SEXUATED TOPOLOGY AND THE
SUSPENSION OF MEANING
A NON-HERMENEUTICAL PHENOMENOLOGICAL
APPROACH TO TEXTUAL ANALYSIS
WILLIAM J. URBAN
CHAPTER 2
PHENOMENOLOGY
Meanings inspired only by remote, confused, inauthentic intuitions – if by any intuitions at all – are not enough: we must go back to the 'things themselves.'191
With these words the dawn of the 20th century was greeted by the new field of research of phenomenology. As suggested by its etymological root in the Greek word phainomenon which means 'appearance,' taken as a philosophical attitude the call was now made to shift the emphasis of study away from the external world of objects to refocus attention on the way these objects appear to the subject, as well as to inquire into the role the subject plays in this process of appearing. Such an appeal has immediate ramifications on both sides of the subject-object divide. On the one hand, treating the object no longer as a simple fact but only as it appears (i.e., as a phenomenon) poses a radical break not only from the way objects are regarded by the natural sciences but from Kantian epistemology as well. For no longer is the phenomenal appearance of an object to be considered a manifestation which fails to reach its essential nature in the noumenal realm, as it was for Kant. The supposed noumenal limitation on the constitution of phenomena, which proved a stumbling block for Kant, is effectively removed by phenomenology since the phenomenal world alone is now considered reality itself and not just the reality we can know. On the other hand, a new emphasis is placed on the subjective experience of these phenomena, as this new discipline finds the ultimate source of all meaning in the lived experience of the subject. Phenomenology might indeed be called the 'philosophy of experience'. Accordingly its task is to describe the structures of this experience, in particular at the level of consciousness, the imagination and the situatedness of the subject in society, history or the world at large. The second chapter undertakes an examination of significant thinkers in phenomenology and its various schools with a particular focus on their descriptive approaches to the text which, broadly speaking, is an object they either take as a mediator between the consciousnesses of its author and readers or as a mediated experience which attempts to disclose a meaningful relation to a world.
Section 2.1 sketches out the two main types of phenomenology, one established by its founding father Husserl, whose insistence on the univocality of meaning objects permitted the creation of a new philosophical approach deemed rigorously scientific, in contrast to Heidegger, whose acceptance of meaning as irreducibly non-univocal effectively grounded hermeneutics in a phenomenology which eschewed such methodology. Section 2.2 examines a few scholars who apply Heidegger's ontology of understanding to other realms of thought. Section 2.3 traces the path laid out by some scholars and schools which remain loyal to Husserl's original epistemology of interpretation.
2.1 The Two Types of Phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger
When discussing Schleiermacher in Section 1.2 above, it was mentioned that psychologism was a growing force throughout the 19th century. This is one facet of the strong empiricist and naturalist philosophies which had a defining influence on the latter half of that century. These philosophies purported that only physical objects truly exist, so accordingly non-physical phenomena like numbers, concepts or thought in general could only be understood as effects of the physicality of the human mind. The study of reasoning thus came to be seen as a province of psychology, the science of the psychical acts of the mind. For Husserl, the belief that psychology can account for rational thought and the laws of logic was in error. Psychologism not only meant that logical objects such as truths, propositions, relations – or meanings – were reducible to psychological states of affairs, but by extension the very foundations of the pure sciences of logic, mathematics, geometry and philosophy itself must be seen as ultimately grounded in psychology. If so, this would require concluding, among other things, that to different psychic structures correspond different logics, or that logic evolves along with the human species and its psyche. Husserl directly confronted such absurdities by taking on the task of refuting psychologism once and for all in his Logical Investigations, Vol. 1, aptly subtitled 'Prolegomena to Pure Logic' and it is generally agreed that he was successful. Yet as Husserl tells us in his foreword, this work actually breaks away from his own previously held psychologistic standpoint, and this is something for which he himself was criticized. That he accomplished this break is thus due in part by his building on previous work done by leading anti-psychologistic logicians of the day. One of these logicians was Frege, who indeed critiqued Husserl's early work precisely on these grounds. This is reason enough to briefly examine Frege before turning to Logical Investigations. But instead of examining Frege's foundational work in modern mathematics and logic which would actually not take us too far off course given the focus on logic in Part II, we turn to his best known work as it most directly addresses the subject matter at hand: meaning.
