SEXUATED TOPOLOGY AND THE
SUSPENSION OF MEANING
A NON-HERMENEUTICAL PHENOMENOLOGICAL
APPROACH TO TEXTUAL ANALYSIS
WILLIAM J. URBAN
1.2 Schleiermacher and the Transcendental Turn to Hermeneutics
Schleiermacher opens his work32 with the following declarative statement: 'Hermeneutics as the art of understanding does not yet exist in a general manner, there are instead only several forms of specific hermeneutics,'33 and indeed if this could also be considered a declaration of intent, by all measures he is successful. For Schleiermacher is universally credited for having overcome the difficulty of managing the dispersed network of lateral links which increasingly grew between philology, biblical interpretation and jurisprudence in the centuries which preceded him. In a word, he combined the three regional hermeneutics into a general form. He does this by bringing the dialectic Ast uncovered to its logical conclusion, effectively absorbing the pedagogical practice of subtilitas explicandi by the proper application of subtilitas intelligendi. He thus goes further than his predecessor for whom the problem of understanding texts immediately negates itself in the philosophy of the original self-identical and selfforming One Spirit. In contrast, the philosophy of Schleiermacher is deeply influenced by Johann Gottlieb Fichte's notion of a productive and active I, which spurs the former's discovery of the relation between the particularities of authorship and the unity of a developing subject and thus helped make Schleiermacher's work one of the most consequential of Romantic hermeneutics with its hallmark focus on the relation between the individual and the totality.34 Moreover, it allows him to recognize a foreign nature to the other which he reads as indexing the finite horizon of language, an obscurity which makes it impossible to exhaust the nature of the individual and condemns the interpreter to an asymptotic approach to the totality of meaning.35 In order to grasp this pioneering turn towards language and its link with the thinking subject, Schleiermacher's development of hermeneutics as 'the art of understanding'36 must be examined more closely.
The accomplishment of widening the scope of hermeneutics towards a greater universality seems unlikely given the fact that he is a Protestant theologian and preacher. Granted, like Ast he is an accomplished philologist, having translated the complete works of Plato,37 but as any glance of his work will show his overriding concern is with understanding the New Testament. Yet it doing so he develops a theory of understanding in such a way as to allow future theorists to recognize its potential universal application not just to Scripture, but to any text and beyond. As we shall see, whether such a potential is ever actual will be a bone of contention for later hermeneutical thinkers and thus Schleiermacher can be said to operate as a touchstone of sorts for 20th century debates regarding methodology. For he reasons that the understanding is composed of two moments, the understanding of speech as taken from language and the understanding of speech as a fact in the thinking subject. The underlying presupposition here is how the act of understanding (moving from external expression to inner thought) is the reverse of the act of speaking (from thought to expression).38 The first moment yields a kind of interpretation appropriately entitled the grammatical as it concerns the linguistic elements of a text whose meaning is discernible within its greater grammatical context and where the text itself is considered with respect to the language shared between the author and his reader. Here the rule-bound aspect of language is stressed whereby a 'person with their activity disappears and appears only as the organ of the language.' One could say that an individual is 'subject to' language. Yet a person is not merely inserted into language without a say-so. To the second moment of understanding corresponds what he calls psychological (or oddly equivalent, the technical) interpretation. With the psychological the spontaneous aspect of language is stressed and further linked to a free subjectivity, for 'language with its determining power disappears and appears only as the organ of the person, in the service of their individuality.'39 Thus an individual is simultaneously also the 'subject of' language. As he reiterates throughout his lectures, proper understanding can only come when both moments are considered together, for while 'every person is on the one hand a location in which a given language forms itself in an individual manner, on the other their discourse can only be understood via the totality of the language.'40 Furthermore, both grammatical and psychological interpretation are equal, and he stresses how neither one can be thought of as grounding the other.41
