After The Hermeneutic Turn PDF

After the Hermeneutic Turn
JAMES RISSER
Seattle University
In his 1975 essay “Phenomenology and Hermeneutics,”1 Paul Ricoeur sets out
to inquire “into the destiny of phenomenology today.” What lies in the back-
ground of this inquiry is the changing direction of Ricoeur’s own work, which
initially situated itself within eidetic phenomenology, but since 1960 had turned
to hermeneutics and speci cally to what Ricoeur called the con ict of inter-
pretations. In the 1975 essay, Ricoeur presents the question of the destiny of
phenomenology through the concern that Husserl’s project of phenomenology
has been transformed, if not displaced, by hermeneutics, which he identi es
with the work of Heidegger and, above all, Gadamer. The inquiry is accord-
ingly an inquiry into the possibility of doing philosophy with them and after
them without forgetting Husserl. Typical of Ricoeur’s philosophical style, he
comes to the conclusion that this destiny is one that would mediate between
phenomenology and hermeneutics. Hermeneutics, he insists, does not ruin phe-
nomenology as such, but only its idealistic interpretation given by Husserl him-
self. The belonging together of phenomenology and hermeneutics is then
established through the exposition of two dialectical claims: phenomenology
remains the unsurpassable presupposition of hermeneutics, 2 yet phenomen-
ology cannot constitute itself without a hermeneutic presupposition, by which
he means that ultimately it is necessary for phenomenology to conceive of its
method as an Auslegung, as an interpretative explication.
Ricoeur establishes the latter claim through an analysis of Husserl’s Cartesian
Meditations in which “phenomenology seeks to give an account not simply of the
ideal meaning of well-formed expressions, but of the meaning of experience as
71
72 JAMES RISSER
a whole” (PH, 124). Ricoeur contends that in the account of phenomenology

given in the Cartesian Meditations the role of Auslegung is no longer limited, as one
nds it in the Logical Investigations, to bringing “signi cation con rming acts to
intuition,” but “will enter into the problems of constitution in their totality”
(PH, 124). At the center of the problem of constitution is the apparent paradox
that, on the one hand, “the reduction of all meaning to the intentional life of
the concrete ego implies that the other is constituted in me and from me,” yet
on the other hand, “phenomenology must account for the originality of the
other’s experience, precisely insofar as it is the experience of someone other
than me” (PH, 125). For Ricoeur, this paradox is heightened when the other
“from me” is no longer a thing but another self, a subject of experience in the
same way I am. In this case of intersubjectivity, in which a common cultural
world arises, a new existential meaning is constituted that “goes beyond the
being of my monadic ego” (PH, 125). It is this paradox, if not outright con ict,
between a project describing transcendence and a project of constituting in
immanence, that is to be resolved through Auslegung.
Ricoeur shows how the resolution can occur by rst noting that in the fourth
and fth Cartesian Meditations Husserl points to the need for interpretative
explication in the in nite work involved in “unfolding the layers of meaning . . .,
which together form the world as a constituted meaning” (PH, 126). This con-
stituted meaning is never created, but only uncovered through the clari cation
of horizons. In linking interpretative explication to the clari cation of horizons,
Husserl attempts to realize a progressive constituting towards what he calls a
“universal genesis.” Ricoeur then claims that the paradox can be resolved pre-
cisely because interpretive explication encompasses both sides of the con ict:
the respect for alterity of others and the experience of transcendence in pri-
mordial experience. Interpretative explication encompasses both insofar as it is
already at work in the sphere of belonging, in the prior sphere of meaning that
subtends the relation of the constituting autonomous subject and the (distant)
other object. This sphere is not a given from which one progresses to another
given, which would be the other. It is, in the language of the fth Cartesian
Mediation, a “founding stratum.”3 As Ricoeur understands it, this founding
stratum remains the limit of a “questioning back.” Yet in such questioning back
“re ection glimpses, in the thickness of experience and through the successive
layers of constitution, what Husserl calls a ‘primal instituting’ [Urstiftung] . . . to
which these layers refer” (PH, 127). This primal instituting is an antecedent that
is never given in itself, and according to Ricoeur, “in spite of its intuitive ker-
nel, this experience remains an interpretation” (PH, 127–128). Quoting Husserl,
Ricoeur concludes:
My own too is discovered by explication and gets its original meaning by
virtue thereof (Hua I 132; CM 102). What is one’s own is revealed only as
‘explicated experience’ (Hua I 132; CM 102). Even better, it could be said
AFTER THE HERMENEUTIC TURN 73
that what is one’s own and what is foreign are polarly constituted in the same
interpretation. (PH, 128)
* * *
Today an intervening generation of thought now separates us from Ricoeur’s

initial question. If we ask the question of the destiny of phenomenology again
today, we would naturally want to begin, not with Ricoeur’s initial question—
for here we want to grant Ricoeur’s contribution to the inquiry— but with the
reformulated question of the destiny of phenomenology after the hermeneutic
turn. We want, in other words, to begin again, starting with the contention that
we can no longer follow the project of intuitionist philosophy but must begin
philosophizing from out of a certain experience of mourning4 and proceed to
inquire into the further transformation, if not displacement, of phenomenology
after the hermeneutic turn. By setting the question within the framework of
Ricoeur’s analysis, the direction of the reformulated question is set out in
advance. On the one hand, that direction is necessarily broad in scope, since
in this context Ricoeur does not distinguish between the hermeneutics of
Heidegger and Gadamer, nor does he distinguish his own position from that of
Heidegger and Gadamer, which raises the concern that the answer to the ques-
tion is programmatic at best. On the other hand, that direction is also limited
to the extent that it does not lead us into a more global inquiry of placing
hermeneutic phenomenology within contemporary Continental philosophy in
general, where one might consider, for example, how the destiny of hermeneu-
tics is to be thought in its merging with deconstruction. 5
What then constitutes the direction of our question? At the point where
Ricoeur indicates the incorporation of hermeneutics into the project of phe-
nomenology, three distinct features of hermeneutic (phenomenology) emerge: 1)
phenomenological description gives way to interpretation as Auslegung; 2) inter-
pretation (of the things themselves) is interpretation fastened to antecedent
experience, what one might call anterior life; 3) the element that necessitates
the transformation of phenomenological description into interpretation is the
element of alterity. Accordingly, the destiny of phenomenology after the her-
meneutic turn is to be seen in the appropriation and transformation of these fea-
tures by hermeneutics.
Interpreting interpretation
Ricoeur rightly raises the issue of interpretation in the context of Husserl’s pro-
ject as an issue of interpretative explication (Auslegung). That is to say, in the
incorporation of hermeneutics into the project of phenomenology, interpreta-
tion is interpreted along methodological lines as explication, as unfolding the
74 JAMES RISSER
sense potential of an experience. Explication is exegesis, a seeking out that

