possible. Through this approach Heidegger not onlybetrays a certain preoccupation with finding the roots of ontology, but also a definite in-tent to lay bare thephenomenonof everydayness in respect to its “intrinsic possibility” or tocorrelate it with specific ontological structures which are analyzable in their own right.The overriding concern for what “makes possible” has made Heidegger subject to thecritique of adapting or adjusting a Kantian transcendental philosophy to fit an inquiry intothe more concrete and essentially finite dimension of being-in-the-world at the expenseof the Kantian infinite and reason. It likewise, in reflecting on the essential unity of under-standing and existence, fails to distinguish on this level of human existence the furtherabstraction of the essential dimensions, by moving immediately to ontology. This againshows Heidegger’s failure, in deference to a quick move to ontology, to face up to some-thing essential to human being, the clear and radical distinction between the essential andexistential dimensions of the synthesis between the finite and infinite. Yet, Heidegger’sfore-comprehension can be instructive here for Ricoeur’s project, preventing it from acertain pitfall of the level of existence. Let us continue our analysis of Heidegger’s view,to flesh out this insight.

As Heidegger observes in a passage fromBeing and Time, “Why does the understanding... always press forward into possibilities? It is because the understanding has in itself theexistential structure which we call ‘projection.’” 11 Upon coupling this factor with the mostelemental feature of interpretation, i.e., in addressing the presuppositions which governany comprehension, we arrive at the distinctive direction for a hermeneutics of existence:to promote a “strategy” for wrestling forth the possibilities dormant in the fore-structureof understanding and thereby to initiate the radicalization of Dasein’s everyday self-

9 Martin Heidegger,History of the Concept of Time, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press, 1985), 257-261.

10 Heidegger,Being and Time, 359. This statement occurs in what is perhaps the most significantmethodological discussion inBeing and Time, the analysis of the “hermeneutical situation” encompassingthe entire inquiry (section 63).

11 Ibid., 184-185.

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comprehension. The implementation of the strategy constitutes hermeneutic phenomenologyproper.

Hermeneutic phenomenology addresses Dasein in all its concreteness as the being whois in each casemine; this approach involves appreciating the drastic switch from a concernfor what Dasein is, as one being among others, towho it is, as possessing the feature ofexistentiality. To be sure, the selection of a more phenomenologically direct approach toaddress man -- pursued intentionally apart from any interest in developing a philosophicalanthropology -- may not seem to change much, since, after all, the “nature of man” remainsin question.12 Yet this step has tremendous significance, both for the task that Heideggerundertakes and for determining the direction of his own hermeneutics. Specifically, thepre-comprehension of Dasein’s existentiality (precisely in contrast to interwordly beings)becomes a safety for insuring that assorted ways of misconceiving Dasein’s Being do notinadvertently slip into the analysis. While this move does prevent making certain aspectsof human existence essential, it at once prevents a more enlightening detour to that verylevel of existence and too quickly forces a unity of human existence which is not there.Thus, while Heidegger’s way can afford an advantage to the longer way, care must betaken not to give it too much play, or the loss entailed in Heidegger’s way will infringeon the many rich advantages of the longer way to ontology. Once again we see that thetoo quick move to the ontology of human existence misses too much of that existence,which must be considered if the place of evil in human experience is to be fleshed out:something to which Heidegger and Heideggerians should become more attuned.

Yet, we must see that, despite his reservation about characterizing the nature of manin the abstract, Heidegger’s concentration onexistencestill requires addressing Dasein’sessence. The proclamation fromBeing and Timestates:The ‘essence’ of Dasein lies in itsexistence” 13 and later, in undoing Descartes’s misconception, “the substance of man isexistence,”14 showing that Dasein finds itself in terms of a comportment in which it holdsforth its own potential to be, and the recognition of this “can be” provides the clue forlaying out the hidden facets of Dasein’s own understanding of its Being.15 The latterconsideration becomes particularly crucial insofar as the attempt to explicate the essentialstructures of care proceed from the projective understanding which is definitive of Dasein.Hermeneutics as an interpretation of human existence, then, develops the pre-comprehensionof care issuing from Dasein itself, in such a way that its very execution converges on thedimension of human existence which is the internal root of interpretation -- the laying outof the horizon of intelligibility precisely as its originates from the “there” of Dasein.

Heidegger himself traces the reflexive structure of interpretation and delineates itscharacter as “self-interpretation.” Yet, a casual reference to this phenomenon can provokeprecisely the opposite connotations than those which are otherwise intended. For herme-neutics, in Heidegger’s sense, is surely not an attempt on behalf of the interpreter to singlehimself out, i.e., his nature, as constituting a specific area of inquiry within the order ofbeings. Herein lies the crux of Heidegger’s criticism of philosophical anthropology, in-cluding that of Ricoeur. Thus, on the one hand, Heidegger’s hermeneutics of existenceaims at addressing the essential structures of care -- existence, facticity, and falling -- and,indeed, grasping them in their fundamental unity. On the other hand, the integration of

12 Cf. Martin Heidegger,Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. James S. Churchill (Bloomington:Indiana University Press, 1962), 212-225.

13 Heidegger,Being and Time, 67.14 Ibid., 255.15 Martin Heidegger,The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington:

Indiana University Press, 1982), 275-279. Here Heidegger makes explicit that “understanding is a basicdetermination of existence.”

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these structures throughout the whole of Dasein’s Being is not decisively comprehendeduntil the existentialia are correlated with the structures that define Dasein’s comportmenttoward beings, including itself, namely, those which are constitutive of the “there,” under-standing, states of mind, and discourse. The deepened inclusivity of Heidegger’s herme-neutics further emphasizes the importance of affirming thepriority of the understandingof Being within the existential analytic. The ontological focus for hermeneutics emergessimply by recalling that understanding is itself a primary component within the disclosed-ness of the “there,” and that it is in the process of considering the existential constitutionof the “there” that the issue of interpretation first emerges. From this hermeneutic situationarises the clue for discovering not only that interpretation is a radicalization of Dasein’scapacity for self-disclosure, but that, as mentioned before, disclosedness encompassesDasein’s Being as care. Heidegger’s so-called critique of philosophical anthropology infavor of this quick move from the comprehension of the Being of Dasein to interpretation,allows him to pass over, to move quickly from, the ontic to the ontological, thus takingthe short cut to the ontology of Dasein.

