Phenomenology and HermeneuticsAuthor(s): Paul RicoeurSource: Noûs, Vol. 9, No. 1, Symposium Papers to be Read at the Meeting of the WesternDivision of the American Philosophical Association in Chicago, Illinois, April 24-26, 1975(Mar., 1975), pp. 85-102Published by: Blackwell PublishingStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2214343 .Accessed: 08/06/2011 14:43

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Phenomenology and Hermeneutics PAUL RICOEUR

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

This study will' not be a contribution to the history of phenomenology, to its archeology, but mainly a questioning of the destiny of phenomenology today. And if I have chosen as a touchstone the general theory of interpretation or herme- neutics, that will not mean either that I would replace a historical monograph with a comparative history of con- temporary philosophy. Whatever may be the dependence of the present meditation on Heidegger and moreover on Gadamer, what is at stake is the possibility of continuing to do philosophy with them and after them-without forgetting Husserl.'

I propose for discussion the following two theses: First Thesis: What hermeneutics has ruined is not

phenomenology, but one of its interpretations, namely its idealistic interpretation by Husserl himself; this is why I will hereafter speak of Husserlian idealism. I will use as a reference and a guide the Nachwort to the Ideen2 and submit its principle theses to the critique of hermeneutics. The two sections of this first part will therefore be purely and simply antithetical.

Second Thesis: Beyond a mere opposition, there exists between phenomenology and hermeneutics a mutual belonging which it is important to explicate. On the one hand, herme- neutics is built on the basis of phenomenology and thus preserves that from which it nevertheless differs: phenome- nology remains the indispensible presupposition of herme- neutics. On the other hand, phenomenology is not able to establish itself without a hermeneutical presupposition. The hermeneutical condition of phenomenology is linked to the role played by the Auslegung in the fulfillment of its philosophical task.

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I. THE HERMENEUTICAL CRITIQUE OF HUSSERLIAN IDEALISM

The first part of this essay seeks to lay bare the divergence which separates the task of a hermeneutic from any idealistic expressions of phenomenology.

One will find here only the development of the antithetical position between the two philosophical projects. Yet, one expects to reserve the possibility that phenomenology as such is not exhausted by one of its interpretations, even that of Husserl himself. It is Husserlian idealism which, to my mind, succumbs to the critique of hermeneutical philosophy.

1. The Schematic Theses of Husserlian Idealism

In order to meet the needs of a necessarily schematic discussion, I have taken as a typical document of Husserlian idealism the Nachwort to the Ideen. It constitutes, with the Cartesian Meditations [3], the most extreme expression of this idealism. From it I have taken the few theses which follow, and which I will afterwards submit to the critique of hermeneutics.

(a) The ideal of scientificity which phenomenology claims is not in continuity with the sciences, with their axioms, with their fundamental enterprise: the "ultimate justification " which constitutes phenomenology is of another order (Nachwort, "Preliminary Remark" and ? 7). This thesis, which expresses the claim to radicality by phenomenology is affirmed in a polemical style; it is the thesis of a combative philosophy which always has an enemy in sight: the enemy in this case being objectivism, naturalism, philosophy of life, anthropology. It proceeds by means of a radical disconnection which cannot be couched in a demonstrative argument, because from what would one deduce it? From a self-assertive style of claim to radicality which is only attested by the denial of what could deny it, Husserlian idealism begins. It is therefore fruitless to ask about the motivation of such a radical beginning; there is no reason internal to a given field which raises the question of origin. It is in this sense that the justification is a Selbst- Begriindung.

(b) The principle foundation is on the order of intuition; to found is to see. In that way, the Nachwort confirms the

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priority, affirmed in the VI Logical Investigation, of the complete fulfillment of empty intentions in contradistinction to any philosophy of deduction or construction (Nachwort, ? ?1-2).

The key-concept, in this regard, is that of an Erfahrungs- feld. The strangeness of phenomenology is entirely that; the principle is at the outset a "field", and the first truth, an "experience". In opposition to every "speculative construc- tion", every radical question is decided at the level of vision.

(c) The place of the fullest intuitivity is subjectivity. All transcendence is doubtful; only immanence is indubitable.

