Paul Fairfield Philosophical Hermeneutics Reinterpreted Dialogues With Existentialism, Pragmatism, Critical Theory and Postmodernism - 000 PDF

Philosophical Hermeneutics Reinterpreted
Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy

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Foucault’s Heidegger, Timothy Rayner
Gadamer and the Question of the Divine, Walter Lammi
Heidegger and a Metaphysics of Feeling, Sharin N. Elkholy
Heidegger and Aristotle, Michael Bowler
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Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology, Kirk M. Besmer
The Movement of Nihilism, edited by Laurence Paul Hemming, Kostas
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Nietzsche’s Ethical Theory, Craig Dove
Nietzsche, Nihilism and the Philosophy of the Future, edited by Jeffrey Metzger
Place, Commonality and Judgement, Andrew Benjamin
Sartre’s Phenomenology, David Reisman
Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, edited by James Luchte
Time and Becoming in Nietzsche’s Thought, Robin Small
The Philosophy of Exaggeration, Alexander Garcia Düttmann
Who’s Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari? Gregg Lambert
Žižek and Heidegger, Thomas Brockelman
Philosophical Hermeneutics
Reinterpreted
Dialogues with Existentialism,

Pragmatism, Critical Theory and
Postmodernism
Paul Fairfield
Continuum International Publishing Group
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© Paul Fairfield, 2011
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-2962-8
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Fairfield, Paul, 1966-
â•‡â•‡ Philosophical hermeneutics reinterpreted : dialogues with existen-
tialism, pragmatism, critical theory, and postmodernism / Paul Fairfield.
â•‡â•‡â•‡â•‡p. cm.
â•‡â•‡ISBN 978-1-4411-1638-3
â•‡â•‡ 1. Hermeneutics--History. I. Title.
â•‡â•‡BD241.F33 2011
â•‡â•‡121’.686--dc22
2011006211
Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

Contents
Introduction: Hermeneutical Engagements 1
Part I. Existentialism7
1. Perspectivism: Friedrich Nietzsche 9
2. Reason as Boundless Communication: Karl Jaspers 27
3. The Thou and the Mass: Gabriel Marcel 44
Part II. Pragmatism61

4. Truth After Correspondence: William James 63
5. The Theory of Inquiry: John Dewey 81
6. Practice, Theory and Anti-Theory: Richard Rorty 99
Part III. Critical Theory117

7. Interpretation and Criticism: Max Horkheimer 119
8. Deliberative Politics: Jürgen Habermas 136
9. Discourse Ethics: Karl-Otto Apel 154
Part IV. Postmodernism171

10. Genealogy and Suspicious Interpretation: Michel Foucault 173
11. Radical Hermeneutics: John Caputo 194
12. Unprincipled Judgements: Jean-François Lyotard 211
Notes231
Bibliography251
Index259
For Gwyneth Fairfield
Introduction
Hermeneutical Engagements
The Janus face stands above so much of what we do and are that it is little
exaggeration to speak of it as the basic movement of spirit itself. The life
of the mind is a two-directional gaze and an unending dialectic within
oppositional structures that are almost too numerous to list. The basic
movement of spirit is a double movement, and one not dissimilar to many
processes in nature. The hermeneutical circle provides an important case
in point; interpretation is a constant relating of universal to particular,
a looking back and forth at individual passages and the meaning of the
text as a whole. This is the work of interpretation, the circular or spiral
structure in which thinking always already proceeds and meaning arises.
It is not only the relation of universal and particular that may be spoken
of in this way but rather a great deal of our intellectual life. We take up a
conversation that precedes us, and it falls to us to offer a contribution that
can never entirely be foreseen. We catch the ball that is thrown to us, but
we also carry it farther.
Consider the following lengthy yet far from exhaustive list of pairings:
universal and particular; Apollonian and Dionysian; logos and mythos;
theory and practice; identity and difference; matter and form; object and
word; disclosure and concealment; understanding and misunderstanding;
question and answer; what we do and what happens to us; what lies in front
of us and what takes place behind our back; constitution and how we have
2 Philosophical Hermeneutics Reinterpreted
been constituted; activity and passivity; invention and discovery; projection

and reception; presence and absence; actuality and possibility; recollection
and anticipation; description and prescription; affirmation and negation;
recovery and suspicion; conservation and innovation; conversation and
coercion.1 These are not dichotomies but working distinctions in which
one value in every case leads into the other. As we move from one side of a
given pairing to the other, we are neither crossing a Rubicon, entering and
exiting worlds, nor switching on and off now one faculty and now another.
All of these values are properly regarded as relata since ‘in themselves’
and apart from the relations that give them meaning and life they are
misleading fictions and not much of anything. The dichotomies of which
philosophers have spoken for millennia are in many cases relics of a time
when thinking was archaic and in others pragmatic distinctions that have
fallen into historical forgetfulness and petrified into absolutes. Regarded
phenomenologically, cognition is a relentless dialectical movement. It is
this constant running back and forth that is decisive and that calls for
thinking or indeed that defines the fundamental structure and the work of
thinking. Cognition that is not a technical fiction – the smooth functioning
of a materialist and mechanistic apparatus or an epistemologist’s blueprint
– but a living reality, lives and moves and has its being in this back-and-forth,
in a logic of the both/and and the neither/nor. When the dialectic comes
to an end – when this constant movement exhausts our energies, thought
settles into one pole or the other, and relata become fixed positions –
difficulties ensue. Thinking becomes one-sided and narrowed at the same
time that it appears well-ordered, and the clear and fortified systems that
we construct conceal half the world and lack thinking’s essential quality of
on-the-wayness. Thinking is dialectical and it is mortal, and it profits us to
dwell on the conditions that can bring about its decline.
What is is always on the move, in constant process of becoming
something else. It is itself, yet it is also not itself. It leads away or points
beyond itself, and our metaphysical efforts to find an essence, pin it down,
or otherwise get it right show an abiding tendency to violate the thing itself.
Understanding is what we do and what we are, yet theoretical efforts to
conceptualize this have long tended toward reduction, oversimplification,
and often enough sheer mythology. All is processual yet unchaotic. There
is order amid disorder and illumination in the darkness, even while the
order of the world is as much invented as discovered, imposed and received
in about equal measure. We light a candle in the darkness, and while the
search for understanding is fraught and unstable, it does not always fail.
Its successes are contingent, marginal, and usually temporary, but they
Hermeneutical Engagements 3
are successes all the same. All being is interpreted being, and interpreta-
tions are historically conditioned, perspectival and partial. Thinking is an
occupation with what lies before us, yet what has happened behind our
back is often decisive. Let us not say always, for we are never mere products
of language or history or in any way trapped by them. There is agency in
interpretation, and there is also how our agency has been constituted.
This is not a contradiction but a phenomenological description of our
hermeneutical situation. We have already understood, or preunderstood,
our object, but we are also capable of understanding differently. Language
preforms thought, and we may also think otherwise. The logic of herme-
neutics is non-linear, non-formal and non-foundational; it is relational,
contextual, and dialogical. Interpretation does not begin at the beginning
and it is without end.
What is must be understood relationally, and the same can be said of
philosophical hermeneutics itself. Post-Heideggerian hermeneutics has
been well articulated by Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur and a large
number of thinkers working under their influence. The reinterpretation
that I undertake in these studies is an effort less to return to the blackboard
that led to Truth and Method in particular than to speak of philosophical
hermeneutics in relational terms, by bringing it into contact with four
neighbouring traditions and a few key figures within each. It is not always
clear how hermeneutics stands toward pragmatism or existential thought,
for instance, or toward critical theory or postmodernism/poststructur-
alism, either in general or as it pertains to specific issues. Rather often
one is given to believe that the latter movements all stand in fundamental
opposition to hermeneutics, and on some issues this is undoubtedly true,
but this should not cause us to overlook important affinities and areas for
productive engagement that have remained underappreciated.
A complicating factor, of course, is that none of the movements or
traditions of thought under discussion can be spoken of as unified
systems or anything close to it. Existentialism, pragmatism, critical theory
and postmodernism are equally imprecise umbrella terms which I use
for purposes of economy only, and in full recognition that a Friedrich
Nietzsche and a Gabriel Marcel share about as much, or as little, as a
William James and a Richard Rorty, a Max Horkheimer and a Jürgen
Habermas, or a Michel Foucault and a John Caputo. We are speaking of
family resemblances, and the same can be said of hermeneutics. By this
term I shall be referring primarily to Gadamer but also to the general
trajectory of thought that he recounted and carried farther in Truth and
Method and other writings as well as the work of Ricoeur and many more
recent thinkers following in their wake. In what follows I shall not attempt
any Tolstoyan tale of five families – something impossible in any case,
apart from textbook-style comparisons – but something far more specific:
a dozen analyses that treat hermeneutics in relation to specific themes in
the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel in the
existential tradition, William James, John Dewey and Richard Rorty in the
pragmatist school, Max Horkheimer, Jürgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel
in critical theory, and Michel Foucault, John Caputo and Jean-François
Lyotard in postmodernism. The aim of these analyses is both to clarify
some outstanding issues in philosophical hermeneutics and, if possible, to
advance it a couple of steps beyond what Gadamer and Ricoeur have given
us. The letter and spirit of hermeneutics are explicitly dialogical, and it is
in this spirit that I undertake what follows. My aim is neither to speak about
existentialism, pragmatism, critical theory and postmodernism from the
standpoint of an outsider or as unified philosophies to which hermeneutics
may or may not stand opposed, nor is it to overhaul radically the ideas
that found expression in Truth and Method, but to bring these ideas into
explicit contact with the above-mentioned traditions. It is on the border
that creative thought often finds a home and that ideas are tested, far
more effectively than when thought becomes inward-looking and limited
to the conversation of fellow travellers. As Gadamer and Ricoeur well knew
and demonstrated in their practice as philosophers, ideas benefit from
dialogical encounters with their respective others, and it is in this spirit that
the following studies are offered.
Hermeneutics exhibits clear differences in many of its orienting questions
from all four of these traditions, as well as differences of vocabulary, style and
often temperament. The importance that such differences carry, however, is
often open to question. How important is it, for instance, that hermeneutics
is, as it were, constitutionally Socratic (the Socrates, that is, of the doctrine of
ignorance, of dialogue and intellectual humility) while Foucault or Apel is not,
or not in the same manner, or that hermeneutics is less empirically oriented
than Dewey or Habermas, or that it does not quite share the sense of life of a
Nietzsche or a Caputo? Do these amount to substantive and indeed irrecon-
cilable philosophical differences? What is the relation between hermeneutics
and classical American pragmatism, or contemporary neo-pragmatism? These
traditions emerged independently of each other and on separate continents,
yet a growing number of scholars are pointing out important and previously
unnoticed affinities between them. Gadamer’s debates with Habermas and
Derrida leave many with the view that hermeneutics is fundamentally at odds
with both critical theory and postmodern thought in general, even while it
Hermeneutical Engagements 5
also shares considerable common ground with both. In what follows, the
questions that are at stake in Part One include the hermeneutical relevance of
perspectivism, the dialogical nature of reason and the ethical implications of
mass society. Part Two discusses pragmatic conceptions of truth, inquiry and
the relation of theory and practice. Part Three examines the nature and condi-
tions of critical reflection and the possibility of both an ethics and a politics of
communication. Finally, the chapters of Part Four inquire into genealogy and
suspicion, radical hermeneutics and the nature of ethical judgement.
While the account of philosophical hermeneutics that emerges in these
chapters is consistent in spirit with the work of Gadamer and Ricoeur,
at times it ventures a step or two beyond its letter. Hermeneutics as I
conceive it is a philosophy of the big tent. Rather more hospitable to its
others, and sometimes its critics, than what is usual in philosophy, herme-
neutics is no dogmatic system of thought but is explicitly dialectical and
dialogical. Taking this idea seriously means that boundaries of thought
must more than occasionally be crossed. This is especially so if we are
seeking a more explicit understanding of many of the conceptual pairings
listed above. Hermeneutical thinkers intent on understanding the theory/
practice relation, for instance, would do well to examine the matter in
relation to the pragmatists for whom this question belonged at the centre
of their concerns and whose positions show clear affinities with Gadamer
in particular. Philosophers who wish to articulate a hermeneutical ethics
or politics would also do well to bring together some familiar Gadamerian
themes with conceptions of discourse ethics and deliberative democracy
that are more directly associated with critical theory, with existential
reflection on mass society, and with a postmodern critique of judgement.
While the present work speaks of interpretation, reason, truth, inquiry
and related notions in ways that in some fashion or other hang together,
no highly unified account of the life of the mind emerges here and
none ought to be expected. Theorists with a passion for simplicity
can always find ways to reduce phenomena in ways that conform with
formal models, and when the things themselves do not fit our models
they can be made to fit, and often are. We can speak of cognition in
strictly mechanistic terms, for instance, and compress the manifold into
a scientific-technological frame if we are content to skim the surface of
intellectual life and shed a bit of light thereby, and if we choose to ignore
the more ambiguous, more profound, more inventive and more troubled
regions of thought. Yet if it is a phenomenologically adequate account
that we seek, let us not expect to find the kind of theoretical elegance
and ‘clarity’ that we might find were human understanding a simple
affair of mechanics or an epistemological problem. Theorists who insist

that all matters that come before them must be simple will be content
to speak of cognition using the model of a machine and its workings,
but the price that we pay for such models is prohibitive. Intellectual
life is a constant running back from one dialectical pole to the other,
a venturing and return without end, and an imaginative negotiation
of a lifeworld. We think in the interstices of traditional dichotomies,
without ahistorical touchstones, without hard wiring, and rather often
without methods. This is not a view that is unique to hermeneutics but
is expressed in a variety of ways by many of the thinkers whom I take
up in the following chapters. The account that emerges draws upon
each of the above-mentioned traditions while remaining very much in
Gadamer’s wake.
Part One
Existentialism
Chapter 1
Perspectivism
Friedrich Nietzsche
That interpretation occurs from a finite perspective – one that reveals

the interpretive object in a particular aspect while also constituting the
being of that object – is not a discovery of twentieth-century hermeneutics.
Gadamer traced the idea in primitive form to Chladenius and, before
him, Leibniz, although it would be much later that the hermeneutical
implications of the concept of perspective, derived from optics, would
become clear.1 They would be clarified, of course, in the writings of the
great hermeneutical philosophers of the twentieth century, above all by
Heidegger and Gadamer. Before both, however, was a figure whose writings
on interpretation and perspective are of unmistakable importance even
while his relation to philosophical hermeneutics is rather difficult to place:
Friedrich Nietzsche. Gadamer’s own account of the history of herme-
neutics in Truth and Method does not omit Nietzsche, yet references to his
works are rather fewer than one might expect in a story that prominently
includes the names of Schleiermacher, Ranke, Droysen, Dilthey, Husserl,
Count York and, of course, Heidegger. More recently, Gianni Vattimo has
argued persuasively not only that Nietzsche was indeed a hermeneutical
thinker but that ‘the only possible way of placing Nietzsche in the history
of modern philosophy is to consider him as belonging to the “school”
of ontological hermeneutics.’ Vattimo’s point is one with which I fully
concur, in spite of the fact, as he also writes, that ‘neither Gadamer .â•›.â•›.
nor Heidegger himself in his courses on Nietzsche appears to consider
Nietzsche as a “hermeneutic” thinker.’2 In spite of Heidegger’s profound
indebtedness to Nietzsche, he would speak of him as a metaphysical, not
hermeneutical, philosopher.
Heidegger’s controversial interpretation is not one that I propose to take
up here. Instead I shall pursue a line of questioning regarding Nietzsche as
a hermeneuticist, as a philosopher not only of existence but, inseparable
from this, of interpretation, perspectivism, genealogy and historicity. That
Nietzsche was an important forerunner of existentialism and postmod-
ernism is well known, yet his connection with hermeneutics may need
to be shown. Let us briefly recall, then, some of the hypotheses that
Nietzsche would share with the hermeneutics of Heidegger and Gadamer

in particular, beginning with the critique of Enlightenment epistemology
and the quest for ahistorical certainty on which it embarked. Nietzsche’s
critiques effectively undermined ahistorical thinking in general along with
the notion of objectivity and the faith in dichotomies on which so much
Enlightenment thought relied. Nietzsche effectively diagnosed many of the
excesses and naiveties of the rationalists and empiricists, the idealists and
positivists, and so on, raising new questions about the nature and limits of
a knowledge now centred on the concept of interpretation. To know is to
interpret one’s object in a manner that is contingent at once on history
and language, on values and the requirements of a certain kind of life, and
on point of view. Knowing the world is not to be thought of on the model
of unconditioned subjectivity encountering an uninterpreted reality, as an
objective beholding of what is there, or a mirroring relation made possible
by some method or other. What has being for us has always already been
schematized and revealed in ways that reflect our historical heritage.
Interpretation belongs to experience in general and from the outset, inter-
pretations that are value- and theory-laden, partial, interested, incomplete
and uncertain.
All of this Nietzsche very ably brought to our attention. He impressed on
us the need to overcome the false antitheses that had brought philosophy
by the nineteenth century to a dead end and to replace these with ways
of thinking that are dialectical, experimental, perspectival, phenomeno-
logical and rhetorical, which partake of the Dionysian no less than the
Apollonian, and of mythos as much as logos. If philosophy is an interpretive
art then it ought to be unabashedly so, a gay science of free-spirited
questioning and provocations, of ‘dangerous maybes’ and Dionysian
excess.3 The hermeneutics of Heidegger and Gadamer would certainly
be less ‘gay’ than what issued from Nietzsche’s pen, yet here as well a new
commitment to overcoming binary oppositions, the quest for foundations,
and two and a half millennia of metaphysics through a project of rigorous
phenomenological interpretation would replace the hackneyed opposi-
tions of rationalism and empiricism, realism and antirealism, and so on.
Other common themes include the finitude and linguisticality of inter-
pretation, the notion of ‘horizon’ (referring, as Gadamer put it, to ‘the
way in which thought is tied to its finite determinacy, and the way one’s
range of vision is gradually expanded’), the susceptibility of interpretation
to distortion (due in no small measure to the workings of language), the
inadequacy of the correspondence theory of truth and what Gadamer
called ‘the dominant epistemological methodologism,’ the impossibility of
Perspectivism 11
‘unprejudiced scholarship’ and of ‘disregarding ourselves’ in research, an

accent on the limits and interpretive nature of science and a critique of the
modern idolatry of it, the non-distinction between what is and its mode(s)
of presentation to us, the phenomenological inseparability of being and
awareness, and some others.4 For Nietzsche, no less than Heidegger and
Gadamer, all being is interpreted being, and while the details of this
hypothesis would differ in important ways, one might say in the case of
each figure that the basic condition of knowing is that of a simultaneous
not-knowing, of a play of light, shadow and darkness that in no instance
leads to unmediated or total disclosure.
But of the numerous hypotheses that twentieth-century hermeneutics
shares with Nietzsche, none is of more consequence than the concept of
perspective itself. Nietzsche’s insight in short was that knowing invariably
occurs from a finite point of view. This applies to scientific and philo-
sophical knowledge no less than to the various other ways of knowing the
world, and it is not a condition from which any technique of reflection
could ever deliver us. This hypothesis would shape the basic problem-
atics of both existential phenomenology and philosophical hermeneutics,
and indeed several other currents of contemporary continental thought,
confirming Nietzsche’s status as the first philosopher of the twentieth
century. This was no minor insight, and while the basic concept preceded
him, it was Nietzsche who radicalized the point and identified several of
its more important implications. It is important that we recall Nietzsche’s
argument before asking some questions about its present relevance for
hermeneutics.
Well prior to Heidegger, it was Nietzsche who first placed the concepts
of interpretation and perspective in the centre of philosophy, displacing
models of knowing subjectivity that had their roots in the seventeenth
century. Through a series of sceptical arguments he brought to an end
the dream of philosophy beholding the universe as a god might, from an
absolutely unconditioned point of view or indeed from no point of view.
Nietzsche’s ‘death of god’ signified the death of ahistorical, nonperspec-
tival thinking, the death of the absolute in all its forms, and the realization
of human finitude. All apparent certainties are products of historical and
linguistic mediation. A ‘self-evident truth’ is a proposition that fits without
resistance into an existing historical schematism and on which many other
propositions depend. Its self-evident appearance is a consequence of
historical forgetfulness and is in every case illusory. Being is not external
to consciousness, nor the reverse. What we perceive and know of the world
is the particular aspect that a finite point of view renders visible, not the
totality. The very concept of totality or being in itself is unintelligible, since

apart from subjectivity it is quite literally unthinkable. Knowing an object,
for Nietzsche, means relating it to the interpreter, viewing it under a
particular aspect and in relation to an existing framework of language and
concepts. It involves in every case viewing the object from a perspective that
constitutes the being of the object.
Nietzsche’s way of putting this is that ‘we possess the concept “being,”
“thing,” only as a relational concept.’5 Being in itself is an idle notion.
What has being for us is never historically unconditioned, a simple matter
of the way things are. Instead, the way things are is the mode in which
they manifest themselves to the occupants of a particular standpoint.
Perspective, as Nietzsche would express it, is ‘the basic condition of
all life’, including all knowing.6 ‘The perspective therefore decides the
character of the “appearance”’ – and where the antithesis of appearance
and reality is abolished.7 As Nietzsche famously stated in On the Genealogy of
Morals, ‘Henceforth, my dear philosophers, let us be on guard against the
dangerous old conceptual fiction that posited a “pure, will-less, painless,
timeless knowing subject”; let us guard against the snares of such contra-
dictory concepts as “pure reason”, “absolute spirituality”, “knowledge
in itself”; these always demand that we should think of an eye that is
completely unthinkable, an eye turned in no particular direction, in which
the active and interpreting forces, through which alone seeing becomes
seeing something, are supposed to be lacking; these always demand of the
eye an absurdity and a nonsense. There is only a perspective seeing, only
a perspective “knowing”; and the more affects we allow to speak about
one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing,
the more complete will our “concept” of this thing, our “objectivity”, be.
But to eliminate the will altogether, to suspend each and every affect,
supposing we were capable of this – what would that mean but to castrate
the intellect?’8 He would formulate the same point in the notes to The Will
to Power as follows: ‘Against positivism, which halts at phenomena – “There
are only facts” – I would say: No, facts is precisely what there is not, only
interpretations. We cannot establish any fact “in itself”: perhaps it is folly
to want to do such a thing. .â•›.â•›. In so far as the word “knowledge” has any
meaning, the world is knowable; but it is interpretable otherwise, it has no
meaning behind it, but countless meanings: “Perspectivism.”’9 What passes
for facts are low-level interpretations that are not presently contested, on
which we rely for pragmatic purposes, and on which many less rudimentary
propositions likewise depend. What Nietzsche rejected are not facts in
this sense but facts ‘in themselves’ and indeed anything that is ‘in itself’,
Perspectivism 13
whether it be things, being, truth or knowledge. The ‘in itself’ would be

knowable only by a god – the same god that the philosophers to whom
Nietzsche placed himself in opposition had long aspired to be.
Perspectivism thus anticipates what Heidegger would term the
as-structure of interpretation. To know, understand or perceive something
is always to perceive it as this or that kind of thing, as belonging to a
particular category of being and thus never to behold it sub specie aeterni-
tatis. A perception that is aperspectival and apart from the as-structure of
interpretation would be a perception from a place that is no-place. What
a thing is for us – not merely how it appears but how it is, the manner in
which it is manifest to us – is contingent on perspective in the sense of
either a language, worldview, disciplinary vocabulary, set of beliefs, values,
affects or will to power. The optical metaphor of perspective refers to any
and all of these and probably some other things besides. No cognitive or
other perspective on any object gives us a privileged view of it, but an aspect
only. An historical event, for instance, may be interpreted from the point of
view of politics or economics, sociology or religion, psychology or morality,
or any number of viewpoints and vocabularies, each of which opens up
a dimension of meaning while closing off others. Each raises particular
questions while dismissing others as irrelevant, yet none gives us a uniquely
and supremely authoritative knowledge of that event, or one that could
encompass everything that can be known of it. The same can be said of
any interpretive object; in being known, it is revealed to us in a particular
and limited aspect. As Alexander Nehamas puts it, ‘Perspectivism implies
that in order to engage in any activity we must necessarily occupy ourselves
with a selection of material and exclude much from our consideration.
It does not imply that we see or know an appearance of the world instead
of that world itself. .â•›.â•›. What is seen is simply the world itself .â•›.â•›. from that
perspective.’10
This basic hypothesis would, of course, be appropriated by philosophical
hermeneutics, albeit with considerable qualification. While abandoning
the perspectivist label and infrequently citing Nietzsche by name, Gadamer
would repeat in Truth and Method that ‘we never succeed in seeing anything
but an ever more extended aspect, a “view” of the world. Those views of
the world are not relative in the sense that one could oppose them to the
“world in itself”, as if the right view from some possible position outside
the human, linguistic world could discover it in its being-in-itself. No one
doubts that the world can exist without man and perhaps will do so. .â•›.â•›.
The multiplicity of .â•›.â•›. worldviews does not involve any relativization of the
“world”. Rather, what the world is is not different from the views in which
it presents itself. The relationship is the same in the perception of things.

Seen phenomenologically, the “thing-in-itself” is, as Husserl has shown,
nothing but the continuity with which the various perceptual perspectives
on objects shade into one another.’ Citing Husserl and Heidegger rather
than Nietzsche, Gadamer ‘repeatedly emphasized’ that ‘there is no possible
consciousness .â•›.â•›. in which any traditionary “subject matter” would appear
in the light of eternity. Every appropriation of tradition .â•›.â•›. is the experience
of an “aspect” of the thing itself.’11 This point is of fundamental herme-
neutical importance and expressions of it appear throughout Gadamer’s
writings as well as the wider literature of post-Heideggerian hermeneutics.
What would carry less influence there is Nietzsche’s decided emphasis
on the falsification of consciousness, a theme that Nietzsche regarded as
essential to his perspectivism. The falsity of which he often wrote concerns
the habit of interpretation becoming dogmatic and mistaking the particular
aspect that comes into view with the object in its totality. Interpretation
arranges, orders, forms, evaluates, simplifies, and so constitutes its object.
In doing so it ‘participates in Being’, as Jean Granier puts it, while being
‘neither the cause, principle, nor measure of reality.’ ‘Each appearance’,
as this scholar also points out, ‘is an apparition – that is, a real manifestation
– and there is nothing to look for beyond these manifestations. To be is
to appear – not in the sense that appearing is the equivalent of Being, but
in that every apparition is a revelation of Being.’ A good interpretation is
faithful to its object while also involving what Granier calls ‘some creative
initiative on the part of the interpreter.’ A common tendency of thought is
to overlook this initiative or deny it outright, thus regarding our perspec-
tival categories as categories of the object in itself. We thus conjure up the
absolute, in spite of its utter unthinkability – unthinkable since, in the same
author’s words, ‘knowledge is a relation, and since an absolute would cease
to be absolute if it sustained a relation to an other being outside itself.’12 Yet
posit the ‘in itself’ and identify it with the aspect that a contingent mode of
access makes visible is both commonplace and the essence of falsification.
Knowing, Nietzsche would always insist, involves simplifying our object;
in every case it involves an imposition of stability and a call to order, an
appropriation that captures the dimension of the thing that serves us. It is
a fundamentally interested and artificial arrangement that comes into view,
one that includes no small element of ‘forcing, adjusting, abbreviating,
omitting, padding, investing, falsifying, and whatever else is of the essence
of interpreting.’13 When Nietzsche spoke of interpretation his language
would always accent the element of illusion and distortion, and where this
means not that we have failed to ‘get it right’ in the sense of accurately
Perspectivism 15
representing being in itself, but that we have compressed the manifold

into an expedient classification. The order of the world is illusory in the
sense that it is a consequence of centuries of arrangement, unification and
simplification according to ‘a scheme that we cannot throw off’ by reason of
its practical utility. Language, for instance, imposes a certain arrangement
on experience, as does logic, science and common sense. ‘The naiveté was
to take an anthropocentric idiosyncracy as the measure of things, as the rule
for determining “real” and “unreal”: in short, to make absolute something
conditioned.’14
The categories of thought, Nietzsche held, ‘are interpreted into things’;
they are impositions and projections that suit those occupying a particular
standpoint, and impositions that we do not regard as such.15 Our concepts
neither simply take in what is there nor partake of the a priori or transcen-
dental. Concepts and values likewise are never more than perspectival
and expedient falsifications in this sense, and where there is no possi-
bility of them being ‘true’ in the sense of corresponding to objective
states of affairs. Whether it be categories of a philosophical, scientific or
moral nature, all such concepts constitute a ‘thoroughly artificial, suitably
constructed and suitably falsified world.’16 It belongs to the very essence
of knowledge that it serves life or a particular form of it; it is a condition
of the knower’s existence. Every interpretive framework furthers the
interests of its adherents and makes it possible to ‘“know” (or believe or
imagine) just as much as may be useful in the interests of the human herd,
the species.’17 Modern epistemology had entirely overlooked not only the
perspectival but the self-serving dimension of knowledge, insisting that
if only we bring our thought into conformity with the correct method,
then all interests and all subjectivity can be overcome. That this is a naïve
illusion is a point on which Nietzsche would continually dwell. Disinterest,
objectivity and detachment were regular targets of his scepticism, of which
the following texts are representative: ‘We have projected the conditions of
our preservation as predicates of being in general. Because we have to be
stable in our beliefs if we are to prosper, we have made the “real” world a
world not of change and becoming, but one of being.’18 ‘The falseness of
a judgement is for us not necessarily an objection to a judgement; in this
respect our new language may sound strangest. The question is to what
extent it is life-promoting, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even
species-cultivating.’19 Finally, ‘The inventive force that invented categories
laboured in the service of our needs, namely of our need for security,
for quick understanding on the basis of signs and sounds, for means of
abbreviation: “substance”, “subject”, “object”, “being”, “becoming” have
nothing to do with metaphysical truths.’20 Passages of this kind are found

throughout Nietzsche’s writings, and what they continually bring to our
attention is the error, as common as it is profound, of projecting what are
essentially conditions necessary for the promotion of our practical interests
onto being itself. Science no less than religion exists ‘to suit us’, as a means
of ‘taking possession of things’ and achieving intellectual comfort.21
Nietzsche’s perspectivism also maintains that we must conceive of
knowledge in terms of the will to knowledge, the will to truth and, insepa-
rable from both, the will to power. Interpretations no less than valuations
and all other forms of human expression are manifestations of the will to
power. A vocabulary of domination and conquest would always inform his
remarks on knowledge. Knowing is a fundamentally instinctive activity:
‘the personal confession of its author’ in the case of philosophy. There is
no eliminating either the perspective or the person of the knower from
knowing and the known, and the person taken not merely as a ‘knowing
subject’ but as a biological agent. It is the body that interprets; the intellect
does not belong to an order transcending the bodily and instinctive, nor
does it transcend the order of the political. Power, or the will to power, lies
at the basis not only of knowledge but of life taken as a whole. ‘A living
thing’, as Nietzsche expressed this point in Beyond Good and Evil, ‘seeks
above all to discharge its strength – life itself is will to power.’22 Knowing is one
form in which this is accomplished. What the knower in every case seeks is
to influence and transform what surrounds it, not merely to behold what
is there. Every perspective on the world seeks to further itself by means
ranging from the civilized to the uncivilized. It interprets reality ‘in order
to press it into service’, and in this sense is ‘a tool of power.’23 Nietzsche’s
frequent insistence that the will to knowledge and truth is a manifestation
of a more fundamental will to power is best understood neither crudely
nor metaphysically but (quasi-) biologically, politically and ontologically.
A good deal of ambiguity would always cling to this doctrine; however the
weight of the textual evidence suggests a view of knowledge as producing
effects on the natural and social worlds and as an interested, instinctive,
pragmatic and form-bestowing act.
The essentially political language of power and command was in some
measure proffered as a corrective of Enlightenment epistemologies that
had spoken of the knowing subject in excessively dispassionate and imper-
sonal terms, as if knowing the truth were a fundamentally passive affair of
registering uninterpreted sense impressions or analyzing clear and distinct
ideas by means of an impossibly cerebral conception of reason. When
discussing knowledge, Nietzsche’s language is as given to excess as it is on
Perspectivism 17
a great many other themes. His point is that nothing about the knower
is passive, uncreative, unbiological, ahistorical or coldly impersonal. It
legislates what it sees, classifies and schematizes the world according to its
own conditions of existence. The strong accent on the active, legislative
nature of interpretation must not be read in too literal or crude a way, as
many of Nietzsche’s detractors are inclined to do. For Nietzsche, the will
to power underlies the life of the human organism in general; as a knower
it bestows intelligibility on the world in an analogous way that as a moral
agent it bestows value and meaning on its existence. Nothing here is given,
and because modern philosophy had so thoroughly misunderstood this,
it became Nietzsche’s task to point it out and to demonstrate its implica-
tions, particularly the manner in which knowledge is the product of human
artifice. The accent on power calls attention to his view that the values and
interpretations that issue from a perspective strive not only to express one’s
own form of life but to expand its sphere of influence and to constitute the
world in which others live.
It is in this sense that Nietzsche spoke of philosophy as ‘the most spiritual
will to power’ and of philosophers as ‘commanders and legislators’ – not to
mean that they are petty autocrats of the mind but that their theoretical
constructions afford an order to an existence that unto itself is without
it. Philosophical interpretations are not alone in this respect. Scientific
hypotheses, artistic expressions, religious precepts, moral values and many
other things are likewise expressions of the will to power that are partisan
in favour of the interpreter. Ultimately it is ‘one’s own forms’ that one
imposes onto being, and normally without thinking that one is doing so.24
Interpretation being an instinctive, quasi-biological matter, it is entirely
inevitable that the structure and meaning we find in the world is of our
own device. The task of philosophical reflection is to become aware of this
fact, and as Maudemarie Clark correctly notes, ‘What Nietzsche objects to
in previous philosophers is not that they read their values into the world,
but that they pretended to be doing something else, that they were not
“honest enough in their work.”’25 Not only philosophers but interpreters in
general, Nietzsche wrote, ‘are all advocates who resent that name, .â•›.â•›. wily
spokesmen for their prejudices which they baptize “truths.”’26 Nietzsche’s
genealogical writings, for example, are hardly presented as value-neutral
descriptions of the history of moral and philosophical concepts but as a
polemic and an exercise in suspicion. Genealogical interpretation aims
to unmask illusions in rather strident terms, not only because Nietzsche
himself was a man of conviction but because of the requirements of intel-
lectual honesty – one of the virtues of mind that he valued most highly.
If moral evaluations typically masquerade as impartial and transcendent

deliverances, then it falls to genealogical interpretation to reveal not only
their histories but their subservience to a particular will to power.
Interpretation as Nietzsche both described and practised it incorporates
an attitude of suspicion, yet he would equally speak of it as an exercise in
exuberant experimentation, as a gay science to which he opposed the ‘spirit
of gravity’. It is a fundamentally creative art that explicitly forswears claims
to certainty. Philosophy practised in this spirit is no less ‘scientific’ than
several other schools of thought aspired to, yet it was to be a gay science in
the sense of uninhibited questioning for which there is no technique. As
Walter Kaufmann expressed it, ‘Questions permitting of experiment are, to
Nietzsche’s mind, those questions to which he can reply: “Versuchen wir’s!â•›”
Let us try it! Experimenting involves testing an answer by trying to live
according to it.’27 No theoretical model can formalize an interpretation that
is experimental in this sense. It is best understood in terms of what it is not:
a method, an attitude of perfect solemnity, a preoccupation with questions
that remain at a surface level of consciousness without any real possibility
of penetrating to the deeper regions of experience. Interpretation does
not come in one form and is not practised with a single attitude of mind.
Here it is suspicious and sceptical; there it is cheerful and mischievous.
On some matters it is inclined toward negation, on others affirmation or
provocation. At times it leaves a question unanswered or open-ended, and
at others it risks a hypothesis or a conviction. In encountering a text it is
receptive and resistant in turn, depending not on any preconceived turn
of mind but on what emerges in our reading of it. Knowing, in short, is
variable, multifarious and experimental. It is thus that he would speak of
philosophy as combining ‘a bold and exuberant spirituality’ with ‘a dialec-
tical severity’.28 It never reduces to a single mood or form and is averse ‘to
reposing once and for all in any one total view of the world.’29
Many of Nietzsche’s remarks on interpretation, knowledge, truth and
related themes undoubtedly aim at correcting the excesses of Enlightenment
thought, with its naïve overestimation of reason, its ahistorical objectivity
and its quest for foundations. In reading his texts we are mindful of
the tradition to which he was continually reacting in his characteristi-
cally free-spirited and excessive way. By Gadamer’s time the works of
Nietzsche and Heidegger had exercised a profound effect on the German
tradition in which he was working, yet in his writings as well a series of
phenomenological arguments is brought to bear against many of the
same Enlightenment doctrines that had aroused Nietzsche’s opposition
and at times express opposition against Nietzsche as well. As he would
Perspectivism 19
write in Truth and Method, ‘It seems to me, however, that the one-sidedness
of hermeneutic universalism has the truth of a corrective. It enlightens
the modern viewpoint based on making, producing and constructing
concerning the necessary conditions to which that viewpoint is subject.
In particular, it limits the position of the philosopher in the modern
world. However much he may be called to draw radical inferences from
everything, the role of prophet, of Cassandra, of preacher or of know-it-
all does not suit him.’ Philosophical correctives always exhibit a certain
one-sidedness, as Gadamer was also aware: ‘[I]t belongs to the special
structure of straightening something crooked’, he noted, ‘that it needs
to be bent in the opposite direction.’ By the middle of the twentieth
century, what Gadamer sought to bend in the opposite direction was both
the false objectivism of the Enlightenment as well as its radical critique.
Gadamer’s battle is therefore waged on two fronts: on one side is modern
philosophy’s ‘prejudice against prejudice’, its naïve methodologism and
foundationalism, and its propensity for ahistorical thinking; on the other
are radical critiques of the same.30 Nietzsche’s perspectivism itself required
a corrective. The accent on falsification and will to power appeared as
an over-correction, a characteristically excessive response to the theories
of knowledge that he rightly rejected. That interpretation is a legislative
imposition of form neglects a matter that for Gadamer is of fundamental
importance: it also listens to being.
An authentic encounter with a text or any interpretive object requires
a disposition toward reception. By the middle of the twentieth century,
the falsification hypothesis in its several forms – Nietzschean, Marxian,
Freudian and some others – had pulled the rug from beneath many of the
illusions of modern thought and at times introduced distortions of its own.
Consciousness, it now needed to be said, is not always false, tradition is not
always a source of misunderstanding, and radical criticism is not above the
fray of interpretation or delivered from the need to take seriously what
the object of interpretation has to say. Gadamer’s emphasis would accord-
ingly fall on the essential receptivity of interpretation. The ‘tradition of
Nietzsche and Heidegger through which Germany defined itself’, as Jean
Grondin expresses it, required ‘a new humility and openness.’31 Hence
Gadamer’s rather un-Nietzschean vocabulary of belonging to the inter-
pretive object, of understanding as an event of our historicity, and of the
‘self-awareness of the individual’ as ‘only a flickering in the closed circuits
of historical life.’ Gadamer’s phenomenological descriptions would speak
not of the complete passivity of hermeneutical reflection but of its funda-
mental hospitality. Texts and interlocutors make claims upon us – truth
claims that we are compelled to take seriously – and it is this that the
discourses of radical critique had overlooked. The interpreter, Gadamer
would write, ‘belongs to the text that he is reading.’ ‘Understanding or
its failure is like an event that happens to us.’ Similarly, ‘We say that we
‘conduct’ a conversation, but the more genuine a conversation is, the less
its conduct lies within the will of either partner.’32 If we can speak of a will
to power at all in interpretation as Gadamer described it, it is a power that
would appear to belong to the text over the reader and to tradition over
the standpoint of the present. While this would lead to a still widespread
caricature of hermeneutics as a philosophy of uncritical conservatism,
Gadamer’s position is clearly no rearguard reaction against either the
Enlightenment or any of the masters of suspicion. Its point is that radical
reflection also has its limits and its conditions of possibility.
Interpretation, radical and otherwise, involves projection, arrangement,
classification and no little simplification; it is a perspectival and creative
act of configuration. This point Nietzsche very artfully brought to our
attention, with all the emphasis and overemphasis that was characteristic
of him. Interpretation also listens; it receives the message of the text or
the claim of the Thou with a humility and a receptivity without which it
deteriorates into a false consciousness of another kind: one of inauthentic
self-certainty. One may wish to emphasize the first hypothesis or the second,
for the purpose of issuing a corrective or for another reason, yet differ-
ences of emphasis do not always amount to substantive and irreconcilable
differences. Both hypotheses are correct – provided the one-sidedness that
each corrective expresses (and that both are such must not be lost sight of)
give way to a more even-handed position.
Gadamer’s metaphor of a fusion of horizons provides a fitting artic-
ulation of such a position, even while at other times the language
of belonging to the text and being claimed by the interlocutor may
be overstated. Equally overstated is Nietzsche’s talk of legislation and
command. Interpretation is at once an active imposition of form and a
reception of truth claims. It transforms the knower and its object in about
equal measure and deteriorates under any other condition. It plays the role
of neither lord nor bondsman, but at times approximates one more than
the other, depending entirely on what emerges in the dialectic of question
and answer. Projection and reception, imposition of meaning and hospi-
tality to truth claims are inseparable dimensions of interpretation and are
antithetical only when regarded as abstractions. The practice of interpre-
tation involves an experience of reciprocity, of ‘coming to an understanding’
in a dialogue of equals, in Gadamer’s words, and where ‘understanding
Perspectivism 21
is not a mere action, a purposeful activity, a setting up of signs through

which I transmit my will to others.’ Rather, it is a social practice, a ‘life
process in which a community of life is lived out’ and in which a ‘“world”
is disclosed.’33
The theme of interpretive reciprocity would certainly receive less
satisfactory treatment in Nietzsche’s work than in twentieth-century herme-
neutics. That interpretation is not only an expression of the will but a
back-and-forth – a ‘dialectic without end’, as Graeme Nicholson puts it –
between speakers, between question and answer, text and reader, the will
and that which resists it, is a theme that Nietzsche underplayed.34 There
is agency in interpretation. There is the questioning act, the anticipation
of meaning, the projection of form and the search for coherence; there
is a looking beneath surfaces, detecting tensions, persuading, criticizing,
listening and any number of actions, yet there is also the question of ‘what
happens to us’ in interpretation. It is on the latter theme, of what happens
behind the back of the interpreter and the will, that Nietzsche’s argument
encounters its limits. The will to power is not sovereign but an effect of
history; the perspective we bring to bear is likewise a contingency, both in
the sense that it is an historical artifact and also that it is frequently revised
in the course of interpretation. The prejudices and projections that define
our perspective are often disconfirmed by the things themselves or by what
emerges or fails to emerge in our reading, causing a revision in our point of
view. The interpreter is always projecting, but when our projections come
up short we are compelled by the interpretive object itself into replacing
them with anticipations, questions or categories of a different kind. This is
what Gadamer called ‘the constant task of understanding’: ‘interpretation
begins with fore-conceptions that are replaced by more suitable ones.’35
By ‘more suitable’ Gadamer meant more faithful to the text, not in better
service to life or to the will to power. It is questionable, however, how clear
this distinction is. The will to power also happens behind our back.
What is clear is that interpretation is no merely subjective act.
Understanding undoubtedly serves the will – this much Nietzsche convinc-
ingly demonstrated – yet that it constitutes ‘a mere instrument’ of it is a
subjectivizing distortion.36 That there is nothing about the subject that is
ahistorical was certainly not lost on Nietzsche; however, his writings would
not identify the full implications of this view. For all of Nietzsche’s criticism
of modern philosophy’s lack of ‘an historical sense’, his own sense of the
historicity of knowledge and the will remained underdeveloped, leaving
it to twentieth-century hermeneutics to thematize the facticity and histo-
ricity of interpretation.37 Nietzsche’s ‘historical sense’ would eventually
lead to Gadamer’s ‘historically effected consciousness’, where this signifies

a consciousness that is at once an historical artifact and aware of itself
as such. That the will itself is such an artifact, that the perspective that
knowledge brings to bear constitutes its object while being itself an effect of
history, was glimpsed by Nietzsche in only a preliminary way. A fuller grasp
of the point might have caused a trimming of certain excesses.
Perspectivism is still vulnerable to the charge of subjectivism – not on
the grounds that having rejected objectivism, subjectivism remained the
only available alternative but because of the one-sidedness of the will to
power. There is something that resists the will: the truth claim that a text
makes, the argument of our interlocutor, the thing itself. The will does not
lie prostrate before these things, but nor does it command them. Only the
one-sidedness of a corrective can make it appear that it is one or the other.
That Nietzsche’s perspectivism entails a full-blown subjectivism is incorrect;
however the balance and the tension that properly exist between the activity
of the interpreter and what resists the will, including what happens behind its
back, is a theme that would remain underdeveloped in his work, the emphasis
lying decisively on one side of the equation. While Nietzsche convincingly
showed that interpretation is permeated with the will to power, the view that
‘man finds in things nothing but what he himself has imported into them’ is
overstated (let us not say false).38 A less bold but truer way of stating it is that
knowing cannot be divorced from the interests of knowers; moral evaluations
serve their agents, common sense serves the practical interests of an historical
community, and scientific knowledge furthers the interests in prediction and
control. All of this can be shown if we have the inclination to look beneath
surfaces every now and then. What is also true is that being itself is never
encountered aperspectivally or apart from interpretation, and that no little
amount of falsification – or at any rate selecting, arranging, ordering and
concealing – belongs to knowing in general. It was Nietzsche who taught us
to see this, and who insisted as well on an intellectual rigour that does not
simply relativize truth or declare true whatever we find to be useful. ‘Life is no
argument’, Nietzsche also wrote. ‘The conditions of life might include error’,
meaning that interpretations of the world that mask the sheer self-assertion
of their advocates are most certainly to be faulted for their lack of rigour.39
What remains unclear is what such rigour can consist in, given his account.
‘[O]ur ideas, our values, our yeas and nays’ may well ‘.â•›.â•›. grow out of us with
the necessity with which a tree bears fruit’, but they also must be demon-
strated.40 Nietzsche well knew that the interpretive object is not a plaything of
the will while removing the grounds on which he could know this.
How does hermeneutics know this? What brake does it place on the
Perspectivism 23
subjectivity of the interpreter? The short answer is the interlocutor to

whom we must account and the object that resists our categorizations.
‘The soul of hermeneutics’, in Gadamer’s words, ‘consists in recognizing
that perhaps the other is right.’41 This pregnant statement takes us to
the heart of the matter, yet his frequent assertions in Truth and Method
to the effect that ‘[u]nderstanding is to be thought of less as a subjective act
than as participating in an event of tradition’ are overstated in the opposite
direction.42 Is interpretation ‘less’ a subjective act than hitherto believed
or not a subjective act? Presumably the former, as ‘participating in an
event’ requires something of the subject. It is not only the text or tradition
that speaks, and what it has to say is not always true, ingenuous or
coherent. Sometimes the claim of the text is manifest nonsense and one’s
interlocutor is delusional. Hermeneutics is not unaware of this, but the
repeated emphasis on the possibility that the other is right can lead us to
overlook some other possibilities, as critics of hermeneutics have pointed
out. Gadamer’s point about tradition was that it is sometimes a source of
understanding, not that it always is. Prejudices and authority are not always
false, Gadamer convincingly demonstrated; but, of course, sometimes they
are. If he did not emphasize the latter point it was because he believed it
did not require it.
‘In a sense,’ as Jean Grondin writes, ‘the whole of Gadamer’s herme-
neutics wishes to remind us that we are not gods.’43 This point can be
urged against Nietzsche as much as it can against much of modern episte-
mology, albeit for different reasons. The object of interpretation is not
one’s subjective creation any more than it can be objectively represented
in propositions. Perspectivism does not issue in an interpretive free-for-all,
yet nor did Nietzsche make it explicit what stands against the will or that to
which interpretation must answer. Gadamer did make this explicit, but in
the process bending matters too far in the opposite direction. In encoun-
tering a text or an interlocutor, one does not genuflect. The caricatures of
Nietzsche as subjectivist and dangerous relativist and of hermeneutics as
traditionalist and conservative are false; in both cases it was selective and
careless reading that gave rise to them, yet it remains that the textual basis
for them is not nonexistent. In Gadamer’s work this impression is based
in part on the examples of interpretive objects that he so often chose and
the vocabulary of receptivity that these examples invite. It is the ‘eminent
text’, the great work of art, and the partner in dialogue that are presented
as exemplars. As long as the object of hermeneutical reflection is of this
kind, it makes eminent good sense to speak of being addressed by a Thou,
of the truth of the work and the possibility of it being right. But what
happens when the object is a set of values that conceals the will to power of
a group, when we are speaking of mundane objects of perception or texts
and works of a less estimable nature? These also call for interpretation, and
it is not obvious in these cases that the language of truth and hospitality
is quite as suitable. When what speaks to us invites a sceptical response,
interpretation appears more an act of the subject than ‘participating in an
event of tradition’ or truth. Nietzsche’s examples – Judeo-Christian values,
for instance – are often of objects that invite suspicion, while Gadamer’s
decidedly are not. The examples and paradigm cases that philosophers
introduce always lend a certain cast to the account that follows, and neither
of the philosophers under discussion here is an exception. The question
for Gadamer is whether the encounter with great art or eminent texts is
paradigmatic of interpretation in general. What about more mundane
forms of seeing-as, the perception of objects, journalistic reporting or
scientific inquiry? There is interpretation as well in the stock examples
of empiricism: the keys are on the table; the cat is on the mat; the earth
revolves around the sun. These examples bear more than an accidental
relation to empiricism, and the same can be said of the examples that
inspired Gadamer. They also lend a certain one-sidedness to his account
and if not ignore then underplay the activity of the subject. When we are
proffering a genealogy of morality, a history of sexuality or an account of
the Communist Party of China, we may still be anticipating truth but we are
also becoming attuned to falsification and distortion. If Gadamer’s herme-
neutics is not unaware of this – and indeed it is not – it is open to question
whether it is able to give an adequate account of it or whether it remains
limited by the examples that orient it.
A final question I wish to take up concerns perspectival plurality. For
Nietzsche, as we have seen, ‘the more affects we allow to speak about one
thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the
more complete will our “concept” of this thing, our “objectivity,” be.’ The
only ‘objectivity’ that is possible in interpretation amounts to ‘the ability
to control one’s Pro and Con and to dispose of them, so that one knows
how to employ a variety of perspectives and affective interpretations in the
service of knowledge.’44 Given that there is no god’s-eye view of any object
of knowledge, and that interpretations that are ‘by our lights’ also cast a
shadow, is it hermeneutically imperative to multiply perspectives in every
case, or in any case? The importance of plurality becomes evident when our
interpretive object is, for instance, an historical event. The Second World
War may be studied through the lens of political history, military strategy,
economics, Jewish history and any number of others. Regarding it through
Perspectivism 25
a single lens gives us an interpretation that is not false but truncated. A

rich understanding requires layers of complexity, that we hold together in
thought any number of overlapping and at times conflicting perspectives,
that we recount a war now from the standpoint of the winners and now the
losers, now in terms of its ‘causes’ and now its long-term consequences.
When the thing itself is complex, so must be our mode of access to it. The
same can be said of texts and works of art. Gadamer would speak of ‘the
structure of truth itself’ in terms of ‘the inherent connection and reciprocal
interrelatedness of alternating viewpoints and alternating perspectives’,
although he would credit this view to Leibniz rather than Nietzsche.45 If
it is the nature of interpretation to be selective in what it brings into view,
and then to reveal an aspect of the thing itself and never the totality, an
understanding that wishes to overcome one-dimensionality necessarily
moves from perspective to perspective and becomes an accumulated effect.
We may read Nietzsche’s texts, for instance, from the standpoint of their
importance for existentialism, hermeneutics or postmodernism, from the
perspective of religion or German intellectual history, of the biography of
a man or a psychological standpoint. Each provides partial illumination of
our object while casting a shadow that only an additional light can remove,
and then incompletely.
The importance of perspectival plurality will be less evident when we
are speaking of less complex objects, but even here the principle retains
its validity. Journalistic reporting that is uniperspectival typically conceals
more than it reveals and slants the news in one way or another. Sociological
interpretation that is wedded to a single point of view tends to narrow our
vision rather than uncover phenomena in a more three-dimensional way.
When that point of view is overtly or covertly political, interpretation tends
toward the strident and ideological. Even ordinary perception requires
that we view objects from various angles in order to get a proper grasp of
the thing, perhaps that we subject it to various conditions and analyse it
now in one way and now in another. Nietzsche’s point, then, appears to
be generalizable. Where perspectives are concerned, the rule is the more
the better – that even perspectives that reveal a relatively narrow aspect of
the object may inform our understanding, and that understanding itself
involves the accumulation and constant mediation of points of view.
In all understanding there is the judgement of what matters, an identi-
fication of salience or importance and a mindful inattention to what is
secondary or irrelevant. Interpretation is every bit as selective as Nietzsche
claimed, but what it selects – what it chooses to pay attention to – is not
only what serves us but what matters in a less subjective (let us not say
objective or utterly impersonal) sense. It is not an aggressive marginali-

zation of all perspectives but one, but an estimation of relative importance.
Moral consciousness, for instance, involves a constant drawing of distinc-
tions between relative value, importance and relevance, and where no
rule appears to help us aside from the careful perception of particulars.
Identifying importance is an evaluation and often a revaluation, and among
the conditions of its possibility is the availability of multiple perspectives.
One is able to discern which aspects of a thing stand out in importance or
value and which are of less account only after all perspectives have had a
hearing and the several aspects of the thing itself have been brought into
view. Nietzsche brought this important hermeneutical principle to our
attention more poignantly than Leibniz, and it is one that we would do well
to recall.
Chapter 2
Reason as Boundless Communication

Karl Jaspers
The enduring relevance of existential thought to hermeneutics is not

limited to Nietzsche’s perspectivism. It includes a number of ideas
concerning the nature of reason that were advanced by the philosopher
whom Gadamer succeeded at the University of Heidelberg in 1949: Karl
Jaspers. It cannot be said, of course, that the hermeneutics of Gadamer and
Ricoeur quite shares the existential pathos of a Jaspers or a Camus, much
less a Kierkegaard or a Nietzsche. Nor can it be said that hermeneutical
philosophers typically acknowledge Jaspers as a major influence on their
thought – the decisive influence among twentieth-century philosophers
of existence being, of course, Heidegger. Yet it remains that the foremost
representative of philosophical hermeneutics was greatly impressed by
Jaspers’ contribution, particularly the early works, and while his references
to Jaspers in Truth and Method and elsewhere are scant, there remains a
deep affinity that it would profit us to examine further, especially as it bears
on what is perhaps the most ultimate question of philosophy: the nature of
reason. Prior to Gadamer and, still more, Habermas, Jaspers originated a
communicative conception of reason that rejected the artificial narrowing
of the concept that had occurred during the Enlightenment.
Other grounds for regarding this now somewhat forgotten figure as a
hermeneutical thinker certainly exist. That ‘[a]ll knowledge is interpre-
tation’ and that the ‘method we apply to the study of texts may be taken
as a parallel to our study of being’ are hypotheses that Jaspers ably articu-
lated. As he expressed it in Way to Wisdom, ‘For we possess being only in
its interpretations. To speak of it is to interpret it, and only that which is
apprehended in speech falls under the head of the knowable. But even
in the prephilosophic stage the language of men’s practical dealings
with things contains an interpretation of being; being is always defined
in reference to something else. Being is for us only in an interpretative
context. Being and the knowledge of being, the existent and what we say of
it, are accordingly a texture of diverse interpretations. All being is for us an
interpretation.’1 The concepts of situation and historicity, the embedded
and aspectival character of all knowledge, including the scientific, and the
phenomenological hypotheses that ‘we interpret reality and ourselves, and

are human only by so doing’, and that the ‘very act of understanding makes
it a factor in reality’ were fundamental to Jaspers’ philosophy of existence.2
Equally fundamental is the theme that I wish to pursue in the present study.
Jaspers would be no less dissatisfied with what had become in modernity of
the concepts of reason and truth than would thinkers of a more explicitly
hermeneutical orientation, and on similar grounds. His phenomenological
proposal for how reason may be better conceived also exhibits clear affinity
both for Gadamer’s dialogical reason, which Gadamer traced to Plato,
and for Habermas’ theory of communicative rationality.3 In each instance
reason is theorized in a less technical and more expansive way than was
characteristic of the philosophy of the Enlightenment.
Jaspers’ innovation was to subject the concept of reason not only to
phenomenological description but to his particular style of existential
elucidation. This elucidation bears recalling particularly in light of the
narrowing influence of so much of modern thought in which the notion of
reason or rationality plays such a prominent role. When so many theorists
in so many disciplines continue to speak of human reason in exclu-
sively utilitarian, instrumentalist, logical, or technological terms it falls to
existential-phenomenological interpretation to recall a richer and perhaps
more originary connotation of the word, and it is here that Jaspers may be
our guide. His elucidation of the concept, in my view, adds an important
dimension to the hermeneutical conception of social reason of which
Gadamer spoke, a supplement that is entirely consistent with the spirit of
the latter account but which Gadamer himself and other hermeneutical
thinkers have largely ignored.4 Let us recall, then, what Jaspers’ account
consists in before inquiring into its relevance for hermeneutics.
If we would speak of reason philosophically, the question before us is,
of course, what it is – what the concept signifies. Putting the question
ahistorically or in any terms that remove the concept from a larger context
of meaning renders the question unanswerable. This much is readily
agreed to by Jaspers, Nietzsche, and other philosophers of existence and
by hermeneutics; concepts do not exist apart from an historical-linguistic
context and cannot be thus analysed. Efforts so to analyse them are inevi-
tably truncated and typically render the concept in too technical and too
epistemological a way. For Jaspers, reason must be thought together with
Existenz or the human being in the sense in which he would always speak of
it: as transcendence, a potentially free and extra-mundane agent of a highly
complex sort. A fundamental hypothesis of Jaspers’ is that ‘my Existenz is
solely due to other Existenz’, or ‘in other words, that there is no Existenz as
Reason as Boundless Communication 29
such, only Existenz in communication.’5 Reason cannot be comprehended

apart from the kind of being that is the rational animal, while the latter
cannot be understood apart from the capacity for linguistic communi-
cation. The human being is not only the rational animal but – inseparable
from this – the speaking animal. Existenz is constituted by the capacity for
rational communication that draws it into complex forms of social inter-
course. Reason must therefore be analysed with constant reference to the
fate of human beings, not in any kind of historical or existential vacuum.
The imperative of existential elucidation does not render our task any
easier, and involves the kind of lengthy detours through cultural analysis
and social criticism that he undertook in such texts as Man in the Modern
Age and The Atom Bomb and the Future of Mankind. I cannot follow these
detours here, of course, but only point out their significance: reason, to
be understood, must be grasped together with the existential situation
and fate of human beings. If rationality in the modern age has become
essentially an affair of ‘the planning human intellect’ and little besides, this
reflects the spiritual condition of the age and must be thus understood.6 In
the manner of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, whose thought so profoundly
influenced him, Jaspers continually urged his readers in the direction of
transcendence or a higher possibility of human existence, and this applies
as well to his analysis of reason. In reason I come to be myself; I become
what I am, as Nietzsche would say, or else I fail to do so and become or
remain something that is not myself.
Reason, then, must be conceptualized not solely in methodological
terms but as a mode of human existence that transcends technique. It is a
way of existing and thinking that includes, while also reaching beyond, the
objectively knowable. Never secure in its possessions, reason ‘continually
overthrows what has been acquired by the understanding’ and ‘is nothing
but the drive to surpass and bind together.’7 It surpasses what he would
sometimes refer to as matters of ‘the intellect’, including the empirical
knowledge of objects and the entire order of scientific knowledge. While
Jaspers the psychologist always insisted on the ultimate inseparability of
science and philosophy, he also drew attention to the limits of science and
warned of the modern tendency toward its absolutization. In its sphere,
scientific knowledge provides us with ‘objectively compelling intellectual
cognition’ and is indeed ‘inseparable’ from philosophy itself: ‘philosophy’,
as he put it, ‘can take no step without the intellect, that is, without
science.’8 Yet neither philosophy nor reason is itself a science, he insisted,
and must not be modelled upon it: ‘philosophy is not a science in the sense
of cogent, generally valid knowledge. .â•›.â•›. The intellect can state scientific
truth in unequivocal theses, but philosophical truth can only be commu-

nicated in movements of thought. No proposition can adequately capture
it.’9 Reason and philosophizing likewise strive to transcend a knowledge
that is empirical, particular and formalistic, and to resist all ‘absolute
doctrinal pronouncements.’10 Since ‘science is not adequate to embrace
Truth’, reason or philosophy in their totality, we must endeavour to think
beyond it and with ‘no assured stability’ or certainty. Reason, as he noted in
Reason and Anti-Reason in Our Time, ‘is constantly on the move. Once it has
gained a position it presses on to criticize it and is therefore opposed to the
tendency to free oneself from the necessity for all further thought by once
and for all accepting irrevocably fixed ideas. It demands a careful thought-
fulness – it is therefore the opposite of mere capriciousness. It leads to
self-knowledge and knowledge of limits, and therefore to humility – and
it is opposed to intellectual arrogance. It demands a constant listening
and it is able to wait – it is therefore opposed to the narrowing furies of
passion. Thus Reason works itself out of the chains of dogma, of caprice,
of arrogance, of passion.’11
Nietzsche and Heidegger were also remarking upon the manner in
which science and technology in the modern age had become a totalized
view of the world while reason itself had narrowed into so many forms
of rationalism, a line of critique with which Jaspers fully concurred. No
transcendence is possible in this condition, Jaspers warned. It is a situation
that finds its social counterpart in the technological and functionalizing
malaise of the twentieth century. When reason is reduced to technique,
the social and existential consequences for the rational being are troubling
indeed. The danger to human selfhood consists, among other things,
in that ‘[t]o-day it is taken as a matter of course that human life is the
supply of mass needs by rationalized production with the aid of technical
advances. The assumption seems to be that the whole can be reduced to
perfect order by reason alone.’12 Jaspers the cultural physician would often
describe the ‘tenor of the age’ as one of inhuman instrumentalism and
functionalism, ‘one of levelling, mechanization, the development of a mass
mentality and universal interchangeability of everything and everyone,
where no one seemed to exist any longer as himself.’13 The individual is
not him- or herself when ‘he is still nothing more than the function of
his daily task’ and when ‘the only desire that may stir him beyond that
of performing this task is the desire to occupy the best obtainable place
in the apparatus.’14 When the conditions of modern life are that bureau-
cracy, mass institutions and mass society, technical order and means-ends
thinking are paramount, and indeed lack an alternative (except perhaps
for superstition), it is not only the concept of reason that is in peril but the
existing individual itself. Reason and Existenz are one – not only concep-
tually, but in terms of their fate in the world.
Theorizing rationality, then, requires us to interpret the concept with
constant reference to the individual conceived not merely in its function-
ality or as a scientifically knowable object but in its whole being. The
trajectory of Jaspers’ philosophizing led continually away from the narrow
and mundane and in the direction of transcendence. What this entails for
the concept of reason is that we are speaking of a capacity that belongs
to Existenz as such, which means as a potentially free and creative agent,
situated within its facticity but not imprisoned by it. Our analysis of reason
‘should not get caught within any mode of the Encompassing’, including
what he would often refer to as ‘empirical existence’ and ‘consciousness
as such.’ ‘Reason is always too little when it is enclosed within final and
determinate forms’, including the scientific and technological, the instru-
mentalist and utilitarian.15
This more expansive conception Jaspers found within the practice of
ordinary interpersonal communication. Less ordered than its technical
counterparts, reason in this sense includes while surpassing the narrowly
‘intellectual’ and scientific. Not itself a technique, it is better spoken of
as a condition of the will and a disposition of mind. While Jaspers would
caution against offering a formal definition of the word – definitions that
typically are essentialist and render the concept as a merely technical
term – in numerous texts he would characterize reason as a domain of
‘boundless communication.’16 ‘There is’, as he would write, ‘something like
a climate of reason’, the principal feature of which is a ‘total will to commu-
nicate.’17 To be rational in the pre-eminent sense of the word is to refuse
all reticence and to open oneself to the questioning and the point of view
of our interlocutor. In much the spirit of hermeneutical dialogue, nothing
is off limits to rational discussion and all persons allow themselves to be
drawn into a conversation in which ideas are proposed and challenged
in uninhibited fashion. A rational ‘climate’ or ‘mood’ is one in which
no speaker and no idea is above the fray of justification and criticism,
none is forbidden to speak, and all are answerable for their views.18 All
reasoned communication includes an orientation toward unity of mind
and openness to whatever our interlocutors have to say, provided only that
their message is not one of intolerance or violence. The following passage
is representative of Jaspers’ position and echoes sentiments found in many
of his writings: ‘Reason can find no rest in the glory and splendour of the
world nor can it ever stop asking questions. Reason is attracted by what is
most alien to it. It wants to illuminate and give being and language even
to the passions of the night which threaten to destroy the laws that govern
the day. .â•›.â•›. Reason, itself the origin of order, attends even the powers
which destroy order. It is always there listening to that which is most alien
to it, to that which breaks in upon it, to that which fails it. Reason wants
to draw us near to everything that is and that must therefore be able to
find expression in speech, in order to preserve it and give it a validity of
its own.’19 The rational frame of mind is inclined to listen and to learn, to
pay attention to what is alien, to anticipate validity, and in general to take
others seriously – which includes demanding a justification of their views.
So conceived, reason is neither a technique, a metaphysical faculty, nor
a deep core of being, but a capacity that draws us into association with
others. Necessarily, reason ‘exists only in common. The individual cannot
be rational by himself.’ It requires that one risk oneself in the confrontation
of ideas and strive for creative expression as well as consensus with other
Existenz. Rational thought does not stand above the fray of assertion and
reply or announce its ‘findings’ from some remote location. It does not
emerge from its inner sanctum or descend from its mountaintop with the
news of a revelation. Rather, it ‘grows out of the free acts of countless men’,
all of whom think for themselves, but not in the sense that we often conceive
of this.20 Descartes famously announced at the outset of the Meditations that
in order to engage in truly rational thought he would need to ‘withdraw in
solitude’ so that the opinions and prejudices of others would not interfere
with the solitary reflection that was to ensue.21 For modern rationalism,
reasoning means thinking more geometrico, in conformity with so many a
priori ‘rules for the direction of the mind’, an operation in which others
can only be a distraction, or perhaps an audience. The truth of which
Jaspers spoke is one that is reached in common, never on a purely private
basis, and the only authority that prevails is not that of a method formu-
lated in advance but that which the participants in conversation jointly
discover. If we would seek a guarantee for the validity of our position,
for Jaspers the only guarantee that is possible is what emerges from open
communication. This is not the kind of guarantee, to be sure, that modern
rationalism and empiricism sought, but it is all that is possible and all that
is needed. To seek absolute assurance for our beliefs – one that would
allow us to settle back in the conviction that we are where we need to be
intellectually and are therefore no longer obliged to entertain competing
ideas – presupposes a conception of truth as an altogether stable property
that simply waits for human beings to happen upon it. It presupposes as
well that knowledge and reason are end-states rather than the processual
values that Jaspers believed them to be. The very ‘essence of philosophy’,
as he expressed it, ‘is not the possession of truth but the search for truth,
regardless of how many philosophers may belie it with their dogmatism.’
The knowledge for which philosophy has searched from the beginning is
not an altogether secure possession or a set of fixed facts but is always on
the way. ‘Philosophy’, as Jaspers in a Heideggerian mood put it, ‘means to
be on the way. Its questions are more essential than its answers, and every
answer becomes a new question.’22
This quality of ‘on-the-wayness’ entails that philosophy – this ‘one
great hymn to reason’ – is invariably in the process of striving after a
knowledge that in some measure eludes its grasp, and that the process of
rational inquiry in principle is unending.23 Reason itself is a process, not
an end-state, one that drives us into communicative engagements without
the possibility of a final terminus. Socratic ignorance belongs as much at
the end of the process as at the beginning, and where there is no true
end at all. Bringing communication to a halt – either because we believe
we have discovered the truth or because we despair of ever doing so – is
antithetical to reason in this sense of the word and always signifies a refusal
of transcendence. So long as reason ‘can never be entirely consummated’,
one cannot rationally adopt fixed positions but views that are provisional
upon ongoing conversation.24
Jaspers would speak of truth as well as a contingent and processual
matter. Truth can no more be separated from communication than it can
be reduced to a single kind or mode. Truth ‘has as many senses as there
are modes of communication in which it arises.’25 A multifaceted ontology
of the Encompassing lies in the background here, for which the meaning
of truth varies within the different modes of the Encompassing in which
communication occurs. The details of this intriguing hypothesis I shall
pass over; however the larger point is that the several forms that truth
takes share a common orientation toward unity of mind. While scientific
truth is determined by objective methods and possesses universal validity,
‘philosophical truth is a function of communication with the other and
with myself. It is the truth I live by and do not merely think about.’26 It is,
moreover, inseparable not only from the communicative process but from
the search for consensus within it. The will to truth draws us into a process
that binds us together, whether we are speaking of the truth of philosophy,
science or any other. Truth is not attained in isolation, and where it appears
to be – as in the case of the thinker who turns away from public life in order
to cultivate solitude and inwardness – this is only the condition of a more
creative communication, perhaps with different interlocutors than the
mass public. One pursues the truth in the way that one becomes oneself:
always in union with others and never ‘in stubborn self-will’ or ‘in a shell of
solitude.’27 Reason, Existenz and truth for Jaspers form an inseparable trinity
and share an orientation toward communicability and a fundamental ‘will
to unity.’ The unifying task of rationality, for instance, is to reconcile alien
positions and to gather disparate forms of knowledge and experience
into a condition of ‘dynamic interrelatedness.’ Conceived apart from this
unifying function, reason degenerates into a technique of rules, while truth
as well becomes narrowed and hypostatized. Always incomplete and subject
to a dialogue that is ongoing, truth is what brings human beings into
solidarity while its value is measured by the kind of union that it brings into
being. The mortal enemy of truth is therefore the sheer insistence that one
is correct and the refusal to entertain any views that would challenge this.
An equally common error occurs when, in Jaspers’ words, we ‘take some
restricted truth for the one truth (and thereby absolutize the compelling validity
of correct intellectual knowledge of finite things in the world into truth
in general); or we take the world as a whole to be cognoscible in a uniform
way (and absolutize a relative whole of physical or biological cognition into
the whole of being itself).’28 The ethical counterpart to this error finds
us absolutizing a single ideal of human life rather than recognizing the
freedom and creativity that are essential to authentic Existenz.
The value of freedom does not belong to morality alone, but is insepa-
rable from the concept of rationality. Human freedom was a frequent theme
in Jaspers’ writings. Its connection with reason consists in its inseparability
from authentic communication. Freedom is not a given of our existence but
is a possibility only – one that we realize through an act of decision or fail to
realize. Free Existenz thinks for itself; however it does not do so in a vacuum
of sociability and history. For its thinking to be rational, it must allow itself
to be drawn into incessant communication, again by an act of decision. The
fundamental choice here is whether to open oneself to the communicative
process and the clash of viewpoints or to retreat into a dogmatic system of
thought. So closely did Jaspers view the connection between reason and
freedom that what he called anti-reason is in its essence the renunciation
of free debate. This idea was especially pronounced in his political writings,
in which his frequent critiques of totalitarianism centre upon its claim to
absolute knowledge and its consequent refusal to entertain opposing ideas.
Authoritarian socialism’s claim to scientific status is one example of this:
‘The great force of Marxist thought obviously lies in its fundamentally false
interpretation of faith as a science. The power of its fanatical certainty is
derived from a belief which the term “science” disguises. What is in fact
a purely personal faith is dubbed “scientific.” It never calls itself a faith

