Logic as a Hermeneutic Engagement
March 30, 2010
“Philosophizing does not begin at some zero point but must think and speak with the language we already possess” [1]
In an Introduction to Phenomenology[2], Dermot Moran presents Hans-Georg Gadamer’s struggle with the fundamentally historical character of understanding throughout his life’s work. His elucidations of “historicity” and Martin Heidegger’s concept of Dasein (roughly, “Being-in-the-world”) were originally intended to carry on the legacy of Heidegger’s own responses to Neo-Kantianism and idealistic forms of Husserlian phenomenology captivating the German intellectual and academic spheres in the late 19th and early 20th century. The history of phenomenology, officially initiated by Edmund Husserl in the 19th century, has taken many turns. Perhaps the most significant of those turns has been Heidegger and Gadamer’s application of hermeneutics to the human sciences, and philosophy at large. I now wish to investigate a particular branch of that hermeneutic turn.
The above quote presents a response to a-historical pretenses in many philosophical disciplines. I will characterize this excerpt as a presentation of understanding as an historical event in which the learner, as a participant within one’s culture and tradition, must realize an already existent conversation with their past and possible future. More specifically, I want to reflect on the way Gadamer identifies this event as a “hermeneutic phenomenon”, and how its “structure” is dissected into the “logic of question and answer”[3].
The challenging premise many Neo-Kantians and Husserlians presented to academia during Gadamer’s younger years was the argument for knowledge as an a-historical possibility. Carrying on Husserl’s legacy, many of these thinkers sought to carry on the project of establishing philosophy as a “rigorous science”, a science with, ostensibly, the same “timeless” quality of the hard sciences. One of the deadliest presuppositions motivating this project was an ignorance of logic’s fundamentally dialogical conditions.
For Gadamer, dialogue derives its significance from reasoning’s function as interpretive, and interpretation is characterized by “why” questions. When one considers reason as a condition for truthful statements, one introduces statements as an answer. E.g., the statement “all dogs bark”, as a logical conclusion, involves a justification, but, as a justification, it is an explanation of why something is the case. The question of “why” something is the case (illuminating the historical “facticity” of our language) gives insight into how understanding ever embarks on logical enterprises in the first place. Humans are fundamentally seeking answers when they seek understanding. Yet, an answer cannot be understood as an answer without a question that conditioned it. Hence, understanding the question is always necessary for understanding the statement, which is, fundamentally, an answer. This is the importance of understanding an intellectual problem as a question and, since it is a question that we take as addressed to us (in attempting to answer it), we recognize the question as our question. It is also important to note that to understand one’s questions is to understand the historic and cultural circumstances that contextualize and make them meaningful.
Language shares the same structure of “question and answer” with understanding. Understanding is historically conditioned by the meaning of questions, realized in the medium of language that is inherited by the human subject. This is what he means when he argues that we are situated within a “horizon”. We are, essentially, hurled onto this horizon. I.e., we are hurled into a net of problematics addressed to us as questions. As linguistic beings, it is in our nature to participate in the game of life’s questions and possible answers and, consequently, one’s culture, to understand those questions and answers. Our attempt to understand is to enter into the conversation that is fundamental to the relational significance of our humanity.
The Relationship Between “Seeing” and Questioning
For Gadamer, Understanding (Verstehen) had to be realized as a meaningful human experience which was schematized by the visual model of “seeing”. In this context, Gadamer’s presentation of “seeing” cannot be overstated. Where Husserl and many other phenomenologists (maybe even later Heidegger) seemed to run with the transcendental element of seeing, Gadamer emphasized the historical conditions for seeing to occur. Gadamer rightly argued that once seeing is brought into the investigation of understanding, as a model and structure for the identity of understanding, one must account for the human subject, historically situated, as a necessary precondition for this event. One does not realize “seeing” in a meaningful way unless one can account for this humanistic element (i.e. the human as subject to historical and social circumstance) that makes seeing particularly revelatory.
Seeing never occurs outside of a “horizon” and historical situation, which set the scene for the viewer. In this way, the viewer participates in the process of understanding by being a necessary addressee of one’s culture and inherited language. By actively understanding, one is engaging the questions of human existence, and to “understand the questionableness of something is already to be questioning”[4]. A meaningful answer is not “logically posited” ex nihilo. To understand an answer is to understand the “questionableness” of the answer. One might also argue that the answer one gives to a question is still subject to further interpretive questions that it introduces. One might ask, “If all dogs bark, then what is a bark?” Hence, to understand the “questionableness” of an answer is to understand the ways it has been, is, and can be interpreted. The moment one might realize that “all dogs bark” is true one does not simply realize a proposition or a dogma with its own independent self-positing existence. One realizes this as true because it is a response, more particularly, their response to a question addressed to them. This is what it means to understand the questionability of something.
If understanding is seeing, and understanding is to realize a question, then to question is to see. To understand is not to realize an abstraction. Understanding is to see one’s horizon, i.e. one’s questions, in which the true object is presented to them. Seeing this horizon is to realize the interpersonal mind (recall the conversational element of question and answer) in a continuous dialectic.
[1] Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Philosophical Apprenticeships. Trans. Robert R. Sullivan. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990.
[2] Moran, Dermot. Introduction to Phenomenology. New York, NY: Routledge, 2000.
[3] Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Trans. revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York, NY: Continuum Publishing Group, 2004.
[4] Gadamer, Truth and Method, 368.
