SEXUATED TOPOLOGY AND THE
SUSPENSION OF MEANING

A NON-HERMENEUTICAL PHENOMENOLOGICAL
APPROACH TO TEXTUAL ANALYSIS

WILLIAM J. URBAN

1.3 The Rise and Debates over Hermeneutical Phenomenology

The truly irreversible turn for hermeneutics comes with the 1927 publication of Being and Time,80 where Heidegger effectively crosses hermeneutical theory with phenomenology. What eventually results from this effort is the hermeneutical phenomenological approach which has come to dominate 20th century thinking on meaning. The urgency of examining this approach is thus great yet because it was originally constituted through the melding of two disciplines, one that was centuries old and the other mere decades old, systematically reviewing this approach proves difficult and especially so given the decision to deal with hermeneutics and phenomenology in separate chapters. Given this division, Heidegger will be formally examined in the following chapter where it will be made clear why he should be placed more in line with the great phenomenologists of the past century rather than within the hermeneutical tradition. Of course as the discussion in this section will be permeated with Heidegger's thought, it may prove useful to read Section 2.1 concurrently, where an account of his break from Husserl, the father of phenomenology, is provided.

One must also make a similar decision with respect to Bultmann. As a student and colleague of Heidegger's, we could equally consider him a phenomenologist, yet given that he is a Protestant theologian whose interest is more narrowly focused on the meaning of Scripture, it seems reasonable to treat Bultmann instead as a thinker who has primarily hermeneutical concerns. So he, along with Ebeling, will be examined in this section. He actually serves as an excellent introduction to hermeneutical phenomenology, directly and concisely addressing the theoretical problem Heidegger had with his teacher Husserl when the latter claimed to have discovered a presuppositionless methodological approach with his new school of phenomenology. Bultmann clearly agrees with Heidegger's demonstration of the impossibility of this claim in his brief essay which fittingly asks 'Is Exegesis without Presuppositions Possible?'81 Even his provisionally positive response to this question is illuminating and demonstrates how his work as a whole has integrally and creatively restated the cumulative wisdom of classical Protestant theology. Critiqued numerous times above, the Roman Catholic Church's penchant for allegorical interpretation is here also rejected since such interpretation is said to amount to dogmatism whereby the results of exegesis are presupposed, for any 'exegesis that is guided by dogmatic prejudices does not hear what the texts says, but only lets the latter say what it wants to hear.'82 What follows is the more proper answer to the essay's question, how 'no exegesis is without presuppositions, inasmuch as the exegete is not a tabula rasa, but on the contrary, approaches the text with specific questions or with a specific way of raising questions and thus has a certain idea of the subject matter with which the text is concerned.'83 Bultmann does not simply speak here of the commonsensical notion of individual biases and weaknesses which are brought inadvertently into interpretation, since these can be eliminated via education. In line with the thinkers examined in Section 1.2, he argues instead that one cannot dismiss the presupposition of the historical method of interrogating texts. For this allows for the possibility of exhibiting and connecting the causal forces, motives and consequences of events and to understand them as a closed unity embedded in the whole historical process.84 Yet not only must these forces and events – the subject matter of history – be understood so as to serve as a presupposition for historical understanding; the further presupposition of historical understanding is the relation of the interpreter to this subject matter directly or indirectly expressed in texts. This 'actual life-context in which the interpreter stands' is what is presupposed by exegesis and the specific understanding of the subject matter of the text reached on the basis of this 'life-relation' to it is what Bultmann calls a 'preunderstanding.'85

It is with this notion (given different names by Heidegger, Gadamer and others) and its underlying logic that 20th century hermeneutical phenomenology expressly goes further than 19th century hermeneutical methodology. Texts now are thought to really begin to speak to us when we approach them alive with our own problems and in learning what they have to say we simultaneously gain knowledge of ourselves. Borrowing a term from Heidegger, he calls this type of encounter, which shares in responsibility for it, an existentiell encounter, a participation in history with one's whole existence and which invalidates the epistemological subject-object schema of natural science. The ramifications of this line of thinking are striking. Since the preunderstanding can never be closed, historical knowledge can never arrive at a definitive state. Certainly there are historical facts, such as the date of 'the assassination of Caesar or Luther's posting of the ninety-five theses. But what these events that can thus be dated mean as historical events cannot be definitively fixed. Hence one must say that a historical event is always first knowable for what it is – precisely as a historical event – in the future. And therefore one can also say that the future of a historical event belongs to that event.'86 This idea of a future orientation to historical events is a great theme in his work on the New Testament. We will turn to this momentarily, but for the moment it is important to note how the phenomena of history have something to say in the hic et nunc, opening themselves in their meaning only to the interpreter who approaches them alive with questions. Thus echoing Nietzsche's insight more than sixty years later, historical research is never finalized as each generation can expand upon the previous meaning taken from historical events since different meanings result from different questions posed as per different generational preunderstandings. Although Bultmann does suggest the above analysis concerns the interpretation of any text, he feels it is especially applicable to Scripture. This is so because the exegete is particularly moved by the existentiell question for God and the attendant demand for a decision regarding the claim encountered in Scripture, resulting in a confession of faith or the expression of unfaith. Either choice is legitimately met with an appropriate understanding of Scripture yet it is important to note that this understanding stays open, for the meaning it discloses must be realized anew in every future.87

Published in the same year as the above essay, History and Eschatology: The Presence of Eternity (1957)88 takes the reader on a whirlwind historical tour from the ancient Greeks and biblical times to the present to lead up to the thesis that Christianity is peculiar in its conception of man as a being 'who understands his historicity radically... [and] who understands his genuine self as an ever-future one.'89 Moreover, he argues that historical consciousness in large part arose because of Christianity. Indeed the two intertwining themes of future orientation and the proper grasp of historical meanings as both rooted in the Christian tradition are suggested by the very title of his book. Sketching the tour this book takes the reader through offers an opportunity to retrace our own path taken above but not without expanding its scope backward in time due to Bultmann's hermeneutical phenomenological reading of the ancient New Testament text.

He first sets up a problematic. Consistent with his Protestantism, in the first chapter he locates the beginnings of the modern striving for freedom with the Reformation's break from Church authority. Yet soon after man becomes the object of (or subject to) science. With the Romantic break from the Enlightenment, faith in universal reason vanishes and the quest for historical truth becomes meaningless. Man, at the mercy of history, is plunged into an historical relativity whose effects are still felt today. From the third chapter onward, it is argued that a return to Scripture offers salvation from this nihilism. Bultmann argues that the earliest writings of this ancient text in fact record the very first detections of meaning in history and human life. Yet early Christian thought only understands such meaning from the standpoint of eschatology, the end of the world; more specifically, the conscious meaning of both the past and the present world is swallowed up in the expected coming of Christ (parousia: the Second Coming), which accompanies the eschatological moment. With St. Paul, however, Christianity achieves a maturity of thought whereby the meaning of history is understood from the eschatological point of view. This is so because 'for the believer who is "in Christ" the decisive event has already happened.' At the same time, Paul's proclamation that Christ has arisen sets aside any interest one could have in the history of any particular nation (Israel) or the world itself, as 'he brings to light another phenomenon, the historicity of man'90 whose Christian 'life is a continuous being on the way, between the "no longer" and the "not yet."'91 This achievement of conceiving the present as a time between the past (resurrection of Christ) and the future (parousia at the end of the world) could not be maintained as the expected future course failed to materialize. Bultmann argues that the developing Church compensated for this failure through sacramentalism, which effectively neutralized eschatology in its universal form; the Church, binding these sacraments to its office, opted instead to offer them as a guarantee for the salvation of the individual soul. The eschatological beyond, at once embodied in the sacramental object, is now also pushed into an indefinite future. In such circumstances, the Church naturally turned its gaze inward to examine its own history and in doing so eventually a general historical concern arose.