But this short cut to ontology overlooks a possible distinction between the essential andexistential aspects of man’s being as a synthesis of the finite and infinite.16 By dwellingon and emphasizing the statement inBeing and Time: that “The ‘essence’ of Dasein lies inits existence,”17 the longer way is precluded by this very stress on the essence as existence.For, even if man’s essence or way of Being is to exist, and if understanding is constitutiveof his Being as Dasein, this existence can still be looked at and analyzed from the point ofview of its concreteness. Thus, Ricoeur’s long way does not entail so much a denial ofthe existentiality or the ontology of Dasein as much as it is corrective by pausing in adetour to reflect on some existential aspects before indulging Heidegger’s prejudice towardthe prior necessity of ontological reflection. Thus, Heidegger’s short way prejudices theissue in favor of his own short way at the expense of clear advantages to the longer way,which pauses to reflect on certain existential dimensions that are not essential to humanbeing. This long way, in distinguishing certain existential dimensions from essentialaspects of human being, affords a great advantage in dealing with human evil. Yet thisdetour to human existence can profit from Heidegger’s myopic view, as will be seen.Hence, let us now turn to the further analysis of Heidegger’s shorter way to ontologythrough his brand of hermeneutics, in order to set the stage for this gain from Heidegger’sway.

To address interpretation in this Heideggerian way as a phenomenon is to becomeresponsive to a movement which already oversees the deeper integration of all the com-ponents of Dasein’s Being and brings to the forefront its own initial dependence on theadvance comprehension of existence, which is ontological at the expense of ontic aspectsof existence. An opportunity is thereby created for arriving at the disclosedness ofexistence precisely as it takes shape in the interpreter him or herself. Interpretation, then,allows the self to relate directly to the possibilities which are housed in the fore-comprehension; this appropriative process, which is directed from the center of Dasein’spotentiality to be, implicitly establishes the interpreter’s own entrance into the truth priorto any attempt at conceptualization.

This ontological emphasis is further reinforced by the fact that any view of “language”is governed by the advance comprehension of existence in such a way that the analysisturns to address the constitution of Dasein in order to discover the capacity for speech.Implicitly, interpretation involves articulating whatever has already been comprehended,

16 Note that Being is capitalized in the context of Heidegger’s reference to Dasein’s Being process,and not for a more ontic aspect of the synthesis of the finite and infinite.

17 Heidegger,Being and Time, 67.

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but the utterance into words of what is being interpreted proceeds from a pre-articulatedlevel of and a predisposition toward comprehension which is grounded in Dasein’s every-dayness. The radicalization of this everyday comprehension, which is a task reserved tohermeneutics, involves bringing into speech the unification of the structures of care whichare already enacted concretely in the individual’s existence. Accordingly, the existentialanalytic, as Heidegger emphasizes, occurs when interpretation becomes the forum wherebyDasein “can put itself into words for the very first time.”18 The thematic of human exist-ence then serves as testimony to Dasein’s own disclosedness; to interpret means to gathertogether the presuppositions that make human existence comprehensible in its own right,so as tolet be seenthat which shows itself in the most direct way possible, i.e., discloseit in its Being. Hermeneutics originally belongs to phenomenology or is the vehicle forits concrete implementation, insofar as the latter is taken most primordially not as a mere“method” but as a re-enactment of the ancient experience of truth asAletheia.

The arrival at this crucial juncture helps to establish that the analysis has traced theunification of Dasein’s Being back to a sufficiently original level. Only by attending tothe project of Heidegger’s hermeneutics is it possible to ensure that no extraneous con-siderations or excessive assumptions have inadvertently been adopted from the fore-structure of understanding. Heidegger questions in an ongoing way, inBeing and Time,whether he has adequately taken into account the totality of presuppositions of the herme-neutic situation. This precaution applies to the intrusion of terms which refer no deeperthan the initial familiarity that everyday Dasein displays towards itself and that wouldartificially restrict the horizon of intelligiblity to what can show itself in terms of theready-to-hand or the present-at-hand. Thus steps are taken to avoid defining Dasein’sBeing inappropriately in terms of such categories as that of substance. Yet, the initial her-meneutic situation is already ontological even in the fore-comprehension, thus movingaway from, and losing the advantages of, a prolonged focus on the ontic and existential,non-essential dimensions of human being. The term Dasein and what it means, Being-There, already bespeaks this prejudice in the initial hermeneutic situation.

Yet, there is a precaution that arises from the Heideggerian short way that may berelevant to a Ricoeurian analysis of the human that circumvents the too quick analysis ofthe understanding of the Being of Dasein, and which elects to spell out an exclusive setof ontic human problems. To be sure, Ricoeur practices such a concrete hermeneutics. Hisemphasis is on the various hermeneutics which capture a specific dimension of humanexistence and the integration of existence thus revealed. In this way, he refuses to riskmissing aspects of human existence not coming into focus in a too quick move to directontological disclosure of Dasein’s Being. However, he runs the risk of exaggerating cer-tain aspects of human existence. Such an exaggeration is imminent when Ricoeur identifiesa set of allegedly perennial and premier kinds of experiences pertaining to the humanexistential predicament and seeks to paint a holistic view of human nature. All of Ricoeur’sprotracted analyses of the use and misuse of the will need to be tempered by an explica-tion of the existential structures of everyday existence which recognizes a certain neutrality,even on the existential level, of the synthesis of the finite and infinite. Only given thisstance of neutrality does it becomes possible to appreciate the transformation occurringwithin the structures of everydaynesswhich brings forth the extremity of Dasein’s thrown-ness into its situation (of which human corruption formsoneside). Conversely, abandoningthis stance of neutrality which is a trademark of a more classical phenomenology, leavesRicoeur vulnerable to endorsing naively a certain religious profile that envisions humanexistence constituted by and predisposed to corruption and fault.