However, this final point has not prevented disputes over the proper reading of Schleiermacher that very much concern which of the two moments of the understanding should be emphasized (and indeed, whether these moments are even part of a universal notion). Added to the difficulty in assessing a work which articulates a split running deep through its core theory of understanding is that this split is redoubled. That is, it also runs diachronically and in a significant enough fashion so as to prove useful in broadly differentiating his career. Although the grammatical-psychological dichotomy is ever-present throughout his work, his early efforts clearly favor grammatical interpretation while he later increasingly turns to the psychological,42 concomitant with the growing influence of psychologism (where meaning is explained by the structures of the human psyche) throughout the 19th century. For thinkers like Heidegger and Gadamer, Schleiermacher is to be critiqued for having backed away from his earlier identity between thought and language which allowed the hermeneutical (re-)construction of the mental processes of the author and the textual meaning in an intrinsically linguistic fashion. He is thus said to lapse back into Ast's psychologist notion of understanding as repeating the artist's process of creation so that the original experience represented by the text somehow rises again as an event for the interpreter. The aim of interpretation thus seems to be to understand as the author did and to recognize his style as an empirical and linguistic manifestation pointing back to the author's non-linguistic artistic genius. Yet Schleiermacher goes further, writing that the 'task is also to be expressed as follows, to understand the utterance at first just as well and then better than its author.'43 This is possible since the author's knowledge of himself is immediate while the interpreter's knowledge is mediated which, potentially allows for making conscious those elements the author only unconsciously possessed. Hence the text can be understood better than its author had originally understood it. This famous assertion and its implication particularly disturbs Gadamer who sees its utterance as registering a lapse, in a German Idealist mode, back to classical philology and its 'subjective' concern with the intended meaning of the author.44 While thinkers like Betti and Hirsch will celebrate Schleiermacher's contention that we are in psychological possession of certain universal characteristics allowing us to divine the author and his work in its individuality which further permits subsuming them both under the proper general categories,45 thinkers like Gadamer will much prefer the language-oriented efforts of the early Schleiermacher as they maintain grammatical interpretation holds a greater objectivity than the psychological.
This latter claim is questionable given that Schleiermacher's insistence on the equality between the two moments of understanding is ever present even in those late-lectures which do indeed turn to a greater emphasis on the activity of the individual subject in the constitution of textual meaning. It is thus too simple to pit an 'objective' grammatical interpretation over-against a 'subjective' psychological interpretation and thus champion or dismiss Schleiermacher according to where one feels his theory properly lies. Rather, the two moments of understanding and their corresponding interpretive strategies must be placed in a dialectic in which grammatical concerns (where textual elements must be situated within the text, within the author's wider work and with his literary community as a whole) interact with technical aspects (where the active role the author has in the non-grammatical creation of meaning must be considered along with the cultural and historical constitution of the subject and his text, all of which can only be grasped via a psychological approach) of a text. What Schleiermacher recognizes is that interpretive knowledge moves in an endless circle – a hermeneutical circle – within which meaning comes to stand.46 This circle is precisely the 'objective' condition of our understanding. While, say, Heidegger and Gadamer recognize this condition and will more expressly consider how no meaning is separable from the act of understanding and is thus not a pre-existing entity, they will try to do so without the notion of modern subjectivity inherited from German Idealism. Indeed much of the confusion in the literature over Schleiermacher could be accounted for by tracing out the respective entry points into this circle and by considering which moments of understanding have been assigned the roles of the whole and the part. Again, neither the grammatical nor the psychological can be considered dominant, which is why the transcendental turn to hermeneutical thinking begins with a redefinition of hermeneutics as the art of understanding. The movement through Schleiermacher forever frees hermeneutics from its previous philological conception as a mere explanatory tool.