Bultmann's point here is that with the eventual secularization of the historical concern, whether in the guise of closely approximating the Church's view that historical events have meaning with respect to a divine teleology via the notion of scientific progress or else abandoning the quest for meaning of history altogether in a philosophy of historical relativism, the real subject of history is lost. This subject, the real core of history from which history ultimately gains its essential meaning, can be expressed in 'what Idealism has taken over from the Christian tradition, namely, the will of man who apprehends responsibility for himself,' the man who takes responsibility for the past as his past and for the future as his future.92 Bultmann attempts to mark this loss by differentiating between his own revival of Pauline historicity, which began to re-emerge in Romanticism, from historicism, a poorer secularized version of historical consciousness. Whereas the latter 'misunderstands the determination [of the present] by the past as purely causal determination and... the future as determined by the past through causality instead of being open,' the former properly treats the present as 'the moment of decision' by which 'the yield of the past is gathered in and the meaning of the future is chosen. This is the character of every historical situation; in it the problem and the meaning of past and future are enclosed and are waiting, as it were, to be unveiled by human decisions.'93 As these decisions are informed by the questions the interpreter puts to a text, which arise from his preunderstanding, the question which immediately arises for the otherwise uninitiated reader is whether objective historical knowledge is possible under his schematic. Indeed a series of thinkers are examined below who challenge Bultmann (along with Ebeling and Gadamer who hold logically homologous viewpoints) and who level the charge that the subjective element is simply too high in this approach. Yet Bultmann offers what can be seen as the standard defense of this approach, turning what looks like a weakness into a strength. That is, although an absolute objective knowledge can never be reached as there is no Archimedean point outside history from which to assess the objective meaning of history as a whole, it is because of this that only the interpreter truly excited by his participation in history and his responsibility for the future can effectively grasp history. As he succinctly puts it: 'In this sense the most subjective interpretation of history is at the same time the most objective.'94 His own twist on this defense is that he finds this logic peculiarly Christian. He argues that the freedom presupposed for historical decisions is not a simple possession of man but a gift 'by which man becomes free from himself in order to gain himself' via the revelation of the grace of God in Jesus Christ, who is the eschatological event which ends the old world; this is not as an established fact of the past but is something repeatedly present and ever addressing man.95 Each instant thus has the possibility of being an eschatological instant, but only in Christian faith can this possibility be further realized. Bultmann concludes that if 'the meaning in history lies always in the present,' then only when this present is conceived as the eschatological present by Christian faith can this meaning be realized.96 The exegete must hear the meaning of the word of Scripture anew each time as its historical meaning is only realized as lying in an eschatological present and is thus grasped only in a present moment by responsible decisions which orient this moment to the future.

When Bultmann writes how '[e]very moment is the now of responsibility, of decision' and further that '[i]n this responsibility, as responsibility over against the past as well as over against the future, the unity of history is grounded,'97 it seems that a part of history (man) is argued to ground the whole of history. As might be expected this greatly problematizes the hermeneutical circle, for one can no longer neatly distinguish the whole from its parts. Ebeling, a student of Bultmann's, tackles such hermeneutical questions more directly. But again he does so within Protestant theology, for he is certainly driven, like Bultmann, by a compulsion to arrive at the saving meaningfulness of the Scriptural text. Yet the 'New Hermeneutic' with which Ebeling has come to be associated contains a discernible theoretical shift to a concern for language. This new approach is concisely articulated in his article "Word of God and Hermeneutic" (1959)98 which also, like Bultmann, opens with an attempt to ground itself by re-contextualizing its historical precedents in light of its new discovery. Taking this 'light' in a somewhat literal sense, we can say Ebeling sees himself as the heir to the Reformers and their belief that 'Scripture possesses claritas, i.e., it has illuminating power, so that a clarifying light shines from it.'99 Such a conception is in accordance with the Reformer's principle of sola scriptura which pits the sole authority of Scripture itself against the dogmatic insistence of tradition which constituted the answer of the Church to the hermeneutical problem of correct understanding of revelation as testified in Scripture. But Luther's once promising doctrine of the claritas scripturae eventually gives way to an orthodoxy which 'identifies Scripture and the word of God without distinction' or else tones down its thesis to allow for hermeneutical work by considering distinctive meanings as standing behind or buried deep within Scriptural text.100 Ebeling retorts that what is overlooked by orthodoxy is the real nature of the event in the process of this text becoming proclamation. Hermeneutics is to facilitate this proclamation, the kerygma, through a focus on the spoken word as event. Indeed the phrase 'word-event theology' is often used interchangeably with 'New Hermeneutic' when characterizing this approach.

But where exactly is the hermeneutical problem for Ebeling? Like for Bultmann and for all significant hermeneuts since Schleiermacher (who is discussed quite favorably by Ebeling), hermeneutics is a theory of the understanding. Yet he departs from this conception, taking a broader view than even Bultmann, for whom the ultimate horizon is man's existential self-understanding directed toward the future. With Ebeling, hermeneutics is now also a theory of words. In a sentence often cited in the secondary literature, he writes that '[t]he primary phenomenon in the realm of understanding is not understanding OF language, but understanding THROUGH language.'101 He explains that the word is what opens up, mediates and brings something to understanding and when this word-event is hindered, hermeneutics is required. So hermeneutics has as its object the word-event and thus at once also attends to the subject matter brought to understanding; yet curiously the role Ebeling reserves for hermeneutics is the more traditional one of removing obstacles. However, this does not prevent him from holding to the more modern notion of denying the distinction between interpretation and hermeneutical methodology since the latter is ultimately an interpretation as well. Here lies 'the famous hermeneutical circle in its methodological significance for hermeneutic itself,' which touches upon the 'ultimate mysteries of the ground of understanding.'102 Although much more complex, Ebeling reiterates here Schleiermacher's thesis of how the hermeneutical circle stands as the condition of understanding. But he articulates a further implication of this logic which certainly bears the mark of his former teacher. As he writes, 'it is part of the phenomenon of understanding that the ground of the understanding, being a point beyond which no further questioning is possible, confronts us with a decision.'103 However, it seems that if this configuration opens a radical abyss of subjective freedom, it is nevertheless quickly filled since it is quite clear to Ebeling 'that God's word is the ultimate ground of understanding because it is here in the last analysis that word is encountered as word and understanding as understanding.'104 If word in the New Hermeneutic is what unites God and man, word of God as inscribed in Scripture would even doubly perform this function. But God's word is always a spoken word for Ebeling. It is never the dead writing of the text itself that should interest us, but rather its transition to the spoken word during the sermon, which allows the proclamation 'that has taken place' to become 'proclamation that takes place.'105 In this way the sermon should be thought of as the execution of the aim of Scriptural text to bring this past proclamation into the present and the eminent function of hermeneutics is to aid this process, ideally removing any obstacles to the word-event so as to bring to the understanding a present experience of the past which, as he also notes, is also not without its futurity.

Yet despite the potential applicability of the methodological approach of Bultmann's existential theology or Ebeling's New Hermeneutic to any text, the theological vehicle it was delivered in virtually ensured it would remain in relative obscurity. These men argued that not only did hermeneutical phenomenology originally arise from Christian thought, but that its most consequential application was to the New Testament. While the secular world could perhaps live with these religious origins, it could not abide the limited applicability of this approach to the religious sphere and thus this type of methodology would accordingly be ignored. Nor could the first architect of hermeneutical phenomenology be counted on to popularize his own revolutionary hermeneutical technique. First, Heidegger's Being and Time was impenetrable to any interpreter unwilling to devote serious study to its subject matter. Second, Heidegger soon afterward turned away from hermeneutics only to briefly flirt with it again decades later. Thus it would take an event of some magnitude to put hermeneutical phenomenology on the map. From the benefit of hindsight over half a century later, that event was Gadamer's 1960 publication of Truth and Method. In a word, this landmark publication made Heidegger's crossing of hermeneutics with phenomenology widely accessible to researchers in the human sciences. But Gadamer's brand of hermeneutical phenomenology would prove divisive to say the least and would quickly find itself in a defensive position as scholars from diverse fields would take immediate issue with its methodology, or more precisely, its lack of methodology. For the title of his book is rather ironic and might read instead 'Truth, not Method.' As he writes in his Introduction, the 'hermeneutical phenomenon is basically not a problem of method at all' since what concerns us in the human sciences are 'modes of experience in which a truth is communicated that cannot be verified by the methodological means proper to science.'106 This claim will provoke many methodological-minded scholars, and the debates which ensue over the next two decades107 will accordingly engage this fundamental question as well as other issues which prove foundational for the human sciences. From the point of view of these debates as ultimately unresolved, one could say that Gadamer's work stands as that which continues to divide much of the subsequent interpretive work in the human sciences into two camps to this day. In terms of the debates themselves, on one side there is the spirited negative reaction to Gadamer by the likes of Betti, Hirsch, Apel and especially Habermas, who all effectively call for a return to a pre-Heideggerian use of hermeneutics to reestablish a general methodological textual approach. On the other side Palmer, Teigas and others are more receptive to Gadamer's approach. Ricoeur, however, seems to have gotten the last word in these debates. From his 1960's staunch defense of hermeneutical phenomenology against the inroads made by structuralism and psychoanalysis regarding the status of meaning to his 1970's schematization of the respective histories and interaction of the hermeneutical and phenomenological fields, he sets down a series of binary terms (e.g., epistemology-ontology, explanation-understanding, subjectivity-objectivity and intuition-dialogue) that proves influential to contextualize future discussion. His overall call for a return to epistemological questions forgotten in the wake of the ontological turn of Heidegger and Gadamer is briefly reviewed below, along with other key players and peripheral figures with respect to their contribution to the so-called 'Gadamer debates.'