though it behaves like any other dogmatic faith: it is blind to everything
that runs counter to it; it is aggressive and incapable of communication.’29
He would offer the same description of National Socialism: ‘National
Socialism meant the most radical break in human communication; it also
meant that man ceased to be himself. It became clear that the rupture of
communication in favour of self-willed violence will always pose a threat to
personal existence and the real danger of losing ourselves.’30 Anti-reason
is ‘the supposed right of reticence’, the refusal to allow our point of view
to be criticized, and the sheer insistence that we are right.31 What does
not promote communication, for Jaspers, is false by definition. No truth is
incapable of supporting its claim to truth with reasons in which others can
see the merit. Totalitarianism does not persuade or respond to its citizens;
it subjects them to the will of the state by means of distortion and violence
and creates a social order in which individuals cannot become themselves.
The knowing vanguard does not submit ideas to the citizenry and solicit
their consent when the former alone possesses the truth and possesses it
with dogmatic certainty. The same phenomenon happens in other areas of
social and intellectual life, of course. One can generally assume in politics
and everywhere else that where there is no attempt at rational persuasion
and no freedom to disagree, there is no truth either, merely the appetite
for power.
Finally, Jaspers would offer some important remarks on the relation
of reason and logic and the non-reducibility of the former to the latter.
In Reason and Existenz he would speak of a ‘rational a-logic’ which promi-
nently includes circular forms of thinking. ‘In all genuine philosophies’,
he maintained, ‘we find .â•›.â•›. circles and contradictions at the decisive
point.’ Logical nonsense is sometimes eminently rational, while attempts
to cleanse a system of thought of all logical tensions end in failure.
His examples of rational a-logic within Existenz philosophy include the
following. For there to be authentic sociability I must be capable of
interiority and withdrawal from the social. For there to be genuine commu-
nication there must be the capacity for silence and solitude in the face of
transcendence. Where there is successful and meaningful action there
is the ever present possibility of failure. As well: ‘I am genuinely rational
only if my whole reason factually and for my knowing is grounded upon
unreason. I believe only through doubting whether I believe.’32 I become
free by opting for freedom; I become myself only in relation to another,
and so on. In these cases the truth is comprehended indirectly, in the form
of paradox or outright contradiction. Perhaps one could add Nietzsche’s
perspectivism as well: all knowledge is perspectival, and this is nonperspec-

tivally true. Critics of perspectivism invariably point this out and declare
the hypothesis logically refuted, but this has every appearance of a merely
clever intellectual manoevre that shows nothing. One might also mention
the hermeneutical circle: the whole must be understood in terms of the
parts and the parts must be understood in terms of the whole. The circular
structure of interpretation appears to be both logically problematic and
inescapable. As a matter of phenomenological fact, this is how under-
standing operates. If there is a logical problem here, then it is a problem
in appearance only, or only on the premise that the rules of logic are the
secular counterpart of the Word of God. Logic has a rightful but limited
authority, Jaspers maintained. Deeming it sacrosanct – and this when the
rules of logical inference themselves cannot be logically demonstrated – is
plain dogmatism. If it is human existence in its higher reaches that we
would understand, we must observe the limits of the merely intellectual,
the logical, and of all cognitive tools that apply directly to the knowledge of
objects. Existenz is not merely empirical existence, as Jaspers never ceased
to remind us.
The central point in Jaspers’ account of reason is that philosophical
ideas invariably remain subject to a discussion that is without end,
including the rules that govern such discussion. Reason’s antithesis is
not passion or contradictory thinking but violence, and where violence
is more often concealed than overt. While it partakes of transcendence,
reason does not sever connection with its historical, cultural and existential
situation but seeks to elucidate the condition in which we find ourselves.
What philosophical hermeneutics would render more explicit is the
phenomenological dimension of such communication, and in a spirit
that complements Jaspers’ account while perhaps lacking its existential
pathos. Existenz philosophy and hermeneutics can agree that rationality
crucially bears on the practice of dialogue, that it is not merely a method
of inference or calculation. The logos that in some measure constitutes our
humanity is no metaphysical essence but is the possibility of uninhibited
communication. The structure of such communication was aptly described
by Gadamer: authentic dialogue is a back-and-forth of question and answer,
assertion and reply, where the orientation of speakers is toward a truth
that is held in common and where we anticipate the possible correctness
of what our interlocutor has to say. In his words, ‘Conversation is a process
of coming to an understanding. Thus it belongs to every true conversation
that each person opens himself to the other, truly accepts his point of view
as valid and transposes himself into the other to such an extent that he
understands not the particular individual but what he says. What is to be

grasped is the substantive rightness of his opinion, so that we can be at one
with each other on the subject. Thus we do not relate the other’s opinion
to him but to our own opinions and views.’ Reason is the social practice of
reasoning together and coming to an understanding with others about a
disputed question. It is a practice in which none can proclaim themselves
above the fray by virtue of special insight or expertise. The claim of the
interlocutor or the text does not confront one as an object in opposition
to sovereign subjectivity but is a truth claim in which one is caught up.
Gadamer likened dialogue to the dialectical structure of play, where what is
essential is the movement back-and-forth rather than any final conclusion.
‘Knowledge’, as he would write, ‘is dialectical from the ground up’, while
the actions of the players ‘should not be considered subjective actions,
since it is, rather, the game itself that plays, for it draws the players into
itself and thus itself becomes the actual subjectum of the playing.’33
What hermeneutics strives to articulate, as one scholar has put it, is ‘a
more reasonable conception of rationality’ than what has long prevailed
in the Western tradition through to the present – more reasonable in the
sense of phenomenologically sound, mindful of its historical conditions
and finitude, and intellectually modest, particularly in comparison with
the various forms of rationalist thought that we have witnessed since the
seventeenth century.34 Modern rationalism constitutes at once an artificial
narrowing of reason, an absurd overestimation of it, and a forgetfulness of
the conditions in which rational thought invariably occurs. In Gadamer’s
words, ‘Reason exists for us only in concrete, historical terms – i.e., it is
not its own master but remains constantly dependent on the given circum-
stances in which it operates.’35 These circumstances include language
and culture, tradition and rhetoric (in the classical sense of the art of
persuasion), and a context of existing beliefs and questions. There is no
reasoning in a vacuum, no cognition that occurs apart from a complex
historical heritage. It begins not at the beginning but always in midstream,
on the model of joining a conversation that began long ago and that it falls
to us to carry forward.
This much is clear from Gadamer’s work and in the literature of
post-Heideggerian hermeneutics more generally. It is also clear that herme-
neutics opposes as much as Jaspers did the reduction of reason to scientific,
calculative or instrumental rationality. What is less clear is the relevance
for hermeneutics of the kind of existential analysis of reason that Jaspers
provided. Is there a tension between the two accounts, an ‘existential
rationality’ that we could relate in some fashion or other to the ‘dialogical
rationality’ of hermeneutics? If there is a tension here, it is owing more

to the existential pathos of Jaspers’ account – a pathos that owes much to
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche – than to any substantive philosophical differ-
ences. It is a sensibility that for better or for worse did not find its way into
philosophical hermeneutics. As I have noted, Gadamer thought it imper-
ative to desubjectivize the practice of knowing, interpreting and reasoning.
What made this imperative was the subjectivizing excesses of a great deal
of modern thought, although it was certainly not proffered as a corrective
of Jaspers’ own account. Is that account subjectivist in any disconcerting
way, as indeed a certain amount of existential thought may be regarded?
Jaspers’ Existenz philosophy, while in many ways reminiscent of Kierkegaard
and Nietzsche, never shared the kind of sentiments epitomized in Jean-Paul
Sartre’s ‘Hell is other people’, nor does his account exhibit the subjectivist
and voluntarist excesses that some of the literature of existentialism did.
He would remain closer in this respect to Heidegger than Sartre. The
general orientation of hermeneutics after Heidegger has been as decidedly
nonsubjectivist as was Jaspers’ own thought, while its characteristic mood
is not one of existential disorientation or angst. On the question that is
before us, Jaspers’ philosophy of existence and philosophical hermeneutics
are not at odds. The rationality that is inseparable from communication is
the social and dialogical reason of which both Jaspers and Gadamer spoke
– not in identical terms, of course, but in terms that are complementary
and appropriately phenomenological. What Jaspers added – or perhaps
what Gadamer and other hermeneutical thinkers subtracted – was the
explicit linkage of the concept of reason with the existential fate of human
beings. To conceive of what reason itself is, Jaspers correctly insisted, we
must grasp it in connection with what the human being is, and is today. The
rational agent is what it is not only in historical and linguistic terms but in
existential terms, or in terms of what humanity presently is and is in process
of becoming. The cultural-existential analysis that Jaspers often practised
remains indispensable not only to the philosophical enterprise in general
but to an understanding of reason itself.
Without being particularly inclined toward the kind of existential
reflection that Jaspers engaged in, Gadamer himself and many other
hermeneutical philosophers after Heidegger have lamented what has
become of ‘reason in the age of science’, further extending Heidegger’s
interpretation of modernity as an age in which science-technology has
become a totalizing system of thought. Reason has indeed been narrowed
to the order of the calculative and instrumental, as Jaspers had also
warned. Yet apart from some observations of this nature, Gadamer and
contemporary hermeneutics have largely moved on from the discourse of

existential thought. Historically speaking, existentialism is largely regarded
as belonging to the nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth centuries,
while philosophical hermeneutics is associated with the second half of the
twentieth century to the present. The sense of existentialism in general as a
phenomenon bounded by time is unfortunate in light of the innumerable
insights that it has to offer – some of which undoubtedly bear the marks
of that time but many of which transcend it. On the question of ration-
ality there is nothing in Jaspers’ account, or nothing essential, that limits
its relevance to his own time. Reason must still be grasped together with
human existence in its full complexity. The concrete circumstances in
which we live, our spiritual and political condition, and the personal,
inward dimension of our existence are no less relevant to our under-
standing of reason than familiar hermeneutical themes of tradition,
language and rhetoric. If some of these circumstances have changed since
Jaspers’ time, most of them have not. A text such as Man in the Modern Age,
for instance, written in 1931, still speaks to the present. The existential
condition of human beings does not change with the rapidity of social
trends or technological development. The general contours of Jaspers’
descriptions retain their accuracy; only the particulars have changed.
The kind of large-scale reflection in which Jaspers engaged in that and
many other texts is decidedly out of fashion today, not only in hermeneutics
but in virtually every avenue of scholarly thought. This is unfortunate, and
indicative far more of the spirit of our times and the specialization of
scholarship than it is of the importance of the topic or the answerability
of existential questions. Theorizing reason and anti-reason must still be
carried out in connection with the fate of human beings in the modern
age, the general features of which were expertly described by several
philosophers of existence, and none more so than Nietzsche, Heidegger
and Jaspers. While the details have changed, the major themes of science
and technology, nihilism and the death of God, authenticity and inauthen-
ticity and so on, have lost none of their relevance. The human being in
the twenty-first century remains a part of the technological and utilitarian
apparatus that these figures described, and ever more so. The salient fact
regarding communication today and indeed of social life generally is the
fact of technology. Science-technology, no longer a perspective on the
world, a mode of the Encompassing or an aspect of what is, appears ever
more as an inescapable and total system of thought. We have become
supremely well adapted – too well adapted – to modern technology, as
is reflected, for instance, in modern communications technology. The
rationality that is hermeneutical dialogue or boundless communication

does not happen via technology of this order but is distorted by an
apparatus that stimulates, informs, forms and confines us. The iron cage of
rationality is still with us; its dimensions have changed but its effect has not.
It has us still, and indeed more than ever. Its outward signs are bureaucracy,
instrumentality, impersonality and gadgetry without end, but at bottom it is
a way of appearing and being that increasingly lacks an alternative.
Reason, if it is a concept that we can still speak of, must retain the power
of transcendence of which Jaspers spoke, in the sense at the very least
that the order of the useful and the methodological does not exhaust our
possibilities. There is more to rationality than what rationalism knows,
more to the human being than what science knows. Anti-reason in our
time remains the violence and self-certainty that refuses communication,
but it is also characterized by the reign of technique beyond which we can
no longer see, that is efficient and ‘natural’, that reduces all to order and
administers our needs. The life of reason is still found in the free commu-
nication of one human being with another, unmediated by technique
and uninhibited by intellectual orthodoxy. It is found where individuals
encounter one another in face-to-face interaction and account to each
other for what they believe and how they conduct themselves. It is found
in the search for a truth that is pursued in common and that is no one’s
possession. The fate of humanity is the fate of communication, while the
latter is impossible to disentangle any longer from technology. From the
ciphers, the symbols and metaphors within which we think to the means
of communication that we increasingly prefer, from the vocabularies we
speak to our ways of knowing and controlling the world, technology is the
regime of truth in which we live and the order from which reason must
seek transcendence.
The question this raises for us is, of course, how this is done. How, as the
current expression has it, do we think ‘outside the box’ when the box itself
has formed us so completely or, to use a more suitable metaphor, when the
net that we must in some fashion think beyond is one in which we are all
so thoroughly caught? Are we still waiting for being to reveal itself anew,
or for a god to save us? Perhaps not, but if we are awaiting a new Age of
Reason – this time one of boundless communication rather than rationalist
orthodoxy – we had better be patient. A great new era of dialogue is not
upon us, but on this possibility, or something like it, the fate of communi-
cation and humanity alike rest. By 1958 Jaspers was warning that if reason
in this sense did not soon arrive then ‘the future of mankind’ was the
atom bomb. From the perspective of the present we may have to separate
Jaspers’ existential from his Cold War anxieties. The former alone remain
relevant, and while their consequences are far less spectacular than total
destruction, they remain profoundly worrisome. What has become increas-
ingly imperative is to think beyond the confines of technology, while the
prospects of doing so have become increasingly unlikely. A century or half
a century ago, existentialist anxiety about technology made sense to a good
many, yet today when we are in its grip still more it appears to trouble us
less. The possibility of transcending technology, together with the need
for doing so, has been forgotten. Why would we wish to, asks a generation
that has been raised on and constituted by technology as never before, and
that sees technology merely as a convenient tool or a simple matter of the
way things are? Why is it necessary to escape the narrowing influence of
modern rationality? How would it profit us, or make our inferences more
certain, or make it easier for us to get what we want? The mind or the
culture that asks these questions in earnest is a cause for existential worry.
It may not amount to a dark night of the forgetfulness of being, and it is
not the atom bomb, but it is a phenomenon that should give us pause all
the same.
How do we think beyond the confines of technology – if we can agree,
that is, to the possibility and necessity of doing so? The question seems
already to call for a technique: what is the model to be followed, what rules
shall now direct the mind? Or is it poetic thinking that is called for? Among
the merits of Jaspers’ philosophizing is that he does not proffer the simple
answer, as if the question of reason were a scientific or technical problem
to be solved. There is no model to be found. Reason is boundless commu-
nication – except that even this is an oversimplification. It is also a mood,
a climate, a disposition of mind, a will to unity, a practice and an art; it is a
source of order and also of disorder, logical and a-logical, something that
cannot be divorced from its context and held aloft for us to analyse. It is
not a technical term but a word in ordinary language, which like so many
such words functions in a bewildering array of ways. We speak of something
standing to reason, of having good reason, of being reasonable or unrea-
sonable. What unifies the phenomena of this word’s disparate uses? It is
likely that no single value accomplishes this apart from the orientation
and abiding imperative toward transcending the established boundaries
of thought, to throw off inflexible systems of belief and to be continually
‘on the way’ this way or that. Reason must be thought of processually and
non-methodologically, perhaps as a certain kind of poetizing, but not only
this. It is oriented toward persuasion, the ordinary offering of accounts for
why one speaks and acts as one does. It exists where human beings agree to
explain themselves and to inquire in common into some disputed matter,

in a spirit of reciprocity and with a modicum of good will. It exists where no
party claims certainty for its position or special insight to which others lack
access. It exists not where violence or manipulation is reduced to zero – for
this is likely to be impossible – but where there is a commitment to let the
stronger argument prevail, and where narrowness of mind gives way to its
opposite.
Human beings can still be defined in terms of rationality, where
this carries no metaphysical connotation and refers specifically to our
freedom to speak and to listen, and to the imperative of communication
that governs our existence. When human reason becomes narrowed in
meaning, something more is at stake than the philosophical analysis of a
concept or the definition of a technical term. We ourselves and our funda-
mental mode of existence are in question. How we think and interact, how
we understand ourselves and our world, is who we are. The search for a
human essence that underlies our modes of communication is pointless.
If our existence is properly to be one of free creativity, as Jaspers and so
many other existential thinkers asserted, we must find ways to think and
act beyond the narrowing influences of modernity. The contradiction
that we face is that free communication, difference and authenticity, are
possible as never before, if we judge matters by their appearances, while
at a deeper level of analysis sameness of thinking, valuing, acting, commu-
nicating and being are as prevalent as ever they were. The former alone is
readily visible, and one easily mistakes a possibility for an attained reality.
Thus many today proclaim a new era of dialogue which has been made
possible by advances in communications technology, or a social order that
finally throws off uniformity and celebrates difference and empowerment,
an order that is brought about by utilitarian rationality and bureaucracy.
Boundless freedom of communication and thought is not upon us. Its
conditions of possibility are many, and include the hermeneutical and
epistemological, the scientific and technological, the educational and
political, and some others. If Jaspers brought much of this to our attention,
it remains our constant hermeneutical task to cultivate the will not only to
communicate but to push continually the frontiers of what is sayable and
imaginable that is reason’s essence.36
Throughout our Western tradition, the will to reason has tended to
become its opposite – some more or less dogmatic form of rationalism,
in which the tolerance of uncertainty and the patience for process give
way to an insistence on incontrovertible knowledge and the reduction
to technique. Perhaps it is a permanent tendency of thought to seek
deliverance from the processual and to postulate what is fixed, often in

the name of reason itself. If we are to be intellectually responsible, an old
story goes, we must tie our judgements and the conversation as a whole
to the secure post of reason. This we can still believe, but how secure do
we imagine the post to be? When this tendency manifests itself it falls to
philosophy to remind us of reason’s limits, of what reason can still be in the
modern world, and of the obligation of boundless communication under
which it places us. If the speaking animal is what we most fundamentally
are, we are called upon to risk ourselves and our point of view in a dialogue
that does not end. It is the beginning of wisdom as well as sound phenom-
enology to recognize that nothing human is unassailable or without limits.
Nothing in our intellectual life is above the fray of dialogue. If reasoned
persuasion sometimes makes use of techniques, as in many areas of inquiry
it clearly does, in others it does not. The imperative of reason in any case
is to refuse the closing off of discussion and to allow the process to unfold
as it will.
Chapter 3
The Thou and the Mass

Gabriel Marcel
That hermeneutics contains implications for practical philosophy was

well known, of course, to both Gadamer and Ricoeur, as it is to numerous
theorists who in one fashion or another have followed in their wake.
Questions regarding justice and the good, the nature of ethical judgement
and social criticism, the relation of theory and practice, universality and
particularity, self and other, and a host of related issues have been raised
anew by a trajectory of thought to which Being and Time and Truth and
Method in particular gave rise. Among these is the question of ethical
relations or the phenomenology of the I-Thou. While the works of Martin
Buber, Emmanuel Levinas and a number of postmodernists on this issue
have certainly garnered more attention than Gadamer’s rather concise
account in the second part of Truth and Method, it is the latter account that
I take up in this chapter and bring into contact with some reflections of a
thinker to whom Gadamer’s writings contain only scant references. Gabriel
Marcel was among the first rank of existential thinkers, although his works
today receive considerably less attention than they might. My question is
the following: What happens to the Thou – or to the experience of the
other as Gadamer described it – under conditions of contemporary mass
society? What becomes of the other, and of the claim that it asserts on
us, when the other is the mass, as Marcel and some other philosophers
of existence spoke of it? Among the more salient facts of modern social
life are technology and the mass, two conditions that have an effect on
moral consciousness that is at once profoundly distorting and seemingly
inescapable. The tenor and scale of social relations at present make the
descriptions of a Buber or a Levinas highly questionable when what habit-
ually greets us is not the Thou or the Other, as these thinkers spoke of
them, but mass society, an anonymous and inhuman entity of some highly
ambiguous kind.
Under modern conditions, upper-case notions of the Thou and the
Other can appear as otherworldly fictions rather than phenomenological
descriptions, while Marcel’s discussion of ‘man against mass society’ –
most especially in his 1952 book of that title – possesses an enduring and
The Thou and the Mass 45
disconcerting relevance. Before turning to Marcel’s analysis, let us recall

Gadamer’s phenomenological account of the I-Thou relation in Part II
of his magnum opus. The context at this point in the text is a discussion
not of ethics but of the nature of hermeneutical experience and the
concept of historically effected consciousness. If, as Gadamer maintained,
‘[h]ermeneutical experience is concerned with tradition’, we must under-
stand the different modes in which tradition may be encountered by us.
There are essentially three such modes, to each of which corresponds a form
of the I-Thou relation. Briefly, the first mode is characterized by an objec-
tivating attitude on the part of the experiencer. We encounter tradition or
the Thou in a manner that ‘tries to discover typical behaviour in one’s fellow
men and can make predictions about others on the basis of experience.’
The Thou here is a representative of human nature and is known as such,
something upon which we can pronounce our self-interested calculations
and predictions. Tradition or the Thou is here an object encountered by
sovereign subjectivity. In the second mode Gadamer described, the posture
of objectivity and control gives way and ‘the Thou is acknowledged as a
person’, yet in a manner that remains ‘a form of self-relatedness. .â•›.â•›. This
relation is not immediate but reflective.’ It is reflective in a sense that the
presumption of authority over our object remains in effect; it is the self that
knows, tradition or the Thou that is known. Every claim of the other meets
with a knowing counterclaim, and ‘the Thou loses the immediacy with
which it makes its claim. It is understood, but this means it is co-opted and
pre-empted reflectively from the standpoint of the other person.’1
The dialectic that Gadamer described culminates in a third and highest
form of hermeneutical experience, the ethical implications of which are
not far to seek. Here at last tradition comes into its own and the Thou
is experienced as such, with no presumption of authority or objective
knowledge, and where the important matter of the claim that tradition or
the Thou makes is received in its potential validity. This is an experience in
the highest sense of the word, where we may have something to learn that
may change us in our being. The other may be right, and the possibility
of this creates an anticipation that we shall not have the last word and we
are not in control. Reciprocity now reigns – not the pseudo-reciprocity that
is a disguised form of domination or reduction of the other to the same,
but an authentic mutuality of equals. ‘In human relations’, as Gadamer
expressed it, ‘the important thing is .â•›.â•›. to experience the Thou truly as a
Thou – i.e., not to overlook his claim but to let him really say something
to us. Here is where openness belongs. .â•›.â•›. Openness to the other, then,
involves recognizing that I myself must accept some things that are against
me, even though no one else forces me to do so.’ Tradition as well makes
a truth claim that it behoves us to take seriously, which means neither to
submit uncritically nor to dominate the scene but something intermediate
between the two. ‘I must allow tradition’s claim to validity .â•›.â•›. in such a way
that it has something to say to me.’2
The experience of the Thou, in this view, is one of radical openness and
reciprocity. What we are open to is not only the other in its otherness but,
perhaps more essentially, the claim that it makes upon us, which may be a
truth claim, a moral claim or some other. The difficulty is that this mode of
experience is not a given and that it presupposes conditions of possibility
that Marcel and some other existential thinkers regarded as dangerously
elusive in the social reality of our times. What happens when the average
everyday experience of social life, or of the other, is the encounter with
mass society? Is one capable of hearing the claim of the Thou under
this condition or is it not rather lost amid the noise of social reality, or
not heard at all due to the fleeting and impersonal nature of so much
of that experience? To answer these questions we must again engage in
some existential elucidation of the kind at which Jaspers and Marcel both
excelled, this time concerning the meaning of our social existence and the
factors that lead to its devitalization.
It is nothing less than the fundamental situation of human beings that
is the object of Marcel’s analysis. To be answerable, this question must
be posed not in ahistorical or wholly abstract terms but in terms of the
condition of human beings at the present time. This existential question
must also be posed as concretely as possible or in such a way that the ‘spirit
of abstraction’ of which Marcel was a lifelong critic shall not hinder the
work of phenomenological interpretation. Marcel’s account begins by
recalling a couple of Nietzsche’s more important existential assertions:
‘God is dead’ and also ‘Man is in his death-throes.’3 The two statements
must be comprehended together, Marcel maintained, and give rise to an
important line of questioning. What do these statements signify for us
and how did it come to pass that modern humanity is in such a perilous
condition? What is the nature of this condition and what are its outward
symptoms? As a Christian, Marcel’s diagnosis would differ profoundly from
Nietzsche’s, especially as this concerns the decline of religious worldviews.
For Marcel, the general enervation of social life that he believed he was
witnessing is a consequence of spiritual decline and of the dominance of
materialist and technological ways of thinking. In an important measure
the human being is what it thinks of itself, not merely what it is in the sense
of a certain kind of object, yet when our ways of thinking about ourselves
or anything are beholden to a single and one-dimensional vocabulary, then

humanity is indeed in its death-throes. ‘[T]oday a considerable temptation
exists’, as Marcel put it, echoing a common worry among existential and
hermeneutical thinkers, ‘.â•›.â•›. to become enclosed in the dimension of
technological thought to the point of denying that there could be any
other dimension.’4 It is a short step from this narrowing of perspective to
the more thoroughgoing degradation of life that Marcel believed he was
witnessing.
The phenomenon of human degradation was a frequent topic of
Marcel’s analysis, and it is here that his observation was often at its most
astute. The modern world is characterized by a profound spiritual disquiet,
he fervently believed, the symptoms of which Nietzsche had begun to
glimpse but which took on new dimensions in the twentieth century.
Among the most important of these is the rise of a form of civilization in
which the individual becomes disconnected from himself and his fellow
humanity. In a profound sense, we are no longer ourselves, while the other
is increasingly experienced not as a Thou but very nearly its antithesis.
While Heidegger would speak in this connection of das Man – ‘the They’
or the interchangeable anyone – Marcel preferred to speak of the mass
as the name for who or what the individual that is not himself is and how
this is experienced. José Ortega y Gasset had described the mass not only
as a collectivity of increasingly bewildering scale but, more essentially, as
‘a psychological fact’ in his The Revolt of the Masses of 1930. The mass is a
way of appearing and of being. Whereas in former times, as Ortega put it,
the ‘individuals who made up these multitudes existed’, they did not exist
‘qua multitude. .â•›.â•›. Each individual or small group occupied a place, his
own, in country, village, town or quarter of the great city. Now, suddenly,
they appear as an agglomeration, and looking in any direction our eyes
meet with the multitudes. Not only in any direction, but precisely in the
best places, the relatively refined creation of human culture, previously
reserved to lesser groups, in a word, to minorities. .â•›.â•›. There are no longer
protagonists; there is only the chorus.’ Under this condition the individual
is experienced as ‘undifferentiated from other men, but as repeating in
himself a generic type.’5
Marcel would take this analysis farther and apply it in a somewhat
different direction than Ortega. The issue that was most pressing for
Marcel was ‘the growing depersonalization of human relationships’ which
the concept of the mass well expresses.6 What has brought about this
condition and what is its meaning? Mass society as both figures spoke
of it signifies far more than the overwhelming number of persons who
populate modern cities or public places. Deeper than this is the mode
in which humanity now appears to us – as the multitudes, a thingly and
quasi-material being that is without a name and a face, that is the same
everywhere and impossible to elude. Since it is a ‘psychological fact’ rather
than a simple function of numbers, it is a phenomenon that characterizes
the town no less than the city. There as well we find a ‘promiscuous
closeness’ that is the opposite of fraternity and ‘human beings increasingly
separated from one another the more they are herded together’, such as
in ‘those enormous housing projects which spring up like mushrooms on
the outskirts of big cities.’7 The ‘agglomeration’ that ‘was yesterday the city’
exercises an ever more powerful attraction on populations at the same time
that they have become dehumanized and unlivable. One does not ‘dwell’,
in Heidegger’s sense, in the city of today, Marcel remarked.8 Instead one
disappears into the throng, and indeed one is the throng, as are those
whom we continue to call our neighbours. The bonds between persons
that it is our obligation to cultivate become contingent and fleeting, and if
the complaint is frequently made that our sociability and our dignity have
been undermined by that fact, or by the perception of oneself as ‘a mere
statistical unit, .â•›.â•›. a specimen among an infinity of others’, the complaint
seldom leads to a decision. What decision can even be made here is an
exceedingly difficult matter when the reactions and opinions that the
individual has and ‘which he thinks are his own, are merely reflections
of the ideas accepted in the circles he frequents and handed round in
the press which he reads daily.’9 Our very gesture of protest is the gesture
that ‘one’ has, and we submit to the mass even, or perhaps especially, in
imagining our resistance.
Marcel struck a strident note in his critique of the social and spiritual
deterioration that he believed had occurred by the middle of the last
century. One example of this phenomenon is the state of communication
that was becoming increasingly mediated by technology at that time. A
trend that has, of course, taken on radical momentum in more recent
decades, he lamented the effects that mass communication technology,
in particular the radio, was beginning to have. For a twenty-first century
audience, Marcel’s anxiety about radio in the early 1950s is amusing, given
the comparison with communications technology of the present. Radio,
as he remarked in Man Against Mass Society, along with other forms of
technological innovation, have made possible the manipulation of public
opinion on a scale that is unprecedented in history, if it is not downright
‘satanic’. In the words of this French dramatist, ‘How shall we be able to
grasp the fact that radio is one of the palpable factors making for our
present spiritual degradation? I should be tempted to ask whether man,

at the level, which is nearly always a low level, of his personal ambition,
is not usurping a prerogative which looks like a distorted analogue, a
caricature, of divine omnipresence. A Hitler or a Mussolini, speaking into
the microphone, could really seem invested with the divine privilege of
being everywhere at once’.10 Technology of mass communication shows an
abiding tendency to propagandize, to degrade the tone of discourse and
to diminish its message, and to serve the interests of whoever commands
it. It contributes to the depersonalization of social life and the cheapening
of any thought that employs it as a medium. This is readily seen, of course,
in the various communications technologies of our own time. The art of
letter writing, to take an obvious example, all but disappeared when written
communication became electronic and instant.11 Technical innovation in
this area was accompanied by a depersonalization and standardization
of expression that Marcel would have found shocking. Almost invariably,
when technology intervenes between speakers, the level, tone and style of
communication deteriorate, yet the imperative toward ever greater conven-
ience, control and personal availability appears to know no limits. ‘Then
there is the Press’, to take an equally obvious example, ‘whose degraded
character can never be denounced resolutely enough.’12
This critique is part of a much broader line of argument regarding
modern technology as a whole that is broadly consistent with Heidegger’s
critique. In addition to the narrowing of perception and self-understanding
that it brings about when it becomes a totalizing and alternativeless system
of thought, modern technology demands of ‘the individual who takes
advantage of it without having had any share in the effort at overcoming diffi-
culties of which such a progress is the culmination, the payment of a heavy
price, of which a certain degradation at the spiritual level is the natural
expression.’13 Marcel, of course, was far from advocating the destruction
of radio or just about any other form of technical progress. It was the
harnessing of technology and its subordination to self-mastery that he
wished to see. He hoped to remind us of what happens to the human
spirit when the values of technical mastery and control become ends
in themselves. The confusion of means and ends becomes a common
phenomenon when the preoccupation with the former eclipses the more
important matter of the goals that technology ostensibly serves.
The alienation of the individual within mass society was a pressing issue
in a great deal of the existential thought of this period. Marcel was hardly
alone in his worries. The growing homogeneity of human beings, the
uniformity of beliefs and values, the disappearance of local customs and
rural life, the loss of human scale, the frantic pace of modern life and a
host of related phenomena were frequent topics of discussion not only
among the philosophers of existence. So as well was the disappearance
of the individual into its socio-economic function. In ‘a world more and
more completely given over to technical processes’, human beings ‘tend
more and more to be reduced to their own strict function in a mechanized
society, though with a margin of leisure reserved for amusements from
which the imagination will be more and more completely banished.’14
The person as standing reserve and human resource is interchangeable
in its being. Its identity is its contribution to the machinery of mass civili-
zation and the enormous institutions on which it depends. Stripped of its
function, the human being becomes a shadowy figure of uncertain purpose
and worth, a social problem of one kind or another. There is a malaise and
a pessimism, Marcel believed, that emerges from such a society, a sense
that ‘this world is empty, it rings hollow; and if it resists this temptation it
is only to the extent that there come into play from within it and in its
favour certain hidden forces which are beyond its power to conceive or to
recognize.’15 Whatever elements of meaning or transcendence still exist in
such a world are matters that fall outside its conceptual framework, while
what lies within it are means without ends and a civilization without spirit.
The rhythm of our lives is no longer that of life itself but of the machine, an
acceleration that creates a constant sense of haste and ‘prevent[s] the slow
sedimentation of habitus which seems surely to have been from all time the
essential condition at the origin of all realities connected with the family.’16
The fundamental situation of daily life is reflected in the decay of family
and other forms of intimate association, the impersonality and anonymity
of public life, the decline of fraternity and community, and a sense of
cynicism and emptiness regarding our social existence in general. Marcel
would speak of ‘a widely diffused pessimism, at the level of the sneer and
the oath rather than that of sighs and weeping’ as ‘a fundamental given fact
about contemporary humanity, .â•›.â•›. a sort of physical nausea at life’ of a kind
that other existential writers were also noting.17
If the basic condition of knowledge as numerous philosophers of
existence conceived of it may be understood in the metaphor of lighting
a candle in the darkness, a parallel phenomenon characterizes our social
existence. There remain connections that bind us to the other in the midst
of a society that in many ways is dehumanized and alienated. ‘To encounter
someone’, in Marcel’s words, ‘is not merely to cross his path but to be, for
the moment at least, near to or with him. To use a term I have often used
before, it means being a co-presence.’18 Marcel’s distinction here is of the
essence: the mass is that with which we cross paths. We do not encounter
it in this sense so much as skirt by it and if possible avoid it altogether. It
does not speak to us and we do not listen. One is not ‘with’ the mass but
is confronted with it as subject to object, perhaps as an obstacle, a means
to an end, or an object of reckoning and prediction. Only if certain condi-
tions of possibility are in place do we genuinely encounter a Thou, in the
sense of listening to and being transformed by the claim that it makes. The
mass is the abstract anonymity that surrounds us, in the midst of which
relations of love and friendship remain possible and urgent.
Marcel would always be a philosopher of the concrete – of the concrete
experience that he contrasted with the ‘spirit of abstraction’ and of
concrete forms of sociability that transcend the mundane. It is a wisdom
that grasps together in thought the concrete and the transcendent that he
continually sought, but that he also found to be elusive in an age utterly
beholden to technology and the material. The nature of this wisdom
and its perilous condition at the present time he summarized in a short
text, fittingly titled The Decline of Wisdom: ‘[C]ommon sense is not so very
different from wisdom. It is a kind of deposit left by wisdom: instead of
drifting about it settles in the average human being, but only for so long
as certain sociological conditions are maintained. The nature of these
conditions is shown by the word “common” itself. There is and can be no
common sense where there is no common life or common notions, that is
to say where there no longer exist any organic groups such as the family,
the village, and so on. Yet the collectivization we are witnessing in every
field is happening at the cost or even in contempt of these organic groups.
.â•›.â•›. For we are confronted everywhere with enormous agglomerations which
are increasingly mechanized, so that the individuals are linked in much the
same way as the parts of a machine.’19 Our everyday experience of social life
is of processes of collectivization, mechanization and calculation on a scale
that leaves the existing individual in the lurch and wisdom as something of
an irrelevance or anachronism. What quarter can there be for wisdom and
the love of it when our existence is spoken of more or less exclusively as a
matter of material causes and effects and our social world is constituted by
so many Hobbesian atoms, existentially adrift and unencumbered in their
being? The sense of the common – of shared norms, a common tradition
and common sense – has been severely degraded, he believed, making any
who would continue to speak of wisdom as an ideal out of step with the
times, even in the discipline of philosophy. To be sure, Marcel’s particular
conception of wisdom was heavily influenced by, if it was not completely
inseparable from, his Christian belief. As he would write in Tragic Wisdom
and Beyond, ‘All my own thinking has aimed at such a wisdom, at least since
my conversion to Catholicism’, a wisdom that is ‘not properly speaking
humanistic’, but that is ‘grounded to some extent in an action emanating
from .â•›.â•›. spiritual powers which are not at all situated within the orbit of the
human world.’20 After his conversion of 1929, all his existential reflections
would need to be interpreted in this light, yet it remains that the wisdom
of which he spoke was not otherworldly but concrete and inseparable from
this sense of the common. It is this sense, he feared, that is disappearing in
a mechanized and utilitarian social order, a civilization that leaves no place
for transcendence and the ‘deep sense of piety towards life’ the absence of
which ‘seem[s] to us to bear the undeniable mark of sin.’21
A mark of the degradation of social life is when the mass institutions
on which we have come to depend approach all matters as problems in
need of solutions rather than what Marcel preferred to call mysteries. The
important distinction between a problem and a mystery turns upon the
nature of the relation between the matter that we are questioning and
the questioner him- or herself. A problem is something that one stands
to as subject to object; it is the obstacle in one’s path, a set of objective
conditions to which one stands at arm’s length. It does not enter into our
being and may be solved or not solved without in any meaningful way
transforming us. In the encounter with mystery the subject-object split
disappears and the matter into which we inquire is inseparable from the
being that we are. Love is a mystery in this sense of the word, as is death
and life itself. To characterize it as such does not mean that any of these
matters utterly defies knowledge but that to question them is to question
ourselves. A mystery is not an object before us, to which we stand in some
distanced relation and upon which we pronounce our self-regarding calcu-
lations, but is a part of our existence. In his words, ‘A problem is something
met with that bars my passage. It is before me in its entirety. A mystery, on
the other hand, is something in which I find myself caught up, and whose
essence is therefore not to be before me in its entirety. It is as though in this
province the distinction between in me and before me loses its meaning.’22
It is a common tendency, Marcel maintained, to attempt to transform a
mystery into a problem and so to degrade it. There is nothing sacred in a
life comprising so many problems in need of solution, nor is a social order
that is devoid of mystery and organized around a complex of utilitarian
problems one that is properly habitable by human beings. Something
inhuman characterizes such an order: a certain absence of depth, meaning
and community. A problem may have considerable complexity, but what it
lacks is the depth dimension that the notion of mystery properly captures.
To partake of a mystery is to ‘find myself committed, and, I would add,

not partially committed, not committed in regard to some determinate
and specialized aspect of myself, but committed as a whole man.’ It is to
‘abolish that frontier between what lies in the self and what lies before the
self.’23 A society that is organized around the supply of mass needs and the
functioning of mass institutions is existentially lost, adept as it may be at
regulating daily life with an eye to utilitarian efficiency.
When techniques rule our ways of thinking about social relations and
human existence in general, mystery is abolished and with it any serious
effort to listen to the claim of the Thou. Seriously to listen is to cross the
frontier to which Marcel alluded and to be co-present with the other. If
institutions by their nature are perhaps incapable of this – and mass institu-
tions still more – individuals are not, yet our capacity for this is attenuated
to the extent that our ways of thinking and relating are reduced to the
order of the technological and the material. ‘The human condition’, as
Marcel importantly observed, ‘.â•›.â•›. seems to be in some ways dependent on
the very manner in which it is understood.’ When it is understood more or
less exclusively in a vocabulary of materialism and technology, then ‘man
is thought of on the model of a machine’, an object of some scientifically
knowable and institutionally manageable kind. As the person in such an
order becomes ‘conscripted into an auxiliary bureaucracy’ and ‘more and
more easily reducible to an index card’, its mode of being-in-the-world is
transformed.24 It becomes the thing it is spoken of and treated as. Mass
man is not a person. It has no dignity of its own, no mystery or capacity
for freedom. It is an entity with a standard set of needs and a function in
the socio-economic mechanism. As such, it is the same everywhere, an
abstraction made real, while what is or was really real – an unrepeatable
individual – goes into eclipse. The abstractions and statistics with which
institutions reckon correspond to nothing in the world, as a matter of
phenomenological fact. The problem of unemployment or health care,
speaking concretely, consists in the lived circumstances and experience
of particular persons, yet this obvious fact again goes into eclipse when
the spirit of abstraction prevails. The human being is neither a case,
demographic, file nor statistic. It is something far more than a biological
or psychological entity, but only if it continues to think of itself as such
or as the bearer of a dignity that belongs to one as a concrete individual.
By contrast, the mass can only be conceived as an abstraction of one kind
or another, and can have no substantial reality of its own. It remains a
‘psychological fact’ and a way of appearing under conditions of modern
life. One does not perceive the mass any more than one perceives any other
generalized abstraction. We perceive concrete persons, since this is indeed

all there is to a society, yet too seldom do we perceive them as such.
Such is the issue that Marcel’s analysis brings to our attention. It puts in
question all talk of the Thou or the other in the different senses of these
expressions that we encounter in contemporary philosophy, including
hermeneutics. How, under conditions of modern life and mass society,
can one still hear the claim of the Thou or authentically encounter him
or her? If ‘[t]he life of the mind’, as Gadamer stated, ‘consists precisely in
recognizing oneself in other being’, if the subject itself comes into its own
in the midst of intersubjectivity and the struggle for recognition that takes
place between real persons, how is any of this possible when our everyday
experience of the social is of the interchangeable anyone?25
Without overstating or dramatizing the point in the way that certain
existential writers may be accused of, my contention is that the funda-
mental condition of social life in our times is the experience of the mass,
the salient features of which are anonymity, depersonalization and the
loss of human scale. In this condition the other person does not become
a Thou but remains an ‘it’, a thingly being whose presence is fleeting
and whose claim upon the self is not heard. Encountering another in an
authentic sense always involves a risk to the self and an overcoming of
barriers. It is never an uncomplicated matter, however the lifeworld in
which we find ourselves generally provides us with the wherewithal with
which to engage in this elemental practice. Yet when the very language of
emotional expression, including of love itself, shrinks down to the needs of
the organism and its utilitarian functioning, when the vocabulary of ethical
relations becomes one of cost-benefit analysis or the satisfaction of physi-
ological and quasi-physiological drives, social life is in a perilous condition.
In Gadamer’s account, the crucial transition in our experience of the
other or of tradition occurs when the latter is regarded no longer from
the standpoint of purported objectivity but in a more immediate relation.
The subject whose behaviour we calculate and predict, whose expressions
we stand to in a distanced and ‘reflective’ relation, is not experienced as
a Thou. It appears as a certain kind of entity over which we preside, and
if it would issue a claim of any kind, it is one that is met with an authori-
tative reply. In the first two modes of hermeneutical experience as he
described them, the subject is the one who knows while the object is the
thing known. It is in the transition to the third mode that the Thou at last
comes into its own, where this means that we perceive not only the other in
its otherness but the important matter of the claim that it makes upon us.
The Thou may understand something that we do not, something that may
potentially transform us. What calls for emphasis here is the contingency
and fragility of this transition. There are conditions that make it possible
to experience the other concretely as a Thou – as a you, an interlocutor
who has something to say to us – and conditions that conspire against
this or that enclose the self within itself and incline it toward depersonali-
zation. If it is the concrete other of whom we are speaking, this is neither
a being who stands in objective opposition to the self nor its abstract
antithesis: an incommensurable Other to whom the self stands in a relation
of submission. In the encounter with the other, one is neither lord nor
bondsman. In the words of Richard Kearney, ‘Hermeneutics suggests that
the other is neither absolutely transcendent nor absolutely immanent, but
somewhere between the two. It suggests that, for the most part, others are
intimately bound up with selves in ways that constitute ethical relations
in their own right. Human discourse involves someone saying something to
someone about something. It is a matter of one self communicating to another
self, recognizing that if there is no perfect symmetry between the two,
this does not necessarily mark a total dissymmetry.’26 This passage aptly
summarizes the hermeneutical position on this issue and cautions against
philosophical accounts that speak of the Other invariably in the upper case
and in excessively transcendent terms. The other is not an otherworldly
or absolute being of some description but is the concrete Thou that
addresses us about some, often disputed, matter. It falls to the self in this
circumstance to behold this claim, to anticipate its possible validity, and to
respond in dialogical fashion.
For this elemental life process to occur, an indispensable precondition
is an openness to what the other has to say, and this is not a given or
simple matter. In ethical relations it is of the highest importance that the
habits we form and that drive the great majority of our conduct do not
constitute merely so many adaptations to a technological and mass order
of things. The issue is that under conditions of mass society, the claim of
the concrete other is all too often lost in the noise of social life. In the face
of the mass we are habituated in our daily existence to a refusal of recog-
nition that is fully reciprocated and to a mode of perceiving and relating
that is depersonalized and more or less devoid of meaning. There is a
fitting response to the claim of the Thou – most often one that proceeds
in the spirit of that claim, and not infrequently one that is critical – yet in
the encounter with the mass there is no claim that can be discerned and
no fitting response. The call of the stranger is not an encounter with the
mass but with the concrete other appearing to us as such. The mass, by
contrast, does not come into view as a Thou; it issues no discernible claim
while the innumerable concrete others whose paths we cross in the course
of everyday life issue an impossible cacophony of claims which we can
attend to, but in a manner that is often perfunctory and guilt-ridden. The
characteristic and habitual mode of relating in the daily encounter with the
mass is inattention. The result is a moral consciousness that is habituated
to anonymity and insensibility. As Marcel observed in a rather important
passage: ‘There are today an increasing number of people whose awareness
is, in the strict sense of the phrase, without a focus; and the techniques
which have transformed the framework of daily life for such people at
such a prodigious pace – I am thinking particularly of the cinema and
the radio – are making a most powerful contribution towards this defocal-
izing process. What I mean is this. One may, it seems to me, lay it down
as a principle that the human creature under normal conditions finds his
bearings in relation to other people, and also to physical objects, that are
not only close to him in space but linked to him by a feeling of intimacy.
Of this feeling of intimacy, I would say that in itself it tends to create a focus
for human awareness. One might go farther and speak of a kind of constel-
lation, at once material and spiritual, which under normal conditions
assembles itself around each human being. But, for a great many reasons
which it would be superfluous to enumerate, this kind of constellation
round the individual life is, in a great many countries, in process of disso-
lution.’27 Today our habitual experience of social life is to find oneself in
the midst of an agglomeration, to encounter others and their claims on an
impossible scale and, as a strategy in psychic survival perhaps, to cultivate
the kind of unfocused awareness of which Marcel spoke. The nurse or
teacher faced on a daily basis with a multitude of charges and adminis-
trative inanities adapts to haste and inattention in the face of the other.
For the resultant moral consciousness, the transition noted above – from
regarding human beings with an objectivating attitude to perceiving them
in a more immediate relation – is an increasingly difficult matter. We have
become accustomed to the social obtuseness of others and quite possibly
our own, the insensibility of mind and wilful unconsciousness that are so
commonplace in our time as no longer to cause surprise. A good part of
our moral competence comes down to the apparently simple act of paying
attention – not only to the plight of the sufferer in a grand sense but to
ordinary persons and the mundane claims that they make upon us in the
course of everyday life.
The situation is exacerbated when the conceptual framework of social
life is itself restricted to the order of the utilitarian and technological.
If much of our existence as social beings, as Kearney stated, consists of
‘someone saying something to someone about something’, the conditions that

make this possible include both attentive minds and a shared language
that is hermeneutically rich enough to enable others and ourselves to
express our claims and counterclaims in ways that may be heard. When
our language becomes degraded in the manner we have seen – to the
level of self-regarding utilities, needs and preference-orderings, as if we
were corporations or perhaps machines – ethical relations once again are
in danger of the kind of degradation that Marcel described. When the
language is lost, the experience is lost with it, and this applies as much
to the I-Thou relation as to any other field of experience. The difficulty
is that the Thou does not come into appearance as such unless we have
the language that expresses and indeed constitutes the experience. The
self that is habituated to functionality, anonymity and replaceability – its
own and others’ – and that speaks a language of ethical relations that is
derived from science, technology or economics has a diminished capacity
to experience the Thou truly as a Thou in Gadamer’s sense, or as the Other
in the sense of Levinas and the postmodernists.
The question is how the other may appear to us, and it is a question
for which habit and language are in a commanding position. The human
being before us may be the beloved, friend, interlocutor or fellow citizen;
it may be the object of desire or knowledge, the nameless functionary,
despised enemy or the mass. We experience ourselves likewise in habitual
roles and within a language of expression, often at our peril. Whether we
are speaking of the teacher overly accustomed to authority and seeming
expertise, the labourer habituated to our replaceability, the social worker
interpreting one and all through the lens of the DSM, the soldier with
an overdeveloped sense of friend and foe or the city dweller excessively
habituated to the daily confrontation with the mass and to one’s personal
invisibility within it, habits give our character and experience a lasting set
and indeed form the self. The capacity for reciprocity that is the essence of
the I-Thou relation is attenuated when the habits we form and the vocab-
ulary we speak dispose us more and more toward experiences of ourselves
and others that are mediated by a technological and materialist system
of thought. This is the existential condition in which we find ourselves,
desiring profoundly a quality of experience that has become elusive if not
anachronistic.
If there is a sense in which ‘Man is in his death-throes’, as Nietzsche
dramatically stated and Marcel repeated, it is a statement best interpreted
as follows. It behoves moral consciousness above all, as Gadamer expressed
it, ‘to experience the Thou truly as a Thou’, where this means ‘not to
overlook his claim but to let him really say something to us.’28 In the social
reality of our times the scope for this kind of experience is increasingly
diminished, habituating us to modes of experiencing others and ourselves
in a degraded light. ‘Man against mass society’, ‘the individual against mass
thinking’ are sentiments that now resonate widely and deeply, and if this
does not exactly signify that we are in our death-throes, nor does it bode
well for the tenor of social life to which our century has become danger-
ously accustomed. Has our age become as degraded, existentially and
socially, as Marcel maintained? Probably not, or not in quite the manner
that he believed. The cultural physician in Marcel is often difficult to
separate from the Christian believer, and if we wish to bracket that belief
in our own reflections, the stridency of his critique is diminished. It is likely
that the existing individual is not at death’s door. Its capacity, however, for
the higher forms of intersubjectivity has been weakened by conditions of
modern life that worried a great many existential thinkers and ought to
worry us still. Social relations that are mediated ever more by technology –
now seemingly as an end in itself or to support the illusion of control over
an existence that in every respect is perilous – that occur on a massive scale,
that are oriented increasingly around utility and functionality, and that are
depersonalized and fleeting give rise to an experience that is alienating
and hollow. Under these conditions, notions of human dignity, authenticity
and openness to the other lose their vitality and take on an appearance of
nostalgia. Philosophical accounts of the Other and the Thou, for instance,
as articulated by a Buber or a Levinas, hark back to vocabularies that are
too theological and difficult – one might say impossible – to separate from
their religious underpinnings. Many of Marcel’s reflections are vulnerable
to the same criticism. It is no return to theological ethics, including one
that speaks the language of phenomenology, that is needed, but concep-
tions of social life that are concrete, non-hyperbolic and non-nostalgic.
It is here, in my view, that Gadamer’s phenomenology of the I-Thou
fares well in comparison with more fashionable and ostensibly more radical
accounts of the Other and the face-to-face. It is an account that lacks
theological fervour, to be sure, but this should be considered a mark in its
favour. The main difficulty for it arises not from the direction of postmod-
ernism but from Marcel’s line of argument: the possibility of hearing the
claim of the Thou is radically diminished in an age of technology and
under conditions of mass civilization. Marcel’s remedy for this is again
difficult to separate from his religious commitments: it is to be found in
experiences of small-group fraternity, community and hospitality – ‘the
sort of piety which is shown in the East to the unknown guest – simply
because he is a guest, because he has entrusted himself to a man and his

dwelling’ – of a kind that is disappearing in the modern world. Marcel’s
ethics is an ‘attempt to recall us to the feeling for our neighbour and the
consciousness of our immediate surroundings’, one that cultivates attach-
ments beyond the order of the utilitarian and that have a sense of mystery
and transcendence about them. It is the experience of concrete others,
not of an absolute Other which partakes of the spirit of abstraction, in
which Marcel placed his faith, experiences of agape, fraternal association
and ‘new aristocracies’ of the spirit, ‘groups managing to form themselves
according to the circumstances around an institution, a personality, a living
idea, and so on.’29 Groups bound together by a shared idea, he believed,
do not degenerate into the kind of herd organization that he decried,
and remain possible sites of fraternity. Speaking of the latter notion in The
Existential Background of Human Dignity (1963), Marcel made a curiously
friendly reference to Levinas’ account of the face-to-face relation while also
expressing surprise that ‘he does not use the term which seems to me the
only adequate one – “neighbour.” We should note that this word takes its
full meaning only when preceded by the possessive adjective, the possessive
in this case no longer being used to claim ownership.’ The phrase ‘my
neighbour’, he went on to write, draws us ‘almost imperceptibly to the
affirmation of a fraternity’ in a sense that differs little, if at all, from the
religious.30
These concepts – my neighbour, fraternity, dignity, mystery, the Thou –
may still speak to our times and provide a vocabulary that is capable in
some measure of offering a counterweight to the depersonalization of
social life that we so often experience. As Marcel knew, ‘intersubjectivity is
openness to the other’; it is an openness without which our social existence
can only be an experience of the mass. It is an openness as well ‘which is
perpetually threatened because at every moment the self may close itself
again and become a prisoner of itself, no longer considering the other
except in relation to itself.’31 We need not and ought not to appropriate
these ideas in their more theological connotations. If Marcel would not
agree with this, it remains that it is no return to religious ethics that is
needed but a conception of ethical relations that places in the centre the
primordial and eminently human act of listening in earnest to the claim of
the other and so allowing it to appear as a Thou, another self that stands
to us in a relation of immediacy and reciprocity. This is the daily struggle
of moral consciousness: to remain or to become open to the claim of the
Thou and to issue our own in a spirit of dialogue, or something resembling
it, and so to preserve the humanity of that relation.
Part Two
Pragmatism
Chapter 4
Truth After Correspondence

William James
Until relatively recent times, few continental philosophers treated

pragmatism with great seriousness. Gadamer’s own view of this movement
is characteristic of a position widespread among continental philosophers
of the early and middle decades of the twentieth century, to the effect that
while pragmatists are correct in identifying lifeworld practices as the appro-
priate point of departure for philosophical theorizing, they simplistically
assimilate truth to the order of utility. Gadamer expressed this in a paper
written prior to Truth and Method titled ‘What is Truth?’ As he expressed it
there: ‘The connection between situation and truth is already part of the
warp and woof of American pragmatism. There the successful coping with
a situation is understood as the real criterion of truth. The fruitfulness of a
knowledge-claim proves itself in that it eliminates a problematical situation.
I do not believe that the pragmatic turn that things take here is sufficient.
That shows itself in that pragmatism simply pushes all so-called philo-
sophical and metaphysical questions to the side because it only concerns
itself with coping with the immediate situation. In order to move forward
it is acceptable to cast off the entire dogmatic ballast of the tradition – I
regard this as a short circuit. The primacy of the question, about which I
spoke, is not a pragmatic primacy. And even less is the answer that is true
bound to the standard of its consequences for action. But pragmatism is
certainly right in that one must go beyond the formal relation in which
the question stands to the meaning of the proposition.’1 This passage,
written in the 1950s, shows only a passing familiarity with pragmatism and
is indicative of the reception this school of thought received in continental
philosophy. It is a misunderstanding that pragmatism ‘only concerns itself
with coping with the immediate situation’ and reduces truth to a kind of
crude epistemological counterpart to utilitarianism. Gadamer himself,
some forty years after the publication of ‘What is Truth?’, perceived as
much: ‘After a delay of almost a century it is being made plain to us how
powerfully we had been enclosed in isolation since the beginning of
World War I despite all efforts to breach such isolation. That there was
philosophical pragmatism in America was certainly not unknown to us,
but it had no presence for us. One knew about James, who had been a
friend of my own teacher Paul Natorp, and one knows about Dewey and
his enormous influence on American culture. But only now do we begin to
understand that American philosophy did have an impact on us and that
certain impulses from there became part of German philosophizing.’2
As a growing number of scholars are pointing out, clear and deep
affinities exist between American pragmatism and much of the continental
thought of the twentieth century, and nowhere more so than phenom-
enology and hermeneutics.3 The basic hypothesis of classical pragmatism
is that the meaning, justification and indeed truth of an idea is deter-
mined in light of its consequences for our practices and lived experience.
While Charles Sanders Peirce limited pragmatism to a theory of meaning,
William James, John Dewey and others formulated it more broadly as a
theory of knowledge and truth. For the two latter figures, a true statement
fundamentally is one that resolves a problematic situation that arises in
the course of human experience. The pragmatic model of inquiry that
they developed was firmly rooted in post-Kantian idealism while drawing
equally upon Darwin and empiricism. While James and Dewey continued
to speak of truth in the realm of propositional knowledge alone, they
rejected the correspondence theory on essentially phenomenological
(or ‘radical empiricist’) grounds and replaced it with a coherentist and
experimental model of inquiry. It is no exaggeration to speak of James and
Dewey as (proto-) phenomenological thinkers, both of whose work reject
not only the correspondence theory of truth but many of the standard
dichotomies and Enlightenment doctrines that Heidegger, Gadamer, and
other hermeneutical philosophers were also leaving behind. In spite of
important affinities, pragmatism was ill received in European philosophy
and became saddled early with a reputation that is false and which only
now is being overcome.4 In bringing it into relation with hermeneutics,
therefore, as the next three chapters attempt, we shall need to remove
some old caricatures and clarify what a few pre-eminent thinkers in this
tradition actually meant in their conceptions of truth, the nature of inquiry
and the theory-practice relation. Since pragmatism assumes different forms
in the writings of different thinkers, I shall focus on one figure per theme,
beginning with James on truth in the present chapter and followed in the
next two by Dewey on inquiry and Richard Rorty on the question of theory
and practice. The argument of these chapters is not that pragmatism and
hermeneutics express identical positions on these issues – for indeed they
do not – but that bringing the two traditions into conversation in this way
may be mutually beneficial.
Truth After Correspondence 65
For James, the concept of truth must be understood in connection

with lived experience and as a mode of praxis. It consists not in a formal
relation between propositions and states of affairs but in ‘a rich and active
commerce .â•›.â•›. between particular thoughts of ours, and the great universe
of other experiences in which they play their parts and have their uses.’
True statements agree with reality, but where correspondence theory had
construed agreement as formal adequation between statements (the only
items, according to correspondence theory and James as well, that make
a claim to truth) and facts considered to obtain objectively, agreement for
James is a dynamic and processual notion inseparable from the projects
of the knower. Agreement must be understood as the agreeableness
of the consequences of an idea for praxis and consists in a ‘process of
being guided’ from one experience to another, ‘from a present idea to a
future terminus.’ Truth is therefore an ‘affair of leading’, a ‘go-between,
a smoother-over of transitions’ in our dealings with the world. We deem
an idea to be true insofar as it prepares us for future experience while
remaining faithful to previous experience, insofar as it brings us into
working touch with a lifeworld and produces coherence and intelligibility.
As James expressed it in Pragmatism: ‘ideas (which themselves are but parts of our
experience) become true just in so far as they help us get into satisfactory relation with
other parts of our experience, to summarize them and get about among them
by conceptual short-cuts instead of following the interminable succession
of particular phenomena. Any idea upon which we can ride, so to speak;
any idea that will carry us prosperously from any one part of our experience
to any other part, linking things satisfactorily, working securely, simplifying,
saving labour; is true for just so much, true in so far forth, true instrumen-
tally.’ In the same text James wrote: ‘From this simple cue pragmatism gets
her general notion of truth as something essentially bound up with the
way in which one moment in our experience may lead us towards other
moments which it will be worthwhile to have been led to. Primarily, and on
the common-sense level, the truth of a state of mind means this function of
a leading that is worthwhile. When a moment in our experience, of any kind
whatever, inspires us with a thought that is true, that means that sooner or
later we dip by that thought’s guidance into the particulars of experience
again and make advantageous connexion with them.’5
In Jamesian phenomenology, truth consists in satisfactory ‘workings’ and
‘leadings’ rather than in accurate representations: ‘True ideas lead us into
useful verbal and conceptual quarters as well as directly up to useful sensible
termini. They lead to consistency, stability and flowing human intercourse.’6
A true belief does no violence to our perceptions, establishes connections
between various regions of experience, and produces coherence. Because

pragmatic ‘workability’, ‘success’, and ‘satisfactoriness’ are perspectival
notions, they must be judged with respect to the projects and interests of
knowers. The truth of an idea cannot be determined apart from its conse-
quential value to those who hold it. Scientific hypotheses, for instance, are
accounted true in virtue of their capacity to offer successful predictions,
cure diseases, create technologies, and in general facilitate our interac-
tions with the world, rather than on the grounds of their mirroring the
way the world is in an objective sense. Theoretical constructions are so
many contrivances for action rather than eternal verities, while scientific
truths constitute useful means of carrying us from one set of phenomena
to another. Herein lies the pragmatic significance of ‘verifiability’: certain
beliefs allow us to cope successfully with the world, adapt to or modify an
environment, and in general realize our practical projects. True beliefs
are verifiable in the sense that they can accommodate progressively more
phenomena and fashion an integrated and complex worldview. Agreement
with reality often signifies the merely negative fact that nothing from
one part of our experience contradicts an idea that satisfactorily leads us
toward, or sheds interesting light upon, another part. By the same token,
statements may be falsified by conflicting with or failing to account for
certain experiences. False beliefs fail to conduct us satisfactorily from one
experience to another and often contradict certain of our true beliefs.
The ‘reality’ with which true ideas agree is threefold: the sum of our
other beliefs, relations of ideas, and ‘matters of fact’ – conceived experi-
entially as ‘the flux of our sensations’ or the totality of sense perceptions.
An interpretation must cohere not only with its object but with our previ-
ously accepted interpretations. The role of the latter is all-important in
the process of inquiry as James described it. In his words, ‘Truth grafts
itself on previous truth, modifying it in the process, just as idiom grafts
itself on previous idiom, and law on previous law. Given previous law and
a novel case, and the judge will twist them into fresh law. Previous idiom;
new slang or metaphor or oddity that hits the public taste: – and presto,
a new idiom is made. Previous truth; fresh facts: – and our mind finds a
new truth.’ The simple addition of a new truth to the stock of the old in a
manner that requires no rearrangement or critical assessment of previous
beliefs is the most elementary form of learning. Acquiring knowledge,
however, frequently entails such a rearrangement. When confronted
with unfamiliar or unanticipated phenomena, coherence is gained by
modifying a previous belief to accommodate the novelty while preserving
all the relevant phenomena. New knowledge modifies and is in turn
modified by settled truths: ‘The novelty soaks in; it stains the ancient mass;
but it is also tinged by what absorbs it.’ When confronted with an anomaly,
some aspect of the ‘ancient mass’ must be reassessed. In the course of
inquiry we discard the belief that produces contradiction and preserve the
remainder with the necessary minimum of disturbance. If the anomaly is
thus rendered coherent, a change of opinion results, or a previous inter-
pretation is replaced with a new one. ‘This new idea is then adopted as the
true one. It preserves the older stock of truths with a minimum of modifi-
cation, stretching them just enough to make them admit the novelty, but
conceiving that in ways as familiar as the case leaves possible.’ As fidelity
to our older truths is of considerable importance, an ‘outrée explanation’
that violates all our previous beliefs is unlikely ever to be adopted.7 James
insisted that coherence among our ideas and experiences is of paramount
importance and that every belief must ‘run the gauntlet’ of our other
beliefs in order that no contradiction may stand. James made this point
abundantly clear in the following passages: ‘Above all we find consistency
satisfactory, consistency between the present idea and the entire rest of
our mental equipment, including the whole order of our sensations, and
that of our intuitions of likeness and difference, and our whole stock of
previously acquired truths.’ Similarly: ‘After man’s interest in breathing
freely, the greatest of all his interests (because it never fluctuates or remits,
as most of his physical interests do) is his interest in consistency, in feeling
that what he now thinks goes with what he thinks on other occasions. We
tirelessly compare truth with truth for this sole purpose. Is the present
candidate for belief perhaps contradicted by principle number one? Is it
compatible with fact number two? and so forth.’8 This coherentist account
is not unlike the doctrine of the hermeneutical circle. We expect an inter-
pretation to reconcile a text’s disparate passages into a unified account,
to employ one sentence to illuminate the meaning of another, and so on.
Interpretations must cohere with other interpretations and in general
help us to negotiate our experience of the world. When the process breaks
down, when anticipations are thwarted or interpretations generate contra-
diction, we say either that we have failed to understand or that the thing
itself is unintelligible.
Dewey’s pragmatic experimentalism further refined James’ account
while remaining consistent in important respects with hermeneutics. Here
again the process of inquiry is described in a fashion that rejects the model
of unconditioned subjectivity on one side and an uninterpreted reality on
the other for a more phenomenologically adequate account of inquiry as
it actually unfolds. The investigative process, for Dewey, essentially involves
an experimental testing of ideas in a fashion that proposes and modifies

hypotheses with a view to producing optimal coherence. Ultimately, ‘[t]he
test of ideas, of thinking generally, is found in the consequences of the acts
to which the ideas lead, that is in the new arrangements of things which are
brought into existence.’9 In expounding this view – which I shall return to
in Chapter 5 – Dewey was following and also transforming Peirce’s dictum
that ‘there is no distinction of meaning so fine as to consist in anything but
a possible difference of practice.’10 In the process of inquiry, a hypothesis
is proposed by which to account for particular phenomena, the progress
of which is followed as it proceeds through various stages of investigation
until it registers pragmatic consequences of a specific kind. Provided
these are consistent with the consequences anticipated by the hypothesis,
and by this means provide for the organization or reorganization of a
given set of phenomena, the hypothesis passes for true until and unless it
generates contradiction in another region of experience. Dewey’s method-
ology integrates experiences with other experiences, phenomena with
phenomena, in dialectical fashion. The product of successful inquiry is not
certainty but ‘warranted assertibility’, a conception of truth that is invar-
iably contingent on the course of further investigation.11 Dewey stressed
that it is the nature of inquiry to be fallible, futural and ultimately practical
in orientation; it never allows us to rest on our conclusions but sets these in
operation on the model of scientific experimentation. Truth is a processual
notion, and in no sense is an end attained once and for all. In pragmatic
knowledge, ‘the process of growth, of improvement and progress, rather
than the static outcome and result, becomes the significant thing.’12
Since a monological conception of truth would clearly contradict the
dialectical spirit of hermeneutics, it bears emphasis that pragmatism incor-
porates an important social element in its conception of truth. For both
James and Dewey, truth arises only in a community of inquirers. As Peirce
had expressed it: ‘In sciences in which men come to agreement, when a
theory has been broached, it is considered to be on probation until this
agreement is reached. After it is reached, the question of certainty becomes
an idle one, because there is no one left who doubts it. We individually
cannot reasonably hope to attain the ultimate philosophy which we pursue;
we can only seek it, therefore, for the community of philosophers. Hence,
if disciplined and candid minds carefully examine a theory and refuse to
accept it, this ought to create doubts in the mind of the author of the theory
himself.’13 In James’ account, truth in the first instance is predicated of the
individual inquirer and is a function of an idea’s pragmatic success within
his or her experience. This is not the end of the matter, however. To pass
for true, the idea must be submitted to the conversation of a community.