This is the thesis of Husserlian idealism. All transcendence is doubtful because it proceeds by Abschattungen, by "out- lines" or "profiles", because the convergence of these Abschattungen is always presumptive, because the presumption can be deceived by inner discordances, and finally, because consciousness can form the hyperbolic hypothesis of a radical discordance between appearances, i.e., the hypothesis of the "destruction of the world". Immanence is not doubtful because it is not given by "profiles", by "outlines", and therefore it implies nothing presumptive, but alone permits the coincidence of reflection with what "has just been" experienced.

(d) Subjectivity thus promoted to a transcendental role is not the empirical consciousness, the object of psychology.

N evertheless, phenomenology and phenomenological psychology are parallel and constitute a "duplicate" which keeps suggesting the confusion of two disciplines, one tran- scendental, the other empirical. Reduction only distinguishes and separates them. A noetic discipline, a no-ology, is thus distinguished from a psychology, but their "content" (Gehalt) is the same: the phenomenological is the psychological "re- duced". Such is the principle of the "parallelism", or better the "correspondence", between the two. Such is also the principle of their difference: only a "conversion"-a philosophical con- version-separates them.

(e) The process of reflection develops its own ethical implica- tions: in this way, reflection is the immediately self-responsible act.

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This ethical nuance that the expression aus letzter Selbstverantwortung ([2]: 139) seems to introduce into the foundational thematic is not a practical addition to an enterprise which, as such, would be purely epistemological: the inversion by which reflection is extracted from its natural attitude is at the same time-in the same breath, one might say-epistemological and ethical. Philosophical conversion is the supremely autonomous act. The ethical dimension is therefore immediately implied in the foundational act, to the extent that this act can only be self-positional. In this sense, it is ultimately self-responsible.

The self-assertive character of the foundation constitutes the philosophical subject as responsible subject. This subject is the philosophizing subject as such.

2. Hermeneutics contra Husserlian Idealism

It is possible to oppose hermeneutics, thesis to thesis, doubt- lessly not to phenomenology as a whole and as such, but to Husserlian idealism. This "antithetical" approach is the neces- sary way to a veritable "dialectical" relationship between the two.

(a) The ideal of scientificity, understood by Husserlian idealism as ultimate justification, encounters its fundamental limit in the ontological condition of comprehension.

This ontological condition can be expressed as finitude. It is not, however, this concept that I would consider the foremost, for it designates in negative terms an entirely positive condition which would be better expressed by the concept of belonging-to (appartenance, Zugeh3rigkeit). This concept designates directly the indispensible condition of every enter- prise of justification and foundation, namely that it is always preceded by a relationship which supports it. Are we saying a relationship to the object? Precisely not. What hermeneutics questions first, in Husserlian idealism, is that it has expressed its immense and unexceedable discovery of intentionality in terms of a conceptuality which weakens its scope, namely, in terms of the subject-object relationship. From this conceptuality pro- ceeds the exigency of finding what makes the object's unity of meaning and of basing this unity in a constituting subjectivity. The first statement of hermeneutics is to say that the

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problematic of objectivity presupposes, prior to itself, a relationship of inclusion which unites the allegedly autonomous subject and the allegedly adverse object. This inclusive relation- ship I call belonging-to. The ontological pre-eminence of belonging-to implies that the question of foundation can no longer simply coincide with that of ultimate justification. For hermeneutics, the question of ultimate foundation continues to belong to the same sphere as objectifying thought, as long as the ideal of scientificity is not questioned as such. The radicality of the question compels the regression from the idea of scientifi- city to the ontological condition of belonging-to, thanks to which the inquirer shares in the thing which he questions.

Belonging-to is afterward apprehended as finitude of knowledge. The negative nuance that the word finitude con- notes is introduced into the totally positive relationship of belonging-to-which is the hermeneutical experience itself- only because subjectivity has already raised its pretension to being the ultimate foundation. This pretension, this hybris, make the relationship of belonging-to appear, by contrast, as finitude.

(b) The Husserlian exigency of the return to intuition is opposed by the necessity for all comprehension to be mediated by an interpretation.

