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Understanding Always Involves Interpretation

19/04/2011 By Kelly Cooper

"When we truly converse, we understand and interpret at once. Both English words correctly translate Gadamer's key term Verstehen. The German word covers not just the act of insight but also the act of articulation or Auslegung by which we talk to ourselves, laying out in language what we actually understand. 'Interpretation belongs to the essential unity of understanding. Whatever is said to us must be so received by us that it speaks and finds a response in our own words and in our own language'.

Understanding always involves interpretation, and this is preeminently true in understanding texts:

Whoever wants to understand a text always performs a projection. We project a meaning of the whole, as soon as a first meaning is manifest in the text. Such a meaning in turn only becomes manifest because one is already reading the text with certain expectations of a determinate meaning. Understanding what is there to be understood consists in working out such a projection which of course is constantly revised by what emerges in penetrating its meaning further…. [A]ny revision of the projection exists in virtue of the possibility of casting up a new projection;… rival projections towards the elaboration can be generated one after the other, until the unity of sense if fixed unequivocally;… the interpretation is initiated with anticipatory notions that are replaced by more adequate ones: precisely this ongoing newly-projecting that constitutes the movement of meaning proper to understanding and interpreting is the process that Heidegger describes.

Whenever we read a text 'there is no author present at the discussion as an answering partner, and no subject matter present which can be so or otherwise. The text as a work stands on its own.' Does this mean there is no dialogue? Not at all.

It seems that here is the dialectic of question and answer, in so far as it has any place at all, is only available in one direction, which means from the side of the one seeking to understand the work of art, who questions it and who is called into question by it, and who tries to listen for the answer of the work. As the person one is, one may, just like anyone thinking, be the inquirer and responder at once, in the same manner as happens in a real conversation between two people. But this dialogue of the understanding reader with himself surely does not seem to be a dialogue with the text, which is fixed and to that extent is finished. Or is this really how it is? Or is there an already finished text given at all?

"(Dostal 2002:186-187).

Dostal, Robert J., ed.
2002 The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer (Cambridge Companions to Philosophy). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

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Dialogue and Language in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics

09/02/2011 By Kelly Cooper

“The most passionate debates about Gadamer’s work in fact center on his rehabilitation of tradition. For him it is less a matter of rehabilitating prejudice per se than exposing the blanket prejudice against prejudice as an abstraction fostered by modern, methodological, Cartesian science. An unsituated consciousness does not exist. Our situatedness constitutes not so much an obstacle-though it certainly is that as well-as a condition of the possibility of understanding. We understand because and to the extent that we are ‘there’ and engaged. Even consciousness is more participatory than disengaged and in control. Just this is what makes it appropriate to speak of a ‘historically effected consciousness’. Gadamer’s expression is consciously ambiguous, as the important preface to the second edition [Truth and Method] explains: it means ‘at once the consciousness effected in the course of history and determined by history, and the very consciousness of being thus effected and determined.’

When his colleague Helmut Kuhn asked him whether it is possible to think with one’s own historicity, Gadamer replied in a letter of 12 February 1962: ‘To think with one’s own historicity-why should that be impossible? To know it-that’s what I think is impossible and I say it often enough: this is precisely what constitutes the nature of historical being, not being able to know oneself. But is the idea of knowing from oneself (von sich) merely vacuous reflection? I think it is the most real.’ Gadamer’s ‘historically effected consciousness’ that knows itself to be affected by history is therefore a reflexive and eminently critical consciousness. On the one hand, it punctures the pretension that we can ultimately ground our knowledge, whether it is a matter of creative scientific explanation or a final grounding in reflection of the kind originating in Idealism; on the other hand, it is most authentically realized in being open to the new experiences that can get us beyond the limits of our present horizons.

This explains the key role that dialogue plays in Gadamer’s general hermeneutics and his turn to language in the final, concluding section of the book. We understand only insofar as we see and find words to stammer out our understanding. ‘Being that can be understood is language’ is how Gadamer puts it in a memorable phrase, which is, however, open to misunderstanding. It hardly means that with language everything can be understood or that everything intelligible has to be expressible in words. The dictum is meant as a limitation: we understand only insofar as we find words for what is to be understood. But when is it that we can do that? Understanding means searching for words for everything that is to be understood and said. Here too taking part in meaning is more fundamental than being in control.

Thus Gadamer takes a highly critical position concerning the dominance of the ‘proposition’ in Western logic. The pure proposition designates something abstract in that it is decoupled from the speech situation, from person-to-person interaction, from need and necessity. What is to be understood is the sense that is carried along with the proposition and dependent on its actualization. Language is most realized not in propositions but in conversation where words are sought for what always remains to be said. This experience of conversation reminds us of a truth in which the unspoken part of what is said presents no hindrance but rather a condition of truth. Method can do little in such cases; taking part is everything. Thus Truth and Method closes with the sentence: ‘What the tool of method does not achieve must-and really can-be achieved by a discipline of questioning and inquiring, a discipline that guarantees truth” (Grondin 2003:288-289).