In the course of inquiry the locus of truth shifts from the vantage point of
the individual to the community of thinkers, while one’s own perspective
enlarges to incorporate an increasing number of inquirers. As the conver-
sation continues and the pool of experience enlarges, truth becomes less
idiosyncratic and increasingly intersubjective. Truth must therefore not
be an altogether determinate quality, but one that permits of degrees. As
consensus emerges we move by degrees from ‘relatively’ true beliefs to what
James (unfortunately) termed ‘absolute’ truth, a term that he construed
not in the manner of dogmatic metaphysics but as ‘that ideal vanishing
point towards which we imagine that all our temporary truths will some day
converge.’14 It constitutes the hypothetical and never to be realized culmi-
nation of inquiry in a consensus that no future experience would overturn.
It warrants repeating, however, that truth for James and Dewey alike always
remains a processual notion that permits no final culminations of any kind,
and hence is neither absolute in the usual sense of the term nor certain.
The intersubjective nature of truth would be more accentuated in
Gadamer’s work, particularly in his notion of the essential linguisticality of
understanding. Solidarity, for Gadamer, ‘is the decisive condition and basis
of all social reason.’15 In determining the merit of truth claims we appeal
not to any metaphysical touchstone but to the conversation and tradition
to which we belong. As Richard Bernstein has pointed out, Gadamer
appealed ‘to a concept of truth that (pragmatically speaking) amounts to
what can be argumentatively validated by the community of interpreters
who open themselves to what tradition “says to us.”’16 While hermeneutical
innovation often requires a break with tradition in given respects, or a
rearrangement of ideas established by our forebears, it remains that even
the most inventive interpretations are oriented by the tradition from which
they emerge, minimally, in order to demonstrate the deficiency of previous
interpretations and the relative merit of a new idea.17
Truth, then, as hermeneutics and pragmatism both conceive it, is essen-
tially dialogical; it emerges only in the course of dialogue and experimental
inquiry. Gadamer likened it to an event of disclosure in which what is
essential is not any conclusive determination but the ongoing dialectic
of question and answer. Interpretation is an open-ended process that
neither begins at the beginning nor culminates in a final conclusion. Truth
occurs as we are taken up by the interpretive object, not when we correctly
represent it in determinate categories. It is an event in which we participate
rather than a fixed relation. In both traditions, truth, consensus and being
itself are unfinished and subject to further inquiry.
Both traditions also accentuate the historicity of truth along with its
essential sociality. Truth is not independent of the process of inquiry and
is contingent on human projects and symbolizing practices. Given the
historicity of the latter, all truths are historical constructions. Our most
ancient and settled categories were once inventions that were declared true
for the reason that they were found to be useful in practice. This thought
is repeatedly expressed in James’ writings, perhaps most eloquently in the
following text: ‘The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything.
Truth independent; truth that we find merely; truth no longer malleable to
human need; truth incorrigible, in a word; such truth exists indeed supera-
bundantly – or is supposed to exist by rationalistically minded thinkers; but
then it means only the dead heart of the living tree, and its being there
means only that truth also has its paleontology and its “prescription”, and
may grow stiff with years of veteran service and petrified in men’s regard
by sheer antiquity. But how plastic even the oldest truths nevertheless really
are has been vividly shown in our day by the transformation of logical and
mathematical ideas, a transformation which seems even to be invading
physics.’18 In emphasizing the idea of truth as a human invention insepa-
rable from the dialogical process and from history itself, James, Dewey and
Gadamer all refused the realist view of truth as obtaining in an absolute
sense. For pragmatism as for hermeneutics, there is no ahistorical truth. As
James expressed it, the notion of truth as an objective relation happened
upon in the course of inquiry, the very idea of eternal verity, ‘the truth with
no one thinking it, is like the coat that fits though no one has ever tried it
on, like the music that no ear has listened to.’19
The two traditions also concur in holding that truth does not always
require direct confirmation by the knower. Just as authority, for Gadamer,
is sometimes a legitimate source of understanding, for James, ‘[t]ruth
lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs
“pass”, so long as nothing challenges them, just as banknotes pass so long
as nobody refuses them.’ While true ideas must be verifiable, they are not
always verified directly by the individual. They may be confirmed indirectly,
either by others whose range of experience exceeds our own, by the lack
of disconfirming evidence for an otherwise fruitful belief, or by an absence
of reasonable doubt concerning a given point of consensus. As James
put it, one need not directly verify all one’s true beliefs ‘any more than a
wealthy man need be always handling money, or a strong man always lifting
weights.’20
In so arguing, James, Dewey and Gadamer all described a process
of inquiry that is without absolute origins save for the phenomena
(James’ ‘blooming, buzzing confusion’ or ‘the flux of our sensations’)

that are arranged and rearranged by an active intellect into coherent
configurations.21 Received understandings are set in motion as provi-
sional anticipations while interpretations and hypotheses are confirmed or
disconfirmed in the course of inquiry. Not infrequently our anticipations
run into unanticipated phenomena and must be reconfigured to accom-
modate the new while remaining faithful to the larger share of the old. It
being ‘not only impossible but manifestly absurd’, in Gadamer’s words, ‘to
try to escape from one’s own concepts’, it is the nature of interpretation to
bring these into play and to allow for their modification when they fail to
produce coherence.22 All three figures cautioned against viewing inquiry as
a naïve leap into alien horizons, against unconditioned perspectives, and
against the quest for certainty. Their respective accounts all appeal to the
notion of coherence in both its experiential and intersubjective connota-
tions and to the dynamic back-and-forth of experimental investigation.
Pragmatism and hermeneutics allow us to conceive of truth no longer as a
mirroring relation but as a praxis-oriented commerce with a lifeworld and
as ‘an intra-experiential affair’ of interpretive leadings and verifications.23
Both refuse to separate the theory of truth from the practice of inquiry as
it unfolds phenomenologically.
It would be a mistake, however, to infer that these traditions hold
nearly identical positions on the nature of truth. In spite of his thorough
rejection of correspondence, James’ account remains within its orbit far
more than does twentieth-century hermeneutics. This is especially evident
in James’ views that truth may be predicated of statements alone, and that
we may continue to characterize truth, albeit with considerable qualifi-
cation, as agreement with reality. While pragmatism and hermeneutics
both pose the question of truth anew in the aftermath of correspondence,
for James the meaning of truth remains inseparable from the method by
which we justify propositions. The same cannot be said of philosophical
hermeneutics. Unlike its nineteenth-century predecessors, Gadamerian
hermeneutics is concerned far less with advancing methodological strat-
egies than describing phenomenologically ‘what happens to us’ in the
practice of interpretation. As Gadamer expressed it in Truth and Method:
‘I did not intend to produce a manual for guiding understanding in the
manner of the earlier hermeneutics. I did not wish to elaborate a system
of rules to describe, let alone direct, the methodical procedure of the
human sciences. .â•›.â•›. My real concern was and is philosophic: not what we
do or what we ought to do, but what happens to us over and above our
wanting and doing.’24 The same sentiment is expressed in Reason in the Age
of Science: ‘The hermeneutics that I characterize as philosophic is not intro-

duced as a new procedure of interpretation or explication. Basically it only
describes what always happens wherever an interpretation is convincing
and successful. It is not at all a matter of a doctrine about a technical skill
that would state how understanding ought to be. We have to acknowledge
what is, and so we cannot change the fact that unacknowledged presup-
positions are always at work in our understanding.’25 While not positing
a dichotomy between truth and method, Gadamer always insisted on the
irreducibility of the former to the latter and characterized the relation
between the two as one of strained tension owing to the latter’s tendency
to claim for itself the entire domain of truth.26 Gadamer’s remarks on
this theme were directed largely against such methodologism and toward
describing a variety of truth that transcends propositional knowledge.
The concept of truth itself, however, seldom received the explicit
treatment that one might expect from a philosopher whose magnum
opus bears the word in its title. While Gadamer invoked the presocratic
and Heideggerian conception of truth as aletheia, he declined to offer an
altogether explicit account of it, much less a comprehensive defence, his
‘chief concern’ being instead ‘to expand the concept of truth in such a
way that we are not only left with the propositional concept of truth which
claimed a monopoly over the concept of truth since Aristotle’s logic.’27
Following Heidegger, Gadamer would speak of the ‘event’ of truth, of
the dialectic of disclosure and concealment evidenced especially in the
encounter with art. Defending the claim to truth of art and the humanities
takes evident priority in Gadamer’s work to articulating a particular theory
of truth. It would remain ambiguous, therefore, what a hermeneutical
theory of truth would consist in or indeed whether it is possible to provide
one. If aletheia has a special relevance when we are asking Heidegger’s
questions about Being and Gadamer’s about the truth of art and the limits
of methodological rationality, it is doubtful that disclosure in this sense
provides a complete account of the nature of truth.
What is clear is that a theory of truth can make no appeal to corre-
spondence between an interpretation and the thing in itself or anything
transcending our experience of the object, including authorial intentions
in the case of texts. It must recognize the historical contingency and
partiality of truth while also according with what one scholar refers to as
Gadamer’s ‘discourse rationality’, ‘a mode of thinking that seeks and finds
whatever anchorage it has in the agreement of others in conversation’,
and not in any ahistorical foundation.28 If we are adopting a phenom-
enological mode of inquiry, we must describe the nature, conditions, and
limits of human knowing, as it bears on texts and text-analogues as well as

ordinary empirical objects. This phenomenological and ‘theoretic stance’,
as Gadamer expressed it, ‘makes us aware reflectively of what is performa-
tively at play in the practical experience of understanding’, a stance that
resembles in many respects the pragmatists’ approach to inquiry.29 Both
approaches seek to explicate ‘how we think’, as Dewey put it, or the
practice that is human knowing and understanding, as it is conducted not
by ideally rational inquirers but by real persons.30 The aim is to describe
in the most phenomenologically adequate and comprehensive terms the
process by which true ideas are fashioned, not to subject inquiry to a set
of fixed procedures that would ostensibly guarantee the certainty of its
conclusions. Pragmatic and hermeneutical thinkers both reject the episte-
mological ‘quest for certainty’ along with what Dewey called the ‘spectator
conception of knowledge’ – ‘the idea that knowledge is intrinsically a mere
beholding or viewing of reality’ – and the notion that truth is ascertained
by stringing propositions together methodologically and by this means
alone.31 Among their more telling criticisms of the correspondence model
is that it constitutes so much bad phenomenology. In failing to recognize
processes that are always already ‘performatively at play’ in the course
of inquiry, this model fails as a theoretical articulation of the practice of
inquiry and of the manner in which truth is disclosed within it.
A theory of truth and inquiry properly proceeds not by imposing precon-
ceived notions of certainty and correspondence but by attending in the
spirit of phenomenology to the practice of interpretation itself. Prior to
issuing prescriptions for how inquiry should proceed we must describe
what it is, what happens to us within it, the conditions and limits of under-
standing, and the nature of truth as it arises in the process of inquiry. We
must explicate not only the method by which we draw inferences but the
process in which human beings find their way about a lifeworld by articu-
lating it and the phenomena that comprise it in language. Not least among
the findings of hermeneutics is that understanding itself constitutes far
more than a merely contingent behaviour or act of sovereign subjectivity
but ‘embraces’, in Gadamer’s words, ‘the whole of [the human being’s]
experience of the world.’ It represents ‘the mode of being of Dasein
itself’ as well as ‘the existential distinction of Dasein.’32 It is by interpreting
the phenomena linguistically that the human being comports itself in a
lifeworld and finds its way about. The language it speaks is no mere tool for
transmitting wordless intuitions but is ‘the medium in which we live from
the outset as social natures and which holds open the totality within which
we live our lives.’33 The practice of hermeneutical reflection is a ‘universal
human task’ which attains ‘completion’ not in a condition of epistemic

certainty but in a truth event that is invariably unfinished, uncertain and
perspectival.34
Gadamer described the hermeneutical process as a constant dynamic
of anticipation and revision, question and answer, assertion and reply,
speaking and listening. This is an essentially dialectical process or back-
and-forth movement that he expressed in the concept of play. The
buoyancy or playfulness of interpretation is not a frivolity, but a reasoned
and shared endeavour to find what is true. In its most basic constitution it
is a process in which speakers participate on a common basis with the aim
of generating consensus about a given object. In this endeavour all alike
are ‘taken up into a movement that has its own dynamic’, a dialectical
movement between interpreters and their object and between the inter-
preters themselves.35 When the process is successful, inquiry has a way of
proceeding in a way that no one anticipated. A conversation, as Gadamer
put it, ‘has a spirit of its own, and .â•›.â•›. the language in which it is conducted
bears its own truth within it – i.e., .â•›.â•›. it allows something to “emerge” which
henceforth exists.’36 The conversation allows the truth or meaning of the
object to emerge in the ‘play’ of hermeneutical dialogue.
Both Heidegger and Gadamer spoke of understanding as a process that
is always already underway in human existence. The act of interpretation
presupposes a forestructure of anticipations or prejudices that are appro-
priated from tradition and which bring the object into view in a particular
light, an object that in no sense is immediately given. Prejudices disclose
the object in a preliminary way and are confirmed or disconfirmed in
the course of interpretation. In interpreting texts, one anticipation in
particular lends an initial intelligibility to the object. This is what Gadamer
termed the anticipation of coherence or completeness which is invariably
present in textual interpretation. One presumes that the text before one
constitutes a unified and internally consistent whole if one expects any
meaning to emerge from it. The reader approaches the text with particular
interests and expectations, not least of which is the expectation that the
meaning of the text as a whole is illuminated by individual passages. On the
basis of a partial experience of the text, or of ‘some initially understandable
elements’ within it, one projects a meaning of the whole. This general
meaning is projected back onto the individual parts, and the circular
movement that results is governed by the capacity of one’s anticipations to
render a coherent interpretation of the text. One anticipates, for instance,
that a text belongs to a particular genre on the basis of its title or author,
and the working of the relevant prejudices will throw a certain light on
individual passages. This is a preliminary expectation only, and like other

expectations may be revised in light of what emerges in the reading. If
one’s anticipations render particular passages incoherent, they are revised
and a new meaning projected until each part coheres with the whole.
‘Understanding the “thing” which arises there, before him, is nothing
other than elaborating a preliminary project which will be progressively
corrected in the course of the interpretative reading.’37
It is, in Gadamer’s words, ‘the experience of being pulled up short
by the text’ that refutes our anticipations.38 This involves a thwarting
of expectations as either a different meaning emerges or no coherent
meaning emerges at all. If a preliminary significance elicited from one
passage contradicts another, or if the projected significance of the whole
contradicts an individual part, the interpretation is revised dialectically
until an internally consistent reading emerges. Like his hermeneutical
predecessors, Gadamer stressed the contextual, circular structure of inter-
pretation between part and whole. It is within the back-and-forth of the
hermeneutical circle that the forestructure of understanding is worked
out, as Heidegger put it, ‘in terms of the things themselves.’39 Heidegger
and Gadamer both spoke of the hermeneutical circle as primarily a
descriptive rather than prescriptive notion. It is not an a priori technique
governing what interpretation ought to be but a description of what it
already is. The very structure of interpretation, the hermeneutical circle
leads from universal to particular and back again and calls upon the
interpretive capacity of the reader rather than setting down formal proce-
dures. ‘The only “objectivity” here’, for Gadamer, ‘is the confirmation
of a fore-meaning in its being worked out. Indeed, what characterizes
the arbitrariness of inappropriate fore-meanings if not that they come to
nothing in being worked out?’40
In this way, Gadamer developed a coherentist and experimental account
of inquiry that is rooted in a phenomenological account of the structure
of hermeneutical practice. The process of circular integration endeavours
to harmonize the whole with the parts, an undertaking that constitutes the
work of interpretation. Since it is possible to integrate whole and part, and
thus disclose meaning, in different ways, some standard is needed in order
to resolve interpretive conflicts. Gadamer’s hypothesis was that coherence
or ‘harmony’ functions as such a standard. This point is expressed in Truth
and Method as follows: ‘Thus the movement of understanding is constantly
from the whole to the part and back to the whole. Our task is to expand
the unity of the understood meaning centrifugally. The harmony of all
the details with the whole is the criterion of correct understanding. The
failure to achieve this harmony means that understanding has failed.’41

Gadamer repeated this point elsewhere; in speaking of the hermeneutical
circle and the working out of anticipations that occurs within it, he wrote:
‘But of course this purely anticipatory global meaning awaits confirmation
or amendment pending its ability to form a unified and consistent vision.
Let us think of this structure in a dynamic way; the effective unity of the
anticipated meaning comes out as the comprehension is enlarged and
renovated by concentric circles. The perfect coherence of the global and
final meaning is the criterion for the understanding. When coherence is
wanting, we say that understanding is deficient.’ Accordingly, ‘the ideal of
truth is located’, in Gadamer’s view, in a ‘demand for coherence’ that is
performatively operative within the hermeneutical process itself.42 While
the hermeneutical circle and the principle of coherence originate as
descriptions arising from within the interpretive process, once articulated
explicitly both also serve a prescriptive function.
Since methodological questions would always be peripheral to Gadamer’s
hermeneutical project, it is no surprise that his remarks on coherence do
not afford an altogether complete account. It is here that pragmatism offers
an important supplement, specifically as it bears on notions of coherence
and experimental inquiry. Jamesian pragmatism, I believe, provides a more
adequate articulation of a coherence theory than Gadamer provided,
and one that does not fundamentally conflict with philosophical herme-
neutics. Pragmatism and hermeneutics both develop a phenomenological,
dialogical, coherentist and experimental model of intellectual investi-
gation. While there are differences between these models, many of them
arise not from a fundamental difference of position but from the examples
of objects of inquiry that each regards as paradigmatic. For James, it is state-
ments about empirical objects that fundamentally orient his account, while
for Gadamer and other hermeneutical thinkers it is texts, works of art and
other text-analogues that do so. The choice of examples is important and
goes some way toward explaining the differing accounts they would offer,
even while speaking the language of coherence, experimentation, and so
on. When we are speaking of inquiry, whether scientific or humanistic, our
account receives a certain orientation from the examples with which we are
concerned.
To an extent, James and Gadamer spoke at cross purposes. When James
posed the question of truth he was asking by what method we may judge
the truth-value of a proposition, while Gadamer wanted ‘to expand the
concept of truth’ beyond the propositional and to do justice to truth in
the realm of art and the humanities. Interpretations are propositions,
but they are not only this. They do not merely state what is or is not the
case but disclose meaning in a less epistemological sense of the word.
Interpretations unconceal; they remove the mystery, or some of it, in which
so many of the phenomena are shrouded. They declare and propose, but
they also strive to say what is telling. This is readily seen in the case of
art, but it applies equally to other areas of interpretation. In every case,
interpretation or inquiry involves a search for coherence and consensus,
but it also varies with its object. When scientific objects are our exemplar,
pragmatism provides a compelling conception of the kind of truth that
we seek; when texts and works of art are the exemplars, hermeneutics
provides the model. The models are overlapping and the differences
fewer and more subtle than we often believe. When it has seemed that
there is a fundamental impasse between pragmatism and hermeneutics
or continental philosophy more generally, it has been due primarily to
misunderstandings of the former. If we would speak of truth in art and
the humanities, it can appear as if the connection between ideas and
their consequences for practice is lost or irrelevant, but the appearance is
false and based on too narrow a conception of practice. As James stated,
the practical consequences that matter are no mere utility or satisfaction
that an idea produces in a believer. A true idea must be tied to the post of
experience and practice, and in particular the practice of finding our way
about a world and rendering our dealings with it coherent.
In theorizing a concept as fundamental to our lifeworld as truth – also
reason, knowledge, experience or art – the philosopher faces a basic
choice. This is to seek what is called analytical clarity or to save the
phenomena of the word’s disparate uses. Seldom can we accomplish
both. In the case of reason, as I argued in Chapter 2, doing justice to the
concept requires that we avoid the sort of artificial narrowing that we so
often find in modern philosophy. Reason may be satisfactorily interpreted
as boundless communication, but already the definition points beyond
itself. The concept of reason is not an object that can be made to sit still
long enough for the philosopher to pronounce upon its essence; it is a
word with a history, a concept that is employed in a wide variety of ways,
and that has an expansive and mercurial quality which can make our
efforts to encapsulate it in a definition (especially one that would reduce
all ambiguity to zero) appear foolish. Much the same can be said of truth.
Let us consider the following sentences, which illustrate just a few of the
ways this word is used in English: There is truth in art; Evolution is true;
Susan is a true friend; Ensure that the baseboard is true to the floor; P
is true; The recipe is tried and true; To thine own self be true; I am the
way, the truth, and the life; Don’t be cruel to a heart that’s true. The list
could be easily extended, but even limiting ourselves to these sentences,
do we find an underlying essence that would unify them all or allow us
to separate proper from improper (or perhaps derivative, accidental or
figurative) uses? I would suggest that we do not. Defenders of different
theories of truth typically focus upon particular uses and examples of that
which is held to be true and for reasons usually unexplained leave out
the rest. Correspondence theorists, for instance, especially those inclined
toward some form of empiricism, are fond of saying such things as, There
is a cup on the table, as if the example has a kind of special status; a theory
of truth, they will say, must do justice to elementary propositions like this
one. The question that is seldom answered and seldom raised is why we
should privilege this kind of example over some others and what becomes
of the rest of the phenomena when we do. Other possible uses or bearers
of truth are not refuted so much as simply left out of the account, without
much of an explanation. If we limit ourselves to the truth of propositions,
then certain theories become plausible; correspondence talk has an initial
appeal, at least when we are speaking of very simple statements about cups
and tables. Upon closer inspection, as James correctly argued, pragmatism
succeeds where correspondence does not. Even here, however, we are
speaking of truth as it pertains to propositions alone. This is a common
manoeuver, but on what grounds is it legitimate? Evidently not on grounds
of saving the phenomena – or not all of them – for this is precisely what
correspondence, pragmatic and some other accounts do not do. Instead
the theorist will assume that by truth we mean propositional truth and that
other uses of the word are inconsequential or erroneous, but what is the
basis of the assumption?
Were we to attempt to save the phenomena – a method both ancient
and contemporary, and about as time-honoured as any in the history of
philosophy – we are faced with bewildering complexity and a plethora
of theories. Correspondence, pragmatism, coherence, consensus,
Heideggerian aletheia, Foucaultian constructivism, redundancy and
semantic theories all succeed in capturing some of the phenomena, and it
is not to be wondered at that all such theories have a respectable number
of defenders. Rather often, adherents of one theory are not on speaking
terms with adherents of another, leaving no one to question why philoso-
phers in one camp would wish to privilege certain examples or uses over
others, or why we are trying to capture this range of the phenomena rather
than that range. Are empirical propositions about cups more important
than the experience of art? Surely not. Are they more clear? Perhaps, but
we ought to be careful about this word as well. Much of what goes under
the name of clarity is artificial, reductive and simplistic. P is true = p is as
clear as one could wish, but as a theory of truth it also does violence to the
phenomena and is silent on most uses of the word.
There is indeterminacy in language, and a good deal of it. Concepts
have histories, and theorizing about them in a historical vacuum is a futile
undertaking. Their origins – especially when we are speaking of many of
the basic notions of philosophy – are often shrouded in unclarity, and over
centuries they are pulled this way and that and may assume any number
of meanings. Wishing to understand, the philosopher will always try to
put matters in order, but there are limits to our ability to do so, and in
the absence of Platonic Forms some measure of ambiguity still clings to
them. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the case of truth. There is
no compelling reason to privilege propositional truth over the truth of art,
or vice versa. Nor is there any rationale for declaring certain uses proper
or essential and others accidental. There are no compelling grounds for
preferring older (including ancient Greek) notions to modern ones, or
more scientific uses to unscientific ones. Truth is far from being a simple
concept, and is every bit as multifarious as it appears to be and as so many
concepts in our language also appear. Truth informs us, solves problems,
creates coherence in our ideas and calls our experience to order; it shows
and tells; since ancient times it has been said to set us free, and it is also
bound up with trust. It is, I believe, highly significant that an early English
variant of truth is ‘troth’, meaning a solemn undertaking or pledge on
which another can rely. My betrothed is my true love, the one who is
trustworthy and loyal. Several uses of truth suggest precisely this quality
of trustworthiness: a true idea is one that we can rely upon and on which
many other ideas depend; it can account for itself and affords a basis for
action. It is not an essential standard, but is any standard – including
pragmatic coherence, consensus or disclosure – essential in every case?
All being is interpreted being, and truth in interpretation may not be
one. A true interpretation accomplishes and is many things: it unconceals
the things themselves, even while concealing in the same gesture; it works
to resolve the problematic situations with which our experience is replete;
it sees-as, negotiates the hermeneutical circle, poses and answers questions,
fashions metaphors and narratives, searches for consensus, and remains
open to revision in every case. It may also be a ‘woman’ in Nietzsche’s sense
– complex, often elusive and ever resistant to the advances of dogmatists.43
It is more a process and an event than a formal relation, and as Gadamer
brought to our attention, there is more to it than any method knows. For
purposes of philosophical interpretation we may speak of truth along the

lines that James and Gadamer both suggested, but when the thing itself
is complex let us not expect our account of it to be as straightforward as
philosophers have often wished.
Chapter 5
The Theory of Inquiry

John Dewey
This chapter extends the argument of Chapter 4: Dewey’s pragmatic theory

of inquiry may be brought into fruitful contact with hermeneutical inquiry
as Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur and some related figures have described
it. Given Dewey’s lack of acquaintance with twentieth-century phenom-
enology and hermeneutics, the extent to which he was formulating ideas
that would also be defended, often in more detail, by thinkers in the latter
traditions is surprising. Dewey placed these themes in a different frame,
of course, and spoke of them in a different vocabulary, but in terms that
are similarly dialectical, experimental and almost hermeneutical. Dewey’s
position receives its basic orientation from Hegel, Darwinian biology and
a highly modified version of empiricism which James termed ‘radical’
and which we might better call phenomenological.1 It is an account that
regards scientific experimentation as an exemplar of inquiry, yet in a sense
that shares nothing with either scientism or positivism. Hermeneutical
philosophers would do well to take a second look at this strikingly original,
subtle and extremely prolific figure.2
Dewey wished to fashion a unified account of intellectual life that
would highlight the organic connections between truth, experience,
knowing, thinking and understanding. The question of what inquiry is
and the logic by which it unfolds in various fields of investigation is for
Dewey, the Jamesian empiricist, a phenomenological matter, as the title
of one of his major works, How We Think, rather matter-of-factly suggests.
Thinking, or the practice of inquiry, contains an immanent method which
it is the task of epistemology to render explicit rather than replace with a
method derived in abstraction from the practice itself. On the question of
what thinking itself is, Dewey defined this concisely as a ‘response to the
doubtful as such.’3 It is essentially the practice of experimental inquiry into
a given problem, the aim of which consists in ‘the directed or controlled
transformation of an indeterminate situation into a determinately unified
one.’4 Thinking responds to a doubtful or problematic situation – the
unknown, anomalous or perplexing – by posing questions, advancing
interpretations and hypotheses, following the course of a given hypothesis
to its conclusion, testing it against the available evidence, and looking

for specific experiential consequences. It is a process that never loses
connection with experience, arising from a doubtful situation within it
and ultimately returning to it with an enhanced knowledge of the connec-
tions between events or ideas and the significance of the original situation.
‘Thinking is thus equivalent,’ in Dewey’s words, ‘to an explicit rendering of
the intelligent element in our experience. It makes it possible to act with
an end in view.’5
Dewey’s account of inquiry must be viewed in light of the pragmatist
or experimentalist (instrumentalist) theory of knowledge that he appro-
priated from James. As we saw in Chapter 4, a pragmatic conception of
knowledge accentuates the connection between thought and action or the
relation of ideas to problematic situations that arise in the course of human
experience. Although Dewey, particularly later in his career, was less fond
of the word ‘pragmatism’ than James – recommending that we ‘avoid its
use’ altogether given the widespread and uncharitable misinterpretations
that had surrounded this term – and was mindful of the criticism that had
greeted James, the theory of knowledge that Dewey defended throughout
his career is thoroughly Jamesian (and to a lesser extent Peircean) in
regarding ‘consequences as necessary tests of the validity of propositions,
provided these consequences are operationally instituted and are such as
to resolve the specific problem evoking the operations.’6 The proviso was
Dewey’s clarification of James’ view and forestalls objections to the effect
that pragmatism provides a philosophical rationalization for whatever
propositions one holds dear.
In Dewey’s pragmatic instrumentalism, as he preferred to call it, the
process of inquiry is described in a fashion that rejects the idea that
knowledge is an objective beholding of reality. Against rationalism and
British empiricism, Dewey sought to render explicit ‘the existing practice
of knowledge’ as we find it in both scientific and humanistic investi-
gation, a practice in which thought and action are ultimately inseparable
and ‘knowledge is power to transform the world’, not as an accidental
byproduct but essentially. The true test of an idea lies in the experiential
consequences to which it leads or in its capacity to bring about a more
coherent arrangement of our experience. Dewey followed Peirce in this,
while giving his theory of meaning a broader application and a more
explicitly experimental and scientific connotation. Whereas older concep-
tions of science had been misled by classical empiricism into regarding
scientists as in essential respects passive recipients of sensations and obser-
vations, provided that they direct their attention toward a given object
The Theory of Inquiry 83
for some period of time, Dewey insisted that the scientist is an active
investigator who must ‘do something’ – hazard an hypothesis, perform an
experiment, study an object under a variety of conditions, and so on – in
order to gain knowledge.7 Thought in general, from the explicitly scientific
to the philosophical, crucially bears upon the pragmatic – ‘how things work
and how to do things’ – not as a secondary matter but ultimately.8
For Dewey, scientific experimentation is the paradigm of inquiry. While
he never embraced any form of positivism nor maintained that procedures
proper to the natural sciences can or ought to be transferred to the human
sciences, Dewey did hold a decidedly optimistic view of science and of
what it might accomplish in refashioning thought in general.9 One finds
throughout his writings no naïve adulation of science – although there
are passages that do approach this – but a measured optimism that ‘the
scientific habit of mind’ is generally applicable to human affairs.10 Dewey’s
reading of the general movement of twentieth-century culture was that
it is an age of science into which modern civilization has moved, in the
sense that empirical and experimental methods are rapidly replacing the
worldviews of the past. While numerous thinkers were making a similar
observation, Dewey would speak of this new scientific era in his characteris-
tically sober and measured way as neither a dark night of the forgetfulness
of being nor a positivist’s utopia but as something intermediate between
the two. Science is something to be neither idealized nor brooded over
but regarded more modestly as a method, and a singularly useful one. It is,
moreover, the same method as that pursued with less exactitude in appar-
ently non-scientific forms of inquiry. While the promise that this method
holds for the transformation of human affairs is nothing short of revolu-
tionary, in Dewey’s view, he stopped short of an uncritical idealization
of science of the kind that characterized many of his contemporaries.
Science represents an ideal of thought in the sense that here the method
of rational investigation that is proper to thought in general is visible in its
purest form. ‘The general adoption of the scientific attitude’ which would
effect ‘nothing less than a revolutionary change in morals, religion, politics
and industry’ means that the ‘attitude’ and method of experimental ‘intel-
ligence’ (to use one of Dewey’s favourite expressions) is what is needed to
bring about a radical transformation in our ways of thinking and relating,
both in liberating us from the dogmas of the past and in supplying us with
a positive model for human knowledge.11
Regarding the exact nature of this model, Dewey stated in one of his
more concise descriptions: ‘By science is meant .â•›.â•›. that knowledge which
is the outcome of methods of observation, reflection and testing which are
deliberately adopted to secure a settled, assured subject matter. It involves

an intelligent and persistent endeavour to revise current beliefs so as to
weed out what is erroneous, to add to their accuracy, and, above all, to
give them such shape that the dependencies of the various facts upon one
another may be as obvious as possible. It is, like all knowledge, an outcome
of activity bringing about certain changes in the environment.’12 Following
James, Dewey conceived of the investigative process as one of experimental
hypothesizing and testing of ideas in a fashion that proposes and modifies
hypotheses with a view to arranging or rearranging phenomena with
optimal coherence. As experimental, this procedure calls for a dynamic
interaction between inquirer and investigated object that bears no resem-
blance to the technical application of rules. In such inquiry, one proposes
an hypothesis to resolve a problematic situation and follows its progress
until it registers specific experiential consequences. If the consequences
anticipated by the hypothesis come about, and provide thereby for the
reorganization of experience, the hypothesis passes for true so long as it
generates no contradiction in other areas of experience.
Inquiry in general involves an effort to resolve a problem of one kind or
another and indeed ‘is the actual transition from the problematic to the
secure, as far as it is intentionally guided.’13 This short definition encap-
sulates a larger process of methodological investigation that begins with a
difficulty, doubt or confusion that arises in the course of lived experience
and leads to a question and the assertion of a provisional hypothesis,
a ‘conjectural anticipation’ or a ‘tentative interpretation’ concerning
a problematic situation. The basic trajectory of thought is a solution-
oriented refinement of this hypothesis in the light of a more thorough
examination of the evidence surrounding the case. The hypothesis is tested
against competing ideas and against the evidence itself by determining its
capacity to accommodate a greater range of phenomena and by ‘doing
something overtly to bring about the anticipated result’, whether this be
subjecting an empirical object to a variety of experimental conditions in
order to see whether it reacts in the ways that the hypothesis predicts, or
testing a textual interpretation by checking it against a progressively larger
number of passages.14 This is a method of trial and error that if successful
resolves the original difficulty without in the process generating more
problems than it solves. Speaking generally, then, ‘[a]nything that may
be called knowledge, or a known object, marks a question answered, a
difficulty disposed of, a confusion cleared up, an inconsistency reduced
to coherence, a perplexity mastered.’15 Dewey’s choice of verbs in this
passage is telling: to inquire – also to know – is to answer, dispose of
difficulties, clarify, reduce to coherence or master a given issue, in essence

to solve a problem. Dewey stressed that it is the nature of inquiry, be it
scientific or humanistic, to be futural, fallible and ultimately practical in
orientation, never allowing us to rest altogether on our conclusions but
setting these in operation. Truth is never the final outcome of thought in
the sense of an end attained once and for all, but is a processual notion,
as James had also maintained. In pragmatic knowledge, ‘the process of
growth, of improvement and progress, rather than the static outcome and
result, becomes the significant thing.’16 In principle, truth remains always
provisional on future inquiry and on the consequences for practice and
experience that they engender.
While scientific experimentation affords the model for thought in
general, it is important to qualify this in a couple of ways. First, the ‘research’
that, according to Dewey, ‘all thinking is’, is most often of a rudimentary
variety and involves no sophisticated operation of inference whatever.17
Dewey provided the following example of thinking in its ordinary, everyday
meaning: ‘[A] man is walking on a warm day. The sky was clear the last
time he observed it; but presently he notes, while occupied primarily with
other things, that the air is cooler. It occurs to him that it is probably going
to rain; looking up, he sees a dark cloud between him and the sun, and
he then quickens his steps. What, if anything, in such a situation can be
called thought? Neither the act of walking nor the noting of the cold is a
thought. Walking is one direction of activity; looking and noting are other
modes of activity. The likelihood that it will rain is, however, something
suggested. The pedestrian feels the cold; first he thinks of clouds, then he
looks and perceives them, and then he thinks of something he does not
see: a storm. This suggested possibility is the idea, the thought. If it is believed
in as a genuine possibility that may occur, it is the kind of thought that falls
within the scope of knowledge and requires reflective consideration.’18 In
the usual course of experience, this is the typical pattern of ‘research’ or
‘inquiry’ that Dewey had in mind, and differs from scientific investigation
only in degree of explicitness and sophistication.
The second qualification to add is that inquiry includes an important
social element, as Peirce and James also maintained, albeit in different
ways. For the pragmatists, as we saw in Chapter 4, it is the nature of inquiry
to strive for consensus within a community of thinkers rather than to occur
essentially in the inner sanctum of the mind. An idea must succeed within
an individual’s experience, but it must also be submitted to the general
conversation. Regarding ideas themselves, Dewey conceived of these as
essentially hypotheses or means of resolving problematic situations. Their
instrumental function alone supplies whatever meaning they hold for us.
This pragmatic conception of ideas poses a direct challenge to standard
views according to which concepts have an essential nature and proper
meaning which it is the business of philosophical reflection to grasp
theoretically. Ideas in general, in the pragmatic view, are not ‘rigidly fixed’
in their meaning but are contingent upon their use value in resolving
difficulties in human experience and facilitating our interactions with a
lifeworld. They never rise above the status of ‘intellectual instruments to
be tested and confirmed – and altered – through consequences effected
by acting upon them.’ Ideas therefore ‘lose all pretence of finality – the
ulterior source of dogmatism.’ Regarding ideas as hypotheses and means
of solving problems, he maintained, ‘would do away with the intolerance
and fanaticism that attend the notion that beliefs and judgements are
capable of inherent truth and authority; inherent in the sense of being
independent of what they lead to when used as directive principles.’19
Nothing is more fatal to inquiry than conceiving of ideas as fixed verities
that must be adhered to regardless of where the investigative process leads
or that they are above the fray of criticism and justification.
Pragmatism’s critics were quick to accuse it of lacking a certain reflective
quality, as if it reduces inquiry or truth itself to the order of crude utility.
Any association of truth value with use value represents for many a betrayal
of philosophy’s age-old promise of gaining an accurate representation
of reality, one that foreswears all prejudice and enables us to separate
knowledge from opinion, reason from rhetoric, and the truth itself from
what merely passes for it in ordinary discourse. At first glance – beyond
which many critics never advanced – it may indeed appear that the
pragmatic view of ideas as hypotheses rather than fixed verities misses
something essential to the life of the mind: something like reflection,
contemplation or understanding for its own sake rather than as a means to
a practical end. To many it appeared as if pragmatism was denying this and
putting forward a crass and simplistic, even antiphilosophical, conception
of thought. The inaccuracy of this is easily seen when one brackets the
reputation that pragmatism received a century ago and actually reads
Dewey’s works, in which he repeatedly addressed the misinterpretations
of James’ and his own position that continually appeared throughout the
first half of the twentieth century. An important case in point concerns
the nature of reflective thought, contemplation and understanding in the
sense of these terms that common sense distinguishes from the pragmatic.
The connotation of ‘pragmatic’ and ‘instrumental’ that James and Dewey
invoked is not the narrow one of common parlance. So far was Dewey from
separating the practical from the theoretical or the instrumental from the
reflective that for this profoundly dialectical thinker such dichotomies are
renounced entirely along with the everyday connotation of the pragmatic
as lacking the depth dimension associated with the contemplative and
philosophical. Dewey’s conception of the intellectual virtues includes a
central place for reflectiveness and the turn of mind that is ‘slow but sure’,
in contrast to the ‘brightness’ that ‘may be but a flash in the pan.’ The
mind that is genuinely reflective ‘is one in whom impressions sink and
accumulate, so that thinking is done at a deeper level of value than by
those with a lighter load.’ The reflective intellect is precisely the one with
an advanced capacity for contemplation and for the ‘wisdom’ that tradition
has long distinguished from mere information. Retaining this distinction,
Dewey considered it an important matter in education to separate the
accumulation of factual knowledge from the higher ideal of wisdom in the
sense of ‘knowledge operating in the direction of powers to the better living
of life.’20 If education crucially bears upon the training of thought, this
includes encouraging habits of mind that far transcend being pragmatic
or solution-oriented in the colloquial sense of these terms to include culti-
vating ‘a deep personal sense of the problem to be dealt with.’ Reflective
thought begins with this ‘sense of the problem’ which, in an unhurried way
and before proposing a solution, searches for clarification regarding the
proper dimensions of the problem or question itself, including the critical
issue of ‘why it is a problem.’ Is it an ostensibly perennial question that
simply falls from the sky, as so many academic problems are customarily
presented to students, or does it arise from some vital experience of life
which the student can be made to see? If the former, the course of thought
that ensues is more likely to resemble ‘mere debating’ and ‘sophistry’ than
the ‘reasoning together’ and ‘process of cooperative search’ that charac-
terizes genuinely reflective inquiry.21 It is precisely the depth dimension of
thought that is among the most vital matters in all inquiry and education,
Dewey often argued. ‘The depth to which a sense of the problem, of the
difficulty, sinks, determines the quality of the thinking that follows; and
any habit of teaching that encourages the pupil for the sake of a successful
recitation or of a display of memorized information to glide over the thin
ice of genuine problems reverses the true method of mind-training.’22
Dewey all but defined the intelligent and educated mind as the one
with an advanced capacity for reflection in a sense that includes the power
to articulate and pursue questions to their depths and to ‘go below the
surface’ of appearances in the way that philosophy has always prized, to
reject the premature answer and the facile solution in favour of slow and
rigorous investigation.23 The term ‘reflective thought’ itself he defined

as the ‘[a]ctive, persistent and careful consideration of any belief or
supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support
it and the further conclusions to which it tends’, thus as an explicit
search for the basis of human knowledge.24 It searches as well for the
connecting links in human experience between one problematic situation
and another, between different lines of inquiry or whole fields of study,
and between a particular subject matter and its larger significance for
human life. Since experience is the proper object of reflective thought,
such thought pays particular attention to these connections rather than
studying objects or ideas apart from the context that supplies them with
meaning. Philosophical concepts, for instance, are properly studied not
as a god might view them, as acontextual essences which are what they are
apart from the uses to which they are put, but as terms within a larger train
of thought or discursive vocabulary. Reflection that proceeds by removing
the concept from all context and connections with other concepts, from
its history, etymology and variety of uses is a project destined for failure. To
reflect upon ideas or objects of any kind, we must regard them in organic
relation to a context of thought and experience. In Dewey’s view it is the
‘neglect of context’ that constitutes ‘the most pervasive fallacy of philo-
sophical thinking’, a habit of thought that is as old as the Greeks and as
contemporary as certain forms of ‘analysis.’25
Reflecting upon an idea involves locating it within a train of thought
or argumentative sequence that importantly includes a ‘con-sequence – a
consecutive ordering [of ideas] in such a way that each determines the
next as its proper outcome.’ In reflective thinking, as in the experience
with which it is concerned, one thing leads to another; an idea or object
is comprehended by relating it to a purpose, a history, a different idea or
object, by identifying that to which it leads, or otherwise by drawing it into
association with something else, and not simply providing an inventory of
its properties or component parts. This includes a critical examination of
its rationale, yet in a sense that is not limited to formal reasoning. In How
We Think, Dewey identified three differences between formal reasoning
in the sense of logical deduction and ‘thinking as it actually goes on in
the mind of any person.’26 While the former is as perfectly impersonal
as mathematics, the latter is contingent on the intellectual habits of the
thinker – whether the individual is attentive or inattentive, disciplined
or undisciplined, and so on. Second, while logical argument forms are
unchanging and unconcerned with the content that fills them, thinking is
a process that changes with some regularity and is forever taking account
of its object and trying to resolve difficulties without creating new ones. As
well, formal reasoning is indifferent to context, while for reflective thought
the larger context of resolving problematic situations remains uppermost
in view. These differences notwithstanding, reflective intelligence as Dewey
conceived of it is as concerned with the rational basis of a belief as what
conventionally goes under the name of logical inference.
Dewey’s conception of reflective thought also includes the notion of
understanding. If pragmatic inquiry is a properly social undertaking, so
is the practice of understanding which is intimately related to reflection.
Although Dewey did not write at great length about the concept of under-
standing or interpretation, he did speak of understanding and its synonym,
comprehension, as ‘an inclusive word – it signifies coming together,
bringing things together; and when we say that human beings have come
to an understanding, we mean that they have come to an agreement,
that they have reached a common mind, a common outlook from which
they see the same things and feel the same way about them.’27 He would
describe understanding as ‘an agreement or settlement of some affair’ between
persons, hence in an explicitly intersubjective connotation, as well as in
more straightforwardly cognitive terms as the capacity ‘to grasp meaning’
in context. To understand an expression is to locate it within the context
that is afforded by a sentence, conversation or discourse. Taken out of
context, the expression permits of only a narrow, definitional under-
standing. Without mentioning the hermeneutical circle by name, Dewey
did speak of ‘the constant spiral movement of knowledge’, and wrote that
all knowing ‘proceeds by taking the thing inquired into out of its isolation’
and placing it in a context ‘until the thing is discovered to be a related
part in some larger whole.’28 The process of contextualization applies to
understanding in general, although hermeneutics itself was never a major
concern of Dewey’s.
Understanding also involves grasping the uses to which something can
be put, and in a sense that pertains to the gaining of control. If, as Peirce
argued, meaning cannot be separated from consequences for practice,
then the object must be understood in terms of that to which it leads. Thus
we may understand an historical event – a battle, let us say – as the decisive
turning point in a war, as bringing about the eventual victory of one side
over the other, or as the defining moment of the war, which allowed
lessons to be learned or a larger meaning to be grasped. If understanding
is one part of a larger reflective process that involves the resolution of
problematic situations generally conceived, it is the part that bears directly
on the connection between means and consequences. From the means
or instrumental side of the equation, an object such as a chair is compre-

hended in being seen as something on which to sit, while from the side of
consequences we can see in examples of invention how a desire to produce
a certain outcome requires us to understand the means that will produce
it. In either event, ‘[t]he relation of means-consequence is the centre and
heart of all understanding.’29
If Dewey’s insistence on the inseparability of understanding and action
differs in important respects from hermeneutical accounts, the accent
on context remains very much in keeping with the latter, as do Dewey’s
remarks concerning the pervasiveness of language in understanding. At
around the time that Heidegger was speaking of the as-structure and the
linguistically mediated nature of interpretation, Dewey emphasized that
it is by means of language and concepts that we comprehend meaning,
that ‘[c]oncepts enable us to generalize, to extend and carry over our
understanding from one thing to another.’ From ordinary perception to
the higher reaches of thought, knowledge is no immediate or objective
beholding of reality, but is invariably mediated by prior understanding
and by language. Perceptual knowledge is linguistically mediated and
thus is an ‘active outgoing construction of mind.’30 He would also speak
of a ‘peculiarly intimate connection’ between language and thought
in general, noting that logos ‘means indifferently both word or speech
and thought or reason.’31 Dewey and Heidegger both regarded this fact
as no mere accident of etymology but as a philosophically important
indication of the inseparability of word and object as well as language
and reflection. Language is no mere tool for communicating wordless
intuitions, something added to thought that in essence is an alinguistic
‘private soliloquy or solipsistic observation.’32 Thought in general does not
occur apart from language, and where Dewey intended by language not
only ‘oral and written speech’ but ‘[g]estures, pictures, monuments, visual
images, finger movements – anything deliberately and artificially employed
as a sign.’ Thinking occurs in signs and its object is not wordless things but
their meaning or pragmatic significance. Reflective thought also transpires
within a context afforded not only by language but by tradition and
culture. The historical embeddedness of thought is a matter with which
Dewey was well familiar both in his earlier Hegelian (or Anglo-American
neohegelian) period and in his later (still Hegelian) period. The life of
the mind in general, for Dewey, is occupied with signs that are social inven-
tions and works with ‘acquired habitual modes of understanding’, with
‘a certain store of previously evolved meanings or at least of experiences
from which meanings may be educed.’33 To understand is fundamentally
to participate in the discursive practices that constitute a culture. The

philosopher, the artist and the scientist all ‘derive their substance from
the stream of culture’ and exhibit the same ‘dependence upon tradition’
that characterizes thought in general, including its most creative forms.34
Dewey’s model here is biological: thinking represents an inheritance as
well as a carrying forward of the accumulated experience of the past. Our
most innovative ideas are themselves ‘already overlaid and saturated with
the products of the reflection of past generations and bygone ages’, and
constitute so many learned habits of mind, responses and departures from
what has been transmitted to us by virtue of our participation in a cultural
tradition.35 Inventive thinking no more divests itself of tradition than of
language itself.
Like Gadamer, Dewey maintained this view without reverting to any kind
of traditionalism or intellectual conservatism. A thinker whose habitual
turn of mind was progressive and futural, Dewey spoke of the creative and
imaginative dimension of thought no less than its situatedness in language
and tradition. Reflection is continually finding new uses for received ideas,
whether it is new technological applications of an old scientific hypothesis
or artistic innovations within old styles and genres. That originality arises
from a context that is determined by familiar ways of thinking rather than
out of thin air implies only that it is contingent and limited, not that it
is unattainable or a rarity. Indeed, thought in general and ‘all conscious
experience has of necessity some degree of imaginative quality’, some
‘conscious adjustment of the new and the old.’ As the living organism
interacts with its environment and is never its mere product, thought as
well represents a vital interaction with the knowledge and meanings that
are passed down to it, whether this involves a wholesale appropriation of
received truths or a conscious departure from them. Either way, the inven-
tiveness that is proper to thought is fundamentally a new reply in an old
conversation.
Inquiry, then, in Dewey’s expansive sense of the word includes an
orientation toward the experiential, the pragmatic and the problematic.
It is an experimental frame of mind that is modelled on scientific inquiry
while also being reflective, imaginative, and hospitable to new ideas. It
seeks both depth and breadth and above all demonstrates a concern for
resolving difficulties that arise within our practices rather than theorizing
in a more scholastic spirit. Thinking is no mere amassing of information or
procedure of following rules. It is a methodological enterprise, yet one that
more closely resembles ordinary trial and error than a conformity to formal
methods. Within the sphere of discourse in which he was working, Dewey’s
model of inquiry has a great deal to recommend it. Classical pragmatism

in general is far more credible and rigorous than its critics have believed.
While the caricatures survive in the minds of those who have not read the
texts, neither James nor (especially) Dewey gave us a conception of truth
or inquiry that is closely tied to the ‘pragmatic’ or the ‘useful’ as these
words are most often used – in the sense, that is, that knowledge is what
‘works’ in a narrow connotation or, worse, what is intellectually comforting
or emotionally satisfying. Pragmatism places the bar of knowledge no lower
than any of its alternatives, nor is it scientistic or crassly utilitarian. What I
shall question is not whether Dewey’s account is compelling but whether it
is complete.
As we saw in Chapter 4, pragmatism and hermeneutics sometimes speak
at cross purposes. Dewey and Gadamer posed distinct but overlapping
questions and at times defended interestingly similar views. Bringing
their accounts into coherence, however, is far from straightforward. For
Dewey, pragmatic inquiry applies across the board, from natural science to
philosophy to politics; liberal democracy, for instance, he conceived as an
ethos of experimental inquiry into the requirements of a just society and
a cooperative search for solutions to various social ills. Gadamer made his
own claim to universality. The hermeneutical phenomenon is fundamental
to our experience of the world in general and is of ontological import. It
is not merely what we do, but what we are. Both positions hold consid-
erable truth, but how can the two be placed on speaking terms? Is there a
pragmatic reading of hermeneutics? A plausible case has been made, for
instance, for reading Heidegger as a pragmatist of sorts. Is there a herme-
neutical reading of Dewey?
Reading Dewey hermeneutically requires that we bring his thought
into contact with a tradition about which he knew little and, as Gadamer
reminded us, with the anticipation that what he had to say may be correct.
It is, in my view, substantially correct; however, the reservation that herme-
neutical thinkers will have concerns the scope of that account. James and
Dewey were making a conscious departure from older forms of empiricism
which had given us an atomistic and phenomenologically inadequate
conception of experience, yet the pragmatic account remains within
empiricism’s orbit. To be sure, it was a ‘radical’ empiricism that they articu-
lated, yet as is so often the case when we formulate views in reaction to a
particular tradition of thought, the new idea bears traces of that tradition.
This can be seen, for instance, in Dewey’s examples of inquiry. In the
example cited above, a man is walking and must resolve the problematic
situation of impending rain. This is an exemplar of inquiry for Dewey,
and the model does justice to the example. What if the example had been
less empirical, such as the meaning of a work of art or an historical event?
Can the model be extended to the ‘object’ without distortion? We are well
acquainted with the tendency still common in many fields to make the
phenomena fit our theoretical models and categories, and it is almost the
definition of bad research. Has Dewey committed this failing? Is the model
too narrow?
When we consider everything that might properly be called thinking
or inquiry, it appears that inquiry is not only pragmatic, in search of
solutions, but interpretive, in search of meaning. Rather often it is both
at once. Dewey’s model succeeds in capturing a good part of what counts
as inquiry, yet that it captures the whole is more doubtful. To see this,
let us recall Heidegger’s distinction between calculative and meditative
thinking. Calculative thought, which reaches its highest expression in
science-technology, manipulates and predicts with a view to achieving a
kind of mastery over its object. It deduces and plans while understanding
neither its limits nor the meaning of its object nor the very act of calcu-
lation itself. It transforms our perceptions of the world into so many usable
objects set against ‘inner’ subjectivity. Calculative thought is governed by
a method that in principle anyone can follow and repeat; it purports to
be free of subjectivity and prejudice, and to be an essentially technical
affair of ascertaining an object’s nature and use value. It prizes efficiency
and organization, clarity and precision in its methods, and certainty in its
conclusions.
Meditative thinking seeks depth of understanding over certainty and
may be applied not only to learned discourses but to ordinary human
experience. It follows no method, gets no results and requires no special
expertise. As Heidegger stated, ‘anyone can follow the path of meditative
thinking in his own manner and within his own limits.’ If the human
being ‘is a thinking, that is, a meditating being’, it falls to each of us to
take up this mode of thought and direct it particularly toward that which
ultimately concerns us. Importantly, it is a way of thinking for which there
is no model; it may or may not begin with a problematic situation and
may or may not lead to its solution. Nor did Heidegger offer us a formal
definition, there being a certain interpretive richness about the term that
eludes straightforward analysis. What is clear, however, is that meditative
thinking possesses a depth dimension that calculation does not, content
as the latter is to remain at a surface level where technical precision
and definite outcomes are sought rather than any deeper dimension of
meaning. Meditative thought, in its orientation toward the meaning and
uniqueness of beings rather than that about them that can be generalized,
measured or used, resists formal modelling and possesses an open-ended
and transformative quality.
Dewey’s model of inquiry is neither straightforwardly calculative nor
meditative in this sense; however it more closely approximates the former,
and here encounters its limits. For Heidegger, thinking does not follow a
single track, or when it does, thought itself becomes dangerously narrowed.
That which resists problem solving, representation in concepts, calculation
or control becomes literally unthinkable; we are reduced to silence before
it or perhaps to speculation or unreasoning guess work. The mode of
thought that Heidegger gestured toward is non-linear and transformative
in the manner of experience itself. It changes one and leads one not toward
any reassuring solution but to where one already stands, only transformed.
We see this most obviously in the encounter with art: we emerge from the
experience changed in a manner that we could not have predicted and that
is not readily repeatable in others. We have understood something anew, or
emerged from the experience with a new outlook or set of questions. One
contemplates a work of art precisely not by squeezing it into a scientific or
technical set of concepts but by allowing the work to speak to us as a unique
work, one that conveys meaning and opens up a world for us. There is no
problem to be solved, no causal relations to ascertain, nothing to quantify
or represent, unless perhaps as a secondary matter. The point, rather, is to
understand, to grasp a meaning that is singular and unrepeatable. Such
thinking, as Heidegger would often say, is a ‘way’ rather than a method,
one that must be travelled to be understood. A method can be represented
in the abstract while the thinking that is or that ‘builds a way’ cannot.36
Heidegger’s description of thinking – as building, dwelling, clearing,
the four-fold of earth and sky, gods and mortals – called attention to its
inexhaustibility, to the breadth and depth of meditative thinking and its
capacity to bring into focus the meaningful dimension of its object without
linearity or empty circularity. For his part, Dewey was alive to the depth
dimension of thinking and understanding while invariably insisting that
it be brought under the umbrella of pragmatic inquiry. The difficulty to
which Heidegger pointed, correctly in my view, is that not everything can
be so described.
Other cases of a thinking that can only very awkwardly be characterized
as inquiry in Dewey’s sense are not difficult to find: the remembrance of
personal experiences of joy or suffering may well occasion inquiry into
the causes or consequences of such events, but fundamentally a remem-
brance of this kind involves an interpretation of their meaning and an
appreciation of their emotional overtones. The experience of grief is not

essentially an inquiry into a problematic situation but again an interpretive
meditation upon the significance of a life now at an end and an equally
important sense of loss. Indeed, many of the events in our lives that we
look back upon as learning experiences have this character of forming
us this way or that, perhaps deepening our experience or character yet
without having solved a problem, unless we stretch the problem-solving
model beyond Dewey’s meaning or truncate the experience itself. A history
lesson on World War II certainly inquires into a wide variety of problems,
but learning the lessons of the Holocaust or simply understanding the
enormity of this occurrence does not comfortably fit within Dewey’s model.
It can, of course, be made to fit, as theorists are wont to do, but not without
a considerable loss of meaning. The interpreter in this case must be trans-
ported in imagination into the point of view of the victims and witness the
moral outrage of this event; thus do we begin to appreciate its significance
in addition to any problems we may solve. Dewey may wish to characterize
this as developing a ‘sense of the problem’ – thus as an important prelim-
inary stage within a larger investigative process – yet it would genuinely
seem that the development of this sense belongs still more to the end
of the process than to the beginning. Understanding an historical event
and learning the lessons it teaches importantly involves a resonance of
emotionally charged meaning in addition to and more fundamentally than
any solutions reached.
Inquiry is an interpretively rich notion. It includes interpretation and
critique, analysis and synthesis, interrogation and explanation, narrative
and metaphor, inference, judgement, taste, discrimination, remembering,
information and a good deal else – much of which has little to do with
technique. Interpretation, for instance, conforms to no method but the
hermeneutical circle and the search for coherence and consensus; however
these are not formal rules but only very rough guidelines. No technique
instructs us on how to read Plato, how to respond to the meaning that
emerges in any text or how to critique what we read or apply it to our
own circumstances. Nor is there a method of constructing a narrative or
fashioning a good metaphor. If critical and intelligent thought sometimes
makes use of methods, as it undoubtedly does, it also involves that which
no method can teach: the art of asking questions and of seeing what
is questionable, of reflecting and contemplating, slowly weighing the
strength or force of an argument, detecting what is salient, cultivating
the intellectual virtues in general, and other elements that go beyond any
model.
Dewey was correct: all thinking is experimental. It may not, however,

always conform to his model of experimentation. Like Jaspers’ ‘boundless
communication’, the notion of experimentation points beyond itself and
resists the reduction to a single model. Experimental inquiry varies with its
object. If we would know the truth of some matter, our mode of inquiry is
contingent on the matter itself. Unless we are dogmatically committed to a
theoretical model, we do not approach historical events in the way we study
atoms or planets, or psyches in the way we study bodies. Our orientation
is experimental in every case, yet the questions we ask, the vocabulary we
use and the method, if any, that we employ depend on what it is that we
would know. Broadly speaking, Dewey’s model applies within the realm of
empirical discourse and Gadamer’s within the realm of human expression.
There is considerable overlap between the models and the ‘objects’ with
which they are concerned, but there is a distinction here of which we must
not lose sight. Scientific research involves a good deal of interpretation
and indeed is an interpretation of the world. Hermeneutical reflection
also works to resolve problematic situations that arise in our experience,
and most obviously in encountering texts. Both models can be extended
beyond the discourse in which they were originally formulated, but like any
model they can also exceed their grasp. Scientism is the most notorious
example of such overreach, and while Deweyan inquiry eludes the standard
critiques of that doctrine, its application to the humanities is about as
awkward as applying hermeneutics to natural science. Both can be done,
but not without interpretive violence. We can, for instance, offer evolu-
tionary explanations of cultural phenomena, and shed a bit of light by this
means, but not without reducing culture to something that it manifestly is
not: a kind of thingly being that we can speak of in a vocabulary carried
over from biology. A culture is not a species. It is better spoken of as a
conversation or a constellation of meanings and hence something that
calls for interpretation far more than scientific explanation. We can also
compress the human psyche into empirical categories and think that we
have pronounced the real truth of the matter, but this too is an illusion
– which should be obvious to anyone who has ever understood a human
being. Making the phenomena fit the research model is generally traceable
to overenthusiasm for the model itself and a lack of imagination. It remains
a common tendency in many fields to mistake the aspect of the thing which
our method reveals for the thing in itself, and our disciplinary perspective
for the non-perspective of objectivity.
These are not dichotomies: scientific and humanistic investigation,
knowledge and understanding, nature and culture, quantitative and
qualitative research, pragmatic inquiry and hermeneutical reflection. We

do not live in a world of binaries, whether we are speaking of nature or,
still more, human reality. If we did, we could neatly divide experimental
thinking in two: pragmatic inquiry into empirical matters and interpre-
tation of human expression. Both the objects and the modes of inquiry
overlap. The complexity of our world is boundless and there is no one
way to know the truth about it. Methods that allow us to cope with some
corner of it are often clung to with a ferocity that is more a psychological
phenomenon than a logical one. There is more to truth than any method
knows, more to what is than we shall ever grasp of it, and more to experi-
mental inquiry than what Dewey described. In all inquiry there is what we
do and what happens to us in the course of our doing; there is what lies in
front of us – an object and a method spelled out in advance – and what has
happened behind our back – how we have been constituted and a funda-
mental orientation that we bring with us. Dewey’s focus was decidedly on
the former. He had intimations of the latter, but it took a thinker outside
the orbit of empiricism and rationalism alike to make this theme explicit.
Dewey still spoke of inquiry as a gaining of control over an object, and while
he spoke in terms far more nuanced and phenomenologically adequate
than the British empiricists, the orientation toward technical control
remained in place, including when he broached humanistic inquiry. For
Dewey, as we have seen, thinking in every form consists in ‘the actual
transition from the problematic to the secure, as far as it is intentionally
guided.’ A reply to this is that thinking rather often includes a transition
in the opposite direction, and it is not always intentionally guided. We
learn from Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, Foucault and some others that
thinking does not always culminate in resolutions and secure outcomes,
particularly when it is philosophical or humanistic. It may culminate, as
with the experience of wonder, in an openness or a receptivity to ideas that
was hitherto foreign to our experience or in a recognition of the limits of
our understanding. Such openness belongs to inquiry not only in its initial
stages but at its end. It is not always a failure of inquiry when we do not
resolve a problem. When what calls for thinking is what Marcel called a
‘mystery’, there is a matter to be investigated, and with some urgency, but
no resolution can be expected. There is no solution to human mortality,
or history, or art, or love. Each gives rise to thought, and a line of thinking
that can be called experimental, yet as Marcel pointed out, when there is
no space between the question and the questioner there is an imperative
to reflect, interpret or otherwise come to terms with the phenomena, but
with no method and no security. Nietzsche’s ‘philosophers of the future’
are also ‘men of experiments’, but not in Dewey’s sense; they are ‘attempters’
and ‘very free spirits’ whose thinking obeys no model.37 Should it be made
to obey a model? Why are so many still troubled at the thought that intel-
ligent inquiry may not be one, that there are different ways of knowing
and that we need neither reduce them to one nor form a hierarchy of
them? Common opinion still regards natural science as at the top of a
hierarchy, beneath which are the humanities and the arts, with the social
sciences somewhere in the middle. What do we imagine would be lost if
we abandoned the hierarchy and maintained that how we know depends
on what we would know? Is this a recipe for relativism, a surrender of
philosophy’s age-old aspiration, as Aristotle put it, ‘to say of what is that it
is, and of what is not that it is not’?38 Indeed it is not, but a recognition that
‘how we think’ is more experimental and more variable than even Dewey
recognized. His theory of inquiry is not complete, and in a way that he did
not see, yet no theoretical model can be. What it can do is describe what
we do and what happens to us in the course of inquiry in a given field,
recognizing that fields overlap and that no mode of inquiry is of unlimited
scope.
Chapter 6
Practice, Theory and Anti-Theory