occurs by laying out. Ricoeur does not hide the fact that this determination of
interpretation bears directly on his own work that at this time focuses on the
hermeneutics of symbols and texts. The text has a privileged status for Ricoeur
not only because it constitutes a unit of meaning that cannot be reduced to the
predicative operation but also because it plays out the dialectic between expla-
nation and understanding, where explanation functions as interpretative expli-
cation.6 But here we cannot fail to note the signi cance of the fact that at the
time when Ricoeur places interpretation within a hermeneutics of textualiza-
tion, Heidegger’s project had surpassed itself in its thematic and methodologi-
cal development. If we look to this development, what we encounter within
the hermeneutic turn is yet another turn that actually transforms the character
of interpretation.
Certainly, when Heidegger rst took up phenomenology in the 1920s and
turned it in the direction of hermeneutics under the framework of a hermeneu-
tics of facticity, interpretation displayed the character of explication. But in set-
ting interpretive explication within this distinctive framework the seed for the
transformation of interpretation has already been planted. Heidegger tells us in
his 1923 lecture course that, in the path taken by a hermeneutics of facticity,
interpretation
does not merely depict matters in terms of the aspect under which they rst
appear. All interpreting is an interpreting with respect to something, on the
basis of it, and with a view to it. The forehaving which is to be interpretively
explicated [ausgelegt], must be put into the context of the object and seen
there.7
In linking interpretation directly to forehaving, Heidegger has already broken
with the structure of interpretative explication in Husserlian phenomenology:
from the perspective of a hermeneutics of facticity, interpretative explication is
no longer put in service to a theoretical conceptuality that would continue to
separate the object and its knowledge.8 Rather, interpretative explication pro-
ceeds from within the already encountered relating of being. But even here in
the claim that interpretation takes place from within a more originary sense of
belonging (i.e., more originary than the theoretical relation of subject and
world), the radicality of Heidegger’s position is not yet fully captured. The
hermeneutics of facticity is for Heidegger at once a self-interpretation of factic-
ity in the sense that it is facticity that “lays itself into its own interpretative expli-
cation.”9 Here facticity or factical life is what Heidegger will later thematize as
Dasein; factical life, in other words, is simply existence, which is “in each case
our own Dasein in its being-there for a while at the particular time.”10 As a
self-interpretation, then, the task of interpretation is to bring existence before
itself, to accomplish a wakefulness of Dasein for itself. But, as rst indicated,
bringing existence before itself is carried out by entering into the forehaving of
interpretation. The precise character of interpretation then follows from the dis-
tinctive framework of the hermeneutics of facticity: interpretive explication
takes place in relation to the antecedent forehaving, with the way in which life
has been taken hold of in advance.
On the basis of this requirement, Heidegger claims that interpretive explica-
tion is developed through formal indication.11 A formal indication is a non-
objectifying form of conceptualization in the sense that it merely xes the
preliminary sense of the phenomenon, leaving the genuine sense of the phe-
nomenon open. As such, a formal indication interprets by announcing without
specifying meaning fully in advance. The formal character of the indication
pertains to the empty intention that must be gone through, i.e., that must be
ful lled by the how of its being encountered. 12 The formal character of formal
indication is, in Heidegger’s words, “that which gives the beginning character
to the task of bringing to fruition [Zeitigung] the original ful llment of what is
indicated.” 13 A formal indication is thus a concept that is initially emptied of its
reference to “what being,” while keeping in sight its attitudinal motivation in
life (the “how being”) such that it indicates the life-situations out of which it
arises and that towards which the philosopher comes to be directed. What is at
stake in formal indication then is the very accomplishment or actualization of
meaning that would bind the interpretation in its living reality.14 Binding the
interpretation in its living reality is, in the language of Being and Time, where
understanding becomes itself. In broader language, understanding as the
accomplishment of meaning occurs in the movement in which life turns back
upon itself — in eVect, recollecting itself — and is thereby the way in which life
comes into its “own.”
When Heidegger’s thinking undergoes the so called “Kehre” in the 1930s,
this is often interpreted as a turning within the project of hermeneutic phe-
nomenology that ostensively abandons the priority of Dasein with respect
to the question of the meaning of Being and, along with this, also aban-
dons hermeneutics. In “A Dialogue on Language,” a late text from 1953–54 in
which he discusses his abandonment of hermeneutics, Heidegger notes in
response to a question from his Japanese interlocutor that his use of the word
“hermeneutic” was intended not as an attempt to inaugurate a new direction
in phenomenology, but as an attempt to think the nature of phenomenology in
a more originary manner.”15 Heidegger then recounts his familiarity with the
term “hermeneutics” from his theological studies and his encounter with
Dilthey’s theory of the history of ideas, and adds that the term is used in Being
and Time in a broader sense as the “attempt to determine the nature of inter-
pretation [Auslegung] rst of all from out of the hermeneutical [Hermeneuti-
schen].”16 This apparently elliptical de nition provokes his interlocutor to ask
again what hermeneutics actually means then for Heidegger. Heidegger’s
response at this juncture is decisive. “Hermeneutic” is related to the noun
76 JAMES RISSER
¥rmhneæw, which in turn refers to ƒErm°w, the divine messenger who brings the
message of destiny. In this context, hermeneutics “means not rst the interpre-
tation [Auslegung], but even before that, the bringing of the message and tid-
ings.”17 Heidegger insists that this original sense of the word is what opened
the way to Being and Time, for it indicates the manner of bringing out the Being
of being.
Heidegger’s own words notwithstanding, this more original meaning of inter-
pretation is not easily detectable in his early writings.18 More important for us,
though, is the fact that when Heidegger takes note of this more original mean-
ing, which he wants to bring into play in moving through phenomenology to
the thinking of Being,19 he does not actually abandon hermeneutics. Certainly
he abandons the use of the word, but at the same time, he lets the hermeneu-
tical as such continue to govern the character of his thinking. If for the later
Heidegger bringing out the Being of being is now a matter of bearing witness
(bekunden) to the call of Being, then hermeneutics now concerns the manner
of corresponding (entsprechen) to the call of Being. With this shift in hermeneu-
tics from interpretative explication to corresponding —a corresponding that
Heidegger assigns to the function of language— Heidegger in eVect abandons
not simply the projective dimension in interpretation, i.e., the framework of
understanding in which Dasein understands itself in its Being as the way of car-
rying out being-in-the-world itself. Equally so, he also abandons the circular
character of interpretation that takes place as a movement from implicit (the
familiar way in which I am in the hold of the world) to explicit (as ultimately
accomplishing the time of Being) as a movement that remains tied to the sphere
of transcendental re ection. This is not to suggest that Heidegger no longer sees
the inherent circularity of nonderivation that resides in the fundamental relat-
ing of Being. When asked in the “Dialogue” to explain the paradox of the cir-
cularity of meaning when the work of language occurs from out of language’s
reality in a way that one is lead to its reality, Heidegger says that the accep-
tance of this circle does not give us “the originary experience of the hermeneu-
tic relation [hermenutischen Bezug].”20 For Heidegger, the issue of hermeneutics
remains integral to his project, but remains so as the hermeneutic relation.
What then constitutes the precise character of the hermeneutic relation? In
the “Dialogue” Heidegger announces it without elaboration as a “responding
dialogue [Entsprechen] that would remain originally appropriated to Saying
[Sage].”21 To develop Heidegger’s notion of Saying here would take us beyond
our intended purpose.22 SuYce it to say that with this word Heidegger wants
to name the “showing” of language itself, where the “showing” concerns not
the simple making manifest of phenomenon by language, but the very letting
appear of Being in its relationality.23 Saying, the very setting beings free from
an event rather than a ground, grants being and releases it into the open. In
Heidegger’s words, “Saying pervades and structures the openness of that clear-
ing which every appearance must seek out and every disappearance must leave
behind, and in which every present or absent being must show, say, announce
itself.”24 Saying thus designates for Heidegger not the spoken word but the
antecedent as such, whereby language “speaks” before explicit meaning. A dia-
logue appropriated to Saying would then be one that responds to the nonrep-
resentable event of Being in the call of language.
But if we let the hermeneutic turn follow the direction of Heidegger’s think-
ing through his own turn, are we not in danger of interpreting interpretation
too narrowly? How is it possible, in other words, to include in this interpreta-
tion of interpretation Gadamer’s project of philosophical hermeneutics, a pro-
ject that by its own account takes over Heidegger’s ontological determination
of understanding rooted in the analytic of Dasein?25 Here we should recall that
when Gadamer accounts for his project, he also says that it is precisely the work
of the later Heidegger that he wants to follow. Gadamer notes, in particular in
his autobiographical re ections, that the focus on the concept of historically
eVected consciousness gave the appearance that he remained completely cap-
tive to the standpoint of the early Heidegger that took Dasein as its starting-
point. But in fact his intention was to adhere to the line of questioning of the
later Heidegger and to make it available in a new way. This new way entailed
an analysis of language and art that, in opposition to Heidegger, did not con-
textualize these thematics in terms of the question of Being.26 This account is
similar to the one he gave in a 1993 interview in which the question of lan-
guage is confronted more directly:
What I tried to do, following Heidegger, was not to see the linguisticality of
human beings in terms of the subjectivity of consciousness and the capacity
for language in that consciousness, as German Idealism and Humboldt had
done. Rather, I moved conversation to the very center of hermeneutics. Per-
haps a phrase from Hölderlin will make clear to you what a turn this move
involved. Because Heidegger could no longer accept the dialectical reconcili-
ation with Christianity that had marked the whole post-Hegelian epoch, he
sought the Word through Hölderlin, whose words “Since we are a conver-
sation and can hear one another,” inspired him. Now Heidegger had under-
stood this as the conversation of human beings with the gods. Perhaps
correctly so. But the hermeneutic turn, which is grounded in the linguisti-
cality of the human being, at least also includes us in the “one another,” and
at the same time it contains the idea that we as human beings have to learn.
We do not need just to hear one another but to listen to one another. That
is “understanding.”27
For Gadamer the task of hermeneutics necessarily enters the play of language,
of awakening the intuitive power that already resides in language.28 And as with
Heidegger, this awakening in which there is the coming-into-language of the
thing itself (the phenomenological Sache) occurs when one listens to the saying
78 JAMES RISSER
power of language.29 Gadamer conceives this hermeneutic structure of lis-