Grondin, Jean
2003 Hans-Georg Gadamer: A Biography. Joel Weinsheimer, trans. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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Lived Before Conceptualized

29/01/2011 By Kelly Cooper

“The term ‘understanding’ is not confined by Heidegger to analytic or reflective consciousness. It refers primarily to those pre-reflexive ‘moods’ (Stimmungen) of our lived experience – e.g. anguish, guilt, fear, concern, wonder and so on-which Heidegger identifies not simply as psychological emotions but as ontological acts of pre-understanding (Vor-Verständnis). For instance, Heidegger argues that our common experience of anguish, which frequently goes by the name of ‘depression’, is irreducible to the sum of ostensible causes which might be adduced at the level of an empirical psychology. We are not simply depressed because we failed exams, had influenza or crashed a car. These are no more than occasions which disrupt our normal patterns of behavior, leaving us exposed to a fundamental void or nothingness at the heart of our existence. At its deepest level, Heidegger argues that anguish is an ontological ‘mood’ which expresses being-in-the-world as an experience of non-being. Unlike fear, for instance, anguish lacks any identifiable object; it occurs precisely where ‘nothing’ is the matter.

Heidegger sees his phenomenological analysis as a way of bringing the moods of our lived pre-understanding to the level of a reflective self-awareness. For Heidegger we exist before we are objectively aware that we exist. Our existence is pre-understanding-in the sense of a pre-reflective interpretation of the world as a project of possibilities for our existence-before we come to reflectively understand it as such. In short, Daisen’s understanding is existential before it is philosophical; it is lived before it is conceptualized. Moreover, human existence constitutes what Heidegger terms ‘a hermeneutic circle’ to the extent that it implicitly interprets (Greek, hermeneuein) Being in terms of its everyday moods and projects before it raises this interpretation to the level of an explicit philosophical questioning. We already know-however vaguely-what we are looking for when we ask the question of Being. If we did not, the question would be meaningless and we would be unable to recognise what we find” (Kearney 1986:34-35).

Kearney, Richard
1986 Modern movements in European philosophy. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.

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Considering Explanation

27/01/2011 By Kelly Cooper

“A closely related problem in the methodology of social science is concerned with the concept of explanation. Various attempts have been made to link this concept to the notion of understanding; but the uneasy syntheses proposed by Max Weber and others soon succumbed to a positivistic emphasis on explanation at the expense of any reference to understanding. The philosophy of the later Wittgenstein tends to reverse this trend, insofar as it disputes the relevance of explanation for the understanding of human phenomena. In the Blue Book, Wittgenstein distinguishes between two senses of the question ‘why?’: it may be used to ask for a reason or for a cause. To offer a reason for something one said or did is to appeal to some accepted rule that shows a way which leads to that action; a rule, in other words, which justifies the utterance of that expression or the performance of that action. To provide a cause, on the other hand, is to adduce a statistical regularity, or to trace a mechanism, or to sketch an historical genesis. In no case, however, would the provision of such a cause further elucidate the significance of what is said or done, any more than it would clarify the meaning of what is believed:

The causes of our belief in a proposition are indeed irrelevant to the question of what we believe. Not so on the grounds, which are grammatically related to the proposition, and tell us what proposition it is.

So while Wittgenstein does not deny that the causes of a particular phenomenon may be interesting for some purposes, he does contend that the causal explanation of that phenomenon in no way contributes to the comprehension of its sense.

The antithesis between reason and cause, or between understanding and explanation, pervades the literature of post-Wittgensteinian philosophy. Peters maintains that a sufficient explanation of human action, as opposed to mere bodily movement, can only be given in terms of the rule-following purposive model and not in causal terms; for there is, he claims, ‘a logical gulf between nature and convention’. Similarly, Melden argues that insofar as ’cause’ is being used in a Humean sense, causal explanation is irrelevant to everyday accounts of human action. For when we offer such accounts, we provide motives or reasons for doing the action; and since the description of a motive necessarily refers to the action which it is a motive for, it cannot be a Humean cause of that action. Winch also observes that relations between ideas are ‘internal relations’; and since social relations between individuals exist only in and through their ideas, social relations are just another species of internal relations. ‘It follows’, Winch infers,

that social relations must be equally an equally unsuitable subject for generalizations and theories of the scientific sort to be formulated about them. Historical explanation is not the application of generalizations and theories to particular instances; it is the tracing of internal relations.

For Winch, an appeal to statistical regularities concerning the occurrence of an action is quite irrelevant to the understanding of that action, just as a formulation of probabilistic laws about the appearance of an expression in no way facilitates its comprehension. What is required in both cases is a fuller grasp of the rules which govern the performance of the action and the utterance of the expression, not the invocation of some account which is completely different in kind” (Thompson 1995:32-33).

Thompson, John B.
1995[1981] Critical Hermeneutics: A study in the thought of Paul Ricoeur and Jurgen Habermas. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

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