Richard Rorty
A principle that is likewise fundamental to hermeneutical and pragmatist

philosophy is that lifeworld practices constitute the alpha and omega of
philosophical theorizing. The aim of theory construction, if we are to
engage in it at all, is to gain a more explicit understanding and critical
perspective on our practices, and without grounding them in something
external to practices themselves. Our social and linguistic practices do not
require philosophical foundations. Both traditions reject the dichotomy
and hierarchy of theory and practice that were bequeathed to us by the
Greeks and instead conceive of this relation in a more dialectical way.
They share as well a phenomenological sensibility for which formalist
and scholastic castle-building is about the worst thing that philosophy can
do. Sufficient common ground exists for hermeneutical and pragmatist
thinkers to pose the question of theory and practice anew and on a shared
basis, as the present chapter sets out to do. I do so in connection less with
classical pragmatism than with perhaps the best known pragmatist of recent
decades. Richard Rorty departed in important ways from the pragmatism
of James and Dewey, and in a manner that he often understated. For the
latter figures, no amount of theory construction enables us to gain an
ahistorical or objective vantage point on our practices. Such a standpoint
is neither available nor needed, James and Dewey maintained, yet they
were far from rejecting theory in all its forms. Theorizing, they held, had
to be reminded of its limits, its conditionedness and its reason for being,
in contrast to modern conceptions that had perpetuated the Greek habit
of subordinating the practical to the theoretical. Philosophical theorizing
had to be chastened but not abolished. This premise they shared with
hermeneutics.
Rorty would be still more sceptical than his predecessors while also
adapting pragmatism to the language of analytic philosophy. Rorty’s
linguistified pragmatism focuses almost exclusively on symbolizing
practices rather than the larger set of social practices and experiences
that concerned Dewey. It is a formulation of pragmatism that he would
also relate to the hermeneutics of Heidegger and Gadamer, albeit in a
somewhat confused way. A couple of decades after speaking favourably of

hermeneutics in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature as ‘an expression of hope
that the cultural space left by the demise of epistemology will not be filled
– that our culture should become one in which the demand for constraint
and confrontation is no longer felt’, Rorty would remark in an interview
that ‘I tossed in Gadamer at the end of that book because I happened to
be reading him when I was writing the final chapters. I agree with most of
what Gadamer says, but his work, like Wittgenstein’s, seems to me largely
negative and therapeutic. I don’t think he offers a new enterprise called
“hermeneutics” for philosophers to engage in. “Hermeneutic philosophy”
is as vague and unfruitful a notion as “analytic philosophy.” Both terms
signify little more than the dislike of each for the other.’1 This remarkable
statement is not the only one of its kind, and on the subject of hermeneutics
Rorty’s propensity for curt provocation was frequently evident. He would
express the view, for instance, that Gadamer’s hermeneutics is a ‘method’
which ‘has been replaced by poststructuralism’ and the hope that ‘the very
idea of hermeneutics should disappear.’2 Exactly what Rorty understood by
hermeneutics, or of it, is far from clear. What he hoped would disappear
are many of the same doctrines that hermeneuticists reject: dichotomous
thinking, essentialism, foundationalism and philosophical theories that
soar over the contingent world of human practices or trace them back to
the absolute.
What hermeneutics and pragmatism, in both its classical and contem-
porary varieties, can agree upon is that the lifeworld practices around which
so much of our experience is organized do not stand in need of the kind
of grounding that modern epistemology sought. Philosophy is at its best,
Rorty often remarked, when it is therapeutic rather than constructive, if by
the latter we mean the project of fashioning large theoretical explanations
of knowledge, truth, justice and so on. Therapeutic philosophy is a largely
negative exercise in debunking such accounts while also challenging the
need for them. The following statements are representative of a position
that Rorty would state and restate throughout his writings: ‘There is no
wholesale, epistemological way to direct, or criticize, or underwrite the
course of inquiry. Rather, the pragmatists tell us, it is the vocabulary of
practice rather than of theory, of action rather than contemplation, in
which one can say something useful about truth.’ ‘What we cannot do is
to rise above all human communities, actual and possible. We cannot find
a skyhook which lifts us out of mere coherence – mere agreement – to
something like “correspondence with reality as it is in itself.” One reason
why dropping this latter notion strikes many people as “relativistic” is that
Practice, Theory and Anti-Theory 101
it denies the necessity that inquiry should someday converge to a single

point – that Truth is “out there”, up in front of us, waiting for us to reach
it.’ As well, ‘we have much more confidence in the practice in question
than in any of its possible philosophical justifications.’3 A postmetaphysical
philosophy is one that regards our culture, our practices and our truths
as so many products of human agreement; they do not correspond to the
way the world is or have a foundation in something that transcends history
and contingency. Efforts both ancient and modern to ground our ways of
speaking and acting within a set of incontrovertible philosophical facts –
Plato’s Forms, Aristotle’s essences, Descartes’ cogito, empiricists’ sense data
and so on – should not be brought to completion but abandoned altogether.
Such efforts do not deliver us from uncertainty but amount rather to an
‘impossible attempt to step outside our skins – the traditions, linguistic and
other, within which we do our thinking and self-criticism – and compare
ourselves with something absolute.’4 Drawing in different ways upon James
and Dewey, Hegel and Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida, Wittgenstein
and various figures in analytic philosophy, Rorty urged us to abandon once
and for all the quest for certainty and the absolute upon which the Greeks
embarked and that gained new life during the Enlightenment. Giving up
this quest means inhabiting a lifeworld of our own creation and searching
for solidarity rather than objectivity.
There is no need for philosophical theorizing if there are no such items
in the world as Truth, Knowledge, the Good, Justice or any of the other
upper-case abstractions that the Greeks hypostatized into nouns whose
nature philosophers were charged with ascertaining. Any such theory,
Rorty held, presupposes that knowledge and truth are determinate entities
which the theorist can accurately represent in the form of a definition,
justify with reference to a foundation, or otherwise present in some elegant
philosophical package. If we are serious about renouncing essentialism and
foundationalism, he argued, we must renounce theory as well and regard
our practices as products of consensus that require no philosophical
guidance and that have neither essences nor grounds. We neither have
nor require theories that are more epistemically solid than the practices
they purport to govern. To cite him once more, ‘Pragmatists think that the
history of attempts to isolate the True or the Good, or to define the word
“true” or “good,” supports their suspicion that there is no interesting work
to be done in this area. It might, of course, have turned out otherwise.
People have, oddly enough, found something interesting to say about
the essence of Force and the definition of “number.” They might have
found something interesting to say about the essence of Truth. But in fact
they haven’t.’ A postmetaphysical culture therefore is one that replaces

Philosophy with philosophy, where the upper-case notion refers to the
search for theoretical ways to fill in the blank in sentences like: What makes
true statements true is _____; What makes right actions right is _____; or
What makes a work of art a work of art is _____. If essentialism fails, there
is no ‘general and useful’ way to complete these sentences.5
The therapeutic task of philosophy in the lower case is to help us get over
the dualisms and the quest for the incontrovertible that have bedevilled
Western thought from its inception. There is no philosophical counterpart
to the Word of God, no ‘topic called knowledge whose nature can be
studied’, no standpoint of objectivity from which to compare the world to
our interpretations of it. All that can be said of truth itself is that it is ‘a
compliment we pay to beliefs that are serving to guide action better than
their competitors’, and where there is no standard of better and worse but
for consensus.6 If ‘we are antiessentialist all the way’, as he put it, then ‘we
shall say that all inquiry is interpretation’ and that there is no need for
a theory of interpretation.7 The distinction of theory and practice itself
presupposes not only the doctrine of essentialism but, as Dewey had noted,
the socio-economic separation in Greek life between knowing and doing.
In Dewey’s words, ‘It reflected, at the time, the economic organization in
which “useful” work was done for the most part by slaves, leaving free men
relieved from labour and “free” on that account.’8 Relaxing this distinction,
or eliminating it, entails that in the practice of inquiry, for instance, ‘there
are no constraints on inquiry save conversational ones – no wholesale
constraints derived from the nature of the objects, or of the mind, or of
language, but only those retail constraints provided by the remarks of our
fellow-inquirers.’9 The same can be said of justice in a liberal democracy;
there is no principled basis on which to critique political discourse apart
from the norms that have generated consensus in our time and place. Such
a position is not relativistic but historicist and ‘frankly ethnocentric.’10
An obvious question this raises is whether there is any philosophical
work to be done in the aftermath of essentialism and foundationalism. The
question was put to Rorty in an interview of 2006 as follows: ‘Q: So what
work would you want to engage in as a philosopher now? RR: Well, it’s not
a field that’s worth being in unless you’re excited by toppling some tower
or other. You can’t tell a student, “Get an interest in toppling this tower.”
Either they’re interested or they aren’t. Q: But how do you feel about the
trajectory of your own career? Is there a feeling that once you’ve toppled
various towers you can only go on saying the same things, because there’s
little left to topple? RR: Yes, I think so. I think I’ve been discouraged by
the fact that every time I think I’ve had a new idea I turn out to have
published it twenty years ago. Most philosophers typically have one set of
ideas which they repeat over and over again. There are occasional excep-
tions. Heidegger and Wittgenstein both actually had two sets of ideas in
the course of their lives.’11 Rorty’s answers are of more than biographical
importance and are consistent with statements he would make elsewhere.
If philosophy is not altogether at an end, Philosophy is, and philosophy
is not far behind. What work remains to be done is essentially limited to
intellectual history and therapeutic kibitzing. Wittgenstein’s later work
serves as an example of the latter and is commended by Rorty insofar as
it ‘sticks to pure satire’ and demonstrates how ‘the traditional problems
.â•›.â•›. are based on a terminology which is as if designed expressly for the
purpose of making solution impossible.’12 Philosophy should not aim to
be constructive or especially creative, or not on a large scale, not because
of any a priori commitment against theory but on grounds of philosophy’s
track record of failure to answer its own questions and to resolve what
Dewey called ‘the problems of men.’
Dewey’s own theoretical efforts received a less than favourable response
from Rorty. The theory of inquiry, for instance, along with the pragmatist
theory of truth, Dewey’s theory of experience and philosophy of education
are typically either ignored in Rorty’s work or given a questionable inter-
pretation. That Dewey himself, or for that matter James or Peirce, was
an anti-theorist in Rorty’s sense is a dubious proposition, although Rorty
would often hold up Dewey as an example of philosophy at its finest. In
Consequences of Pragmatism, for instance, he would remark: ‘As long as we
see James or Dewey as having “theories of truth” or “theories of knowledge”
or “theories of morality” we shall get them wrong. We shall ignore their
criticisms of the assumption that there ought to be theories about such
matters.’ Clearly, they did have theories about such matters and plenty else
besides. Rorty’s point was that he did not find such theories compelling.
James’ and Dewey’s point was that theorizing need not presuppose essen-
tialism or foundationalism and that doing so in a pragmatic spirit means
providing a reflective articulation and critique of our practices rather than
a grounding in something ahistorical. The main hypothesis in Dewey’s
book-length study of the theory-practice relation, The Quest for Certainty, was
precisely that human practices are the point of departure of all legitimate
philosophical theorizing and that the point of such theories is to resolve
the problematic situations that arise within them, not that there is nothing
philosophically interesting to be said about inquiry, experience, truth and
so on. His point as well was that the depreciation of practice that began with
the Greeks had at long last to be overturned, and not in such a way that we
are merely engineering a pendulum swing to the opposite extreme. While
Rorty was inclined to assert, falsely, that Dewey – along with Nietzsche,
Heidegger, and Wittgenstein – held that ‘philosophy may have exhausted
its potentialities’ and saw ‘no interesting future for a distinct discipline
called “philosophy,”’ he would better have said – and occasionally did –
that the constructive efforts of Dewey and the other classical pragmatists to
fashion a nonessentialist, nonfoundationalist, and nondualistic philosophy
were not, in Rorty’s estimation, a success.13
Be that as it may, in Rorty’s conception of pragmatism, theory
construction in more or less every form is an essentialist and ill-fated
undertaking. It contributes nothing to our understanding or capacity to
critique our practices. If it is rational criticism that we seek, this is to be
had not with reference to theoretical principles or general criteria of the
kind favoured by a Marx or a Habermas, but in the light of ordinary efforts
in persuasion. Rationality itself, in his view, ‘is simply a matter of being
open and curious, and of relying on persuasion rather than force.’14 The
critique of ideology, for instance, is only ‘an occasionally useful tactical
weapon in social struggles’, and ‘one among many others’ rather than
any ascent into pure reason.15 How, then, is the philosopher or social
critic (or anyone else) to proceed? Does philosophy provide no resources
whatever in our rhetorical engagements? The general trajectory of Rorty’s
argumentation is decidedly sceptical, yet in places he does offer some views
on what philosophy, duly chastened, may have to offer. As he repeatedly
stated, ‘we should not look for skyhooks, but only for toeholds.’ What,
then, are these? Toeholds for critique and interpretation, in short, are to
be found in the resources of our culture. Rational persuasion consists in
‘playing off parts of our minds against other parts’, ‘muddling through
toward happiness as best we can’, ‘draw[ing] the map of a culture during
a specific time in a specific place (for instance, European culture in the
twentieth century)’, and finding ‘small experimental ways’ of resolving
problems in contrast to ‘large theoretical ways.’16 Theoretical principles
at most ‘provide succinct formulations of past achievements’ or summary
descriptions of statements deemed useful in our historical community, but
nothing more than this.17 One properly applies such principles or norms
not in the fashion of a categorical imperative but by looking back and forth
in a pragmatic way between general principles and the consequences of
applying them. Ultimately it is agreement that matters – agreement that is
based on persuasion rather than force, and where there is no large-scale
way of distinguishing one from the other.
We cannot justify without circularity the standards and conventions that

we appeal to in our attempts at persuasion, Rorty emphatically argued
– not, again, on the basis of an a priori argument but in view of many
centuries of failed efforts to this end.18 We appeal to the standards that
are ‘ours’, and when these standards themselves are the problem – as the
ideology critic, for one, will assert – the best we can do is compare the
concrete advantages of our ‘final vocabulary’ or cultural tradition to some
other. Inter-societal comparison is one fruitful way not of leaping outside
our lifeworld but of regarding given elements of it from another, equally
conditioned, perspective.
This historicist conception of pragmatism has a good deal to recommend
it, and it does make common cause with philosophical hermeneutics in a
number of respects. As I noted at the outset of this chapter, pragmatists
and hermeneutical thinkers are united in opposing a great many efforts in
the history of Western thought to provide our practices with a theoretical
or foundationalist grounding of one kind or another. Whether we are
speaking of social practices generally or linguistic practices in a narrower,
analytic sense, human practices neither can nor need be legitimated with
reference to something outside them that is asserted to be historically
unconditioned and incontrovertible. Philosophical gestures toward the
absolute may at last be forgotten together with religious gestures to the
same end; indeed, without the latter it is unlikely that the former would
have had much point. Philosophy in many ways still aspires to know the
Word of God, and the great service of pragmatism is to cause us to climb
down from the heavens and regard our practices as no longer standing
in opposition to something of which theoretical knowledge affords us a
glimpse. My reservations about Rorty’s pragmatism stem not from any
glimpse into the absolute but from a slightly more optimistic, and not at
all unpragmatic, conception of what philosophical theorizing can effect –
provided that we remain mindful of its limits and that it is undertaken in a
phenomenological spirit.
In advancing this case I would like to recall a few examples of theories that
are less obviously vulnerable to Rorty’s line of criticism than theories of a
straightforwardly essentialist and foundationalist kind. Dewey’s philosophy
of education and theory of inquiry, James’ theory of truth, Jaspers’ theory
of communicative reason, Paul Ricoeur’s narrative theory of the self and
philosophical hermeneutics itself all share with Rorty the conviction that
philosophy must overcome Philosophy. Where they part company is on the
question of whether there are ways of proceeding in theory construction
that are anti-Theoretical yet still ‘useful’ in Rorty’s sense, that do not slide
back into foundationalism or essentialism or that otherwise compress

the manifold into some orderly package which misunderstands through
reduction, oversimplification or sheer mythology. Let us consider the
first example above. Dewey, in my view, had nothing to learn from Rorty’s
critique of Philosophy; indeed, as Rorty fully acknowledged, his critique is
in large part appropriated directly from Dewey. Yet the latter insisted in his
writings on the philosophy of education that no critical perspective is to be
had in this field in the absence of a theory of inquiry and experience of the
kind discussed in Chapter 5. The problems that he detected in traditional
schooling centred on the quality of experience that students were having in
these institutions, while the alternative he envisioned proceeded from an
experimental conception of learning. The classroom, he argued, ought to
be a place of intellectual inquiry into matters that arise out of the students’
extracurricular experience rather than a setting that is disconnected from
ordinary life and that is centred on the transfer into youthful minds of
an altogether predigested curriculum, as older views had it. Educative
experience is a proper object of philosophical theorizing, he maintained,
and the account that he offered in such texts as Democracy and Education
and Experience and Education was largely successful, in my view, in providing
the resources with which to transform our educational practices.19 This
is theory not for theory’s sake but for the sake of practice, as is true of
pragmatist philosophy in general.
The same can be said of the other theories just mentioned and no doubt
others besides. Perspectivism, to be sure, is not an epistemology but a
description of how knowledge proceeds which also has prescriptive import.
That interpretation involves an accumulating of perspectives, none of which
approximates objectivity, is at once descriptive and prescriptive. So as well is the
doctrine of the hermeneutical circle; fundamentally, it is a phenomenological
description of how interpretation proceeds, yet it also gives us an important
clue as to how to proceed when we encounter unanticipated textual passages.
Interpretation ought to be, and is – the two propositions amount to one – an
experimental and perspectival undertaking, a reconciling of whole and part,
a search for coherence and consensus, a will to boundless communication,
an art rather than a technique, a disclosure and a concealment, a histori-
cally conditioned and dialogical encounter, the resolution of a problematic
situation, a project in service to life, and some other things. These statements
are both ‘general and useful’, whether it be for prescriptive and critical
purposes – for they do prescribe a basic orientation for inquiry – or for the
purpose of philosophical understanding, and none is particularly vulnerable
to charges of essentialism, foundationalism or reductionism.
What pragmatists, hermeneuticists and all others can agree to is the need
for reasoned criticism of our practices. Whether this requires large-scale
theorizing or more modest, immanent forms of reflection is what is in
question. The argument that no amount of theory construction will enable
us to gain a God’s-eye view of our practices has been convincingly made,
and well before Rorty. From what standpoint, then, is a critique of our
practices to proceed if not from the standpoint of the absolute? As we have
seen, Rorty prefers a vocabulary of local practices and traditions over total-
izing theories, yet whether abandoning essentialism and foundationalism
entails abandoning theory in all forms, including forms not predicated
upon the subordination of practice, is an open question.
Without privileging theory over practice – or, as Rorty prefers, practice
over theory – it is possible to defend a conception of philosophical theory
that is at once hermeneutical and pragmatic. The argument that I proffer is
fought on two fronts: on one hand, I share Rorty’s opposition to the subor-
dination of practice to theory, while on the other hand parting company
with those who would jettison all forms of theorizing in favour of the
primacy of practice. Recognizing the latter, I shall argue, does not entail
abandoning all methods of theoretical reasoning, but only those methods
that seek absolute grounds for our practices. There is a conception of
theory that is immanent to practice. If we can speak of a dialectical relation
of theory and practice, we need subordinate neither practice to theory nor
theory to practice.
For nonfoundationalists, the project of fashioning an indubitable episte-
mological or metaphysical basis for human practices not only fails in its
aim of removing all vestiges of contingency and uncertainty that seem
to characterize so essentially the order of human praxis, but mistakenly
assumes the necessity of providing such a basis for the practices that take
root in a lifeworld. It is simply unnecessary to provide axiomatic grounds
for our practices. Human being-in-the-world includes an embeddedness
within practices that fundamentally orient us as cognitive and moral agents
and which are understood largely prereflectively, partially and pragmati-
cally. Being ready-to-hand, they do not readily lend themselves to explicit
reflection and tend to enter conscious awareness, as Heidegger illustrated
in Being and Time, only as a consequence of their breakdown. Language
itself, as Gadamer has shown, is in its primary mode of being the practice
of hermeneutical dialogue. Language is given to us as practitioners in a
dynamic back-and-forth movement of statement and counterstatement, a
dialectic that we do not preside over as sovereign subjectivity but take up as
participants. The primacy of practice entails that our being-in-the-world is
oriented by involvements in a myriad linguistic and social practices in terms

of which we find our way about a lifeworld and that such practices, while
ready-to-hand in their immediate mode of being, are already reflective and
capable of being theoretically articulated. Involvement in practices calls
upon capacities of understanding, reason and judgement that speak to the
reflective nature not only of practice itself but of the act of participation
within it.
Alasdair MacIntyre has defined a practice as ‘any coherent and complex
form of socially established cooperative human activity through which
goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying
to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and
partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human
powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and
goods involved, are systematically extended.’ The principal feature of
MacIntyre’s definition is the notion of ‘internal goods’ to which any
practice is said to be oriented, as indicated, for instance, by standards
delimiting appropriate conduct. These are understood as ends that are
held in common and cooperatively achieved in the course of engaging in a
given practice, and are contrasted with ‘external goods’ which may be had
by other means, typically in forms of strategic action, and which are invar-
iably the private possession of an individual. Internal goods are attainable
exclusively through cooperative participation in a practice. To illustrate the
distinction, MacIntyre offers the example of chess as a practice in which
one engages not for the sake of external ends, such as reputation or wealth,
but to practise the virtues associated with this activity such as fairness or
good sportsmanship. These virtues are attained only within the rules of the
game, while reputation or wealth may be had by other means, including the
merely strategic or instrumental from which the order of practice is mainly
distinguished. A key feature separating instrumental action from practice
properly so called is that, as MacIntyre writes, ‘[i]t belongs to the concept of
a practice .â•›.â•›. that its goods can only be achieved by subordinating ourselves
within the practice in our relationship to other practitioners. We have to
learn to recognize what is due to whom; we have to be prepared to take
whatever self-endangering risks are demanded along the way; and we have
to listen carefully to what we are told about our own inadequacies and to
reply with the same carefulness for the facts.’20 Participating in a practice is
distinguished from utilitarian behaviour in virtue of this element of ‘subor-
dination’ to requirements that are imposed upon us by the structure of the
practice itself, including the standards of excellence and internal ends that
constitute the practice as a distinct form of activity.
The conception of praxis of which I shall speak shares with MacIntyre’s

notion a connotation far broader than modern conceptions of applied
science or technique, and shares nothing whatever with popular concep-
tions that speak of practices loosely as any habitual form of behaviour,
particularly one that does not involve higher order cognition. ‘Praxis’
may be spoken of broadly as the larger order of social endeavour in which
human beings participate in common by creating institutions, fashioning
identities, investigating and criticizing, creating works of art, exchanging
goods and services, and a myriad of other forms of intersubjectivity. By
the singular term ‘practice’ I shall intend a complex of action types,
relationships, roles and standards which display a common orientation
toward particular ends. To engage in a practice is to be drawn into social
relationships and roles of particular kinds and to observe constraints on
our actions that in combination display a unifying orientation toward the
attainment of specific aims, aims that define the practice and distinguish it
from others. Practices are teleologically structured and display as purposive
an orientation as goal-directed action in general.
Practices thus conceived encompass both cognitive and pragmatic forms
of activity including inquiry, hermeneutical dialogue, education, the arts,
sports, commerce, law, politics, medicine, friendship and romantic love
(the list is not exhaustive). Each practice exhibits a teleological dimension
that is identifiable phenomenologically and which is oriented in its charac-
teristic forms of activity, relationships, standards and general structure
toward attaining or approximating ends that constitute the practice’s
reason for being. To express this in a manner that is more phenomeno-
logically adequate than the hypostatizing language of internal ‘ends’ – as
if these were fully realizable end-states – and that avoids the Aristotelian/
Catholic moralism of the ‘virtues,’ we may speak of a practice as displaying
a basic animating spirit in which practitioners are taken up, which makes
demands upon us and conducts us toward a condition of self-forgetful
participation. Unlike straightforward forms of instrumental action,
engaging in a practice is not an exercise in sovereign subjectivity (the
pursuit of pleasure or the avoidance of pain), but is a becoming involved,
as we say, in the spirit of the thing – and where the ‘thing’ in question
is no thing at all, but a process containing an immanent and orienting
purposiveness. The life of a practice is inseparable from this quality of
internal teleology which is not presided over by the subject but that in
which the latter is taken up, as one becomes caught up in conversation or
in an artistic performance. Gadamer provided a compelling description
of this phenomenon in a discussion in Truth and Method of aesthetic
practice and the activity of the spectator of a performance – an account

that carries significance far beyond its immediate context: ‘the true being
of the spectator, who belongs to the play of art, cannot be adequately
understood in terms of subjectivity, as a way that aesthetic consciousness
conducts itself. .â•›.â•›. Considered as a subjective accomplishment in human
conduct, being present has the character of being outside oneself. .â•›.â•›. In
fact, being outside oneself is the positive possibility of being wholly with
something else. This kind of being present is a self-forgetfulness, and to
be a spectator consists in giving oneself in self-forgetfulness to what one is
watching. Here self-forgetfulness is anything but a privative condition, for
it arises from devoting one’s full attention to the matter at hand, and this
is the spectator’s own positive accomplishment.’21 The practice of dialogue
displays a similar play structure, characterized by the incessant to and fro
of assertion and reply, question and answer, that is oriented toward under-
standing our object. The conversation is not dominated by any speaker but
is a dialectical process in which interlocutors are taken up in a common
endeavour to identify the significance or truth of the subject matter. The
dialogue ‘takes its own course’ when this condition is fully manifest. The
teleological dimension of the practice is more an orientation than any final
culmination or a telos that is attained once and for all.
This phenomenon is equally characteristic of other areas of praxis
than the aesthetic and hermeneutical dimensions with which Gadamer
was principally concerned. When, for instance, the practice of education
succeeds in its task, there is a spirit of cooperative investigation and
openness to the subject matter that comes into its own. This practice
comprises a curriculum, classroom discussion, examinations, assigned
roles and instructional methods that are oriented in common toward a
condition in which the learning process – evidenced by an acquisition
of knowledge and critical capacity that is never complete – is allowed to
prevail. The phenomenon is equally evident in practices such as compet-
itive games and sports in which, as Gadamer expressed it, players are ‘taken
up into a movement that has its own dynamic. The game is underway
when the individual player participates in full earnest, that is, when he no
longer holds himself back as one who is merely playing, for whom it is not
serious.’22 This form of praxis is constituted by standards of excellence and
strategies commonly oriented by a dialectical process that is dominated by
no individual but by an abiding spirit of competition and sportsmanship of
which each of the participants partakes. Professional practices such as law,
medicine or scholarship are equally teleological in their constitution, the
fundamental purpose of each being to administer justice, secure health,
and acquire knowledge within a setting of institutions and procedures.

While it is well known that not all participants are in fact oriented in
their actions toward securing the aims that are internal to their practice,
the point that warrants emphasis is that the practice itself – if not all the
practitioners – remains oriented toward specific aims in terms of which
standards of excellence are defined and the realization of which constitutes
the practice’s reason for being. In the case of any given practice there are
participants who allow themselves to be taken up into its spirit and become
fully oriented in their conduct by its internal dynamic, and those who
do not – who substitute extraneous ends or otherwise hold back in their
participation. What distinguishes the two is no mere difference in technical
skill but the mode of comportment of the practitioner: whether they are
disposed toward the kind of self-forgetfulness alluded to above and allow
the practice to take the course that it would or insist on bending it to their
will. This is reflected, for instance, in the languages of art and romantic
love: we speak of an artist being inspired, of the work of art creating
itself, of falling in love or of being swept away, expressions suggestive of a
voluntary relinquishing of self-possession and being taken up into a process
one does not altogether control.
As processes, it is the nature of practices that while they are teleologi-
cally structured, the particular telos at which they aim is only approximated,
often fleetingly, and typically in the form of a common reality. Such
‘ends’ possess a dynamic and processual quality, close in this respect to
regulative ideals which orient conduct without being finally attainable. A
paradigm case is inquiry or dialogue which, while oriented toward truth or
meaning, prevents us from hypostatizing the latter or transforming them
into objects of epistemic certainty. Dialogue is oriented toward signifi-
cance and consensus, yet it is a process in which a final truth or objective
meaning is never attained. The telos is no static outcome but an unending
process of achieving partial understanding. Analogously, the practice of
law aims at securing justice, where this is conceived not in utopian terms
but as a continual process of affording better protection for human rights.
Much the same obtains in other practices: medicine aims at securing a
patient’s health, a value that bears no resemblance to a static condition
fully attainable by any person; scholarly investigation aims at the discovery
of knowledge without supposing that the process of inquiry will some day
come to an end.
Once foundational metaphors are dispensed with, there is no need to
ground judgements on something more ‘basic’ than the practices that have
taken hold in our lifeworld, contingent though they be. The search for large
theoretical bases of our practices may well be abandoned. The question,

however, remains: from what perspective can we offer a principled critique
of our practices or of the manner in which these are carried out? Theory
can be conceived as arising from within practices themselves rather than
descending on them from a transcendent location. Practice-immanent
theory seeks not to provide an objective basis for practices but to identify
criteria that phenomenologically are already implicitly operative within
practices themselves. The aim of this form of theorizing is to critique a
given practice in light of an expressly articulated understanding of the
aims inherent in it. In describing the implicit teleology of a practice, theory
does not preside over it from without but modifies it from within by identi-
fying a practice’s immanent logic. The criteria it articulates serve a critical
function while being inherent in, or performatively operative within,
the practice. The traditional view among philosophers that in order to
practise rational criticism we must occupy a vantage point that transcends
it altogether may be replaced with one that arises from a finite perspective
that makes no claim to objectivity or certainty. Rather than subordinating
practice (conceived since the Greeks as defective, contingent and merely
empirical) to theory (conceived since the Greeks as pristine, divine and
unconditioned), practice-immanent theorizing takes lifeworld practices as
its methodological starting point.
The aim of theory thus conceived is twofold. It informs critical reflection
by rendering explicit the fundamental constitution of a practice and
orients or reorients action given an understanding of what the practice
aims to achieve. On the first point: while our involvement in a practice is
never without some understanding of what it aims to achieve, what actions
are appropriate to it, and of ways and means of competent performance,
this form of understanding is typically prereflective and consists primarily
of practical know-how. The first task of the theorist is to render this
knowledge explicit. One describes phenomenologically what individuals
are doing when they participate in a practice and what happens to them
no less: what actions comprise it, what aims are in view, what standards are
operative within it, and so on. At this stage theorizing is an interpretive
enterprise that seeks a reflective awareness of a practice’s internal consti-
tution or immanent dynamic. The second aim of theory construction is to
gain critical perspective on the manner in which a practice is carried out.
Given a more explicit understanding of a practice, theory supplements
the know-how practitioners already possess with criteria that are useful in
assessing action. Theorizing provides a perspective from which potentially
to challenge this practical know-how by demonstrating how it may actually
fail to bring about the practice’s internal aims or produces a distortion. In

articulating criteria or principles already operative (prereflectively) in a
practice, theory makes it possible to reorient, or even radically overhaul,
the fashion in which it is conducted. An immanent mode of theorizing
views a practice, as it were, from within, describing its internal constitution
and the actions and criteria that distinguish it as the particular practice that
it is.
Theoretical understanding is especially mindful of a practice’s teleological
dimension since it is in light of this that the theorist can articulate principles
of critique. Given an understanding of the ends toward which a practice is
always already oriented, the theorist may fashion principles of critique that
have their basis in, and are an explicit articulation of, the ends that belong
to that practice. While it is unlikely to generate formal decision procedures
for attaining these ends, this form of theorizing makes it possible to appraise
actions, policies and rules in light of their conduciveness to a practice’s
internal aims and can often bring to light the way in which extraneous ends
can enter into and thereby corrupt a practice. Importing extraneous values
into a practice produces a kind of distortion. When personal desires, for
instance, or a political agenda supplants a practice’s own ends, the result is
a distortion of the practice itself, often one that transforms it into a merely
strategic form of behaviour. Practices make demands on us, and distortions
occur when we violate these out of motives that are extraneous to that form
of activity and at odds with its purposes. This occurs, for example, when
educators supplant aims that belong to the learning process with an agenda
(political, religious, etc.) the purpose of which is to instil the educator’s
belief rather than cultivate the intellectual capacity of students. The task of
the education theorist in this case is to remind practitioners of the ends that
constitute this practice and to critique pedagogical methods that subordinate
these to a dogmatic agenda, to identify actions or policies that supplant
the animating spirit of education by substituting ends extraneous to that
form of activity or that perhaps belong to the practice but in a secondary
capacity. The profit motive, for instance, in a practice such as medicine is an
accepted element of professional activity, yet it is constrained by the more
fundamental matter of the patient’s health. Medical malpractice is less a
matter of technical incompetence than a failure to act in the best interests
of the patient’s health, perhaps for reasons of financial gain or to satisfy
another purpose that is extraneous to the practice itself or subordinate to
its more fundamental aim.
Distortions of this kind are partly due to the dichotomy of theory and
practice itself, and the subordination of the latter. Methods of theory
construction that claim to derive principles from an unconditioned stand-

point and impose these upon practices from some authoritative position
typically do so in a way that undermines their animating spirit or sacrifices
it to a preconceived notion of their proper outcomes. To guarantee this
outcome, criteria are legislated from without and imposed on participants
without regard for the practice’s internal logic, the usual result of which is
its subversion. A case in point within moral and political thought is utilitari-
anism. This theory has us optimize whatever ‘preferences’ individuals hold
in all social practices and recognizes only those rules and obligations that
are generated by the utility calculus rather than any arising from a given
practice itself or indeed from any other source. This strategic method of
deliberation is concerned exclusively with identifying the most efficient
means of satisfying arbitrarily chosen ends, whether they resemble in any
respect a practice’s internal aims or not. This method almost invariably
corrupts a practice by radically modifying the comportment of practi-
tioners who, no longer disposed toward the kind of self-forgetfulness
described above, instead prefer to dominate the scene as a strategy in
utility optimization. The instrumentalization of a practice is a virtual recipe
for its distortion since it brackets its most salient feature – its teleological
orientation – which it banishes to the order of the arational. Whereas
utilitarianism is premised on a subjectivism regarding ends, the aims that
govern a practice are ends in themselves for those who allow themselves to
be taken up in a process that they do not control. The modern instrumen-
talization and technification of praxis that is exemplified in utilitarianism
has the effect of fragmenting practices in the ostensible interest of satisfying
human purposes while effectively reducing them to so many quantities of
pleasure and pain.
Philosophical hermeneutics itself is an example of practice-immanent
theorizing. A principle long identified as vital to the interpretive process is
the hermeneutical circle. The classic description of this in Being and Time
reads as follows: ‘It is not to be reduced to the level of a vicious circle,
or even of a circle which is merely tolerated. In the circle is hidden a
positive possibility of the most primordial kind of knowing. To be sure, we
genuinely take hold of this possibility only when, in our interpretation, we
have understood that our first, last and constant task is never to allow our
fore-having, fore-sight and fore-conception to be presented to us by fancies
and popular conceptions, but rather to make the scientific theme secure
by working out these fore-structures in terms of the things themselves.’23 In
remarking on this passage, Gadamer observed: ‘What Heidegger is working
out here is not primarily a prescription for the practice of understanding,
but a description of the way interpretative understanding is achieved.’24 In

hermeneutical theory it is phenomenological description of the practice
of interpretation that is primary and that is prior to prescription. While
the hermeneutical circle is in the first instance a descriptive account of
interpretation, it is also not without prescriptive value and serves in many
cases to inform our interpretation – by cautioning us, for instance, against
reading a passage in isolation from a larger context. Here is an example of
a theoretical principle that has its basis in phenomenological description
of a practice and that is capable of informing our interpretive efforts once
expressly fashioned.
There may be hope for theory. If there is, we must think of it no longer
in the upper case as a search for foundations or essences but more
modestly as an immanent, phenomenological and critical reflection on
our practices. Ultimately, the aim of theorizing is to allow us the better
to cope with our practices and to attain the ends that belong to them,
given a more explicit grasp of the ends themselves and the distorting
factors that often beset our ways of acting and thinking. I can therefore
concur with Gary Madison when he states, ‘It is one thing to accord
priority to praxis, to ethos; it is quite another, however, to deny to theory
a legitimate and, indeed, central role in the formation and sustenance
of life practices and socio-political modes of being-in-the-world – in
other words, their justification or .â•›.â•›. “legitimation”. .â•›.â•›. [Rorty] ignores
the fact that arriving at some (theoretical) understanding of things is
a most important way in which humans manage to cope with things.’ I
concur with him as well that ‘the validity of a theory is always something
that must be redeemed in practice.’25 Hermeneutics itself is a theoretical
search for understanding – of what we do and what happens to us in our
doing, of what is and of what might be, and of our being-in-the-world
in the most fundamental sense. Pragmatism provides elaboration for
what hermeneutics already knows: that theory is not its own end, that
its function is to understand and to enhance our practices, and that it
grounds and ‘mirrors’ nothing at all. The difference that theory makes
is not merely a difference in how we organize our Ps and Qs in a realm
of pure reason; it must always touch down to the reality of human
experience and action. At its best, theorizing remains mindful of its
limits and does not lose sight of the complexity of its object or reduce it
to some artificial simplicity. When what we would understand is under-
standing itself, or reason or language or truth, the things themselves
resist our efforts to encapsulate them in a simple formula of the kind
that philosophy so often prizes in the name of elegance and clarity.
Theories are impressionistic interpretations at the best of times. The

‘object’ that they would know is no object at all, but a text analogue, a
matter that in every case calls for an interpretation that is partial and
incomplete, but that may all the same be ‘useful’.
Part Three
Critical Theory
Chapter 7
Interpretation and Criticism

Max Horkheimer
That interpretation is not only universal to experience but belongs funda-

mentally to the ontological constitution of human existence is a basic
hermeneutical hypothesis that must be squared with the need for reasoned
criticism not only of our interpretations but of our practices and way of life
as a whole. To interpret and to understand most often connotes a coming
into agreement with others about what is important, meaningful or true,
yet rather often the claim is made that critique runs in an antithetical
direction, that it interrupts consensus and negates received modes of
seeing-as and so amounts to a non- or even antihermeneutical discourse.
Criticism, in this frequently encountered view, is an alternative to inter-
pretation, not a form of it, while understanding itself confines us within
tradition and culture when these are the very matters that call for critique.
Especially when interpretations are mired in ideology, criticism must
rise above the ordinary course of conversation and pronounce a rational
assessment of what passes for true within it. The standpoint of the social
critic in particular must be one of rational objectivity and impartiality, if
possible one that transcends the contingencies of time and place.
This, of course, was the matter at issue in the debate between Gadamer
and Jürgen Habermas that followed the publication of Truth and Method,
and it has perhaps been the most important issue confronting herme-
neutics since that time. The scope of hermeneutical and rhetorical
reflection, Gadamer argued, is universal, a hypothesis that critical theorists
in particular took as an invitation to an uncritical brand of conservatism.
That this is not so, and that criticism itself belongs to the larger practice
that is the search for understanding rather than constituting an exercise
in unconditioned reflection, was Gadamer’s rejoinder, and it is a rejoinder
with which I fully concur. The project of ascending to a critical standpoint
that is not only rational in some sense of the word but objective, scien-
tific and explanatory in Habermas’ sense is a dogmatic overestimation
of what is possible for finite cognition. Rather than rehearse the terms
of this well known debate, I propose in the present chapter to revisit the
original claims of critical theory and the critique of ideology in the writings
of Max Horkheimer, and in the two following chapters to engage with

Habermas’ more recent work on the theory of deliberative democracy as
well as Habermas’ and Karl-Otto Apel’s conception of discourse ethics.
My reason for returning to Horkheimer is that his earlier formulation
of critical theory may be less vulnerable to the criticisms that hermeneu-
tical philosophers have directed at Habermas, incorporating as it does a
notion of immanent criticism that in some ways is as close to Gadamer as
to Habermas. All criticism, I shall argue, is immanent criticism. What this
entails, and how robust our conception of immanent critique may be, are
the questions that I shall address.
Let us begin with an important distinction in Horkheimer’s thought
between two modes of theorizing that he designated as traditional and
critical. Traditional theory would presumably include philosophical herme-
neutics and refers in general to theoretical discourses that describe and
organize experience with reference to categories that are embedded
in current sociological conditions. In philosophy, Horkheimer spoke of
Descartes’ Discourse on Method as an exemplar, while in the sciences tradi-
tional theory encompasses the usual course of empirical research. In the
latter case we are dealing with useful information and pragmatic inquiry
that does not fundamentally disturb the order that is passed down to us,
the aim being to answer questions and solve problems that are contained
within such an order. It does not question the origins or larger implica-
tions of the order itself but puts it to use in rendering our experience of
the world coherent. Traditional philosophical theory similarly occupies
itself with received principles and methods whose fundamental purpose is
again to organize and clarify experience and to eliminate contradictions
among our inherited ideas. It works within an apparatus of judgements
and concepts that it does not question, or not fundamentally and not
critically. Even when inclined toward scepticism, traditional theorizing on
the model of Descartes or Hume runs up against the limits of a system of
propositions that it takes as given. Their philosophical ‘achievements are a
factor in the conservation and continuous renewal of the existing state of
affairs’, as Horkheimer put it. ‘In the social division of labour the savant’s
role is to integrate facts into conceptual frameworks and to keep the latter
up to date so that he himself and all who use them may be masters of the
widest possible range of facts. Experiment has the scientific role of estab-
lishing facts in such a way that they fit into theory as currently accepted. The
factual material or subject matter is provided from without; science sees
to its formulation in clear and comprehensible terms, so that men may be
able to use knowledge as they wish.’1 The knowledge may be used as they
Interpretation and Criticism 121
wish provided they do not wish to disturb the received order of categories
and techniques by means of which they classify particulars. A term with a
clearly pejorative connotation, traditional theory unwittingly affirms and
reinforces an existing social order by ensuring its functioning while habit-
ually refusing to turn a critical eye to the system within which it operates.
Critical theory reverses this, and as the term announces ‘is not a cog in
an already existent mechanism’ but instead ‘is an element in action leading
to new social forms.’ Theorizing here aims to achieve ‘the rational state of
society’ and is in the service of social praxis understood in a Marxian sense.
It is within Marxian categories of class struggle, ideology, revolution, and so
on that the critical theorist sets to work diagnosing the present condition of
social life. The business of social criticism generally is to turn a suspicious
eye to ideological interpretations and practices that conceal from persons
the truth of their plight within an oppressive order. ‘The real social function
of philosophy’, as Horkheimer expressed it, ‘lies in its criticism of what is
prevalent’, thus on the model not of the Discourse on Method but of Marx’s
various works. While inclined toward negation, critique in this sense ‘does
not mean superficial fault-finding with individual ideas or conditions, as
though a philosopher were a crank. Nor does it mean that the philosopher
complains about this or that isolated condition and suggests remedies.’
Instead, the ‘chief aim of such criticism is to prevent mankind from losing
itself in those ideas and activities which the existing organization of society
instils into its members.’ It is to resist current ways of seeing the world by
exposing contradictions in our conceptual framework and working toward
the eventual goal, as he expressed it, of ‘man’s emancipation from slavery.’2
The ultimate aim of intellectual investigation in general, whether it be
philosophical or scientific, is less to acquire knowledge about the world
than to transform it in a particular direction. The critical theorist works
with a conception of society and history as a whole that is developing in an
identifiable direction – if not quite in the manner that dialectical materi-
alism asserted then in an approximately similar and still emancipatory
direction. History is marching on, and the theorist’s task is to place oneself
in the forefront of this movement and critique existing forms of life from
this vantage point. The ‘critical attitude’ as Horkheimer would speak of it
‘is wholly distrustful of the rules of conduct with which society as presently
constituted provides each of its members.’ Its characteristic stance is of
opposition to prevailing ways of thinking and it distrusts profoundly the
evaluative categories that are employed in a given society no less than its
institutions and practices. Its diagnosis of the present begins in Marxian
fashion with economic categories of exchange, commodity, value, and
so on, and explains the contradictions of our times as so many effects

of capitalist production. Broadly conceived, critical theory ‘says that the
basic form of the historically given commodity economy on which modern
history rests contains in itself the internal and external tensions of the
modern era; it generates these tensions over and over again in an increas-
ingly heightened form; and after a period of progress, development of
human powers, and emancipation for the individual, after an enormous
extension of human control over nature, it finally hinders further devel-
opment and drives humanity into a new barbarism.’ The critical attitude
sees our culture as declining from the comprehensive historical vantage
point that it seeks. The theorist’s task is far less to interpret hermeneuti-
cally than in myriad ways ‘to distinguish the appearance from the essence,
to examine the foundations of things, in short, really to know them.’3
The task of critical theory is not to interpret but to know, and to do so
from a point of view that far transcends what is available to ordinary persons.
This is an interdisciplinary standpoint that incorporates knowledge both
scientific (natural and social) and humanistic into a comprehensive social
theory with broad-ranging explanatory power. Philosophy and science,
evaluation and description were to form a larger unity under the aegis of
the Institute for Social Research over which Horkheimer presided. The
research that issued therefrom took for its object the condition of social life
as a totality and drew freely upon philosophy, economics, history, sociology
and other fields in ways that crossed disciplinary boundaries and blurred
distinctions of fact and value, science and evaluation. As one commen-
tator has pointed out, ‘Horkheimer, as director, often saw himself as the
synthesizer of the findings of the research conducted under the Institute’s
auspices’, as is reflected in his habit of crossing disciplinary lines with
seeming ease.4 The materialist metaphysics on which his social theory is
based itself ‘requires the unification of philosophy and science’, not in the
sense of the positivist thought that he categorically rejected but in the sense
that while the objects and methods of inquiry to some extent vary from one
field to another, critical theory ‘does not recognize any difference between
science and philosophy as such.’5
While striving for a vantage point of scientific universality and rational
objectivity, Horkheimer also emphasized that the critical theorist stands
entirely within history and culture. Theoretical reflection does not enable
one to transcend the historical moment in which one stands or occupy a
moral point of view in the Kantian sense of the term. A more limited kind
of objectivity was the critic’s goal, one that is broadly interdisciplinary,
historically informed and politically partisan. The critical theorist stands
as well within a class structure and identifies rather emphatically with

the underclass in a social order that is fundamentally hegemonic. In the
account that Horkheimer and other early figures in this school put forward,
the influence of Marx is everywhere apparent, and this includes an essen-
tially Marxian notion of immanent criticism. The critic’s gesture of protest,
Horkheimer argued, is ‘both a protest against this order of things’ and one
that is ‘generated by the order itself.’6 Critique is an altogether necessary
element in the development of a society and one that issues from a point
of view internal to it. The critic’s radicality presupposes no dubious episte-
mological claims to ahistorical or unconditioned knowledge, for ‘man the
knower is himself part of the totality, of the world and all it contains.’7
What the critical attitude presupposes is that the historical moment in
which we stand is capable of radical self-consciousness and that a capacity
for reason that belongs to all persons may reach an advanced state in the
dialectical thought of the critic. Perceiver and perceived alike are histori-
cally conditioned and no powers of self-reflection can change this fact. The
only quarter for radical criticism is to judge a given social order by one’s
own responsibility, by the standards that are contained within that order,
and by demonstrating how its actions contradict its ideals rather than ideals
that are ostensibly universal or grounded in metaphysics. Only that which
violates its own standards is a proper object of criticism. Immanent critique
is especially mindful of the tendency of many things to turn into their
opposites, as when the philosophy of the Enlightenment little resembled
the authentic enlightenment of the proletariat that critical theorists had
in mind, or when the democratic ideal deteriorates into ‘a new mythology
.â•›.â•›. in the form of popular verdicts on each and every matter, imple-
mented by all kinds of polls and modern techniques of communication.’
Democracy in a cheapened form ‘has become the sovereign force to which
thought must cater. It is a new god, not in the sense in which the heralds
of the great revolutions conceived it, namely, as a power of resistance to
existing injustice, but as a power of resistance to anything that does not
conform.’8 In the economic realm in particular, ideals show a tendency to
be transformed into counterfeits: ‘fair exchange into a deepening of social
injustice, a free economy into monopolistic control, productive work into
rigid relationships which hinder production, the maintenance of society’s
life into the pauperization of the peoples.’9
The claim to radicality, then, does not entail that critique forms a total-
izing or rationally autonomous view of its object. Theorizing never allows
one to escape one’s finitude or behold the absolute. What it does allow the
critic is a standpoint from which to identify the rootedness of a given object
in particular human interests. While all ideas are rooted in history, culture,
and interests, their claim to truth can be assessed independently of these
– especially class – interests. This is the task of the critique of ideology.
False consciousness or ideology in Horkheimer’s sense refers to ideas that
prevail in a given culture while concealing the class interests that they
serve. Liberal capitalism is a cloak for bourgeois egoism; while speaking
the language of individual freedom and the common good it turns these
values into their opposites in ways that escape the notice of most persons,
including those whose interests it violates. Behind claims of impartiality the
ideology critic unmasks sectarian interests of various kinds, most especially
the self-interest of the powerful and the affluent. To say of an idea that it
is ideological, for Horkheimer, ‘is not to say that its practitioners are not
concerned with pure truth. Every human way of acting which hides the true
nature of society, built as it is on contrarieties, is ideological, and the claim
that philosophical, moral and religious acts of faith, scientific theories,
legal maxims and cultural institutions have this function is not an attack on
the character of those who originate them but only states the objective role
such realities play in society.’ Not all illusions are ideological in this sense,
while ideas that are ‘valid in themselves’ may function ideologically if they
serve to conceal and legitimize the interests of dominant groups and the
contradictions to which their ideas and actions give rise.10 Ideology in this
sense bears not only on economic practices and their legitimation but on
the general ways in which human beings think, act and relate to each other,
including the ways in which they perceive their own interests. The critic’s
task, then, is to expose the basis of ideas within factional interests as well as
in history, and without falling into a debilitating relativism. The proletar-
iat’s own attitudes, values and tastes are as likely to be mired in an ideology
that enslaves them as the upper classes are inclined to believe what serves
them and ensures their continued domination. In both cases, to say that
their ways of perceiving and evaluating are ideological is not necessarily to
say that they are false but that they are effects of class interests.
To get a better idea of the kind of radical critique that Horkheimer had
in mind let us take a look at a few examples from his writings. In ‘The Social
Function of Philosophy’ he would ask of Descartes’ thought both the socio-
logical question, of what particular social group his philosophy is properly
viewed as an expression and more importantly what ‘decisive historical
process’ explains the philosophy and the group itself. Cartesian rationalism
reflects an economic system that depended upon ever increasing precision
in mechanistic and mathematical thinking. Radical criticism enjoins us
therefore ‘to study the productive system of those days and to show how a
member of the rising middle class, by force of his very activity in commerce
and manufacture, was induced to make precise calculations if he wished
to preserve and increase his power in the newly developed competitive
market, and the same holds true of his agents, so to speak, in science
and technology’ as well as other areas of intellectual life. In philosophy
no less than economics, ‘the given approach to the world was its consid-
eration in mathematical terms.’11 The ways of an ascending bourgeois class
pervaded the culture and brought about a general cultivation of habits
and notions that served its interests. The philosophical implications of
this pervasive historical process were what occupied Descartes and others
whose penchant for mathematical and mechanistic thinking did not arise
in a vacuum but drew upon the historical culture to which it belonged.
Related to this is the critique of instrumental rationality that Horkheimer
and other Frankfurt School theorists proffered. Here again is an ideal that
is transformed into a counterfeit. Reason, conceived since ancient times
as a fundamental mark of our humanity, is now solely an affair of calcu-
lation, prediction and gain on a model of mathematics and economics. In
modernity the rational animal is strategically clever and efficient in pursuing
its arbitrarily chosen ends. It is able to adjust means to ends profitably, not
only in the realm of production or achieving control over nature but in
all areas of life. Reason or ‘intelligence itself is becoming more like the
machine’s in that it must adapt itself to ever more precisely prescribed
tasks.’12 It must apply techniques to everything within its purview and assume
a command over nature that transforms the world itself into an object of
exploitation. ‘The complete transformation of the world into a world of
means rather than of ends is itself the consequence of the historical devel-
opment of the methods of production.’13 Under the weight of economic
imperatives reason is reduced to a technology of profit, creating a world of
exploitable objects and a life of disenchantment. The ‘iron cage’ of which
Max Weber spoke is an apt description of a state of affairs in which instru-
mental rationalization and bureaucratization reign over human existence
and ends disappear into means. Domination of nature becomes inseparable
from the domination of human beings, while ‘for all their activity men are
becoming more passive; for all their power over nature they are becoming
more powerless in relation to society and themselves.’14 A comportment of
strategic egoism and imperialism that is of economic origin reduces reason
to its antithesis, together with moral concepts of freedom, happiness,
justice, and so on. In the name of reason our basic orientation to the natural
and social world is transformed into a pervasive unreason where everything
is measured by the standard of efficiency and gain.
A related phenomenon is the culture industry of which Horkheimer

and Theodor Adorno were especially astute critics. Dialectic of Enlightenment
in particular featured an important line of criticism of what had become
of culture under the influence of twentieth-century liberal capitalism. In
their well known critique, whole realms of cultural expression had become
so many commodities to be produced and consumed without regard
for anything more meaningful than entertainment and profit. In being
reduced to the dynamics of exchange, culture became an industry and a
product to be bought and sold. Increasingly inseparable from advertising
and popular amusement, cultural works are now produced in order to be
consumed, in accordance with a formula that substitutes for originality.
‘Not only are the hit songs, stars and soap operas cyclically recurrent and
rigidly invariable types, but the specific content of the entertainment
itself is derived from them and only appears to change. The details are
interchangeable.’ Cultural and art works had become mass-produced,
stereotyped commodities without soul, consumer objects calculated to
suit the public taste and produce an optimal return for their producers
while being devoid of imagination and significance. ‘The development of
the culture industry’, they observed, ‘has led to the predominance of the
effect, the obvious touch and the technical detail over the work itself –
which once expressed an idea, but was liquidated together with the idea.’15
Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s critique demonstrated the myriad ways in
which art and culture had again been transformed into their antitheses,
imposters that are able to pass for the genuine article so long as the latter
belongs exclusively to the past.
An additional line of criticism that Horkheimer put forward concerns
the value of individuality which liberal capitalism had also appeared to
champion and which at a deeper level of analysis it cheapened and finally
destroyed. Individualism conceived as a moral and political-economic
imperative under capitalism had collapsed under the same weight as art,
culture and reason; in being taken up in an economy of exchange relations,
individuality, along with so many other values, disappeared into its opposite,
leaving only its counterfeit form to survive. Persons now undermine their
own individuality and in its own name, as the person’s needs and real
interests are systematically falsified in a social world governed by instru-
mental rationality and ‘the corporate mentality.’ In his words, ‘The less
the distinctive character of the individual plays a role in shaping his life
and the more the members of the upcoming generation become simply
functions in an increasingly planned and managed society, the more fact-
oriented, unimaginative and conformist their thinking becomes.’ Decades
after Horkheimer wrote these words, one would be hard pressed to deny
their validity. If talk of ‘the radical elimination of the individual’ is a touch
overstated, the following remarks may not be: ‘As interiority has withered
away, the joy of making personal decisions, of cultural development and of
the free exercise of imagination has gone with it. Other inclinations and
other goals mark the man of today: technological expertise, presence of
mind, pleasure in the mastery of machinery, the need to be part of and
to agree with the majority or some group which is chosen as a model and
whose regulations replace individual judgement.’16 An age of individualism
finds the person in full eclipse and replaced by the group mentality, mass
thinking, and an abject conformity that we mistake for personal fulfilment.
Despite the continuing relevance of such critiques, I shall pass over their
details. I mention them here for illustrative purposes only, and what they
illustrate is the method of immanent criticism at work. Horkheimer held
out no utopian vision for his readers and was notably circumspect on the
question of solutions to the problems he so often diagnosed. His reluctance
to offer solutions or alternatives is rooted in his conviction that theoretical
reflection, no matter how critical, cannot anticipate the specific features
of a just society or spell out in advance what consensus free persons might
reach in a classless democracy. Such an order is better described in negative
terms: it is a society without hegemony, exploitation, and the contradictions
that beset the present state of things, but the rational society is not fully
articulable theoretically. What the critical theorist can accomplish, however,
is to identify sources of progress within a society and make common cause
with them, most especially the proletariat. Critical reflection serves this
class and the aim of securing their emancipation. If reflection in general,
including the theoretical, serves particular human interests, it is the interests
of this class on behalf of which the critic advocates, since their liberation
entails the liberation of all. Since the common good and the general cause
of progress are vitally served by abolishing the class system, the critic must
side with the oppressed and endeavour ‘to hasten developments which
will lead to a society without injustice’ – including in cases where the critic
‘can find himself in opposition to views prevailing even among the prole-
tariat.’ Theoretical and critical knowledge reveals neither a utopian vision
nor political absolutes, yet it does aim to comprehend society and history
as totalities and in this light to identify strategies toward our common
emancipation. Criticism makes no claims to unconditioned objectivity even
while Horkheimer and other critical theorists would continue to speak in
somewhat essentialist terms of the ‘real meaning’ of a given phenomenon
and of ‘real social causes’ as theoretically knowable objects.17
Critical theory’s indebtedness to Marx is a source of numerous philo-

sophical difficulties, including Horkheimer’s essentialist and at times
dogmatic tendencies. The language of real meanings and objective causes
of social phenomena rests upon several unsupportable assumptions and a
totalizing perspective that Horkheimer himself abjured. The ambition to
unify philosophy and science and the claim to scientific status for social
criticism are as dubious as they are unnecessary if what we seek is a basis
for reasoned criticism of our interpretations or way of life as a whole.
Social criticism requires no exaggerated epistemological, metaphysical
or scientific claims, as his own practice as a critic well illustrates. The
examples above demonstrate Horkheimer’s considerable skill as a critic
of his times, and should one subtract from these critiques claims made in
more theoretical moments about scientific objectivity, historical progress
and deep meanings, the critiques themselves would suffer no loss. To
characterize the critique of instrumental rationality or the culture industry
as redescriptions rather than something more epistemologically ambitious
does not weaken them as criticisms or in any way undermine their validity.
To speak of them as the interpretations and judgements that they clearly
are, rather than the scientific certainties that they wish to be and are not,
in no way detracts from their force as criticism. What needs to be asked
of the scientific social critic is what special dignity do we imagine the
mantle of scientific knowledge conveys upon one’s descriptions and judge-
ments. Why suppose that what are primarily normative claims require the
confirmation of empirical science? What is it about political judgements,
apart from empty enthusiasm, that causes us to make claims for them
that we would not consider making in other areas of discourse, claims if
not to certainty then to something rather close to it or to some totalizing
standpoint that in less political moments we know better than to invoke?
Horkheimer well knew that ‘man the knower is himself part of the totality,
of the world and all it contains’ while insisting that reflection be critical,
not traditional, and that the distinction between the two is clear. That
matters are not so categorical, and that dressing up political judgements
in the language of objective science serves no purpose, are claims I would
urge against Horkheimer and some other formulations of critical theory.
On what basis would we claim, with Horkheimer, that all criticism is
immanent and, against him, that all criticism is interpretation and an
interpretation that is inseparable from tradition? The claim regarding
immanence is rooted both in phenomenology and in scepticism about the
various forms of unconditioned reflection that philosophers for centuries
have sought without success. After Nietzsche and Heidegger in particular,
it is no longer possible to deny that thinking, critical and otherwise, is

embedded within a perspective and a historical lifeworld, and no philo-
sophical or scientific powers of reflection allow us to escape this fact.
Thinking simultaneously discloses and conceals our object and invokes
a language that constitutes the object and frames any judgements we are
likely to form of it. Criticism no less than interpretation has a factical
dimension of which we easily lose sight. It is well and good to say of philoso-
phers that they have wanted to understand the world when the point is to
change it, but we neither change nor criticize what we have not first under-
stood, and understood not as a god might but in ways that are historically
contingent, linguistically mediated, perspectival and partial. Having a mind
to criticize, in a political vein or any other, neither enables nor requires us
to rise above our participation in a lifeworld. Indeed it is a form of such
participation, including when the lifeworld itself, or some aspect of it, is
our object. Rather often what we wish to critique has already constituted us.
To say this appears to many to undermine the very possibility of critique, or
one that can make a claim to rationality, yet this is an illusion.
Criticism is invariably preceded by tacit interpretations, concepts,
symbols and values that provide reflection with a fundamental orientation.
Critical awareness is never in the sovereign position of absolute distance
from its object but is embedded in every case within an ontological
preunderstanding. To suppose that through criticism we could get behind
tradition or language itself to its ‘real’ determinants is to misrepresent
both as mere adjuncts of social reality rather than the conversation that
we are and, in the case of language, the universal medium in which the
things themselves come into view. To engage in critique is always already to
have conveyed an initial intelligibility upon our object, integrated it within
a conceptual framework, and subsumed it under a universal. Explicit
criticism and judgement are subsequent to being-in-the-world and involve
the introduction of the same hermeneutical ‘as’ that belongs to interpre-
tation in general. We are speaking here not of a simple apprehension of
what presents itself to the unclouded eye but of a perception that selects
which aspects of an object are of special relevance. In social criticism the
moral-political vocabulary that we speak crucially affects which aspects of
a case we shall identify as salient and hence the judgement we form. A
normative language directs reflection in particular ways and informs what
we are likely to regard as the relevant features of moral or political cases.
It is thus far from trivial which normative language social criticism adopts,
for it disposes criticism this way or that and unconceals social reality in
ways that are far from objective. Criticism is a linguistic event, and not least
when language is our object and is asserted to be mired in ideology. This

verdict is not reached from a prelinguistic location – indeed there is no
such location – but from a particular normative vantage point, a horizon
of tacit evaluations and prejudices that simultaneously precedes, makes
possible and limits reflection. It is here that the hermeneutical dimension
of critique comes into view: against all conceptions of presuppositionless
knowledge, critical reflection, no matter how rigorous or interdisciplinary,
presupposes a set of tacit evaluations, many of which escape our notice and
are accepted uncritically. Neat separations of criticism and tradition are
possible only when we neglect the factical dimension of the former.
When we survey everything that can fairly count as acts of reasoned
criticism, including examples from Horkheimer’s work, we do not see any
transcendence of the immanent or exercises in scientific objectivity but
interpretive judgements that are often and anxiously presented otherwise.
Aspirations to objectivity and scientificity, of course, are nothing new in
political discourse, and the claims of critical theorists to have radically seen
through the subterfuge and made good on these aspirations once and for
all ring about as hollow as the similar claims of Marx and so many other
modern theorists. Underlying these claims is a longstanding and deeply
rooted anxiety about both interpretation and a conception of judgement
that is uncertain, finite and rhetorical. For so long now the idea has been
that we can and must rise above all this, and that any claim to the contrary
must lead to conservatism or relativism, that there is nothing surprising in
Horkheimer’s insistence that critical theory can deliver on Marx’s promise
of placing criticism on the secure path of a science. The promise and the
aspirations associated with it are remnants of foundationalist epistemologies
and metaphysical schemes that can no longer be taken seriously. Critique is
not a science but an art, and one that belongs to the applied side of herme-
neutics. It does not soar above tradition but is a way of participating in it.
To see this, it is generally better to look less to theoretical statements than
to the critical practice of figures like Horkheimer, whose various critiques
demonstrate the same involvement in tradition and the hermeneutical
circle, the same perspectivity, rhetoric, metaphor and narrative, the same
hermeneutical as-structure, subsumption of particulars under universals
and search for coherence as what characterizes interpretation in general.
The ‘eclipse of reason’ of which Horkheimer wrote presupposed no purely
objective or scientific grasp of Reason itself any more than the critique of
the culture industry depended on some ahistorical superinterpretation of
culture or the critique of individualism rested on anything more than a
plausible and contestable interpretation of the person and a judgement
about the life that suits it. Social theorists, including later Frankfurt School
figures, often erect elaborate superstructures for critique that the critiques
themselves do not require. The intent, of course, is to raise the discourse
above the art of interpretation and persuasion, but in the end we are left
with judgements that are no less disputable than if we had abandoned the
superstructure and declared them the interpretations that they are. The
critique of the culture industry is a story about what is happening to us,
a narrative with a moral and a warning, and it is one of the most valuable
critiques to have emerged from the Frankfurt School. Whether it has
unified the philosophical and the scientific, delivered a telling blow, or
beheld the absolute matters not at all; it is good description.
When we attend phenomenologically to the practice of criticism,
including Horkheimer’s, what we find is the same dialectical structure as
that which characterizes all hermeneutical reflection. Ricoeur spoke of this
as the dialectic of recollection and innovation, and it is a fitting description
of what we do and what happens to us in this practice. The critical attitude
recalls from tradition a conceptuality that it brings to bear upon its object
while also applying concepts imaginatively. Imagination for Ricoeur is a
linguistic capacity that responds to the need for original signification or
semantic innovation, for loosening the hold of received ways of speaking
by differently categorizing particulars and reimagining the categories
themselves. New meaning emerges when a different conceptuality is brought
to bear, and imagination is the capacity to modify perception and extend
the limits of understanding by disclosing new possibilities of interpre-
tation. In bringing hitherto disparate phenomena into sudden proximity,
for instance, imaginative predication transcends established meaning by
‘misusing’ language as it is habitually understood. While operating within
a settled order of language, metaphor in particular fashions new meaning
by creating a breach in this order. The transference of meaning from one
conceptual domain to another is not only a borrowing of terminology but
a transgression of boundaries and a violation of the normal functioning of
language, and it is a transgression and a violation on which critique directly
depends. Metaphorical language redescribes by reclassifying; in ‘mistaking’,
as it were, one thing for another, it modifies the received meaning of
concepts and reforms existing systems of classification. Disrupting the old
order makes it possible to describe what had hitherto been unexpressed
and unexpressible. It becomes intelligible to speak for the first time of
history as a class struggle, civilization as repression of desire and life as will
to power. In every case we are not grasping an essence or explaining an
effect but introducing a new application of the hermeneutical ‘as.’18
It is a profound misconception that because interpretation is embedded

within language and culture it is unable to gain any purchase for critique
when language and culture themselves are ideological. The allegation from
critical theorists that hermeneutics leaves us with an attenuated critical
capacity or an unreflective conservatism assumes that factical recollection
is not one moment of a dialectic, along with semantic innovation, but its
only moment. Historically situated, critique appropriates what is passed
down to us in tradition while also extending the horizon that we occupy
by questioning received meanings and creating new modes of disclosure.
There is no captivity within language, nor are meanings ever so settled
that we are forbidden from questioning and revising them. It is a miscon-
ception as well that recollection and innovation, tradition and critique,
stand in unvarying opposition. If the critical attitude remains oriented by
tradition, it is also capable of modifying perceptions through creative utter-
ances that open up new possibilities of meaning, that reveal what habitual
understandings conceal, and that transform what is given into what is
questionable. If it is largely the innovative dimension of critique that
introduces an attitude of suspicion, it is an attitude that is rootless unless it
arises from an historical lifeworld. Criticism remains a possibility so long as
semantic innovation, imaginative redescription, practical judgement and
dialogue about the social ills of our times remain open to us.
Critical consciousness reveals and conceals in the same gesture and in
no case amounts to total disclosure. To speak of it as interpretive disclosure
means that we are revealing not only meanings but the interests and
prejudices that underlie our way of life. Received evaluations very often
(perhaps always) conceal the interests that they serve and appear under
the guise of impartiality, just as the prejudicial structure of interpretation
operates for the most part behind our back. In both cases it falls to critical
consciousness to bring these matters to light, and without supposing that
by doing so we are revealing all and concealing nothing. To speak of objec-
tivity here or of pure disclosure is false. We are revealing neither essences
nor ‘real’ factors supposedly operating behind the facade of language
and tradition but interpretations of what lies beneath our habitual ways
of thinking. If critical interpretation aims to disclose what present under-
standings conceal, this should not be inflated into the metaphysical and
quasi-scientific view that we are moving from effects to causes, appearances
to realities, or manifest to latent meanings. If we wish to speak of criticism
as deciphering or seeing through the subterfuge, we must avoid doing so
in a way that rehabilitates essentialism yet again. Social phenomena are
underdetermined in their meaning, and as long as this is the case all talk of
objective meanings and real determinants can only amount to a dogmatic