After Schleiermacher, this double-faceted notion of understanding is combined with a Kantian-inspired theory of transcendental synthesis of the historical manifold by Humboldt who, together with Droysen's investigative historical practice, laid a foundation for understanding the historical world. Humboldt appears to take the notion of the 'art' of understanding in a literal fashion, for his theory of history is based on the essential affinity he sees between the task of the historian endeavoring to depict what has taken place and the creativity of the poet. Both practitioners in their respective disciplines 'must take the scattered pieces he has gathered into himself and work them into a whole... by supplementing and connecting what was incomplete and fragmented... through the imagination.'47 This text is riddled with notions bearing the imprint of German Idealism and certainly his discussion of the 'spontaneous and even creative' imaginative act on the part of the historian in order to attain the truth of what has taken place cannot but bring to mind the Kantian faculty of imagination.48 Through its synthetic power, the scattered historical manifold is not only given to the historian as a whole, but ideally reveals that which conditions historical events in a chain-like fashion. Hence the historian is also to uncover the inner succession of forces beneath accidental and superficial appearances, the necessity behind every contingency.49 Like the artist, the historian accomplishes this by being guided by ideas arising from the events themselves and thus ideas are not to be seen as externally imposed but as originating from the already understood connection between the subject and its object. In reasoning which anticipates Heidegger and Gadamer, this is so because 'everything which is effective in world history is also active within man himself.'50 Yet moving away from them, Humboldt bemoans a deficiency of complete knowledge of historical events and to compensate he further posits an ungraspable beyond, a noumenal realm of 'generative forces'51 to explain what spontaneously initiates, intervenes and transforms the chain of accessible historical phenomena. We could say he places in this realm the Cause of the causal chain itself, the Necessity behind all contingently linked events. Thus holding out for a grand teleology, he tells us that the very 'goal of history can only be the realization of the idea.'52 With this conception the hermeneutical circle has effectively broadened its scope and doubled itself outside itself: while the historian certainly plays his part, hermeneutically grasping the meaning of a particular event in a whole synthesized through his power of imagination, he only does so within the overall historical trajectory of the Idea. The proper understanding of history now has a much more complex set of conditions.
Droysen only adds to these conditions. Again bearing the stamp of Kant, Droysen presents his methodological approach to historical phenomena through a discussion of the sensible intuitions of time and space which lead up to his thesis that the 'data for historical investigation are not past things, for these have disappeared, but things which are still present here and now.'53 The past is in a way present, or in contemporary terms it falls within our horizon, which leads to a conception of how 'every "I" [is] enclosed in itself... [how] the human being is, in essential nature, a totality in himself.'54 Yet he is quick to add how this totality is only relative. In true hermeneutical fashion there is a circular nature to this understanding, for the individual's essential nature is only realized when understood by others in partnership with the absolute totality of historical forces which strive to actualize what he calls 'moral energy.'55 This echoes Humboldt's noumenal Idea, yet the crucial difference is that Droysen categorically denies any teleological progression to historical events, for it 'is sheer abstraction and fallacious to believe' we can go beyond a relativity of origins.56 In a word, without an origin there can be no organic development. He further explains that to truly understand the historical object we must recognize how 'we are moving in a circle,' grasping the object at one moment 'as existing' and then in the next 'as having become.' The subject thus figures prominently in this process for Droysen, whose 'interpretation intends to enliven and analyze these dry, lifeless materials in the hopes of returning them to life and allowing them to speak again through the art of interpretation.'57 Yet understanding is not without its pragmatic side, and he thus maps out an investigative practice inclusive of technological and psychological interpretation under the direction of an interpretive strategy guided by a non-teleological idea of moral forces.58
But to avoid a potential misunderstanding, it is not so much that Droysen and Humboldt feel that there is no such thing as objective history (as in some 20th century post-Nietzschean vein), but rather that it is simply forever inaccessible to us. Yet the recognition of this epistemological failure is not as disastrous as it would have been in previous centuries. For Romantic hermeneutics the investigation of historical phenomena cannot but bear the interpreter's subjective imprint, conditioned as he himself is by the forces and events of the historical past. Thus in a curious twist what is originally thought to be the object of investigation gives way to the true object, namely, these latter forces and events that shape the historian's investigative practice. For Droysen and Humboldt, recognizing this lends to an otherwise subjectively-appropriated historical understanding an objectivity entirely unimaginable to thinkers prior to the Kantian turn. What further suggests itself here is how it is no historical accident that the hermeneutical circle was first articulated as such only after German Idealist philosophy theorized the conditions of the possible experience of objects, for without this theorization the hermeneutical circle cannot be objectively experienced and thus would remain unarticulated. Only with this theorization does it first become possible to conceive the hermeneutical circle as the objective condition of understanding itself.