This article, “On Sinn and Bedeutung” [On Sense and Meaning] (1892),192 could be seen as reflecting his frustration with his contemporaries' inexact talk regarding the meaning of an expression. To that end, he set out to make a rigorous distinction between sense and meaning, which has proved highly influential to this day. To appreciate how he accomplished this, it should be noted that by the time of writing this article, he had already made his crucial move in extending the idea of function-argument analysis from mathematics to logic. This meant he no longer analyzed propositional statements as had traditionally been done. In simple terms, instead of treating these as of the apophantic form of 'S is P,' Frege now used the mathematical notion of argument to replace the subject term of the statement and the mathematical notion of function to replace the predicate term and in doing so he thus assured a certain mathematical rigor to his analysis of ordinary language. In terms of the distinction in question, the definite object referred to by an expression is what Frege calls its meaning. In his famous example, the meaning of 'Morning Star' is Venus. But it is clear that such an object can have many expressions, as in 'Evening Star' which refers to that same object. Frege concludes that '[t]he Bedeutung of "Evening Star" would be the same as that of "Morning Star," but not the sense.'193 Simply said, the two expressions have the same meaning, but embody different senses. Through this simple distinction Frege is able to redefine other commonly used terms. For instance, he expands his analysis to entire assertoric sentences, such as 'The Morning Star is a body illuminated by the Sun' and asks whether the 'thought' contained therein is its sense or meaning. He concludes that this 'thought... cannot be the Bedeutung of the sentence, but must rather be considered as its sense'194 for the simple reason that someone might hold the above sentence true and an identical sentence which substitutes 'Evening Star' for 'Morning Star' as false if they did not know the two arguments have the same meaning. Frege also assigns terms to the various connections to be had between the three levels of the sign, its sense and its meaning. For instance, 'judgment' is the step from the level of sense or thought to meaning. But his most controversial claim, already implied in the above, is his equating of the meaning of a sentence with its truth-value.195 This allows Frege to cast upon any assertoric sentence which has a meaning a judgment regarding that meaning as either the True or the False. But despite his founding influence in analytic philosophy and the philosophy of language, Frege was met with dissenting opinion regarding many of his claims. One notable dissenter was Husserl, who effectively critiqued Frege's basic distinction of sense and meaning while sharing in the overall anti-psychologist project.
Husserl chooses to attack the psychologistic notion of meaning as a mental entity of the human mind by appealing to the existence of an objective domain of meanings which transcends the mental life of any thinker. Thus he admonishes us:
'If someone wished to argue from the fact that a true judgement, like any judgement, must spring from the constitution of the judging subject in virtue of appropriate natural laws, we should warn him not to confuse the "judgement," qua content of judgement, i.e. as an ideal unity, with the individual, real act of judgement. It is the former that we mean when we speak of the judgement 2 × 2 = 4, which is the same whoever passes it.'196
There are two points to be noted here. First, Husserl is accusing psychologism of conflating the logical object with the logical act. To illustrate this, we can use the apophantic judgment form of 'S is P,' the form Husserl always considered the basic structure of thinking and language and to which Heidegger criticizes. For Husserl, the sphere of meaning is the content of the judgment 'S(two times two) is P(equal to four)' and not the act or assertion of this judgment. Moreover, the laws of logic apply not to the act of judgment which is the domain of the psychological sphere, but to the meanings which make up the content of a judgment. Said in another way, let X = a logical proposition (e.g., 2 × 2 = 4) and Y = a rational thinker. The psychologistic reading of 'Y thinks X' would consider X to be a mental entity of Y's mind, a real part of Y's mental life while Husserl's reading would consider X to be an object of Y's thinking. Husserl thus maintains a separation between the subject and the object and so works with a version of the epistemological subject-object schema. This leads to the second point discernible in the above quotation, which is the failure of psychologism to recognize logical objects as distinct from real objects. In contrast to psychologism, the content of 2 × 2 = 4, its meaning, is a logical object which should be treated as harboring a being and a truth despite its lack of physicality. Certainly there are individual assertions of 2 × 2 = 4, but to 'talk of a subjective truth, that [it] is one thing for one man and the opposite for another, must count as the purest nonsense.'197 For Husserl, the singular truth of this proposition transcends all its individual assertions and without it the very idea of scientific knowledge is impossible.