privileging of our interpretations or an attempt to derive them from the
absolute. The language of critical deciphering and suspicious unmasking
too often leads in this direction rather than to the more phenomeno-
logically adequate view that we are interpreting meanings, all of which
are perspectival and incomplete descriptions rather than total disclosures.
This amounts to saying with Heidegger that ‘concealment, lethe, belongs to
a-letheia, not just as an addition, not as shadow to light, but rather as the
heart of aletheia.’19 Disclosing and concealing are dialectically correlative
moments in interpretation, be it critical, traditional or otherwise.
We can agree with Horkheimer that ‘[t]he real social function of
philosophy lies in its criticism of the present’ so long as we do not
inflate this sentiment into an impossible metaphysical and epistemological
position – a position that Horkheimer at times gestured toward without
going as far down the path as Marx before him or Habermas after him.
We can still aim at the emancipation of humanity from whatever blinding
prejudices we believe them to suffer from or from the factional interests
that underlie our habitual interpretations and evaluations, so long as we
do not suppose that we shall rid ourselves thereby of all prejudices and
all interests or that the critic’s task is ‘to distinguish the appearance from
the essence.’ There are no essences to be grasped, only interpretations
standing behind interpretations. Critical reflection in every case reveals
one among many possible meanings. Under the best of circumstances, it
is carried out in a fallibilist spirit and remains aware that the metaphors
and narratives that it constructs are partial descriptions that conceal other
possible modes of disclosure. All too often it becomes so enamoured with
its constructions that it mistakes a contingent way of seeing for objective
explanation and metaphors for literal truths. It is not only traditional
speech that can harden into dogma; the tendency to idolize its judgements
and to close itself off from discussion is not unknown in the discourse
that characterizes itself as critical or on the political left. When interpreta-
tions become scientific explanations, moral perceptions become moral
facts, and political judgements become world-historical necessities, we
may suspect that something has gone wrong in the argument and that the
critical attitude itself has turned into its opposite.
Criticism calls upon us to change our perceptions even while nothing
compels us to do so – no foundational knowledge or ‘real’ factors
operating behind the back of language. We may speak of the things
themselves compelling interpretation in one fashion or another, but
even here there is always liberty in how we do this. Because meaning is
inexhaustible, interpretation leads to no final pronouncement but to more

interpretation, a perpetual retelling of what things mean for us and what
they might yet mean. What is described may always be described otherwise
and indeed must be if language is to be a living language and if our culture
is to be a conversation that is ongoing. Critical interpretation can speak of
sectarian interests functioning beneath the surface of our practices; it can
speak as well of a will to power underlying our values, or of any number
of meanings underlying any other number. It can shed light this way and
that, but it cannot reveal meaning without concealing another. It can be as
suspicious and as radical as one likes, but it cannot remove its perceptions
from the discussion on grounds of special insight. The critical attitude can
also serve an iconoclastic function, reminding us when our ideals have
deteriorated into idols and of the partiality of all our ideas. It can provoke
current ways of perceiving and see through the false certainty of many a
belief without deteriorating into pure negation. Since everything that can
be understood can be reimagined, in principle there is nothing preventing
every aspect of our lifeworld from falling under the critic’s gaze, and if not
all at once then piece by piece. If it remains that the basic orientation of
understanding involves a striving for agreement, we must not imagine that
our agreements are so settled that they cannot or ought not be unsettled,
as many critics of hermeneutics are correct in reminding us. Seeing differ-
ently and in the spirit of critique defines our participation in a lifeworld no
less than any simple assent to the beliefs of our predecessors.
There is no opposition between interpretation and critique, nor is the
separation of traditional and critical theory as clear as Horkheimer asserted.
Our involvement in tradition must indeed be critical, but too often this has
been taken to mean that thought cannot stand opposed to its object without
standing at an impossible distance from it. If there is no standpoint that
is outside language and culture, this undermines the capacity for criticism
only if we are still dreaming of a critique that pronounces the last word on
its object from a standpoint of unconditioned reason. Immanent criticism
is all that is possible and all that is needed to shed light on what must be
attested to in any age – the abiding self-regard in our interpretations and
evaluations and the workings of power in everything that we do and are.
So far is hermeneutics from undermining critique that we must regard the
latter itself as a form of interpretation that operates in every case within
the hermeneutical circle and that looks back and forth from particular to
universal in a dialectic without beginning or end. Our disagreement with
Horkheimer, then, is less pronounced than that which separated Gadamer
and Habermas. The latter’s claims regarding critical self-reflection were far
more ambitious than Horkheimer’s and more vulnerable to the charges

that hermeneuticists have directed at them. Horkheimer’s separation of
traditional and critical theory may be too neat, his ambition to distinguish
effects from causes and appearances from essences too metaphysical, and
his talk of progressive social forces a touch mythical, but where he was not
mistaken was in regarding critique as immanent to the lifeworld in which
it operates.
Chapter 8
Deliberative Politics
Jürgen Habermas
The debate between hermeneutics and Habermasian critical theory lies

in the background of the present study, the focus of which is Habermas’
recent work in the field of democratic theory. This work follows a trajectory
that began in the 1960s at the time when Habermas articulated his critique
of Truth and Method while applying it in a new direction. The most influ-
ential normative theory of democracy to emerge in the last couple of
decades goes under the name of deliberative democracy. While this theory
takes several forms, Habermas’ formulation is undoubtedly one of the most
important, the centrepiece of which is the notion of public deliberation.1
In his view, the ultimate grounds of democratic legitimacy are the collective
deliberations of the public, deliberations that are conceived in terms of a
somewhat idealized set of procedures. The analysis that follows provides
an assessment of deliberative politics in its Habermasian formulation
which recalls the debate with hermeneutics. I wish to argue that despite its
considerable merits, deliberative democracy is vulnerable to a similar line
of criticism to that which Gadamer advanced in that earlier debate.
Habermas has defended a conception of deliberative democracy that is
intermediate between liberal and communitarian views, one that remains
consistent with his earlier research on such themes as the public sphere,
the critique of ideology, communicative rationality and discourse ethics.
Briefly stated, Habermas’ model seeks to provide a rational basis for
democracy by appealing to a conception of public deliberation. The
conduct of democratic institutions is legitimate and rational in the event
that it represents the outcome of procedures of public reasoning. As
he expresses it in Between Facts and Norms, ‘practical reason no longer
resides in universal human rights, or in the ethical substance of a specific
community, but in the rules of discourse and forms of argumentation that
borrow their normative content from the validity basis of action oriented to
reaching understanding. In the final analysis, this normative content arises
from the structure of linguistic communication and the communicative
mode of sociation.’ Habermas’ proceduralism is reminiscent of the earlier
notion of an ideal speech situation, conceived as a hypothetical ideal of
Deliberative Politics 137
open-ended and egalitarian communication oriented toward rational

consensus, or a consensus based not on power but on an appeal to superior
arguments and generalized interests. To count as rational, participation in
democratic decision-making must be oriented not egoistically or strategi-
cally but by impartial processes of collective ‘opinion formation’ and ‘will
formation’ which are generalizable in nature. In the background here is
Habermas’ distinction between strategic and communicative action and
the modes of rationality proper to each. Strategic or instrumental ration-
ality (the capacity to identify efficient means of realizing given individual
ends) differs in important ways from communicative rationality which
seeks understanding and consensus, is free of power – particularly in
the form of ideology or systematic distortion of our linguistic and social
practices – and ‘is motivated solely by the unforced force of the better
argument.’2 Democratic deliberations are rational so long as they conform
to standards of argumentation such as the principle of universalization or
‘ideal role-taking.’3 Habermas modifies the essentially Kantian idea of a
universalization test into a transcendental-pragmatic theory of argumen-
tation. As he writes: ‘Under the pragmatic presuppositions of an inclusive
and noncoercive rational discourse among free and equal participants,
everyone is required to take the perspective of everyone else, and thus
project herself into the understandings of self and world of all others;
from this interlocking of perspectives there emerges an ideally extended
we-perspective from which all can test in common whether they wish to
make a controversial norm the basis of their shared practice.’4 On this
conception of ‘public reason’, principles are valid if they could generate
genuinely uncoerced consensus under conditions of rational discourse.
As fellow critical theorist Seyla Benhabib states, ‘According to the
deliberative model of democracy, it is a necessary condition for attaining
legitimacy and rationality with regard to collective decision-making
processes in a polity that the institutions of this polity are so arranged that
what is considered in the common interest of all results from processes
of collective deliberation conducted rationally and fairly among free and
equal individuals.’5 Collective deliberation procedures require that political
discussion be at once egalitarian, public and inclusive, free of coercion,
rationally motivated, impartial, and occur in the form of argumentation
or, as Habermas puts it, ‘through the regulated exchange of information
and reasons among parties who introduce and critically test proposals.’6
Habermas sharply distinguishes rational from merely factual consensus,
the former alone having a claim to democratic legitimacy. ‘Everything
depends’, in his words, ‘on the conditions of communication and the
procedures that lend the institutionalized opinion- and will-formation their

legitimating force.’ Public reason properly so called constitutes an ‘ideal
procedure for deliberation and decision-making’ and comprises ‘rules of
discourse and forms of argumentation that derive their normative content
from the validity-basis of action oriented to reaching understanding, and
ultimately from the structure of linguistic communication.’7 While no few
obstacles exist to democratic deliberation thus conceived, for Habermas
such obstacles are merely empirical and accordingly, in principle at least,
eliminable. The locations in which Habermas envisions such discourse
coming to pass include ‘parliamentary bodies, on the one hand, and in
the informal networks of the public sphere, on the other.’ He continues:
‘Both within and outside parliamentary bodies geared to decision-making,
these subjectless modes of communication form arenas in which a more or
less rational opinion- and will-formation concerning issues and problems
affecting society as a whole can take place. Informal opinion-formation
result in institutionalized election decisions and legislative decrees through
which communicatively generated power is transformed into administra-
tively utilizable power.’8 Habermas calls for a radical expansion of public
fora of deliberation and informal networks of communication while
applauding the ‘new social movements’ of the left which, he believes, often
put this ideal into practice.
Despite its centrality to deliberative democracy, the concept of public
deliberation itself has received relatively scant attention from a majority of
theorists in this field. As one such theorist has remarked, ‘For all the talk of
deliberation among democratic theorists, few tell us what it actually is. Too
many proponents of deliberation [among whom he includes Habermas]
are satisfied with merely describing some very general procedural condi-
tions and rules. Often it is thought to be sufficient to show that deliberation
fulfils the requirements of political equality by maximizing the opportu-
nities for deliberation and the number of citizens who take advantage of
them. Although this is certainly true, there is little discussion of what makes
deliberation public, what it can really accomplish, and when it is actually
successful.’9 The basic deliberationist ideal is that public policy must be
fashioned in ways that are acceptable and justifiable to people affected by
them on an equal basis, while also meeting the more general requirements
of fashioning an orderly and egalitarian public sphere. In his writings on
both deliberative democracy and discourse ethics, Habermas often speaks
of that to which persons could (hypothetically) agree, in a sense that is
ambiguously intermediate between that to which they should rationally
agree (according to the theorist, reasoning monologically) and that to
which, as a matter of fact, they do agree. The ambiguity is troubling. Any

political theorist would maintain that policies justified by their method
‘could’ be accepted by all citizens, if only they were rational. The decidedly
hypothetical language of capability or potentiality risks watering down the
original promise of deliberative politics, which is not that citizens (real
persons) ‘could’ accept a given policy but that they actually would and will.
What does it add to solitary reflection to say that real persons ‘could’ agree
to its conclusions?
It is an important matter whether public deliberation is regarded as a
real or ideal (actual or counterfactual) mode of discourse. It has been
customary for well over a century for democratic theorists to call for
increased public deliberation and (real) participation in politics – one
thinks, for instance, of John Stuart Mill and especially John Dewey, no
less than Habermas – yet it is a call that at the present time is often highly
formalized and restricted to participation of a rather specific kind. In its
Habermasian formulation, deliberative democracy makes large demands
of political deliberators, including the bracketing of a great many beliefs,
values and attitudes that characterize our particularity as individuals and
as members of a culture. What counts as a potentially convincing reason
in political deliberation is restricted to a rather narrow range of utter-
ances relative to what typically passes for democratic argumentation, and is
limited to judgements that pass certain ideal procedures or argumentative
rules which under real-world conditions are, to say the least, difficult to
satisfy. The formalization and rationalization of the concept of public delib-
eration make it eminently questionable whether anything that currently
passes, or has ever passed, for democracy is the genuine article. As James
Bohman remarks, the ‘ideal approach’ that Habermas puts forward ‘.â•›.â•›.
makes it difficult to connect normative political theory to the practices of
actual democracies and to real possibilities for democratic reform.’10 This
approach makes it especially odd that Habermas should look to either
parliamentary institutions, new social movements of the left or ‘informal
networks of the public sphere’ as fora for public deliberation, given the
less than Spinozian rigour one typically observes in their deliberations, if
indeed ‘deliberations’ is a suitable term.
If a degree of idealism and rationalism is detectable in the concept of
public deliberation that is the centrepiece of deliberative democracy, it
is owing to the numerous differences between the ideal of deliberation
and democratic politics as it is, or could ever be, practised under real-
world conditions. Habermasian deliberation is a well-ordered, formalistic,
argumentative, inclusive and egalitarian form of discourse. It presupposes
a common orientation toward generalizable interests, the renunciation of

strategic action and particularity, a general understanding and acceptance
of the rules of rational discourse, a commitment to justice that super-
sedes the will to power and appropriate fora in which such deliberations
may occur. It requires a renunciation of rhetoric and the usual antics of
partisan politics, an advanced degree of good will, tolerance and respect
for all opinions and differences and acceptance of the legitimacy of
majority decisions with which one personally disagrees. The conditions
of deliberation so conceived are still more stringent than deliberation
in its ordinary connotations. Jury deliberation, for instance, places upon
individuals a great many demands which are already more stringent than
the requirements of ordinary political participation. Deliberation in this
form presupposes not only an appropriate institutional structure and
commitment to egalitarian discourse but agreement with respect to ends,
an absence of private agendas, knowledge of the evidence and any relevant
laws, a capacity to discern degrees of relevance and to see through lawyerly
sophistry, an advanced degree of disinterest, and so on. Even personal
deliberation presupposes a level of knowledge and self-knowledge, a more
or less stable set of values, an array of options and a capacity for intelligent
choice, among other things. Public deliberation requires many of the same
conditions and far more.
The idealism I have noted becomes visible when we consider the possi-
bility of these conditions becoming translated into practice. It is perhaps
not an accident that Habermas should prefer to limit his focus to large
questions of political epistemology rather than to matters more pragmatic,
given the obvious difficulty of applying this formalized epistemology to the
real world of democracy.11 Some of the more obvious difficulties with the
deliberative model include the possibility of political discourse meeting
conditions of strict impartiality, equality and inclusivity, rational argumen-
tation, communicative action or even good will or the priority of the will
to justice over the will to power. Democratic discourse is no graduate
seminar in political philosophy, and characterizing it as deliberation in
the sense in which we have been speaking of it dramatically understates
the deep conflicts and complexities that invariably belong to the realm
of politics. Consider, for instance, the apparently minimal requirement
of commitment to reasoned argumentation in a spirit of disinterest and
good will. Do we expect this from speakers ‘deliberating’ across ideological
boundaries, or in many cases even within them? Do liberals and Marxists,
for example, deliberate together in a spirit of dispassionate argumentation,
or feminists and religious conservatives? Do they attend one another’s
conferences, read one another’s literature or even speak to each other

rather than past each other? Might they?
Habermas’ reply is that obstacles to public deliberation are merely
empirical, that there is no necessity for them, and that in principle they
are eliminable. The reply has optimism on its side, but it is the optimism
of the rationalist and the utopian. It is precisely because political speech
and action, particularly when they occur on a mass scale, seldom resemble
authentic deliberation that we have parliamentary legislatures – to create a
quasi-agent that can do (or at least mimic) what the general public cannot:
deliberate in this sense. Even there, however, deliberation is not exactly
what political representatives do when they engage each other in debate.
Strategic action, political struggle, grandstanding and adolescent point-
scoring are often more accurate descriptions of parliamentary debate than
deliberation, descriptions that apply equally to the new social movements
to which Habermas and many others look as exemplars of public deliber-
ation. There as well, the mode of political utterance one frequently detects
belongs to the struggle for power and strategic action masquerading as
communicative action.
The idealizing and rationalizing tendency of deliberative democracy
is as old as the philosophical tradition itself, with deep roots in Plato’s
celebrated critique of the Sophists and repeated in endless variation
throughout the history of Western thought. At bottom it is the sentiment
that if only we could sanitize language and get everyone to follow the
rules then at last we could endorse what passes for truth or justice in such
conversation. If only the Sophists would dispense with their rhetoric and
engage in the true science of dialectic, if only we could wipe the slate of
belief clean and think on the basis of clear and distinct ideas alone, if only
we could conceal from citizens their nongeneralizable interests and their
particularity, then at last reason would have its day. Habermas takes up this
tradition and calls for greater public deliberation – provided such delibera-
tions bracket partiality, private ends, particular identities, inequalities, the
will to power, strategic action, ill will, desire, rhetoric, culture and tradition.
Then at last we could embrace whatever consensus such deliberations
produce. If the demos will not follow the rules – as alas they do not – then
we shall take flight to a realm of idealizations and counterfactuals; we shall
distinguish what people agree to from what they ‘would’ or ‘could’ agree
to if only they were rational and played by the rules.
Is it mere pessimism to suppose that much of what Habermas would
eliminate from democratic discourse is ineliminable and that obstacles
to public deliberation so conceived are more than merely empirical or
accidental features of politics as it is currently practised, that such features

are universal and perhaps ontological? Let us examine a few of the
obstacles that Habermas identifies. The list – and it is a long one – includes
much or all of what constitutes our particularity as moral agents: our forms
of life, tradition, nonuniversalizable values, customary or shared judge-
ments, as well as our private will and identity. It includes further everything
associated with the will to power: the imperative to prevail, to exert
influence, strategize, struggle and desire. Each of these is to be bracketed
from reflection through the application of deliberative procedures. Yet
what if these obstacles to reflection are simultaneously its conditions of
possibility? When one transports oneself into ‘the moral point of view’,
however formalistically conceived, is it not precisely oneself that is trans-
ported? One is not, by means of procedures or techniques of reflection,
divested of all standpoint and orientation but that afforded by the proce-
dures themselves, any more than historical consciousness transports us into
alien horizons incommensurable with our own time and place. Political
deliberation is never without a fundamental orientation that conditions,
predisposes and limits reflection in a particular fashion, that uncovers
and conceals social phenomena in non-objective ways. Even if we were to
succeed in bracketing from reflection who we ourselves are, it would be far
from obvious what relevance such reflection would have for us.
If Habermasian deliberation would eliminate all vestiges of strategic
action, ideology and power-seeking in its myriad forms, how likely is it
that we could ever satisfy this condition – that we could, for instance,
eliminate self-interest and the motivation to prevail in a sense that is not
of strict impartiality? What we routinely observe in democratic politics is
not the primacy of communicative action or impartial collective ‘opinion
and will formation’ but their veritable antitheses: politicians as entrepre-
neurs, parties as agents of specific factions or voting blocs, and activism
as an openly strategic mode of action whose modus operandi is closer to
intimidation than egalitarian conversation. There is as much strategizing,
sophistry and sheer noise in democratic discourse as either public delib-
eration, impartial will formation or even negotiation. Actually existing
democracy is unkempt, not especially principled, and beholden to person-
ality, and while there is nothing new or objectionable in wishing it radically
otherwise, expecting it to become so – even as a counterfactual thought
experiment – is a dream akin to the classless society or the peaceable
kingdom. Conceiving of deliberative democracy as a reality, as capable
of becoming one, or as a criterion of legitimacy does not bolster the
democratic idea but idolizes it and undermines it in the same gesture.
If the fundamental idea of deliberative democracy is that politics ought

not be a mere matter of tallying preferences but that we may justifiably
expect political officeholders to justify policies to the people who are
affected by them, and beyond this that we ought to maximize oppor-
tunities for discussion among officeholders and citizens alike, there is
undoubtedly much in the idea that is plausible and attractive.12 In the end,
however, one must decide whether one believes in democratic discussion
or one does not. Democracy and rationalism do not mix. Democratic
speech is a thing of this world; it cannot be made to follow the rules of
Habermasian (or any other formalist) argumentation, and ‘ideology’ and
‘systematic distortion’ remain permanent, ineliminable possibilities. Efforts
to combine democratic discussion with formalist argumentation typically
give rise to the following line of argument. First, the theorist proposes
the need for public deliberation, in contrast to simple aggregation or
utilitarian preference-tallying. However, worries quickly ensue: what about
hegemony, ideology, systematic distortion, irrationality, rhetoric, appeals to
emotion or mere sophistry? The solution is to replace real discourse with
ideal discourse. If the people themselves will not follow the rules of rational
argumentation we shall invent hypothetical deliberators who will. If this
manoever is too idealistic or rationalistic, we shall reintroduce elements
of real discourse and speak no longer of what citizens rationally should or
factually do agree to but of that to which they ‘could’ or are ‘capable’ of
agreeing.13
Any political theorist could argue that the citizens of their ideal state
‘could’ or have ‘reason to accept’ it. To be plausible, the theory of delib-
erative democracy must not lose touch with the practice that is actually
existing political discourse. If democracy is to be a thing of this world and
not a philosopher’s fiction, it cannot incorporate rationalist epistemology.
In the end, one must decide whether one believes in ordinary forms of
political dialogue or one does not. While it is eminently reasonable to wish
for a higher level of political discussion, something dubious happens when
theorists begin to speak of ‘public deliberation’ as an ideal, a slide from
an aspiration – a bit of political mythos – to an epistemology. Philosophers
have always aspired to deliver us from mythos to logos, but in the case of
democracy a bit of caution is in order.
Should we wish to speak of democracy as a politics of deliberation, we
ought to regard this more as an aspiration than as a normative ideal in
the usual sense. Theorizing democracy may well serve not only the usual
function of theory construction but an imaginative purpose as well: to allow
us to aspire and to dream. What it must not do is become otherworldly
or lose touch with the practice of actually existing democracy. It must not
in its imaginings lose sight of the fact that the democratic idea must be
applicable in practice if it is to be at all useful. If there is a sense in which
democracy is indeed ‘to come’, as Jacques Derrida has put it, it remains
that it is also here and now; indeed it is, as Nietzsche would say, ‘human,
all too human.’ If regarded as a trope or a plea, a bit of political reverie
perhaps, deliberative democracy is entirely unobjectionable; however this
is not how Habermas presents the idea. Were it so regarded, deliberative
democracy may serve not only as a worthy ideal but indeed as a reminder
of liberal democracy’s own animating spirit, in spite of the fact that it is
presented as an alternative to it. It may well serve to remind liberals of the
originally emancipatory and participatory spirit of liberal politics – that is,
before liberalism emerged as the dominant political form of modernity
and, rather quickly thereafter, became moribund. As such a reminder,
or perhaps corrective, it provides a useful and attractive account of the
democratic idea. It runs aground, however, when it is transformed into a
new form of political rationalism.
As mentioned, public deliberation as Habermas conceives of it is oriented
solely by ‘the unforced force of the better argument’, where argumentation
is a formalistic operation of thought that is free not only of ideology but
of rhetoric as well. There is nothing unusual in this. Political philosophy
from its inception has endeavoured to sanitize the language of politics in
both its theoretical and practical forms, and is consistent with efforts in
other areas of philosophical inquiry to separate decisively knowledge from
opinion, rational speech from the irrational, emotive or merely popular.
The aspiration of many a political theorist has long been to domesticate
epistemically the beast that is political speech, and most especially democratic
speech. The warnings of Plato and Aristotle regarding the unruliness of a
politics of the demos continue to ring in the ears of contemporary theorists,
including those professing an unwavering commitment to democracy. Many
political thinkers of the present are no less concerned to demarcate truth,
or something closely resembling it, from the merely reasonable, probable
or persuasive to ordinary minds – for, as we are never permitted to forget,
what an electoral majority deems persuasive may be so much ideology,
systematic distortion or manifest nonsense. Even political philosophers who
have rejected foundationalism, undergone the linguistic turn, or even flirted
with the postmodern typically share a profound and age-old disquiet in the
face of the despised other of political philosophy: political rhetoric.
While rhetoric, as a matter of historical fact, belongs with politics and
political philosophy from their beginnings, and while political theorists,
wedded as they have long been to ideals of formal and rigorous argumen-
tation, have more than occasionally strayed into the rhetorical domain, it
remains among the fundamental aspirations of political theory – including
Habermas’ – to reject this ill-reputed mode of speech. It is no exaggeration,
however, to characterize the entire history of political philosophy as one of
repeated unfaithfulness to its own anti-rhetorical ideal. It is worth noting
that the most devastating critic of the Athenian rhetoricians was himself
among the most skilled of ancient writers in the art of rhetoric, employing
the form of the dialogue, metaphor and mythic prose with an artfulness
that readers of Plato have never ceased to admire. Political theorists from
Plato’s time to our own have been at once disdainful of rhetoric and skilled
in its execution, never failing to have recourse to one or another tropology
at strategic points in their argumentation. Yet the idea persists that we may
and ought to aspire to a political philosophy, and possibly even a politics,
that is free of rhetoric – and indeed, not only this, but one that is free of
ideology, domination, strategic action, prejudice, partiality, particularity,
and so on. Habermas is but one example of a contemporary political
theorist in whose work this idea persists, imagining a day when political
speech may be rid of all these distorting factors and more. Political speech
would then constitute a thoroughly civilized, well-regulated and impartial
form of deliberation wherein everyone followed the rules of rational
argumentation and all empirical obstacles to the formation of a public will
were overcome. What if, however, such obstacles are not merely empirical,
perhaps indeed not obstacles at all, or not only this, but conditions of the
possibility of political speech itself?
The premise of Habermas’ political epistemology is that it is possible
to disentangle normative content from the rhetorical form in which it
appears. Habermas is hardly alone in this view; indeed, the weight of
tradition is decidedly on his side. After well over a century of philosophical
investigation into the fundamental intimacy of thought and language, and
an increasing appreciation of language as a living and eminently human
– indeed, ‘all too human’ – phenomenon, one might have expected that
theories of democracy in which language so centrally figures would have
gained a more adequate appreciation of the living character of political
language and thought. The phenomenon that is language, as we now
know, is far broader than any mere formalism of rules or structural neces-
sities. Heidegger and Gadamer in particular have taught us to see language
as comparable to a worldview, a universal medium in which phenomena in
general come into view and, precisely as living language, as an unending
process of question and answer, assertion and reply, and dialogical
reciprocity. Language is forever in motion; it is a conversation that we join

in midstream and that, while oriented toward consensus, never reaches a
condition of finality. As Nietzsche and many of his postmodern heirs have
also impressed upon us, and sometimes overdramatized, human language
is not the altogether orchestrated and well-regulated affair that deliberative
democrats like Habermas describe it as being or capable of becoming. In
democratic speech we encounter not only oases of genuine public deliber-
ation but struggle, desire, domination, will to power, mythology, resentment,
communicative incompetence, lunacy, bombast and sheer noise. All of this
is no less of the essence of democratic speech than its nobler aspect and is
found everywhere that democratic institutions exist or have ever existed.
Consider, to take but one instance, what invariably happens to political
discussion as it is oriented toward the masses, as befits the major portion of
such discussion within contemporary mass society. Here I am reminded of
Sigmund Freud’s hypothesis regarding group psychology and its universal
tendency toward regression. Is there not a linguistic counterpart to this
phenomenon which even those untrained in the art of suspicion may
readily see? Consider some of the conditions of ordinary dialogue that are
more or less held in abeyance in the usual course of democratic speech
aimed at a mass public: a degree of consensus between speakers, or one
that is found with relative ease; a common language and horizon of
understanding within which agreements and disagreements alike become
meaningful; relative ease in orienting discussion toward a communicative
rather than strategic orientation; agreed upon terms of description and
evaluative standards; a shared sense of the problem or question before us;
an inclination to speak to each other rather than past each other for the
purpose of impressing a mass audience; dialogical responsibility (meaning
the obligation to respond directly to the claim of one’s interlocutor rather
than skirt round it for a strategic purpose); a degree of good will; and the
capacity to listen. Indeed here even the elementary art of listening is in
short supply, where listening involves not merely the strategic posture of
registering another’s claim as a necessary prelude to destroying it, but an
openness to the possibility, however improbable, of learning.
If Habermas’ reply is that this other side of political speech is merely
an empirical obstacle which may be removed through the application
of rational procedures, it is perhaps more than pessimism that gives us
pause here. How plausible is it, for instance, to regard as a mere contin-
gency the will to power within political discourse? What are the prospects
of effectively subordinating this will to the will to justice or impartiality?
In the wake of Nietzsche or Foucault, this proposition appears unlikely.
Nietzsche regarded the will to power, correctly in my view, as no accidental

property of human psychology but as belonging fundamentally to the
ontological condition of human existence. More fundamentally, desire
– not only the desire to heed the common good but to convince others
of the truth of one’s beliefs – belongs to the basic orientation of political
speech. If Habermas is correct to draw attention to its cognitive dimension,
he is mistaken in overlooking, or regarding as a contingency, its essential
affectivity.
Not only the affectivity of democratic speech but its fundamentally
rhetorical character are regarded by Habermas and many other delib-
erationists as unfortunate accompaniments of argumentation proper, and
eradicable in principle. Again, the weight of tradition is on their side,
yet what do we invariably find as we scratch the surface of democratic
argumentation? The first item we encounter is a narrative structure, a trope
that immediately announces our entry into the rhetorical domain. It is an
‘historical’ narrative – one, moreover, of dubious accuracy: democracy, we
are told, had its origin in a golden age at the dawn of Western civilization,
an age that was followed by two inglorious millennia of dormancy before
its celebrated rebirth in the modern period and final triumph of 1989.
Democracy also belongs within a still larger narrative frame: a metanar-
rative of emancipation and progressive equality encompassing everything
from biblical mythology to the modern Enlightenment to the various
emancipatory movements of the twentieth century. Democracy legitimates
itself not only by means of principled argumentation but by recounting
history in a particular way, locating itself within a world-historical saga
which contains an unmistakable teleological dimension. Would we wish to
say, then, that the narrative quality of democracy, or its rhetorical tropology
more generally, is extraneous to the matter of its rational justification? The
more general question is whether the narrative and rhetorical qualities of
democratic speech are mere contingencies or whether they do not rather
belong to its fundamental structure.
That the dichotomy of philosophy (or reason) and rhetoric is false
is entailed by the intimacy of language and thought that hermeneutics
has brought to our attention. If we increasingly speak of the mutual
dependency of thought and language, reason and desire, theory and
practice, it should come as no surprise should we now speak of the funda-
mentally rhetorical nature of philosophy itself. ‘The new rhetoric’, as it
has come to be called, challenges the age-old separation of philosophy
as a discipline whose object is truth and whose means are deductive and
inductive reasoning, and rhetoric whose object is linguistic forms and
their applications in written prose and public speaking.14 The new rhetoric
affirms the productive philosophical significance of language and linguistic
imagination, including the fundamental significance of metaphor and
narrative in various fields of philosophical reflection. As language has
assumed an increasingly visible presence in contemporary philosophy, and
its relation to thought, understanding and reason better conceived, the
discipline of rhetoric as well has come to understand its own profound
connection to reason and truth.15 Contemporary philosophy (some of
it) and rhetoric alike have gained a more fundamental realization of
the intimacy of word and object, the inseparability of form and content,
and the legitimacy of what Gadamer has called ‘the probable, the eikos
(verisimilar), and that which is convincing to the ordinary reason against
the claim of science to accept as true only what can be demonstrated and
tested!’16 The decline of foundationalism has entailed broadening the
scope of rational speech to include not only that which admits of proof
but what is reasonable and convincing within argumentation or persuasive
speech broadly conceived. This encompassing of the rhetorical domain
within philosophy, or overlapping and interpenetration of themes between
these two formerly separate disciplines, is a consequence not only of the
failure of foundationalism but of the phenomenological stance that accen-
tuates the situated, perspectival and dialogical nature of reason while also
accenting in the study of politics, in Chaim Perelman’s words, ‘the manner
in which the most diverse authors in all fields do in fact reason about
values.’17
Consider as a case in point the fundamental importance of metaphor
and narrative in both political and philosophical discourse more generally.
Important advances in thought never fail to invoke a novel tropology
that logically precedes and structures argumentation, argumentation that
unfolds within an interpretive framework that is itself a product of
linguistic imagination and rhetorical invention. Metaphor and narrative
are pre-theoretic constructions that gain acceptance not through formally
demonstrative reasoning but by inventively synthesizing human experience
in ways that are illuminating, evocative, profound, or at any rate different.
Political theorists never fail to invoke a tropology in advancing their
arguments, including all those who profess a disdain for rhetoric in
general, and this includes Habermas. This figure appears in many ways
to personify the anti-rhetorical ideal. Here at last, it seems, is a political
theorist faithful to the ideal of argumentation that is free not only of
rhetorical artifice but of distortion, ideology, manipulation and passion,
the cold voice of reason itself. Habermas himself encourages this reading
by dwelling on the cognitive, argumentative and formalistic dimension of

discourse and warning of the corruptive power of language and the danger
of systematically distorted communication. What do we find, however, in
Habermas’ political writings but a narrative – not, to be sure, the classical
liberal tale of the state of nature and the social contract, but an ‘historical’
narrative more powerful still. This is what Ricoeur has called the narrative
or tradition of emancipation, ‘that of liberating acts, of the Exodus and the
Resurrection’, and extending into the modern period of Enlightenment,
liberal politics, Marxism, feminism and other ways of thinking that under-
stand themselves as emancipatory. ‘Perhaps’, as Ricoeur has noted, ‘there
would be no more interest in emancipation, no more anticipation of
freedom, if the Exodus and the Resurrection were effaced from the
memory of mankind.’18 If Habermas would be loath to situate deliberative
democracy or his larger critical theory of society in a narrative stemming
from the Old Testament, it remains that the rhetorical force and meaning
of the emancipation that critical theory has long promised stem not only
from an ethical-political narrative but from the oldest such narrative in the
history of the West. Consider as well the basic problematic that animates
Habermas’ entire project: We, the masses of the late modern capitalist
West, are victims of ideology; our practices and consciousness are products
of domination of which we are largely unaware; yet we must not fear, for
there is a path to enlightenment; enlightenment brings emancipation, and
by the grace of good fortune there are certain individuals who are suffi-
ciently enlightened as to show the rest of us the way. If Habermas does not
tell us that we have nothing to lose but our chains, he couches a promise of
emancipation in a more contemporary tropology – one that speaks of ‘the
inclusion of the other’ and promises an end to ideology.
Gadamer’s view that ‘the ubiquity of rhetoric, indeed, is unlimited’ is not
to be taken as disparaging or a comment on the frailty of human reason
but in the true spirit of phenomenology.19 ‘Rhetoric is the universal form
of human communication, which even today determines our social life in
an incomparably more profound fashion than does science.’20 There is no
eliminating rhetoric from public deliberation, no matter what procedures
of reflection are brought to bear. In the realm of politics Gadamer’s obser-
vation is especially difficult to deny, yet deny it, heatedly and in one voice,
is what political philosophy has done since its inception. If Habermas and
other deliberative democrats are correct in asserting that it is necessary to
choose between discourse and violence, they err in inflating the distinction
into a full-fledged dichotomy wherein public deliberation is a sanitized
and potentially power-free enterprise. Democratic speech in real-world
conditions is far too agonistic and rhetorical ever to satisfy Habermas’

ideal. The words and deeds of political actors are oriented toward the art
of persuasion, bringing others around rhetorically to one’s way of thinking,
and seeing one’s own values reflected in public institutions as much as it is
toward public-spiritedness. Indeed, public-spiritedness or civic-mindedness
itself, where it is not a rationalist fiction but an achievable ideal, is inher-
ently confrontational and implicated in the will to power. Deliberationists
like Habermas are caught in a bind: they are proponents of informal
networks of public discussion of which as rationalists they must take a very
dim view. They are democrats who do not believe in democracy, or any
democracy that could ever exist on earth.
As I argued in Chapter 2, there is a conception of communicative
reason that can renounce the more brutal forms of the will to power
without becoming yet another form of rationalism, a discursive practice
that is rhetorical, agonistic and far from utopian, but that is symmetrically
structured and oriented toward reciprocity. The conception of reason of
which democracy may well stand as a symbol is the reason that is inherent
in ordinary dialogue, including that which does not conform to formalist
paradigms of thought but that draws upon ordinary capacities of practical
judgement, social criticism, persuasion, reason-giving and negotiation.
This is a nonformalist rationality, the principal features of which are
openness to communication and learning, a willingness to offer and
receive criticism and to test its convictions against opposing values. It is a
fundamentally undogmatic practice of identifying compelling arguments
and fashioning reasoned, if limited, agreements, one in which no speaker
enjoys special authority or insight into the truth about justice, and in which
all alike share the burden of expressing judgements and defending them
in the face of competing views. Communicative reason takes differences
very seriously indeed, even as it remains oriented toward fashioning some
manner of common ground, some overlapping consensus and temporary
compromises with which we can live. It is a rationality that is at once
rhetorical, critical, civic-minded, power-seeking, partial and undogmatic.
Above all, it is one that is prepared to negotiate, to compromise and to
lose as often as it wins. What it is not is an ideal procedure whose outcome
can be safely guaranteed, a political epistemology in the tradition of the
social contract, the categorical imperative or the utilitarian calculus. It
is closer to a symbol and an aspiration than a method, one that trans-
forms enemies into discussional adversaries. In politics violence is the
only ultimate alternative to open discussion, and if it is objected that it is
present in such discussion as well, perhaps in nascent form, one would be
hard pressed to disagree. Yet it is all that we have and all for which we can
reasonably hope. Communicative reason as hermeneutics conceives of it
recognizes otherness while mediating between self and other by the only
means available to it: the boundless will to communicate. The mediation
that democratic politics undertakes approximates neither the solidarity
of communitarianism nor the veritable warfare of identity politics in its
less moderate forms. It preserves and negotiates tensions of sameness and
difference, unity and diversity, in a logic of the back-and-forth that, in a
dialectical and pragmatic spirit, resists all finality.
What must be questioned is the tendency, as old as the Western tradition
itself, to transform reason into rationalism in one or another variety.
This age-old tendency in philosophy is so entrenched in thought that it
is often taken, or mistaken, as the characteristic stance, perhaps even the
essence, of philosophy itself: to ‘supply its [morality’s] principle’, as Kant so
modestly put it in the Preface to his Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals,
as if the formalist model that was to follow were a mere ‘correct[ion]’ or
supplement to the ancient question of the good life for human beings – a
supplement, moreover, quite natural and appropriate to rational beings.21
It is in order to ‘supply its principle’ that rationalist thought from Plato
to Habermas has always sought to sanitize and legitimate what passes
for reasoned utterance, to pronounce the definitive verdict upon such
discourse. Supplying democracy’s principle means supplying a method
by which to separate opinion from knowledge, interpretation from some
cognitive state displaying greater formal and methodological rigour. The
question of democracy then becomes an epistemological one: How do we
know that majority-approved measures are in fact just? What makes them
just? If the answer cannot be that they partake of the Form of Justice itself,
then perhaps we can formulate a political epistemology, a method or stand-
point from which to answer these questions with formal certainty.
Historically, there is a tendency, as common among ancient as among
modern thinkers, to transform almost imperceptibly, and by a seemingly
inevitable operation of thought, reason into rationalism, including the
reason that is inherent to democracy itself. The practice of reasoning –
of ordinary reason-giving, justifying, criticizing, questioning, persuading,
dialogical toing and froing – is transformed in the hands of many a philos-
opher into a dogma – a method or an epistemology, ideally one that might
include a guarantee. Socrates, the gadfly of the Athenian marketplace,
the great poser of questions and professor of his own ignorance, becomes
Socrates the Platonist, the philosopher of the Forms, whose ignorance
succumbs to death by a thousand qualifications. The pattern is repeated so
often in the Western tradition that it begins to look like the fundamental
movement of spirit itself, as Hegel would say, the great world-historical, and
by all means rational, directionality of thought as such. Thus, in political
thought the idea that our institutional arrangements should be subject
to general discussion and public approval – an eminently reasonable
idea – shades into highly contestable forms of ideality, on the grounds
that we must know whether the outcome of such discussion is rational,
thus relieving the anxiety bequeathed to us by Plato and Aristotle, and
confirmed by history, that the demos is as ill-equipped for political rule as
for the pursuit of wisdom.
For Habermasian deliberationists, democratic politics is a politics of the
forum, not the market, and democratic rationality is communicative, not
instrumental. What this model lacks in realism it would make up for in
idealism, and with some considerable plausibility. It is eminently sensible
to speak of democracy as a common effort to resolve differences of
opinion through persuasion rather than force, as a search for unity within
difference and for a conception of the common good that transcends mere
preference tallying. It is here that we find the intuitive core of the delib-
erative model: democratic politics as dialogical, potentially harmonious,
peaceful, egalitarian and free. It begins to appear fanciful when this basic
idea is articulated in a vocabulary of collective will and opinion formation,
of ‘achieving common ends’ by citizens and legislators ‘tak[ing] counsel
together’ as a fundamentally harmonious community.22 It is a fine-sounding
idea, surely. What democrat does not long for election campaigns in which
politicians argue – actually argue, using careful reasoning and generating
well-justified conclusions – about issues of public policy, in which citizens
debate the same issues in a spirit of disinterested inquiry and hermeneu-
tical dialogue, with an open mind and an unwavering commitment to
justice? If only it were so. For deliberationists it may well be so, but only if
certain highly formalized conditions are met.
A basic choice confronts the deliberative and all varieties of democrat:
to believe in dialogue or not. Those who do not substitute a monologue
of rationalist methodology in one form or another. The concept of
dialogue receives a far more adequate formulation in hermeneutics than
in the theory of deliberative democracy. Hermeneutics rightly insists on
the profound difference between dialogue and monologue, where the
former connotes a non-formalized back-and-forth movement of question
and answer, assertion and reply, in a spirit of fallibility and openness.
So conceived, dialogue is the social counterpart of Aristotelian phronesis
and draws upon the competencies of ordinary speakers without formalist
methodology. It generates consensus and solidarity on occasion, yet one

that remains invariably open to contest and possibly radical revision.
The dialogue that is wedded to rationalism is a dialogue in name only, a
disguised form of monologue.
If the fundamental orientation of a democratic citizenry is not merely
strategic or competitive, nor is it (in fact or capable of becoming) wholly
the opposite. Public debate invariably contains an underside of non-delib-
eration, ideology, knee-jerk thinking, recalcitrance and bombast. If there
remain grounds for optimism regarding the capacity of human intelli-
gence to bring about some semblance of dialogical rapprochement, it will
not approximate the well-orchestrated, rationalized conception of this
dreamed of by deliberationists. Among the philosophical conceptions of
dialogue currently on offer, the hermeneutical and rhetorical view that
Gadamer and other hermeneutical philosophers have defended is far and
away the most adequate phenomenologically. For Gadamer, the dialogical
process is not governed by methods but calls upon ordinary capacities
of critical discernment and practical judgement, interpretation and the
creative interchange of question and answer.23 Gadamer’s account of
language as the practice of dialogue, and of dialogue as at once a herme-
neutical, rhetorical and world-disclosing practice stands in stark contrast
to rationalistic conceptions of public deliberation, and is certainly less
vulnerable than the latter to the charge of utopianism. Even the herme-
neutical conception is not one that we should expect to see realized in
democratic discourse – a discourse that is invariably strategic and bombastic
as well as rhetorical in a less objectionable sense. If communicative reason,
conceived along more hermeneutical than Habermasian lines, is the
antidote to much of what presently ails our democracies, the questions this
leaves us with concern the prospect of dialogue in a globalized world and
the conditions that would make this a genuine possibility.
Chapter 9
Discourse Ethics
Karl-Otto Apel
Philosophical ethics, and specifically the premise that there is an ethics

implicit in the communicative process, is the most productive meeting
ground for hermeneutics and critical theory. Profound differences quickly
emerge, of course, concerning how this premise and the larger argument
to which it gives rise are to be formulated, yet before turning to the differ-
ences let us begin with the basic idea: communication that is oriented
toward understanding (communicative action, discourse, dialogue) always
already presupposes an ethics of some more or less inchoate kind which
it is the task of philosophy to render explicit. Theorizing so conceived is a
matter not of fashioning decision procedures from a transcendent location
known as ‘the moral point of view’ but of identifying normative condi-
tions that are implicit to conversation and that belong to its fundamental
orientation. Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel are the two most noted repre-
sentatives of communicative or discourse ethics, and while the argument
is more commonly associated with contemporary critical theory than
hermeneutics it is an approach upon which philosophers on both sides of
this divide could reach at least some partial agreement. The disagreements
are clear and obvious, and particularly in the case of Apel. This Kantian
formalist regularly charges not only hermeneuticists but philosophers of
existence, postmodernists, pragmatists and other nonfoundationalists with
relativism and with committing a performative contradiction that quickly
reduces each of their positions to absurdity. Apel’s brand of transcendental
philosophy is influenced by the linguistic and hermeneutical turns that a
good deal of contemporary philosophy has taken, yet his commitments to
apriorism, foundationalism and formalism survive these turns and indeed
are highly pronounced. The only alternative to relativism as Apel sees it is
an ethics of discourse that identifies the idealized presuppositions of this
practice and fashions these as universally valid principles of morality. This
method alone affords a standpoint from which the critique of ideology
and indeed ‘a critique of whole forms of life and their official language-
games’ becomes possible. This ambitious task, as he states in Towards
a Transformation of Philosophy, requires ‘sailing between the Scylla of a
Discourse Ethics 155
relativistic hermeneutics .â•›.â•›. and the Charybdis of a dogmatic-objectivistic

critique that no longer admits of any real discourse.’ This goal ‘can be
achieved in the long run only along with the practical realization of the
unlimited communication community’ of which C. S. Peirce in particular
spoke.1
What is needed, Apel and Habermas maintain, is a philosophical ethics
that can provide a critical standpoint on lifeworld practices and norms
which goes well beyond what hermeneutics and indeed the early Frankfurt
School were able to provide, both of which, Apel believes, succumb in the
end to moral relativism. Social criticism requires a rigorous grounding in
the pragmatic presuppositions of language, an approach that can provide
nothing short of ‘a rational foundation of universally valid ethics’ while also
providing ‘a radical critique of the current paradigm of philosophy.’2
Refuting relativism is as vitally important to Apel as securing the founda-
tions of a ‘philosophy of emancipation’ and ‘the ideal of domination-free
communication or discourse.’3 Such an ethics is dependent upon neither
culture nor metaphysics; indeed it is ‘the only possible way of avoiding
metaphysics’ and is ‘not a recourse to empirical facts either.’4 The position
I wish to advance is that the considerable promise that communicative
ethics holds, especially if we are speaking of the philosophical under-
pinnings of human rights, is compromised when it promises too much.
Apel’s anxieties about performative contradictions, moral scepticism and
especially relativism compel him toward the kind of dogmatic excesses that
are usual when arguments are formulated with this opponent in mind.
Ethical theorists who have not exorcized this demon regularly build castles
of cognitivism, formalism, foundationalism and transcendental apriorism
and are every bit as susceptible to criticism as the cavalier relativists about
whom they worry far too much. ‘Everything is permitted’ or ‘The good
is whatever convention or I myself say it is’ are not positions that need to
be taken seriously, and those who do often fly to extremes of rationalist
orthodoxy. Discourse ethics as Apel conceives of it is among the more
orthodox positions in contemporary moral philosophy and ridding it of its
excesses begins with getting over these anxieties.
Before suggesting a reformulation let us examine Apel’s argument
in some detail and point out as well its relation to Habermas’ position.
Apel’s is a transcendental philosophy in the tradition of Descartes, Kant
and Husserl, but with the difference that it begins not with any kind
of ‘methodological solipsism’ but with the practice of communication
oriented toward understanding or what he calls discourse. This is not
hermeneutical dialogue and it has nothing to do with either rhetoric,
negotiation, manipulation or power. We are speaking of argumentation

in a formalist sense of the term, a linguistic practice involving claims to
validity, meaning, truth, moral rightness and possible consensus. Discourse
is ‘serious argumentation’, a power-free ‘meta-institution of all cultural
institutions’, more what we are than what we do.5 It is ‘non-circumventable’
and has presuppositions or conditions of possibility that are equally
non-circumventable ‘and thus far transcendental.’ ‘We cannot question
these transcendental presuppositions without abolishing the performance
of philosophy.’6 Apel’s method of transcendental reflection is to identify
a priori the unavoidable preconditions of argumentation, be it scientific,
philosophical, political or what have you. The act of discourse presupposes
in every case the ideal of an ‘unlimited communication community’ or
ideal speech situation in which all vestiges of domination are renounced
and superior arguments carry the day.7 All speakers implicitly recognize
this ideal and any whose statements or actions violate this standard fall into
a certain kind of contradiction.
‘First philosophy’ so conceived is ‘transcendental pragmatics’ and it
provides a foundation for practical philosophy.8 Apel advances a series of
very strong claims for a philosophy so grounded. Antifoundationalism is
relativism and a self-cancelling contradiction. Its only rationally consistent
alternative is the method of transcendental reflection on the pragmatics
of language after the fashion of Peirce’s pragmaticism and emphatically
not the pragmatism of James, Dewey or Rorty, all of whom are relativists.
Transcendental thought is no empirical or phenomenological investigation
but is an a priori reflection upon what Kant called a ‘fact of reason’, the
unavoidable and incontrovertible presuppositions of discourse and which
are ‘implied in the inter-subjectivity of human communication and interaction’
in general.9 Transcendental pragmatics affords an ahistorical and fully
‘rational ultimate justification (Letztbegründung) of the “moral point of view”,
and with it the refutation of moral scepticism and relativism.’10 The kind of
grounding that it provides is not a derivation or deduction of conclusions
from some set of self-evident truths. Moral principles, for instance, are not
derived from empirical or any philosophical premises but grounded in
the performance of argumentation. The distinction between a grounding
through transcendental reflection and one through rationalist deduction
is vital for Apel and it is the former alone that is possible after the linguistic
turn. The only manner in which ‘an ultimate foundation is possible’, Apel
holds, is ‘through transcendental reflection on what in argumentative discourse
we cannot deny without committing a performative self-contradiction’ – a contra-
diction, he believes, into which a great many philosophers fall.11
What, then, are the necessary preconditions of argumentative discourse

and what are their consequences for ethics? First, by consequences we
do not intend that a set of moral principles is implied in such discourse
but that it is presupposed there. It is presupposed that in issuing claims
about what is good or true all speakers are anticipating an ideal communi-
cation community in which claims are judged objectively and impartially.
Truth and the good are that to which such a community would consent,
not that to which any actually existing set of inquirers does consent as
a matter of merely empirical fact. The world of reflection is removed
from the empirical, and the ethical does not arise from the historical
or cultural. Moral theory is a freestanding enterprise that presupposes
nothing whatever of the anthropological or psychological, nor of the
ontological or metaphysical. The philosopher is charged with establishing
formal procedures that govern practical discourses and not the further
task of ‘proposing and accepting material norms [which] he must delegate
to the participants of the practical discourses.’ The discourse theorist ‘will
be one of these participants too, but, within the practical discourses, he
has not a privileged position but only a specific role within a division of labour
between those experts who are consulted.’12 If the criticism arises that those
who create the rules also win the game or otherwise occupy a position
that is covertly privileged within it, Apel denies that this follows and that
setting down procedures is a power play. It is argumentation alone, free of
hegemony, that rules.
What Peirce taught us to see, Apel states, is that the rational inquirer and
specifically ‘the natural scientist must be in a position to identify himself
(as an interchangeable member) with an unlimited community of exper-
iment.’ The pragmatic view of inquiry renounces methodological solipsism
and requires all investigators to submit their hypotheses to a community
of their peers. Advancing a truth claim presupposes recognition of this
community and one’s place in it and the corresponding recognition that
in all discourse one does not retreat to a presocial location from which one
merely issues one’s ‘findings.’ Instead we recognize the real community
of inquiry in which we are participants as well as anticipate a community
of a different kind. This is the ‘unlimited community of interpretation which is
presupposed by everyone who takes part in critical discussion (that is, by everyone
who thinks!).’13 For Apel, this is a ‘counterfactually anticipated’ ideal which is
no less valid and binding on participants for its being hypothetical.14 The
act of thinking always already presupposes a double commitment to the
actually existing discursive community and its idealized counterpart ‘that
would basically be capable of adequately understanding the meaning of
his arguments and judging their truth in a definitive manner.’15 The latter
ideal is the never-to-be-realized but always anticipated standpoint from
which validity claims are finally judged true or false.
The ethical consequences of this argument are not far to seek. Among
the necessary preconditions of discourse are moral principles of a roughly
Kantian kind. Without appealing to the categorical imperative itself, Apel
regards particular ethical norms as elementary ‘facts of reason’, beginning
with the principle of discourse. It cannot be disputed without pragmatic
self-contradiction that all parties have an equal right of participation in
discourse and that all claims regarding the right and the good can receive
a hearing. No competent speaker may be excluded from the community
of inquiry, although he would also qualify this in important ways. The act
of arguing itself commits one to the meta-norm or procedural rule that
good reasons alone redeem normative claims and that the judge of such
reasons is the community itself. Consensus – not the real consensus of real
speakers but the counterfactual agreement of counterfactual speakers – is
the standard and its verdict is no more challengeable in moral than in
scientific matters. As Apel expresses it, ‘in every serious argumentation –
and therefore also in all solitary thinking with claim to validity! – we have
always already necessarily acknowledged a normative-ethical principle,
according to which all disputable questions, all discrepancies, all conflicts,
etc., between communication partners, should only be decided through
arguments capable of consensus.’16 What counts as a good moral argument
is not that we have derived a conclusion from principles or conformed to
a method, but that it is able to produce agreement by taking all parties
to the discourse into consideration and eliminating the domination that
so often prevails there. Good reasons are those whose force can be felt
by the community of inquiry, all of whose members are committed to
taking seriously all other members’ claims and interests. The assumption
of moral responsibility is essentially the recognition that one’s conception
of the good is a claim of which the community as a totality must judge the
validity. Apel’s manoeuvre of ‘strict reflection’ allows him, he believes, to
speak in a Kantian vein of ‘the moral law as a self-evidently given “fact of
reason”’ without the dubious metaphysics that underlies Kantian morality.17
Transcendental pragmatics produces an ethics that is self-grounding and
independent of metaphysical and empirical premises, including the ‘free
acknowledgment of norms’ by real speakers which ‘is only a necessary but
not a sufficient condition for the moral validity of norms.’18 Factual recog-
nition of a given norm is not a sufficient condition of its validity since it
might still fail to include all possible participants and, of course, because
regarding it as sufficient would amount to relativism. All parties to the

conversation, real and hypothetical, actual and potential, must be taken
equally into account as well as all potential moral claims, all of which are
judged impartially. All needs of all persons are morally relevant, any claim
to the contrary amounts to hegemony, and we have implicitly recognized
this in the very act of thinking.
To deny any of this, Apel insists, immediately implicates us in a
contradiction. This is not a logical contradiction but the pragmatic or
performative contradiction of which Habermas has also spoken. It occurs
when the content of a statement contradicts the act of uttering it and the
presuppositions of that act. This occurs, for instance, in the liar paradox
and the declaration that one is a solipsist, to take the most obvious
examples; however Apel and Habermas maintain that it is a common
error in philosophy. Many a position in this field is self-cancelling in this
sense and Apel regularly charges his opponents in moral philosophy with
this error. Avoiding it is of the highest importance for him and is vitally
at stake in transcendental reflection. Any overt or covert denial of the
moral or other preconditions of discourse succumbs to this error and
refutes itself. It therefore becomes a test of a proposed foundation that
‘[w]e are justified in regarding those presuppositions of argumentation
as ultimate principles which we cannot deny without, in the process,
committing a performative self-contradiction but which cannot, for the
same reason, be logically deduced without involving us in a vicious circle
(petitio principii).’ This argument becomes more interesting when we move
from the examples of solipsism and the liar paradox to what appear to be
tenable moral and philosophical positions. Two examples that he mentions
are ‘I hereby affirm that I have no truth-claim’ and ‘I hereby argue that,
in principle, I need not acknowledge my communication partners as
co-subjects of argumentation with equal rights of accepting and using
speech-acts as arguments’, statements that commit the same error, he
believes, as ‘I hereby state that I don’t exist.’19 It is no more possible to
deny truth, meaning or equal rights than one’s existence or the existence
of one’s interlocutor. The argument becomes more interesting still when
Apel takes it in a rather specific political direction. For his part, Habermas
has placed great emphasis on the principle of universalization which is
a successor of sorts to the categorical imperative. As he formulates this
principle, ‘every valid norm has to fulfil the condition that all concerned
can accept the consequences and the side effects its universal observance
can be anticipated to have for the satisfaction of everyone’s interests (and
that these consequences are preferred to those of known alternative
possibilities for regulation).’20 Apel’s formulation differs slightly: ‘I would

say first: we all have equal rights as members of an indefinite community
of argumentation. Second, in principle we all have equal duties, in one
word, co-responsibility.’21 Equal freedom in pursuing one’s conception of
the good life and equal responsibility in working to resolve the common
problems of humanity are the two fundamental principles Apel identifies,
both of which are to be understood as ‘conditions of human interaction
that make it possible to settle all conflicts of interests by argumentative
discourse and not by violence.’22
So stated, these principles cohere with a variety of moral and political
positions; however Apel interprets them in specifically Marxian terms
and a whole political program is thus entailed, or presupposed as an
inescapable fact of reason. Non-Marxist proponents of equal rights will
be surprised that Apel considers it but a short step in transcendental
reflection from equal rights to Marxism. ‘For it is evident’, he states, ‘that
the task of realizing the ideal communication community also implies
the transcendence of a class society, or – formulated in terms of commu-
nication theory – the elimination of all socially determined asymmetries
of interpersonal dialogue. “Taking up the cause of the proletariat” can
possibly, therefore, be justified in ethical terms if one adopts our philo-
sophical a priori.’23 The foundation not only of discourse ethics but of
Marxian politics is fully justifiable a priori by reflecting on language and
without appealing to dialectical materialism. This is a bold manoeuvre
and it is coupled with a second argument that is equally bold. This is that
human cultures can confidently be asserted to be evolving in the direction
toward which discourse ethics points. Shifting from moral philosophy to
evolutionary science, Apel claims, together with Habermas and such figures
as Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg and Arnold Gehlen, that humanity is
entering a new phase in its evolution and that this new stage corresponds
precisely with the transcendental conditions of discourse of which Apel
has been speaking. With clear echoes of Hegel and Marx, Apel attempts a
theoretical reconstruction of cultural evolution beginning with the period
after hominization during which institutional discipline gradually replaced
instinctive behavior and the existential situation of humanity became for
the first time an ethical problem. In this historical metanarrative, human
morality was first conceived in self-regarding and conventional terms as
both a ‘micro-ethics’ and a ‘meso-ethics’, where the first term refers to
norms governing clans and the second to those governing legal states.
Beginning in the period that Karl Jaspers spoke of as the ‘axis time’ in the
ancient world that corresponded with the rise of philosophy and many of
the great world religions – roughly 800 through 200 BCE – conventional
norms began to be challenged and morality was increasingly grounded
in religious belief and philosophical rationality. The possibility of a post-
conventional moral consciousness arose and by the time of modernity
became philosophically well articulated and reached a high point in the
writings of Kant. Moral principles in this highest stage of evolution are
not only a priori presuppositions and unquestionable facts of reason but
facts of history as well. For Apel, it is a fact and indeed the very telos of
history that human civilization is evolving in an identifiable moral direction
which corresponds to a universal and principled ‘macro-ethics’ that leaves
tradition and convention entirely behind and replaces them with the kind
of formalist ethics of which we have been speaking. The moral situation
of humanity is now such that a universal striving for consensus of all those
affected by a given norm is the only valid standard and the only alternative
to a possible devolution. Discourse ethics is on the right side of history and
‘should correspond or answer to a new stage in the cultural evolution of
man.’24
The ethical principles of which Apel speaks are to be understood as
regulative ideas in Kant’s sense. These are not rules or decision procedures
in the fashion of the utilitarian calculus or even the categorical imperative
but are hypothetically anticipated ideals that are never perfectly instan-
tiated in practice. One who engages in discourse invariably anticipates
the eventual coming into being of the unlimited community of argumen-
tation in which one understands oneself as a participant, and in a way
directly comparable to Kant’s idealized ‘kingdom of ends.’ Kant did not
expect the kingdom to materialize in the empirical realm, of course, and
regarded human beings as having a foot in two worlds while Apel similarly
views participants in discourse as incapable of fully realizing the condi-
tions of ideal speech yet obliged to work nonetheless to this end. Ideal
communication is a linguistic utopia of sorts that we ‘must anticipate .â•›.â•›.
counterfactually’ and regard as ‘an alternative or counterworld to the
existing reality’ rather than either a fully realizable end-state or an impos-
sible idealization. Indeed we cannot be fully satisfied in speaking of the
presuppositions of communication as a regulative idea, he argues, since we
‘must anticipate as an ideal state of affairs and assume as fulfilled in a certain
manner, counterfactually, the conditions of an ideal community of commu-
nication or an ideal speech situation.’25 It behoves us to reach toward what
in some measure eludes us.
The philosopher to whom Apel is closest in a great many respects is,
of course, Habermas, although a couple of differences between their
positions ought to be noted. Both figures have attempted since the 1970s
to provide philosophical ethics with a foundation in the rationality of
discourse while retaining affinities with Frankfurt School neomarxism as
well as Kantian deontology. Their writings both exhibit no little anxiety
regarding relativism and conservatism and decided commitments to moral
universalism, cognitivism and a communicative rationality that is far more
formalistic than what we spoke of in Chapter 2. They agree as well that
while specific norms and a fully elaborated view of the good cannot be
derived from principles, the proper business of moral philosophy is ‘to
ground only the procedural principle for real practical discourses .â•›.â•›. through
which the affected persons themselves – or their advocates – can ground
norms that are acceptable to all affected persons and ultimately applicable
to concrete situations.’26 The theorist is one step removed from the more
direct role of the utilitarian moralist, for instance, who applies principles to
cases directly and with a claim to philosophical knowledge. The discourse
theorist instead provides a grounding for procedures by which affected
parties may reach a consensus of their own, although the theorist may also
participate in such discourses in an expert capacity. Apel and Habermas
diverge primarily on the question of the status of transcendental philosophy
and the issue of whether the categorical separation between the a priori and
the a posteriori can be sustained. For Habermas, it cannot, and the presup-
positions of argumentation are at once necessary and contingent upon
empirical testing and are falsifiable by the latter – a position that, according
to Apel, constitutes yet another performative contradiction.27 Habermas’
‘universal pragmatics’ is decidedly more empirical than the transcendental
pragmatics of Apel, and the latter’s claim to an ultimate foundation is
somewhat attenuated in Habermas’ work. One might say that Habermas
is a weak transcendentalist where Apel’s transcendentalism is stronger and
far less wedded to the social sciences. Both endevour to leave metaphysics
behind while diverging on whether Apel’s transcendental apriorism consti-
tutes a metaphysical position.
I have cited Apel above as expressing the desire to navigate between a
hermeneutics that he considers relativistic and a ‘dogmatic-objectivistic
critique that no longer admits of any real discourse’, a desire that appeals
to an idealized and ostensibly nonmetaphysical conception of discourse
and its conditions of possibility. My suggested reformulation of discourse
ethics begins with discourse itself, the method of transcendental reflection,
and the anxiety about relativism that is so pronounced in Apel’s writings.
The topic of relativism I shall take up briefly in Chapter 12, but for now
the point I would urge is that we not take quite so seriously the prospect
of moral philosophy deteriorating into this highly untenable and for the
most part hypothetical position. Philosophers who worry too much about
the happy-go-lucky relativists whom we so often hear about and so seldom
encounter in the flesh habitually go to extremes to refute them, and this
includes those such as Apel who distinguish rational discourse from its
various antitheses in a resolutely unphenomenological and too categorical
way. Like Kant, Apel takes his reason pure, undiluted by the empirical,
hermeneutical, rhetorical and pragmatic in the Deweyan sense. Its business
is validity claims, and a more serious occupation there is not. The trans-
formation of philosophy for which he calls involves systematic and ‘strict
reflection’ on performative contradictions and the transcendental a priori
of linguistic communication while ‘the test of avoiding the performative self-
contradiction’ becomes an absolute method and a test that even Habermas
fails.28 One wonders who, in Apel’s view, does not fail this test, who is not a
relativist or proponent of some other position that is allegedly self-refuting.
Apel surely has a point in asserting that the dialogical process contains
conditions of possibility and indeed an ethics that is in some sense
non-circumventable and presupposed by participants within it, which is
to say all who speak and listen. There are conditions that make commu-
nication oriented toward understanding a real possibility, and these
conditions include an ethical orientation toward the recognition of equal
freedom and the renunciation of violence. Conversation indeed presup-
poses an appeal to the freedom of our interlocutor whom we are seeking
to persuade with reasons rather than manipulate, and whose own truth
claim we are prepared to take seriously. The difficulty with Apel’s argument
is that he inflates the distinction between discourse and violence into a
full-blown dichotomy which calls for a reflection that is impossibly aprior-
istic and historically unconditioned. The dichotomy and the mode of
reflection are both dubious on phenomenological grounds, and unless
we are prepared to leap into the metaphysical, as Apel claims he is not,
the argument must be reconceived at this point. First, transcendental
reflection into any absolute ‘fact of reason’ is metaphysical mythology. It is
better to speak phenomenologically of the conditions of real dialogue than
in a too idealistic way of the transcendental a priori of a communication
that itself is too rationalistic, counterfactual and otherworldly. We do not
need to transform Kantian apriorism or foundationalism but to reject
them. Ethics has no ultimate grounding nor is it a matter of simple conven-
tionalism, and while theorizing it indeed requires us to navigate between
relativism and objectivism, Apel goes to such lengths in avoiding the
former that he ends up in the latter, as determined antirelativists so often
do. The discourse in discourse ethics is so formalistic and idealized – or,

as he says, ‘strict’, ‘earnest,’ and ‘serious’ – that it loses connection not only
with the unserious and unstrict but with the reasonable and persuasive.29
There is no room for rhetorical persuasion in serious argumentation as
Apel conceives it, nor is there power in knowledge or any recourse to the
empirical or phenomenological in the transcendental. Apel’s distinctions
are often impossibly clean. Were he writing in a time prior to the linguistic,
hermeneutical and pragmatic turns that he claims to have been deeply
influenced by, or had he not made this claim, it would be no surprise when
he sharply separates the a priori from the a posteriori, the transcendental
from the empirical, argument from persuasion and conversation from
domination, yet after these turns how sharp do we imagine these distinc-
tions to be? Even dialogue and violence are neatly separable only when
regarded as abstractions rather than the worldly realities that they are.
‘Domination-free communication’ is a worthy ideal only when it touches
down to the real world of human practices. Under any other condition it
commits the same error as older forms of rationalism and transcenden-
talizes its way into irrelevance.
Apel still longs for a standpoint beyond history and culture, a world
of pure reason in which knowledge is apodictic and even ethical judge-
ments – the important ones – are indisputable. In the beautiful world
of the rationalist, every question has an answer, conversation is about
validity claims and dispassionate argument, moral disagreements are
impartially adjudicated and power is easily identified and removed. The
trouble is that reason is always mixed with unreason, and even reason
itself is not nearly as rationalistic as formalists wish it could be. There is
no domination-free communication, no non-rhetorical argumentation,
and no power-free knowledge, and making things counterfactual cannot
change this fact. What would knowledge be like if it were power-free, and
communication were it to lack all vestiges of manipulation, strategy and
subterfuge, are impossible questions. More than this, they are irrelevant.
What hypothetical conversation partners would agree upon in a realm of
pure hypothesis, whether it be an ‘unlimited communication community’,
a Rawlsian ‘original position’, state of nature, kingdom of ends or any
other, is of no importance to situated humanity. The point in speaking of
an ethics of communication is to cope with the unreason that resides in
all reason, not to abolish it by means of some gesture toward the absolute.
These gestures always fail and there is no absolute. Communication in
its higher reaches does contain presuppositions, but even these are not
absolutes but conditions without which the whole business deteriorates
into power-seeking in its grosser forms. They supply a basic orientation that
under the best of circumstances makes it possible to manage disagreement
and cope with the conflict of interpretations and the moral difficulties
that arise when human beings encounter one another, but what they do
not do is point the way toward certainty or to a conversational utopia. The
tendency in all rationalism is to abstract the formal element from thinking
and knowing (discarding all the rest), transform it into an absolute, imagi-
natively transport oneself into this (non-) standpoint, and from there be
seated at the right hand of the Father in all matters epistemological and
metaphysical but especially moral and political. Apel’s Marxian stand with
the proletariat, he believes, is not a contestable political judgement, one
way of speaking about equal rights, but a transcendentally inescapable
fact of reason and scientific fact of history as well. When the claim is that
denying Marxism is no different, transcendentally speaking, than denying
one’s own existence, it can fairly be assumed that something has gone
wrong in the argument, some contingency has been transformed into a
necessity or a judgement into an iron law.
If we would speak of what is non-circumventable in communication,
we must speak not only of formal and ideal conditions but of real condi-
tions that we do our best to cope with but that we cannot abolish, even
as a counterfactual thought experiment. Power, negotiation, persuasion,
prejudice and unreason all belong to reason itself, and no technique of
contradiction avoidance will make it otherwise. They are all non-circum-
ventable, to use Apel’s word, and whether they are transcendentally or
phenomenologically so matters not at all. They are unavoidable, present
wherever human beings search in common for what is true or good, and
they all define the situation of reflection no less than formal claims to
validity. What Apel calls ‘strict reflection’ takes place within the context of
a lifeworld, of common assumptions and common sense – what Gadamer
has called a ‘deep common accord’ – and in the case of moral matters of
common values.30 Apart from such an accord there is no basis on which to
reflect at all, strictly or otherwise, unless we revert to the methodological
solipsism that Apel rejects.
This brings me to another difficulty with his formulation of discourse
ethics. Apel has stated that it is ‘the deadly sin in philosophy’ to attempt
any ‘immunization against criticism’, and with this I am in full agreement.31
No greater error in thinking can be made than to imagine one’s truth
claims, regardless of their content, to be unassailable or above the fray
of real conversation. He has also stated that in the critique of ideology
it is frequently necessary to cut off the conversation in order to explain,
critically and authoritatively, the errors of our interlocutor’s ways, and it is