The break from the Enlightenment is also evident in Humboldt's notion of language. An accomplished linguist conversant in many languages, he shatters the Enlightenment view whereby language is conceived as a neutral means of transferring the meaning of a historical event from one subject to another. The presupposition that meaning is a transferable object works well for the hermeneutics of Chladenius, but not in the post-critical Romantic period. As Humboldt writes, since language 'is the formative organ of thought' and 'language develops only in social intercourse,' meaning is rather a coproduction between the speaker-author and listener-reader.59 Language is at once that which binds society and is its product. Moreover, language itself cannot become an object for the mind since objects only attain complete substantiality through the medium of the concept and no concept is possible without language.60 We could very well say that for Humboldt, language does not exist. Yet this does not prevent language from embodying a view of the world it makes its own and within which it throws its speaker. Again, a circle can be seen by which a particular speaker is woven into the tissues of language through that very same act which spins out its linguistic thread. This circle appears closed. Even by learning another language with its alternative world-view offers no escape, as one's mother tongue and attendant viewpoint will continue to maintain its dominance.61
Boeckh much more directly challenges the Enlightenment by confronting its classical philology with the new methodological concerns of Romanticism. Having been a student of both Ast and Schleiermacher, he was ideally positioned to theorize the hermeneutical basis of philology, the latter of which he considered a universal human science dealing with all historical and cultural works communicated to us through language. Since the understanding of these works was also at stake and not simply a question of deciding on the meaning of original authorial intent, Boeckh finds Schleiermacher's general hermeneutics well suited to supplement the practical rules of philology so as to uncover the formal and material conditions of these linguistic phenomena. His efforts will result in a mid-19th century revival of a philological concern for language, persuasive enough that a century later his comprehensive interpretive schema will be partially revived and developed by Hirsch, who will be examined below.
In general, Boeckh reasons that the understanding has two ways62 to reach its goal of bringing unconscious activity of literary works to a conscious level. The first is interpretation, which seeks to comprehend the meaning of the object intrinsically, without reference to anything else. The second is criticism, which predictably releases this restriction to understand the meaning of a work relationally, with respect to its immersion in its broader historical circumstances or the particular literary tradition or genre within which it sits. While the two serve different functions, both are needed to adequately understand a work, for 'in practice criticism and interpretation cannot be separated'63 and thus both are obviously needed to articulate that general hermeneutical circle whereby the text (part) derives it meaning from its context (whole) and vice versa. Yet Boeckh further breaks down each of these two levels in a manner following Schleiermacher. For instance, there are four kinds of interpretation,64 two of which operate as the objective conditions for the understanding (the grammatical interpretation focuses on the literal meaning of the words, and the historical interpretation focuses on that meaning with respect to the material relations and context of the work) and two as its subjective conditions (the individual interpretation focuses on the subject itself, and the generic interpretation takes the subject in relation to the wider aim and direction of the work). Boeckh illustrates the complexity of their interaction particularly through the medieval notion of the four levels of meaning, which harkens back to a discussion above in Section 1.1. This simultaneously serves as his critique of medieval exegetical thought. As he sees it, there are only two levels, the literal and the allegorical, since the tropological and anagogical are said to be only subdivisions of the latter. Thus allegorical meaning is always at the expense of the literal meaning of the words; its meaning stands in metaphoric relation to the literal meaning. More specifically, to ascertain the appropriate allegorical-metaphorical meaning of a work from a series of potentials, it is important to use both individual and generic interpretation to assess authorial motivation. This sets up a proper interpretive boundary and helps prevent reading false meanings outside these limits. But equally so, one must also consider the actual conditions through an historical interpretation. The ostensible point here is that '[w]hile allegory is a particular and very important kind of representation, understanding it is by no means a separate kind of interpretation. It consists rather, like every other work, in the co-operation of the four kinds of hermeneutical activity: grammatical, historical, individual, and generic.'65 The wider point is that for Boeckh there is not just one hermeneutical circle between interpretation and criticism but many66 within which meaning comes to stand as a condition of understanding. The complexity of Boeckh's philological hermeneutics serves as a testament to the sophistication of mid-19th century thought on the question of textual meaning.