The massive undertaking that is Truth and Method begins with a critique of modern aesthetic consciousness (largely from Kant onward) to argue how the experience of truth happens in understanding art without reliance on an a priori method, to end with a discussion of the ontological turn to language and its implications for hermeneutics. Our present focus is on its longer second part, which begins with an historical review of hermeneutics from the Enlightenment of Chladenius, through Ast, Humboldt, Droysen, Boeckh, Nietzsche, but especially Schleiermacher108 and Dilthey. As we saw above, Dilthey views expressions as the objectifications of life so he reasons that it should be possible to reach an objectively valid knowledge in the human sciences on par with that of the natural sciences. Yet this aim is in tension with Dilthey's insight into how our consciousness is historically conditioned. This for Gadamer is the fundamental conflict in Dilthey's methodological project, something 'Dilthey thought about... tirelessly. He was always attempting to legitimate the knowledge of what was historically conditioned as an achievement of objective science, despite the fact that the knower is himself conditioned.'109 Over and over again Gadamer reiterates how Dilthey's epistemological aspirations for the human sciences are simply incompatible with his life philosophy since the former presumes the ability of the investigator to subtract himself from the historical flux, yet the occupation of such an Archimedean point proves impossible, as Dilthey himself is well aware. Yet it is important to note that Gadamer does not dismiss Dilthey for attempting to achieve objectivity for the human sciences, but only for his aspirations for scientific objectivity, which only proves his 'unresolved Cartesianism.'110 As Gadamer writes,

'Dilthey's concept of inductive procedure, borrowed from the natural sciences, is inadequate. Fundamentally, historical experience... is not a procedure and does not have the anonymity of a method. Admittedly, one can derive general rules of experience from it, but their methodological value is not that of laws under which all cases could be clearly subsumed... In view of this situation it must be admitted that knowledge in the human sciences is not the same as in the inductive sciences,but has quite a different kind of objectivity and is acquired in a quite different way.'111

As the title of a key subsection in his book suggests, this different kind of objectivity is reached through 'Heidegger's Project of a Hermeneutic Phenomenology' where Heidegger builds on Husserl's phenomenology to conceive a kind of objectivity standing outside the subject-object dichotomy. More specifically, it was Husserl's contention that all the beings in the subject's world stand within an intentional horizon of consciousness he called a 'life-world' and, together with his analysis 'of the anonymous creation of meaning that forms the ground of experience,' the objectivity of science came to be viewed as a special case of this intentionality of universal life. With the 'new and radical turn in light of the question of being,' scientific objectivity was equally demoted by Heidegger, this time articulated as a subspecies of that legitimate understanding which comprises 'the original form of the realization of Dasein [being-there], which is being-in-the-world.'112 Heidegger's hermeneutical phenomenology effectively reverses all past approaches based on the way in which the world belongs to human subjects; instead, the trick is to conceive of the way in which human subjects belong to the world. This belongingness arises through the process of understanding, the process through which one exists as a human being and the process which underscores all scientific understandings. The interpretation of understanding is thus ontological, describing the process of being thrown into the world in a present which is oriented both toward the past and the future. In a word, 'the structure of Dasein is thrown projection' such that the realization of its own being is at once understanding.113 This should sound familiar after the above discussions of Bultmann and Ebeling and as a fellow hermeneutical phenomenologist, Gadamer certainly also grasps the circular structure of understanding Heidegger derived from the temporality of Dasein. But what are Gadamer's particular contributions to this notion of understanding as a thrown projection?

The 'thrown' of this phrase indexes the temporal element of the past, indicating how we always already understand in some fashion. This is due to what Heidegger called the fore-structures of understanding or what Bultmann simply calls preunderstanding. Since all acts of understanding begin with these fore-structures, it is clear that one cannot escape the hermeneutical circle to attain direct knowledge, and for Gadamer this point of departure is inherited tradition. Gadamer provocatively uses the word 'prejudices' to collectively designate Heidegger's fore-structures and to put into question both the Enlightenment's too easy rejection of the authority of tradition in the name of reason as well as the Romantic overreaction which simply reversed this negative reception to blindly embrace the inherited prejudices of the past. As Gadamer uses it, prejudice is a prejudgment and has an intended neutral connotation until a final judgment is rendered. Moreover, he follows Heidegger's phenomenological path with respect to how this final judgment can be reached. As with Heidegger, who seeks to properly ground his fore-structures of understanding on the things themselves, so too with Gadamer, who is equally concerned with the productive possibility of the hermeneutical circle of understanding and thus seeks the ground for distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate prejudices.114 This is important since not all of the interpreter's prejudices carried in with him when he engages with a text are legitimate, so there must be some way to reject those undesirable prejudices acquired by chance or popular conception. In blatant opposition to the disposition of Enlightenment thinkers, Gadamer finds reason to acknowledge authority qua authority and thus a large part of his project can be seen as a rehabilitation of the authority of tradition so as to prove that it harbors legitimate prejudices. He reasons that we rightly acknowledge a teacher or expert 'as superior to oneself in judgment and insight and that for this reason his judgment takes precedence – i.e., it has priority over one's own.'115 As well, tradition 'needs to be affirmed, embraced, cultivated. It is, essentially, preservation...[which] is an act of reason, though an inconspicuous one.'116 If something has stood the test of time, it has most likely been judged as worthy and thus is a possible source for legitimate prejudices. Our interaction with a classic text is such a source and Gadamer often returns to it for the lessons it bestows. Passed down to us through tradition, the interpretation of a classic text illustrates how the '[u]nderstanding is to be thought of less as a subjective act than as participating in an event of tradition, a process of transmission in which past and present are constantly mediated. This is what must be validated by hermeneutical theory, which is far too dominated by the idea of a procedure, a method.'117

Yet understanding also has the temporal element of the future and the 'projection' part of the phrase 'thrown projection' captures just that. Here is the activity of the interpreter caught in the hermeneutical circle, involving a projection or 'anticipation of meaning in which the whole... envisaged becomes actual understanding when the parts that are determined by the whole themselves also determine this whole.'118 Correct understanding is when all the particular details harmonize with the whole. Thus far this is just a more sophisticated articulation of the hermeneutical circle. But when this future oriented movement of the interpreter is combined with his thrown-ness into tradition, a much more sophisticated logic results, and Gadamer takes pains at demonstrating how tradition is not simply a static or permanent precondition but is itself something the interpreter co-determines. To see this we should recognize in Gadamer's 'fore-conception of completeness' the condensation of the two temporal elements whereby the interpreter prejudicially assumes or projects an immanent unity of meaning to the text before him. In this way 'the circle of understanding is not a "methodological" circle, but describes an element of the ontological structure of understanding'119 whereby the interpreter could be said to pulsate between the strangeness of a traditionary text and its projected familiarity. This is a favorable situation as it enables the interpreter to call into question his prejudices, which otherwise would go unexamined. So too with temporal distance between the interpreter and the text, which classical hermeneutic thought struggled to overcome. In contrast, Gadamer recognizes the productive nature of this distance; in fact, the greater the distance the more likely it is that the interpreter will confront those other prejudices found in previous generational readings of the text which results in calling his own prejudices into question. This favorable result opens up future projections of meanings and possibilities for the interpreter. History is thus effective in the event of understanding, and Gadamer calls upon us to become reflectively aware of this, of standing within the hermeneutical circle of understanding. This is possible due to our possession of a 'historically effected consciousness.'120 To aid us in grasping this, he utilizes the term 'horizon' to designate one's inherited set of prejudices, which establishes one's sphere of possible meaning. The term as well suggests how this set can change, possibly contracting through the exclusion of a subset of prejudices or else expanding to encompass a larger set. Now for Gadamer, when the interpreter endeavors to understand a text, he actually projects the text's horizon and its attendant prejudices within his own initial horizon. And the interpreter is to become aware of this, to consciously use his foreconception of completeness to fine-tune his horizon so as to fuse it with the projected historical horizon of the text itself. In other words, this latter horizon must be experienced as always already having been projected within one's inherited set of prejudices. Thus 'understanding is always the fusion of these horizons supposedly existing by themselves.'121 In this way the interpreter's encounter with a text allows for a new understanding to arise and for changes in the horizon of meaning.