There is no doubt that this principle is borrowed from the epistemology of the historical sciences. In this way, it belongs to the epistemological field defined by Schleiermacher and Dilthey. However, if interpretation were only a historico- hermeneutical concept, it would remain as regional as the "sciences of the spirit" themselves. But the usage of interpreta- tion in the historico-hermeneutical sciences is only the anchoring point for a universal concept of interpretation which has the same extension as that of comprehension and, finally, as that of belonging-to. In this way, it exceeds the simple methodology of exegesis and philology, and designates the work of explication which is attached to all hermeneutical experi- ence.

The universality of interpretation is attested in many ways. Its most obvious application is in the use of "natural languages" in the conversational situation. As opposed to the "langues bien faites", constructed according to the exigencies of mathematical

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logic, and in which all of the basic terms are defined in an axiomatic way, the usage of natural languages rests on the polysemic value of the words. Words of the natural languages contain in their semantic area a potential of meaning which is exhausted by no actual usage, but which has to be constantly screened and sifted and determined by the context. To this selective function of the context, interpretation, in the most primitive sense of the word, is connected. Interpretation is the process by which, in the exchange of question and response, the speaker and hearer determine together the contextual values which structure their conversation. Before, therefore, all Kunstlehre, which would make an autonomous discipline of exegesis and philology, there is a spontaneous process of interpretation which pertains to the most primitive exercise of comprehension in any given situation.

But conversation rests on a relationship too limited to cover the field of explication. Conversation, i.e., the dialogic relationship, is contained within the borders of a vis-a-vis which is a face to face. The historical connection which comprises it is much more complex. The "short" intersubjective relationship is actually connected, within the broader context of history, to all kinds of "long" intersubjective relationships, mediated by all kinds of institutions, social roles, and collectivities (groups, classes, nations, cultural traditions, etc.). What supports these "long" intersubjective relationships is a historical tradition, of which dialogue is only a segment.

In that way, the scope of explication extends so far beyond dialogue that it covers the widest historical connection ([1]: 250ff). We may relate this broad concept of interpreta- tion, coextensive to a historical tradition, to the mediation by the text. By this I mean not only expressions fixed by writing, but also mediations exerted by all the documents and monu- ments which have a fundamental trait in common with the written word. This common trait, which constitutes the text as text, is the fact that the meaning of the text has become autonomous in relation to the intention of the author, the critical situation of discourse, and its first addressee. Possibili- ties of multiple interpretation are opened by a text which is thus freed from its Sitz-im-Leben. Beyond the polysemy of words in conversation is found a polysemy of text which invites a plural reading. This is the moment of interpretation, in the technical sense of exegesis of texts.

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In what sense is the development of all comprehension by interpretation opposed to the Husserlian project of ultimate foundation? Essentially in this, that all interpretation places the interpreter in medias res and never at the beginning nor at the end. We happen upon a conversation which has already begun and in which we try to orient ourselves in order to make our own contribution to it. But the ideal of an intuitive foundation is that of an interpretation which, at a certain moment, would become a total vision. This hypothesis is what Gadamer has called "total mediation". Only a total mediation would be equivalent to an intuition simultaneously primal and final. Idealist phenomenology can henceforth support its claim to an ultimate foundation only by taking into account the Hegelian claim of absolute knowledge, no longer in a speculative way, but an intuitive. Now the hypothesis of philosophical herme- neutics is that interpretation is an open process that no single vision closes.

(c) That the ultimate foundation is subjectivity, that all transcendence is doubtful and only immanence indubitable-this becomes in its own turn eminently doubtful, in so far as it appears that the Cogito also could be submitted to the radical critique that phenomenology applies otherwise to all appear- ance. The ruses of self-consciousness are more clever than those of the thing. One remembers the doubt which, according to Heidegger, accompanies the question: "Who is being-there?" (Being and Time, ?25).