tening and response in its most direct form as a dialectic of question and
answer. The meaning of a text, for example, which is always a text of tradition
(i.e., a text that has been “handed over”), emerges in seeing the question that
the text poses; but this question only arises in response to the initial ques-
tion of the reader, which in turn is taken up into the text. In responding, the
reader does not “lay out,” but “lays open” — the very heart of questioning — such
that interpreting has the character of ex-posing (the risk and venture beyond
shelter). But if interpretation is structured primarily along the lines of listening
and response in a dialectic of question and answer, then we should not make
too much of Gadamer’s own emphasis on interpretive explication within the
hermeneutic circle that he appeals to in his account of understanding in the
historical human sciences. 30 Rather, we must continue to emphasize the way
in which Gadamer appropriates the later Heidegger’s language of belonging
and listening as the appropriate language for the activity of interpretation. If
for Heidegger the hermeneutic relation names the interpretive activity of lis-
tening and response con gured by the call of Being, for Gadamer that same
interpretive activity of listening and response is now con gured by the voice
of the other that is there in the word. Gadamer, in deference to Heidegger,
though, wants to carry the hermeneutic project forward as an explicit project
of communication where interpretation is always the interpretation not only of
the other, but also for the other. 31
The Entanglement of Interpretation
Let us recall our point of departure in Husserlian phenomenology. The self-