In this manner Gadamer believes he has overcome the Diltheyan desire to establish an objective epistemological methodology for the human sciences. Through the extension of Heidegger's initial phenomenological break and the secularization of the theological projects of Bultmann and Ebeling, the adaptation of the new hermeneutical phenomenological approach to textual analysis in the human sciences is now accomplished and available in accessible form in Truth and Method. The response is swift. Within two years Betti publishes a booklet entitled "Hermeneutics as the General Methodology of the Geisteswissenschaften" (1962),122 which not only specifically targets Gadamer, but as well Heidegger, Bultmann and Ebeling. The work laments in its opening lines their move away from Ast, Schleiermacher, Humboldt, Droysen, Boeckh and the rich hermeneutical heritage of the Romantic period in general. In a word Betti quite simply sees Gadamer et al. as a threat to the legitimacy of referring to objects of interpretation and thus to the objectivity of interpretation itself and this 'negation of objectivity we, as historians, have to oppose with all firmness.'123

As suggested by its title, his work seeks a return to the Diltheyan notion of mental objectifications, which Betti calls 'meaning-full forms,' to conceive interpretation as a triadic process in which the interpreter apprehends these forms so as to reconstruct the creative thought of the author and the original meaning of his text. So where Gadamer turns away from the subject-object schema, Betti sees in it a productive and indispensible vehicle for achieving objective standards for interpretation and accordingly offers four canons to reach these standards, two of which concern the object of interpretation and two with its subject. The first is the 'hermeneutical autonomy of the object,' which stresses how the meaning-full forms in a text 'should be judged in relation to the standards immanent in the [author's] original intention.'124 We are decidedly not to judge them according to their suitability for other purposes deemed relevant to the interpreter, which is what Betti sees Gadamer's approach encouraging. The second is the 'coherence of meaning' or 'the principle of totality' from which it is assumed that from a unitary mind will spring a whole textual meaning which can be derived from its individual elements, with the latter in turn only understandable with reference to the comprehensive whole of which it is a part – a clear articulation of the hermeneutical circle. He speaks favorably here of Schleiermacher, from whom he often takes his own measure, arguing that this Romantic is misread by Gadamer. On the subjective side, the third canon of the 'actuality of understanding' agrees in principle with Bultmann's preunderstanding inasmuch as it recognizes how the interpreter's own experience will impact his understanding of a text. Yet Bultmann goes too far to suggest that 'it is impossible to maintain a clear distinction between the knowing subject and his object.'125 For Betti sees Bultmann completely overshadowing the object with the subjective side of interpretation. Likewise Gadamer's fore-conception of completeness equally 'rests on self-deception, i.e., it does not provide a reliable criterion for the correctness of understanding.'126 In general, a fundamental reason why Gadamer et al. do not adhere to these canons is that these men all fail to adhere to the fundamental distinction between interpretation and understanding, a distinction held to for centuries prior to Heidegger.127 Betti effectively argues that when interpretation is no longer thought of as an action and a procedure that aims for and results in the outcome of understanding, the very integrity of objective valid results in the human sciences is challenged. The subjectivism and relativism to which Gadamer has led the human sciences must be forcefully addressed.

But perhaps the fourth canon and its surrounding discussion provides the key to why this first response to Gadamer's work is the most polemic of all responses. In order to see this, recall how for Gadamer the projection of the text's meaning occurs within the interpreter's horizon so that understanding is always the fusion of these two horizons. We can now go further and introduce Gadamer's thesis that what is essential for projecting this historical horizon is application, something that must be considered 'as integral a part of the hermeneutical process as are understanding and interpretation.'128 Gadamer explains that where Romantic hermeneutics absorbed subtilitas explicandi (interpretation or explanation) by subtilitas intelligendi (understanding) starting with the work of Schleiermacher (which Betti denies), we must now add to this a third element, subtilitas applicandi (application) to comprise one unified process of understanding (and thus adding insult to injury in Betti's mind). To show how application is just as much a phase in the process of understanding as interpretation, Gadamer uses the example of legal hermeneutics to consider two cases of understanding a law. On the one hand, a judge may need to understand how the law applies to a particular case in circumstances not anticipated by the lawmakers and thus may need to establish a new precedent case that correctly realizes the original intent and meaning of the law. On the other hand is the case of the legal historian. If he is interested in explicating the true meaning of the law he is not to just consider its application when the law was first created; rather, he must also consider the history of its precedent cases since '[t]rying to understand the law in terms of its historical origin, the historian cannot disregard its continuing effect.'129 In reading Betti's booklet it is clear Gadamer's argument vexes its author, especially when we learn Betti himself is an Italian jurist and legal historian by trade. At the theoretical level, Gadamer is effectively disregarding the fourth canon of the 'hermeneutical correspondence of meaning' or 'meaning-adequacy in understanding,' which says that since 'it is the case that mind alone can address mind, then it follows that only a mind of equal stature and congenial disposition can gain access to, and understand, another mind in a meaningfully adequate way. An actual interest in understanding is by itself not enough, however lively it may be.'130 Certainly with Gadamer still in mind, Betti five pages later argues how one must be an expert and properly trained in his respective field to properly understand the meaningcontent of texts in that field; so if that field is law, the historian of law must have expert familiarity with the conceptual tools of legal dogmatics. Only in this way can one reach the technical interpretation necessary to unearth the specific laws of formation underlying objectifications of mental life and turn to the structural analysis of meaning-full forms, which is necessary for their correct understanding. This, together with the three other hermeneutical canons, form for Betti the proper methodological focus for tackling our common hermeneutical problematic as it comes into focus in the field of the human sciences.

From an entirely different quarter, Hirsch follows Betti's critique of Gadamer's alleged subjectivism and relativism in an essay appended to his Validity in Interpretation (1967)131 first published two years prior to this book. Properly speaking, this book is the first treatise in general hermeneutics written in English but its audience was rather confined to the isolated community of American literary criticism, whose cherished assumptions the book challenged by arguing that hermeneutics should serve as the foundational discipline for all literary interpretation – just not the hermeneutical phenomenological approach exemplified by Gadamer. For Gadamer's

'attack on the philological tradition in Germany and its "naïve" aspirations to objectivity... [and] the new hermeneutics Gadamer offers to replace the tradition of Schleiermacher, Humboldt, Droysen, Boeckh, Steinthal, Dilthey and Simmel may be more destructive in its implications than he had reckoned. In any case, this theory contains inner conflicts and inconsistencies which not one of the above masters wouldhave allowed to pass into print.'132

To demonstrate this inconsistency, Hirsch quotes from Truth and Method to the effect that Gadamer too recognizes the dangers of the relativism implied by historicity. He then examines a few principle concepts said to have been designed by Gadamer to address this danger and judges them to be failures. For instance, with respect to tradition, Hirsch correctly states how for Gadamer the meaning of a text lies in its subject matter, which is independent of its author and reader (though shared by both). Since Gadamer argues that understanding is not a reproductive but a productive activity, Hirsch reasons the text would then have an indeterminate meaning since 'the meaning of the text is a never-ending array of possible meanings lying in wait for a never-ending array of interpreters.'133 Hence Gadamer is inconsistent, expressly rejecting relativism but accepting the productivity of interpretation, which can only lead to relativism. Hirsch also finds evidence of inconsistency when Gadamer seems to express meaning as self-identical through its repetitive reapplication to different interpretative horizons, yet more often backs away from this to expressly deny the existence of any such original meaning. Thirdly, Hirsch challenges Gadamer's notion of the fusion of horizons as secretly presupposing an understanding of the original text before a fusion takes place within interpretation. The implication here is that Gadamer's denial of a distinction between the activities of interpretation and understanding is a lapse into relativism and also inconsistent with his formal rejection of it. In general, Hirsch sees Gadamer's extension of Heidegger's doctrine of radical historicity as the source of relativism and thus something which cannot be maintained134 along with his doctrine of prejudice, which forms his version of the hermeneutical circle. While the latter has merit, Hirsch concludes against Gadamer that neither prejudices nor the hermeneutical circle is fully inescapable as objectivity can be reached.