It is in the critique of ideologies, as much as and perhaps more than in psychoanalysis, that I would search for arguments supporting this doubt contained in Heidegger's question. The critique of ideologies and psychoanalysis give us today a way to add to the critique of the object a critique of the subject. Husserl believed that self-knowledge could not be presumptive because it does not proceed from "outlines" or "profiles". But self-knowledge can be presumptive for other reasons. In the measure to which self-knowledge is a dialogue of the soul with itself, and to which this dialogue could be systematically distorted by the violence and by all the intrusions of the structures of domination into those of communication, self- knowledge, as interiorized communication, can also be as doubtful as knowledge of the object, although for different reasons.

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Only, it seems to me, a hermeneutic of communication could assume the task of including the critique of ideologies in self-comprehension ([7]), and that in two complementary ways. On the one hand, it could reveal the insurmountable character of the ideological phenomenon on the basis of its own meditation on the role of "pre-comprehension" with regard to a cultural object in general. Hermeneutics has only to raise this notion of comprehension, first applied to the exegesis of a text, to the level of a general theory of prejudices which could be coextensive with the historical connection itself. In the same way that miscomprehension is a fundamental structure of exegesis (Schleiermacher), prejudice is a fundamental structure of communication in its institutional forms. On the other hand, hermeneutics could reveal the necessity of a critique of ideologies, even if this critique could never be total because of the structure of pre-comprehension. This critique rests on the element of distantiation, which we have not previously men- tioned, but which belongs to the historical connection as such.

This concept of distantiation is the dialectical counterpart of belonging-to, in the sense that our manner of belonging to a historical tradition is to be related according to a distance which oscillates between remoteness and proximity. To inter- pret is to bring close the far (temporal, geographic, cultural, spiritual). The mediation by the text is, in this regard, the model of a distantiation which is not simply alienating, as the Verfremdung against which Gadamer fights in all his work ([1]: 11, 80, 151, 156, 364ff), but which is authentically creative. The text is, par excellence, the support of a communi- cation in and by distance.

If this is so, hermeneutics is capable of taking into account in its own terms both the insurmountable character of the ideological phenomenon and the possibility of beginning, without ever being able to finish, a critique of ideologies. Hermeneutics is able to do it because, being different from phenomenological idealism, the subject of which it speaks is from the outset open to the efficacy of history (to make allusion to Gadamer's famous notion of Wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewuptsein, [1]: 284). Because distantiation is a moment of belonging-to, the critique of ideologies can be incorporated, as an objective and explicative segment, into the project of enlarging and restoring communication and self-comprehension.

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The extension of comprehension by textual exegesis and its constant rectification by the critique of ideologies belongs by principle to the process of Auslegung. Textual exegesis and critique of ideologies are the two privileged paths on which comprehension is developed by interpretation and thus becomes itself.

(d) A radical way of questioning the primacy of subjectivity is to take as a guideline the theory of the text. In the measure to which the meaning of the text has become autonomous in relation to the subjective intention of its author, the essential question is not to recover, beneath the text, the lost intention, but to display before the text, the "world" which it opens and discloses. Said another way, the hermeneutical task is to discern the "thing" of the text (Gadamer) and not the psychology of the author. The thing of the text is to its structure as, in the proposition, the reference is to the sense (Frege). In the same way, as in the proposition, we are not content with the sense which is its ideal object, but we ask further about its reference, that is, about its claim to truth, so, in the text, we cannot stop with the immanent structure, with the internal system of dependences born of the intersecting of "codes" that the text uses; we want to unfold the world that the text projects. I am not, in saying this, ignoring the fact that one important category of texts, what we call literature-namely, narrative fiction, drama, poetry-seems to abolish all reference to everyday reality, to the point that language glorifies itself at the expense of the referential function of ordinary discourse. But it is precisely in the measure to which the discourse of fiction "suspends" this referential function of the first degree that it frees a reference of the second degree, in which the world is no longer manifested as an ensemble of manipulatable objects, but as the horizon of our life and our project, in short as a Lebenswelt, as being-in-the-world. This referential dimension only attains its full development with works of fiction and poetry, which pose the fundamental hermeneutical problem. The question is no longer to define hermeneutics as an inquiry into the psychological intentions which are hidden in the text, but as the explication of the being-in-the-world shown by the text. What is to be interpreted in a text is the projection of a world which I could inhabit. Remembering the principle of

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distantiation mentioned above, one could say that the fictional or poetic text is not limited to placing the meaning of the text at a distance from the intention of the author, but that it places the reference of the text as well at a distance from the world articulated by everyday language. Reality is, in this way, metamorphosed by the way in which what I would call the "imaginative variations" of literature apply to the real.

