Against hermeneutics
Most of the recent object-oriented realist ontology-inspired critiques of hermeneutics share one shortcoming: the all misrepresent hermeneutics. This is obvious from the fact that hermeneutics is usually presented as a form of psychologism. The result is that hermeneuts claim that they are misunderstood, rather than wrong. This seems to me to be the safe exit route. So I’ll start from how not to criticize hermeneutics. Then, let’s see how hermeneutical philosophers themselves understand that is at stake in this debate with realist approaches. The trick is to show, that even from this perspective hermeneutical way of doing philosophy is to be abandoned. Fuuf, let’s breathe in and start with the part which hopefully is useful even if you think everything else I say is a piece of crap.
How not to criticize hermeneutics
The important thing to remember is this: hermeneutical philosophy is not a theory of meaning. You’ll find this in all handbooks. Let me quote the one which happens to be on my table:
Hermes, the messenger of the gods, exercised a practical activity: the delivery of announcements, warnings, prophecies. In its mythical origins and in its following history, hermeneutics, as transformative and communicative practice, is opposed to theory as contemplation of eternal essences unalterable by their observer (Ferraris, 1996: 1).
What is hermeneutics, then? First of all, it is a practical activity. One tries to understand. The philosophically interesting hermeneutics results from attempts to understand understanding itself, interpretation, translation and other philosophers. What one means when one says what understanding is the primary relation to the world? It simply means what all our perception already comes as meaningful, as our every action does. I see an apple and at same time I understand that it is probably delicious, I understand that it is a fruit and so on and so forth. There is simply no pure perception. Even when I do not recognize a thing I still perceive it as unknown, strange or alien. Thus, as Gadamer puts it, “being that can be understood is language”. But as we already know by now, all being is understood by default. So, for us, being is given as language. Derrida’s “there is nothing outside the text” means the same. To complete the picture one has to add that hermeneutics tries to understand concrete understanding of the concrete subjects living in the world. Usually, this results in descriptions. This is extremely important. The hermeneutical point of view is often established by appealing to authority: telling a story (“Heidegger claimed that…”, “from Gadamer we can infer this…” and so on). But it always boils down to descriptions of experience. But human experience can be understood only while taking into consideration the structures that are “bigger than subject”. Thus context, be it historical, existential, economic, theoretical, gender or one of concrete languages (understanding text written in English, rather the German) is always essential. In this sense, hermeneutic philosophy is a type of transcendental philosophy: to explain experience, it appeals to processes which constitute it and are not the ones subject consciously does.
By now you probably already see that things start to move in a circle and explain one another. Three very important lessons to be learned. (1) Hermeneutical philosophy is interested (it is its methodology, if one wants) in concrete processes, rather than causes of these processes. (2) Thus “interpretations” are mostly descriptions of the experience of thing to be understood. (3) If human understanding is always meaningful, one is limited by meaning. In other words, one can philosophize only from a human perspective. Heidegger, after all, asks the question of the meaning of being, not a question of being. Consider also the fascination with famous Wittgenstein’s motto. Hermeneutic reading emphasizes language: the limits of my language constitute the limits of my world. The positivists (and most likely Ludwig himself) emphasize the world: the limits of my world constitute the limits of my language. The hermeneutic philosophy investigates the meaning of phenomena for us, not how are they in themselves. (4) And finally, it is true, that for hermeneutic philosopher any single act of understanding is context dependent. It is true, that when I see an apple, the meaning I get is constructed by the whole horizon of what I already understand. But it is absolutely wrong to think that when I see an apple I, myself, somehow construct it’s meaning. No hermeneutic philosopher that I know of, holds this view. Usually meanings emerge before me, I am thrown into them. What I’m trying to say is that hermeneutics is not a type of psychologism, but rather a certain specism. We are enclosed in our meaning as a language users, not as individuals. Thus, the usual remarks that when I see a cup I do not interpret it… Well, you do. You are already talking about the cup. Do not criticize hermeneutics in this way.
Hermeneutics at the mercy of ethics
I hope that everything I said until now can be accepted by a defender of hermeneutics. Now, the more tricky part. After Heidegger, there are two tendencies philosophers follow. One type of hermeneutics tries to maneuver between interpretation and truth, while other gives up the idea of truth completely. The first tendency is dominant in Gadamer and Ricoeur. I think this project is self-contradictory. In Gadamer’s terms, the dialectics between “the things themselves” and “interpretation as an endless conversation” can be described, but not explained. I think, that as soon as one tries to explain how from the “endless conversation” truth can emerge, one will have to give up something or collapse into straightforward pragmatism. The second tendency is exemplified by philosophy of Vattimo and Derrida. Keep in mind, that these are tendencies, rather than types, and are at the work in all hermeneutic thought. Therefore, philosopher can express one tendency in one text, and appeal to the other on another occasion.
Here we finally get to the point. How can one criticize hermeneutics? In his last book “Of reality” Vattimo clarifies the stakes. According to him, weak thought (his version of hermeneutics) is most “reasonable” attitude, which “makes most sense”. Let us give him this point, although it would be interesting to see how he would cash out these expressions without appealing to some “states of affairs” or collapsing to pragmatism. More interestingly, according to Vattimo hermeneutic attitude is preferable to others because it provides the best ethico-political potential. The story is well known and told by many different philosophers differently. To keep the story short, metaphysical ideas of eternal truth, essences and hard reality led to violence, political oppression and finally, to Holocaust. Thus, the hermeneutic philosophy after Heidegger gives up on all of these, including being itself, to imagine the world without violence and oppression. Here are some quotes from Vattimo:
Weak thought, as hermeneutic thinking, is certainly a thinking of dialogue that is established on the very disappearance of absolutes, by really taking itself as the inheritor of the Christian ideal of charity (Vattimo, 2016: 116).