To better appreciate Hirsch's position, his overall theory of interpretation as embodied in his book must be outlined. As suggested by the title of this work, Hirsch lays down his principles within a belief that valid interpretations can be achieved. Yet he carefully emphasizes how validity is not the same as certainty. Consistent with his defense of philology, the primary source of valid interpretation is the original author, who must be seen as the determiner of the meaning of a text. However, Hirsch notes that since the mid-1920s there has been 'a heavy and largely victorious assault on the sensible belief that a text means what its author meant.'135 The reasons for this 'banishment' of the author and the resulting rejection of 'the only compelling normative principle that could lend validity to an interpretation' are numerous and complex.136 His stance is clearly influenced by the Husserlian theory of meaning which is examined in Chapter 2 below. Briefly, Hirsch holds that the author's meaning is 'universally compelling and generally sharable'137 because it is a self-identical, determinant and unchanging object intended by the author's will which can be reproduced by 'a deliberate reconstruction of the author's subjective stance.'138 Gadamer's theory of the projection of historical horizons and the notion of application of course rules out the doubling of consciousness, which would be needed to accomplish this reconstruction, but Hirsch, following Schleiermacher and Dilthey, believes consciousness can indeed be split into two: one which reconstructs the author's stance, and one which preserves its own stance. Hirsch is also influenced by Saussure, recognizing that the individual principle of willed authorial meaning is expressed in linguistic signs. If so, he reasons there is a larger social principle at stake in the governance of meaning involving the subsumption of the text under its proper linguistic genre.139 Thus an effort is made to systematically classify genres, types and traits to redefine 'the whole' and give to 'the part' an autonomy which 'not only describes more accurately the interpretative process but also resolves a troublesome paradox,' that is, it makes 'the hermeneutical circle... less mysterious and paradoxical than many in the German hermeneutical tradition have made it out to be.'140 Another central thesis concerns a distinction he borrows from Boeckh. As seen above in Section 1.2, Boeckh's interpretation seeks to explicate textual meaning while criticism treats that textual meaning as a component within a larger context; Hirsch calls the object of the former meaning and the object of the latter the significance of the text.141 So when Gadamer considers the series of changing contexts as integral to the complete meaning of a classic text, for Hirsch this is just the significance of the text's meaning to something else. In his eyes, Gadamer's failure to maintain this distinction makes him overlook how the meaning he purports to take from a text is only a name for the relation between the true meaning (as per authorial intent), and Gadamer's own personal valuation of the situation. For Hirsch, Gadamer at best deals in judgment and criticism. Perhaps most interestingly, Hirsch calls for making use of the scientific method of probability theory, that 'logic of uncertainty... fundamental to all the humane sciences as well,' to validate a true meaning since it also allows for qualitative judgments on whether a particular unknown is subsumable under a known class.142

Making use of procedures from the natural sciences takes on an even greater role in the work of Apel and Habermas, two similarly-minded German scholars who are equally dismayed with Gadamerian-styled research which expressly defies the need for methodology. This is obvious from the very descriptive title of Apel's essay “Scientistics, Hermeneutics, Critique of Ideology: An Outline of a Theory of Science from an Epistemological-Anthropological Point of View” (1968)143 which will be discussed momentarily. But first there is an important difference to note between Betti-Hirsch and Apel-Habermas. Broadly speaking, while all four men endeavor to provide a solid methodological foundation for the human sciences in the spirit of Dilthey, Betti's and Hirsch's correctives to Gadamer are essentially a reactivation of Romantic hermeneutics. They thus lead us into a pre-Heideggerian position. In contrast, while Apel and Habermas are certainly not hermeneutical phenomenologists, they more fully confront the Heideggerian turn by taking the historicity of understanding as their point of departure. One way to recognize the difference between these two parties is by reference to Dilthey's notion of how meaning is embedded in the expressed objectifications of life. These are the objects of an objectively valid knowledge and form the basis of a methodology for all four men. Yet Apel and Habermas move one step further: they take this objectively understood meaning and confront it with the 'author's' self-understanding of the intentions underlying these expressions. Any gap between these two moments is then to be accounted for by explanatory and interpretive procedures (of, say, psychoanalysis). From this perspective, while Betti and Hirsch's analysis of objectifications and authorial intent is done in a thorough enough fashion, they ultimately treat these two elements in relative isolation; whereas Apel and Habermas endeavor to think objectivations and authorial intent together as related dialectically. Given this object of the human sciences, the critical hermeneutics of Apel and Habermas should be considered empirical-materialist.144

In his essay Apel first establishes the need to radicalize and transform Kantian epistemology because 'a pure consciousness of objects, taken in itself, is not able to extract meaning from the world.'145 He argues that we cannot meaningfully conceive any knowledge other than one which is meaningful to us, which is to say that if our cognitive consciousness is to constitute meaning, it must do so as 'bodily-engaged' in the hic et nunc. There is thus the need to supplement the reflective Kantian a priori of consciousness (i.e., the inquiry into the conditions of the possibility of knowledge) with an engaged bodily a priori of knowledge.146 These two stand in complementary relation with each other and give a more complete picture as to how we are practically interested beings even when we engage in highly theoretical pursuits. Having thus established what he means by the 'epistemological-anthropological point of view,' the remainder of the essay deals with the first three terms of its title. Roughly speaking, 'scientistics' is to the natural sciences as 'hermeneutics' is to the human sciences, and their dialectical interaction is called the 'critique of ideology.' On the one hand, Apel argues that although the natural sciences subordinate the understanding of the human sciences to its capacity for supplying explanations of causal forces, the former nevertheless needs the latter to fully account for the transmission of culture. Illustrating his reasoning through cases of historical events, it is clear that such events cannot simply be subsumed under general laws since the conditions for these events are not causes but rationales, the intentions of freely acting individuals. Citing Heidegger's 'being-in-the-world,'147 the historian already belongs in history and herein lies the meaningful a priori transmission of history which, is just as relevant to the verification of scientific hypotheses as quantitative data. Moreover, as a priori it operates as a condition of possibility of natural science as well as its absolute limit. Yet Apel notes that this meaning-motivations dimension where the communication of tradition occurs can itself become a topic of scientific knowledge. But this 'possibility of a methodical-progressive objectivation of meaning in the hermeneutical sciences' is something which 'Gadamer disputes... [going] so far as to make the revocation of all methodical abstractions a precondition of the philosophical analysis of meaning in the hermeneutical sciences.'148 On the other hand, Apel argues the reverse case: the human sciences need the methodology the natural sciences can provide since on its own the former is incapable of performing what it was originally meant to perform. He explains that the communication of tradition was institutionally established and socially binding for centuries. But after the Enlightenment fatally questioned the immediacy of understanding tradition, the human sciences arose to address the deficit. Yet Apel judges that hermeneutics alone is incapable of performing the function of communicating tradition, as the fragmentation of what is to be understood is too great. He writes that '[i]f there is to be a rational integration of the results of the hermeneutical sciences at all, if this is not to be left to art or existential self-understanding, then this task... must also draw upon a further large group of sciences and a methodical way of thought which is reducible neither to scientific nor to hermeneutical inquiry.'149 In contrast to Gadamer, what the model of psychoanalysis reveals to Apel is that we are not fully transparent to ourselves. Yet this can be overcome. When the psychoanalyst assumes a cognitive attitude of an objective distance from his patient, he is better positioned to understand the latter's 'nonunderstandable' personal history and analogously, historians can do the same with their objects of study. For example, by suspending the official motivations of politicians one can see that the true causal factors for World War I lay with imperialist desires to open new markets.150 A psychoanalysis of human social history is thus called for, one which sets social-scientific explanation and historical-hermeneutical understanding of meaning-traditions into a dialectical mediation called the 'critique of ideology,' the latter of which serves 'to represent the only meaningful logical foundation and moral justification for the objectively explanatory sciences of man.'151