What is the impact on Husserlian idealism of this herme- neutics centered on the thing of the text? Essentially this: phenomenology, which was born with the discovery of the universal character of intentionality, has not remained faithful to its own discovery, namely that consciousness has its meaning beyond itself. The idealist theory of the constitution of meaning in consciousness has thus hypostasized subjectivity. The price of this hypostasis is the difficulty created by the above "parallelism" between phenomenology and psychology. These difficulties attest that phenomenology is always in danger of being reduced to a transcendental subjectivism. The radical way of putting an end to this continuously recurring confusion is to move the axis of interpretation from the question of subjectivity to that of the world. This is what the theory of the text proposes to do, in subordinating the question of the intention of the author to that of the thing of the text.

(e) In opposition to the idealistic thesis of the ultimate self-responsibility of the mediating subject, hermeneutics sug- gests subjectivity be made the last, and not the first, category of a theory of comprehension. Subjectivity must be lost as the radical origin if it is to be retained in a more modest role.

Here again, the theory of the text is a good guide. It shows that the act of subjectivity is less what starts than what completes. This conclusive act could be expressed as appropria- tion (Zueignung). It does not pretend, as does romantic hermeneutics, to rejoin the original subjectivity which carried the meaning of the text. It responds instead to the thing of the text. It is therefore the counterpart of distantiation which established the text in its own autonomy in relation to the author, to its situation, and to its original destination.

It is also the counterpart of this other distantiation by which a new being-in-the-world, projected by the text, with- draws from false evidences of everyday reality. Thus, appropria-

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tion is a moment of the theory of interpretation, without ever fraudulently reintroduing the primacy of subjectivity.

That appropriation does not imply the surreptitious return to sovereign subjectivity can be attested in the following manner: if it remains true that hermeneutics ends in self- comprehension, it is necessary to rectify the subjectivism of this proposition by saying that to self-comprehend is to self- comprehend before the text. From then on, what is the appropriation from one point of view is disappropriation from another point of view. To appropriate is to make what was strange become appropriate. What is appropriated is, then, the thing of the text. But the thing of the text only becomes my own if I disappropriate myself from myself, in order to let the thing of the text be. Then I exchange the me, master of myself, for the self, disciple of the text.

One could again express this process in terms of distantia- tion and speak of a distantiation of self to self within appropriation itself. This distantiation requires all the strategies of suspicion, one of which is the critique of ideologies, referred to above. Distantiation in all its forms, constitutes the critical moment par excellence in comprehension.

This ultimate and radical form of distantiation is the ruin of the pretension of the ego to be established as an ultimate origin. The ego must assume for itself the "imaginative variations" by which it could respond to the "imaginative variations" of the real that the literature of fiction and poetry, more than any other form of discourse, produces. This style of "response to . . ." hermeneutics opposes to the idealism of ultimate self-responsibility.

II. TOWARD A HERMENEUTICAL PHENOMENOLOGY

The hermeneutical critique of Husserlian idealism is only, in my view, the negative side of a more positively oriented research, which I here call by the programmatic and exploratory title of "Hermeneutical phenomenology". The present essay does not pretend to work out-"to do"-this hermeneutical phenomenol- ogy; it is limited to showing its possibility by establishing that beyond the critique of Husserlian idealism, phenomenology remains the indispensible presupposition of hermeneutics.

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1. The most fundamental phenomenological presupposition of a philosophy of interpretation is that every question about any kind of "being" is a question about the "meaning of being".

Presupposed in this is therefore the choice for the phenomenological attitude as opposed to the naturalistic- objectivistic attitude. The choice for meaning is therefore the most general presupposition of all hermeneutics. Hermeneutics becomes a philosophy of interpretation-and not simply a methodology of exegesis and philology-if and only if, regressing to the conditions of the possibility of exegesis and philology, even beyond a theory of the text in general, it addresses the linguistic condition-namely the Sprachlichkeit- of all experience ([1]: 367ff).