Husserl expands on his treatment of meaning as a logical object as his investigations proceed, dividing all beings into the ideal and the real and then further dividing ideal objects into those that are meanings (e.g., names, concepts, propositions, truths) and those that are not (e.g., numbers, relations, essences).198 But by the first investigation it is already clear that '[p]ure logic, wherever it deals with concepts, judgements, and syllogisms, is exclusively concerned with the ideal unities that we here call "meanings."'199 Indeed the ideal object of meaning is so privileged over other ideal objects that logic itself is defined as the science of meanings. The danger with this notion of holding meanings to be ideal entities which qualify as objects just as much as the real objects of empirical science is that it immediately brings Plato to mind. However, even though Husserl considers meanings irreducible in their being and thus objective, transcendent, singular, unchanging, universal, sharable and standing outside time, they decidedly do not exist in some Platonic heaven; Husserl's opening remarks in the second chapter of the second investigation make this clear. So how exactly are we to conceive of Husserl's notion of the ideality of meaning? His use of metaphors often only adds to the mystery. For instance, in the fifth investigation he effectively tells us that meaning is to the expression as the soul is to the body so meanings, like souls, can animate the bodies of different expressions.200 It is, however, far more likely the case that differing expressions harbor different meanings as in his famous example of 'the victor of Jena' and 'the vanquished at Waterloo.' While we saw how Frege would declare these equivalent in terms of their meaning since the same object is referenced in both expressions, Husserl argues that they have different meaningful contents. Here is the basic distinction between Frege and Husserl, yet it does not answer our question. Again, how and from where do meanings come to embody expressions?
To answer this we must recognize how logical experience has two sides which parallel the subjectobject divide, namely, the subjective objectivating act as well as the objective ideal meaning discussed above. As introduced in the fifth investigation, the two sides compose the two moments of his theory of consciousness as 'intentional.' For Husserl, the intentionality of consciousness means it is directed beyond itself to a vast array of objects both real and ideal. There are thus both acts of consciousness and objects of those acts, and so consciousness is always consciousness of something, or in his own words '[i]n perception something is perceived, in imagination, something imagined, in a statement something stated, in love something loved, in hate hated, in desire desired etc.'201 Yet Husserl does not think of the object as 'out there' to which a consciousness must relate. Rather, it is the correlate or content or 'matter' of the act of consciousness, 'that element in an act which first gives it reference to an object, and reference so wholly definite that it not merely fixes the object meant in a general way, but also the precise way in which it is meant.'202 So the thing meant in a meaning-intentional act is the matter of that act and is to be taken as an ideal object of meaning. Certainly the constitution of meaning is encompassed in one intentional experience. But since Husserl nevertheless makes a distinction between subject and object in this one experience, this allows for a conceptualization of meaning-making as a process which takes place between them. If we inevitably resign ourselves to a Platonic vision to aid us in understanding Husserl's theory of meaning, as long as we do not hypostasize meanings 'up there,' this is acceptable. This moderate Platonic approach might envisage meaning in a Husserlian vein as a half-existing stuff in the Heavens, a Gegenstand, an object belonging to the domain of possible experience which designates a simple phenomenal entity. A subjective meaning-intentional act would then be required to transform that possibility into a fully existent actuality, to instantiate its universality into an objectivated instant through the conscious act of a subject intending a particular meaning.
Now, both interpretation and understanding are acts of consciousness and thus constitutive of meaning. But for Husserl so are perceiving, imagining, desiring, hoping and countless other conscious acts. Clearly his philosophy has departed from the classical field of hermeneutics and its privileging of interpretation and understanding as tools or mediums by which to grasp meaning. In truth his approach is not really concerned with meanings directly so much as their sense as meanings and accordingly his new epistemology is a methodological approach which primarily proceeds by asking how such a sense is constituted in the first place. It thus seems that the hermeneutical question as it was asked up through the 19th century has been slightly demoted by Husserl's phenomenological method of inquiry. This is especially the case when we reflect on how Husserl insists on the univocality of meaning. For if meanings cannot be built out of other meanings, phenomenology as it stands in the Logical Investigations has no real need for hermeneutics to explicate that meaning since meaning comes already objectively known to the conscious subject. The only thing left at that point is to describe those processes which constituted that meaning. The crucial turn comes when Heidegger in contrast accepts meaning as irreducibly non-univocal and thus creates for phenomenology a need for hermeneutics to choose from among competing potentialities of meaning. Meaning once again and in an unheard of way suddenly takes center stage. His raising of 'the question of the meaning of being' on the opening page of Being and Time effectively announces a crossing of phenomenology with hermeneutics. The phenomenological motto of 'back to the things themselves' takes on a decidedly hermeneutical flavor as the hermeneutical phenomenology which emerges from this work transforms what was once mere (hermeneutical) technique into the thing itself. Section 1.3 above considered hermeneutical phenomenology through some of its later adherents as well as through the eyes of some of its critics. In the remainder of the present section we examine its birthplace in the Heidegger of 1927 as well as a text of his a quarter of a century later, which provides commentary on his abandonment of hermeneutics soon after the publication of Being and Time.