an explanation that brooks no reply. In Apel’s words, ‘In any conversation
between people it is apparent that one party no longer attempts to take
the other seriously hermeneutically with regard to his intentions but rather
distances himself from the other objectively as a quasi-natural entity, where
he no longer attempts to create the unity of language in communication
but rather seeks to evaluate what the other person says as the symptom of an
objective situation which he seeks to explain from outside in a language in
which his partner does not participate. Typical of this partial breakdown of
hermeneutic communication in favour of objective methods of acquiring
knowledge is the doctor’s relationship to his patients, and in particular the
psychotherapist’s relationship to the neurotic patient. In my opinion, this
model of partially suspended communication may indeed be made just
as fruitful as the positive basic model of conversation for the foundation
of the theory of social science.’ This immediately returns us, of course, to
the terms of the Gadamer-Habermas debate in which Apel sides decisively
with the latter. Without rehearsing that debate, a question that Gadamer
raised for the ideology critic is under what conditions may one justifiably
refuse ‘to take the other seriously’ and regard our erstwhile interlocutor ‘as
a quasi-natural entity’ whose truth claims call no longer for the reply of a
peer but for the explanation of an expert. Apel acknowledges that it is ‘an
extremely delicate moral problem’ – and, one would think, a rather difficult
epistemological matter – to identify ‘[i]n what situations and by virtue of
what criteria may one participant in a communicative exchange claim for
himself an emancipated consciousness and consider himself, therefore, to
be authorized to act as a social therapist.’ It is a delicate problem, but not,
it would appear, a difficult one. With remarkable resoluteness Apel asserts
that ‘psychological and social-psychological behavioural analyses can quite
easily function like causal explanations – on the basis of laws – which are
applied to the object from outside’, and that ‘the model of psychotherapy
can be transferred, to some extent, to the relationship of the philosophy
of history to the self-understanding of human society.’32 Habermas had
argued along similar lines, and the two theorists agree as well that
Kohlberg’s inquiries in moral-developmental psychology have provided a
scientific basis for assessing our interlocutor’s level of moral competence
as well as our own. In Kohlberg’s account the sixth and highest develop-
mental stage accentuates formal and universal principles and corresponds
perfectly with discourse ethics. The social scientist is now in a position to
critique, explain or otherwise pronounce with authority upon the inter-
locutor’s claims, including their moral-political judgements. It so happens
that persons at stage six are very few in number, according to Kohlberg,
from which it follows that the proper judges of the moral and communi-
cative competence of the participants in conversation will be few.33
Let us imagine such a conversation. Were our topic the justice or
injustice of capitalism, for example, and a participant in the conversation
were Friedrich A. Hayek, the ideology critic would not meet his argument
in defence of a free market with a counterargument but explain his view
as a certain kind of symptom; his texts, we shall say, are a rationalization
of the vested interests, a systematic distortion of language or indicative of
someone at an inferior stage of moral development. We are offering not a
judgement on the validity of his argument but an expert’s verdict upon his
competence. It goes without saying that he is not free to pronounce upon
ours, for we stand at the forefront of moral development, communicative
competence and cultural evolution. There is as much dogmatism here as
in any older and more orthodox form of Marxism. While Apel repeatedly
states that ‘all the participants in this discourse have, in principle, an
equal right to solve problems within this operation’, this becomes a hollow
assertion when a few participants claim special rights and special compe-
tence.34 So long as we follow procedures identified by the theorist, and
so long as we are stage-six universalists, deontological formalists and left
intellectuals, we are free to join the unlimited communication community;
otherwise we are out of order and likely incompetent. The arguments
of the latter group do not warrant counterarguments but dismissal on
procedural or competence grounds. If Apel is correct that ‘the deadly sin
in philosophy’ is to immunize our views against criticism, and if our views
include a highly debatable moral-political stance, the implication is clear.
If the hermeneuticist is a self-contradicting relativist, the discourse-ethical
critic of ideology is a sinner. Gadamer put the point more gently: he or she
‘is a spoilsport whom one shuns.’35 Either way, the argument is dogmatic, as
is any move to suspend the conversation on grounds of special competence.
This leads me to propose a discourse-ethical principle of my own, which
I should like to call the principle of hermeneutical good faith. This is not
good will in the sense that Gadamer spoke of it in his encounter with Jacques
Derrida (a topic I shall discuss in Chapter 11). Hermeneutical good faith
involves a double anticipation, the first of which concerns our interlocutor’s
truth claims while the second concerns our interlocutor him- or herself. First,
it is imperative that in the encounter with an interlocutor or text we are
prepared to take their claims to truth seriously, which means to anticipate that
they may be right and that we ourselves have failed to understand something.
Gadamer frequently spoke to this point, and while it appears elementary
I believe it warrants the emphasis that he placed upon it. The second
imperative is that we anticipate our interlocutor is competent and a worthy
adversary in the event of disagreement. Leaving aside the content of their
truth claims, they themselves are our peers and must be engaged as such. If
our knowledge or credentials exceed their own, they are not for that reason
unfit to engage in the conversation of humankind. Bad faith in this sense is
a general posture that is not prepared to take the other seriously in the sense
not only of deception but, perhaps more importantly, of intellectual imperi-
ousness. There are times in conversation, as Apel says, when the anticipation
of truth is put aside and we must move to an explanatory discourse that seeks
to view the other’s claims as a certain kind of effect or symptom. The question
is under what conditions this move can be made in good faith. When Freud
provided a psychoanalytic explanation of religious belief, for instance, was this
a legitimate move in the conversation or an attempt to escape it by arrogating
to himself a point of view and a knowledge in which the other may not
participate? Supposing that the explanatory account he offered in such texts
as Moses and Monotheism and The Future of an Illusion were true and we came to
regard religious belief as a neurotic symptom, would this relieve us of having
to take the believer and religion itself seriously as a philosophical matter? We
are speaking here of ideas, not only persons and their pathology but ideas
around which a good part of human life and culture have been organized
for millennia. We are free to reject these ideas, of course, but doing so solely
on psychological or other explanatory grounds is a case of bad faith. The
same can be said of Kohlberg’s ostensibly scientific treatment of moral ideas
that are prior to stage six, which is to say the ethical orientations of nearly
everyone in contemporary and all prior societies. Utilitarian moralists, for
instance, rightfully expect to have their arguments taken seriously, including
by persons who claim to have reached a higher stage of development. Even if
we accept Kohlberg’s account – and I would not recommend that we do – we
are not relieved of having to rebut utilitarianism on properly philosophical
grounds. But perhaps the clearest example of hermeneutical bad faith comes
not from Freud or Kohlberg but from Marx and the neomarxists. No amount
of transcendental reflection, dialectical gymnastics or political enthusiasm
legitimates the kind of high-handed dismissals of ideas toward which too
many in this group have long been inclined. Theoretical notions of dialectical
materialism, progress, cultural evolution or communicative competence do
nothing to satisfy the longing so many have to rise above the fray of conver-
sation or to pronounce the final word within it. Left intellectuals do not sit at
the right hand of the absolute. They are political interpreters along with the
rest of us.
There are no criteria and there is no right for any participant in inquiry
to claim special status for oneself or one’s claims, including when those
claims are explanatory. Bracketing the issue of our explanation’s truth
value, the move to explain why our interlocutor is speaking as they are
rather than interpret their expressions in a more hermeneutically usual
way is legitimate in the event that we also provide a philosophical counter-
argument to their position that is independent of our explanation. Freud
did not refute religion, even if one finds his account of the psychology
of the believer compelling, nor did Kohlberg refute any moral position
whatever by asserting that it belongs to a lower developmental stage.
If we would speak with Apel of an ethics that is implicit to or presup-
posed within the conversational process, we must include a principle of
good faith that would prevent any speaker from claiming false expertise
in an inquiry in which we are only ever participants. Rational communi-
cation is impossible when some speakers believe it falls to them to assign
their interlocutors an order of rank, on transcendental-pragmatic or any
other grounds. If one necessarily presupposes anything at all in the acts
of speaking and listening, it is that our fellow speaker is worthy of being
spoken and listened to and that their competence is not less than our
own. Should we suspect in the course of inquiry that their claims must be
explained as effects or indeed that their competence is in question, this
does not count as a refutation of the claims themselves. There is indeed an
ethics of communication and principles without which the whole business
deteriorates into something fraudulent; however, fraud comes in many
forms and Apel has not provided a complete account of it in speaking in
too narrow a way of ideology and domination. The investigative process
presupposes a commitment to equal rights and equal responsibility. It
presupposes as well a ‘deep common accord’ in the sense of moral preun-
derstandings, common sense and shared aspirations which we do our
best to bring about without ever finally succeeding. It is likely that all our
moral-political principles are of this nature, not formal rules or a priori
necessities but aspirations held in common by all those who take seriously
the need to understand what is true and what is good. We may speak of
them as regulative ideas, but the language of transcendental apriorism
is too metaphysical and inclines us to overlook that aspirations are not
absolutes but possibilities and projects that lie always ahead of us and that
remain subject to the conversation. While implicit to this conversation is an
ethical orientation, it is nothing as specific as Marxian politics or as formal
as Kantian morality. It is more like a constellation of ideals and symbols
that require ongoing interpretation and that show an abiding tendency to
be mixed with their opposites. Communication and domination, reason

and unreason, freedom and servitude are antithetical only when regarded
metaphysically. Regarded phenomenologically, they define our aspirations
and the projects at which we sometimes succeed and sometimes fail.
Part Four
Postmodernism
Chapter 10
Genealogy and Suspicious Interpretation

Michel Foucault
Post-Heideggerian philosophy is often said to branch in two principal

and conflicting directions: philosophical hermeneutics and poststructur-
alism/postmodernism. How profound this conflict is and whether Michel
Foucault in particular took us ‘beyond hermeneutics’, as a great many
poststructuralists and postmodernists maintain, are the questions that
orient the following discussion.1 Rorty’s claim, cited in Chapter 6, that
hermeneutics ‘has been replaced by poststructuralism’, or surpassed by
it, is repeated with some frequency in the literature. Béatrice Han, for
instance, writes that Foucault’s ‘understanding of interpretation returns
neither to traditional exegesis (the “commentary” that the archaeologist
despised so much) nor to a hermeneutics of suspicion such as Ricoeur’s,
which presupposes the existence of a profound meaning deformed by
everyday comprehension and practices of subjects, recoverable through
an analysis of these distortions.’2 Foucault’s archaeological and later
genealogical projects both invoke a concept of interpretation that owes
a great deal to Nietzsche and Heidegger. For all three of these figures,
interpretation in every case is perspectival, linguistic and historically condi-
tioned. While genealogy has a critical intent, in no sense does it allow the
interpreter to rise above their own cultural embeddedness, in contrast to
the objectivist aspirations of some forms of critical theory. If the claim is
that poststructuralism/postmodernism, in the thought of Foucault or his
contemporaries, surpasses hermeneutics in some important respect, it
must significantly modify the idea of interpretation itself.
Foucault, as we often hear, interpreted history, if not everything that
fell before his gaze, with tradition-subverting suspicion, particularly in the
genealogical writings, while Gadamer and other hermeneutical thinkers
prefer to recover elements of that same tradition. Hence the apparent
radicality of postmodernism and the conservatism of hermeneutics. As
Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow write: ‘Subjection, domination and
combat are found everywhere [Foucault] looks. Whenever he hears
talk of meaning and value, of virtue and goodness, he looks for strat-
egies of domination. .â•›.â•›. Instead of origins, hidden meanings or explicit
intentionality, Foucault the genealogist finds force relations working

themselves out in particular events, historical movements, and history.’3
We hear that where hermeneutics continues upon a quest for essentialist
or objective meaning, postmodernism dismantles and genealogizes such
meaning, that it interprets with a suspicious posture yet in a more radical
way than the hermeneutics of suspicion. Thus John Caputo follows Derrida
in charging Gadamer with defending an untenable metaphysical ‘tradi-
tionalism’ and ‘philosophy of eternal truth’, one that ‘turns on an implicit
acceptance of the metaphysical distinction between a more or less stable
and objective meaning and its ceaselessly changing expression.’ As Caputo
puts it, ‘Gadamer’s “tradition” is innocent of Nietzsche’s suspicious eye, of
Foucaultian genealogy’, a suspicion that compels hermeneutics to take a
‘radical’, that is, postmodern and deconstructive, turn.4
I return in this chapter to Ricoeur’s distinction between the hermeneutics
of recovery and suspicion. While Ricoeur brought this distinction to bear
on the debate between hermeneutics and critical theory, it may be equally
relevant to the somewhat ambiguous relation between hermeneutics and
postmodernism, including the work of Foucault.5 My hypothesis is that the
gulf between philosophical hermeneutics and Foucaultian genealogy has
been dramatically overstated. Gadamer and more recent hermeneutical
thinkers explicitly reject an objectivism of meaning, and his recovery of
select themes from the Western philosophical tradition – notably Platonic
dialogue, Aristotelian phronesis and Hegelian dialectic, all much revised
– differs in no important respect from Foucault’s own rehabilitation of
an ancient ethics of self-care. Many postmodernists continue to regard
Gadamer’s position here as metaphysical and conservative, yet if any
genuine gulf separates these two figures, it pertains far less to Foucault’s
radical suspicion of tradition and Gadamer’s non-radical rehabilitation of
it than to the style or mood in which the two thinkers spoke of tradition.
In some ways Gadamer appeared an optimist with respect to the possibility
of recovering historical truths, while in the genealogical writings Foucault
decidedly did not, yet this difference may be of less consequence than
many claim, a matter far more of style than of substance. Both figures,
as well as the larger schools of thought that they represented, stood
to tradition in a fundamentally Heideggerian way: as interpreters and
immanent critics, selectively retrieving traditionary concepts while turning
these to a creative purpose of their own. Neither believed it possible to
stand outside tradition, although Foucault sometimes made it appear as if
he could. After examining genealogy and recalling Ricoeur’s distinction
between these two modes of hermeneutics, I shall compare Gadamer’s
Genealogy and Suspicious Interpretation 175
appropriation of phronesis with Foucault’s recovery from classical sources

of an ethics of the care of the self, drawing attention to relevant similarities
and differences in their interpretive strategies. My claim will be that the
substantive similarities here far outweigh more superficial differences of
style and rhetoric and obviate the need to choose between these two essen-
tially Heideggerian schools of thought.
Foucault’s genealogical project borrows more than its name from
Nietzsche, and includes a number of premises and interpretive methods
derived from the latter. Like Nietzsche, he undertook a series of inquiries
into the nature and workings of power, the general intent of which was to
reveal its hitherto unperceived forms from the standpoint of the situated
historian, a perspective that eschews theory while retaining a critical
intent. It replaces the theoretical systematicity of ideology critique with
a more modest conception of critique, being sceptical of all attempts to
form judgements from the perspective of reason, science or universal
principles. On his view, any scientific hierarchy of discourses serves merely
to conceal the perspectivity of knowledge and to lend false legitimacy to a
single interpretive perspective. Foucault abandoned the search for a total-
izing standpoint for critique along with any form of theory construction
that would legitimize the role of universal judge. He abandoned as well
the ideal of power-free communication and proposed to replace ideology
critique with specific historical investigations of the forms of power that are
endemic to modernity.
Genealogy, in Foucault’s words, ‘is gray, meticulous and patiently
documentary. It operates on a field of entangled and confused parchments,
on documents that have been scratched over and recopied many times.’6
Fundamentally, it is a matter of ‘historical investigation into the events that
have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects
of what we are doing, thinking, saying.’7 Following Nietzsche, whose
genealogy of morality attempted to trace the history of ethics in order to
reveal the will to power operative within modern standards of evaluation,
Foucault’s method of interpretation is similarly historical, perspectival
and partisan while oriented toward modern practices of power. Without
appealing to the will to power, Foucault’s genealogical writings ostensibly
bracket questions of the rationality of normative or epistemological claims
(or their ‘order of rank’) and constitute a set of investigations into the
origins and development of modern concepts, practices and institutions.
Foucault never combined these disparate inquiries into any systematic
whole. Instead, the aim of these texts (principally Discipline and Punish
and The History of Sexuality) is to remind us of what has been forgotten in
our contemporary forms of practice. Genealogical research or ‘effective

history’ especially documents the specific ways in which power reaches into
and fashions subjectivity. The fundamental manner in which individuals
are constituted Foucault revealed as essentially a political phenomenon.
Modern subjectivity is constituted within a network of possibilities and
norms governing thought and behaviour and of actions governing actions.
The body itself is an effect of power, something disciplined and modified
by everything from medical technologies to labour to sexual norms.
Recounting in specific ways how the subject is an effect of power relations
is perhaps genealogy’s most crucial task.
In every case genealogy disturbs what was thought solid and reveals the
contingency behind all apparent necessity. It dissolves the self-evidence
of received judgements and reminds us how both these judgements and
the epistemic field in which they are constituted are historical artifacts.
If it is in the nature of power to present itself as having no alternative or
as belonging to an unassailable order, genealogy dissolves the dogmatic
consciousness that is essential to its operations. Archaeology and genealogy
alike are invariably oppositional. As one scholar writes, Foucault’s ‘objective
is to unearth, to excavate factors and events, overlooked likenesses, discon-
tinuities and disruptions, anomalies and suppressed items, which yield a
new picture of whatever has previously gone unquestioned and has been
taken as definitive knowledge and truth with respect to a particular subject
matter and more generally of how the world is. Foucault is everywhere
concerned with exhuming the hidden, the obscure, the marginal, the
accidental, the forgotten, the overlooked, the covered-up, the displaced.
His subjects for investigation are whatever is taken as the most natural,
obvious, evident, undeniable, manifest, prominent and indisputable.’8 It is
not essential structures or ahistorical causes that the genealogist unearths
but contingencies, accidents and deployments of power that had remained
unseen. The genealogical project counters established power/knowledge
configurations and reveals accepted historical continuities and overarching
structures as so many effects of power, as subterfuge or accidents of one
kind or another. Genealogy ‘disturbs what was previously considered
immobile; it fragments what was thought unified; it shows the hetero-
geneity of what was imagined consistent with itself.’9 It traces the effects
of strategies that, while decipherable, are often without malicious intent
and without a directing agency. It reveals how power is exercised not on a
top-down basis but from the bottom up, how it is circulated and pervades
a great variety of practices and institutions, and how it constitutes social
reality as a whole.
Genealogy differs from conventional historical inquiry in selectively

attending to events of the past that gave rise to exceptionable condi-
tions of the present as well as in refusing to interpret events in terms of
a continuous line of development from an absolute point of origin to a
present or future terminus. There is no design in history, neither teleology
nor inevitability, neither absolute beginnings nor final culminations.
Genealogy searches for origins in myriad places, none of which is essential,
and examines a multiplicity of factors that gave rise to later conditions.
Foucault was especially critical of historical research that subordinates
the particularity of events to any kind of overarching explanatory scheme.
The genealogist detects no laws, metaphysical necessities or essences to be
glimpsed behind the particularities of history, no fixed patterns in terms
of which to structure the past. Foucault wished to preserve and ‘record
the singularity of events outside of any monotonous finality.’10 In drawing
attention to the multiple factors that underlie events, genealogy under-
mines the reassuring predictability of traditional historical investigation. In
recording the accidents and the errors that gave rise to modern practices,
the complexity and contingency of historical events, genealogy upsets all
comforting talk of progress and necessity.
Foucault would always retain a perspectivist view of historical interpre-
tation. If there is no standpoint from which to gain a totalized view of the
past or present, the genealogist is no more able to discern the hand of
God than the historians whose methods he expressly rejected. Instead, this
method requires detailed investigation into the constitution of modern
forms of thinking, acting and being. It opposes all universalist and scientific
forms of historical explanation such as historical materialism, and claims
neither the status of a science nor in any way to bestow objective insight into
human affairs. To the question of whether genealogy is or is not a science,
Foucault responded: ‘It is surely the following kinds of questions that would
need to be posed: What types of knowledge do you want to disqualify in the
very instant of your demand: “Is it a science?” Which speaking, discoursing
subjects – which subjects of experience and knowledge – do you then want
to “diminish” when you say: “I who conduct this discourse am conducting
a scientific discourse, and I am a scientist”? Which theoretical-political
avant-garde do you want to enthrone in order to isolate it from all the
discontinuous forms of knowledge that circulate about it? When I see
you straining to establish the scientificity of Marxism I do not really think
that you are demonstrating once and for all that Marxism has a rational
structure and that therefore its propositions are the outcome of verifiable
procedures; for me you are doing something altogether different, you
are investing Marxist discourses and those who uphold them with the
effects of a power which the West since medieval times has attributed to
science and has reserved for those engaged in scientific discourse.’ The
‘tyranny of globalizing discourses’ Foucault resolutely rejected in favour of
local forms of knowledge that do not depend on ‘established regimes of
thought.’11 Where historians often sought evidence of continuous devel-
opment and hidden meanings, Foucault accentuated discontinuity, the
accidental character of events and the superficiality of all ostensible depths.
Behind all talk of progress, genealogy discovers strategies of power and the
succession of one form of power/knowledge after another. Behind inter-
pretations of concepts and claims to knowledge it finds various forms of
intrigue. It documents how discourses, practices and institutions embody
forms of domination, and in ways that are decidedly non-conspiratorial. It
‘seeks to reestablish the various systems of subjection: not the anticipatory
power of meaning, but the hazardous play of dominations.’12
Genealogical critique always invokes local and popular forms of
knowledge. Eschewing the explanatory systems of the ‘universal intel-
lectual’, Foucault’s ‘specific intellectual’ favours what has been demoted
to a low rank in the scientific hierarchy of knowledges and champions an
‘insurrection of subjugated knowledges’ in the sense of a rehabilitation of local
discourses that have been dismissed for their apparent lack of rigour: ‘a
whole set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their
task or insufficiently elaborated: naïve knowledges, located low down on
the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity.’13
The genealogist takes up the claims of the participant, activist, patient
and inmate along with other forms of situated and local knowledge not
on account of their rationality or consensus-generating capacity but
precisely for their capacity to interrupt consensus and destabilize estab-
lished regimes of knowledge. Subjugated knowledges serve as instruments
of critique since they disrupt the self-evident appearance of what passes for
truth and remind us how our practices came to be and may be otherwise.
Herein lies genealogy’s claim to radicality: as an oppositional and icono-
clastic mode of interpretation, genealogy destabilizes forms of practice and
knowledge that have constituted modern subjects.
The universal intellectual speaks from the vantage point of scientific
knowledge, a teleological philosophy of history or a universalist normative
theory, and is heir to ‘the Greek wise man, the Jewish prophet, the Roman
legislator.’14 Thinking in terms of totalities invariably overlooks the inter-
preter’s own participation in that which they would critique and the manner
in which their own reflection is made possible by the power relations they
attempt to unmask. What is needed therefore is a reexamination of the

intellectual’s role in the light of Nietzsche’s perspectivism. The genealogist
must be a specific intellectual, a radically situated critic who interprets the
specificities of our practices and power relations from the standpoint of
participants in various kinds of local struggle. Specific intellectuals are not
theorists but activists with firsthand knowledge of the contingencies and
contradictions that belong to particular domains of practice. As Foucault
expressed it: ‘The intellectual no longer has to play the role of an advisor.
The project, tactics and goals to be adopted are a matter for those who
do the fighting. What the intellectual can do is to provide instruments of
analysis, and at present this is the historian’s essential role. What’s effec-
tively needed is a ramified, penetrative perception of the present, one that
makes it possible to locate lines of weakness, strong points, positions where
the instances of power have secured and implanted themselves by a system
of organization dating back over 150 years. In other words, a topological
and geological survey of the battlefield – that is the intellectual’s role. But
as for saying, “Here is what you must do!”, certainly not.’15
While the influence of Nietzsche and Heidegger was omnipresent in
Foucault’s work, the genealogical writings also express an underlying ethos
of emancipation. Specifically it is the emancipation of subjugated knowl-
edges and the problematizing of our current regimes of truth at which they
point. In Power/Knowledge, for instance, he would state that ‘a genealogy
should be seen as a kind of attempt to emancipate historical knowledges
from .â•›.â•›. subjection, to render them, that is, capable of opposition and of
struggle against the coercion of a theoretical, unitary, formal and scientific
discourse.’16 Similarly, in ‘The Subject and Power’, he proposed that ‘the
political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is not to try to
liberate the individual from the state, and from the state’s institutions, but
to liberate us both from the state and from the type of individualization
which is linked to the state.’17 Such affirmations are surprising given
that genealogy brackets questions of assessment. While Foucault rejected
emancipation as a theoretical principle, the force of his critique appears
to presuppose some notion of human freedom. On one hand, genealogy
is a descriptive enterprise that brackets claims to truth and rightness, while
on the other hand it is a partisan endeavour – in the fashion once again
of Nietzschean genealogy, albeit less explicitly. A moral horizon underlies
the genealogical project and gives it whatever critical force that it carries,
yet unlike the original genealogist of morality Foucault never clarified in
these inquiries the place from which he himself spoke.18 He championed
an ‘insurrection of subjugated knowledges’ and ‘new forms of subjectivity’, yet
was reluctant to explain why or to provide alternatives or solutions to the

problems that he uncovered.19 In Remarks on Marx, for instance, he would
write: ‘I absolutely will not play the part of one who prescribes solutions. I
hold that the role of the intellectual today is not that of establishing laws
or proposing solutions or prophesying, since by doing that one can only
contribute to the functioning of a determinate situation of power that to
my mind must be criticized.’20 In an interview of 1977, Foucault responded
thus to the following questions: ‘“Do you want the revolution? Do you want
anything more than the simple ethical duty to struggle here and now, at
the side of one or another oppressed and miserable group, such as fools
or prisoners?” I have no answer. But I believe that to engage in politics –
aside from just party politics – is to try to know with the greatest possible
honesty whether the revolution is desirable. It is in exploring this terrible
molehill that politics runs the danger of caving in.’21 Foucault’s interest as
an historical interpreter lay in the domain of problems, contradictions and
dominations, not solutions or alternatives. His aim was to problematize
established regimes of knowledge, to unmask the dangers besetting our
practices and to describe these in ways that highlight their complexity
and caution against facile solutions. Herein lies the considerable value of
genealogy as a mode of critical interpretation.
Wherein lies the divide between the genealogical project and post-Heideg-
gerian hermeneutics? What Heidegger taught us to see is the fundamental
inseparability of illumination and concealment. Interpretation is never
a pure disclosure or aperspectival grasp of the phenomena, but involves
the complex interplay of lethe and aletheia, quite apart from whether
we are appropriating or resisting the claims that a text or any object of
interpretation makes upon us. Interpretation in every instance is condi-
tioned by history and language; it is perspectival and partial in what it
brings into view, and inclined at once toward revelation and concealment.
Philosophical hermeneutics and Foucaultian genealogy can agree to this
much, among many other matters. Disagreement arises both between
these two schools and between hermeneutics and critical theory around
the distinction between suspicion and recovery. As Ricoeur expressed it,
the premise of the hermeneutics of suspicion is that we must ‘look upon
the whole of consciousness primarily as “false” consciousness.’22 It falls
therefore to critique as a suspicious mode of interpretation to demystify
what present ways of seeing-as conceal or distort, and in a general spirit
of emancipation, however this is conceived. The figures whom Ricoeur
identified under the rubric of suspicious hermeneutics are one in regarding
consciousness as simultaneously a disclosure and a deception, yet primarily
the latter. Beneath its significations lie the will to power, the history of class
struggle, the repression of desire or ideology in the form of systematically
distorted communication. While their methods of decipherment range
from genealogy to psychoanalysis to the critique of ideology, hermeneu-
ticists of suspicion practice an art of interpretation as demystifying the
falsifications of consciousness. By contrast, the hermeneutics of recovery
or recollection returns to the interpretive object’s original context and
performs an exegesis with an eye to recovering its truth value. This mode
of interpretation inclines toward affirmation and rehabilitation where
the hermeneutics of suspicion is inclined toward negation. Its attitudinal
posture is distinct from the latter in that one anticipates the possibility of
a selective appropriation of one’s object. Consciousness is not primarily
false, in this view, nor is misunderstanding the rule, while illumination is
the exception. These two modes are sometimes accounted as ‘strategies’,
yet in a way that trades on an ambiguity in the word in virtue of which
we are often inclined to regard the two as contrasting or indeed incom-
patible ways of proceeding in interpretation. One proceeds with a strategy
of either suspicious unmasking or uncritical endorsement. Whether this
constitutes a dichotomy must be questioned.
For his part, Ricoeur was far from regarding these two modes of
interpretation as antithetical. In Freud and Philosophy he would speak of
hermeneutics as ‘animated’ not by one of two incompatible aims but ‘by
this double motivation: willingness to suspect, willingness to listen; vow of
rigour, vow of obedience.’ The ‘extreme iconoclasm’ that suspicion brings
about itself ‘belongs to the restoration of meaning’ rather than constituting
a meaning- or tradition-destroying gesture.23 Ricoeur’s point in the context
of the Gadamer-Habermas debate was to argue, against the latter, that
suspicion in the form of ideology critique is precisely a mode of herme-
neutical reflection, not the purely objective, scientific and explanatory
discourse that Habermas claimed it to be. Ricoeur’s point was well taken.
However suspicious or oppositional one is inclined to be, there is no rising
above the fray of interpretation – no skyhooks, as Rorty would say – or as
Gadamer expressed it, the scope of hermeneutical reflection is universal.
This can be seen by examining the interpretive practice of herme-
neuticists both suspicious and ostensibly conservative. Examples of the
hermeneutics of recovery include Gadamer’s rehabilitation of Platonic
dialogue, Aristotelian phronesis and Hegelian dialectic. Under the rubric
of suspicious hermeneutics Ricoeur mentioned Nietzsche’s genealogy
of morality, Marx’s critique of capitalism, Freud’s psychoanalysis, and
Habermas’ critique of ideology. Since the debate with Habermas, the
impression of Gadamer as a kind of conservator of tradition has unfor-

tunately stuck in many minds, despite the fact that the texts Gadamer
gave us quite obviously disconfirm this reading. Ricoeur might well have
mentioned as examples of the hermeneutics of recovery not only many
of his own philosophical efforts but Habermas’ rehabilitation of Kantian
morality, Nietzsche’s celebration of the Dionysian and a classical ethics of
nobility, Marx’s appropriations of Hegel and Rousseau and a great many
other cases of philosophers, as radical as one likes, recovering ideas from
tradition while turning them to a purpose of their own. In each instance
what we find is not any simple return to yesteryear but a properly critical
appropriation, and an appropriation without which original and critical
thought could not begin.
When we examine the actual interpretive practices not only of Foucault
or Gadamer but of any notable thinker, what we find is neither wholesale
suspicion nor wholesale recovery, but a selective yea- and nay-saying
depending entirely on what emerges in the course of interpretation. Thus
Gadamer recovered a few ideas from Plato and Aristotle, Nietzsche found
inspiration in certain other Greek sources, Heidegger borrowed from the
presocratics, Habermas from Kant, Ricoeur from Freud, Derrida from
Nietzsche. What distinguishes these appropriations from each other? In
none of these pairings is the former an unimaginative disciple of the latter;
instead they are creative interpreters, selectively retrieving ideas that can be
refashioned and turned to a purpose of their own. None was recovering an
objective truth in unrevised form.
If Ricoeur’s reply to Habermas was that critique is itself a form of herme-
neutical reflection rather than an alternative to it, a similar point can be
made with respect to postmodern genealogy. As the original genealogist of
morality was well aware, genealogy is a particular mode or style of interpre-
tation. It does not aim to recover an objective meaning or essentialist truth
of any kind, but remains a perspectival interpretation. If it is animated by
a desire to problematize or unmask this or that – the will to power under-
lying moral values, the vicissitudes of power/knowledge, or what have you
– it does not transcend interpretation in the sense of either a Nietzsche, a
Heidegger or a Gadamer, nor does it amount to total disclosure. For these
latter figures, it is not only truth or meaning that interpretation uncovers
but precisely distortion, subterfuge and idolatry. Moreover, they rightly
deny that any sharp distinctions can be drawn between hermeneutical
interpretation and either explanation, critique or genealogy itself.
This can be seen in the practice of genealogy wherein critique takes the
form of a partisan and decidedly suspicious form of historical investigation.
Whether we are speaking of Nietzsche’s genealogy or Foucault’s, suspi-

cious reflection involves historicizing, recounting or narrating in a certain
manner. It is historicizing with a moral or political aim in view, but having
such an aim neither requires nor enables us to transcend the finitude of
interpretation. Nietzsche was well aware that his own practice of genealogy
was interpretive and perspectival through and through, not some purely
revelatory discourse. Objectivity is an idol, he always insisted, and it is no
more attainable in historical or emancipatory reflection than anywhere
else. Foucaultian genealogy as well is an affair of historical reflection – with
a suspicious and demystifying intent, to be sure, yet in no sense does it
transcend hermeneutical reflection. His genealogy would never exceed the
limits that Nietzsche ascribed to it, although he undoubtedly refined the
method itself and extended it farther than his predecessor. The combined
influence of Nietzsche and Heidegger on Foucault’s genealogical writings
is unmistakable and profound. Indeed narrative itself, like fashioning
metaphors and other forms of imaginative predication, belongs precisely
to the practice of hermeneutical reflection. Genealogy, be it Nietzsche’s
or Foucault’s, is a form of historical narrative that is itself a species of
hermeneutical interpretation, not something to which the latter is in any
important respect contrasted.
An important question that arises in connection with Foucault’s later
writings concerns the status of genealogy as an interpretive practice. Is
genealogical critique a hermeneutical mode of reflection or, as is usually
claimed, an alternative to it? Dreyfus and Rabinow defend the latter option,
however their reasons for doing so are worth noting. While they point
out the obvious fact that genealogy is an interpretive practice, they insist
on separating this from hermeneutical interpretation for the reason that
the former renounces the quest for fixed and objective meaning behind
the phenomena it investigates. It admits that behind every meaning and
every perspective lies another meaning and another perspective, and
acknowledges that it will never gain an objective viewpoint on human
history. Dreyfus and Rabinow cite the following remark from Foucault’s
essay, ‘Nietzsche, Freud, Marx’: ‘If interpretation is a never-ending task,
it is simply because there is nothing to interpret. There is nothing
absolutely primary to interpret because, when all is said and done, under-
neath it all everything is already interpretation.’ Interpretation does not
uncover anything but other interpretations which have been imposed by
previous speakers – interpretations, according to Dreyfus and Rabinow,
the imposition of which is arbitrary: ‘In this discovery of groundlessness
the inherent arbitrariness of interpretation is revealed. For if there is
nothing to interpret, then everything is open to interpretation; the only

limits are those arbitrarily imposed.’24 Dreyfus and Rabinow’s claim that
genealogy is interpretive but not hermeneutical raises a question of
definition. The notion of hermeneutics with which they operate here harks
back to the romantic hermeneutics of Friedrich August Wolf, Friedrich
Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey, according to whom the aim of inter-
pretation is indeed to uncover the original and essential meaning of a
text – that which represents the author’s intention. By now, however, this
is a highly antiquated reading of the term hermeneutics, given the turn in
Heideggerian and subsequent hermeneutics away from all talk of essen-
tialist or objectively determinable meaning. On Dreyfus and Rabinow’s
reading, then, the only difference between Foucaultian genealogy and
hermeneutical reflection is the apparent arbitrariness of the former; thus
acknowledging the interpretive nature of genealogy also forces us to grant
its arbitrariness. That interpretation must either constitute a revelation
of essentialist meaning and final truth or remain an arbitrary matter is a
false opposition. Genealogy is no more arbitrary than historical inquiry
in its more conventional forms. It interprets interpretations rather than
unearths essentialist meanings, but the same is true of hermeneutics.
Wherein, then, lies the difference?
Many postmodernists continue to contrast Foucault’s views (or Derrida’s,
or their own) with hermeneutics, yet for what reasons? One possibility is
that hermeneutics aims not only at recovering some truth or other from
tradition (what thinker has not done this?) but at an objective meaning as
well. Thus, according to Derrida, Gadamer was (as the latter put it) but ‘a
lost sheep in the dried up pastures of metaphysics’ since he remained in
quest of the true, that is, objective, meaning of the interpretive object.25
This charge would stick if applied to the objectivist hermeneutics of an
E. D. Hirsch – a form of anti-Heideggerian hermeneutics that today finds
few advocates – but that it applies to Gadamerian hermeneutics is clearly
false. Gadamer explicitly repudiated the notion of a text or interpretive
object of any kind having an objective or essentialist meaning. Nietzsche
and Heidegger had both demolished this idea and Gadamer never sought
to rehabilitate it. Nor did Ricoeur or, to my knowledge, any more recent
proponent of philosophical hermeneutics. Interpretations may be better
or worse, more or less fruitful, reasonable, coherent or suggestive, but
objectively true they are not.
If there is an incompatibility between Gadamerian hermeneutics and
postmodern genealogy, might it lie in what Ricoeur identified as the basic
premise of the hermeneutics of suspicion: that consciousness is primarily
false consciousness? This would mean that misunderstanding and mysti-

fication are the rule in human consciousness while understanding and
demystifying critique are the exception, yet what could justify this claim?
However commonplace one believes falsehood to be, does this give
it primacy over its abstract antithesis? For that matter, who maintains
that consciousness is primarily true? Apparently the hermeneuticists of
recovery, but do they? What would this even mean?
When one sets out interpreting a text, historical event, work of art, or
what have you, one sometimes adopts a posture of suspicion – thus looking
beneath surfaces for evidence of mystification, idolatry or intrigue – and
sometimes of recovery – thus anticipating the possibility of understanding
something one had not previously seen. This depends on what emerges in
the reading rather than on any prior disposition – whether the claims that
the text makes ring true or false, whether they accord with our experience
and prior understandings or run afoul of something that we know. We are
not confronted with a grand either-or; one alternately appropriates and
discounts, recovers and rejects. One does not adopt a posture of recep-
tivity or suspicion entirely on the basis of prior commitments. One reads
precisely because one is not already in possession of the truth but must
inquire with an open mind into what another has to say. Recovery and
suspicion are far from mutually exclusive, the two postures being deployed
in turn depending on the back-and-forth between reader and text, on
the legitimacy of a claim or the persuasiveness of an argument. That one
should survey the history of philosophy and recover some ideas along the
way – rather than think on the basis of clear and distinct ideas of one’s
own – is neither conservative nor metaphysical but altogether inevitable.
No doubt, one interprets with different aims in view: here one is suspicious,
there one is not; here one recovers, there one does not. The aim depends
entirely on what emerges in the text. One is not suspicious of everything,
or of nothing. Nor does one recover everything, or nothing. One may be
more inclined this way or that, but both aims belong to the interpretive
process and neither has primacy over the other. Was Aristotle a suspicious
interpreter of Plato? Yes and no. Was he engaged in a salvage operation
or writing in an oppositional spirit? At times one, at times the other. The
same can be said of Hegel’s reading of Kant, Marx’s reading of Hegel,
Habermas’ reading of Marx, and so on.
There is no opposition that is not parasitic on affirmation, no suspicion
that is not premised on some valorization or other. One utters a ‘no’ in
the light of what one has already affirmed. Even the demystification of
genealogical analysis and ideology critique depends for its intelligibility on
a prior commitment of some kind. One practises critique not by pointing

out an inherent problem or evil but by showing how what one is criticizing
runs afoul of what one deems important. Far from negation and affir-
mation, or suspicion and recovery, being antithetical, these two modes of
reflection are best regarded as existing in a state of dynamic tension. To
negate is already to have affirmed, and to affirm is to be capable – with a
little imagination – of negation. Accordingly, suspicion and recovery are
as fundamentally inseparable as illumination and concealment. In neither
instance does the work of interpretation lead to full disclosure in the sense
of an aperspectival grasp of an object sub specie aeternitatis, nor does it lead
to complete mystification. Both modes of interpretation shed light and cast
a shadow in the same gesture, just as both are predicated on affirmation
and negation alike. The original master of suspicion himself urged his
readers to reject ‘the faith in opposite values’ which for Nietzsche constituted
the ‘fundamental faith of the metaphysicians.’26 That we must choose
between two antithetical interpretive strategies is yet another example of
this faith.
Why, then, does the idea persist that the hermeneutics of suspicion
and recovery are separate strategies, the former undertaken by the
radical and the latter by the conservative? The answer to this question, I
believe, is found far less in the actual interpretive practices of Foucault
and Gadamer than in the style or spirit in which they wrote, less in the
way in which they stood to tradition than in the rhetorical ways in which
they spoke of it – Gadamer with a measure of optimism or esteem and
Foucault with pessimism. I shall return to this point later. First, let us look
more closely at two examples of the kind of historical appropriations to
which I have alluded: Gadamer’s recovery of phronesis from the sixth book
of the Nicomachean Ethics and Foucault’s later turn toward the care of the
self. Where do we find suspicious demystification and where traditionalist
recollection?
Thinking that characterizes itself as radical must get below surfaces and
grasp its object from the root. Popular conceptions have long overlooked
the word’s etymology and reduced radicality to oppositional thinking in
general, or still more crudely to left politics. If it is left, one is often given
to believe, it is radical; otherwise it is conservative, nostalgic and perhaps
metaphysical. Postmodernism is radical and oppositional in its posture
toward not only tradition but metaphysics, power, the subject, gender and
almost everything that falls before its gaze. Genealogy is above all a critique
that stands inveterately opposed to its object, the historical unfoldings of
which it recounts with an attitude of partisanship and mistrust. Nietzsche’s
genealogy of morality and Marx’s critique of the market economy remain

exemplars of radical thought. Both figures have long exerted a powerful
influence on postmodernism, both for the arguments that they put forward
and perhaps still more for the oppositional spirit that so often animated
their writings. The point was not only to understand a given object via
interpretation but to unmask, demystify, or otherwise see through the
subterfuge that had surrounded a given object of interpretation. In a
word, it is opposition that is the sine qua non of radicality, or so a familiar
story goes. Toward the end of Foucault’s life, however, suspicion toward
tradition was displaced in one important instance by a return of sorts to
an ethics of self-care which Foucault appropriated from classical sources.
Having become accustomed to his diagnoses of the power dimension of
knowledge, readers of Foucault might well have been surprised when in
the History of Sexuality volumes we find him articulating an ethics that
amounts to a surprisingly straightforward recovery of Greek and Roman
ideas, albeit with an admixture of Nietzschean self-fashioning. The Care of
the Self is particularly surprising in this connection. The first volume saw
Foucault engaging in a similar style of critique to his other genealogical
texts, yet the later volumes find Foucault in a somewhat different mood.
By the second and third volumes Foucault’s ethical interests led him to
return to a variety of Greek and Roman sources and to recover an ethics
oriented far less by the ancient imperative to know thyself than by the
imperative to cultivate or take care of oneself for one’s own sake. This is
an ethics that does not provide decision procedures or a catalogue of the
virtues, but is oriented toward the relation of the self with itself. The basic
idea Foucault expressed as follows: ‘This “cultivation of the self” can be
briefly characterized by the fact that in this case the art of existence – the
techne tou biou in its different forms – is dominated by the principle that says
one must “take care of oneself.” It is this principle of the care of the self
that establishes its necessity, presides over its development and organizes
its practice. But one has to be precise here; the idea that one ought to
attend to oneself, care for oneself (heautou epimeleisthai), was actually a very
ancient theme in Greek culture.’ Foucault found expressions of this imper-
ative in the Epicureans, Socrates, Plato, Seneca, Pliny and a great many
figures in the ancient world. In addition to being a philosophical precept
‘consecrated by Socrates’, the care of the self ‘took the form of an attitude,
a mode of behaviour; it became instilled in ways of living; it evolved into
procedures, practices and formulas that people reflected on, developed,
perfected and taught.’ Self-care became a set of occupations, a labour
that filled a portion of one’s day or one’s life and assumed a wide variety
of forms, from personal introspection and reflection on daily events to

retreats, study, conversation and the pursuit of tranquillity. It included the
care of the body and the mind, physical exercise, the satisfaction of needs
and all manner of self-improvement. It was a social practice that ‘found
a ready support in the whole bundle of customary relations of kinship,
friendship and obligation’, one that extended into the medical art and
education no less than ethics. The orientation of these practices of the self
was not strictly egoistic but personal and social in roughly equal measure:
‘It is to be understood first of all as a change of activity: not that one must
cease all other forms of occupation and devote oneself entirely and exclu-
sively to oneself; but in the activities that one ought to engage in, one had
best keep in mind that the chief objective one should set for oneself is to be
sought within oneself, in the relation of oneself to oneself.’27 In the modern
age, Nietzsche gave the idea new life as well as a more explicitly aesthetic
turn, perhaps most eloquently in his ‘One thing is needful’ aphorism from
the fourth book of The Gay Science.28 Foucault echoed Nietzsche’s point in
an interview of 1983: ‘What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has
become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals,
or to life. That art is something which is specialized or which is done by
experts who are artists. But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art?
Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?’29 That
Foucault would take the ethics of self-care farther than the ancients did is
evident in his turn toward Nietzsche.
If an ethics of self-care and aesthetic self-creation has been forgotten
in the modern world, due largely to its eclipse by the imperative of self-
knowledge, it fell to Foucault to recover this ancient insight. If Foucault
did not advocate any simple return to classical notions, but a more creative
appropriation via Nietzsche, it remains an appropriation of ancient ideas
divested of their metaphysical trappings, and an appropriation that has
been well received by many of Foucault’s readers. How does this ancient
appropriation differ from Gadamer’s recovery of Platonic dialogue or
Aristotelian phronesis? Let us consider the latter case (a topic to which I
shall return in Chapter 12).
Gadamer’s recovery of phronesis occurs primarily in Part II of Truth and
Method in a section titled ‘The Hermeneutic Relevance of Aristotle.’ His
aim in this portion of the text was not to advocate a straightforward return
to Aristotelian ethics, but to demonstrate the relevance of the conception
of moral knowledge outlined in Book Six of the Nicomachean Ethics to
Gadamer’s own hermeneutical project. Indeed the context of these remarks
is not a discussion of moral philosophy at all but Gadamer’s identification
of the ‘elements of a theory of hermeneutic experience’, the title of the

second division of Part II. (Gadamer’s most sustained treatment of ethics
appears in two other books: Plato’s Dialectical Ethics and especially The Idea
of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy. In these texts as well we find no
wholesale return to virtue ethics, in the manner of Alasdair MacIntyre, but
something far more original.) His point was that phronesis affords a kind of
model for human understanding in general. In his words: ‘For the herme-
neutical problem too is clearly distinct from “pure” knowledge detached
from any particular kind of being. We spoke of the interpreter’s belonging
to the tradition he is interpreting, and we saw that understanding itself is
a historical event. The alienation of the interpreter from the interpreted
by the objectifying methods of modern science, characteristic of the
hermeneutics and historiography of the nineteenth century, appeared as
the consequence of a false objectification. My purpose in returning to the
example of Aristotelian ethics is to help us realize and avoid this. For moral
knowledge, as Aristotle describes it, is clearly not objective knowledge – i.e.,
the knower is not standing over against a situation that he merely observes;
he is directly confronted with what he sees. It is something he has to do.’30
Gadamer’s use of Aristotle here was motivated by the need to correct the
false objectivism of pre-Heideggerian hermeneutics. Interpretation shares
with moral knowledge as Aristotle described it a certain view of the relation
between universal and particular, the abstract and the applied. For Aristotle,
moral judgement involves a reciprocity between universal and particular
that is unlike forms of technical knowledge that begin with a clear grasp of
both the ends it sets out to achieve and the method of achieving them, and
which applies principles in a more or less automatic way. Phronesis does not
merely subsume particulars under general rules known in advance, but is
responsive to contingencies and involves a two-way illumination of general
moral requirements and particular cases. Application is properly regarded
as an art of bringing universals and particulars to bear on each other in the
absence of rules.
For Gadamer, the concept of phronesis sheds light on the relation between
universals and particulars more generally and on the nature of inter-
pretation both within and without moral contexts. Universals are never
grasped clearly and distinctly apart from the contexts in which they are
instantiated. Determining what morality requires does not involve standing
over against a given case and affixing to it a principle that could be fully
comprehended in abstract form. It is better regarded as a reading of the
situation or a perception of its moral significance from within the situation
itself. As an interpreter, one is not an objective observer of something
standing over against one, but is caught up, in a more immediate way, in
an effort to understand a particular in the light of a universal or the text
as a whole in the light of individual passages. It is as an instantiation of
a universal that the particular is interpreted, a universal that is not fully
determined in its being apart from its applications. For Gadamer, under-
standing is inseparable not only from interpretation but from application
as well. Understanding a text involves applying its meaning to the reader’s
own situation, just as moral principles are never understood entirely apart
from the cases that they govern. Application is not a subsuming of a deter-
minate particular under an equally determinate universal. Universals only
come into being as such in the process of being instantiated in or applied
to particular contexts. This is the meaning of Gadamer’s thesis that under-
standing and application, as well as interpretation, must be regarded ‘as
comprising one unified process.’31 Gadamer spoke of the interpreter as
‘belonging’ to the interpreted object in the sense that one stands to a text
not as subject to object but in a more immediate relation. The interpreter
belongs to the text in the sense that one belongs to history: one does not
stand at a radical distance from either but is constituted and claimed in
some fashion prior to any explicit interpretive efforts. Aristotle’s catalogue
of the virtues affords a knowledge of general moral requirements that
inform but underdetermine our judgements. What matters in phronesis
is the case at hand, the resolution of which one determines by relating
the case to such requirements, yet in a way that is not rule-governed.
Analogously, interpretation involves an application of the universal to the
particular that is fully reciprocal and unaided by formal methods.
Gadamer might have advanced this phenomenological argument
without referring to Aristotle at all. That he preferred to do so is indicative
not of his conservatism but of his dialogical practice as a thinker. Gadamer
was inclined to acknowledge his philosophical debts more often than
many do, habitually preferring to situate his own views in the context of
tradition rather than present them as historically unprecedented. There is
nothing conservative in this. It is a requirement of intellectual inquiry to
acknowledge one’s debts and to know the history and sources of one’s own
position rather than give the appearance of fashioning ideas from scratch,
as Gadamer might have done had he wished to strike a more radical pose.
The substantive similarities between hermeneutics and genealogy, and
between the hermeneutics of suspicion and recovery, run deep. In spite
of evident differences of vocabulary, rhetorical strategies and attitudinal
postures, and while pursuing quite different lines of inquiry, Foucault
and Gadamer remained decisively within the trajectory of Heideggerian
phenomenology. How is it, then, that these two schools of thought

continue to be understood in largely oppositional terms, with postmod-
ernism asserted to represent an advance over hermeneutics? Is Foucault’s
recovery of classical ideas radical and suspicious while Gadamer’s recovery
efforts are conservative and metaphysical? Foucault, it is said, was champi-
oning an ‘insurrection of subjugated knowledges’ while Gadamer was returning
to the past. Quite obviously, Gadamer was not returning to the past but
embarking on a similar kind of historical-interpretive enterprise as that
of Foucault. One might well say that Gadamer initiated an insurrection of
his own, yet without quite telling us – that phronesis undermined modern
conceptions of experience and ethics at once, that the recovery of Platonic
dialogue (in much-revised form) subverted modern, epistemology-centred
philosophy in general. A radical thinker he undoubtedly was; a lover of
literary excess, however, he was not.
Readers of Foucault and Gadamer, as well as the larger schools of
thought that they represented, will have noticed important stylistic and
indeed temperamental differences between the two. Postmodernism and
poststructuralism are political and, as we are so often told, radical ways
of thinking that stand in habitual opposition to tradition, consensus
and anything that passes for objectivity or ahistorical necessity. Their
political commitments are never far from the surface and typically incline
their advocates to ‘call into question’ and to ‘problematize’ rather more
than they answer or resolve. For its part, hermeneutics is less explicitly
political, although it is hardly without implications for politics and ethics
– implications that Gadamer himself went only part way toward identi-
fying. Apart from small disagreements that too often become magnified
out of proportion, genuine differences between Foucault and Gadamer
pertain far more to strategy than substance, and less to interpretive than
rhetorical strategy, less to how these two figures actually stood to tradition
than how they spoke of it. Foucault’s texts persuade by problematizing
and unmasking, Gadamer’s by interpreting tradition in a less oppositional
spirit and as at times a source of understanding. Foucault may well have
been more pessimistic than Gadamer, yet when have differences of style or
temperament amounted to substantive philosophical differences between
which we must choose? Here I am reminded of James’ observation at the
outset of Pragmatism about philosophical differences being ultimately
traceable to differences of temperament, an observation that, to my mind,
is true and that the present case would seem to confirm. James’ point is
worth recalling: ‘The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a
certain clash of human temperaments. Undignified as such a treatment
may seem to some of my colleagues, I shall have to take account of this

clash and explain a good many of the divergences of philosophers by it.
Of whatever temperament a professional philosopher is, he tries when
philosophizing to sink the fact of his temperament. Temperament is no
conventionally recognized reason, so he urges impersonal reasons only for
his conclusions. Yet his temperament really gives him a stronger bias than
any of his more strictly objective premises. It loads the evidence for him one
way or the other, making for a more sentimental or a more hard-hearted
view of the universe, just as this fact or that principle would. He trusts his
temperament. Wanting a universe that suits it, he believes in any represen-
tation of the universe that does suit it. He feels men of opposite temper to
be out of key with the world’s character, and in his heart considers them
incompetent and “not in it”, in the philosophic business, even though they
may far excel him in dialectical ability.’32 Astute psychologist that he was,
James divided philosophical temperaments into two kinds: the tender- and
the tough-minded – the former including the optimistic, among other
things, and the latter the pessimistic and sceptical. Foucault, James would
have surely said, belongs in the latter group, Gadamer more likely in the
former. So as well with many of their fellow travellers. Being pessimistic
or optimistic, tough- or tender-minded, persuading through oppositional
prose or some other kind do not amount to irreconcilable differences.
They are literary and rhetorical differences that, substantively speaking, are
not of ultimate importance. Whether we are unmasking or rehabilitating,
whether we are suspicious genealogists or thinkers of a somewhat more
sanguine kind, interpretation is interpretation. No matter our dispositions
or strategies, it remains a contingent and historically effected mode of
seeing-as which conceals and unconceals in the same gesture. After the
death of God it is also all that we have.
What difference does style make? All the difference in the world, as the
case of Foucault and Gadamer well demonstrates. Suspicion, like cynicism,
is always fashionable. It is the rhetorical device par excellence if one’s
audience is so inclined and unpersuasive if it is not. This goes some way
toward explaining the different receptions Foucault’s work has received
in continental (especially French) and Anglo-American circles, among
readers who, on the one hand, emerged out of the political atmosphere
of May 1968 and, on the other, analytic philosophers, for whom the prose
of the technician persuades rather more than that of the revolutionist. It
may also explain why Gadamer’s talk of tradition – as a source not always
of error but of truth as well – continues to sound to many like stuffy
conservatism, no matter how carefully he clarified his meaning or how
forcefully he articulated his opposition to conservatism and traditionalism

in all their forms. The word itself, and the prominent role that it plays in
philosophical hermeneutics, made such clarification a lost cause for those
who wish to regard themselves as radicals and whose predilection is for a
vocabulary of opposition.
That Foucaultian genealogy and hermeneutics are at odds on funda-
mentals, that we are confronted here with philosophical positions between
which we must choose, or that one has in any meaningful sense surpassed
the other, has not been demonstrated.
Chapter 11
Radical Hermeneutics
John Caputo
The claim to radicality is one that John Caputo has made with great
frequency in Radical Hermeneutics and its sequel, More Radical Hermeneutics,
and is based on an incorporation into hermeneutical thought of Derridean
deconstruction, a postmodern philosophy of religion and a serious
misreading of philosophical hermeneutics. Here again one finds profound
differences of style, tone and temperament in the writings of Gadamer,
Ricoeur and some related thinkers on one hand and Caputo and Jacques
Derrida on the other, some of which I shall discuss in what follows and which
again have a tendency to be inflated. Thinking that characterizes itself as
radical so often resorts to caricatures of the opposition and posturing
that its claim to have plumbed a depth or seen through the subterfuge
that others have not must on occasion be viewed with scepticism. Radical
hermeneutics is premised on a misreading of Gadamer, and this is an
issue that muddies the waters considerably if we are intent upon seeing
how this position represents either a departure or an advance over philo-
sophical hermeneutics. Our question in this chapter concerns the merits
of Caputo’s radical gesture, including its implications for the philosophy
of religion. The turn in recent continental thought to religion is a trend to
which Caputo has offered an important contribution, and while in my view
it is a trend that invites suspicion – particularly in the case of postmodern
writers who acknowledge a sizeable debt to Nietzsche – I shall limit myself
to a few remarks concerning the ‘openness to the mystery’ of which the
later Heidegger spoke and Caputo’s appropriation of this theme.
The project of radicalizing hermeneutics presupposes that the thing itself
is not already radical and perhaps, as Caputo also believes, that it leans
rather far in the opposite direction. Showing that this is so obliges us to
recall Derrida’s critique of hermeneutics. During his ‘encounter’ (it is best
not to call it a conversation) with Gadamer in 1981, Derrida advanced the
claim that Gadamer’s talk of good will in understanding an interlocutor or
a text implicates hermeneutics in Kantian metaphysics, a claim that Caputo
would later amplify in asserting that ‘under Gadamer’s hand, hermeneutics
is marked by Hegelian and Platonic metaphysics’ as well.1 As Gadamer would
Radical Hermeneutics 195
say of Derrida’s characterization of him, ‘it is I myself who, in taking up

and continuing hermeneutics as philosophy, would appear at best as the lost
sheep in the dried up pastures of metaphysics.’2 These are pastures in which
no sensible phenomenologist would wish to find oneself, but what claim
is being made here about the hermeneutics to which both Derrida and
Caputo stand opposed – the former in the name of an antihermeneutical
deconstruction and the latter under the banner of a radical hermeneutics
that incorporates deconstruction within it? Derrida’s point about Kantian
metaphysics is slightly amusing but may be left aside in order to take a
closer look at Caputo’s view which carries forward the spirit and substance
of Derrida’s critique. Caputo charges Gadamer with being a traditionalist,
foundationalist, and ‘closet essentialist’ owing to his ‘attachment not only
to Plato, the aboriginal essentialist, but more interestingly to Hegel, whose
overtly and robustly essentialist thought had an historical twist.’3 Whereas
‘hermeneutics in the Gadamerian sense turns on the communication of
meaning, the way meaning gets handed on and reappropriated across
the ages, dissemination is an undoing of hermeneutics, a disruption of its
“postal” service and harmonious deliveries. By its reduction of the privilege of
meaning, dissemination means to release all the hitherto suppressed powers
of the signifier.’4 Statements abound in Caputo’s work that ‘Gadamer’s is a
philosophy of meaning – of the transmission, communication, preservation,
enrichment and nourishing of meaning’ while deconstruction more radically
‘has taken the step back out of meaning into that which grants meaning
and at the same time delimits it.’5 Not only is philosophical hermeneutics
a ‘philosophy of meaning’ but, on Caputo’s telling, it is a philosophy of
objective and essentialist meaning. Gadamer, he writes, ‘does not think that
language is the expression of a pre-constituted meaning, but that language is
the emergence, constitution or coming into being of meaning (and indeed
being itself). But it is the coming to be of meaning. Language is related to
meaning as the explicit to the implicit, the emergent to the latent, the actual
to the possible.’6 Indeed, the ‘whole argument’ that Gadamer presented in
Truth and Method ‘remains attached to the tradition as the bearer of eternal
truths’ and ‘turns on an implicit acceptance of the metaphysical distinction
between a more or less stable and objective meaning and its ceaselessly
changing expression.’ Philosophical hermeneutics, Caputo maintains, ‘is a
reactionary gesture’, a full retreat into metaphysics since ‘the matter to be
thought is the fundamental content of the metaphysical tradition – the
notions of dialogue in Plato, phronesis in Aristotle, dialectic in Hegel – all of
which are put to work in a metaphysical effort to preserve and cultivate the
truth of the tradition which is closer to Hegel than Heidegger.’7
More generally, Caputo repeats the assertion often heard in postmodern

circles that hermeneutics ‘is innocent of Nietzsche’s suspicious eye, of
Foucaultian genealogy’, and, of course, of Derridean deconstruction. In
place of suspicion, hermeneutics offers reassurance that ‘all is well, that
beneath the surface of historical transition an unchanging, infinite spirit
labours.’ Nietzsche’s critique of ‘Egyptianism’ is in the background here;
Caputo cites Nietzsche’s remark that ‘All that philosophers have handled
for millenia has been conceptual mummies; nothing actual has escaped
from their hands alive. .â•›.â•›. What is, does not become; what becomes, is not’,
adding: ‘Philosophy is scandalized by motion and thus tries either to
exclude movement outright from real being (Platonism) or, more subver-
sively, to portray itself as a friend of movement and thus to lure it into the
philosophical house of logical categories (Hegelianism).’ It is the latter
move that hermeneutics of the non-radical variety ostensibly makes. Its
metaphysics is a subversive metaphysics, its essentialism of the closet variety.
It is an attempt, as Caputo often says, to still the flux, to deny becoming,
and to provide metaphysical comfort that meaning and truth are out there,
embedded in tradition, and that all we need do is take it up and apply
it. The notion of phronesis, for instance, is a ‘fundamentally conservative
notion’ since it ‘requires a stable paradigm’ and a ‘fixed order’ rather than
a radical disruption of that order.8
The hermeneutics of Gadamer and Ricoeur contains ‘a nostalgia for
meaning and unity’, for truth and stability behind all contingency.9 Having
glimpsed the flux that Nietzsche and Heidegger so effectively brought to
our attention, it ‘arrests the flux’ and ‘stills the conflict of interpretations.’
‘That, of course, is Derrida’s objection to hermeneutics and why he will
not use the word, for hermeneutics seems to him to mean the “mistake”
of trying to “arrest the text in a certain position, thus settling on a thesis,
meaning, or truth.”’10 The point of interpretation, radically conceived,
is not to understand meaning or know the truth but to keep the play of
language in play. This is the implication of Heidegger’s critical and radical
side for which hermeneutics lacks the courage. Its failure of nerve consists
in its being ‘too much interested in garnering the accumulated goods of
the tradition, the “truth” (verum, alethea) which it has stored up, to ask the
question of the a-letheia process itself, which Heidegger never ceased to
pose.’11 If we would speak of tradition at all, the aim of a radical herme-
neutics, as of deconstruction, is not to learn from it but ‘to keep the event
of tradition going, to keep it on the move.’12 Its aim is the Kierkegaardian
one of restoring the difficulty of life and the fragility of thought in constant
opposition to metaphysics in all its manifestations. Never far from Derrida,
Caputo is constantly vigilant on the side of the Dionysian, the free play
of deconstruction, undecidability and différance. Insofar as interpretation
can be said to have an aim, it consists in ‘coping with the flux’ without
repressing it by means of some gesture toward the absolute. Philosophers
who have caught a glimpse of contingency have a tendency to retreat from
it. The great exception is again Derrida, who ‘does not want, ultimately,
to tame it or merely tolerate it but positively to celebrate and cultivate it.’
Radical hermeneutics endeavours ‘if not to live constantly in that element,
at least to spend some time there, to make an occasional excursion into
that desert.’ Emphasizing the perilousness and difficulty of the task, and
frequently dramatizing the point, Caputo tells us that our aim is to ‘cope’
with this element or ‘to stay in play with it’ rather than seek metaphysical
reassurances.13 How one accomplishes this matters rather less than whether
one makes the attempt.
What Caputo finds in the trajectory of thought running from Kierkegaard
and Nietzsche to Heidegger and Derrida, but not in Gadamer and
Ricoeur, is a resolute affirmation of becoming, a thinking that recognizes
the abyss beneath us without reverting to an objectifying metaphysics.
Essentialism and metaphysics in all their forms must be jettisoned in favour
of a Nietzschean innocence of becoming and a view of life as something
that is ‘conducted along a narrow line, on either side of which lies the
chaos.’14 This is a sense of life that is especially reminiscent of Nietzsche
and Kierkegaard. Caputo repeatedly employs metaphors of the desert,
the flux, chaos, free-wheeling repetition and play in a hermeneutics that
is ‘cold’ and without any manner of reassurance or intellectual comfort.
Interpretation is a gay science while the only truth of which we can speak
is Nietzsche’s womanly truth. The atmosphere by turns is dangerous and
exuberant and always resistant to the spirit of gravity.
In short, ‘[t]he play is all’ in a hermeneutics that is schooled in decon-
struction. ‘Beneath, behind, around, to the side of all grounding and
founding, in the ground’s cracks and crevices and interstices, is the play.
.â•›.â•›. The one great danger, the most perilous condition of all .â•›.â•›. is to take
reason too seriously.’15 What hermeneutics requires is a Kierkegaardian
leap into mystery, into a more poetic thinking that embraces difference
over unity, free play over seriousness, and creativity over methodology.
But for the method of deconstruction itself (and, of course, ‘method’
is not quite the word), radical hermeneutics regards all methodology as
intellectual faintheartedness and a retreat into essentialism. The work of
interpretation is play, yet not in Gadamer’s sense of the back-and-forth
of dialogue since this too, according to Caputo, is a metaphysical gesture
that presupposes some deep truth that we are trying to get right, some
code that we are endeavouring to crack. Instead it is deconstructive free
play that is the business of literary and all interpretation. Whether we are
speaking of texts, traditions, perceptual objects or what have you, there is
no phenomenological givenness in experience, nothing to get right and
no pure origin apart from the ‘supplement.’ There is no sphere of prelin-
guistic meaning or truth that interpretation must re-present, only the play
of linguistic signifiers in which nothing is pure or originary. In general,
there is no ideality without language, no constitution without signs, and no
realm of decidable meaning. In Caputo’s words, ‘The very meaning and
mission of deconstruction is to show that things .â•›.â•›. do not have definable
meanings and determinable missions, that they are always more than any
mission would impose, that they exceed the boundaries they currently
occupy. What is really going on in things, what is really happening, is always
to come.’16 The meaning and the truth that we seek elude us and make a
mockery of all rational methodology. The implication of undecidability is
that nothing is set in stone, that while we are not unable to decide we are
unable to still or contain the play of signifiers. No verdict is final, no case
closed, no interpretation correct. The orientation of radical hermeneutics
is therefore toward the disruptive and provocative and against any effort
to reduce the meaning of the text to the author’s intention or otherwise
call the play to order. What has been interpreted can be reinterpreted
as tensions and complexities are continually brought to light and texts
come into association with other texts. If much of this is already implicit to
hermeneutics, Caputo insists that it is an ‘antihermeneutical interpretation
of interpretation’ that he is offering since it ‘denies all deep meanings, all
hidden truth, indeed truth itself.’ Radical hermeneutics speaks in ‘a wholly
different voice, a wilder and more Nietzschean tone’ while constituting
‘a philosophy not of retrieval but of a more impious and free-wheeling
repetition.’ Philosophical hermeneutics contains a metaphysical nostalgia
that postmodernism has wholly abandoned. It reigns in the object of inter-
pretation, pronounces upon its meaning, and excludes certain connections
and effects of a text as irrelevant. To claim that one has understood a text or
text-analogue is to commit an interpretive violence against it while decon-
structive interpretation is an act of liberation, a refusal to pin down what
cannot be pinned down. Following Derrida once more, Caputo speaks of
hermeneutics as ‘rabbinical’ in its deference to the text, for the tradition
it reveres and the spirit of gravity in which it works. There is a ‘theological
reverence’ here and a ‘piety’ that radical thought rejects in favour of poetic
liberation. ‘The poet’, Caputo writes, ‘.â•›.â•›. is imprudent and autonomous, an
outlaw. He does not bow his head to the sacred original. If he is involved in
interpretation at all, it is in a wilder, freer, antihermeneutic way which lacks
the piety of rabbinical hermeneutics.’17 If interpreters come in two types,
rabbis and poets, Gadamer and Ricoeur belong in the first category while
Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida belong in the second.
Poetic thinkers, like all radicals, do not revere. Instead they are trans-
gressors forever attuned to discontinuity, disruption and difference while
keeping the play of interpretation and reinterpretation going.
Caputo is well aware that many will hear this as a recipe for interpretive
arbitrariness, and he does endeavour to show how this is not the case. No
criteria and no methods govern interpretation, and this entails neither
indecision nor arbitrariness but emancipation. Caputo’s language here is
of an irreverent ‘free play of endless textual effects’ which is ‘out of control’
and whose alternative is violence, yet it is neither random, relativistic
nor irrational.18 Derridean différance is ‘a wild and formless infinity’ that
refuses the reduction to determinate meaning and a Gadamerian fusion
of horizons, yet it is a misconception that in deconstruction interpretation
dissolves into chaos or that a text can be read in any way that we wish.19 The
impression is easily gained, of course, whether we are speaking of Derrida
or Caputo, but for both thinkers to speak of interpretation as open-ended
does not mean that it is arbitrary. ‘The point is to make life difficult’, Caputo
says, ‘not impossible’, not to jettison reason but to fashion a non-rationalist
conception of it. The point is not only to keep the play going but to keep
it fair and reasonable, Caputo tells us in moments in which he appears
somewhat less radical. If there are no criteria, there are still conditions of
fairness. What, then, are these? The challenge for Caputo at this stage in
the argument is a large one: what makes radical hermeneutics radical, he
tells us often and with no little fanfare, is its embrace of the flux, its resolute
refusal to retreat into metaphysics, including the subversive metaphysics of
philosophical hermeneutics, and its ‘outlaw’ self-image. Any talk of criteria
in interpretation is not only essentialist and foundationalist but ‘banal,
after the fact, wooden, or, even worse, repressive.’20 Rational principles
are for rationalists and are politically dangerous, dogmatic and – no less
problematic for the radically minded – dull. Recourse to them evinces a
failure of nerve. Caputo presses hard on this theme, and his vigilance on
behalf of the Dionysian makes any transition back to Apollonian conditions
of fairness and reasonableness awkward. He has told us that even phronesis
presupposes an unquestioned order of things to which only guardians
of that order and metaphysicians can appeal. What sort of Apollonian
moment is possible for the radical?
It is a question of fair play without criteria of fairness, of reasonableness

