The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  Implicit in such a view is an ethical sense that understanding has to do justice both to what can be established objectively in what is understood, and to the person producing what is understood. There are no rules for this: in the case of a literary text, the idea of an intended effect of the text can be regarded as less significant than the assessment of whether the text reveals something new to its readers; in the case of a personal confession the view of the utterer demands a different kind of understanding. Without attention to all dimensions of human expression, understanding cannot do justice to what is to be understood.

  The further consequences Schleiermacher draws from the issue of how words are combined suggest how analytical semantic approaches are too often blind to essential aspects of real communication, including in writing and print, where such elements as rhythm, tone, emphasis, speed, silence, brevity or length are an ineliminable part of what is communicated. He connects these elements of human expression to the problem of understanding other individuals, which relates to the nature of self-consciousness, ‘the most particular and untranslatable aspect of the symbolising activity’.39 He terms the aspect of self-consciousness which inherently individualizes us and prevents interpretative closure ‘feeling’ or ‘immediate self-consciousness’.40 Feeling plays a specific structural epistemological role in German Romantic philosophy, having almost nothing to do with the usual association of Romanticism with the precedence of ‘feelings’ over objective knowledge. In the philosophy of mind it is often argued that self-consciousness cannot depend upon the identification of myself as myself, because a criterion for the identification is lacking. In order to see myself as myself in a mirror I must already ‘know’ I am doing the seeing, because the mirror just shows an image that could be somebody else, but this ‘knowledge’ is not propositional. Why the term feeling is used by the early Romantics for this issue is apparent in Novalis’ remark that ‘feeling cannot feel itself’: otherwise another regress of the kind present in ‘I know that I know that I know’ results. Feeling for Schleiermacher is therefore ‘immediate’, not dependent on reflexive identification, and is used to point to the individual’s irreducible way of ‘being in the world’41—he uses the phrase before Heidegger, who was familiar with the Christian Faith. Immediate self-consciousness cannot be conveyed by concepts, as rules for identifying something, precisely because it does not involve an identification. It therefore can only be manifested or shown in other ways, and attending to these other ways is part of the normative structure of Schleiermacher’s thought.

  Schleiermacher thinks music shows something essential about immediate self-consciousness:

  If we once more consider how one so easily one-sidedly presupposes that the very direction of the individual towards communication is a verbal one (eine logische), and yet must admit that all musical representation only really has a minimum of verbal content, then a powerful refutation of this assertion lies in this fact, and it follows that there must be a massive intensity in this direction of the human mind to be able to represent itself purely in its mobility, apart from everything verbal (abgesehen von allem Logischen).42

  Rather than seeking to understand the nature of conscious life just in terms of ‘mental states’ or any of the other objectifying ways characteristic of the analytical tradition, Schleiermacher, like Merleau-Ponty after him, focuses on the idea that much that makes sense in human life is based precisely on consciousness being primarily characterized by its mobility. He thereby offers the beginnings of a philosophical account of why music is so essential to human culture that is largely lacking in much of Western philosophy.43

  The ‘productivity’ that leads to articulation in language is internal: ‘but it only becomes external via the sound (Ton). This is analogous to the musical element and in the use of language we always get an impression of this musical element’.44 The musical element in language is evidently not semantic in the usual sense, but the fact that both the meaning and the illocutionary force of any utterance can be changed by its tone, emphasis and rhythm means that in actual communication what an utterance does is not adequately understood in terms of its supposed semantic content anyway. Even speech act theory (Schleiermacher already uses the term ‘speech act’) does not take any serious account of this aspect of communication, though the later Wittgenstein did.45 When seen in relation to the cultural investment in music, poetry, and other literary forms, then, Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics again highlights missing elements of an adequate philosophical consideration of language and sense-making in many areas of modern philosophy. The orientation to the natural sciences of much analytical philosophy, which leads to undoubted major insights, can, then, also occlude crucial dimensions of what language is.

  21.7 EXPLANATION AND UNDERSTANDING

  Why, though, has Schleiermacher had so little longer term effect on philosophy with regard to many of the issues we have just outlined, where he presages, in ways his contemporaries often do not, insights associated with, for example, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Gadamer, and Davidson? One explanation is evidently the vagaries of the reception of philosophical texts, which may become forgotten, or not be understood because the contexts in which the insights of the text make most sense only emerge later. The concrete influence of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics in the nineteenth century is primarily on the development of modern philology. August Boeckh echoes certain key aspects of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics in a sometimes almost verbatim manner: for example, on the issue of understanding an author better than he understood himself.46 Boeckh’s text is, however, more notable for its depth of scholarship and detailed exploration of the methods of philology than for any real philosophical development of the insights of Schleiermacher.