giveness in intuitive self-evidence produced in intentional acts gives way to
interpretation in the attempt to account for the other of myself. In the further
interpretation of interpretation we have seen that, apropos to both Heidegger
and Gadamer, interpretation pertains to the fundamental letting the message
have its say, the message that cannot be fully extricated from its antecedent
“background.” By virtue of this entanglement of interpretation with an ante-
cedent, what comes to interpretation is not the object for the subject — and
accordingly interpretation does not takes place along a simple horizontal axis
of indirection (Being and its co-speaker, the text and its reader)— but the
antecedent as such that is “running along” the interpretation (the time of Being,
tradition that is language). What comes to interpretation, one might say, is the
Sache in its “precursoryness” in the double sense of precursor as that which pre-
cedes and that which announces a coming.
Now, it is precisely from this entanglement that interpretation necessarily has
the structure of an event. But what precisely does it mean to speak of inter-
pretation as an event? In the most obvious sense, the event of interpretation
means that hearing the message is not a matter of human construction, but is
something the befalls human speaking. Such obviousness, though, hides the fact
that it is the interpretation itself that is the event. This means for Heidegger that
the response structure of interpreting enters into Being’s own withdrawing,
which Heidegger relates for the most part to the essential modality of l®yeia
as bound to concealment. In the well-known passage from “The Origin of the
Work of Art,” Heidegger tells us that
the nature of truth, that is, of unconcealedness, is dominated throughout by

a denial. Yet this denial is not a defect or a fault, as though truth were an
unalloyed unconcealedness that has rid itself of everything concealed. If truth
could accomplish this, it would no longer be itself. This denial, in the form
of a double concealment [of refusal and dissembling], belongs to the nature
of truth as unconcealedness. Truth, in its nature, is un-truth.32
The character of truth as the character of Being has an inherent disjointure by

which it is of itself and other than itself. The event of language displays the
same structure. If the speaking of language always holds within it the unspo-
ken, what is unspoken, Heidegger tells us, “is not merely something that lacks
voice, it is what remains unsaid, what is not yet shown, what has not yet
reached its appearance. That which must remain wholly unspoken is held back
in the unsaid, abides in concealment as unshowable, is mystery.”33
By virtue of this event of truth/Being/language, Heidegger conceives the
response structure of interpreting not only as that which is outside the ambit of
the theoretical and the domain of subjectivity but also as that which is other-
wise than a simple transmission (of one to the other) between the call of Being
and the one addressed by the call. If it were a matter of a simple transmission,
then interpreting could still be con gured along the lines of a laying out (aus-
legen) that carries across. Interpreting is otherwise than a simple transmission for
Heidegger insofar as interpreting is now oriented to the opening up (aus-tragen)
of Being in its diVerence. This diVerence is not the diVerence between Being
and beings, but the Austrag, which names what is diVering in the diVerence
between Being and being. In his essay “Language” Heidegger call this diVering
Unter-Schied, the scission between Being and beings in which the very uncon-
cealing of Being conceals itself in beings, but which is at once the carrying out
that carries through (durchtragenden Austrags) into presence world (i.e., the four-
fold) and thing.34 This event of diVerence is here an event of language, an event,
strictly speaking, not in language but of language. The poetic word in particu-
lar lets the diVering between world and thing come to presence. The philo-
sophical word attends to this same con guration in the thinking of Ereignis, the
granting event in the thought of which thinking enters the very source of Being.
In thinking this source, which ultimately it must be said grants Being in terms
of time,35 interpretive thinking is concerned not with displacing the withdrawal
80 JAMES RISSER
into concealment that marks the event of Being, but on the contrary, with pre-
serving it. This is the sense in which the response structure of interpreting
enters into Being’s own withdrawing. Heidegger calls thinking in this manner
recollection— a gathering of sorts that awakens thought to the withdrawal such
that the concealing of the withdrawal of Being, which Heidegger claims char-
acterizes the history of metaphysics, ends. So conceived, thinking itself is now
set free, within its responsiveness, for the possibility of another destiny.
But again, in following the path of “interpretation” into Heidegger’s later
thinking, we have to ask whether we nd ourselves no longer in hermeneutics.
The answer to this question is unmistakable when we see that, in Gadamer’s
step back from the question of Being, he nevertheless retains the fundamental
conception of Heidegger’s characterization of the interpretative event. Certainly
every reader of Truth and Method knows quite well that Gadamer situates inter-
pretation in an entanglement with an antecedent such that “understanding is
not suitably conceived at all as a consciousness of something.”36 If it is tradi-
tion — or better, the voice of the other in tradition— that speaks, such speak-
ing, as we have already noted, is enabled by the conversation that is essentially
a play of language. It is by virtue of this play that the communicative event in
which one hears the voice of the other becomes something more than a
simple transmission. That is to say, although the dialogical character of the
hermeneutic event suggests a notion of intersubjectivity embedded in the her-
meneutic event of understanding— a conversation between oneself and
another — Gadamer would reject such a suggestion because it implies the very
metaphysics of presence that he wants to distance himself from. 37 Conversation,
which enacts the play of language, is more properly a participation in the
Saying of language, which, in its distinctive formulation by Gadamer, is haunt-
ed by nonpresence. In his ongoing attempt to separate himself from Hegel,
Gadamer writes:
I would ask, against Hegel: Is the rst and last principle in which the philo-
sophical thinking of being culminates really “Geist”? . . . [I]t is my conviction
that Heidegger has been the rst thinker since Hegel to present us with a
positive alternative possibility, a possibility that gets beyond mere dialectical
reversal. This is Heidegger’s point: Truth is not the total unconcealment
whose ideal ful llment would in the end remain the presence of absolute
spirit to itself. Rather, Heidegger taught us to think truth as unconcealing
and concealing at the same time. The great eVorts at thinking in the tradi-
tion, eVorts in which we feel ourselves over and over again to be addressed
and expressed, all stand in this tension. What is asserted is not everything.
Indeed, it is the unsaid that rst makes it, and lets it be, a word that can reach us. This
seems to me to be compellingly true.38 (Emphasis added)
To state the matter directly: for Gadamer, too, the interpretive event is
con gured by the dynamics of concealing such that interpretation has the char-
acter of recollection. All communication stands under the experience of being