18 Heidegger,Being and Time, 362.

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By seeking a deeper unity of Dasein’s Being which is distinct from but not exclusiveof all ontical considerations, Heidegger’s hermeneutics is able to avoid some of thetendencies that stem from characterizing the nature of man primarily in terms of a presetextended ethical vision and thus of the existential power of volition. Heidegger does,however, fail to focus on the synthesis of the infinite and the finite in human existence,but rather, chooses to bring the spirit or reason of man down to the finite and to assert theunity of care on the level of existence, thus leading him to affirm the coincidence ofDasein’s existence and essence in contrast to Ricoeur. Thus, the short way misses themore complex ontic dimensions of human existence which should have some play in amore explicit ontological focus. As will be seen further, it likewise misses, as sometimesdoes Ricoeur, a certain equi-primordiality of the epistemic and ontological at the funda-mental level of human existence in being-in-the-world. For, if it is so that the understand-ing and interpretation of its own being is so fundamental to human existence, it is likewisetrue that the difference between the ontological and the epistemological focuses, overcomingtraditional restrictions and limitations, are merely two distinctively differing focuses onthe same fundamental dimension of human ontological-epistemic existence. In this context,perhaps it is necessary to affirm a reciprocal guidance on one another of the long andshort ways to ontology. For, Ricoeur’s short way can be guided by an adjusted Heideg-gerian pre-comprehension and the attempt to get Dasein properly within the focus of fore-comprehension of the hermeneutic method, now taking into account human being as asynthesis of the finite and infinite; and then a pause and detour become necessary pre-cisely at this point, in order to reflect further on human existence in its desire and spiritleading to the Sacred. This will bring to light the disproportion in the synthesis betweenthe finite and infinite on the cognitive, practical and especially affectively levels of thissynthesis, which is something to which Heideggerian analysis is totally oblivious, due toits lopping off of the infinite and its burying of reason in the finite.

In such an expansion, what emerges is the view that the structures of human existenceare, like the eidetic or essential structures, equally foundational for innocent, fallen, andregenerated existence, for it is precisely existence which is neutral to all of these. Thisaltered view does not rule out of place the privileged place of the mythic of evil, but,rather, puts it on an equal footing with the mythic of innocence and of regeneration, allwithout over-playing or over-interpreting its place in the philosophical analysis of humanexistence. Far from foreclosing all “specific” analyses of aspects of concrete existencewithin the world, the project of hermeneutic phenomenology opens up precisely thoseavenues by illuminating beforehand the horizon for the understanding of human existencein the synthesis of the finite and infinite in human being. What still needs to be deter-mined, is some of the implication of this correction of Ricoeur’s long way to ontology inhis grafting of hermeneutics onto phenomenology. Now that we have established aneutrality on the level of human existence in this grafting process, we can attempt to bringto light some of the insights for a philosophy that wants to inquire into human evil bylooking at religious language and the experience that underlies it. We must try to flesh outa further presupposition that stands in need of correction if philosophical reflection on evilis to be further grounded, but without an initial unwarranted prejudice.

In order to achieve this end, a philosophical foundation must be provided to supportthe various levels of religious options which are operative in philosophical reflection onreligious existence and which originate from the essential level of openness and prior dis-closure of human existence. In this context much of Ricoeur’s philosophical reflection onthe religious realm of the Sacred and on evil is, however, philosophically ambiguous. Hisenthusiastic openness to the sciences on the ontic level implicitly allows for a possiblerapport with such philosophical reflection on the Sacred and on the religious dimensionsof experience. As will become evident shortly, Ricoeur’s philosophical reflection of the

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Sacred must be expanded and deepened, so that the faith options influencing hisphilosophical thought are brought to their proper explication in the depth of human exist-ence, at a level below specific faith concerns.

For Ricoeur, there is a certain continuity between hermeneutics of existence and aphilosophical reflection on religious existence that leads to the expression of the Sacredin symbols and myths, or to the place of evil and fallenness in human existence. Ricoeurmight well regret Heidegger’s too quick move to the ontological origins of theology andepistemology. In contrast to Heidegger, Ricoeur remains on the ontic level, perhapssometimes not heeding the need for its prior disclosure, which might well serve as a guidefor his own analyses of ontic dimensions of religious existence and of expressions andinterpretations of symbols and myths. Indeed, a prior ontological disclosure could providea beneficial preview for Ricoeur’s own ontic focus, allowing its reflection to transpirewithin a certain explicitly grasped, but still operative, element of his hermeneutic situation.It is one such element in Ricoeur’s view of ontic religious existence that needs furtherclarification. This is simply the other side of the required existential neutrality consideredabove.

On this ontic level in an extended ethics, Ricoeur has focused pointedly upon theproblem of the place of evil in freedom within human existence, and upon the ontic rela-tion of human existence to the Sacred that is central to his whole philosophy. It is thusthat for Ricoeur, when pausing to dwell on the ontic, this has fostered an epistemologyof interpretation beneath the subject-object disjunction and has allowed for an integrationor a dialectizing of the phenomenology of spirit with a psychoanalysis of desire, with theirrespective orientations to teleology and to archeology, both of which prepare for the rela-tion to the Sacred within a phenomenology of religion and its eschatology. He has spentvast energies on the consideration of the conflict of interpretations in order to reveal whathe calls differing aspects of existence that ontically found various hermeneutic methods,as seen above.19 For, although his pausing to reflect on the ontic level of existence andthe conflict of interpretation delays his ontology, the resolution of the conflict and therevelation of aspects of existence indicate the importance of considering the ontic levelfurther than Heidegger does.

Yet, in spite of these serious advantages of proceeding via the long way to examineontical dimensions of human existence, Ricoeur’s hermeneutics seems to allow specificreligious content to enter into his own philosophical fore-comprehension of humanexistence, which leads him away from the existential neutrality required above. This issomething that has been seen to be corrected by means of a slight adjustment. To accom-modate the radicality implied in Heidegger’s approach, Ricoeur’s view of existence requiresan adjustment beyond the neutrality of existence that liberates human existence fromfallenness as its necessary constitution. There is a further need to explicate the faith optionwithin which much of his philosophy of existence is developed, in order to liberate exist-encephilosophically from its prejudice of a specific religious tradition. This traditionassumes the corruption at the heart of human existence, which is what gives too muchplay to radical evil as necessarily constitutive in existential freedom. The essential dimen-sions of this were seen above, but the religious aspect needs to be explicitly dealt with.

Perhaps by widening his initial hermeneutic situation to be somewhat broadened in thedirection of Heidegger, Ricoeur’s way becomes better attuned to a philosophically radical-ized approach to the religious neutrality at the heart of human existence. Such an approachwould seek in the self’s responsiveness to the Sacred the enactment of freedom which un-

19 Ricoeur, “Existence and Hermeneutics,” 13. These advantages of the “long way” militate againstthe Heideggerian “short way.” Ibid., 6, 10-11, 23-24.