without rationalism. It is a question, in other words, of dialogue, ‘a cross-
fertilizing dialogue among many different points of view.’ For Caputo and
Derrida alike, ‘things get worked out in a way which is very much like
what Rorty (following Oakeshott) calls the conversation of mankind .â•›.â•›. by
a kind of ongoing debate in which the forces of rhetoric clash and settle
into a consensus of whose contingency it is the role of the Socratics and
Derrideans to remind us. .â•›.â•›. The upshot of Derrida’s critical praxis is not
confusion and anarchy, as is often claimed, but free and open debate.’21
Caputo’s descriptions of a dialogue that is free and open sound familiar
not only to readers of Rorty and a fortiori Dewey, but to readers of Gadamer
and Ricoeur. Wherein lies the difference? The debate that is free and open
in a radical sense can make no appeal to freedom or openness conceived
as principles, to hermeneutical good will, to the fusion of horizons, to an
ideal speech situation or to notions of pragmatic coherence or consensus,
for all of this is metaphysical, repressive or otherwise non-radical. It must
be a non-totalizing dialogue that is free of all gestures toward the absolute,
one that is rhetorical but not sophistical, open-ended and hospitable to
difference, inclined toward iconoclasm and the political left, and not
deadly serious. On the question of science, it is well disposed to Thomas
Kuhn and (especially) Paul Feyerabend, and prizes revolution over a
normalcy that in most cases is authoritarian. Its openness to the other
is said to be more thoroughgoing than what Gadamer spoke of, yet it
is an openness that does not anticipate that the other may be right, for
this is reverential and rabbinical. We are open to the other without quite
being prepared to learn from them, for this implicates us in the language
of metaphysics and places us on the receiving end of an essentialist’s
postal service. Caputo is emphatic that interpretation is not arbitrary, yet
when it comes to identifying the conditions that would render it fair and
reasonable, it is primarily negative description that he offers. We must
neither repress the play of interpretations nor dream of the coming of the
absolute, but remain open to difference. Interpretive hospitality is not a
principle of rationality, but it is an imperative of a somewhat less formal
kind. ‘Like Rorty’, he writes, ‘I want to try to make it without entertaining
any illusions about big world-historical or Being-historical stories’, without
large-scale theories of rationality, knowledge, or truth.22
We are to be open – radically open and vigilant in our hospitality to the
other. Above all, we are to be open to the mystery of which Heidegger
spoke in his later works. The religious turn that things take here makes
the distinction with philosophical hermeneutics more emphatic. While
hermeneutics arose out of Protestant Christianity as a matter of historical

fact, hermeneutical philosophy is not religiously committed. In radical
hermeneutics the situation is decidedly otherwise. More than a century
after Nietzsche pronounced the death of God, Caputo and many other
postmoderns who claim the same figure as a major influence now speak of
the return of God or religion, and in radical form. His formulation of this
remains ‘parasitic upon the confessional forms’ of religion, most especially
Christianity, however it is a ‘religiousness without the confessional religions’
– particularly without their metaphysical underpinnings – that he wishes to
salvage after a few centuries of learned scepticism. For Caputo, the centre-
piece of religion is ‘the passion for the impossible.’ The ‘mark of a religious
sensibility’ is not any intellectual assent to doctrines but what he calls the
‘movement of living on the limit of the possible, in hope for and expec-
tation of the impossible, a reality beyond the real.’ Religion is a question
of desire, not reason; it ‘is for the unhinged’, not the sober-minded. It is
a ‘sense of life [that] awakens when we lose our bearings and let go, when
we find ourselves brought up against something that exceeds our powers,
that overpowers us and knocks us off our hinges.’ It is a sense of life to
which he contrasts the rationalistic and narrowly pragmatic, the character
who is concerned only with certainties and mundane practicalities and
whose experience is not cognitively deficient so much as unimaginative.
The passion for the impossible that defines religious faith is a non-knowing
that harks back to ‘what the mystics call a docta ignorantia, a learned or
wise ignorance.’23 Like the ignorance of Socrates, it is the knowledge that
one does not know and must live in this condition without expectation of
deliverance. Caputo states and restates the point: there is no respite from
the flux in which our existence is played out and no secret to which the
believer has special access. Religion is an effort to cope with mystery and it
is authentic only in the degree that it recognizes the contingency and diffi-
culty of our condition. Religious faith is an effort to live with ambiguity and
to make ourselves at home in a world in which our concepts are so many
‘thin membranes of structures which we stretch across the flux.’24 If it is our
existential condition to know neither who we are nor what it is that we love
when we love God, we can at least strive to keep these questions open and
to love whatever it is that we love with Dionysian flair.
At times Caputo defines religion very simply as ‘the love of God’, while
acknowledging that the phrase ‘needs some work.’ No mythical supreme
being, ‘God is a name we confer on things we love very dearly, like peace
or justice or the messianic age.’ In saying this, he writes not as a theologian
in the sense of one who expounds doctrines asserted to represent the
truth about the deity or the afterlife but as a phenomenologist. It is an

experience and a sense of life that he is interpreting, one that goes beyond
and that has little to do with knowledge. He insists upon preserving the
ambiguity and open-endedness of this experience and upon resisting the
urge to reduce this to some determinate form that can be investigated as
an intellectual proposition. As a sensibility, it is analogous to an aesthetic
or political sense, a capacity for affective interpretation that is a ‘basic
structure of our lives.’ Those who lack this, or who conceive of the religious
as a propositional matter, Caputo chides as people who are not ‘worth
their salt.’ One who does not share the religious sense of life lacks love,
he insists, along with passion, depth, and a few other things. Religiosity is
‘the very thing that most constitutes human experience as experience.’ It
is a structure that impels us beyond ourselves and beyond what is known,
and toward the impossible. Yet religion also partakes of truth – a truth
that is without knowledge, that is of a different sort than scientific truth,
and that is analogous to the truth that we find in art. Religious experience
reveals truth, yet not in the sense that it provides access to propositional
knowledge. This is a truth that is unscientific and unknowing; it is not
possessed but made and enacted in the course of loving whatever it is that
we love. Since we love many things and enact this love in innumerable ways,
religious truth is not one but many. Caputo draws the obvious conclusion:
‘Unlike a scientific theory, there is not a reason on earth (or in heaven)
why many different religious narratives cannot all be true. “The one true
religion” in that sense makes no more sense than “the one true language”
or the “one true poetry”, “the one true story” or “the one true culture.”’
All religions are true – equally so, such that there is no religious conversion
that can be understood as a transformation from ignorance to knowledge
or from being unsaved to being saved. He would qualify this in the case of
certain religious movements and persons, particularly fundamentalists of
whom he takes a decidedly different view. Here, of course, are movements
that proclaim their love of God with no little enthusiasm and make a rather
strong claim to the truth. Where fundamentalism goes wrong is in allowing
the love of God to deteriorate into a creed, a ‘passion for God gone mad’
which inclines the faithful toward violence and hatred for those not of like
mind.25 A group that speaks of itself as the chosen people or special in the
eyes of God is sure to become sectarian and oppressive. The fundamentalist
or religious dogmatist of whatever kind insists that since there is one true
religion, all others are erroneous and their adherents quite likely damned.
For Caputo, it is the nature of religion to exist in a state of tension, but in
the sense of being at odds with itself, not in conflict or competition with
rival creeds. He is equally critical of newer forms of spirituality of the kind

that fill the shelves of popular bookshops. If fundamentalism makes the
mistake of codifying the love of God into a unified body of doctrines and
practices which are idolized and divisive, religious nonsense in its flashier
forms is humbug.
The postmodern ‘religion without religion’ (a phrase that Caputo
appropriates from Derrida) is defined above all by a passionate longing for
that which cannot be reduced to a formula or captured in something as
formal as a proposition. There is no secret of which the religious person
knows, ‘although we have many interpretations.’26 Religion deals precisely
with that which does not appear. Mystery and that which we love elude us,
like the absent Messiah of which deconstruction speaks: ‘Deconstruction is
(like) a deep desire for a Messiah who never shows (up), a subtle spirit or
elusive spectre that would be extinguished by the harsh hands of presence
and actuality. The very idea of a Messiah who is never to show and whom we
accordingly desire all the more is the very paradigm of deconstruction.’27
We are to keep open to the mystery, not pronounce upon its meaning,
for its meaning we do not and shall not know. Mystical theology provides
a model for the kind of experience of which Caputo is speaking, mindful
as it has long been not to make dubious claims to knowledge or to name
the unnameable or say the unsayable. Mysticism does not know the secret,
and while talk of revelation certainly makes it appear as if the believer does
know it and is an ordained recipient in the very postal service of which
Derrida spoke, Caputo insists that this is not the case, that the Messiah
is always to come and that there is no religious secret that we could hold
within our grasp. The secret requires an endless play of interpretations
where ‘all of them are true.’28
I have stated that radical hermeneutics is premised on a misreading of
philosophical hermeneutics, and coming to critical terms with Caputo’s
argument must begin here. The remarks that follow are not intended to
subvert that argument or to treat Caputo’s texts in quite the way that he
treats Gadamer’s, or Ricoeur’s, on which he is all but silent. I shall not,
for instance, speak of Caputo as a closet fundamentalist, although it is an
accusation that is as plausible as the closet essentialism charge. Instead I
shall pose three questions for Caputo. First, what is to be done with such
old philosophical concepts as meaning, truth, understanding, experience,
reason, the self or, for that matter, God? Is it best to jettison these notions
(some or all of them) on the grounds perhaps that they belong to the
language of metaphysics and are irredeemably essentialist, or to reinterpret
them in ways that are more phenomenologically adequate? There are times
when philosophers and gardeners should let go of what is dead or dying

and pull it up by the roots so that something new can grow in its place, and
there are other times when some creative rehabilitation is in order. Caputo
opts for the latter strategy in the case of God but not meaning, religious
truth but not truth. Why is this? My second question concerns whether
there is a logic of vigilance. Deconstruction and radical hermeneutics are
constantly vigilant on behalf of the Dionysian, undecidability, and keeping
the play of interpretation in play, while others, perhaps more pragmatically
inclined or less anxious to display their radical credentials, are vigilant on
behalf of interpretation’s more Apollonian moment. Is there a logic of
vigilance or is this, as James would say, a question of temperament? My
final question concerns religious mysticism: why are so many mystics quite
so prolific? Many of us admire a prolific writer; a prolific mystic leaves me
puzzled.
Our first question forces us to clarify briefly Gadamer’s position on
meaning. Neither Gadamer nor Ricoeur, nor to my knowledge any more
recent proponent of philosophical hermeneutics, maintains that the
meaning of a text or text-analogue is either identical with its author’s
intention, objective, prelinguistic, acontextual, essentialist or final. Caputo’s
assertion that ‘Gadamer’s is a philosophy of meaning’ is unobjectionable
on the face of it, for it does describe the manner in which meanings
and truths are handed down to us in tradition, but the claim that this
implicates hermeneutics in metaphysical essentialism is false. Gadamer
clearly and adamantly rejected all forms of objectivism and essentialism.
He repeatedly stated that ‘There cannot, therefore, be any single inter-
pretation that is correct “in itself”’, that ‘Not just occasionally but always,
the meaning of a text goes beyond its author’, and that ‘I too affirm
[with Derrida] that understanding is always understanding differently.’29
Meaning ‘can be experienced even where it is not actually intended’; it
is never proper or fully present, and is in every case inexhaustible.30 It is
‘the inexhaustibility of the experience of meaning’, as Gadamer stated, to
which ‘I tried to hold fast.’31 Meaning is an event of mediation, an effect
that emerges in the back-and-forth between text and reader and is not
a pre-existing essence that the reader merely discovers. It is an event in
which one participates. Meaning is inexhaustible in the sense that there
is always more to be said, and said differently, about what we encounter
in interpretation. ‘The ongoing dialogue’, as he expressed it, ‘permits no
final conclusion. It would be a poor hermeneuticist who thought he could
have, or had to have, the last word.’32 In similar fashion Ricoeur spoke of a
‘surplus of meaning’; the interpretive object means more than we can say
of it, in a sense that differs little from what Caputo says of Derrida: ‘He is
arguing not that our discourse has no meaning or that anything goes but,
on the contrary, that it has too many meanings so that we can fix meaning
only tentatively and only so far.’33 These are Caputo’s words when he is
defending deconstruction against the arbitrariness charge. Here he speaks
in a more Apollonian mood than usual, and in saying this the difference
between his own position, or his interpretation of Derrida, and Gadamer’s,
minus the essentialist caricature, is greatly diminished. Philosophical and
radical hermeneutics both maintain that the meaning of a text or any
object of interpretation is neither unitary, essentialist, objectively deter-
minable nor out there awaiting discovery. The text contains a surplus and
an inexhaustibility of significance, ‘too many meanings’ as Caputo says,
and all efforts to capture the one true meaning are futile. Talk of the
one true this and the one true that is over with, and whether we think of
ourselves as radicals or not, we are operating in the interstices between
essentialism and anarchism, between objectivism and subjectivism. There
is an important sense in which interpretation is a faithful rendering of the
things themselves, but being faithful in this sense does not mean that we
are ‘getting it right’, as Rorty would say, or that we are being reverential or
rabbinical. Faithfulness means that while we are participating in an event,
we are not making it up, that we are not saying things like ‘The meaning of
Les Misérables is every man for himself’ or ‘The moral of the New Testament
is to be yourself.’ Texts are read differently, art speaks differently, history
is recounted differently, symbols give rise to thought, and signs are
ambiguous; all of this is true, and none of these statements betrays dubious
metaphysical commitments. In every case we are intermediate between
essentialism and relativism, and interpretation partakes of the rabbinical
and the poetic, and of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, in about equal
measure.
Hermeneutics must be a philosophy of the big tent. It must incorporate
within it both a ‘willingness to suspect’ and a ‘willingness to listen’, a
‘vow of rigour’ and a ‘vow of obedience’, as Ricoeur has said.34 Whether
radical or not, it includes both a Dionysian and an Apollonian moment,
an inclination toward the theoretical and the pragmatic, suspicion and
recovery, and when it inclines too far in one direction it loses its bearings.
Philosophical hermeneutics retains the notion of meaning while ridding
it of essentialism – so as well with reason, truth, experience and a number
of concepts that serve important philosophical purposes while being
detachable from their metaphysical connotations. If, as Caputo believes,
there can be ‘religion without religion’, a God without a God that many
religious believers would recognize, and even a conception of reason that

is ‘a far more reasonable reason than metaphysics has been proffering
for some time now’, why can hermeneutics not speak of a meaning
without essentialist meaning or understanding without the metaphysics
of presence?35 Why is phronesis a ‘fundamentally conservative notion’ but
God is not? What governs the choice of whether to jettison an old concept
or to reinterpret it? For my part, I am inclined toward reinterpretation or
rehabilitation of a concept when there is a vital philosophical purpose to be
served and no good reason for conceding it to essentialists, foundationalists
or others who would claim it as their moral property. James’ and Dewey’s
reinterpretation of truth, Jaspers’ of reason, and Gadamer’s of meaning are
a few examples of how this can be done to good effect. If Caputo is sympa-
thetic with Rorty’s efforts to articulate a lower-case philosophy without
Philosophy, why the opposition to Gadamer’s and Ricoeur’s efforts toward
a similar end? Gardeners know when to rehabilitate a plant and when to
pronounce upon it. Does the radical hermeneuticist?
Our second question concerns the logic of vigilance. Following Derrida,
radical hermeneutics is constantly vigilant on behalf of the Dionysian, of
a linguistic free play that is impious, wild and unending. What is needful
above all is to be watchful for and to resist all efforts to still the flux. If
we are radical, our business is to disrupt and to problematize, and if it
is still necessary to reconstruct and to resolve problems, rather less ink
is spent in the latter occupation than in the former. Why is this? No one
would question Nietzsche’s radical credentials, yet he well knew that
thinking requires both a Dionysian and an Apollonian moment, and
while he spent far more ink defending the rights of the former than the
latter, this was because of the defeat that the Dionysian had suffered at
the hands of Socrates and Plato and that philosophy ever since had done
little to remedy. While it was urgently necessary, Nietzsche believed, to
rehabilitate the Dionysian, the point was not to confound the Apollonian
but to bring the two into a state of high and creative tension. This was a
radical gesture, but by the time the postmoderns enter the scene, things
look rather different. Dionysian vigilance now takes on the appearance
of an end in itself; the postmodern thinker is one who disrupts, calls into
question and destabilizes rather more than they propose or resolve – not,
of course, in the sense of a final solution, for we know better than to seek
this, but a hypothesis that has been duly chastened without being useless.
If for the Dionysian an Apollonian moment is still necessary every now
and then – to answer humourless critics, for instance – it is a moment that
tends to lack conviction. Many a postmodern thinker leaves the Apollonian
dimension of thought underdeveloped and we are left to wonder about

what Gary Madison calls ‘the positive, philosophical significance of the
critique of metaphysics and epistemology.’ As he asks of Derrida and Rorty
in particular, ‘Where does it all get us? What future, if any, is there for
philosophy after the death of Philosophy?’36 We are told and retold not to
perpetuate the metaphysics of presence, not to arrest the flux and not to
cope with it by arresting it subversively – so much vigilance over here and
so little over there.
This is an issue for those of us in agreement with a good deal
of postmodern thought and who also believe that philosophy’s proper
condition is one of tension between the Apollonian and the Dionysian.
Like so much of postmodern philosophy, radical hermeneutics is at its
most convincing when it is making life difficult, when it is suspicious and
oppositional and when it is defending the rights of multiplicity over total-
izing unity. Caputo writes that ‘Derrida’s work is one of vigilance against
the metaphysical desire for meaning and stability, the desire of metaphysics
to get beyond the physis, the play and the flux’, and the same is true
of Caputo’s work. His hermeneutics ‘requires ceaseless deconstructive
vigilance to “maintain” itself there’, at the heart of becoming.37 To this I
have no objection. The problem is that I also have no objection to Dewey
when he insisted that the ultimate concern of philosophy is to resolve what
he called ‘the problems of men’, not only to historicize and genealogize
them while warning against certain kinds of solution. The Dionysian is
an important moment in inquiry, but it is not its beginning, middle and
end. If we are serious about justice or democracy, for instance, as Dewey
and Derrida both unquestionably were, it will not do to speak a little too
much of the democracy to come and rather little of the democracy that
is here and now, just as becoming buried in the minutiae of public policy
tends to bury our political imagination as well. The imperative of which
radical hermeneutics speaks, to cope with the difficulty of life without
repressing it, requires a turn of mind and a vigilance that is Janus-faced.
The Apollonian and the Dionysian, logos and mythos, the theoretical and
the pragmatic, reason and desire must be thought together, and a vigilance
that is one-sided eases one set of worries while leaving us silent in the face
of worries that are countervailing and no less urgent.
Is there a rationale for vigilance on one side of an equation? There is
only so much of this quality that one soul can house, and perhaps it is too
much to expect a thinker to be Apollonian by day and Dionysian by night,
yet be that as it may, the division of labour that finds thinkers divided into
rabbis and poets is intolerable. ‘Like Socrates’, Caputo states, ‘Derrida’s
daemon is not positive.’ He is a ‘practitioner of disruptive strategies whose

point – whose style/stylus – is to unmask pretension, to foil the claim to
knowledge.’38 Much the same can be said of Caputo along with Rorty,
Foucault, Lyotard and a great many other postmoderns. It cannot be said
of Dewey, Ricoeur or Gadamer. From the point of view of the first group,
the second looks naïve and fainthearted while the second may regard the
first as irresponsible and anarchistic. Both are mistaken; the postmoderns
are no more wanton than hermeneuticists are conservative or pragmatists
are naïve. James would say that once again we are speaking of a difference
in temperament and that this apparent impasse is a question more of
psychology than philosophy, if indeed this distinction can still be drawn.
When Nietzsche remarked that ‘most of the conscious thinking of a philos-
opher is secretly guided and forced into certain channels by his instincts’,
he was correct. Philosophy is always ‘the personal confession of its author.’39
It is the confession of our daimonion, temperament or sense of life – call it
what you will – and as James stated it is something in which the thinker has
perfect confidence. The philosopher ‘trusts his temperament’ as Socrates
trusted his daimonion, not because he was able to produce a demonstration
of its reliability but as a psychological article of faith. Radicals and sceptics
still do not question their sense of life, and the tough- and tender-minded
alike are convinced that those of the opposite disposition are, as James said,
‘out of key with the world’s character’ and ‘not in it.’40 This is precisely
what Caputo says of anyone who lacks a religious sense of life; they are not
‘worth their salt.’ This does not need to be shown; believers know it in their
bones, just as postmodernists know that hermeneuticists are conservatives
and essentialists and hard-nosed analysts know that postmodernists are
irrationalists. There is no need for textual evidence; it does not exist and
we do not need it for our sense of life tells us it is so. Apollonians gaze
upon Dionysians in uncomprehending indignation. Usually they do not
allow themselves even to read the latter’s texts for fear of contamination or
intoxication, while the Dionysians return the favour for fear of boredom.
It is our sense of life that governs where our vigilance lies, and apart from
psycho-logic there is no logic to be found here. Knowledge serves knowers
in myriad ways, and it serves their sense of life above all. One thematizes,
accentuates and celebrates the free play of interpretation, while another
speaks of the humility of the listener, but the opposition that this implies
is more apparent than real. The accent on listening sounds like reverence
to the poetic, but it is not reverence and it is not ‘theological.’ Gadamer’s
constant theme is that the other may be right, not that they are right and
not that when tradition speaks we must bow our heads. The claim of the
other and of tradition may be utter nonsense, and if hermeneutics does

not emphasize the point it is because it is obvious. By the same token,
Dionysian free play sounds like anarchism to the sober-minded, but in both
cases we are speaking of caricatures. A philosophy of the big tent is more
likely to be found in a hermeneutics that is philosophical and phenomeno-
logical than one that speaks a little too emphatically of its radicality. It is
not only in politics that opposition to the big tent comes most often from
the inhospitable and the self-certain, and in the case of radical herme-
neutics the much-celebrated deconstructive hospitality to the other is, I
suspect, rather less hospitable when the other does not share our sense of
life. Apollonian purists make us laugh and Dionysians make us indignant.
In either case it is our sense of life that has been affronted, and perhaps
while we are being suspicious we might be a little suspicious of this as well.
Interpretation is multifarious. It is appetitive, spirited and rational, suspi-
cious and hospitable, critical and receptive, devilish and angelic, all at once
and as need be. We can accentuate one aspect or the other if we are trying
to achieve a certain effect, to offer a corrective, or if our sense of life simply
demands it of us, but let us keep our tent large and not allow our vigilance
to be too one-sided.
My final question is brief, and it concerns mysticism. Radical herme-
neutics is committed to a Heideggerian ‘openness to the mystery’, and
so stated I am in unqualified agreement. The trouble is that something
happens on the road from openness to the mystery to Caputo’s mysticism,
something that I fear is not unlike what happens on the road from reason
to rationalism. The mystic must not be silent, Caputo insists, for silence
betrays a metaphysical claim to knowledge. The silent imagine that they
know the secret, but there is no secret, he tells us. The mystic is compelled
to speak, and to continue speaking, and as volume piles upon volume
something happens to the docta ignorantia and the claim to non-knowledge.
It dies the death of a thousand qualifications and by some slow but unstop-
pable process we begin to know a great deal. What great knowledge there
often is in the profession of ignorance – more and more docta and less
and less ignorantia. An entire theology emerges – one that is ‘weak’ and
non-metaphysical, but a theology all the same. Mystics are chatty. Their
prolificacy may not amount to one of Apel’s performative contradictions,
but it is almost that. At any rate, it is odd. Of religion there is so little
to know – nothing at all, Caputo maintains – yet somehow so much to
say. My question is, why so much? Why the compulsion to speak of the
unspeakable, in such quantity or in any quantity? For that matter, why does
openness to the mystery need to take us in the direction of religion and
the confessional faiths? Caputo is vitally concerned to stop the retreat into
nostalgia and metaphysical comfort that, he insists, hermeneutical talk of
meaning and truth exhibits, yet somehow the language of God, religious
truth and Christian faith survives his scepticism. My own view is that while
openness to mystery belongs to the very highest reaches of thinking, the
compulsion to speak about it should be resisted. I am with Caputo when he
writes in Radical Hermeneutics: ‘It is a question always of staying under way
(unterwegs), when the essential thing is the way and where the illusion of
a final formulation and resting point is dispelled as so much metaphysics.
It is a question of awakening to the mystery of this primordial relationship
which defines and sustains us, not in order to remove the mystery but
to preserve it as a mystery, to shelter it from the withering glare of
metaphysical conceptuality.’ Some volumes later, as metaphysical concep-
tuality is replaced with theological conceptuality, I am not with him and I
suspect that the Heideggerian imperative ‘to keep open to the mystery as a
mystery’ has gradually given way to an imperative of an altogether different
kind: to keep open to the mystery as an object of learned discourse. Prayers
and tears are well and good until the end of the story, when even the
higher men have a tendency to worship asses. ‘Whereof one cannot speak,
thereof one must be silent.’41 Openness to the mystery, full stop.
Chapter 12
Unprincipled Judgements
Jean-François Lyotard
Philosophical hermeneutics is no more credulous toward metanarratives

than what goes under the names of postmodernism and poststructuralism.
Jean-François Lyotard famously spoke of the postmodern as a Nietzschean
‘incredulity toward metanarratives’, and as definitions of this word go, it is
as good as any. We are ‘[s]implifying to the extreme’, he cautioned, yet if
no definition quite succeeds in capturing the trajectories of thought that
over the last fifty odd years have followed Nietzsche and Heidegger, let us
not regard this as a cause for worry. More worrisome perhaps, or more
odd, is Lyotard’s inclusion of what he called ‘the hermeneutics of meaning’
on his short list of metanarratives in the same context in The Postmodern
Condition in which he announced his definition of the postmodern. As he
put it, ‘I will use the term modern to designate any science that legitimates
itself with reference to a metadiscourse of this kind making an explicit
appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of Spirit, the herme-
neutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject or
the creation of wealth.’1 Whether ‘the hermeneutics of meaning’ refers to
the philosophical and phenomenological hermeneutics of Gadamer and
Ricoeur, Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity, the romantic hermeneutics
of Dilthey or Schleiermacher or perhaps the objectivist hermeneutics of E.
D. Hirsch is not clarified here, nor did Lyotard make frequent reference
to Gadamer, Ricoeur or other recent post-Heideggerian hermeneutical
thinkers. Lines of communication between hermeneutics and postmodern
thought in general have been rather less open than they might have been,
despite their common Heideggerian heritage. My purpose in this final
chapter is to engage Lyotard’s postmodernism on the theme of moral-
political judgement. The hypothesis of this chapter is that while Lyotard’s
scepticism about grounding judgements in metanarratives is well taken, his
account of judgement constitutes an over-correction of the views that he
and hermeneutical philosophers likewise reject.
A postmodern politics, Lyotard held, must be a politics of judgement.
The nature of such judgement and its relation to justice he would speak of
in approximately Aristotelian terms, particularly in Just Gaming, and in ways
that show some affinity to Gadamer’s rehabilitated conception of phronesis.

As we began to see in Chapter 10, Gadamer regarded Aristotelian phronesis
as a model not only of moral knowledge but of hermeneutical reflection
more generally. Both Lyotard and Gadamer regarded the concept of
judgement as belonging at the centre of the moral-political domain,
a judgement that is neither a formal technique nor grounded in an
ahistorical foundation. Beyond this, however, their differences would run
deep. Lyotard’s incredulity perhaps extends farther than Gadamer’s. Even
if it extends no farther, it extends in a somewhat different direction. In any
event, our questions are as follows: in what sense is a political morality that
takes seriously both Nietzsche’s critique and the onslaught of postmodern
scepticism that followed it a politics of judgement? Is it invariably opposed
to a politics of principles? If in postmodernity we cannot legitimate judge-
ments by tracing them back to the absolute, can we justify them at all? All
judgements, like all interpretations, contain an estimation of importance
by which others might be expected to be persuaded, yet on what basis
do they do so? Can we still speak of a basis, of reasons or justifications
without sliding back into foundationalism or metanarratives of one kind
or another? These are urgent questions, and our point of departure will be
where hermeneutics and postmodernism intersect.
Lyotard urged us to ‘wage a war on totality’ and to resist the ‘terror’ and
the ‘totalizing obsessions’ of modernity.2 What do these directives mean
and what are their implications? For Lyotard, they entail that we think of
justice as a Wittgensteinian language game for which there is no formal
model. ‘It means that there is no just society’, no theoretical blueprint to
sanction and support political prescriptions. Justice ‘is of the order of the
prescriptive’, and prescriptive statements cannot be grounded in descrip-
tions, principles, or on an ontology. Metaphors of grounds and foundations
are to be dispensed with in favour of a plurality of language games and of
novel utterances within them. Among the ideas Lyotard opposed is that
in judging one is issuing prescriptions that have their basis in theoretical
descriptions of Justice itself, of ‘the very being of justice’ in the sense of
either a Plato or a Hobbes, a Marx or a Mill. There is no essence of justice;
there are no essences period. There are only prescriptions, and while these
may be just, they are not made just by virtue of an account of the way things
are. In saying this, Lyotard opposed the ‘deep conviction’, both ancient
and modern, ‘that there is a true being of society, and that society will be
just if it is brought into conformity with this true being, and therefore one
can draw just prescriptions from a description that is true, in the sense of
“correct.”’ No logical path leads from the true to the just, from description
Unprincipled Judgements 213
to prescription. Indeed, ‘one can never reach the just by a conclusion.’3

Prescription and description are altogether separate language games, and
neither form of utterance serves to legitimate the other.
Lyotard was especially emphatic that political judgements are never
legitimated with reference to a metanarrative or large-scale theoretical
explanation. What distinguishes the modern from the postmodern is
precisely the reliance of the former upon grand narratives such as
‘the progressive emancipation of reason and freedom, the progressive
or catastrophic emancipation of labour (source of alienated value in
capitalism), the enrichment of all humanity through the progress of
capitalist techno-science, and even – if we include Christianity itself in
modernity (in opposition to the classicism of antiquity) – the salvation
of creatures through the conversion of souls to the Christian narrative of
martyred love.’ A metanarrative’s function is to provide legitimation for
our ways of thinking and acting in general, very much in the fashion of a
myth. What distinguishes the two is that ‘unlike myths, [metanarratives]
ground this legitimacy not in an original “founding” act, but in a future to
be brought about, that is, in an Idea to be realized. This Idea (of freedom,
“enlightenment”, socialism, general prosperity) has legitimating value
because it is universal. It gives modernity its characteristic mode: the project,
that is, the will directed toward a goal.’4 This is a project and a goal asserted
to be valid for all time, and often enough to represent the onward march
of history itself. Having transcended the contingency of first-order narra-
tives, the metanarrative is a teleological discourse that claims to encompass
political and scientific utterance alike and to ground our judgements once
and for all. Postmodernity, by contrast, dethrones all privileged forms
of discourse, undermines foundations, teleology, and theories (which
‘themselves are concealed narratives’), and is invariably suspicious of the
‘great “actors” and “subjects” of history – the nation-state, the proletariat,
the party, the West, etc.’5
The function of the Kantian Idea is to regulate judgements in the
name of the universal. The primary example of this in the political and
scientific thought of the last two centuries is the Idea of the progressive
emancipation of humankind from its various forms of bondage. As Lyotard
expressed it, ‘[t]he sometimes violent divergences between political liber-
alism, economic liberalism, Marxism, anarchism, the radicalism of the
Third Republic and socialism count for little next to the abiding unanimity
about the end to be attained. The promise of freedom is for everyone
the horizon of progress and its legitimation.’6 The difficulty is that the
capacity to form judgements must be regulated by ideas of some kind, yet
in modernity it is ‘an Idea of totality’ that invariably serves this function.7

The totalizing standard today defies credulity; the question of what is to
be done need not and ought not be answered in the name of the trans-
cendent. Lyotard singled out Habermas and Apel in this connection
as contemporary proponents of a position that we can no longer take
seriously. Critical-theoretic appeals to emancipation and rational consensus
are too Kantian to Lyotard’s way of thinking and, broadly speaking, do not
withstand the critique that Nietzsche initiated. More specifically, he argued
in The Postmodern Condition that Habermas’ and Apel’s notion of universal
consensus rests on two dubious assumptions. These are, first, that the
rules that govern our language games are capable of generating universal
agreement and, second, that the overriding aim of discourse is consensus.
On the first point, Lyotard’s contention is that ‘language games are hetero-
morphous, subject to heterogeneous sets of pragmatic rules.’ The rules of
any given language game are subject to the agreement of its players and
are never heterogeneous, beyond dispute or identifiable a priori. On the
second point, universal consensus is not the goal of inquiry, whether we
are speaking of politics, science, or any other form of discourse. At most,
consensus represents ‘only a particular state of discussion, not its end’, and
not its most decisive moment. Habermas’ and Apel’s most dubious propo-
sition is that which largely defines the modern project: ‘that humanity as a
collective (universal) subject seeks its common emancipation through the
regularization of the “moves” permitted in all language games and that
the legitimacy of any statement resides in its contributing to that emanci-
pation.’8 Insofar as our language games can be said to have an end of any
kind, this end is defined far more by invention than consensus.
Political judgements, for Lyotard, are not redeemed by their consensus-
generating capacity, nor are they derived from a syllogism. Prescriptive
statements belong to the order of opinion and not to the order of
knowledge or truth. ‘There is’, in his words, ‘no knowledge in matters of
ethics. And therefore there will be no knowledge in matters of politics.’
Instead we are required to form judgements without criteria of any kind.
This constitutes the very heart of Lyotard’s ‘pagan’ politics: our judge-
ments are neither determinant (in Kant’s sense), informed by training and
habit (Aristotle), guided by a sensus communis (Gadamer) nor by concepts
or criteria. ‘One is without criteria, yet one must decide.’ All talk of criteria
is illegitimate since ‘the idea of criteria comes from the discourse of truth
and supposes a referent or a “reality” and, by dint of this, it does not belong
to the discourse of justice. This is very important. It must be understood
that if one wants criteria in the discourse of justice one is tolerating de facto
the encroachment of the discourse of justice by the discourse of truth.’9

Judgements are not arbitrary, yet for Lyotard it is a rather difficult matter
to explain how this is not so. What is clear is that we can no longer have
recourse to metanarratives, theoretical principles, universals or criteria.
The closest that he would come to identifying standards that are capable
of regulating our judgements are the ideas of plurality, the differend and
invention.
In postmodernity one finds a plurality of language games, none of which
has privileged status over the others. Communication is far from the well-
regulated exchange of arguments of which Habermas in particular speaks,
but is an affair in which ‘questions, requests, assertions, and narratives are
launched pell-mell into battle.’ In other words, ‘to speak is to fight’, in the
sense that interlocutors seek to persuade each other by using ‘any available
ammunition, changing games from one utterance to the next’ and with ‘the
greatest possible flexibility’ in following rules.10 Nothing in the rules of our
language games – which themselves are products of contingent agreements
between players – prevents us from leaping from one form of utterance to
another, and indeed this is the usual form that discourse takes. Typically
we do not play only one language game at a time – or not for long – but
move from descriptive statements to prescriptive judgements, performative
utterances, questions, promises, narratives, artistic expressions, command
and obligation, technical games, and so on. Any given utterance is judged
by the rules of the game to which it belongs and in which it is a move, yet
within a single conversation the usual course is to move rapidly from one
language game to another. Our condition in postmodernity is to think and
to speak at the intersection of an indefinite number of such games between
which, Lyotard insisted, ‘there is no common measure.’ No rule dictates
how one moves from one form of discourse to another, although one
can generally determine when this is done to good effect and one knows
a ‘master stroke’ when one sees it.11 As with communication in general,
then, moral-political discourse is no ideal speech situation or rationally
orchestrated search for consensus but its virtual antithesis: it is an unstable
and unending series of utterances, ‘the trumping of a communicational
adversary, an essentially conflictual relationship between tricksters.’12 The
point in all of this is not to generate consensus or hit upon the truth but to
invent novel moves.
The language game of narrative receives special attention in Lyotard’s
account. What is to replace the unitary grand narrative are small and often
local narratives. This is owing not only to the usual postmodern scepticism
regarding large-scale theorizing but to the premium that Lyotard placed
on invention. As he expressed it, ‘the little narrative [petit récit] remains the
quintessential form of imaginative invention, most particularly in science’
but in political matters as well.13 The grand narrative – of emancipation
or what have you – creates a monopoly on what is politically sayable and
so closes off the differend and possibilities of creative utterance in general.
What is to be avoided above all is the discursive regime that forbids
anything new from being said – and new not in the limited sense of filing
new information in old pigeon holes but radically new, in which the rules
of the game themselves come into question. Pagan politics expresses ‘[t]he
need to be godless in things political’, or to replace the belief in one god
with many, each of which coexists with while trying to outdo the others.14
Tension in multiplicity is the precondition of creativity, and it is this on
which the possibility of justice relies. The statement, ‘“one ought to be
pagan” means “one must maximize as much as possible the multiplication
of small narratives.”’15
Whatever justice is, it is not a matter of conforming to abstract moral
requirements or playing the game in the usual way by the usual rules.
There is always the need to take our language games farther, to move the
conversation forward either by playing a new move or, more radically, by
changing the rules themselves and inventing new games. Justice as Lyotard
conceived of it aims not at convergence or finality but always at divergence,
at inventing ever newer moves, more and more novel opinions without
granting anyone the honour of having the last word. The orienting goal, as
one commentator puts it, is ‘simply to produce more work, to generate new
and fresh statements, to make you have “new ideas”, or, best of all, again
and again to “make it new.”’16 The modern search for secure grounds is
replaced with the search for inventive statements, without criteria for deter-
mining their legitimacy. To the Kantian ideal of unity or finality Lyotard
opposed multiplicity and diversity of opinion, raising the question of
whether it is possible to fashion as a political principle of sorts, ‘“Always act
in such a way that the maxim of your will may” I won’t say “not be erected”,
but it is almost that, “into a principle of universal legislation.”’17 The closest
item one finds in Lyotard’s work to a principle or a Kantian Idea is the Idea
of divergence, novelty or ‘the inventor’s paralogy.’18 Whether this quite
constitutes an Idea in Kant’s sense is a matter on which Lyotard expressed
some uncertainty, but his point was that here is a standard or a horizon that
is capable of guiding our political judgements without positing a theory of
justice – if we mean by this an essentialist account that presupposes some
‘reality’ that tells us ‘what is just.’ The Idea of multiplicity regulates justice
in the sense of informing our judgements, but without supposing that
justice itself has a referent. Lyotard would remain hesitant on this point:
‘Is a politics regulated by such an idea of multiplicity possible? Is it possible
to decide in a just way in, and according to, this multiplicity? And here I
must say that I don’t know.’19 The game of justice has no ontology, least of
all one that partakes of essentialism. There is no justice itself to which our
actions or judgements might conform.
In postmodernity, then, the idea of plurality – of language games, narra-
tives and judgements – at long last comes into its own and replaces all talk
of rational consensus and finality. It is also an idea with roots in ancient
thought, although Lyotard’s account of this raises some questions. The
obvious connection of the pagan with the sophists or ‘lesser Greeks’ is
one of which he was well aware. Political judgements are opinions that
are ‘outside of any knowledge of reality’; no rational or scientific politics
is possible. Judging is more an affective than a deductive matter, and
‘one of the properties of paganism is to leave prescriptions hanging’,
without connection to a Form of Justice or any modern equivalent. If it
is not difficult to imagine the sophists agreeing with a great deal of this,
Lyotard’s stated indebtedness to the Nicomachean Ethics is more surprising.
Just Gaming in particular makes frequent reference to Aristotle’s notion of
the prudent judge. If ‘the Aristotle of the Politics, of the Ethics, even of the
Topics and the Rhetoric, is indeed an Aristotle very close to paganism’, and
indeed to the sophists, it is primarily due to his account of moral-political
judgement. On Lyotard’s reading, the phronimos judges from case to case,
without knowledge or a sensus communis, and indeed ‘outside of habit’;
‘Aristotle’s prudent individual .â•›.â•›. makes judgements about the just and the
unjust without the least criterion.’20
This is an unusual Aristotle. If Gadamer’s interpretation differs
profoundly from Lyotard’s, it is more important that we find here an
intersection between hermeneutics and postmodernism that warrants
our attention. Both agree upon the need for an ethics and a politics of
judgement and that Aristotle affords the needed starting point in such
a project. Our question concerns the meaning and implications of a
politics of judgement, and in addressing it I shall not place Gadamer and
Lyotard in simple opposition to each other but read them both as making
important inroads on this theme. Indeed, there is a great deal in political
paganism with which the hermeneuticist can agree, beginning with the
opposition to metanarratives and to all talk of foundations and essentialism
in matters of justice. Both regard the political realm as fundamentally
rhetorical and without appeal to the transcendent or to some unshakeable
ground from which we may derive judgements. There is no eliminating
contingency, uncertainty or contestation, no decision procedure that will

allow us to rise above our own embeddedness in language and history, and
what critical reflection is available to us is of the immanent variety.
Where the two begin to diverge is on the question of a common measure
that Lyotard insisted is absent from our language games. If conversation
can be likened to a game or set of games, as it undoubtedly can, it remains
that the participants are bound together in a common effort to determine
what is just, while our prescriptions in every case are dialogical interpre-
tations that are about something in our social world. Judging is neither
an isolated linguistic unit nor a merely self-regarding act of expression
but is a reply to what another has said, a move in a game that amounts
to, while also inviting, a countermove. Lyotard did not deny this, yet the
one-sidedness of his concentration upon the agonistic and the adversarial
can cause us to overlook the hermeneutical fact that communication is not
always a contest in which one seeks to outmanoeuvre an opposing player.
One’s comportment is not always strategic, as the metaphor of prescription
already suggests. It is no naïvety to speak of good will here or the antici-
pation that the other may be right. If our language games are every bit as
agonistic as Lyotard maintained, as I believe they are, this remains one
side of a complex story. Political discourse is no ideal speech situation or
utopia of public deliberation, yet nor is it a contrarian’s dystopia. There is a
tension here that must be preserved between the strategic gaming of which
Lyotard spoke and the search for agreement that orients all conversation
that is worthy of the name, as it is out of this tension that novel utterance
emerges. We need not and ought not choose between a conception of
discourse as aiming at consensus and one that aims at perpetual revolution.
For particular purposes we shall often emphasize one or the other, but
the suggestion that we find, for instance, in the debate between Lyotard
and Habermas that it is multiplicity or unity that reigns supreme is
dubious, particularly if we are speaking about the real world of democratic
discourse. Regarded as an abstract antithesis, the choice between the
two appears to be forced, yet phenomenologically speaking the fact of
plurality – legitimate and rational plurality – and the search for unity are
co-present in all intellectual investigation, if indeed they are not ultimately
inseparable values. It is not only metanarratives of which postmodernity is
rightly sceptical but binary oppositions that do not map onto our practices,
including the one of which we are speaking. Lyotard and Habermas both
have a point, but in both cases the point is lost when multiplicity or unity
is regarded not as an important moment in inquiry but as a kind of first
principle.
A second polarity that surprisingly finds expression in Lyotard’s account

is that between knowledge and opinion. A philosophy so profoundly
indebted to Nietzsche and Heidegger is not a natural home for Platonic
dichotomies, yet this one features prominently in Lyotard’s argument.
Gadamer’s position here, following Aristotle, is precisely that phronesis is not
an alternative to knowledge but another form of it. It differs in important
ways from technical knowledge, but it is not for that reason something with
which knowledge is contrasted. What kind of knowledge this is was treated
in the sixth book of the Nicomachean Ethics, and Gadamer’s interpretation
of this theme is worth recalling.
Among the more salient features of moral-political judgement is its
dialogical and dialectical structure. To judge is to negotiate the distinction
between universal and particular in what Calvin Schrag calls ‘the space
of intersubjectivity.’21 A clear contrast to this view is afforded by ethical
formalism. Utilitarians, Kantians and other formalists regard practical
judgement as a rule-governed application of abstract moral requirements
to particular cases. Principles, conceived as decision procedures formu-
lated in advance of a given case, function as major premises in a practical
syllogism, while the act of judging abstracts from the contingencies of a
case and focuses on a single dominant consideration, such as whether an
act is universalizable or maximizes the general utility. Practical judgement
is a matter of subsuming the case under a ready-made universal and
following procedures without any significant reliance on the inventiveness
or personal responsibility of the judge. For hermeneutics, the situation is
reversed. While we are speaking of knowledge, phronesis as Aristotle and
Gadamer both spoke of it is a knowledge of particulars for which there is
no formal model and which is not governed by rules. Judging is not an act
of derivation but an interpretation that aims at disclosing meaning in a
given case and, as Ricoeur stated, ‘grasping the situation in its singularity.’22
Phronesis is concerned with particulars, yet these are not known in
isolation. Practical judgement as Aristotle spoke of it involves neither the
hegemony of the universal nor its abolition but a reciprocity of universal
and particular which is fundamentally unlike technical and scientific forms
of knowledge (techne, episteme) and which is not governed by a method.
Technical knowledge begins with a clear grasp of the end it sets out to
achieve and the method by which to achieve it, and applies its rules in
a more or less automatic way, while in contrast, phronesis is responsive to
the contingencies of a situation and involves a two-way illumination of the
particular case and a moral concept (virtue, law, or what have you). In
judging, we are not merely subsuming a case under a rule spelled out in
advance but interpreting it in the light of a universal, and where universal

and particular are codetermining. Interpreting any particular requires the
mediation of a universal, of which it is seen as an instance or in terms of
which its meaning can be understood. Phronesis in this respect is directly
comparable to textual interpretation, in which an individual passage must
be taken out of its isolation and read in the light of the text as a whole. In
political judgement as well, while it is the particular that is our object, we
do not perceive this apart from a moral concept of one kind or another.
We interpret and judge always in relational terms, by viewing a particular
in connection with (from the perspective of) the relevant universal. It is
equally true that our grasp of the particular is mediated by the universal
and that our grasp of the latter is mediated by the former.
No rule governs the application of moral concepts. The reason for this is
twofold. When we seek a formal basis for their application, there is no way
to avoid an infinite regress of rules governing rules. Further, a judgement
that is appropriately responsive to particularity is far too complex to be
catalogued in a set of procedures. Abstract normative requirements, for
instance, permit exceptions that cannot be enumerated in advance. The
formalist view would need either to forbid exceptions (thus opening itself
to the charge of rule fetishism) or provide further rules governing what
may count as an exception and what is to be done once it is recognized.
The difficulty in formulating rules of this kind is that special cases do not
come in types. The most complex of rules are incapable of mapping the
intellectual virtue of phronesis. Judgement is better spoken of as a skill or
art of bringing a particular and a universal to bear on each other in the
absence of rules, and thus as a virtue (intellectual and moral) of mediation.
It is the art of interpreting cases in the light of the appropriate universal
without criteria of appropriateness. If it works with abstract moral concepts,
it is not governed by them but employs them in the fashion of hypotheses.
Judgement is a skill in detecting the salient features of a case, in separating
what is important from what is trivial, and in subsuming particulars under
universals. While, with Kant, we may say that ‘judgement in general is
the faculty of thinking the particular as contained under the universal’,
practical judgement is an instance of this in which neither universal nor
particular is given.23 It is neither reflective nor determinant; it is neither
the case that the particular is given and we are in a condition of having
to find the appropriate universal under which to subsume it, nor that the
universal is given and we must determine which particular belongs under
it. Our interpretation of a case is mediated by a moral concept, yet so too
is the latter mediated (has its content determined) by the former. Judging
is a dialectical process in which universal and particular are mutually deter-

mined in their being.
Phronesis determines the way in which such reciprocal illumination occurs
and is the skillful exercise of looking back and forth, between universal
and particular, and judging both the moral concept to be applied and
the manner of its application. It does not reach conclusions deductively
but perceives a moral context in a way that is ‘fitting’ or ‘suitable.’ The
vagueness of speaking with Aristotle of what is fitting, or what the situation
requires, is inescapable since there are no necessary and sufficient condi-
tions determining the abstract content of these expressions. Nor is there
a substantive common feature uniting all instances of good judgement.
In many cases what is fitting is a more or less straightforward application
of a value or norm, while on other occasions it requires that we recognize
an exception in the light of the circumstances surrounding a case, or
challenging the norm itself. Knowing how to make distinctions of this kind
is the mark of a competent judge, one that does not obey rules bureaucrati-
cally but tailors moral requirements to cases in a flexible way. Like any art,
judging is an ability to establish a fit between abstract requirements and
concrete action without following rules. Unlike the novice, one who has
mastered a skill is not forever consulting rules but has a developed sense of
what the situation calls for and how to perform whatever action is required.
This is a sensibility that, as Aristotle showed, is acquired through training
and habit. It is not only an ability to reason well but a virtue of mind that
is inseparable from the ethical virtues and acquired together with them in
the process of education. It is a capacity that operates not only in language
games but in a lifeworld, and is informed by the experience of both the
individual and their culture. Indeed, phronesis is a social process inseparable
from dialogue since the judgements one forms are either a cultural appro-
priation or a creative departure from the same; they are moves in a game
in which one is not the only player. In making prescriptive statements it
behoves us not merely to utter a yea or a nay but to persuade. We are in the
domain of rhetoric here, and while Lyotard was inclined to compare politics
with art it cannot be lost sight of that what we say is addressed to an inter-
locutor who must be persuaded and who in the usual course of things resists
us. Judgements must have reasons, and if these are not formal derivations
but something ultimately indistinguishable from interpretations, it remains
that they are not arbitrary acts of decision of which others can be informed
but not persuaded. Political persuasion is a Janus-faced movement back and
forth from a universal to a particular, in which neither is given and there is
no method to be followed apart from careful perception.
Phronesis so conceived is closely associated with equity (epieikeia), which

Aristotle spoke of as the ‘correction of legal justice.’ Normative requirements
formulated in abstract terms have a certain deficiency; their generality may
lead us to overlook aspects of a case that are crucially relevant. What calls
for moral appraisal or political judgement is particular, and universals of
all kinds never catch up with their complexity, thus requiring flexibility in
application. ‘For when the thing is indefinite’, Aristotle wrote, ‘the rule also
is indefinite, like the leaden rule used in making the Lesbian moulding;
the rule adapts itself to the shape of the stone and is not rigid.’24 Equity
has us apply general laws while attending carefully to the particularity of
cases and without losing sight of a judgement’s consequences. Aristotle
and Gadamer would both speak of flexibility, even-handedness and a sense
of proportion as indicators of good judgement – not, as Lyotard believed,
because there are no criteria but because there are many. Our lifeworld
provides us with a plethora of moral concepts and norms, with laws and
political values that orient but also underdetermine our judgement. In
every case we must decide which standard to apply and how to apply it,
yet standards or criteria in some sense of the word there must be if we
take seriously the need to persuade and to justify. In judging, we do not
merely declare ‘Here I stand’ but appeal to values we anticipate our inter-
locutors will share. These standards are many and are themselves contested
in their meaning, their relative weight and their practical implications,
yet they provide orientation for a dialogue that is at once hermeneutical
and rhetorical, civil and combative. For all Lyotard’s talk of invention – a
position with which I fully agree – he may have underestimated the extent
to which even this is situated in tradition and the ethos of a historical
community. One does not invent from scratch, and moral imagination
never lacks a heritage. Lyotard the phenomenologist was well aware of the
human being’s embeddedness in a lifeworld, but the political thinker may
have underestimated its consequences.
Phronesis must be thought of together with both invention and appli-
cation. Gadamer advanced the important hypothesis that application is
inseparable from understanding and interpretation. ‘Understanding’, as
he put it, ‘.â•›.â•›. is a special case of applying something universal to a particular
situation’, and so too is judging. Application in the cases of both moral
knowledge and the interpretation of texts is distinct from application in the
sciences in that it follows no method and works not only from the universal
to the particular but vice versa. The applied sciences, governed by a techno-
logical view of the theory-practice relation, apply principles that are known
clearly and distinctly in advance of individual cases. A proper application
subsumes the case at hand according to general requirements and the

relation between the two is one of strict subordination. By contrast, in the
perception of a moral case, as Gadamer remarked, ‘moral concepts are
never given as a whole or determined in a normatively univocal way. Rather,
the ordering of life by the rules of law and morality is incomplete and needs
productive supplementation. Judgement is necessary in order to make a
correct evaluation of the concrete instance.’25 Moral concepts lack essences
and are never fully determined apart from the contexts in which they are
applied, just as understanding the meaning of a text involves applying this
to the reader’s own circumstances. For hermeneutics, application ‘can
never signify a subsidiary operation appended as an afterthought to under-
standing: the object of our application determines from the beginning and
in its totality the real and concrete content of hermeneutic understanding.
Application is not a calibration of some generality given in advance in
order to unravel afterwards a particular situation. In attending to a text,
for example, the interpreter does not try to apply a general criterion to
a particular case; on the contrary, he is interested in the fundamentally
original significance of the writing under his consideration.’26 In judging,
we are not applying concepts in the sense that a determinate particular
is subsumed under an equally determinate universal, and according to a
rule. Universals only come into being in being applied to, or instantiated
in, particular contexts. Universal and particular, as one hermeneuticist
writes, exist only ‘as the two “poles” of one and the same creative dialectical
activity’, and not as ‘separate and distinct’ items.27 This is the meaning of
Gadamer’s thesis that understanding and application, as well as interpre-
tation, must be regarded ‘as comprising one unified process.’28 We can say
the same of judgement and application. Determining what is just involves
applying a value or principle to a case, yet not in the familiar sense that we
are standing over against the case and affixing to it a principle that could
be fully known in abstract form. It is better regarded as a reading of the
situation from within the situation itself. As with textual interpretation,
one is caught up in an effort to understand the specific in the light of the
general, and in a more immediate way than formalist models suggest.
Jean Grondin remarks that application ‘is less a mechanical process
than a capacity, less a matter of rules than an ability-to-be, less a procedure
than a mental subtlety.’29 That the same description applies to phronesis
is a point that the Nicomachean Ethics makes abundantly clear. Gadamer’s
analysis of this, as we have seen, emphasized the contrast with techne: ‘For
we can only apply something that we already have; but we do not possess
moral knowledge in such a way that we already have it and then apply it to
specific situations. The image that a man has of what ought to be – i.e., his
ideas of right and wrong, of decency, courage, dignity, loyalty, and so forth
(all concepts that have their equivalents in Aristotle’s catalogue of virtues)
– are certainly in some sense images that he uses to guide his conduct.
But there is still a basic difference between this and the guiding image the
craftsman uses: the plan of the object he is going to make. What is right, for
example, cannot be fully determined independently of the situation that
requires a right action from me, whereas the eidos of what a craftsman wants
to make is fully determined by the use for which it is intended.’30 Moral-
political judgements are unprincipled only in the sense that we are not
employing a technique, decision procedure or essentialist notion of justice.
We do not have what the craftsman has, yet to assert with Lyotard that
there are no criteria full stop is overstated. There is nothing problematic
or metaphysical in claiming that there are ‘in some sense images’ that we
bring to bear in deciding what is to be done, some principle of freedom
or equality that orients our judgement without amounting to a categorical
imperative or a Form of Justice. Judging is not a glimpsing of justice itself,
for there is no justice itself. It is seeing a case in the light of a value that
we can defend but not prove. It is interwoven with a moral concept of one
kind or another – not in the sense of a definition or a clear and distinct
idea, but an idea that is a ‘horizon’ in Lyotard’s sense and not unlike a
regulative idea in Kant’s sense, the never-to-be-fully-realized but orienting
value at which we continually aim. It is likely that all our principles can be
understood this way, without any need to construe these as metaphysical,
methodological or moral absolutes. Not one of our political values is
known or applied in its pure form since as pure universality it is nothing at
all. Freedom, democracy, equality and so on are all of the nature of aspira-
tions, not realities, and are fully realized only in the fevered imaginations
of ideologues.
Like all statements that are intended to persuade, judgements must
be tied to the post of reason, even if the post itself is a perspective and a
historical artifact (as indeed it is). The realm of the political is at equal
remove from a rationalist’s fantasy and an agonistic free-for-all. It may be
likened to a game or a contest in which, as Lyotard said, ‘to speak is to
fight’, yet unlike a good many games the point is not to win. The point,
as he also said, is to win over, to persuade and to issue prescriptions that
– as the metaphor already suggests – aim at the amelioration of social
ills. Lyotard’s own political statements confirm this and are rather less
combative and revolutionary than one might have been led to expect.
Speaking of his purported irrationalism, for instance, he commented: ‘I’ve
struggled in different ways against capitalism’s regime of pseudorationality

and performativity. I’ve emphasized the importance of the moment of
dissent in the process of constructing knowledge, lying at the heart of the
community of thought.’31 Even in the context of May 1968, he would write
on behalf of ‘the movement’: ‘In particular, we affirm that we will concede
nothing on the following points: freedom of expression and political
assembly in the faculty; participation by both students and teachers in
all bodies; and common student-teacher electoral lists.’32 Were it not for
the revolutionary prose, one might be tempted to call these principles,
and principles that are not especially novel; freedom of expression and
assembly, student and faculty participation, dissent, anti-capitalism and
opposition to performativity are values that were not unknown prior to
1968 and enjoy a good deal of consensus at the present time. Perhaps it is
indecent to say so, but they would also generate much agreement among
contemporary liberals and others who do not think of themselves as
political radicals.
The question of irrationalism and relativism is posed so often in discus-
sions of Lyotard that I should like to conclude this chapter with a few
remarks on the issue and an explanation of why I shall not level this charge
against him. Lyotard is not alone in this, of course. Postmodern and
poststructuralist thinkers in general are regularly accused of defending
some sort of relativist or historicist position by philosophers with more
objectivist leanings, as are hermeneuticists and indeed most of the figures
I have discussed in this book. None of them is properly regarded as a
relativist, but I shall limit myself to Lyotard and to hermeneutics. What
does the charge of relativism amount to and how seriously should we take
it? Lyotard, Gadamer and other philosophers who are accused of relativism
typically do not regard the accusation with great seriousness, and they
are not to be faulted for this. Like irrationalism, relativism is primarily an
epithet of condemnation rather than a position that a philosopher might
actually defend. It is a word, as Grondin correctly notes, that ‘intends to
cause fear’: ‘For Gadamer and Heidegger, relativism is only .â•›.â•›. a spectre,
a bugbear that intends to create fear by depicting the infamous conse-
quences which are to be upheld by “everything is relative.”’33 Most often the
charge is a sophism that is meant to manoeuvre its addressee into taking
seriously some form of objectivist or essentialist thinking by arguing that
the only alternative is the road to perdition or, in the case of politics, Hitler.
Pagan politics may be vulnerable to objection, but a road to Hitler it is not.
What is the meaning of relativism in the minority of cases in which it is
not an empty term of abuse? Rorty discerned three meanings in articulating
his own reply to the charge: first, every statement is as true and every
judgement as just as any other; second, ‘true’ and ‘just’ are equivocal terms;
and third, there is nothing substantive to be said about truth or justice but
for historically specific procedures of justification. Rorty himself defended
the third view while rejecting the first two. The second view, he believed,
is ‘eccentric’ while the first is self-refuting – a charge sometimes directed
at the third view as well.34 It is not obvious in the case of either Lyotard or
hermeneutics which of the three views allegedly applies; however let us
first consider the claim that either position is logically self-refuting. Does
Lyotard’s argument that political judgements are not legitimated by means
of metanarratives or objective criteria, or Gadamer’s that interpretations
are justified with reference to other interpretations rather than ahistorical
touchstones – or similar arguments offered by Nietzsche, Heidegger,
James, Dewey, Foucault, Rorty and so on – refute itself? To see that it does
not, as Gadamer noted, ‘we must ask whether the two propositions – “all
knowledge is historically conditioned” and “this piece of knowledge is true
unconditionally” – are on the same level, so that they could contradict
each other.’ A statement can contradict another only if the two are ‘on the
same level’ in this sense or if, in Lyotard’s terms, they belong to the same
language game. In the case of the two statements Gadamer cited, they are
not. A phenomenological statement about understanding or judgement is
on a different level of discourse from a statement about statements, or in
Gadamer’s words, ‘what men say about themselves is not to be understood
as objective assertions concerning a particular being.’35 Reflexive state-
ments and descriptions of the world are separate language games played
by separate rules. A statement in one can no more contradict a statement
in the other than a move in baseball can counter a move in hockey. We do
not have a contradiction when the political judgement ‘This should not
be’ is countered with the descriptive utterance ‘It is.’ The second statement
neither contradicts nor refutes the first but jumps to a separate language
game and so misses the point. The same kind of jump occurs from the first
proposition cited by Gadamer above to the second.
It is an aporia of reason that reason itself has no rational foundation.
The principle of sufficient reason itself no more admits of rational proof
than the rules of logic admit of logical demonstration, yet the existence
of an aporia does not mean that we are at a standstill or that we have
refuted ourselves.36 Pure reflection, were it to exist, would be no privi-
leged route to the things themselves, and what passes for it are typically
empty formalisms from which nothing substantive follows. To cite Truth
and Method once more: ‘What does [the thesis that relativism refutes itself]
achieve? The reflective argument that proves successful here rebounds