subject to time where all things escape us. This is the context in which
Gadamer explicitly links conversation to recollection in his 1985 essay “Des-
truktion and Deconstruction.” 39 Conversation is recollection as a recovery from
forgetfulness, a recovery not of something formerly known and now brought to
mind, but of a question presumed to be dead. The recovery is accordingly a
summoning of the word back into its time.40 For Gadamer this summoning
transcends all linguistically articulable intending and knowing. When the word
appears, at best it can be said “‘it’ has come out [‘es’ herausgekommen ist].”41 Real
speech for Gadamer is not constituted, but happens. The event of understand-
ing is precisely this “it happens.”
From Response to Responsibility
Given the analysis of hermeneutics to this point —an analysis that intention-
ally has attempted to keep the hermeneutics of Heidegger and Gadamer
together 42 — we can say that for both Heidegger and Gadamer hermeneutics
consists of an interpretive response (Hören) occurring within a fundamental
belonging (Zugehörigkeit), in which all relating stands under a certain displace-
ment and dispossession. Such a statement not only brings (hermeneutic)
recollection into relief from its Hegelian counterpart in as much as the
self-accomplishing in the hermeneutic event is not a thinking that appropri-
ates;43 in diVerent words, the self-interpretation of Being is not to be confused
with the Hegelian self-recognition of being in the other, where being nds itself
all over again by turning alterity into itself. Here, in anticipation of questions
that could arise from a Derridian or Levinasian reading of Heideggerian
hermeneutics in particular, one must caution against the idea that Heideggerian
Ereignis has to do with appropriation, making one’s own, in its ordinary sense
of taking possession, as if in Ereignis Being takes possession of itself, becomes
present to itself. Although Heidegger uses this word to convey the event in
which Being appropriates to mortals their essence, Ereignis, as the granting event
problematizes the very condition of being one’s own (eigen). If Ereignis is the
event that lets mortals come into what is proper to their being, the proper is
to be thought in terms of a relating to the granting, which takes leave of every-
thing familiar— or better, displaces mortal being into a certain experience of
diVerence. For Gadamer as well — and this is perhaps the more diYcult point
to accept without a more extensive analysis of the issue— despite the fact that
in Truth and Method he uses the language of appropriation, of assimilation to
one’s own, to describe the hermeneutic event, the hermeneutic event happens:
“‘es’ herausgekommen ist.” This “it” is something other than myself that I am able
to see only because I undergo a certain experience of dispossession in the
encounter.
82 JAMES RISSER
If one grants that the hermeneutic event problematizes the character of one’s
own, then one should be prepared to acknowledge a similar problematizing of
the counter notion of alterity. This is most obvious in relation to Husserlian
phenomenology, where alterity is a matter of analogical presentation. The other
is the other of one’s own life, which is the rst givenness, and as such is sim-
ply an alterego. Is it not the case, though, that the other as other — the very
issue of alterity— is precisely that which cannot express itself analogically?44 And
that means, certainly with respect to the early Heidegger, one should look for
the experience of the other not in the structure of being-with, but in the com-
portment to the foreign voice, where Dasein in some sense is broken open. But
if hermeneutics — and here we are interested not in the hermeneutics of Dasein
but in the hermeneutics that wants to summon the word back into time— does
not take up the other in terms of analogical presentation,44 how does the expe-
rience of alterity enter the work of hermeneutics? The question itself may be
regarded as problematic insofar as the hermeneutic event is still regarded as the
self-interpretation of being. It is precisely its relation to this self-interpretation
that even Gadamer’s hermeneutics, which overtly presents the structure of
interpretation in terms of the experience of the other, is criticized for having
an inadequate grasp of this experience of the other.45 Without attending to this
further question that would ask us to consider quite directly the relation of
Gadamer to Levinas, we can, however, answer the initial question within the
development of hermeneutics.
What I want to suggest is that the experience of alterity enters the work of
hermeneutics — a hermeneutics that has undergone a certain shift from the theo-
retical to the practical, not unlike what one nds in Kant —as the promise of
interpretation, which hermeneutics enacts through the act of mourning. In his
essay “The Nature of Language,” Heidegger writes: “If we are to think through
the nature of language, language must rst promise [zusagen] itself to us.”46
Literally, zusagen is a “saying-to” (someone), which is paradigmatic in the case
of giving someone your word. In this giving one declares or asserts, avows, not
in the manner of reporting (as when one asserts that ‘today it is raining’), but
in the manner of a circling back to the giving itself that stands under expecta-
tion. To promise, to give you my word, is to expect to hear from me again.
For Heidegger, “language occurs as this promise”;47 that is to say, language
gives itself and in this giving announces an arrival, but, as a promise, is not itself
the arrival. To the extent that language has the structure of a promise, the
ground of language remains out of reach. What is missing in Heidegger’s brief
account of the connection between speaking and promising is evident in
Gadamer’s own brief remark on this same issue. In distinguishing the language
of poetry from language in general, Gadamer relates the autonomous charac-
ter of the poem, which he identi es as Aussage, to two other forms of saying,
the promise or pledge (Zusage) and the proclamation (Ansage). Gadamer uses
Luther’s expression “It stands written [Es stehet geschieben]” as an example of a