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folds a pre-given set of possibilities and which fosters a certain self-concern stemmingdirectly from Dasein’s openness. For example, Ricoeur’s treatment of the “already there”character of evil20 and the “necessarily corrupt nature of freedom,”21 or “the prior cap-tivity, which makes it so that I must do evil”22 can be replaced or put on a better philo-sophical basis than the Kantian notion of radical evil, or, for that matter, any religioustradition that too quickly buys into a view of an essential corruption of human existence.Rather, philosophically, all that these expressions say is that man is not determined andthat freedom is capable of good as well as evil (or the lesser evil of errors and meremistakes). Thus, reinterpreted, Ricoeur’s statement that “I claim that my freedom hasalready made itself non-free” means that freedom is already human, and thus must beactualized in the finite.23 This reinterpretation recognizes, within the existential structures,a neutrality common to innocent, fallen, and recreated existence.

20 Ricoeur,The Conflict of Interpretations, 435.21 Ibid., 422.22 Ibid., 436.23 Ibid.

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3. PAUL RICOEUR’S THEORY OF TRUTH: FROM PHENOMENOLOGY TO

COMMUNICATIVE ACTION

David M. Kaplan

At various stages throughout his career, Ricoeur has examined the nature and limits ofphenomenology, hermeneutics, narrative theory, and communicative rationality. Each timehe addresses himself to a subject, it takes the form of a mediation that highlights andpreserves differences between two positions without synthesizing a new unity. Instead,Ricoeur claims only to draw a “hermeneutic arc” between opposites, a metaphor that sug-gests a mitigated version of mediation. A hermeneutic arc, drawn between antitheticalpositions, contrasts each theory as seen from the perspective of the other, linking themtogether in a way that produces no theoretical resolution but only a practical one. Inprinciple, opposites remain unreconciled; in practice there is a way to proceed as if theywere not. Among the arcs Ricoeur has drawn, include those between phenomenology andhermeneutics, hermeneutics and structuralism, narrative theory and communicative ration-ality. On Ricoeur’s own self-interpretation, there is no relation between these mediations:each one addresses a different problem, developed in conjunction with different dialoguepartners, and is limited in scope. He claims only to deal with particular problems, not tocreate systems in a more traditionally dialectical fashion. Yet, Ricoeur manages to doprecisely that: he exhibits the internal connections among phenomenology, hermeneutics,narrative, and communicative rationality, and, in so doing, he suggests a single, promisingmodel of social inquiry. Such a model contains a much stronger theory of truth andvalidity than found in the hermeneutic philosophies of Heidegger and Gadamer, but, at thesame time, is less absolute than Husserlian phenomenology and more interpretive andcreative than Habermasian communicative rationality. Building on the works of Ricoeur,I want to argue that phenomenological description, interpretive narration, and discursiveargumentation are dialectically related; each is a part of a “practical whole” and needs theother to be complete.

There are three distinct yet related conceptions of truth operative in Ricoeur’s work.They are truth as approximation, truth as manifestation, and truth as argumentation. Truthas approximation draws on Husserlian phenomenology, in which truth is the fulfilling ofan empty intentionality. Truth as manifestation draws on Heideggerian hermeneutics, inwhich truth is the presencing of being. Ricoeur’s theories of metaphor and narrative ex-tend this tradition. Finally, truth as argumentation draws on Habermasian pragmatics, inwhich truth is a rationally achieved consensus over a validity claim. Yet, for some reason,Ricoeur repeatedly emphasizes the weakest, least adequate, Heideggerian conception oftruth, when he speaks of the world-disclosing character of literary reference inThe Ruleof Metaphor(1978) andTime and Narrative(1984). The Heideggerian conception of truthas manifestation only complements the two stronger conceptions of truth and validityrelated to the Husserlian and Habermasian character of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics. These arethe undeveloped elements in Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology that should bebrought out to show that a much stronger conception of truth and validity can be gleanedfrom his scattered remarks on the subject.

Phenomenology

Ricoeur retains from Husserl the central insight into the intentionality of consciousness,and the methodological technique of bracketing. The well-known doctrine of intentionalityasserts that all experience is directed toward some object of reference, while every object

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of experience is correlated to a particular experience. What is experienced is alwayscorrelated with how it is experienced by someone. Intentionality is the fundamental,invariant, transcendental condition for the possibility of experience. The methodologicaltechnique of bracketing, or the phenomenological reductions, are rules for directing ourattention toward experience. What we bracket is the temptation either to make judgmentsabout the ontological status of an object of experience, or to theorize and explain ratherthan describe experience. Instead, we are treating all experience simply as given in con-sciousness as a phenomena, or a meaning presenting itself to a consciousness. Further-more, the reductions are geared toward uncovering essences, or what is invariant inexperience. The goal of a phenomenological description is to explicate experience in termsof the intentional relationship to the world. Ricoeur’s conception of phenomenology ismuch like it is for Husserl: a descriptive analysis based on the doctrine of intentionality,and the methodological principles of bracketing and the eidetic reduction. As he explains,in phenomenology “our relation to the world becomes apparent as a result of reduction;in and through reduction every being comes to be described as a phenomenon, as ap-pearance, thus as a meaning to be made explicit.”1

Implicit in the Husserlian conception of intentionality is the notion of evidence as aform of experience that satisfies or fulfills the conditions that guarantee certainty. Thephenomenological conception of evidence is not a set of truth criteria, but rather theexperiences that guarantee that an assertion is warranted. Various forms of evidence arepossible, depending on the type of object, or assertion, or validity claim in question. Inall cases, evidence involves the kind of experience that guarantees the reasonableness ofthe assertion, object, or claim. Such justification involves seeing proof with our own eyes.All proofs, arguments, deductions and inferences are derivative from what we perceiveabout the object or assertion. The validity basis for any form of evidence or argumentstems from our direct perception of the matter in question. Evidence is nothing more thana particular kind of experience.