  Boeckh’s central premise does, though, involve the philosophical issue which probably most concerns Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), and many other philosophers in the second half of the century who are broadly thought of as ‘Neo-Kantians’. Boeckh describes his method as ‘Erkenntnis des Erkannten’.47 Translating the phrase is instructively difficult. ‘Erkenntnis’ means ‘cognition’, ‘knowledge’, ‘recognition’, but ‘cognition/knowledge of what is known’ makes little sense: something like ‘insight into what is known’ gets a little closer. The point of the idea is to make clear the difference between knowledge of the objective world in the natural sciences, and the knowledge produced in the human sciences. In the latter what is known is itself always the result of a kind of knowledge, in the sense that it is produced by human thinking and activity, whereas natural objects are not products in the same way.

  Boeckh’s idea is one of many attempts in the second half of the nineteenth century to secure the methodological status of the human sciences in relation to the more and more dominant natural sciences, and this is the central theme of much of the work of Dilthey. Although he writes a major work on The Life of Schleiermacher (first volume 1870), and it is a theme in much of his writing, Dilthey’s main focus on hermeneutics as a central feature of his philosophy really dates from around 1900.48 However, his concerns prior to this are vital to the developments which will lead to Heidegger’s ‘existential hermeneutics’. The major issue which Dilthey considers is evident in relation to the problem of the scientific status of psychology, which still makes many crucial philosophical issues apparent. Psychology is concerned with both the ‘subjective’ and the ‘objective’ aspects of mental activity, so that the relationship between culture and nature is inherently present in any attempt to characterize its methods. The tension here is suggested by the contrast between Dilthey’s aim of a ‘science of the experience of the human mind’,49 and the idea, associated with the psychology of Wilhelm Wundt and others, of a ‘science of the human mind’ based on causal laws.

  This tension leads Dilthey to his famous reflections on a version of the distinction we saw in Boeckh, between what Dilthey calls ‘understanding’ and ‘explanation’, where ‘[w]‌e explain nature, we understand the life of the soul’,50
because ‘only what the mind has created does it understand’.51 Nature is the object of causally based natural science, the human world is the object of the Geisteswissenchaften (‘sciences of spirit/mind’). Psychology belongs for Dilthey to the Geisteswissenchaften: ‘only if its object becomes accessible to us in behaviour which is founded in the nexus of life, expression and understanding’,52 rather than mere stimulus and response. He posits the three elements of ‘Erlebnis [immediate individual experience prior to any objectification in judgement], expression and understanding’53 as the foundation of the Geisteswissenchaften. The problem which vitiates some of his work is that it tends towards psychologism when it tries to give an adequate account of the lived experience he regards as the foundation of cognition. The inner aspect of experience keeps revealing itself as not just something internal, and this leads Dilthey himself to deconstruct his own core distinction: ‘the milieu is indispensable for understanding. At the highest point understanding is therefore not in this way different from explaining, to the extent to which explanation is possible in this area. And explaining for its part has the completion of understanding as its presupposition’.54

  Dilthey’s notion of a ‘Critique of Historical Reason’ is supposed to link the insights of hermeneutics to a new version of epistemology, in order to ground those aspects of human knowledge which rely upon understanding. However, he moves, on the one hand, in the direction of a proto-structuralist sense that the Geisteswissenschaften ‘are directed towards objective cognition of their object’,55 where language is clearly decisive:

  universal movements go through the individual as their point of transit…we must seek new foundations for understanding universal movements. …The individual is only the crossing point for cultural systems, organisations, into which the individual’s existence is woven: how could they be understood via the individual?56

  On the other hand, he also retains the sense that objectivity of this kind is at the mercy of the historical contingency of individual Erlebnis, the importance of which he sees as most apparent in the uniqueness of artistic production.

  Dilthey has considerable influence on academic debate over the issues raised by hermeneutics, and the questions he asks are vital to the development of modern philosophy. However, his actual application of his ideas to the understanding of major literary figures, like Goethe, is often deeply flawed, as a result of his psychologism. The results of his philosophical reflections are also not always that substantial, because he remains caught in the difficulties inherent in the attempt to differentiate scientific from other forms of understanding in an all-encompassing method. It will be Heidegger who advocates cutting the Gordian knot by refusing to accept a thoroughgoing division between kinds of explanation and understanding, ‘existential hermeneutics’ assuming that the very nature of what we are is always interpretative, and that scientific forms depend, as Schleiermacher already began to see, on basic forms of understanding produced in the life-world.

  21.8 THE HERMENEUTICS OF SUSPICION

  At this point one needs to confront the fact that the most far-reaching effects of questions of interpretation in the second half of the nineteenth century are not based on the attempt to map out a defensible methodology for the human sciences, even one with as wide-ranging implications as that of Schleiermacher, but on the radical assault on academic philosophy itself of Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche. Paul Ricoeur has referred to Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, as initiating a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’. Schleiermacher was well aware, as we have seen, that systemic factors not in the control of the utterer must be considered in understanding utterances. The change in the second half of the century is with respect to the scope and nature of the way these factors are seen. What is at issue here is another version of the relationship between explaining and understanding. If the real significance of an utterance derives from some kind of causal pressure, understanding it comes closer to explanation than to the kind of hermeneutic understanding that seeks to mediate between subjective, intentional, and objective, cognitively oriented aspects. Given the ongoing debates, for example in neuroscience, about just how causal factors in many different areas of inquiry are to be understood, this issue remains deeply controversial.