Zusage. According to Gadamer, when someone makes a promise one can call
upon what is said and rely upon it. This is for him more than a communica-
tion: “it is rather a binding word that presupposes mutual validity. It does not
lie in my power alone to promise something. It also depends upon the other
who accepts my promise, and only then does it become a promise.”48 Gadamer
makes it more evident to us that the promise is tied to a certain performative
dimension; but more importantly, he makes it evident that, with respect to its
destination, a promise is made in the name of the other.
But if the promise of language is made in the name of the other, what is it
that is promised in the promise? For both Heidegger and Gadamer, what is
promised is what gives itself in language, namely, itself — the word; and to the
extent that the word has not yet arrived, the word promised is a future word.
It is precisely for the sake of this future word that every interpretation turns
into a promise of interpretation.
Let us not forget, though, the obvious: a promise intends the absence of for-
getting as a certain form of remembering. To promise is to keep in memory as
in the case of a promise to meet a friend becomes a promise to remember a
time of meeting. To promise is to say to someone ‘I will not forget’. The
promise itself, then, which nevertheless can be forgotten, is oriented to the
future of memory. Hermeneutics takes place in this orientation to an arrival
that is continually threatened by its forgetting such that interpretation is bound
to a future that will never be present. And because this orientation is tied to
memory and its loss, hermeneutics nds itself within the experience of mourn-
ing. This mourning, which concerns the departed other, is not a matter of grief
over the demise of meaning and Being in the element of forgetting and with-
drawal in the time of Being, but, as is appropriate to the experience of mourn-
ing, is a matter of a certain attentiveness that lies within the recalling response
of interpretation.
To make a further suggestion: this attentiveness is what turns the response
structure of interpreting into responsibility. Every response as response is ori-
ented to answerability. In the interpretation of the word —if not in general, then
certainly for Heidegger’s word of Being and Gadamer’s word of the other —
hermeneutics must answer for the future of the word. It is responsible for the
promise of language. Such responsibility is neither a function of rights from
ownership, nor of that which arises from an alterity that presents itself in imme-
diacy. It is rather a responsibility that is a function of all hearing, a responsi-
bility that entails a duty to remember.49 One could say then —and of course do
so only in the most provisional manner — that hermeneutics, responding to its
element of alterity, stands under a practical demand. It must summon the
promised word into its time— the generation of speech as well as the genera-
tion of history. Under this demand in which interpretation is always already
84 JAMES RISSER
oriented to answerability in the word of the other, the word of Being, and the
word of history, hermeneutics is confronting a fundamental question of how we
answer for our time.
NOTES
1. Paul Ricoeur, “Phenomenology and Hermeneutics,” in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed.
and trans. John B. Thompson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 101–28.
Hereafter cited as “PH.”
2. Ricoeur establishes this claim through four theses: 1) phenomenology rst takes the question
of being as a question of the meaning of being; 2) phenomenology rst employs the herme-
neutical concept of distantiation (as the counter-concept to belonging) in the notion of phe-
nomenological epoché; 3) phenomenology, similar to hermeneutics, references the linguistic order
back to the structure of experience; 4) phenomenology, like the hermeneutics of historical
experience, grounds the order of objectivity in the life-world. See “Phenomenology and
Hermeneutics,” 114–19.
3. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus NijhoV,
1970), 96.
4. See Ricoeur’s interview with Charles Reagan, in Paul Ricoeur: His Life and His Work (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1996). Hermeneutics, Ricoeur says, “is a kind of mourning of the
immediate” (100).
5. This is the position that John Caputo takes in Radical Hermeneutics (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1987). I want to keep a safe distance from this project for several reasons. If
Caputo wants to claim, analogous to Ricoeur, that deconstruction does not ruin hermeneutics
as such but only its “essentialist” element, his description of that element is not one that is
given by either Heidegger or Gadamer himself. My distance then pertains primarily to want-
ing to show, analogous to Ricoeur, that the further transformation of hermeneutics must rst
be thought from within its own internal development.
6. Ricoeur writes: “Textualization, broadly coextensive with the phenomenon of writing, seemed
to me to call for a dialectical relation between the moment of explanation and that of under-
standing. It was in this way that I arrived at the formula ‘explaining more in order to under-
stand better’, a formula that in a sense became the motto of hermeneutics, as I conceived of
it and attempted to employ it” (“Intellectual Autobiography,” in The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur,
The Library of Living Philosophers [Chicago: Open Court, 1995], 31).
7. Martin Heidegger, Ontology — The Hermeneutics of Facticity, trans. John van Buren (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 60.
8. Heidegger writes: “The relationship here between hermeneutics and facticity is not a relation-
ship between the grasping of an object and the object grasped, in relation to which the former
would simply have to measure itself ” (Ontology — The Hermeneutics of Facticity, 12).
9. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Heidegger’s One Path,” in Reading Heidegger from the Start, ed. Theodore
Kisiel and John van Buren (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), 25. In Ontology — The Hermeneutics of
Facticity, Heidegger states this as “interpreting is a being which belongs to the being of factical
life itself ” (see p. 12).
10. Ontology — The Hermeneutics of Facticity, 17.
11. Commenting on his encounter with Heidegger in the 1920s, Gadamer writes: “It was the
young Heidegger who, as he recognized the prejudgments behind this reigning conceptuality,
called it into account. He took from Kierkegaard the expression formal indications — formale
Anzeige — and with it he brought into play the phenomenological principle of the self-showing
of the thing itself ” (“Re ections on My Philosophical Journey,” in The Philosophy of Hans-Georg