According to Husserl, the condition for objectivity is that the object of consciousnessmust be given in such a way that nothing is missing from the lived experience of thatobject. Truth is grounded in experience -- not the experience of the natural attitude, butexperience that has been phenomenologically reduced. Objectivity is given to a certainkind of consciousness in which the object corresponds with the act that intends it andbestows meaning upon it. Something is given to consciousness objectively, when theexperience satisfies or fulfills an intention. Thus, evidence is a kind of seeing and intuitingthat grasps things that present themselves in full clarity and evident intuition. The thingitself is given in itself to me, but not by means of an idea, a hypothesis, or an emptymeaning. An unverified judgment is a mere opinion that has not been confronted by howthings actually are. The meaning of such an intention is empty; it can only be fulfilled bya confrontation with the things that would satisfy the requirement of validity for thatparticular judgment. A fulfilled intention is the relevant, direct experience of whatever isrequired in order to have a clear grasp of the object in question. The evidence that wouldfill an intention would be different, for example, for a claim about a material object, aremembered event, an aesthetic judgment, the correct pronunciation of a word, and so on.The same object can be meant in an empty or filled way; the difference is, if the objectis meant in presence or meant in absence. For example, an empty, absent intention is aremembered name; the fulfilled, present intention is the experience of perceiving the namenext to a picture in the high school year book. A scientific hypothesis is an empty

1 Paul Ricoeur, “The Question of the Subject: The Challenge of Semiology,” in idem,The Conflictof Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, ed. Don Ihde, trans. Willis Domingo et al. (Evanston, Ill.:Northwestern University Press, 1974), 247.

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intention; an experiment that confirms the hypothesis is a filled intention. All evidence isthe fulfilling of an empty intention with the appropriate experience (i.e., the approximationof the meaning-giving intention to the presence of the object meant). Truth is, therefore,the clear articulation of the experience of evident presence.2

Ricoeur devoted much of his early career to patient criticism and appropriation ofHusserl. InFreedom and Nature(1950), for example, Ricoeur retains Husserl’s conceptionof the fulfillment of intentionality but applies it to a phenomenology of the will. Hedefines voluntary action in terms of a will that projects and decides the direction of anaction to be done by me that is within my capabilities. To decide is to anticipate the futurebased on my capability or power to execute that action. A phenomenology of voluntaryaction shows that the realization of a decision is the fulfillment of a project or anintention-to-do something that is within my power. The intentionality of a project is athought, but only the execution of a decision fulfills the intentionality of the project. Anaction fulfills a decision somewhat like a perception fulfills an empty theoreticalintention.3

Phenomenology continues to play a role in Ricoeur’s recent major works. InOneselfAs Another(1990), Ricoeur uses a typical phenomenological argument against Parfit, whoquestions the nature of our personal identity with examples of brain duplication, memorytransplantation, and cloning machines. Ricoeur replies that such thought experiments failto appreciate that human beings are not merely their brains and bodies, but corporealbeings who inhabit the world and who have intrinsic, not mere extrinsic, relations to thatworld. Our “belonging” to the world is the condition for the possibility for any reflectionon or discourse about the world. Yet a description of belonging is precisely what isignored by personal identity thought experiments about cloning and brain duplication.Ricoeur turns to phenomenology to develop a notion of the self that is fundamentallyrelated to its surroundings and community.

In his exchange with neuroscientist Jean-Pierre Changeux inWhat Makes us Think?(2002), Ricoeur again returns to phenomenology, this time to correct Changeux’s attemptto use biological explanations for all aspects of human experience. This research program,known as “connectionism,” seeks to give an account of experience solely in terms of brainfunction. Changeux hopes to find a “third discourse” that would reconcile mind and bodyand eventually lead to a “neuronal” link between scientific knowledge (of the brain) andthe normative prescriptions (of human agency). Ricoeur believes such an endeavor isdoomed to fail, because the very premise of connectionism is confused. His argument isvintage phenomenology; the argument is based on an appeal to description. Third-person

2 Edmund Husserl,Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorion Cairns (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960),11-23, 46-64. According to Husserl, absolutely indubitable evidence would require full presence oradequate givenness. Adequate evidence is absolute self-givenness, which is beyond question. Suchevidence would be a completely fulfilled intention in which the object is self-given in an absolutelyimmediate seeing. However, such absolute certainty is, in principle, impossible to achieve. Experience isnever completely fulfilled. There are always expectant and attendant meanings that mediate presence withabsence. There are always implicit, co-present aspects of consciousness that form the inner and outerhorizons of experience. Intentionality always intends beyond itself. There are always potentialities, implicitin every intentional act, that can never be completely accounted for. Experience itself provides the cluesfor the further experiences that are necessary to confirm, correct and fulfill such implicit intentionalities.The perspectival character of experience is evidence that things are never fully present in a complete andabsolute manner. Complete fulfillment is an infinite task that could never be completed, and absolutecertainty can never be attained. Instead, full presence functions as a limit idea that guides the gradualfulfillment of intentions.

3 Paul Ricoeur,Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary, trans. Erazim Kohak(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1966), 135-197.

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explanations of causal events in the brain are different from first-person reports aboutone’s experience. What occurs in the brain may indeed correspond to my experience, butmy experience cannot be reduced to what happens in the brain. One must investigateexperience phenomenologically, not through empirical techniques.4

Most recently, inMemory, History, and Forgetting(2004), Ricoeur undertakes a(Husserlian) phenomenological analysis of memory. The phenomenology of memorybegins with an analysis of the objects of memory, the memory-experiences one has beforeone’s mind; it then considers the act of searching for a given memory, of anamnesis andrecollection; finally, from memory as given and exercised, Ricoeur examines reflectivememory, or memory itself. This phenomenology of memory grounds the successivestudies on the epistemological nature of history and the activities of historians, andconcludes with a “hermeneutics of the historical condition” that culminates on the pheno-menon of forgetting and forgiveness. Together they comprise a reflection on the problemof representing the past. It is Ricoeur’s most explicitly phenomenological work in years.Among the investigations he conducts are a phenomenology of imagination, of perception,of mistakes, of recollection, and of testimony. Phenomenological description -- i.e.,evidence -- is an inseparable part of historic understanding.5

Hermeneutics and Narrative Theory

Closely related to the phenomenological account of truth as approximation is thehermeneutic conception of truth as manifestation. Ricoeur shares with Heidegger a con-ception of truth asaletheia, which means bringing things out from concealment into theopen. According to Heidegger,aletheiameans “taking entities out of their hiddenness andletting them be seen in their unhiddenness (their uncoveredness).”6 Truth as manifestation,for Ricoeur, is the revelation and disclosure of hidden aspects of reality, which occurswhen we understand reference of creative discourses. All imaginative and creative usesof language improve our ability to express ourselves and extend our understanding of theworld. Symbols, myths, metaphors, and fiction can capture experience in ways thatordinary, descriptive language cannot. Ricoeur maintains that the reference of creativelanguage is “divided” or “split,” meaning that such writing points to aspects of the worldthat can only be suggested and referred to indirectly. Creative language refers to suchaspects of the world as if they were real and as if we could be there.