As this survey of historical thought on meaning is largely following scholars in chronological order, Nietzsche's scattered writings on the matter should be examined before a final discussion of Dilthey is made to close out this section. Yet by doing so, this trajectory takes an unexpected theoretical detour and thus also allows for an opportunity to reflect on the path taken so far. For Nietzsche offers up a challenge to the hermeneutical tradition as it stood at the close of the 19th century and given that the substance of this challenge was ignored for decades, this also confirms yet one more tradition in which Nietzsche could be said to have 'come too early.' Consider the implications when he asks what people
'want when they want "knowledge"? Nothing more than this: Something strange is to be reduced to something familiar [etwas Bekanntes]... What is familiar means what we are used to so that we no longer marvel at it, our everyday, some rule in which we are stuck, anything at all in which we feel at home. Look, isn't our need for knowledge precisely this need for the familiar, the will to uncover under everything strange, unusual, and questionable something that no longer disturbs us?'67
In reading these words it immediately becomes apparent that those scholars discussed up to now, from Flacius to Boeckh, so busied themselves with the formulation of rules and entire methodologies that they never once stopped to seriously question an operative presupposition they held, namely, the finitude of meaning. In stark contrast, Nietzsche holds that 'the world.... has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings. – "Perspectivism."'68 Where hermeneutics prior to the 20th century could hold interpretation to be an endless endeavor, this was either because of a subjective deficit of inadequate training, inexact methods, or failure to grasp the conditions of understanding, or because the text qua object failed to yield its meaning due to difficulties with its archaic language or because of authorial ineptitude. Yet the idea that the meaning was 'there' and could at least be approximated was never in doubt. Now Nietzsche professes that there potentially exists an infinity of meaning. This is because to each 'perspective, the basic condition of all life,'69 there corresponds an interpretation, a will to truth which has the ability to lay meaning into things.70 Because there are infinite perspectives (and there are only perspectives), there is a plurality of interpretations, but in no way is Nietzsche an updated version of Chladenius since it is sheer perversity to believe in a 'meaning-in-itself' just as equally as 'facts-in-themselves.'71 No facts, everything is in flux and the ability to endure this fragmentation and disquietude is a sign of strength and cause for celebration.
The hermeneutical thinkers thus far examined were incapable of embracing such a conception. From Nietzsche's perspective, their hermeneutical rules ultimately had the design to mitigate and convert the strange, unusual and questionable into things which no longer prove disturbing. However, despite Nietzsche's introducing a certain conception which proves troublesome to hermeneutical thought, he does not seem to fully identity with this dimension he opens up, nor does he uncover its ontological conditions. More exactly, what Nietzsche lacks is a specific theorization and conceptualization of this disturbance, the particular resistance point which proves disturbing to the hermeneutical pursuit. That he recognizes a disturbance is commendable. Yet it may be that once any thought (even Nietzsche's) begins to entertain the question of meaning, objects which disturb the easy appropriation of meaning can only be registered at best on the subjective level, that is, as disturbing to the subject engaged in the hermeneutical pursuit; at this point any possibility of grasping such disturbances in their objective mode dissolves. Thus inclusive of the Nietzschean thesis regarding the infinity of meaning, if we could say that the presence of a disturbance in the field of meaning is nevertheless manifest in the trajectory of hermeneutical thought thus far reviewed, it only reveals itself symptomatically through the continuing efforts of formulation, dissatisfaction and re-formulation of rules, interpretive strategies and changing notions of understanding of these thinkers – efforts which have propelled their tradition through the centuries. We continue this historical trajectory with Dilthey.