Gadamer, The Library of Living Philosophers, ed. Lewis Hahn [Chicago: Open Court, 1997], 21).
12. In Ontology — The Hermeneutics of Facticity, Heidegger gives the example of being-in-the-world as
a formal indication.
13. “‘Formal’ gibt den ‘Ansatzcharakter’ des Vollzugs der Zeitigung der ursprünglichen Erfüllung
des Angezeigten.” This is the description of formal indication that Heidegger gives in his
winter semester 1921/22 lecture course. See Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristotles. Vol. 61
of Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1985), 33; hereafter cited as GA,
followed by volume and page. “Zeitigung” connotes a bringing forth with respect to time, an
unfolding in time. “Bringing to fruition” as ripening and bearing fruit conveys this sense of
unfolding in time.
14. See Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristotles, GA 61:166.
15. Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. Peter Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 9.
Unterwegs zur Sprache, GA 12:91.
16. On the Way to Language, 11; Unterwegs zur Sprache, GA 12:93.
18. Heidegger does make note of this more original meaning of interpretation in Ontology — The
Hermeneutics of Facticity. See p. 6.
19. See Heidegger’s letter to William Richardson, in Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (The
Hague: Martinus NijhoV, 1967), vii–xxiii.
22. For a more detailed analysis, see Gerald Bruns, Heidegger’s Estrangements: Language, Truth, and
Poetry in the Later Writings (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
23. In his essay “Language,” Heidegger uses the word “dif-ference” (Unter-Schied ) to indicate the
speaking that occurs in the nature of language. To state the relationships in a much too abbre-
viated form: language speaks by naming things; such naming calls things into their thinging
in relation to world (the four-fold); in the between of world and thing a division occurs: a
dif-ference; dif-ference is not a mediation, but a disclosing appropriation in terms of which
human speaking is but a responding. See “Language,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans.
Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 189–210, Unterwegs zur Sprache, GA
12:9–30.
25. See, for example, Gadamer, “Forward to the Second Edition” in Truth and Method, trans. Joel
Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Continuum, 1989). Originally
published as Wahrheit und Methode, in vol. 1 of Gesammelte Werke, (Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck,
1990).
26. See “Re ections on My Philosophical Journey,” 46.
27. Gadamer, Hans-Georg Gadamer im Gespräch, ed. Carsten Dutt (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag
C. Winter, 1993), 12–13. Later in the interview Gadamer is again asked about his relation to
the later Heidegger, this time in response to Heidegger’s claim in “A Dialogue on Language”
that not every talk between people can be called a dialogue (Gespräch), since dialogue names
the gathering (Versammlung) out of the essence of language. Dutt states that he does not nd this
in his (Gadamer’s) writings, to which Gadamer responds, “I do not make it, but I do follow
it!” See p. 38.
28. When Gadamer says in Truth and Method that the fusion of horizons is the achievement of lan-
guage, he immediately adds that “we are endeavoring to approach the mystery of language
from the conversation that we ourselves are.” This conversation, no matter in what form, is
concerned with the subject matter that is in language, and the way understanding occurs is in
the coming-into-language of the thing itself (Truth and Method, 378; Wahrheit und Methode, 383).
86 JAMES RISSER
29. In his description of the third form of the I-Thou relation, the form that presents the true char-
acter of hermeneutic experience, Gadamer writes: “In human relations the important thing is,
as we have seen, 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. But ultimately this open-
ness does not exist only for the person who speaks; rather anyone who listens is fundamen-
tally open. Without such openness to one another there is no genuine human bond. Belonging
together always means being able to listen to one another” (Truth and Method, 361; Wahrheit und
Methode, 367).
30. I am convinced that critics of Gadamerian hermeneutics such as Nancy and Hamacher sim-
ply do not read Truth and Method through to the end. It is easy to stop at the notion of “fusion
of horizons” and infer from that the following series: mediation— domestication—conserva-
tion — conservatism. But ultimately no account of Gadamer’s hermeneutics can be suYcient
without including his account of experience and language, which quali es in an essential way
the character of mediation operative in his hermeneutics.
31. This idea is most succinctly expressed in yet another recent interview that Gadamer gave. In
response to a question about his indebtedness to Heidegger, Gadamer says: “I should point
out, however, that I did not attempt what the later Heidegger was after: forcibly recasting lan-
guage, so to speak. This is not language any more, I said to myself. True, one always searches
for the right word in language. Yet it is not the word which is decisive, but the whole process
of communication. Therefore, I am not at all obliged to say things once and for all in a single
word. It is suYcient that the other has understood. This was my way—that I told Heidegger
that language is not the powerful word; language is reply” (“A Conversation with Hans-Georg
Gadamer,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology vol. 26, no. 2 (May 1995):123.
32. Poetry, Language, Thought, 54; Holzwege, 5th ed. (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1972), 43.
33. On the Way to Language, 122; Unterwegs zur Sprache, GA 12:241–242.
34. The essay “Language” is the text of a lecture initially given in 1950. See note 29 above. In
the essay, Heidegger, in his attempt to break free of the logic of identity with respect to the
question of Being, explicitly says that Unter-Schied is “neither distinction nor relation.” See Poetry,
Language, Thought, 203; Unterwegs zur Sprache, GA 12:23.
35. Commenting on the line from Hölderlin “since we are a conversation,” Heidegger writes: “We
are— a linguistic occurrence [Sprachgeschehnis], and this happening [Geschehen] is temporal, not
only in the external sense that it ows away in time according to which beginning, duration,
and cessation in each case are measurable, but also the linguistic occurrence is the com-
mencement [Anfang] and ground of the authentic historical time of human beings. This con-
versation does not begin some time or other within a owing away of ‘historical’ events: since
such dialogue occurs, is, time and history.” (Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und
Der Rein”, “GA 39:69–70). Heidegger’s most succinct discussion of Ereignis as the granting of