Where Husserl's phenomenology was clearly epistemologically oriented, examining the relation between the subjective experience of knowing and the objectivity of the content known, Heidegger's phenomenology is ontological, primarily oriented to the being of that finite being, Dasein, which poses the question of the meaning of being since 'it is the being that always already in its being is related to what is sought in this question.'203 Heidegger's approach has no need for method for 'hermeneutics, as the interpretation of the being of Da-sein,'204 is to recover understanding not in the mode of knowledge but in the mode of being. Instead of making inquiries into the conditions needed for a subject to understand a text, history or the world at large, an ontological reversal is to take place so that the hermeneutical phenomenologist seeks the being of that being which consists of and exists through understanding. The essential being belonging to Dasein is found in the ontological structure of understanding, which stands prior to empirical understanding and accordingly what Heidegger calls 'the fore-structures of understanding' must be interrogated. This interrogation is found primarily in sections 31-34. The task as he sees it is not to simply reinstall interpretation and understanding back to the privileged place they enjoyed in the hermeneutical tradition but to reveal their primordial status in terms of Dasein expressed as understanding itself. More specifically, Dasein articulates meaning in the form of an interpretation 'of something as something... essentially grounded in fore-having, fore-sight and fore-conception. Interpretation is never a presuppositionless grasping of something previously given.'205 The implication here that a presuppositionless interpretation is an illusion is an implicit critique of Husserl, who expressly articulates his phenomenology in such a way. Illustrating these fore-structures in terms of a textual approach, consider a text such as Antigone. Heidegger's point would be that we could never interpret it abstractly as we always already carry with us a certain involvement with such a task, e.g., our levels of knowledge of Greek language and literature in general (fore-having); we also interpret from a particular point of view, e.g., our Lacanian disposition might cause us to treat Antigone as the embodiment of a sublime ethical lesson (fore-sight); we further hold a conceptual reservoir in advance, e.g., our familiarity of Sophocles and his other works (fore-conception). Analysis of these fore-structures frustrates a conception which situates meaning on the side of the object-text, for if '[m]eaning, structured by fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception... an existential of Dasein, not a property which is attached to beings, which lies "behind" them or floats somewhere as a "realm between".... [then only] Da-sein "has" meaning,... only Da-sein can be meaningful or meaningless.'206 Heidegger then goes on to ask whether this articulates a vicious circle since what interpretation can contribute to understanding has already been understood. Do not the premises (fore-structures) presuppose what appears in the conclusion? This question of course articulates the problematic of the classical hermeneutical circle, that in order to begin the hermeneutical task, one must either presuppose an understanding of the whole (which is immediately undermined by the fact that understanding the whole depends on the understanding of the part) or an understanding of the part (again undermined since the part is only understood through the understanding of the whole). Heidegger's famous solution is to recognize the inevitability of this circle in understanding, to recognize how we are always already involved in this circle which belongs to the structure of meaning:
'What is decisive is not to get out of the circle, but to get in it in the right way. This circle of understanding is not a circle in which any random kind of knowledge operates, but it is rather the expression of the existential fore-structure of Da-sein itself. The circle must not be degraded to a vitiosum, not even to a tolerated one. A positive possibility of the most primordial knowledge is hidden in it which, however, is only grasped in a genuine way when interpretation has understood that its first, constant, and last task is not to let fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception be given to it by chance ideas and popular conceptions, but to guarantee the scientific theme by developing these in terms of the things themselves.'207
What Heidegger has in mind when using the term scientific is certainly not in a natural scientific sense. Rather, he effectively asks us to avoid chance or popular conceptions by testing them on the things themselves. For example, one should not simply accept Lacan's word but read Antigone to see if it does indeed open up a new dimension of ethicality. More precisely instead of 'seeing' if this is the case, in Heideggerian terminology we would be asked to 'hear' and 'listen' to what the text has to say, for such hearing is said to constitute the authentic openness of Dasein for its own most possibility of being.