Habermas is also of the belief that hermeneutics and the scientific attitude are thoroughly complimentary in the human sciences. In the Preface to his Knowledge and Human Interests (1968) he states quite clearly how his aim is to reconstruct the prehistory of modern positivism so as to reclaim a theory of knowledge for human interests within a radical framework of self-reflection. In the initial chapters he explains how philosophy slowly abandoned its claims to epistemology and how the 'scientism' of the natural sciences – the positivist belief that its own methodology which lacks any capacity for self-reflection is knowledge itself – arose in its place.152 He first provides an account of the demise of philosophy beginning with the failures of Kantian epistemology, which relied too heavily on empirical concepts from the physical sciences; then the promising critique of Kant by Hegelian reflection is examined, which also ends in failure since Hegel's philosophy of identity precludes epistemology (i.e., the subject-object separation necessary for epistemology is ultimately denied by Hegel according to Habermas); to finally end up with Karl Marx's overcoming of Hegel, yet whose materialist approach proves too restrictive to prevent the positivist atrophy of epistemology since for Marx the human species' self-reflection is strictly conceived through labor alone. In the second part of this book the history of positivist thought, which replaced the abandoned concern for epistemology, is carefully examined. This is necessary because its illusory hold on us is so successful that it 'can no longer be dispelled by a return to Kant but only immanently – by forcing methodology to carry out a process of self-reflection in terms of its own problems.'153 This is a difficult undertaking since the effect of positivism has been to flatten out epistemology into methodology itself. In such a scenario the knowing subject is no longer the reference point and so the constitution of objects of possible experience is no longer problematic. And where there is no problem, the very enquiry into the meaning of these objects becomes superfluous and even appears to be an irrational pursuit. Habermas begins his historical analysis by first looking at the early positivism of Auguste Comte and Ernst Mach to trace back its removal of the knowing subject's capacity for reflection to their effacement of the metaphysical schema of essence and appearance. This effectively elevated and centered empirical facts as the only objects deemed worthy of its rule-bound methodological approach. However, the pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce fares better, being one of 'the first to gain clarity about the systematic meaning of [positivist] experience,'154 yet Peirce ultimately did not grasp his own methodological investigation as a self-reflection of the sciences.

Nor did Dilthey. For Habermas, what Dilthey overlooks in his theory of the three classes of life expressions is their possible non-coordination with the intended meaning of its author, the case where objectivations do not effectively express the subject's meaning-intention. For example, the facial tick which unintentionally points to the fact that the speaker is lying. For Dilthey this type of scenario was a limiting case and was left unexamined. Instead, his hermeneutical analysis exclusively aimed at trying to understand conscious intentions that were completely objectified without distortion. But Dilthey's 'model, however, could be generally applicable only under the conditions of a non-repressive society. Therefore deviations from it are the normal case under all known social conditions.'155 What was for Dilthey the norm is in fact a (non-existing) exception and so his hermeneutics, aiming as it does at conscious intentions, is at best inconsequential. At worst it is insufficient to repair the mutilations and restore the corrupted text to its integrity. Why? Because these 'mutilations have meaning as such. The meaning of a corrupt text of this sort can be adequately comprehended only after it has become possible to illuminate the meaning of the corruption itself.'156 Habermas instead calls on the 'depth hermeneutics' of Freud to uncover this meaning since manifested distortions can be traced back to the self-deceptions of the subject. Here lies the rationale of his turn toward psychoanalysis as the discipline closest to harboring a model theory of self reflection. For the aim of this discipline is to release the subject from his self-deception and this favorably results in the dissolution of the symptomatic distortions linked to that deception. More specifically, psychoanalysis does this through adequately explaining the unconscious causal forces behind the self-deception and once the subject understands this, proper self-reflection is said to have been reached. Note here that in the classic terms of Dilthey, Habermas is prioritizing the explanatory function of the natural sciences over the understanding of the human sciences. Yet the understanding in turn has its moment, since once these causal forces are understood, it simultaneously cancels their efficacy. To articulate Habermas' project in terms of textual technique, it is fair to say that for him the objectivity of hermeneutical understanding occurs when the interpreter reflects the object of a text and himself simultaneously as moments of an encompassing objective structure. This logic of an objective comprehension of itself in its own self-formative process is thus Habermas' version of the hermeneutical circle, which can theoretically close the gap between the incomplete objectivated meaning and that latent meaning of its author discernible from the larger context of life. In terms of Habermas' wider critical project, hermeneutics likewise figures large: since '[t]he process of inquiry in the [human] sciences moves at the transcendental level of communication, so that the explication of meaning structures is necessarily subject to the viewpoint of the possible maintenance of the intersubjectivity of mutual understanding,'157 the hermeneutical methodological technique is to be used whenever a disturbance of consensus manifests itself. Its aim is to establish unconstrained agreement of expectations and move the participants toward a non-violent recognition. This is of course to be distinguished from the process of inquiry in the natural sciences, which is organized in a transcendental framework of instrumental action whereby nature objectifies itself into an object of knowledge for possible technical control. Yet Habermas nevertheless does strive to maintain the methodological standards of the natural sciences for the subject of the human sciences.

For someone like Palmer, Habermas is still too rooted in the Cartesian tradition with his concern for the subjective element in interpretation, which effectively treats the hermeneutical experience as conceptual knowledge. As noted at the beginning of this chapter, his Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer (1969) should be considered the first proper introduction of hermeneutics to a wider English-speaking audience. While Hirsch's publication was two years earlier, it should be recalled that it had a limited target audience. But the greater distinction between the two works concerns their respective content. In contrast to Hirsch, Palmer's book is much broader in scope. Its first part contains lengthy discussions of the etymological roots of hermeneutics and of contending modern definitions, which prepare the reader for its substantive second part where a chapter or two is devoted to each of the four scholars named in its title. This is prefaced by discussions of important philologists of the past as well as an assessment of the contemporary state of affairs in hermeneutics inclusive of Betti and Hirsch himself, who are both critiqued from a decidedly hermeneutical phenomenological perspective. Indeed, this book unabashedly champions Heidegger and especially Gadamer,158 whose perspective imprints itself on the content of this book at every turn as it builds up to its third and final part. Beyond his achievement of having first introduced hermeneutics and in particular, Gadamer's hermeneutical phenomenology to the English-speaking world, his 'Hermeneutical Manifesto to American Literary Interpretation,' which closes the book, is where he leaves his most original mark on hermeneutical theory. There he pleads with American criticism to halt its search for new tools and to instead turn to a rigorous reexamination of the presuppositions of its interpretative approach through a bold exploration of Heidegger and Gadamer.159 In general he finds this school overlooks the historical character of understanding literary texts, one of the unfortunate consequences of their employment of the subject-object schema which treats the text as an external aesthetic object. While not specifically mentioning Habermas in his work, Palmer would certainly include him in this critique despite Habermas' frequently expressed recognition of the historical nature of understanding. Palmer's point would be that he really does not recognize this, since by definition any critic who has a concern for methodology like Habermas (or Betti, Hirsch, Apel or any hermeneutical thinker prior to Heidegger) also has a need for presupposing a distance between the subject-interpreter and the object-text. And because of this the historical dimension of understanding, which always already undermines this distance, is overlooked. Palmer systematically formulates such hermeneutical phenomenological lessons in his programmatic final chapter entitled 'Thirty Theses on Interpretation.' Significantly, more than one third of these theses concern admonishments against the methodological way of thinking, which is said to lose the meaning of the text. For instance, Thesis 18 reverses the usual methodological framework of a passive object yielding to an active subject: 'It is not the interpreter who grasps the meaning of the text; the meaning of the text seizes him.'160 For Palmer, as for Gadamer, there is no choice amongst competing methodologies to be made, for it is the very notion of method itself that must be questioned.