Now this linguistic condition, in its turn, has its own presupposition within a general theory of "sense". It is difficult, it is true, to formulate this presupposition in a non-idealistic terminology. The cleft between the phenomenological attitude and the naturalistic attitude-or, as was said, the choice for meaning-appears to be merely identified with the choice for consciousness "in" which meaning occurs. Is it not in "suspending" all Seinsglaube that one has access to the dimension of meaning? Is not every philosophy of sense idealistic?

These implications, it seems to me, are not at all compelling. If one returns from Husserl's Ideas and Cartesian Meditations to his Logical Investigations, one discovers a state of phenomenology in which the notions of "expression" and "meaning", of consciousness and intentionality, of intellectual intuition, are elaborated without the "reduction", in its idealistic sense, being introduced. On the contrary, the thesis of intentionality asks explicitly that if all meaning is for a consciousness, no consciousness is self-consciousness before being consciousness of something toward which it overcomes itself, or, as Sartre said in a remarkable article, [8], in 1937, something toward which it "explodes". That consciousness is outside itself, that it is towards meaning, before meaning is for it, and still more, before that consciousness is for-itself, is this not what the central discovery of phenomenology implies? Thus to return to the non-idealistic meaning of reduction is to remain faithful to the major discovery of the Logical Investigations, namely that the logical notion of sense-such as Frege, for

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example, introduced it-is only an aspect of a broader notion of sense which has the same extension as that of intentionality. The right is thus won to speak of the "sense" of perception, of imagination, of will, etc. This subordination of the logical notion of meaning to the universal notion of meaning, under the guidance of the concept of intentionality, does not at all imply that a transcendental subjectivity has sovereign mastery of the meaning towards which it is directed. On the contrary, phenomenology could be pulled in the opposite direction, namely to the side of the thesis of the pre-eminence of meaning above self-consciousness.

2. Hermeneutics is related in another way to phenomenology, namely, by its recourse to distantiation at the heart of the experience of belonging-to. Distantiation, according to herme- neutics, is not without a rapport with the epoche according to phenomenology, but with an epoche interpreted in a non- idealistic sense, as an aspect of the intentional movement of consciousness toward meaning. Every consciousness of meaning involves a moment of distantiation, of placing at a distance "lived" experience. Phenomenology begins when, not content to "live"-or to "revive"-we interpret the lived in order to signify it. It is in that way that epoche and meaning are tightly connected.

This rapport is easy to discern in the case of language. The linguistic sign can only stand for something if it is not the thing. The sign, in this way, involves a specific negativity. The epoche is the virtual event, the fictional act which begins the entire game by which we exchange signs for things, signs for other signs, uttered signs for received signs. Phenomenology is like the explicit retrieve of this virtual event which it raises to the dignity of act, of philosophical gesture. It makes thematic what was only operational; thus it makes meaning appear as meaning.

This philosophical gesture hermeneutics prolongs in its own region, the historical sciences, and more generally, the humanities. The "lived" which it intends to bring to language and to raise to meaning is the historical connection, mediated by the transmission of written documents, works, institutions, monuments, which make the historical past present to us. What we have called "belonging-to" is nothing other than adherence to the historically lived, what Hegel called the "substance" of

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morals. To the "lived" of phenomenology corresponds, on the side of hermeneutics, consciousness exposed to historical efficacy. This is why hermeneutical distantiation is to belonging- to as, in phenomenology, the epoche is to the lived. Herme- neutics, also, begins when, not content to belong to the trans- mitted tradition, we interpret the relationship of belonging-to in order to signify it.

This parallelism is of considerable importance if it is true that hermeneutics must assume in itself the critical moment, the moment of suspicion, from which proceeds the critique of ideologies, psychoanalysis, etc. This critical moment can be incorporated in belonging-to if and only if distantiation is con- substantial with belonging-to.