against the arguer, for it renders the truth value of reflection suspect. It is
not the reality of scepticism or of truth-dissolving relativism but the truth
claim of all formal argument that is affected. Thus the formalism of such
reflective argument is of specious philosophical legitimacy. In fact it tells us
nothing. We are familiar with this kind of thing from the Greek Sophists,
whose inner hollowness Plato demonstrated. It was also he who saw clearly
that there is no argumentatively adequate criterion by which to distinguish
between truly philosophical and sophistic discourse. In particular, he shows
in his Seventh Letter that the formal refutability of a proposition does not
necessarily exclude its being true.’37
Were relativism a tenable philosophical position, the fundamental
problem with it, hermeneutically speaking, would not be that it creates
a logical problem but that it brings intelligent conversation to a halt. If
it did result in a genuine logical problem, it would still need to be asked
what follows from a priori arguments of this kind. Unless we wish to assert
(as many who express this argument appear to believe) that the rules of
our logic are a philosophical counterpart to the word of God, we must
concede that they are conventions, useful fictions which like the rules of
any language game are subject to the ongoing agreement of the players.
Jaspers had a point when he spoke of a ‘rational a-logic’; his point was
that when we forget the limits of logic or of any system of thought we
enclose ourselves in a worldview that is narrowing and dogmatic. If any
kind of forward movement is possible in our ways of thinking, it happens
precisely when we do not regard established rules of the game as sacro-
sanct but hazard a move that brings these into question. Lyotard’s and
other postmodernists’ constant theme is that we must change or otherwise
limber up the rules of the game and think in more experimental ways than
philosophical modernity deemed permissible.
But what if our critics were to persist, and indeed were correct, that
there is a logical problem here and that the rules of our logic are utterly
sacrosanct? What would follow? If the position that knowledge is finite
and conditioned – by language, culture, power, perspective or what have
you – refutes itself, have we proven in cogito-like fashion that absolute
knowledge is possible after all? What is the content of such knowledge and
what is the method? It will be a form of pure reflection which, escaping
all finitude, beholds the world as it is in itself and the Moral Law as well.
Could we ask the possessors of this knowledge to describe what they see,
and in pure terms? The project has been tried since Plato and the track
record is not good. At last the idea dawned on Nietzsche and Dewey that
this was a project in security-seeking not unlike religion, and that the
preoccupation with pure forms and pure reflection caused us to lose sight
of the phenomena. It was ‘an attempt’, as Rorty said, ‘to avoid facing up
to contingency, to escape from time and chance.’38 Philosophers from the
beginning have dreamed of being gods, and reminding us that we are not
is neither a contradiction nor an invitation to relativism.
The position that both Lyotard and hermeneuticists defend would better
go under the name of anti-essentialism than relativism, as Rorty said of his
own version of pragmatism. It is a serious misinterpretation of any of these
views to regard them as claiming that truth or justice is relative to anything
at all. They are denying that truth and justice have essences, and as Rorty
also remarked, ‘I do not see how a claim that something does not exist can
be construed as a claim that something is relative to something else.’39 The
problem for our critics is that they cannot imagine how one could deny
this without ending up in equivocation or, again, Hitler. The answer is that
we avoid the implication by denying the underlying duality. Philosophers
who reject ancient dichotomies – reality/appearance, knowledge/opinion,
rationalism/irrationalism, absolutism/relativism, objectivism/subjectivism
– appear as relativists to those who accept those dichotomies and cannot
imagine how philosophy could proceed without them. Thinking without
dichotomies is what postmodernists, hermeneuticists and almost all the
philosophers whom I have discussed in these chapters are endeavouring
to do. An incredulity toward false oppositions is no less imperative, and
no less postmodern, than an incredulity toward metanarratives. There is
no more point in speaking of Lyotard or Gadamer as relativists than in
speaking of them as heretics or infidels. It is only within a certain worldview
that these terms hold meaning, and when the quest for certainty is given
up along with the Kingdom of God, the fear of relativism vanishes into air.
One final point I would make in this connection is that while the
general thrust of Lyotard’s writings, as of all philosophizing that takes
Nietzsche and Heidegger seriously, is generally away from dichotomous
thinking, on occasion he did revert to it in very questionable ways. In
particular, the distinctions that he drew rather categorically between
knowledge and opinion, and between a politics of principles and a politics
of judgement must be challenged. Phronesis is a form of knowledge, and
judgements without principles are blind. If judgement has no connection
with principles or universals of one kind or another, if all talk of principles
is hopelessly metaphysical and essentialist, it is exceedingly difficult to see
how our political judgements could be engaged dialogically. Surely not all
talk of justification or ‘good reasons’ must make dubious appeals to the
absolute. There is no Moral Law; this we can grant, but the alternative
is not invention for invention’s sake or the perpetual novelty that can
be difficult to distinguish from mere newness. When we are speaking of
what ought to be, there is no chasm separating knowledge from opinion,
criticism from interpretation or some other cognitive acts that are still too
often spoken of as altogether discrete faculties of mind. Very often there
is a point in distinguishing what we know from what we believe or opine,
in separating one language game from another, but one of the lessons of
both postmodernism and hermeneutics is that when we cross from one to
the other we are not entering and exiting worlds or switching on and off
now one faculty and now another. To speak of a judgement that makes no
appeal to the absolute does not mean that our prescriptions are now unrea-
soning or arbitrary. It means that in interpreting what is and judging what
ought to be, we participate in the event of truth and in the happening of
justice.
Notes
Introduction
1
The list can be easily extended: reason and unreason; truth and untruth; light
and shadow; order and disorder; reality and appearance; substance and style;
quantity and quality; statement and reply; analysis and synthesis; decision and
undecidability; being and becoming; within and without; reconstruction and
deconstruction; past and future; solution and problem; principle and case;
disinterest and interest; returning and venturing; self and other; freedom and
unfreedom; the here and now and the ‘to come’.
Chapter 1
1.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, second revised edition, trans. J.
Weinsheimer and D. G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1989), 182.
2
Gianni Vattimo, Dialogue with Nietzsche, trans. W. McCuaig (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2000), 74, 76.
3
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York:
Vintage, 1989), sec. 2, p. 10.
4
Gadamer, Truth and Method, 302, 282, 305.
5
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J.
Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), sec. 583, p. 313.
6
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Preface, p. 2.
7
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, sec. 567, p. 305.
8
Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. W. Kaufmann
and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1969), III sec. 12, p. 119. Throughout
this book all italics in quoted material are in the original.
9
10
Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life As Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1985), 50.
11
Gadamer, Truth and Method, 447, 473.
12.
Jean Granier, ‘Perspectivism and Interpretation’ in The New Nietzsche: Contemporary
Styles of Interpretation, ed. David Allison (New York: Delta, 1977), 190, 191, 192.
13
Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, III sec. 24, p. 151.
14
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, sec. 522, p. 283; sec. 584, p. 315.
15
Ibid., sec. 590, p. 323.
16
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 24, p. 35.
17
Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), sec.
354, p. 300.
18
19
20
21
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 14, p. 21; The Will to Power, sec. 503, p. 274.
22
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 6, p. 13; sec. 13, p. 21.
23
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, sec. 480, p. 267; sec. 480, p. 266.
24
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 9, p. 16; sec. 211, p. 136; sec. 259, p. 203.
25
Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Pres, 1990), 240. Clark here cites Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 5, p. 12.
26
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 5, pp. 12–13.
27
Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1974), 89.
28
29
30
Gadamer, Truth and Method, xxxvii–xxxviii, 555, 270.
31
Jean Grondin, Hans-Georg Gadamer: A Biography, trans. J. Weinsheimer (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 330.
32
33
Ibid., 446.
34
Graeme Nicholson, ‘Gadamer – A Dialectic Without End,’ Symposium: Canadian
Journal of Continental Philosophy vol. 6, no. 2. Fall 2002.
35
Gadamer, Truth and Method, 267.
36
37
38
Ibid., sec. 606, p. 327.
39
Nietzsche, The Gay Science, sec. 121, p. 177.
40
Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Preface sec. 2, p. 16.
41
Gadamer, Interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung, February 1990.
42
43
Jean Grondin, The Philosophy of Gadamer, trans. K. Plant (Montreal: McGill-
Queen’s University Press, 2003), 96.
44
Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, III sec. 12, p. 119.
45
Gadamer, Interview: Die Welt als Spiegelkabinett: Zum 350. Geburtstag von
Leibniz am 1. Juli 1996.
Chapter 2
1
Karl Jaspers, Way to Wisdom, trans. R. Manheim (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1976), 77, 77–8.
2
Jaspers, The Atom Bomb and the Future of Mankind, trans. E. B. Ashton (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1961), 275, 276.
3
See especially Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 2 vols, trans.
T. McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984 and 1987). Jaspers remains a curiously
Notes 233
unacknowledged source of the theory of communicative rationality in these

volumes and elsewhere in Habermas’ work.
4
An important exception to this is Gary B. Madison. See his The Hermeneutics of
Postmodernity: Figures and Themes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988) and
The Politics of Postmodernity: Essays in Applied Hermeneutics (Boston: Kluwer, 2001).
5
Jaspers, Philosophy, vol. 2, trans. E. B. Ashton (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1970), 13.
6
Jaspers, The Atom Bomb and the Future of Mankind, 232.
7
Jaspers, Philosophy of Existence, trans. R. Grabay (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 58, 58–9.
8
9
Jaspers, Philosophy and the World: Selected Essays and Lectures, trans. E. B. Ashton
(Washington: Gateway, 1989), 279.
10
Jaspers, Philosophy of Existence, 60.
11
Jaspers, Reason and Anti-Reason in our Time, trans. S. Godman (London: SCM
Press, 1952), 38, 39.
12
Jaspers, Man in the Modern Age, trans. E. and C. Paul (New York: Doubleday,
1957), 33.
13
Jaspers, Philosophy of Existence, 4.
14
Jaspers, Man in the Modern Age, 51.
15
Jaspers, Reason and Existenz, trans. W. Earle (London: Noonday, 1955), 65, 66.
16
Jaspers, Reason and Anti-Reason in our Time, 44.
17
Jaspers, The Perennial Scope of Philosophy, trans. R. Manheim (London: Routledge,
1950), 47, 48.
18
As he would write, ‘Reason is more than the sum of acts of clear thinking. These
acts, rather, spring from a life-carrying basic mood, and it is this mood we call
reason.’ Jaspers, The Atom Bomb and the Future of Mankind, 218.
19
Jaspers, Reason and Anti-Reason in our Time, 40–1.
20
Jaspers, The Atom Bomb and the Future of Mankind, 218, 7.
21
René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. D. Cress (Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1979), 13.
22
Jaspers, Way to Wisdom, 12.
23
Ibid., 12; Jaspers, Philosophy of Existence, 60.
24
25
Jaspers, Reason and Existenz, 80.
26
Jaspers, Philosophy, vol. 2, 100.
27
Jaspers, The Perennial Scope of Philosophy, 49.
28
Jaspers, Philosophy of Existence, 54, 55, 75.
29
30
Jaspers, Philosophy and the World, 296.
31
32
Jaspers, Reason and Existenz, 113, 118.
33
34
Grondin, The Philosophy of Gadamer, 140.
35
36
As one Jaspers scholar writes, ‘Reason .â•›.â•›. must keep itself open for all the modes
of reality and for all the possibilities of thinking and try to bind and recollect
them all. Open Reason requires both clarity, the glory of logical understanding,
and unity, the transcendent aim of rational a-logic.’ Sebastian Samay, Reason
Revisited: The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1971), 215.
Chapter 3
1
2
Ibid., 361.
3
Gabriel Marcel, Man Against Mass Society, trans. G. S. Fraser (South Bend: St.
Augustine’s Press, 2008), 9.
4
Marcel, Tragic Wisdom and Beyond, trans. S. Jolin and P. McCormick (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1973), 195.
5
José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (New York: Norton, 1960), 14, 13,
13–14.
6
Marcel, Man Against Mass Society, 152.
7
Marcel, The Existential Background of Human Dignity (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1963), 158.
8
Marcel, Tragic Wisdom and Beyond, 152.
9
Marcel, Homo Viator, trans. E. Craufurd (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 20.
10
11
Gadamer remarked on this point, and well prior to email: ‘The art of letter-
writing consists in not letting what one says become a treatise on the subject
but in making it acceptable to the correspondent. But on the other hand it also
consists in preserving and fulfilling the standard of finality that everything stated
in writing has. The time lapse between sending a letter and receiving an answer
is not just an external factor, but gives this form of communication its special
nature as a particular form of writing. So we note that speeding up the post has
not improved this form of communication but, on the contrary, has led to a
decline in the art of letter-writing.’ Gadamer, Truth and Method, 369.
12
Marcel, Homo Viator, 80.
13
14
Ibid., 53.
15
Marcel, The Philosophy of Existentialism, trans. M. Harari (New York: Citadel Press,
1956), 12.
16
Marcel, Homo Viator, 79.
17
18
Marcel, Creative Fidelity, trans. R. Rosthal (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 12.
19
Marcel, The Decline of Wisdom, trans. M. Harari (London: Harvill Press, 1954),
46–7.
20
Marcel, Tragic Wisdom and Beyond, 198.
21
Marcel, Man Against Mass Society, 60. Elaborating on this last point, Marcel
remarked: ‘One must admit, however, that the use of the term “sin”, at a level of
discussion which is that of philosophy and not of theology, may arouse certain
objections. Is not sin in its very essence the rebellion of the creature against his
Notes 235
Creator, and can this word retain any meaning for the unbeliever whose own
position is precisely that God the Creator does not exist? Such an objection seems
to have an incontestable formal validity. But if we go a little deeper, we shall
have, it seems to me, to recognize that unbelievers themselves, faced with the
abuses, with the systematic horrors, which we have seen become more and more
widespread in the last thirty years, have acquired a growing awareness of the
note of sin that is the mark of such monstrosities – and this even though we have
witnessed during the same period a certain regression of public morality.’ A little
later in the same text he would write: ‘But here we come again on that age-old
notion of sin, as that notion has been understood by all the great religious
traditions without exception; I mean sin as pride, sin as hubris, sin, ultimately, as
revolt.’ Ibid., 59, 74.
22
Marcel, Being and Having, trans. K. Farrer (Westminster: Dacre Press, 1949), 100.
23
24
Ibid., 73, 136, 135.
25
26
Richard Kearney, Strangers, Gods, and Monsters: Ideas of Otherness (New York:
Routledge, 2002), 79.
27
28
29
Marcel, Man Against Mass Society, 192, 203, 201.
30
Marcel, The Existential Background of Human Dignity, 130.
31
Marcel, Tragic Wisdom and Beyond, 253–4.
Chapter 4
1
Gadamer, ‘What is Truth?’ in Hermeneutics and Truth, ed. Brice R. Wachterhauser
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1994), 42–3.
2
Gadamer, ‘Reply to Thomas M. Alexander’ in The Philosophy of Hans-Georg
Gadamer, Library of Living Philosophers vol. xxiv, ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn
(Chicago: Open Court, 1997), 346.
3
Many of these affinities are discussed is John Dewey and Continental Philosophy, ed.
Paul Fairfield (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010).
4
According to its early reputation, pragmatism gives expression to a materialistic
and naïvely optimistic worldview. Worse still, it was widely regarded as an apology
for intellectual licence, owing in part to ungenerous critics who showed at best
a passing familiarity with pragmatism’s key texts, notably James’ Pragmatism,
a book so widely and profoundly misread as to occasion its author to write a
‘sequel’ titled The Meaning of Truth, and in part to James’ sometimes careless
use of language. A text originally composed for oral presentation, Pragmatism
contains numerous formulations of the pragmatist theory of truth, some of which
sacrifice clarity for pithy remarks that reveal little about James’ considered view.
His references to truth, for instance, as ‘only the expedient in the way of our
thinking’ or ‘the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief’
stuck in the minds of many while doing nothing whatever to clarify the meaning
of pragmatism. His critics took James to be opening the door to irrationality and
intellectual licence, a suspicion seemingly confirmed by the argument of The Will
to Believe. It is unfortunate that language of this kind, which by no means captures
James’ considered view, much less that of Peirce or Dewey, profoundly influ-
enced pragmatism’s reception and occasioned its immediate dismissal by many.
In more careful moments, James emphasized that the ‘cash value’ of a belief,
in which its truth consists, is to be understood strictly ‘in experiential terms’ or
with respect to its phenomenological verifiability: ‘True ideas are those that we can
assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot. That is
the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas; that, therefore, is the
meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known-as.’ William James, Pragmatism
(Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1981), 106, 42, 97, 97. The ‘satisfaction’ that
truth affords is not to be identified with any emotional satisfaction a belief may
cause. For James, a belief passes for true for the reason that it produces experi-
ential coherence which in turn makes it possible for human beings to negotiate
their way about the phenomena, and not merely on the grounds that it produces
an emotional or material payoff. In phenomenological terms, it is ‘the circum-
pressure of experience itself’ that is ‘the only real guarantee we have against
licentious thinking.’ James, The Meaning of Truth (Harvard: Harvard University
Press, 1981), 47. Dewey was still more clear in this regard, carefully avoiding
James’ occasional casualness of expression while insisting on the circumscription
of terms such as ‘satisfaction’ and ‘practical interests’ to the immediate object
of true belief. ‘Too often [Dewey wrote] .â•›.â•›. when truth has been thought of as
satisfaction, it has been thought of as merely emotional satisfaction, a private
comfort, a meeting of purely personal need. But the satisfaction in question
means a satisfaction of the needs and conditions of the problem out of which the
idea, the purpose and method of action, arises. .â•›.â•›. Again, when truth is defined
as utility, it is often thought to mean utility for some purely personal end, some
profit upon which a particular individual has set his heart. .â•›.â•›. As a matter of fact,
truth as utility means service in making just that contribution to reorganization
in experience that the idea or theory claims to be able to make. The usefulness
of a road is not measured by the degree to which it lends itself to the purposes
of a highwayman. It is measured by whether it actually functions as a road, as a
means of easy and effective public transportation and communication. And so
with the serviceableness of an idea or hypothesis as a measure of its truth’. John
Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920). MW 12: 170. The satisfactoriness of an
empirical belief consists exclusively in its capacity to predict future experience,
account for present perceptions, and cohere with other relevant beliefs. The
good promoted by the belief consists not in any extraneous emotional satis-
faction on the part of the subject, but in its ability to account coherently for
all the relevant phenomena. The ‘problem’ resolved by a true belief, Dewey
repeatedly asserted, is solely that which originally occasioned a given course of
inquiry.
5
James, Pragmatism, 39, 102, 103, 101, 35, 34, 98–9.
6
Ibid., 103.
7
Ibid., 117, 116, 83, 35, 35.
8
James, The Meaning of Truth, 105, 113.
Notes 237
9
Dewey, The Quest for Certainty (1929). LW 4: 109.
10
Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers, vol. 5 (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1931–1958), 400.
11
Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938). LW 12: 15.
12
Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920). MW 12: 181.
13
Peirce, ‘Some Consequences of Four Incapacities.’ The Journal of Speculative
Philosophy vol. 2, 1868, 140.
14
James, Pragmatism, 106–7.
15
Gadamer, Reason in the Age of Science, trans. F. G. Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1989), 87.
16
Richard Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and
Praxis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 154.
17
Gadamer and James both emphasized the gradual, evolutionary character of
such transformation. See Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays,
ed. Robert Bernasconi, trans. N. Walker (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1988), 9; and James, Pragmatism, 35. Both indicated how, as James put it, ‘the
most violent revolutions in an individual’s beliefs leave most of his old order
standing.’ James, Pragmatism, 35.
18
James, Pragmatism, 37.
19
James, The Meaning of Truth, 110.
20
James, Pragmatism, 100, 106.
21
James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (New York: Dover, 1950), 488.
22
23
James, The Meaning of Truth, 76.
24
Gadamer, Truth and Method, xxviii.
25
Gadamer, Reason in the Age of Science, 111.
26
While at times it seems as if Gadamer indeed sets up such an opposition, the
intent of such passages is unmistakeably polemical, their purpose being to
provide a corrective to the methodological imperialism prevalent within the
human sciences. The following texts represent perhaps Gadamer’s clearest state-
ments on the matter and caution against conceiving truth in simple opposition
to method: ‘In my work, heightening the tension between truth and method
had a polemical intent. Ultimately, as Descartes himself realized, it belongs to
the special structure of straightening something crooked that it needs to be bent
in the opposite direction. But what was crooked in this case was not so much
the methodology of the sciences as their reflexive self-consciousness.’ Gadamer,
Truth and Method, 555. Similarly: ‘[T]he title of Truth and Method never intended
that the antithesis it implies should be mutually exclusive.’ Gadamer, Philosophical
Hermeneutics, 26.
27
Gadamer, ‘Reply to Joan Stambaugh’ in The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, 135.
28
Robert Sullivan, Political Hermeneutics: The Early Thinking of Hans-Georg Gadamer
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), 11.
29
Gadamer, Reason in the Age of Science, 112. The phenomenological significance of
James is well documented by James M. Edie in William James and Phenomenology
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).
30
Dewey, How We Think (1933). LW 8: 181.
31
32
Gadamer, Truth and Method, xxx; Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, 49.
33
Gadamer, Reason in the Age of Science, 4.
34
Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, 17.
35
Ibid., 66.
36
37
Gadamer, ‘The Problem of Historical Consciousness’ in Interpretive Social Science:
A Second Look, eds. Paul Rabinow and William Sullivan, trans. J. Close (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1987), 129, 130.
38
39
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New
York: Harper and Row, 1962), 195.
40
41
Ibid., 291.
42
Gadamer, ‘The Problem of Historical Consciousness’, 127, 87.
43
As Nietzsche began the Preface to Beyond Good and Evil, ‘Supposing truth is a
woman – what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philoso-
phers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have been very inexpert about women?
That the gruesome seriousness, the clumsy obtrusiveness with which they have
usually approached truth so far have been awkward and very improper methods
for winning a woman’s heart? What is certain is that she has not allowed herself
to be won – and today every kind of dogmatism is left standing dispirited and
discouraged. If it is left standing at all! For there are scoffers who claim that it has
fallen, that all dogmatism lies on the ground – even more, that all dogmatism is
dying.’ Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Preface, p. 1.
Chapter 5
1
See James’ Essays in Radical Empiricism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1996). For a thorough examination of Dewey’s indebtedness to Hegel, see James
A. Good, A Search for Unity in Diversity: The ‘Permanent Hegelian Deposit’ in the
Philosophy of John Dewey (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2006).
2
Richard Rorty did much to restore interest in Dewey’s thought, beginning in
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).
This may be regarded as a mixed blessing. Rorty’s Dewey looks rather more like
Rorty than Dewey. The latter’s complete works total no less than thirty-eight thick
volumes and cover just about every subdiscipline in philosophy and some related
fields.
3
Dewey, The Quest for Certainty (1929). LW 4: 179. All references to Dewey’s works
are to The Collected Works, edited by Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1969–1991), which are classified under The Early Works,
1882–1898; The Middle Works, 1899–1924; and The Later Works, 1925–1953. I
shall abbreviate these as EW, MW, and LW followed by the volume number.
4
Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938). LW 12: 121.
5
Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916). MW 9: 152.
6
Dewey, ‘Preface’ to Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938). LW 12: 4.
Notes 239
7
8
Dewey, ‘The Challenge of Democracy to Education’ (1937). LW 11: 184.
9
Dewey made explicit the point concerning the methods of the natural sciences
not being transferable to humanistic inquiry in a footnote to an essay from 1949:
‘The word “methods” is italicized as a precaution against a possible misunder-
standing which would be contrary to what is intended. What is needed is not the
carrying over of procedures that have approved themselves in physical science,
but new methods as adapted to human issues and problems, as methods already
in scientific use have shown themselves to be in physical subject matter.’ Dewey,
‘Philosophy’s Future in our Scientific Age: Never Was Its Role More Crucial’
(1949). LW 16: 379.
10
Dewey, ‘Science as Subject Matter and as Method’ (1910). MW 6: 78.
11
Dewey, Individualism, Old and New (1929). LW 5: 115.
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
Dewey, How We Think (rev. ed. 1933). LW 8: 118–19.
19
20
Dewey, How We Think (rev. ed. 1933). LW 8: 148, 163.
21
Dewey, ‘Foreword to Argumentation and Public Discussion’ (1936). LW 11: 515.
22
Dewey, How We Think (rev. ed. 1933). LW 8: 148.
23
Dewey, ‘John Dewey Responds’ (1950). LW 17: 85.
24
25
Dewey, ‘Context and Thought’ (1931). LW 6: 5.
26
Dewey, How We Think (rev. ed. 1933). LW 8: 114, 171–2.
27
Dewey, ‘Understanding and Prejudice’ (1929). LW 5: 396.
28
Dewey, How We Think (rev. ed. 1933). LW 8: 225, 237, 226–7.
29
Ibid., 233.
30
Dewey, Psychology (1887). EW 2: 180.
31
32
Dewey, ‘The Inclusive Philosophic Idea’ (1928). LW 3: 51.
33
Dewey, How We Think (rev. ed. 1933). LW 8: 301, 214–15.
34
Dewey, Art as Experience (1934). LW 10: 270. On this point, also see MW 9: 7; LW
2: 57; LW 6: 11–13; and LW 10: 274–5.
35
Dewey, Experience and Nature (1925). LW 1: 40.
36
Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, trans. W. Lovitt, in Basic
Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), 311.
37
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 210, p. 134; sec. 42, p. 52; sec. 44, p. 53.
38
Aristotle, Metaphysics IV. 7.27, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon,
trans. W. D. Ross (New York: Random House, 1941).
Chapter 6
1
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1979), 315; C. G. Prado, ‘A Conversation with Richard Rorty’, Symposium:
Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy vol. 7, no. 2, fall 2003, 228.
2
Jürgen Habermas, Richard Rorty and Leszek Kolakowski, Debating the State of
Philosophy (Westport: Praeger, 1996), 35; Rorty, Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will
Take Care of Itself, ed. Eduardo Mendieta (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2006), 37; Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, Philosophical Papers vol. 1
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 103.
3
Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1982), 162; Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, 38; Rorty, Truth and Progress,
Philosophical Papers vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
64.
4
Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, xix.
5
Ibid., xiv, xiii.
6
Rorty, Take Care of Freedom, 120, 94.
7
Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, 102.
8
Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920). MW 12: 258–9.
9
Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, 165.
10
Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Others, Philosophical Papers vol. 2 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991), 168. I return to Rorty’s stance on relativism
in Chapter 12.
11
Rorty, Take Care of Freedom, 135–6.
12
Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, 34.
13
Ibid., 160, 40–1.
14
15
Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Others, 135.
16
Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, 14; Rorty, Debating the State of Philosophy, 61;
Rorty, Take Care of Freedom, 84; Rorty, Truth and Progress, 228.
17
18
As he articulated this point, ‘For the ironists, “final vocabulary” does not mean
“the one which puts all doubts to rest” or “the one which satisfies our criteria of
ultimacy, or adequacy, or optimality.” They do not think of reflection as being
governed by criteria. Criteria, in their view, are never more than the platitudes
which contextually define the terms of a final vocabulary currently in use. Ironists
agree with Davidson about our inability to step outside our language in order to
compare it with something else, and with Heidegger about the contingency and
historicity of that language.’ Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989), 75.
19
I discuss this at length in Education After Dewey (London: Continuum, 2009).
20
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University
of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 187, 191.
21
Gadamer, Truth and Method, 125–6.
22
23
Heidegger, Being and Time, 195.
24
Notes 241
25
Gary B. Madison, The Politics of Postmodernity: Essays in Applied Hermeneutics (Boston:
Kluwer, 2001), 17, 143. Madison draws important connections between herme-
neutics and classical pragmatism in several other works, including Understanding:
A Phenomenological-Pragmatic Analysis (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1982) and The
Hermeneutics of Postmodernity: Figures and Themes (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1988).
Chapter 7
1
Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. M. O’Connell (New York:
Continuum, 1972), 196.
2
Ibid., 216, 264–5, 246.
3
Ibid., 207, 227, 270.
4
David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1980), 189.
5
Horkheimer, Critical Theory, 34.
6
Ibid., 229.
7
Horkheimer, Critique of Instrumental Reason, trans. M. O’Connell (New York:
Continuum, 1994), 1.
8
Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York: Continuum, 1987), 30.
9
Horkheimer, Critical Theory, 247.
10
Ibid., 7.
11
Ibid., 263–4.
12
Horkheimer, Critique of Instrumental Reason, 27.
13
Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, 102.
14
Horkheimer, Critique of Instrumental Reason, 27.
15
Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. J. Cumming
(New York: Continuum, 1991), 125.
16
Horkheimer, Critique of Instrumental Reason, 157, 95, 158, 12.
17
Horkheimer, Critical Theory, 221, 101.
18
See especially Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the
Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. R. Czerny et. al (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1977).
19
Heidegger, ‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking’, in Basic Writings,
trans. J. Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 390.
Chapter 8
1
In addition to Habermas, some of the more notable theorists in this field include
John Rawls, Amy Gutmann, Dennis Thompson, John Dryzek, Ian Shapiro, Jon
Elster, Robert Goodin, Iris Marion Young, James Bohman, Seyla Benhabib,
Joshua Cohen and James Fishkin, among others.
2
Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory
of Law and Democracy, trans. W. Rehg (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), 296–7,
306. Also see Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 2 volumes, trans. T.
McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984 and 1987). As Habermas elsewhere writes,
‘In discourse what is called the force of the better argument is wholly unforced.’
Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. C. Lenhardt and
S. W. Nicholsen (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 160.
3
Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 162.
4
Habermas, ‘Reconciliation Through the Public Use of Reason: Remarks on John
Rawls’s Political Liberalism’, The Journal of Philosophy vol. XCII, no. 3, March 1995,
117. Also see Habermas’ Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action; Justification
and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics, trans. C. Cronin (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1993); Between Facts and Norms; The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political
Theory, trans. C. Cronin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998).
5
Seyla Benhabib, ‘Toward a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy’, in
Democracy and Difference, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1996), 69.
6
Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 305.
7
Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other, 245–6. Habermas describes this ideal
procedure (with reference to Joshua Cohen) in the following terms: ‘(a)
Processes of deliberation take place in argumentative form, that is, through the
regulated exchange of information and reasons among parties who introduce
and critically test proposals; (b) Deliberations are inclusive and public. No
one may be excluded in principle; all of those who are possibly affected by the
decisions have equal chances to enter and take part; (c) Deliberations are free of
any external coercion. The participants are sovereign insofar as they are bound
only by the presuppositions of communication and rules of argumentation;
(d) Deliberations are free of any internal coercion that could detract from
the equality of the participants. Each has an equal opportunity to be heard,
to introduce topics, to make contributions, to suggest and criticize proposals.
The taking of yes/no positions is motivated solely by the unforced force of the
better argument. Additional conditions specify the procedure in view of the
political character of deliberative processes; (e) Deliberations aim in general at
rationally motivated agreement and can in principle be indefinitely continued
or resumed at any time.â•›.â•›.; (f) Political deliberations extend to any matter that
can be regulated in the equal interest of all.â•›.â•›.; (g) Political deliberations also
include the interpretation of needs and wants and the change of prepolitical
attitudes and preferences.’ Finally, ‘In short, the ideal procedure of deliberation
and decision making presupposes as its bearer an association that agrees to
regulate the conditions of its common life impartially. What brings legal conso-
ciates together is, in the final analysis, the linguistic bond that holds together each
communication community.’ Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 305–6.
8
Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other, 248–9.
9
James Bohman, Public Deliberation: Pluralism, Complexity, and Democracy (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1996), 24–5.
10
Ibid., ix.
11
As Ricardo Blaug observes, ‘Habermas posits a normative counterfactual ideal
of complete participation, and he fully intends this to help us with the more
empirical problem of how a political order might be made more democratic.
Notes 243
Yet though he is able to highlight the importance of the public sphere and to
call for the increase in deliberative fora in order to deepen democracy, he never
really confronts questions regarding the actual functioning of such fora. Indeed,
his most recent work moves rather in the opposite direction, concentrating on
the “macro” questions of the normative basis of law and constitutional practices.’
Ricardo Blaug, Democracy, Real and Ideal: Discourse Ethics and Radical Politics
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), xiv.
12
In John Dryzek’s words, ‘democratic legitimacy [can] be seen in terms of the
ability or opportunity to participate in effective deliberation on the part of those
subject to collective decisions .â•›.â•›. [and thus] claims on behalf of or against such
decisions have to be justified to these people in terms that, on reflection, they
are capable of accepting.’ John Dryzek, Deliberative Democracy and Beyond: Liberals,
Critics, Contestations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 1.
13
Another example is Joshua Cohen, who argues that under deliberative democracy
citizens must be not only free and equal but reasonable, in the sense that ‘they
aim to defend and criticize institutions and programs in terms of considerations
that others, as free and equal, have reason to accept, given the fact of reasonable
pluralism.’ Joshua Cohen, ‘Democracy and Liberty’ in Deliberative Democracy, ed.
Jon Elster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 194.
14
See Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise
on Argumentation, trans. J. Wilkonson and P. Weaver (Notre Dame: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1969).
15
As one hermeneuticist remarks: ‘The important transformations that have
occurred in these two disciplines [philosophy and rhetoric] could perhaps be
best characterized in terms of the classical distinction between res and verba. What
has occurred in philosophy is, so to speak, a broadening-out in its conception
of reality (and, accordingly, of truth) in such a way as to include language in the
very definition of reality and truth themselves. .â•›.â•›. [T]his development is aptly
summed up in Gadamer’s famous statement: “Being that can be understood is
language.” In a parallel fashion, the treatment of language in rhetoric has been
broadened out such that it is no longer restricted to a matter of mere stylistics
but has taken for its object “truth” itself (and, accordingly, reality as well) – if
by “truth” one understands the various “truth claims” that people, of whatever
sort and in whatever circumstances, make about what they take to be “reality.”
The development here involves, in the words of Calvin Schrag, “a move from a
rhetoric of expression to a rhetoric of truth.”’ Gary B. Madison, The Politics of
Postmodernity: Essays in Applied Hermeneutics (Boston: Kluwer, 2001), 106. Madison
here cites Gadamer, Truth and Method, 474 and Calvin O. Schrag, Communicative
Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986),
187.
16
Gadamer, ‘Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Ideology-Critique’, trans. G. B. Hess and
R. E. Palmer, in Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in our Time, eds. Walter Jost and Michael
J. Hyde (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 318.
17
Chaim Perelman, The New Rhetoric and the Humanities: Essays on Rhetoric and its
Application (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1979), 9.
18
Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. and trans. John B.
Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 99, 99–100.
19
Gadamer, ‘Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Ideology-Critique’, 318.
20
Gadamer, ‘The Relevance of the Beautiful’ in The Relevance of the Beautiful and
Other Essays, ed. Robert Bernasconi, trans. N. Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge
21
Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. J. W. Ellington
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 1.
22
James Bohman and William Rehg, eds. Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and
Politics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), xiv, x.
23
‘Coming to an understanding’ in dialogue, in Gadamer’s words, ‘.â•›.â•›. is a life
process in which a community of life is lived out. To that extent, coming to an
understanding through human conversation is no different from the under-
standing that occurs between animals. But human language must be thought of
as a special and unique life process since, in linguistic communication, “world” is
disclosed. Reaching an understanding in language places a subject matter before
those communicating like a disputed object set between them. Thus the world
is the common ground, trodden by none and recognized by all, uniting all who
talk to one another.’ Gadamer, Truth and Method, 446.
Chapter 9
1
Karl-Otto Apel, Towards a Transformation of Philosophy, trans. G. Adey and D. Frisby
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), 172.
2
Apel, The Response of Discourse Ethics. Morality and the Meaning of Life 13. Leuven:
Peters, 2001, 28.
3
Apel, ‘Regarding the Relationship of Morality, Law, and Democracy: On
Habermas’s Philosophy of Law from a Transcendental-Pragmatic Point of View’ in
Habermas and Pragmatism, eds. Mitchell Aboulafia, Myra Bookman and Catherine
Kemp (London: Routledge, 2002), 24.
4
Apel, ‘Globalisation and the Need for Universal Ethics’ in Public Reason and
Applied Ethics: The Ways of Practical Reason in a Pluralist Society, eds. Adela Cortina,
Domingo Garcia-Marzá and Jesús Conill (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2008), 138.
5
Apel, Ethics and the Theory of Rationality. Selected Essays Vol. II, trans. E. Mendeta
(New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1996), 201.
6
Apel, ‘What Is Philosophy? The Philosophical Point of View After the End of
Dogmatic Metaphysics’ in What Is Philosophy?, eds. C. P. Ragland and Sarah Heidt
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 166.
7
Apel, Towards a Transformation of Philosophy, 138.
8
Apel, ‘What Is Philosophy?’, 177.
9
Apel, The Response of Discourse Ethics, 68.
10
Apel, Ethics and the Theory of Rationality, 195.
11
Apel, ‘Regarding the Relationship of Morality, Law, and Democracy’, 22.
12
13
Apel, Towards a Transformation of Philosophy, 276, 123.
14
15
Notes 245
16
Apel, Ethics and the Theory of Rationality, 195.
17
Apel, ‘Kant, Hegel, and the Contemporary Question Concerning the Normative
Foundations of Morality and Right’ in Hegel on Ethics and Politics, eds. Robert
Pippin and Otfried Höffe, trans. N. Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004), 68, 70.
18
19
Apel, Ethics and the Theory of Rationality, 255, 320.
20
Jürgen Habermas, ‘Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical
Justification’ in The Communicative Ethics Controversy, eds. Seyla Benhabib and
Fred Dallmayr (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 71. Robert Alexy elaborates upon
Habermas’ statement as follows, which Habermas cites with approval in the same
text: ‘(3.1) Every subject with the competence to speak and act is allowed to
take part in a discourse. (3.2) a. Everyone is allowed to question any assertion
whatever. b. Everyone is allowed to introduce any assertion whatever into the
discourse. c. Everyone is allowed to express his attitudes, desires and needs. (3.3)
No speaker may, by internal or external coercion, be prevented from exercising
his rights as laid down in (3.1) and (3.2).’ Ibid., 86.
21
Apel et. al, What Right Does Ethics Have? Public Philosophy in a Pluralistic Culture, ed.
Sander Griffioen (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1990), 17.
22
23
24
Apel, What Right Does Ethics Have?, 23.
25
Apel, ‘Is the Ethics of the Ideal Communication Community a Utopia? On
the Relationship between Ethics, Utopia, and the Critique of Utopia’ in
The Communicative Ethics Controversy, eds. Seyla Benhabib and Fred Dallmayr
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 47, 46.
26
Apel, ‘Regarding the Relationship of Morality, Law, and Democracy’, 21.
27
See Apel, ‘What Is Philosophy?’, 173.
28
Apel, What Right Does Ethics Have?, 16; Apel, The Response of Discourse Ethics, 47.
29
Apel, Ethics and the Theory of Rationality, 196; Apel, The Response of Discourse Ethics,
80.
30
31
Apel, ‘What Is Philosophy?’, 159.
32
Apel, Towards a Transformation of Philosophy, 68, 285, 70, 71.
33
See Lawrence Kohlberg, Essays on Moral Development Vol. 1: The Philosophy of
Moral Development (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981) and Essays on Moral
Development Vol. 2: The Psychology of Moral Development (San Francisco: Harper and
Row, 1984).
34
Apel, What Right Does Ethics Have?, 15.
35
Chapter 10
1
See Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and
Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
2
Béatrice Han, Foucault’s Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical,
trans. E. Pile (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 101. Another example
is Herman Nilson, who contrasts Foucault and hermeneutics as follows: ‘For
Foucault, mankind had no hidden purpose which had to be discovered; there is
no abyss lying in the dark depths of being which betrays to us what we truly are.
Man is something developing, unfinished, which is more a reason for a creative
activity than for a hermeneutic decipherment.’ Herman Nilson, Michel Foucault
and the Games of Truth, trans. R. Clark (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998),
79. Other examples are not hard to find. Jean-François Lyotard also included
what he called ‘the hermeneutics of meaning’ in his short list of metanarra-
tives in the introduction to The Postmodern Condition. The list reads as follows:
‘the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the
rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth’, rather as if the differ-
ences between each are a somewhat minor matter. Jean-François Lyotard, The
Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xxiii.
3
Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 109.
4
John D. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic
Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 111, 112.
5
I shall not pursue the somewhat tedious question of whether Foucault was or was
not a postmodernist or poststructuralist, or how the distinction between these
two terms may be analyzed.
6
Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice:
Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. D. F. Bouchard and
S. Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 139.
7
Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow,
trans. C. Porter (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 46.
8
C. G. Prado, Starting with Foucault: An Introduction to Genealogy (Boulder: Westview
Press, 1995).
9
Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, 147.
10
Ibid., 139.
11
Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin
Gordon, trans. C. Gordon et al. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 84–5, 83, 81.
12
Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, 148.
13
Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 81, 82.
14
Foucault, ‘Power and Sex’ in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other
Writings 1977–1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. D. J. Parent (New York:
Routledge, 1988), 124.
15
Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 62.
16
Ibid., 85.
17
Foucault, ‘Afterword: The Subject and Power’ in Dreyfus and Rabinow, Beyond
Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 216.
18
This tension is captured in Habermas’ characterization of Foucault as a ‘cryptonor-
mativist’ whose premises prevent him from accounting for the standards on
which his critique implicitly relies. See Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of
Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. F. G. Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987),
266–93.
Notes 247
19
Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power,’ 216.
20
Foucault, Remarks on Marx, trans. R. J. Goldstein and J. Cascaito (New York:
Semiotext[e], 1991), 157.
21
Foucault, ‘Power and Sex,’ 122.
22
Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. D. Savage (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 33.
23
Ibid., 27.
24
Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 107.
25
Gadamer, ‘Letter to Dallmayr’, in Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida
Encounter, eds. Diane Michelfelder and Richard Palmer (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1989), 94.
26
27
Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality vol. 3, trans. R. Hurley
(New York: Vintage, 1986), 43, 44, 45, 52–3, 64–5.
28
The aphorism begins: ‘One thing is needful: – To “give style” to one’s character
– a great and rare art! It is practised by those who survey all the strengths and
weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one
of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye. Here a
large mass of second nature has been added; there a piece of original nature has
been removed – both times through long practice and daily work at it. Here the
ugly that could not be removed is concealed; there it has been reinterpreted and
made sublime. .â•›.â•›. In the end, when the work is finished, it becomes evident how
the constraint of a single taste governed and formed everything large and small.
Whether this taste was good or bad is less important than one might suppose, if
only it was a single taste!’ Nietzsche, The Gay Science, sec. 290, p. 232.
29
Foucault, ‘On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress’ in
Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 236.
30
31
Ibid., 310.
32
Chapter 11
1
John D. Caputo, More Radical Hermeneutics: On Not Knowing Who We Are
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 42.
2
Gadamer, ‘Letter to Dallmayr’ in Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida
Encounter, eds. Diane Michelfelder and Richard Palmer (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1989), 94.
3
Caputo, ‘Gadamer’s Closet Essentialism: A Derridean Critique’ in Dialogue and
Deconstruction, 259.
4
Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project
5
Caputo, ‘Gadamer’s Closet Essentialism’, 262.
6
Caputo, More Radical Hermeneutics, 53.
7
Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics, 111, 5, 6.
8
Ibid., 112, 11–12, 217. Caputo cites Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols and The
Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Baltimore: Penguin, 1968), p. 35.
9
Ibid., 97.
10
Caputo, More Radical Hermeneutics, 204. Caputo is citing Jacques Derrida, Points .â•›.â•›.
Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Elizabeth Weber, trans. P. Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford
11
Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics, 96–7.
12
Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (New York:
Fordham University Press, 1997), 37.
13
Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics, 221, 145, 271.
14
Ibid., 278.
15
Ibid., 225.
16
Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 31.
17
Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics, 117, 118, 119, 116–17.
18
Ibid., 151, 150.
19
20
Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics, 7, 197.
21
Ibid., 197, 196.
22
23
Caputo, On Religion (New York: Routledge, 2001), 33, 67, 13, 19.
24
Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics, 269.
25
Caputo, On Religion, 1, 8, 9, 110, 107. As he writes elsewhere of fundamentalism:
‘Their faith is direct, nonironic, and reactionary. And my own take on that is
twofold. 1. They know something that the intellectuals have forgotten; they
affirm something that we must understand. 2. At the same time, their faith
is reactionary; it has been stampeded into a literalist extreme by the deraci-
nating effects of modern technology and global capitalism. Their beliefs and
practices are dangerous and uncritical and hence this allows their religion to be
manipulated for nationalistic purposes, held captive by the worst forces, forces
that contradict everything that Jesus and the prophets stand for.’ Caputo and
Gianni Vattimo, After the Death of God (New York: Columbia University Press,
2007), 154.
26
Caputo, ‘Hauntological Hermeneutics and the Interpretation of Christian Faith’
in Hermeneutics at the Crossroads, eds. Kevin Vanhoozer et. al. (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2006), 103.
27
Caputo, ‘Apostles of the Impossible: On God and the Gift in Derrida and Marion’
in God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, eds. John Caputo and Michael Scanlon
28
Caputo, ‘Hauntological Hermeneutics and the Interpretation of Christian Faith’,
108.
29
Gadamer, Truth and Method, 397, 296; Gadamer, ‘Letter to Dallmayr’, 96.
30
31
Gadamer, ‘Text and Interpretation’ in Dialogue and Deconstruction, 24. As Gary
Madison remarks, ‘To the deconstructionist notion of undecidability should
be opposed the quite different notion of inexhaustibility. In contrast to decon-
struction, hermeneutics maintains that there is always the possibility of meaning,
but, in contrast to logocentrism, it maintains that it is never possible to arrive at
Notes 249
a final meaning.’ Gary B. Madison, The Hermeneutics of Postmodernity: Figures and

Themes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 115.
32
Gadamer, Truth and Method, 579. Speaking of Derrida in an interview of 1993,
Gadamer stated ‘But what we are dealing with here is a conversation in which,
unfortunately, Derrida is not allowing himself to get involved. Why he cannot
do this I do not know. I think he suspects that the readiness to reach an under-
standing and the will to reach an understanding, which are the presuppositions
of every conversation, magically reintroduce the transcendental signified into
the event of posing and answering questions. I certainly don’t want this. The
“dialectic of the word” .â•›.â•›. is based on the freedom of each partner, which I have
never disputed but on the contrary have particularly emphasized. Conversation
is the game of language, and readiness for conversation is only the entrance
door into this game, not an absurd effort to hold the game within boundaries.’
Gadamer, ‘Aesthetics’ in Gadamer in Conversation: Reflections and Commentary, ed.
and trans. Richard Palmer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 68.
33
Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 59.
34
Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 27.
35
Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics, 209.
36
Madison, The Hermeneutics of Postmodernity, 107.
37
Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics, 146, 147.
38
Ibid., 195.
39
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 3, p. 11; sec. 6, p. 13.
40
41
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922), 7.
Chapter 12
1
Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. G.
Bennington and B. Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984),
xxiv, xxiii.
2
Ibid., 82, 81; ‘Tomb of the Intellectual’ in Political Writings, trans. B. Readings and
K. Paul (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 7.
3
Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thébaud, Just Gaming, trans. W. Godzich (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 25, 20, 23, 17.
4
Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence 1982–1985, trans. D. Barry et. al.
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 17–18, 50.
5
Lyotard, ‘Lessons in Paganism’ in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin
(Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 130; Frederick Jameson, ‘Foreword’ to The
Postmodern Condition, xii.
6
Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained, 82.
7
Lyotard, Just Gaming, 88.
8
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 65, 66.
9
Lyotard, Just Gaming, 73, 17, 98.
10
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 17, 10, 17.
11
Lyotard, Just Gaming, 50, 61.
12
Jameson, ‘Foreword’ to The Postmodern Condition, xi.
13
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 60.
14
Lyotard, ‘Lessons in Paganism’, 130.
15
16
Jameson, ‘Foreword’ to The Postmodern Condition, ix.
17
18
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, xxv.
19
Lyotard, Just Gaming, 77, 94.
20
Ibid., 75, 59, 28, 82, 14.
21
See especially Calvin O. Schrag, Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).
22
Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. K. Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1992), 175.
23
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner
Press, 1951), 15.
24
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. W. D. Ross, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed.
Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), 1137b12, 1137b29–30.
25
26
Gadamer, ‘The Problem of Historical Consciousness’, trans. J. Close, in Interpretive
Social Science: A Second Look, eds. Paul Rabinow and William Sullivan (Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1987), 125–6.
27
Jeff Mitscherling, ‘Hegelian Elements in Gadamer’s Notions of Application and
Play’, Man and World vol. 25, no. 1 (January 1992), 65.
28
29
Jean Grondin, The Philosophy of Gadamer, trans. K. Plant (Montreal: McGill-
Queen’s University Press, 2003), 102.
30
31
Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained, 73.
32
Lyotard, ‘Preamble to a Charter’ in Political Writings, 45.
33
Grondin, The Philosophy of Gadamer, 112.
34
35
Gadamer, Truth and Method, 534, 449n85.
36
As Caputo states, ‘If we ask the principle of reason for its own reason, if we ask
what is the reason for the principle of reason, if we ask about the reasonableness
of reason, we get no answer. The silence is very embarrassing. Under pain of
infinite regress, the buck of reason stops with the principle of reason itself. The
principle cannot itself have a reason. It must be its own authority, speak with its
own voice. It cannot call the police; it is the police.’ Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics,
225.
37
Ibid., 344–5.
38
39
Ibid., 27.
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Index
Adorno, Theodorâ•‡ 126, 192 coherenceâ•‡ 21, 64–67, 71, 74–77, 79,
agencyâ•‡ 3, 21, 31 82, 84, 85, 95, 106, 130, 200
agreementâ•‡ 32, 33, 34, 65, 68, 69, 77, common senseâ•‡ 15, 51, 52, 214, 217
79, 85, 89, 95, 101, 102, 106, 119, conceptsâ•‡ 12, 14, 15, 17, 21, 28, 71, 77,
134, 136, 150, 153, 158, 178, 191, 79, 86, 88, 90, 129, 131, 178, 223,
200, 214, 217 224; also see universals
ahistorical thoughtâ•‡ 10, 11, 17, 34, 70, consensus; see agreement
99, 103, 105, 122, 128 conservatismâ•‡ 20, 23, 91, 119, 130, 162,
Alexy, Robertâ•‡ 245n20 174, 182, 185, 186, 190–193, 208
anti-theoryâ•‡99–116 correctivesâ•‡ 19, 20, 22, 237n26
Apel, Karl-Ottoâ•‡ 4, 154–170, 214 correspondenceâ•‡ 64, 65, 71–73, 78
Apollonianâ•‡ 1, 10, 199, 204–209 creativity; see invention
applicationâ•‡ 189, 190, 221–224 critical theoryâ•‡ 3, 4, 117–170, 173
Aristotleâ•‡ 72, 98, 101, 109, 144, 152, criticismâ•‡ 19, 20, 21, 30, 55, 86, 95, 99,
185, 188, 190, 214, 217, 219, 221, 102–104, 106, 107, 112, 113, 115,
222, 224 119–135, 150, 153, 155, 175, 179,
artâ•‡ 17, 24, 25, 77, 79, 94, 102, 126 180, 182, 185, 218, 229
as-structureâ•‡ 13, 24, 79, 90, 119, critique of ideologyâ•‡ 104, 105, 119–135,
129–131, 180, 192 136, 154, 165, 167, 181, 185
cultureâ•‡ 37, 96, 104, 119, 126, 130, 132,
becomingâ•‡ 15, 231n1 134, 141, 160
beingâ•‡ 3, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 19, 22, cultural evolutionâ•‡ 160, 161, 168
27, 40, 72, 79, 97, 231n1
Benhabib, Seylaâ•‡ 136 Darwin, Charlesâ•‡ 64, 81
Bernstein, Richardâ•‡ 69 deconstructionâ•‡ 194, 195, 197–199, 203,
Blaug, Ricardoâ•‡ 242n11 204, 207, 209, 231n1
Bohman, Jamesâ•‡ 139 deliberative democracyâ•‡ 5, 136–153
Buber, Martinâ•‡ 58 Derrida, Jacquesâ•‡ 4, 144, 174, 182, 184,
194–200, 203–207, 249n32
Camus, Albertâ•‡ 27 Descartes, Renéâ•‡ 32, 101, 120, 124,
Caputo, Johnâ•‡ 4, 174, 194–210 125
certaintyâ•‡ 18, 32, 40, 42, 73, 74, 101 Dewey, Johnâ•‡ 4, 64, 67–70, 73, 81–98,
Chladenius, Johann Martinâ•‡ 9 99, 102–106, 139, 156, 200,
claimsâ•‡ 19, 20, 22, 35, 37, 44–46, 51, 206–208, 227, 238n1
53–58, 72, 167, 169, 185 dialecticâ•‡ 1, 2, 6, 10, 20, 21, 37, 68, 72,
Clark, Maudemarieâ•‡ 17 74, 75, 81, 99, 107, 110, 131, 133,
Cohen, Joshuaâ•‡ 243n13 134, 148, 174, 181, 195, 219
260 Index
dialogueâ•‡ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 20, 23, 27–43, 48, foundationalismâ•‡ 10, 18, 100–103, 106,
59, 69, 74, 76, 106, 107, 109–111, 130, 148, 154, 155, 199, 225
132, 143, 145, 146, 150–153, 154, foundationsâ•‡ 99, 111, 155, 212, 217
163, 164, 170, 174, 181, 188, 190, freedomâ•‡ 34, 42, 53, 125, 170, 179, 200,
191, 195, 197, 199, 200, 215, 218, 213, 224, 231n1
221, 228 Freud, Sigmundâ•‡ 19, 146, 168, 169, 181
dichotomiesâ•‡ 2, 6, 10, 87, 99, 100, 113,
186, 218, 219, 228 genealogyâ•‡ 9, 17, 18, 24, 173–193
Dilthey, Wilhelmâ•‡ 9, 184, 211 good faithâ•‡ 167–169
Dionysianâ•‡ 1, 10, 197, 199, 204–209 good willâ•‡ 42, 139, 146, 167, 194, 200,
disclosureâ•‡ 1, 9, 10, 11, 69, 72, 77–79, 218
106, 129, 132, 133, 153, 180, 186 Granier, Jeanâ•‡ 14
discourse ethicsâ•‡ 5, 136, 154–170 Grondin, Jeanâ•‡ 19, 23, 223, 225
dogmatismâ•‡ 14, 30, 33, 34, 35, 86, 128,
133, 167, 186 Habermas, Jürgenâ•‡ 4, 27, 28, 104, 119,
Dreyfus, Hubertâ•‡ 173, 183, 184 120, 133, 134, 136–153, 154, 155,
Droysen, Friedrichâ•‡ 9 159–163, 166, 181, 182, 185, 214,
218
educationâ•‡ 87, 103, 105, 106, 109, 110, habitsâ•‡ 55, 57, 58, 87, 91, 215, 221
113 Han, Béatriceâ•‡ 173, 184
emancipationâ•‡ 147, 179, 180, 198, 199, Heidegger, Martinâ•‡ 9, 11, 13, 14, 27, 30,
213, 214, 216 38, 47, 49, 72, 74, 75, 90, 92–94,
empiricismâ•‡ 24, 32, 64, 78, 81, 82, 92, 97, 99, 103, 104, 107, 114, 128,
97, 101 133, 145, 173, 174, 179, 182, 184,
Enlightenmentâ•‡ 10, 15, 16, 18, 20, 23, 196, 199, 200, 209, 211, 225
27, 28, 64 Hegel, G. W. F.â•‡ 81, 90, 152, 160, 174,
essenceâ•‡ 2, 42, 77, 78, 86, 88, 114, 181, 185, 195, 196, 238n1
131–133, 135, 212 hermeneutical circleâ•‡ 1, 36, 67, 75, 76,
essentialismâ•‡ 31, 100–104, 106, 127, 79, 89, 95, 106, 114, 115, 130
128, 132, 182, 184, 195–197, 199, Hirsch, E. D.â•‡ 184, 211
203–205, 208, 216, 217, 228 historically effected consciousnessâ•‡ 21,
eventâ•‡ 72, 74, 79, 229 45
existential elucidationâ•‡ 28, 29, 37–39, historicityâ•‡ 3, 9, 10, 21, 22, 27, 37, 70,
46 122, 129, 132
existentialismâ•‡ 3, 7–60 horizonâ•‡ 10, 20
experienceâ•‡ 10, 15, 57, 65, 68, 71, 77, Horkheimer, Maxâ•‡ 119–135
79, 81, 82, 85, 88, 91, 92, 103, 106, humilityâ•‡ 19, 20, 30
115, 189, 203, 205 Husserl, Edmundâ•‡ 9, 14
experimentationâ•‡ 10, 18, 64, 67–69, 75,
76, 81–85, 91, 96–98, 104, 106, 227 ideal speech situationâ•‡ 136, 156, 200,
expertiseâ•‡ 37, 42, 93, 134, 167, 169 215, 218
ideologyâ•‡ 25, 119, 121, 132, 136, 142,
facticityâ•‡ 21, 27, 91, 129, 130, 132, 142 149, 153, 181
falsificationâ•‡ 14, 15, 19, 22, 24 imaginationâ•‡ 91, 127, 131, 132, 183, 222
finitudeâ•‡ 10, 11, 37 inquiryâ•‡ 5, 67–70, 72, 73, 76, 81–98,
Foucault, Michelâ•‡ 4, 78, 97, 146, 103, 105, 106, 109, 111
173–193, 208
Index 261
instrumentalityâ•‡ 30, 31, 40, 49, 52, 56, MacIntyre, Alasdairâ•‡ 108, 189
114 Madison, Gary B.â•‡ 115, 207, 233n4,
interestsâ•‡ 10, 15, 16, 22, 66, 74, 124, 241n25, 243n15, 248n31
127, 132–134 Marcel, Gabrielâ•‡ 44–59, 97
inventionâ•‡ 2, 15, 17, 20, 33, 42, 91, 197, Marx, Karlâ•‡ 19, 34, 104, 121, 122, 128,
215, 216, 222, 229 130, 133, 149, 160, 165, 167–169,
177, 178, 181, 182, 185, 187, 213
James, Williamâ•‡ 63–80, 82, 84–86, 92, mass societyâ•‡ 30, 44–59
99, 103, 105, 156, 191, 192, 206, meaningâ•‡ 1, 17, 21, 50, 55, 64, 68,
208 74, 75, 77, 79, 86, 89, 90, 93,
Jaspers, Karlâ•‡ 27–43, 96, 105, 160, 206, 94, 127, 128, 131–134, 173, 174,
227, 232n3 178, 181–184, 190, 195, 196, 198,
judgementâ•‡ 95, 108, 127–133, 139, 203–206, 248n31
150, 153, 190, 211–229; also see meditative thinkingâ•‡ 93, 94
phronesis metanarrativesâ•‡ 211, 213, 215, 216,
justiceâ•‡ 100–102, 125, 212, 214–217, 228
222, 224 metaphorâ•‡ 79, 95, 130, 133, 145, 148,
justificationâ•‡ 64, 86, 89 183
methodâ•‡ 11, 15, 18, 32, 33, 41, 43, 71,
Kant, Immanuelâ•‡ 136, 151, 156, 158, 72, 75, 76, 81, 83, 91, 93, 95, 97,
161–163, 169, 213, 216, 220, 224 100, 109, 151, 190, 199, 219
Kaufmann, Walterâ•‡ 18 Mill, John Stuartâ•‡ 139
Kearney, Richardâ•‡ 55, 56 Mitscherling, Jeffâ•‡ 223
Kierkegaard, Sørenâ•‡ 27, 29, 38, 196, mysteryâ•‡ 52, 53, 59, 77, 97, 194, 197,
197, 199 203, 209, 210
knowledgeâ•‡ 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 18, mysticismâ•‡ 204, 209–210; also see
22, 27, 32, 33, 37, 38, 50, 73, 77, religion
81, 82, 84, 86, 90, 92, 96, 100, 101, mythosâ•‡ 1, 10
111, 122, 178, 179, 219, 228, 229
Kohlberg, Lawrenceâ•‡ 160, 166–169 narrativeâ•‡ 79, 95, 105, 130, 147, 149,
183, 215–217
languageâ•‡ 3, 10, 12, 13, 15, 37, 39, 40, Nehamas, Alexanderâ•‡ 13
47, 57, 73, 74, 90, 107, 129, 130, neighbourâ•‡ 48, 59
132, 134, 141, 145–148, 153, 155, new social movementsâ•‡ 141, 147
195, 244n23 Nicholson, Graemeâ•‡ 21
language gamesâ•‡ 212, 214, 215, 217, Nietzsche, Friedrichâ•‡ 4, 9–26, 27, 29,
218, 227, 229 30, 35, 38, 46, 47, 57, 79, 97, 104,
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelmâ•‡ 9, 25, 26 128, 144, 146, 147, 173, 175, 179,
Levinas, Emmanuelâ•‡ 57, 58, 198 181–184, 186, 188, 197, 199, 206,
linguisticalityâ•‡ 10, 38, 69, 90, 131 208, 227, 247n28
listeningâ•‡ 21, 30, 32, 42, 51, 53, 59, 74, Nilson, Hermanâ•‡ 246n2
146, 208
logicâ•‡ 15, 35, 88, 89, 227 objectivityâ•‡ 10, 15, 18, 19, 29, 45, 54, 96,
logosâ•‡ 1, 10, 36, 207 99, 101, 102, 106, 119, 122, 127,
Lyotard, Jean-Françoisâ•‡ 208, 211–229, 130, 132, 157, 183, 189, 191, 195,
246n2 204
262 Index
opennessâ•‡ 19, 45, 46, 55, 58, 59, 97, Rabinow, Paulâ•‡ 173, 183, 184
104, 110, 150, 152, 200, 203, 209, radical hermeneuticsâ•‡ 194–210
210 radical thoughtâ•‡ 20, 122, 134, 155, 173,
Ortega y Gasset, Joséâ•‡ 47 174, 178, 186, 187, 190, 191, 194,
otherâ•‡ 23, 54–56, 58, 59, 151; also see 199, 200, 225
Thou Ranke, Leopold vonâ•‡ 9
rationalismâ•‡ 32, 37, 97, 124, 139, 141,
particularsâ•‡ 1, 75, 130, 189, 190, 144, 150, 152, 153, 164, 165, 199,
219–223 228
perceptionâ•‡ 13, 14, 24, 25, 26, 90, 129, reasonâ•‡ 5, 12, 16, 18, 27–43, 77, 86,
131 87, 108, 115, 125, 126, 136, 139,
Peirce, Charles Sandersâ•‡ 64, 68, 82, 85, 147–153, 163–165, 169, 170, 199,
89, 103, 155–157 203, 205–207, 226, 228, 231n1,
Perelman, Chaimâ•‡ 148 233n18, 250n36
perspectivismâ•‡ 3, 9–26, 36, 106, 129, reciprocityâ•‡ 45, 46
130, 148, 177, 179 reflectionâ•‡ 86–89, 91
phenomenologyâ•‡ 10, 11, 18, 28, 53, 64, regulative ideasâ•‡ 161, 169, 213, 216, 224
65, 72, 75, 81, 99, 105, 112, 114, relativismâ•‡ 22, 23, 98, 100, 102, 124,
128, 148, 163, 190, 191, 202, 209, 130, 154–156, 162, 163, 225–228
237n29 religionâ•‡ 16, 17, 25, 58, 59, 194, 200,
phronesisâ•‡ 152, 174, 175, 181, 186, 188, 203, 209; also see mysticism.
189, 191, 195, 196, 199, 206, rhetoricâ•‡ 10, 21, 37, 39, 41, 86, 104,
212, 217, 219–223, 228; also see 105, 119, 130, 131, 139, 141,
judgement 143–153, 163–165, 186, 190–192,
Platoâ•‡ 28, 101, 141, 144, 145, 151, 152, 217, 221, 222, 224
227 Ricoeur, Paulâ•‡ 4, 105, 131, 149, 173,
pluralityâ•‡ 24–26, 218 174, 180–182, 184, 204, 205, 208,
postmodernismâ•‡ 3, 4, 100, 146, 171–229 219
practiceâ•‡ 1, 21, 63, 68, 70, 73, 75, 77, Rorty, Richardâ•‡ 99–116, 156, 173, 181,
85, 87, 99–116, 155 200, 205, 207, 208, 225, 226, 228,
practice-immanent theoryâ•‡ 112–116 238n2
Prado, Carlos G.â•‡ 176 rulesâ•‡ 34, 190, 215, 219–221
pragmatismâ•‡ 3, 5, 61–116, 235n4
praxisâ•‡ 65, 71, 109, 121 Samay, Sebastianâ•‡ 233n36
prejudicesâ•‡ 21, 23, 71, 74, 75, 86, 129, Schleiermacher, Friedrichâ•‡ 9, 184, 211
130, 132, 133, 165 Schrag, Calvinâ•‡ 219, 243n15
principlesâ•‡ 113, 114, 156, 157, 190, 199, scienceâ•‡ 11, 15–18, 22, 24, 27, 29–40,
215, 219, 224, 225, 228, 231n1 57, 66, 68, 76, 77, 81–83, 85, 91,
proceduresâ•‡ 113, 225 96, 98, 122, 128, 130, 157, 175,
processâ•‡ 33, 41, 43, 65, 68, 69, 79, 85, 178, 216
109, 111 sense of lifeâ•‡ 38, 197, 200, 201, 208,
public deliberationâ•‡ 136–142, 144, 146, 209
149, 218, 242n7 subjectivityâ•‡ 11, 15, 16, 21, 22, 23, 25,
29, 30, 37, 38, 109, 110, 114, 178,
questioningâ•‡ 1, 10, 13, 18, 20, 21, 31, 179, 205, 228
36, 37, 52, 69, 74, 79, 81, 87, 95, suspicionâ•‡ 2, 17, 18, 20, 24, 121,
97, 145, 151–153 132–134, 173–193, 205, 209
Index 263
technologyâ•‡ 28, 29, 30, 31, 39–51, 53, 97, 100–103, 181, 182, 196, 198,
55–58 202–205, 215, 231n1, 238n43
temperamentâ•‡ 4, 191–193, 194, 204,
208 uncertaintyâ•‡ 10, 69, 74
theoryâ•‡ 1, 10, 66, 73, 87, 99–116, universalsâ•‡ 1, 75, 130, 189, 190, 213,
120–122, 127, 134, 135, 143, 157, 215, 219–223; also see concepts
162, 175, 207, 213
theory/practice relationâ•‡ 5, 64, 147 valuesâ•‡ 10, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 22, 24, 26,
thinkingâ•‡ 1, 81, 88, 93, 94, 96, 127, 129, 130, 134
129 Vattimo, Gianniâ•‡ 9
Thouâ•‡ 20, 23, 44–59; also see other vigilanceâ•‡ 197, 199, 204, 206–209
totalityâ•‡ 11, 14, 25, 39, 127, 128, 178, violenceâ•‡ 36, 40, 42, 45, 104, 149, 150,
212, 214 163, 164, 170, 180, 198, 199
traditionâ•‡ 19, 23, 37, 39, 45, 46, 51, 69,
74, 91, 105, 107, 128–130, 132, Weber, Maxâ•‡ 125
134, 141, 142, 181, 182, 191–193, will to powerâ•‡ 13, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21,
195, 196, 208, 222 22, 23, 131, 134, 139, 141, 142,
transcendental thoughtâ•‡ 15, 154–170 146, 147, 150, 175, 181
transcendenceâ•‡ 28, 29, 31, 33, 36, 40, Wittgenstein, Ludwigâ•‡ 100, 103, 104,
41, 50, 52, 59 210, 212
transformationâ•‡ 16, 20, 51, 94 Wolf, Friedrich Augustâ•‡ 184
truthâ•‡ 5, 10, 11, 15, 16, 18, 22, 24, 28,
30, 32–37, 40, 63–80, 81, 84–86, York, Countâ•‡ 9

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Philosophical Hermeneutics Reinterpreted

Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy

Dialogues with Existentialism,

© Paul Fairfield, 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-2962-8

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

Introduction: Hermeneutical Engagements 1

Part II. Pragmatism61

Part III. Critical Theory117

Part IV. Postmodernism171

been constituted; activity and passivity; invention and discovery; projection

affair of mechanics or an epistemological problem. Theorists who insist

That interpretation occurs from a finite perspective – one that reveals

Nietzsche would share with the hermeneutics of Heidegger and Gadamer

‘unprejudiced scholarship’ and of ‘disregarding ourselves’ in research, an

totality. The very concept of totality or being in itself is unintelligible, since

whether it be things, being, truth or knowledge. The ‘in itself’ would be

it presents itself. The relationship is the same in the perception of things.

representing being in itself, but that we have compressed the manifold

nothing to do with metaphysical truths.’20 Passages of this kind are found

If moral evaluations typically masquerade as impartial and transcendent

is not a mere action, a purposeful activity, a setting up of signs through

lead to Gadamer’s ‘historically effected consciousness’, where this signifies

subjectivity of the interpreter? The short answer is the interlocutor to

a single lens gives us an interpretation that is not false but truncated. A

objective or utterly impersonal) sense. It is not an aggressive marginali-

Reason as Boundless Communication

The enduring relevance of existential thought to hermeneutics is not

phenomenological hypotheses that ‘we interpret reality and ourselves, and

such, only Existenz in communication.’5 Reason cannot be comprehended

truth in unequivocal theses, but philosophical truth can only be commu-

a purely personal faith is dubbed “scientific.” It never calls itself a faith

perspectivism as well: all knowledge is perspectival, and this is nonperspec-

understands not the particular individual but what he says. What is to be

rationality’ of hermeneutics? If there is a tension here, it is owing more

contemporary hermeneutics have largely moved on from the discourse of

rationality that is hermeneutical dialogue or boundless communication

explain themselves and to inquire in common into some disputed matter,

deliverance from the processual and to postulate what is fixed, often in

The Thou and the Mass

That hermeneutics contains implications for practical philosophy was

disconcerting relevance. Before turning to Marcel’s analysis, let us recall

or anything are beholden to a single and one-dimensional vocabulary, then

present spiritual degradation? I should be tempted to ask whether man,

To partake of a mystery is to ‘find myself committed, and, I would add,

generalized abstraction. We perceive concrete persons, since this is indeed

‘someone saying something to someone about something’, the conditions that

because he is a guest, because he has entrusted himself to a man and his

Truth After Correspondence

Until relatively recent times, few continental philosophers treated

For James, the concept of truth must be understood in connection

between various regions of experience, and produces coherence. Because

an experimental testing of ideas in a fashion that proposes and modifies

for true, the idea must be submitted to the conversation of a community.

(James’ ‘blooming, buzzing confusion’ or ‘the flux of our sensations’)

of Science: ‘The hermeneutics that I characterize as philosophic is not intro-

limits of human knowing, as it bears on texts and text-analogues as well as

human task’ which attains ‘completion’ not in a condition of epistemic

individual passages. This is a preliminary expectation only, and like other

failure to achieve this harmony means that understanding has failed.’41

Introduction: Hermeneutical Engagements 1

Part II. Pragmatism61

Part III. Critical Theory117

Part IV. Postmodernism171