To reduce violence and the supremacy of entities that pretend to be true Being (for example, as one sees with nonnegotiable principles that today are increasingly utilized by fundamentalists) and all of the violence that is legitimated in the name of the absolutized entity (Stephen Dedalus, again, home, country, church) is the road to the dissolution of the reality that corresponds to the nihilistic vocation of Being. It is and can only be an ethical dissolution — therefore a “duty” that one never completes and that above all is not realized in a theoretical rejection of the “real world,” as the critics of hermeneutics had once thought (Vattimo, 2016: 117).
If we follow this logic of Vattimo and many others, the real question is this: does hermeneutic philosophy really offer an attitude which can prevent violence and lead to emancipation and freedom? My answer is no. Indeed, I think today we witness complete collapse of the hermeneutical ethical project. Therefore, I suggest that we abandon hermeneutic way of doing philosophy.
The collapse of hermeneutical ethical project
Vattimo himself refers to hermeneutics as a sort of Koine, that is to say shared language and way of doing continental philosophy. Similarly, one can say that hermeneutic attitude today is a Koine of many interactions we have outside of the academy. Pluralism, toleration and sensitivity to language and different traditions are indeed positive traits of the hermeneutical ethics. But in last 5 years very different hermeneutical attitude emerged. Let me share a story with you.
Few weeks ago I was debating the validity of arguments which have the form “let’s not allow x, cause it may lead to y” in Facebook with a guy who belongs to “new right” movement in my country. I gave him the example:
Suppose someone would have said we should not allow women to leave the kitchen, because women emancipation can lead to higher depression rates and frustration in men.
His reply:
You took an example which is bias toward your point of view. You take women emancipation to be a good thing, while my perspective on it may be different.
Note, that as stupid as it is, his reply is perfectly in line with hermeneutic type of thinking. And this is only one example. New right populist movements always use “perspective”, rather than “metaphysical truth” to explain their point of views. The same is true with Putin’s Russia: Putin claims to advocate for multi-polar world of cultures, with “Russian world” as one of its parts. Now, Putin’s propaganda machine “Russia Today” also claim to provide a different, Russian, point of view. To all these cases, what can hermeneutic philosopher advise us? One way out is to appeal to the enlightenment tradition and its ideals, but why bother with hermeneutics at all then? The other, more cynical answer, is to claim that there is no essential difference in principle between left and right perspectivism, Russia Today and The Guardian, or Putin and Obama. But for me, a citizen of a small eastern European country, this simply means that hermeneutics cannot offer anything. To understand Putin and try to dialogue with him is not an option. Indeed, if today some student would come to lecture on hermeneutics and claim that all our judgments are only valid in our perspective, so stoning women or killing Jews is not wrong in itself, the lecturer would have no tools to show that he is wrong. All these examples show, that hermeneutics can not distinguish good and bad perspectivism on its own terms and provides us with little meaningful to say in the face of the burning questions of the day.
But that is not the only problem hermeneutician faces. I do not know how can he help us in the face of other challenges and novelties we face: starting with new advancements in biology, problems of artificial intelligence, fair economy, ecological crisis and so on.
Two dogmas of hermeneutics
Recognizing the problem is the first step. I am not advocating to return to some objectivist philosophy, or even worse, to some premodern positions. That’s impossible. There is a variety of new realist approaches on the market. My personal preferences are beside the point here. I would like to close this entry by pointing out two dogmas I think we have to overcome to move forward and which are closely related to what I’ve been talking about. I will call one Ricouer’s dogma and the other one — the Event dogma.
Ricouer dogma is the question “where are you talking from?”. According to this question it is only possible to talk from a certain perspective, and what is spoken can only be criticized either internally, or from the other perspective. I find this idea to be paralyzing both to our philosophical and social aims, because it reduces everything to the question of perspective. There is always this hidden idea somewhere, that you always end up right where you started, you move in circles. To this dogma, I would like to oppose that I would like to call a Hegelian dogma: “forget where you came from, tell me where do you think you arrived”.
The event dogma is the idea that the truly important change can only occur as horizon changing event. The grandiosity of the event forces the history of the thinking of the event: First, with Heidegger, the experience of the event is denied, simply because an event is too radical thing to experience. We are thinking only after the effects of the event. Later, Derrida rethinks the event from the point of view of the impossibility of the event. In a similar way, in his last book Vattimo thinks that there were no events between us and Heidegger and that we live in basically the same old world. It is no wonder then, why Vattimo does not see any relevant significance of the things I’ve talked about in the previous section. This notion of the event completely blinds the philosopher to see the change in the world and is of no use to me today. It is also bankrupt politically. But most ironically, if we follow hermeneutical logic here, follow this history of the end of metaphysical truth, dissolution of being to traces, to the point where hermeneutics becomes the only possible game in town, we reach the point where we must ask: so, is this the end of history? Is hermeneutics here to supposedly be the most “reasonable” forever? Or, to put this question in Heidegger’s terms, does the verstehen of Dasein and the whole machinery of Being and Time belong to some epoch of being, or, breaking with all historicity of hermeneutics, it is a-historical?