3. Hermeneutics also shares with phenomenology the thesis of the derived character of merely linguistic meanings.

It is easy, in this regard, to return to the phenomenological root of this well-known thesis of hermeneutics. Beginning with the most recent analysis, that of Gadamer [1] , one can see how the very composition of Wahrheit und Methode reflects this derived character of the problematic of language. Even if it is true that every experience has a "linguistic dimension", and that this Sprachlichkeit permeates every experience, it is not however with the Sprachlichkeit that a hermeneutical philoso- phy must begin. It is first necessary to say what is brought to language. This is why philosophy begins with the experience of art, which is not necessarily linguistic. Furthermore, in this experience, the more ontological aspects of the game (Spiel)-in the playful as well as the theatrical sense-are preferred ([1]: 97ff). In the participation of the players in the game, hermeneutics seeks the primary experience of belonging-to about which philosophy may inquire. And it is the game which reveals the function of exhibition or presentation (Darstellung), which, doubtlessly, summons the linguistic medium, but by necessity precedes and supports discourse. Discourse does not even come to the forefront in the second group of experiences interpreted in Wahrheit und Methode. Consciousness as exposed to the effects of history,3 which makes total reflection on prejudices impossible and precedes every objectification of the past by the historian, is not reducible to only linguistic aspects of the transmission of the past. Texts, documents, and

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monuments represent only one mediation among others, even if they are exemplary for the reasons stated above. The interplay of distance and proximity, constitutive of the historical connection, is what is brought to language, rather than what language produces.

This reference of the whole linguistic order back to the structure of experience constitutes, to my mind, the most important phenomenological presupposition of hermeneutics.

Since the time of the Logical Investigations, one can perceive the need for putting logical signification within the framework of a general theory of intentionality. This need implied that the paradigm of intentional relationships moved from the logical plan toward the perceptive plan, in which our first signifying relation to the thing is formed. Thus, in the Ideen I, Husserl went so far as to say that the layer of expression is essentially "unproductive" ([2] , ? 124). And the analysis of noetico-noematic correlations could be conducted quite far without the linguistic articulation as such being considered. The strategic level proper to phenomenology is, then, the noeme, with its modifications (presence, preservation, memories, fantasies, etc.), its modes of belief (certitude, doubt, reckoning, etc.), its degrees of actuality and potentiality. This constitution of the complete noeme precedes the properly linguistic plan, where the functions of denomination, predica- tion, syntactical liaison, etc., have access to articulation.

This way of subordinating the linguistic plan to the pre-linguistic plan of noematic analysis is, it seems to me, exemplary for hermeneutics. When the latter subordinates the linguistic experience to the whole of our aesthetic and historical experiences, it continues, at the level of the Humanities, the movement started by Husserl at the level of perceptive experience.

4. This kinship between the ante-predicative of phenomenology and that of hermeneutics is all the closer as Husserlian phenomenology has itself begun to spread the phenomenology of perception in the direction of a hermeneutic of historic experience. One knows how:

On the one hand, Husserl kept developing the properly temporal implications of perceptive experience. He was thus placed, by his-own analysis, on the path of the historicity of

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human experience taken as a whole. In particular, it became more and more evident that the presumptive, inadequate, unfinished character which results for perceptive experience of its temporal structure could be extended step by step to historical experience taken as a whole. A new model of truth thus proceeded from the phenomenology of perception that could be easily transposed into the historico-hermeneutical sciences. Such is the consequence that Merleau-Ponty has drawn from Husserlian phenomenology.

On the other hand, perceptive experience appeared more and more as an artificially isolated segment of a relation to the "world of life", itself endowed with a historic and cultural character. I would not insist here on this philosophy of Lebenswelt from the time of the Krisis, incidentally con- temporary with the analytic of Dasein by Heidegger. It is enough to notice that the return from the objectified and mathematicized nature of the Galilean and Newtonian sciences to the Lebenswelt is paradigmatic for an analogous return in hermeneutics at the level of the Humanities, when hermeneutics undertakes to rejoin the artistic, historic, and linguistic experi- ence which precedes and supports the objectifications and explications of historical and sociological sciences. This return to the Lebenswelt can all the better play a paradigmatic role for hermeneutics to the extent that, first, Husserl does not confound the Lebenswelt with I know not what ineffable immediateness, and, second, the Lebenswelt is not identified with the vital and emotional layers of human experience, but designates by this expression the reservoir of meaning, the surplus of meaning of the life experience, which makes possible the objectifying and explicative attitude.