time and Being is found in his essay “Time and Being.” See On Time and Being, trans. Joan
Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).
36. In the “Philosophical Foundations of the Twentieth Century,” Gadamer writes: “By proceed-
ing from the special case of understanding tradition, I have myself shown that understanding
is always an event. . . . The freedom of re ection, this presumed being-with-itself, does not
occur at all in understanding, so much is understanding conditioned at every moment by the
historicity of existence” (Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. David Linge [Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1976], 125).
37. Gadamer is explicitly critical of Husserl’s project at that point where interpretation enters the
method of phenomenology in the attempt to account for the experience of the other precisely
because the attempt to account for the other is taken as a problem simply of the alterego, and
thus as a problem of intersubjectivity. See “The Phenomenological Movement,” in Philosophical
Hermeneutics, 163–66. Elsewhere Gadamer says: “If we describe conversation as an intersubjec-
tive ‘play’ with language, we are already deeply immersed in the language of metaphysics. This
immersion is so deep that we no longer believe ourselves able to say what we mean by a ‘con-
versation’ without the concept of the ‘subject’. . . . With Husserl, we can understand how he
arrives at a concept like ‘intersubjectivity’ because he is determined to remain in the Cartesian
sphere of subjectivity. That leads . . . to the utterly absurd consequence that we rst intend the
‘other’ as an object of perception constituted by aspects, etc., and then in a higher-level act,
confer on this ‘other’ the character of a ‘subject’ through transcendental empathy. We can
admire the consistency with which Husserl holds fast to the primacy of his approach. However,
we notice that the narrowness and one-sidedness of the ontology of presence cannot be
avoided by such an approach” (Gadamer, “Text Matters,” in States of Mind, ed. Richard
Kearney (New York: [New York University Press, 1995]), p. 277.
38. “Re ections on My Philosophical Journey,” 35.
39. Gadamer, “Destruktion and Deconstruction,” in Dialogue and Deconstruction, ed. Diane Michelfelder
and Richard Palmer (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989), 103–113; originally published in Hermeneutik
II, vol. 2 of Gesammelte Werke, (Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1993), 361–72.
40. In “Destruktion and Deconstruction,” Gadamer writes that the Socratic dialogue “is the true
carrying out of Anamnesis. What is accomplished in conversation is a summoning back in
thought [denkende Erinnerung] that is possible only for the soul fallen into the nitude of bodily
existence. This is the very meaning of the speculative unity that is achieved in the ‘virtuality’
of the word.” (Dialogue and Deconstruction, 111–12; Hermeneutik II, 370).
41. Gadamer, “Wort und Bild — so wahr, so seiend,” in Ästhetik und Poetik I, vol. 8 of Gesammelte
Werke (Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1993), 388.
42. A more complete account of the development of hermeneutics that I am following here would
have to take note of more subtle distinctions that would more forcefully attempt to separate
the positions of Heidegger and Gadamer. I have attempted to do this in my “Hermeneutics
Between Gadamer and Heidegger,” Philosophy Today 41 (Supplement 1997): 134–41. See also
Robert Bernasconi, “Bridging the Abyss: Heidegger and Gadamer.” Research in Phenomenology 16
(1986): 1–24; and Rod Coltman, The Language of Hermeneutics: Gadamer and Heidegger in Dialogue
(Albany: SUNY Press, 1998). The former focuses primarily on the relation between Heidegger
and Gadamer in terms of the issue of continuity and discontinuity of the tradition. The latter
does not deal with the hermeneutical as such, but analyzes their respective relationships to
Plato, Aristotle, Hölderlin, and Hegel.
43. For an extensive analysis of the relation between hermeneutic (Heideggerian) recollection and
Hegelian Erinnerung, see David Farrell Krell, Of Memory, Reminiscence, and Writing (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1990), chap. 5.
44. The analogical in its strongest sense would be that in which the other is like me, the other
of myself. This sense is clearly at work in Husserl’s analysis in the Cartesian Meditations. In a
weaker sense, the analogical occurs whenever pairing occurs, as in any consideration of the pair
own and alien. Using this second sense it may be the case that hermeneutics does not escape
the analogical altogether.
45. See Bernasconi, “‘You Don’t Know What I’m Talking About’: Alterity and the Hermeneutic
Ideal,” in The Specter of Relativism, ed. Lawrence Schmidt (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1995), 178–194.
47. “Die Sprache west als dieser Zuspruch” (On the Way to Language, 76; Unterwegs zur Sprache, GA 12:170.
48. Gadamer, “On the contribution of poetry to the search for truth” in The Relevance of the Beautiful,
ed. Robert Bernasconi (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 109; Ästhetik und Poetik
I, 74. Gadamer gives the following example to make his point: “a man promises his wife that
he will never again drink more than he really needs to satisfy his thirst. Perhaps his wife has
known for a long time that he will never be able to keep his promise. For this reason, she does
88 JAMES RISSER
not accept it and says she cannot believe him. This reciprocal relationship between saying and
answering belongs to the essence of a pledge.”
49. It is at this point that the hermeneutic project of Gadamer and Heidegger, as it has been set
out here, would rejoin the work of Paul Ricoeur. See Ricoeur’s recent essay “Memory and
Forgetting” in Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, ed. Richard Kearney and
Mark Dooley (New York: Routledge, 1999), 5–11.

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After the Hermeneutic Turn

a whole” (PH, 124). Ricoeur contends that in the account of phenomenology

Today an intervening generation of thought now separates us from Ricoeur’s

sense potential of an experience. Explication is exegesis, a seeking out that

power of language.29 Gadamer conceives this hermeneutic structure of lis-

The Entanglement of Interpretation

Let us recall our point of departure in Husserlian phenomenology. The self-

the nature of truth, that is, of unconcealedness, is dominated throughout by

The character of truth as the character of Being has an inherent disjointure by

acter of recollection. All communication stands under the experience of being

From Response to Responsibility

Luther’s expression “It stands written [Es stehet geschieben]” as an example of a

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