Hermeneutics and Phenomenology by Saulius Geniusas Paul Fairfield

Author:Saulius Geniusas,Paul Fairfield
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Part Three

Hermeneutics in Dialogue with Phenomenology

9

The Metaphysical Dimension of Hermeneutics

Jean Grondin

Hermeneutics and metaphysics are two disciplines one is not used to seeing together. Indeed, one often sees in hermeneutics a ‘post-metaphysical’ form of thinking. This is claimed not only because metaphysics would belong to a bygone age of philosophy but also because hermeneutics would contain or imply a repudiation of metaphysics (as appears evident in the work of Heidegger, for instance). Hermeneutics, it seems, highlights our interpretive relation to the world: to say that our world-experience is ‘hermeneutical’ means that it is governed by worldviews, ‘frameworks’, and interpretations that would impose themselves upon reality and make it impossible to speak of the things as they are in themselves. If, for hermeneutics, ‘everything is a matter of interpretation’, which is a way of renewing the universality claim of classical philosophy under hermeneutical auspices, there would be no access to Being, much less an ultimate account of Being, which would signify the end of metaphysics, understood as a reflection on Being and its ultimate principles.

This is a non- or even anti-metaphysical reading of hermeneutics that was promoted by postmodern authors and readers of Hans-Georg Gadamer such as Gianni Vattimo and Richard Rorty. It is striking to note, however, that the most important representatives of hermeneutical thought, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur, never claimed that their thinking wanted to overcome metaphysics. On the contrary, they at times discretely underlined the metaphysical bent of their thinking. This is particularly evident in the case of Gadamer, on whom I will concentrate here.

Two revealing testimonies of Gadamer

At the end of Truth and Method, Gadamer unfolds his grand thesis on our relationship to Being that would happen through language and which is summed up in his famous, albeit ambiguous, dictum, ‘Being that can be understood is language’. It is in this context that he writes that hermeneutics ‘leads us back into the problem dimension of classical metaphysics’ (führt uns in die Problemdimension der klassischen Dimension der Hermeneutik zurück).1 This passage is seldom discussed or thought to its end in Gadamer scholarship. It does suggest that in the eyes of Gadamer hermeneutics does not lead us beyond metaphysics, but on the contrary back into it. I would like to suggest here how this is the case by developing some of these overseen and underplayed metaphysical elements of his thought.2

The other passage comes from a less well-known text titled ‘Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Metaphysics’ from 1983. Gadamer writes in the last sentence, which always enjoys a particular hermeneutical significance, of this text: ‘Phenomenology, hermeneutics and metaphysics are not three different philosophical points of views, but philosophy itself.’3 This affirmation is worth pondering for it says essential things and goes against the grain of some of the ‘conventional wisdom’, which is not always wise, regarding phenomenology and hermeneutics. It certainly does not present metaphysics as something that one should overcome at all cost. On the contrary, it says that it corresponds to the act of philosophizing itself. (Gadamer uses the verbal expression

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