Apperception, Knowledge, and Experience

CHAPTER 4. Discontinuity and Coherence

CHAPTER 4 Discontinuity and Coherence We have been reading certain developments in German philosophy as an attempt to close the gap between Kant's transcendental apparatus and the world to which that apparatus gives order and coherence. We have seen, however, that none of the developments under consideration has been able to provide a completely transcendental or a priori account of the Kantian schema. Rather schemata appear to result from the interaction of the mind and the empirical data of experience. Hence we might conclude with Heidegger that it is through schemata that what we call a "world" is first opened up. In confronting these diverse schemata we are offered a rich and open series of structures for analysis. But this richness , diversity, and openness are also cause for concern, for they raise the question of whether in living under different schematic forms we inhabit different worlds, and if so, whether meaningful communication between such worlds is possible. Discontinuities and the Infinite Play of Signs Hans Georg Gadamer has taken up the challenge of providing coherence where a plurality of diverse and competingtraditions and interpretations seems to hold sway.1 Gadamer begins with Heidegger's hermeneutical circle, which results from the impossibility of accomplishing completely the phenomenological reduction.2 The fact that as Dasein I am always already in a world means that there can be no absolute standpoint, no presuppositionless philosophy, no sheer objectivity. Understanding, therefore, is always an interpretive project and interpretation takes place within the parameters of the situation into which I have been thrown. Hence all understanding is prejudiced, for it is founded on the "forestructure of understanding." Thus for Gadamer historicity is not an acci- 180 APPERCEPTION, KNOWLEDGE, AND EXPERIENCE dental factor that can be overcome but an ontological one. Our prejudices , however, do not cut us off from the past but rather open it up to us (PH, 9; WM, 261; 246). This is because understanding itself is not to be thought of so much as an action ofsubjectivity , but as the entering into an event of transmission in which past and present are constantly mediated. This is what must gain validity in hermeneutical theory, which is much too dominated by the ideal of a procedure, a method.3 Hence Gadamer seeks to rehabilitate authority and tradition by singling out legitimate prejudices, a task that recalls Heidegger's search for an authentic knowing. The past is never merely something to be recovered or duplicated by the interpreter but rather "effective history" (Wirkungsgeschichte) that makes possible a dialogue between each new interpreter and the text to be understood (WM, 284 ff., 324 ff.; 267 ff., 305 ff.). The importance of the dialogue opened up by tradition has been obscured by our obsession with method.4 Gadamer maintains, however, that if we put methodological considerations aside, we can gain a critical awareness of our prejudices and correct them in order to hear what a text says to us. But such corrections never transcend all prejudices to attain complete objectivity (PH, 38). Perhaps Gadamer's chief contribution to hermeneutics is his effort to shift discussion away from techniques and methods to the clarification of understanding as an intersubjective event. Central to this view is his belief that language and the understanding oftransmitted meaning are one and the same process. Hence there is no prelinguistic experience of the world that is then captured in language. Language is by no means simply an instrument, a tool. For it is in the nature of the tool that we master its use, which is to say we take it in hand and lay it aside when it has done its service. That is not the same as when we take the words of a language, lying ready in the mouth, and with their use let them sink back into the general store of words over which we dispose. Such an analogy is false because we never find ourselves as consciousness over against the world and, as it wore [sic], grasp after a tool of understanding in a worldless condition. Rather, in all our knowledge of ourselves and in all knowledge of the world, we are always already encompassed by the language that is our own. (PH, 62) That language mediates our relation to reality is a point already made by Hegel and Heidegger, among others, but Gadamer considers DISCONTINUITY AND COHERENCE 181 drawing a relativistic conclusion from this fact...