So an analysis of the particular statements which make up a text is precisely what is not to be done. Heidegger demonstrates that utilizing the apophantic propositional form of 'S is P' is not the best way to present what is understood and moreover does not involve interpretation. With Husserl implicitly in mind, he admonishes us to 'make no advance restriction on the concept of meaning which would confine it to a signification of a "content of judgment."'208 His own analysis leads him to conclude that this 'apophantic as' is derivative and abstracted from the lived context of the 'existential-hermeneutical as' involved in interpretation and understanding. So in no way does Heidegger conceive of the content of 'S is P' as harboring meaning qua object to which a subject can square off against, which is another way of saying he does not utilize the subject-object schema. He often takes the time to criticize this fundamental presupposition of methodology and significantly does just that many pages later within the context of discussing the hermeneutical circle – the only other time he speaks of this circle in this work. This passage is also worth quoting at length:
'To deny the circle, to make a secret of it or even to wish to overcome it means to anchor this misunderstanding [viz., overlooking how understanding itself constitutes a basic kind of the being of Dasein] once and for all. Rather, our attempt must aim at leaping into this "circle" primordially and completely, so that even at the beginning of our analysis of Da-sein we make sure that we have a complete view of the circular being of Da-sein. Not too much, but too little is "presupposed" for the ontology of Da-sein, if one "starts out with" a worldless I in order then to provide that I with an object and an ontologically baseless relation to that object... The thematic objection is artificially and dogmatically cut out if one limits oneself "initially" to a "theoretical subject," and then complements it "on the practical side" with an additional "ethic."'209
The last line is clearly a reference to the Kantian subject in the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), but Heidegger's overall critique of the epistemological subject-object schema is equally applicable to whoever fails to recognize its a priori ontological dimension. In the final section of his work, Heidegger provides us with 'a standard for every philosophical investigation: Philosophy is universal phenomenological ontology, beginning with a hermeneutic of Da-sein which, as an analytic of existence, has made fast the guideline for all philosophical questioning at the point where it arises and to which it returns.'210 If so, the question remains why Heidegger abandoned hermeneutics after Being and Time, to the point that he refrained from even using the term in all his subsequent texts with one notable exception.
That exception is his "A Dialogue on Language between a Japanese and an Inquirer" (1954).211 The text is in dialogue form and along its course Heidegger and his Japanese friend often return to the topic of hermeneutics. In this way we are provided with multiple reasons why 'in my later writings I no longer employ the term "hermeneutics."'212 As an initial explanation, he tells us that he had inherited the term from his early Christian theological studies, which he later supplemented with studies of Dilthey and Schleiermacher, who, as we have seen, broadened the term's applicable horizon away from its original exclusive focus on Scripture. He reminds us that in Being and Time he extends this even further, attempting to define the nature of interpretation on hermeneutical grounds. As he writes, 'hermeneutics, used as an adjunct word to "phenomenology," does not have its usual meaning, methodology of interpretation, but means the interpretation itself.'213 It was also an etymological focus on the term, particularly hermēneuein with its notion of bearing of messages and tidings, which allowed him to combine the two fields into the hermeneutical phenomenology that resulted from Being and Time. But although this approach does tend to 'leave the sphere of the subject-object relation behind us,'214 ultimately Heidegger finds his former use of hermeneutics inadequate as it reflects the lack of proper focus on language which would completely dissolve any remnant of an active subjectivity. So where he previously believed that the necessary acceptance of the hermeneutical circle allowed for an originary experience of the hermeneutical relation, his current work abandons this view and avoids presenting the circle 'as resolutely as I would avoid speaking about language.'215 Using terms that immediately reveal the debt owed to Heidegger by Ebeling's word-event theology, since speaking about language tends to turn it into an object we are instead to have an authentic dialogue of language which allows a 'saying' to take place, a 'showing' of the thing in the sense of 'letting appear' and 'letting shine.' While inexpressible and never an object of mental representation, a circle nevertheless stands with respect to the message and the message-bearer in dialogue. This 'hermeneutic relation to the two-fold of presence and present beings,' which dialogue places man into, is only graspable during its sway of usage, as the Japanese confesses: 'When I can follow you in the dialogue, I succeed. Left alone, I am helpless.'216 This notion of dialogue of course could be extended to the experience of the well-intentioned reader who hears and understands what a difficult text like Being and Time has to say while actively engaged with it, but once it is set aside is often at a loss as to what was just read.
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