In The Rule of Metaphor, Ricoeur develops his thesis that the split-reference of creativediscourse discloses a possible way of being-in-the-world that remains hidden fromordinary language and first-order reference. A metaphor is an “heuristic fiction” that“redescribes” reality by referring to it in terms of something imaginative or fictional,allowing us to learn something about reality from fiction. I experience the world throughmy experience of creative discourse. Reading creates a clearing that opens up newpossibilities of being in the world. Heuristic fictions help us to perceive new relations andnew connections among things, broadening our ability to express ourselves and understandourselves. InTime and Narrative, the basic unit of meaning is a narrative, which is

4 Paul Ricoeur and Jean-Pierre Changeux,What Makes Us Think? A Neuroscientist and aPhilosopher Argue About Ethics, Human Nature and the Brain, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Princeton, N.J.:Princeton University Press, 2000), 33-69.

5 Paul Ricoeur,Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 2004), 5-132.

6 Martin Heidegger,Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York:Harper & Row, 1962), 262.

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constituted by its plot that unifies the elements of a story -- including the reasons,motives, and actions of characters -- with events, accidents, and circumstances togetherinto a coherent unity. A plot synthesizes, integrates, and schematizes actions, events, and,ultimately, time into a unified whole that says something new and different than the sumof its parts.

A narrative truth is like a metaphorical truth, which is the ability of poetic discourseto bring to language hidden aspects of reality. A reader or hearer experiences a new wayof seeing -- as through the referential dimension -- opened up by the use of creativelanguage, including sentences symbols, metaphors, sentences, and narratives. Reading andhearing a creative discourse leads me to the (real or imaginary) reference through thesense of that discourse. I experience the world through my experience of listening andreading. Similarly, I experience the world through the unfolding of a narrative.

Reference and horizon are correlative as are figure and ground. All experience bothpossesses a contour that circumscribes it and distinguishes it, and arises against ahorizon of potentialities that constitutes at once an internal and an external horizon ofexperience: internal in the sense that it is always possible to give more details and bemore precise about whatever is considered within some stable contour; external in thesense that the intended thing stands in potential relationships to everything else withinthe horizon of a total world, which itself never figures as the object of discourse.7

Narrative discourse refers to possible experiences one could have. As the reader graspsthe sense and reference of the text, the reader’s experience is mediated and transformedby it. In this way, narratives disclose, reveal, and manifest something true.

Ricoeur devoted most of his work of the 1970s-1980s toward developing a theory oftruth as manifestation. There is no need to recount in detail all of the places it appearedand continues to appear in his work. However, inOneself As Another, he begins to reducethe role of narratives (and hermeneutics, in general) in order to affirm a stronger notionof the universal that would justify our epistemological and normative claims. The criteriafor a narrative truth in literature are inadequate for less creative discourses like moralreasoning or legal interpretation. One must offer valid, relevant reasons for preferring oneinterpretation over another. Although he never abandons a hermeneutic theory of truth,Ricoeur eventually argues that it needs to complemented by a stronger theory of truth asvalid argumentation. He turns to Habermas for that.

Communicative Rationality

Ricoeur follows Habermas far less than either Husserl or Heidegger, but he reads him,learns from him, and incorporates his theory of communication into a broader vision ofhermeneutic philosophy and philosophical anthropology. Ricoeur appropriates fromHabermas the transcendental-pragmatic presuppositions of discourse in which competentspeakers can achieve understanding based on the recognition of validity claims. ForHabermas, reaching understanding depends on knowing how to redeem implicit validityclaims in speech. Discourse is the “reflective medium” or what Habermas sometimes callsthe “court of appeal” where participants explicitly raise and contest the validity claimsimplicit in speech and action. Acceptance of a valid proposition ought to motivate one to

7 Paul Ricoeur,Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 78.

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accept one argument over another. A true consensus is one that is achieved on argumentand appeal, as opposed to false consensus which is achieved though coercion anddomination. Such communicative competence presupposes familiarity with the conditionsunder which the validity of a claim would be acceptable to another. Together, individualscoordinate action with one another thanks to the validity basis of communication, whichalways permits participants to call one another into question. Communicative rationalityrefers to “the central experience of the unconstrained, unifying, consensus-bringing forceof argumentative speech, in which different participants overcome their merely subjectiveviews and, owing to the mutuality of rationally motivated conviction, assure themselvesof both the unity of the objective world and the intersubjectivity of their lifeworld.”8

Truth, for Habermas, is a validity claim, the justification of which is attained by arationally achieved consensus. Participants must know how to raise and test validityclaims, and they must be committed to reaching agreement rationally before they canestablish something as true, right, or sincere. What determines rational discourse is theregulative ideal of unconstrained communication and the ideal speech situation, both ofwhich function as regulative ideals, establishing conditions for achieving mutual under-standing, establishing trust and good will, and promoting social integration and culturalreproduction.

Ricoeur has an inconsistent take on Habermas. Sometimes he fully accepts andappropriates communicative rationality, other times his endorsement is more conditional.In his mediations of the Habermas-Gadamer debates in the early 1970s, for example,Ricoeur claims only to juxtapose hermeneutics and the critique of ideology.9 He claimshe has no intention to “fuse them into a super-system that would compass both,” butrather, merely to show how “each speaks from a different place,” so that “each may beasked to recognize the other.”10 Olivier Abel calls this method of non-synthetic reconcil-iation Ricoeur’s “ethics of method.”11 For moral reasons, Ricoeur takes great pains torespect the differences among the philosophies he brings together. By showing how eachcan recognize the validity of the other, there is no reason to create a third perspective thatwould reconcile, hence eradicate, both terms. Instead, Ricoeur’s methodological practiceof drawing a hermeneutic arc that contrasts, relates, and thereby suggests practical (nottheoretical) ways to move beyond an opposition, preserves what is valid in both positions.In theory, for example, hermeneutics and the critique of ideology are unreconcilable; inpractice, the very activity of recovering a tradition within the horizon of anticipatedunderstanding achieves the practical aim of both. Where theoretical mediations areimpossible, practical mediations are not.

Yet, there are several places in Ricoeur’s works where he very explicitly incorporatesa theory of communicative rationality into a hermeneutic philosophy, creating (implicitly)the very mediation he claims is impossible. For example, in the 1970s he described textualinterpretation as a movement from guess to validation and from explanation to com-

8 Jürgen Habermas,Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, Reason and the Rationalization ofSociety, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 10.