5. But these last remarks have already led us to the point at which phenomenology can only be the presupposition of hermeneutics in the measure to which it, in its turn, involves a hermeneutical presupposition.

By hermeneutical presupposition I essentially intend the necessity for phenomenology to conceive of its method as an Auslegung, an exegesis, an explication, an interpretation. The IV Cartesian Meditation defines the phenomenological enterprise entirely as Auslegung. Paragraph 41, which closes the IV Meditation, expressly defines transcendental idealism as the

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" 'phenomenological self-explication' that went on in my ego" (117; [3]: 84).4 What characterizes the "style" of interpreta- tion is the character of "infinite work" which is attached to the unfolding of the horizons of actual experience. Phe- nomenology is an "indefinitely pursued" meditation, because the reflection is overwhelmed by the potential signification of one's own lived experience. This theme is returned to at the end of the V Meditation. Paragraph 59 is entitled: "Ontological explication and its place within constitutional transcendental phenomenology as a whole." What Husserl called ontological explication consists of the unfolding of the layers of meaning (nature, animality, psychism, culture, personality) which to- gether constitute the "world as constituted meaning". Thus, explication is held halfway between a philosophy of construc- tion and a philosophy of description. Contra Hegel and his successors, contra all "metaphysical construction", Husserl maintained that phenomenology "creates" nothing, but only "finds" (168; [3]: 141); phenomenology is an explication of experience:

[P] henomenological explication does nothing but explicate the sense this world has for us all, prior to any philosophizing, and obviously gets solely from our experience-a sense which philosophy can uncover but never alter, and which, because of an essential necessity, not because of our weakness, entails (in the case of any actual experience) horizons that need fundamental clarification [Kldrung]. (177; [3]: 151.)

What Husserl anticipates here, without drawing any of the consequences of it, is the coincidence of intuition and explica- tion. All phenomenology is an explication in the evidence and an evidence of explication. An evidence which makes itself explicit, an explication which deploys an evidence, such is phenomenological experience. It is in this sense that phe- nomenology finds actualization only as hermeneutics.

But the truth of this proposition can only be acknowl- edged if, at the same time, one entirely assumes the critique of Husserlian idealism by hermeneutics. It is here that the Second part of this essay refers back to the First: phenomenology and hermeneutics remain the presuppositions of each other to the

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extent that the idealism of Husserlian phenomenology keeps being submitted to the critique of hermeneutics.

R. Bradley DeFord, trans.

REFERENCES

[1] H. G. Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (Tiubingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1960, 1965, 1973).

[2] Edmund Husserl, Ideen, ed. by Walter Bremel, in Husserliana V (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952): 138-62.

[3] , Cartesian Meditations, trans. by Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960).

[4] Paul Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary (1950) (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1966).

[5] , Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (1965) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969).

[6] __ -, The Conflict of Interpretations (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970).

[7] , "Hermeneutique et Critique des ideologies," in Idceologie et Demy thisa- tion, ed. by Castelli (Paris: Aubier, 1973).

[8] J. P. Sartre, "Une idee fondamentale de la phenomenologie de Husserl: l'Intentionnalite" (1937), reprinted in his Situations I (Paris: Gallimard, 1947).

NOTES

'This essay makes the point of the changing of method implied by my own evolution, from an eidetic phenomenology in [4] to [5] and [6].

2This text, published for the first time in Jahrbuch fiur Phil. u Phan. Forschung (1930), has been published by the late H. L. van Breda, director of the Husserl Archives in Louvain, in [2].

'With this expression I am proposing an equivalent of the concept of Wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewuj3tsein, used above, p. 92.

4To decipher this notation: in this citation and those that follow, the first number refers to the page of the German edition (noted in the margin of the English translation); the second number refers to the English translation, which in this case is by Dorion Cairns.