  One way to focus the controversy can be suggested via the ethical dimension I suggested was a significant part of what Schleiermacher was aiming at. Attempting to understand appropriately can involve revealing how what is asserted is motivated by interests that are so deeply ingrained in the speaker by the nature of the unreflectively accumulated pressures and assumptions of their environment and life history that they cannot see what really leads to what they say, and the interpreter is therefore right to show the workings of ‘social causality’ in what is meant. At the same time, it would be wrong to make the objectifying aspect of such interpretation the sole perspective: that way the interpreter implicitly arrogates to themself a position which in turn calls for their own unconscious assumptions and prejudices to be examined, and thence to another regress, as the next interpreter’s position will be subject to the same examination, and so on. It is in part for this reason that Gadamer, in his development of hermeneutics in the wake of Heidegger, will insist on a ‘rehabilitation of prejudice’, on the grounds that we are never in a position to objectify all the assumptions, the ‘pre-judgements’, which make sense of the world for us, because this would require an extra-mundane, metaphysical location. All we can do is seek a ‘fusion of horizons’ with the other which acknowledges that one can always interpret the world differently. The attitude which supports this kind of acknowledgement involves an ethical sense of the value of the other, and the question is whether this ethical sense can be reduced to something which is ultimately causal. Once again an issue arising out of the basic question of how to interpret the expressions of others takes one into decisive questions in modern philosophy concerning the natural and the cultural. This very division now starts to look questionable as the pressures of ‘second nature’,57 that is, the cumulative effects of individual action in society which are controlled by nobody, become as threatening as ‘first nature’.

  The proponents of a hermeneutics of suspicion are, at the same time, open to the question of whether they fail to appreciate the nature of the ethical dimension that is already part of what Schleiermacher argues and is germane to Gadamer. In a thoroughly agonistic view of interpretation, of the kind that is present at times in both Marx and Nietzsche, the workings of power are the transcendental ground of what has to be explained for the surface deception inherent in communicative action to be unmasked. Marx’s conception of ideology, and Nietzsche’s view of interpretation in terms of the ‘will to power’ can be seen as themselves the reflex of the increasingly antagonistic capitalist world of the second half of the nineteenth century, where ‘all that’s solid melts into air’ (Marx in The Communist Manifesto). In these views part of what melts is the substantiality of ethical perspectives.

  In Marx, individual ethics is undermined by the systemic pressures of the economic system, where, in the famous phrase from the Commodity chapter of Capital, Volume One, ‘they know it not, but they do it’. Agents’ understandings of what they do and say are not transparent to the agents, because the systemic consequences of their actions cannot exhaustively figure in the agents’ reflections. In a world which is more and more connected by the commodity form of exchange, such consequences may be obscured even where the actors would wish to understand the real meaning of their actions beyond what they subjectively intend. The consequence for Marx, though, is the demand for a way of interpreting ethical issues which considers structural factors which limit the capacity of individualistic ethics to understand why the capitalist world becomes brutal in the way it does. Adorno and the Frankfurt School will develop this aspect of Marx in relation to modern culture in ways which are still being explored.58 In Nietzsche, in contrast, the ‘slave revolt in morality’ inverts the valuations of actions, such that the powerful are persuad
ed to interpret their assertion of what they are as immoral, setting in train the Christianization of Western culture. Rather than morality being based on a transcendental ground, of the kind Kant proposes with the categorical imperative, the ‘revolt’ is in fact a result of a historical shift in the ‘lordly right to give names’, such that what is said to be good and what is said to be evil radically alters, shifting the balance of power in Western society from the supposedly strong to the supposedly weak. In this respect Nietzsche interprets everything from texts to cultural forms in terms of the way different ‘quanta’ of will to power gain ascendency over each other.

  The benign form of this view of how interpretations are at odds with each other is Nietzsche’s ‘perspectivism’, which deconstructs the idea of a God’s eye view of how the world is to be interpreted by seeing the world not as a unified totality, but as an endless series of different perspectives that cannot be unified into a complete picture. This view is in certain respects not so far from some of what we saw in Schleiermacher. The problematic aspect of Nietzsche’s approach is suggested by the idea of the ‘right to give names’ as the ground for understanding the nature of communication and interpretation. Nietzsche’s idea echoes Marx’s claim that the ‘ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas’: in both cases the idea of truths or morals being independent of their origins is undermined by the sense that they are the effect of the ruling interests in society. In the new historical circumstances of the nineteenth century, where the dominant factors of the world we now inhabit emerge, this idea is evidently illuminating in relation to a great many phenomena, and it plays a major role in contemporary culture’s self-understanding, for instance in the work of Michel Foucault.