9 For Ricoeur's mediation of the Habermas-Gadamer debate, see Paul Ricoeur, “Ethics and Culture,”in idem,Political and Social Essays, ed. David Stewart and Joseph Bien (Athens, Ohio: Ohio UniversityPress, 1974), 153-65; idem, “Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology,” in idem,From Text to Action,270-307; idem,Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, ed. George Taylor (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1986), 249-253, 310-314. For an analysis of Ricoeur's mediation of the Habermas-Gadamer debates,see, David M. Kaplan,Ricoeur's Critical Theory(Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2003), 37-45.

10 Ricoeur, “Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology,” 294-295.11 For the ethical character of Ricoeur's method of mediation that respects differences, see Olivier

Abel, “Ricoeur's Ethics of Method,”Philosophy Today(Spring 1993): 23-30.

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prehension.12 An interpretation consists of a guess based on experiences resulting inexplanations that must be validated by others, terminating in comprehension, which isanother name for understanding that is informed and enriched by an objective process ofvalidation. Determining which interpretations are more plausible than others requires thatwe argue for our descriptions and explanations by offering relevant reasons in order toconvince an other of the superiority of one interpretation over another. Given the rangeof interpretations, often conflicting and contradictory, Ricoeur echoes Habermas, claimingthat “the question of criteria belongs to a certain kind of interpretation itself, that is to say,to a coming to an agreement between arguments. So it presupposes a certain model ofrationality where universality, verification, and so on are compelling.”13

Again, inTime and Narrative, Ricoeur argues that a regulative ideal of communicationis operative within communication. He agrees with Habermas that any critique of traditionis mediated by a regulative ideal of unconstrained communication, which, in turn, remainshistorically situated in order to be applied in a particular context. The regulative ideal ofunconstrained communication mediates our consciousness of effective-history.

The transcendence of the idea of truth, inasmuch as it is immediately a dialogical idea,has to been seen as already at work in the practice of communication. When so re-installed in the horizon of expectation, this dialogical idea cannot fail to rejoin thoseanticipations buried in tradition per se. Taken as such, the pure transcendental quitelegitimately assumes the negative status of a limit-idea as regards many of ourdetermined expectations as well as our hypostatized traditions. However, at the risk ofremaining alien to effective-history, this limit-idea has to become a regulative one,orienting the concrete dialectic between our horizon of expectation and our space ofexperience.14

Ricoeur appropriates communicative rationality even more explicitly inOneself AsAnother where he incorporates the ethics of communication as found in Habermas’sreinterpretation of the deontological tradition. Ricoeur agrees that communicative ethicsprovides a framework for resolving conflicts and reaching consensus regarding moralimperatives. Communicative ethics preserves both the universal validity and impartialityof moral judgments. Above all, it retains the central Kantian notion of autonomy butreinterpreted as “communicative autonomy,” which is the ability of speakers to expressthemselves freely to others. Ricoeur is in full agreement with Habermas over the basicprinciples of communicative ethics -- that the very process of justifying normative claimspresupposes that speakers have a shared understanding of what norms and reasons are andwhat they expect of us. Valid norms are discursively redeemable, impartial, universal, andrationally justifiable.

His acceptance is, of course, qualified. Rather than contrast, as Habermas does, thedifference between argumentation on one hand, and particular interpretations, personalconvictions, and traditional conventions on the other, Ricoeur argues that argumentationitself is an interpretive practice that leads to a potentially universal practical judgment ina particular situation. As Ricoeur puts it inOneself As Another, “what has to bequestioned is the antagonism between argumentation and convention, substituting for it

12 Paul Ricoeur,Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning(Fort Worth, Tex.:Texas Christian University Press, 1976).

13 Paul Ricoeur, “Interview with Charles Reagan,” inPaul Ricoeur: His Life and His Work(Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1996), 104-105.

14 Paul Ricoeur,Time and Narrative, vol. 3, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 226.

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a subtle dialectic between argumentation and conviction, which has no theoretical outcomebut only the practical outcome of the arbitration of moral judgment in situation.”15

Argumentation is a particular, sometimes formalized, practice in which participants clarifytheir convictions in order to resolve conflicts and reach understanding. Argumentationnever stands above our convictions or conventions, but instead is the “critical agencyoperatingat the heartof convictions.”16

In The Just(2000), Ricoeur continues to advance a theory of interpretation andargumentation in the context of legal interpretation and decision-making. Ricoeur concurswith Habermas that the “thesis of a potential agreement at the level of an unlimited andunconstrained community” forms the horizon of universal consensus before which “we areto place the formal rules of every discussion claiming correctness.”17 Argumentation,however, is dialectically related to interpretation. The rules governing discussion go handin hand with a prior meaning-giving context in which the interpretations of our needs andinterests occur.

The notion of an ideal discourse situation offers a horizon of correctness for alldiscourse where the participants seek to convince each other through argument. The idealis not just anticipated, it is already at work. But we must also emphasize that the ideal canbe inserted into the course of a discussion only if it is articulated on the basis of alreadypublic expressions of interests, hence of needs marked by prevailing interpretations con-cerning their legitimacy.18

The relationship between facts and norms in general is a dialectic interpretation andargumentation. Ricoeur goes on to say that the principle of universalization, “onlyprovides a check on the process of mutual adjustment between the interpreted norm andthe interpreted fact. In this sense, interpretation is not external to argumentation. It con-stitutes itsorganon.”19 Claims like these strain the credibility of Ricoeur’s prior claimto avoid creating super-systems that would encompass them both.

Narrative-Evidence and Communicative Rationality

When Ricoeur’s reflections on truth are taken together, we have a model of theinterpretation and validation of claims raised about human actions involving evidence,narration, and argumentation. Unlike the hermeneutic philosophies of Heidegger andGadamer, Ricoeur’s theory of truth entails the argumentative vindication of claims underthe presupposition of unconstrained communication. But unlike the universal pragmaticsof Habermas, Ricoeur’s theory of truth presupposes not only the prior interpretation of thesubject of discussion within a broader, interpretive context, but also the prior experiencesparticipants bring to discussion. It includes the very descriptive, narrative, testimonialexperiences that a consensus theory of truth forbids. If we were to construct a model oftruth and validity from Ricoeur’s scattered remarks on the subject, we could draw ahermeneutic arc that would have one end anchored in phenomenological experience,passing through a narrative interpretation, anchored at the other end in communicativerationality. The path of the arc from phenomenology to hermeneutics is old route that doesnot need to be revisited here. The more interesting paths are those that connect an

15 Paul Ricoeur,Oneself As Another(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 287.16 Ibid., 288.17 Paul Ricoeur, “Interpretation and/or Argumentation,” in idem,The Just, trans. David Pellauer

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 117.18 Ibid., 119.19 Ibid., 122.