Whatever lessons one ultimately takes from Nietzsche, not all is lost by turning to his contemporary. For Dilthey is very much also a philosopher for whom life itself forms the ultimate horizon for thought. This is evident everywhere in his final work of the first decade of the 20th century. He there quite expressly informs us of his aim to delimit a new human science [Geisteswissenschaften] from the natural sciences.72 This is possible because the human sciences are said to be linked together by a common investigative object, the nexus of lived experience, expression and understanding by which the human race communicates, endures its artistic creations and objectifies its spirit in social formations.73 Aware that this object's value, purpose and meaning can only be uncovered through interpretive technique, Dilthey can also be credited with expanding the scope of hermeneutics to its logical epistemic limit when he conceives it as the very foundation for this new science. But his departure from the heritage of Romanticism lies precisely in conceiving this project as an epistemological problem.74 As will be seen below in Section 1.3, any effort such as his which seeks to secure an objectively valid methodological basis for understanding in the Geisteswissenschaften on par with that of explanation in the natural sciences is critiqued in various guises in the decades which immediately follow his work. These critiques will presuppose that any modeling of the human sciences on the epistemological methodology of the natural sciences is a deeply flawed endeavor. Later, Dilthey's methodological concerns will be revived and expanded upon and since much of the debates which take place between these two factions in the latter half of the 20th century surround precisely this question of the (im)possibility of a sound methodology, Dilthey's project is worth a closer examination.
This project notably included a draft for a Critique of Historical Reason, whose first section expands on the triad of lived experience, expression and understanding, which can effectively be taken as forming Dilthey's hermeneutical formula. Obviously modeled on the Critique of Pure Reason, Dilthey argues that the draft embodies an effort encompassing Kant's work (reason happens in life after all) and thus is to be considered the more fundamental undertaking. It even comes complete with its own set of historical categories, of which meaning is the most important, an 'all-inclusive category' on which all other categories depend and which designates 'the special relation that the parts have to the whole within life.'75 Meaning is what the understanding of life looks for in the expressions of man, so the hermeneutical triad is ranked from the elementary and inner content of lived experience through its public expression to the higher levels of understanding, which provide the widest context. More specifically, Dilthey is interested in grasping the direct contact we are said to have with life, an experience which 'does not stand over against an observer as an object, but its existence for me is indistinguishable from what in it is there for me.'76 It is a unitary meaning 'which forms a unity of presence in the flow of time... [and] is the smallest unit definable as a lived experience.'77 Intrinsically temporal and never static, the unity of meaning encompasses both the memory of the past and the anticipation of the future and thus should be recognized as the basic historical unit which can form more comprehensive units linked by shared meanings. The method of the human sciences takes aim at these meanings communicated to us by others in their expressive manifestations of life. Of the three possible classes of these expressions,78 those that express lived experience come closest to the spiritual meaning of the whole life-nexus. The example often given is great works of art, which strive to put forward their spiritual content in a way that does not misrepresent its author; such works stand fixed, truthful and mark a sphere in which life discloses itself at a depth inaccessible to theoretical reflection. Thus the understanding is not a cognitive operation of the mind like in the natural sciences, where the goal is to consciously acquire objects so as to explain to others what has been grasped. Rather, Diltheyan understanding seeks a glimpse at the overall connectedness and unity of a person, an artwork or a text in its overall life-relationship, moving from particular to particular to try to grasp its meaning or else moving from particulars to try to establish a universal law. But higher understanding goes furthest, trying to establish a structure or ordering system that gathers individual cases as parts of a whole. Not only does the text embody the inner world of experience of its author, as had been the case for Schleiermacher. It is now said to also embody the socio-historical world itself. By seeing how the operations of understanding take place within an 'insoluble riddle,'79 namely, the hermeneutical principle of the reciprocal relation between the part and the whole, Dilthey effectively renews and greatly expands the project of Schleiermacher's general hermeneutics by placing it at the cornerstone of the formation of the historical world in the human sciences. With the 20th century poised to give birth to new fields which will increasingly problematize the hermeneutical project as it further develops and to which it will be forced to react, Dilthey may be said to stand at the closure of classical thought on meaning.
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