In discussing Habermas' critique of Hegel above it was suggested that epistemological pursuits necessitate thinking in terms of a separation between subject and object. Palmer is well aware of this connection. But where the hermeneutical project of Habermas seeks a critical knowledge of socio-cultural objects and thus very much wants to maintain this separation, Palmer follows Heidegger and Gadamer in continually stressing the ontological foundations of this subject-object separation, how the ontological function of understanding discloses the being encompassing both the subject and the object. This is concisely captured in Thesis 4: 'The hermeneutical experience is ontological.'161 In trying to make sense of these debates between the methodologically-minded advocates for epistemology and those who instead turn to ontology, we might examine Ricoeur's essay "The Task of Hermeneutics" (1973).162 Ricoeur sketches there the historical trajectory of the central concern for epistemology in the 19th century to the increasing turn toward ontology in the 20th century. In light of this we might say the debates occurring in the 1960s are the first significant materialization of a clash precipitated by this larger historical process, one in which the newer ontological claims of hermeneutical phenomenology so forcefully asserted themselves in the popular Truth and Method that traditional epistemology was finally forced to respond.

Evidently by 1973 the camp of ontology had won enough major battles that for Ricoeur the 'task' was now to bring epistemology out from under Heidegger's philosophy and thus redeem for it a more dignified status. This might appear to mean that Ricoeur falls easily into the camp of epistemology in line with those working to establish an objective methodology. Yet his balanced, middle-of-the-road style everywhere prohibits a simple labeling of his approach – ironic given his penchant for well-crafted prosody which always comes complete with neat structural divisions and concepts to efficiently categorize and sort its subject matter. The present essay is no exception. While ultimately arguing for a return to epistemology, he does demonstrate a greater appreciation for Gadamer than any of the others examined above who take issue with the hermeneutical phenomenological approach of Truth and Method. The first part of the essay traces Schleiermacher's wish to incorporate into a general framework all regional hermeneutics up to Dilthey, who is said to have completed the project. Ricoeur perspicaciously argues how 'this movement of deregionalisation cannot be pressed to the end unless at the same time the properly epistemological concerns of hermeneutics – its efforts to achieve a scientific status – are subordinated to ontological preoccupations, whereby understanding ceases to appear as a simple mode of knowing in order to become a way of being and a way of relating to beings and to being.'163 So really Dilthey only finished the epistemological project of a general hermeneutics. What remained to be done was the ontologization of this project and the attendant conception of hermeneutics not as a general technique, but as the fundamental thing itself. Heidegger and Gadamer effectively accomplish this ontologization by rejecting Dilthey's belief that the human sciences could compete with the natural sciences by means of its own methodology, which also meant understanding Dilthey's aporia between explanation and understanding as taking place within an epistemological framework. By rejecting this framework, Heidegger and Gadamer 'would subsume questions of method to the reign of a primordial ontology'164 so that the question changes from 'how do we know?' to 'what is the mode of being of that being who understands this question?' Yet for Ricoeur, Heidegger's subordination of epistemology to ontology is no resolution to Dilthey's aporia but just its simple displacement to the aporia between epistemology and ontology. The question Ricoeur asks expresses a Diltheyan concern: if Heideggerian philosophy is 'always engaged in going back to the foundations... [are we not] left incapable of beginning the movement of return which would lead from the fundamental ontology to the properly epistemological question of the status of the human sciences'?165 He fears that if this question is not addressed, such a philosophy is only in dialogue with itself and moreover, could not even achieve its stated intent to return to foundational matters. Additionally and in echo of Habermas, the question of critique also cannot be accounted for in such a philosophy.

Ricoeur contends that the new aporia Heidegger has created becomes the central problem of Truth and Method because Gadamer takes seriously Dilthey's question. But this is expressed in terms of Heideggerian ontology. As we saw above, Gadamer contends that the fundamental presupposition of the methodology of the natural sciences is an alienating distanciation between the subject and the object, which destroys the primordial relation of belonging, our relation to the historical as such. For Ricoeur, this signals that Gadamer does attempt the return movement to the epistemological question that the former wants to accomplish and further argues that what 'marks the summit of Gadamer's reflection on the foundation of the human sciences'166 is his historically effected consciousness. This category is not a methodology but rather a reflective consciousness of this methodology, of being exposed to history and its effects in a way that cannot be objectified since it is a phenomenon of history itself. But Ricoeur sees a problem. Such a conception of consciousness expressly rejects any notion of distance and so cannot account for the critical capacity of consciousness. Thus Gadamer stands in need of correction. Firstly, Ricoeur contends there is a productive aspect to the element of distance, a general tension between the proximate and the remote, which is essential to the historical consciousness Gadamer places at the foundation of the human sciences. This productivity of distanciation can also paradoxically be seen as integral to the functioning of the fusion of horizons, which was also expressly conceived by Gadamer to overcome historical distance. Finally, Gadamer makes 'an impassioned apology for the dialogue which we are and for the prior understanding which supports us' via the mediation of language. This conception categorically denies any autonomous role for the author, the reader or the text. But for Ricoeur the mediation is rather through 'the matter of the text.' The difference from Gadamer is subtle but crucial, for when Ricoeur explains that this mediating function is only operational 'because the interlocutors fade away in face of the things said,' he nevertheless does retain a minimal notion of a subject and a text, even though for the moment of the encounter the matter of the text which directs the exchange 'belongs neither to its author nor to its reader.'167 It is thus by retaining the subject-object distance that Ricoeur believes he can 're-regionalise' hermeneutics and grant to both explanation and epistemology an autonomy lost with Heidegger's ontological turn to understanding.168

Frank also effectively works with a subject-object matrix, interested as he is in maintaining the subject's autonomy in relation to the text. In his essay "The Interpretation of a Text" (1974)169 he confronts contemporary tendencies to reduce individuals to structure while celebrating the existentialist emphasis on the individual in his ethical singularity. The discussion in this essay thus anticipates fields of scholarship covered in the next two chapters below. Interestingly, Frank returns to Schleiermacher to find that he is in a sense the father of both structuralism and existentialist phenomenology. On the one hand what Schleiermacher 'labeled grammatical interpretation anticipates, as Peter Szondi first observed, in outline form the working hypothesis of structurization as it... has been developed and in part practiced in our own day above all by A. J. Greimas and R. Barthes.'170 Once a text's structure is in place, neither dissenting declarations of meaning by the author nor individual prejudices of the interpreter can change the meaning its elements take in relation to their structural surroundings. For both grammatical interpretation and contemporary structuralism equally ignore extra-textual interventions by the author and the interpreter. Frank focuses his analysis on Roland Barthes, whose technique represents for him a supreme example of what Barthes in his own words describes as a commitment 'to the dream of "écriture [writing] without style."'171 The problem with Barthes is that his scholarly rigor of codifying and providing quantitative categories to capture the significance of those textual signs constituted at the intersection of the sliding levels of expression and meaning results in 'an enormous impoverishment in the understanding of the meaning.'172 With respect to Barthes' (post)structuralist turn, which breaks away from his previous attempt of providing sum totals of semantic units so as to grasp the transcendent Meaning which supposedly structures all the signs of a text, the result is equally disastrous. For his (post)structuralist codifying technique uncovers the text's ambiguity by endeavoring to multiply meaning, which again frustrates understanding.