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argumentative theory of truth as validity with a phenomenological theory of evidence andwith a narrative theory of truth as manifestation.

The path linking Husserl to Habermas through Ricoeur is the more reconstructive ofthe two. It starts by noting that, Habermas’s theory of communicative competencepresupposes the reflective awareness of the individual participants in communicativeaction to raise and test implicit validity claims. Even though the theory defines truth interms of the modes of argumentation competent speakers engage in together, it still makesreference to the perspectives of the participants in communication who reflectivelythematize the validity claims of one another, who are oriented to mutual recognition, whoindividually and collectively have learned how to communicate competently, and whomust be motivated to accept the force of the better argument. In fact, communicativerationality is, in part, defined in terms of the experience speakers and actors have whenengaged in such discourse. In order to understand an expression, the interpreter must“bring to mind” the reasons with which a speaker would defend its validity; we must be“open,” “committed,” and “motivated” to reach understanding. Such subjective expressionsand first-person descriptions are neither foreign nor inimical to communicative rationality.

Establishing truth is a function of the reasons I can offer to support my claim and theideal conditions under which my claim is accepted. But the formal procedures for reachingagreement in rational discourse say nothing about the content of the agreement. There islittle or no connection between the objectivity of experience and the truth of agreed-uponpropositions. So long as there is mutual, rational agreement, there is no way to mediateconflicting interpretations other than through further rational argumentation. From aphenomenological perspective, the consensus theory of truth entailed by the theory ofcommunicative rationality lacks an adequate theory of evidence. Habermas recognizes thelacuna in a consensus theory of truth, but claims that he is only specifying the idealconditions that must be satisfied in order for there to be any rational agreement. The ideaof truth is transcendental and universally binding; the content of truth is historical andcontingent. He explains that the criteria of truth lie at a different level than the idea ofredeeming validity-claims. In other words, Habermas claims only to specify the proceduralconditions for establishing validity, not to specify the criteria for ascertaining truth. Whatcounts as a good reason is something that depends on standards about which it must bepossible to argue. Nevertheless, Habermas confesses that he regards as “justified theadmonition that I have hitherto not taken the evidential dimension of the concept of truthadequately into account.”20

If a theory of evidence is not incompatible with a consensus theory of truth, and ifHabermas already acknowledges the legitimacy of reflective, first-person descriptions ofexperience, then perhaps it is possible to reconcile a phenomenological theory of evidencewith a pragmatic theory of truth. Ricoeur’s model of textual interpretation as a movementfrom guess to validation and from explanation to comprehension traces the path from(individual) experience to (collective) argumentation. Following Ricoeur and Habermas,if we recognize the necessity of the perspectives of the participants in discourse, who mustbe motivated to accept the better reason, then we can see how subjective experiencecontributes to intersubjective experience. The relevant subjective experience for thevalidation of a truth claim is the experience of evidence. Achieving consensus byredeeming validity claims discursively presupposes that the participants achieve evidentexperience that they test, validate and corroborate with one another. Evidence is thegradual fulfillment of the intentionalities necessary to confirm a guess, validate a claim

20 Jürgen Habermas, “Reply to My Critics,” in idem,Habermas: Critical Debates, ed. John B.Thompson and David Held (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1982), 275.

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or warrant an assertion. Such fulfillment can occur alone or with others. It can occur byreading a book, consulting an authority, performing a test, believing a good argument,confirming by experience, and so on. There are as many ways of fulfilling intentions asthere are intentions. As filled intentions, they share a common structural relationship ofpresence and absence, and an approximate correlation between the object and itssuccessive appearances. The closer I come -- or we come -- to having the appropriateevident experiences, warrants an assertion; in turn, reaching understanding communic-atively validates evidence. Establishing the validity of evident experience is something thatrequires intersubjective validation, achieved through a process or rational argumentationthat approximates ideal speech. In turn, evident experience establishes the objectivity ofa rationally achieved consensus. For a claim to be warranted, it must be supported by bothrational argument and appropriate evidence.

The relation of narrative to argumentation is even more clear. Ricoeur himself makesthe connection apparent on a number of occasions.21 Following his lead we can say thata narrative is an interpretation of events that raises claims of truth and normativity andthus presupposes the anticipation of consensus of universally binding reasons, whereasargumentation presupposes a narrative-interpretative framework that delimits a context ofrelevant facts to be subject to justification. “Narrative evidence” refers to the form ofdiscourse we use to make truth claims about human actions. The evidence we bring todiscussion to argue for an interpretation unfolds in a narrative, as participants raise andtest the implicit truth claims contained in an interpretation to reach consensus. Narrative-evidence thus requires a principle of universalization in order to find a fair resolution toconflicting narratives, in the absence of an overarching vantage point that everyone recog-nizes. In turn, the argumentative practice itself -- that would vindicate a validity claim --occurs, in part, through narration. In short, narration and argumentation overlap. Narrationrequires argumentation to redeem its validity claims to truth and normativity, given theinadequacies in a model of narrative truth as manifestation. Argumentation requiresnarration to determine what the validity claim is about, how an event is placed under anexplanatory rule, and to establish generalizable needs and vindicate normative judgments.Argumentation constitutes the “logical framework” and interpretation of the “inventiveframework.”22

The political implications of the dialectic of narrative evidence and argumentationcannot be overstated if an interpretation of history is a retelling of what happened: whatstories are told, how events are organized and assigned significance, to whom and whatresponsibility is attributed, and to whom stories are told, determine what will be preserved,remembered, judged and, above all, taken as true. To Ricoeur’s credit, he has alwaysinsisted that one can argue for the relative superiority of a conflicting interpretation byshowing how one interpretation is false or invalid, or that the possibility of one inter-pretation is more probable than another. It is always possible to argue for one interpreta-tion over another. To do so, we offer evidence from experience, use creative language toreveal and to show, and rationally debate the implicit validity claims raised. This, Ibelieve, is what is implied in Ricoeur’s theory of truth, developed along the arc fromphenomenology to narrative to communicative action.

21 Ricoeur, “Interpretation and/or Argumentation,” 109-126.22 Paul Ricoeur, “Conscience and the Law,” in idem,The Just, 153.

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