On the other hand, Schleiermacher's psychological interpretation moves away from treating the text as if it had no author and instead appeals to the productivity of the subject so as to reestablish the connection to a living communication, which the piece of writing interrupted. This type of interpretation acknowledges style but by expressly following Boeckh and Humboldt, Frank argues how this is never exactly graspable or repeatable since the union of the general and individual components of style are unstable. Frank thus admits that no true meaning can be arrived at by being attentive to style due to the impossibility of assuming an Archimedean point outside of language. He uses Derrida's notion of différance in this respect, which pits a constant slippage of meaning against the grammatical interpretation of structuralism, which presupposes 'at least one meaning for and with itself;' instead, Frank recognizes how '[m]eaning has no anchor – in other words, no definitive, no certain interpretation – in the infinite text; it attests, as Derrida says, to "an irreducible and creative multiplicity."'173 But neither Derrida's nor any other contemporary model of interpretation possesses the criteria for describing stylistic expression, criteria which Frank deems necessary to complete psychological interpretation. That is, with one exception, and '[t]his one exception is Sartre... Above all, this chef-d'oeuvre may stand in passing as the state's witness for enduring relevance of that which Schleiermacher had called the "technical [or psychological] interpretation: the complete understanding of style."'174 For Sartre, the multiplicity which Derrida speaks of always unfolds on two relational planes, one which registers how epochal circumstances relate to the living totality of the author, and one which relates the author's 'fundamental project' to the totality of his particular textual output. These are of course circular relations, relating part to whole and whole to part, and Frank recognizes 'style' as that which names 'the break, the difference, by which the individual proceeds beyond the given.'175 For Sartre, the style of the text calls its interpreter into creative collaboration, reminding him of his ability to move beyond structured meaning, of how 'we ourselves are responsible for meaning... Judged by the methodological ideal of the exact natural sciences, the idea of the individual's irreducibility to the structure appears trivial or sentimental: the world will continue to exist without him. It is still easier for it – Sartre reminded us of this – to continue to exist without human beings at all.'176 For Frank the subject-object schema must not be overshadowed by an underlying multiplicity in a way which would deny the irreplaceability and singularity of the individual subject.

The hermeneutical circle is only implicitly articulated in this article. But with Frank's reading of Sartre, which stresses how the constitution of meaning is due to a creative collaboration with the author, we see how Frank in no way considers meaning pre-existing in the hermeneutical circle. Nancy no more believes in such a pre-existence and much more directly takes on the issue of the relation between the individual, meaning and the hermeneutical circle in his essay "Sharing Voices" (1982).177 Indeed its opening pages form a sustained discussion of the hermeneutical circle in its classic form, the ontological treatment it receives in Being and Time and the subsequent (mis)understanding of the latter. More specifically, his analysis aims to 'engender doubt regarding the existence of a simple correspondence between the hermeneutical circle and Heideggerian preunderstanding – and engender doubt, consequently, regarding the hermeneutic interpretation (Bultmannian or Gadamerian) of Heidegger.'178 In a word, Nancy holds that Bultmann and Gadamer are in error thinking that Heidegger equates the hermeneutical circle with a meaning which is pre-given in the circular condition of the preunderstanding or the pre-judgment. What his two followers seem to be missing is the anticipatory gesture inherent in Heidegger's notion of interpretation and Auslegung [clarification] of expressions so that '[f]ar from hermēneuein being related to this pre-understanding, it consists in Auslegung, in which it announces what it comprehends.'179 To appreciate Nancy's reading and emphasis on this aspect of Heidegger, we do well to remember that it is a decidedly French reading, which considers meaning in terms of the futur antérieur, marking what 'will have been' the case after a particular future moment has lapsed. This verbal declension concisely holds both a past and a future in a present understanding, and inasmuch as Bultmann and Gadamer are seen as focusing on a meaning which is always already understood, they overlook how 'hermeneutics anticipates meaning, whereas hermēneuein creates the anticipatory or "annunciative" structure of meaning itself. The first is possible only on the ground of the second. The latter does not define interpretation, nor in all rigor something like "pre-understanding." Hermēneuein defines this: understanding is possible only by the anticipation of meaning which creates meaning itself.'180 This paradoxical logic is perhaps clearer once Nancy turns to another key text by Heidegger, which is formally taken up in the following chapter below. For our present purposes, when Nancy stresses how for Heidegger the staging of a dialogue between two interlocutors is what is important and how the object of this dialogue is the dialogue itself, which can never be seized as an object, we can see how the 'hermeneut has, first of all and essentially – if not exclusively – a knowledge which is not about "content," nor about meaning, but which is nothing more than a "form."'181 The dialogue qua form is the 'object' of dialogue which cannot be epistemologically brought to bear. Nevertheless, Nancy tells us that the strange thing is that this knowledge is indeed a complete meaning. Moreover such analysis is equally applicable to the reader of a poem, as this too is in the form of dialogue. Here also a circular exchange takes place, a 'divine sharing' whereby the Muse offers a gift which the poet hears and inscribes. The hermeneut then recognizes this sharing of a 'divine voice' which makes hermēneia nothing but the articulation and announcement of this sharing.182 Nancy conceives of this sharing as chains of rings or hermeneutical circles in which the interpreter is the final link who does not so much provide interpretations of interpretations in the Nietzschean sense but gives, shares, announces and abandons himself in the multiplying and sharing of voices from which he draws his very existence.183 With such a conception of hermeneutics we are very far indeed from the subject-object schema and a concern for objective methodology in the natural scientific sense.

In an endnote to the final page of this essay Nancy suggests his work provides a possible resolution to the debate between Gadamer and Habermas. He reasons that if the question of dialogue is also both a question of interpretation and communication, then 'the hermeneutic of Gadamer [which] culminates in a general theory of the dialogue as truth... can agree with, theoretically and politically, the "communicational" vision of J. Habermas. In the same way as interpretation is thought to be the reappropriation of a meaning, communication is, then, thought to be the – at least Utopian – appropriation of a rational consensus.'184 Nothing more is said but Nancy's weighing in on these two men should not be surprising. Interest in the exchange which took place between Gadamer and Habermas steadily grew from the mid-1970s so that by 1990 some dozen or more journal articles existed which explicitly referenced the debate in their titles. This secondary literature falls into three broad categories. There are those that side with Habermas, a smaller group that sides with Gadamer, and those which attempt to meld the two views and declare them compatible. Nancy would no doubt fall into this last category. While interest seems to have waned after 1990, curiously in 1995 two full-length books appeared entirely dedicated to the debate. The subtitle of Alan How's The Habermas-Gadamer Debate and the Nature of the Social: Back to Bedrock (1995)185 gives an indication of why this debate, which contained the most lengthy and sustained exchange of all the Gadamer debates, was of such interest. In his own words,

'the issues generated by the debate speak to the most fundamental questions affecting not only my own discipline of sociology, but other social sciences and the humanities generally. Though neither author is a foundationalist in the philosophical sense, their debate was a kind of excavation, it dug down and revealed the foundations of the social world, and does, I think, provide the best context inwhich analysis and discussion of theoretical matters affecting these disciplines can take place.'186

Moreover, as foundational issues in the human sciences arise, so do fundamental questions regarding methodology, as we have seen. In terms of which category How falls into, it is most likely the second as he tells us he has been increasingly drawn to the complexities of Gadamer's responses to Habermas' criticisms, the latter of which are too quickly celebrated simply because they are critical.187 Broadly speaking, in his Knowledge and Hermeneutic Understanding: A Study of the Habermas-Gadamer Debate (1995),188 Teigas also feels more sympathetic to Gadamer in the face of the latter's treatment in the secondary literature. Yet he does seem to agree with Nancy's speculation that the two hermeneutical paradigms are compatible when he reviews his own analysis in the final chapter of his book to conclude 'that, in all cases, a mediation seemed to be possible between the two positions and none of them could claim superiority over the other.'189 So in no way does Teigas (or How for that matter) declare a winner in the debate. Instead we are asked to grasp the two debaters in their conflict and distinguish the two contrasting roles they reserve for hermeneutics: where Gadamer thinks more in terms of the experience of the meaning of the text seizing the interpreter, Habermas in contrast utilizes hermeneutics to understand the meaning the interpreter actively seizes from the text. Yet according to Teigas, one of the reasons Gadamer and Habermas can be brought into productive dialogue where each is informed by the other's limitations is that they share the same underlying set of humanistic values inherited from the Enlightenment. So in an entirely different way than Nancy, Gadamer is also noted to deviate from Heidegger. For in the end, while Teigas judges how Gadamer and Habermas cannot be merged, he nevertheless feels they can be submitted together to a meta-critique by Heidegger's own critique of humanism as not truly challenging the technocratic rationality of the natural sciences.190 A discussion of Heidegger is continued in Chapter 2 below to position his thought as that which splits the field of phenomenology into two trajectories across the 20th century.

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