Michael N. Forster and Kristin Gjesdal (Eds): The Cambridge Companion to Hermeneutics

The Cambridge Companion to Hermeneutics Book Cover The Cambridge Companion to Hermeneutics
Cambridge Companions to Philosophy
Michael N. Forster, Kristin Gjesdal (Eds.)
Cambridge University Press
2019
Paperback £ 22.99
432

Reviewed by:  Leen Verheyen (University of Antwerp)

In their introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Hermeneutics, editors Michael N. Forster and Kristin Gjesdal immediately make clear that the volume differs in approach from other, similar guides to hermeneutics. Whereas there are a number of volumes available that offer histories of hermeneutics or treatments of individual hermeneutical theorists, this book focuses on the question of how hermeneutical issues relate to different fields of study, such as theology, literature, history and psychoanalysis. In this way, the authors aim to demonstrate how hermeneutical thinking thrives and develops through concrete interdisciplinary reflection.

The book opens with an article on “Hermeneutics and Theology,” written by Christoph Bultman. In this essay, Bultman offers a historical overview of different approaches to the interpretation of religious texts and focuses in particular on the various approaches that were developed and debated during the German Enlightenment. Although Bultman offers a clear overview of different approaches within biblical hermeneutics, to a certain extent his precise aim and argument remain unclear, with the central questions behind his overview not made explicit.

In an interesting contribution in the second chapter, Dalia Nassar focuses on the way in which the study of nature in the eighteenth century involved hermeneutical methods and insights that transformed the way in which we approach and represent the natural world. In her essay, “Hermeneutics and Nature,” Nassar directs attention to the ideas of Buffon, Diderot and, especially, Herder. Nassar starts her investigation by highlighting the fact that the emergence of a hermeneutics of nature that can be found in their works must be understood in light of the liberalization of science in the mid-eighteenth century. This liberalization meant that science was no longer understood as founded on mathematics, which led to the introduction of new modes of knowledge in scientific research. According to Nassar, one of the important ideas within the development of a hermeneutics of nature in the eighteenth century was Herder’s concept of a “circle” or a “world.” If we want to understand the structure of a bird or a bee, we should focus on their relationship to the environment or world. Instead of being devoted to classifying animals or other forms of life into different categories, Herder thus directs his attention to grasping the particular “world” a certain creature inhabits and to the way this world is reflected in the structure of its inhabitants. Interpreting nature thus implies seeing the parts in their relation to the whole and, in turn, seeing how the whole is manifest in the parts.

In the following chapter, “Hermeneutics and Romanticism,” Fred Rush focuses on the form that hermeneutics took in German Romanticism, and in particular in the works of Schlegel, Schleiermacher and Humboldt. It is in their works that hermeneutics becomes concerned explicitly with methodological questions. Rush sketches the historical and philosophical circumstances in which this turn comes about.

In his chapter on “Hermeneutics and German Idealism,” Paul Redding also focuses on the emergence of a philosophical hermeneutics in the wake of an era of post-Kantian philosophy. In particular, he explores the different stances taken by hermeneutical philosophers such as Hamann and Herder, and idealist philosophers such as Fichte and Hegel, towards the relation between thought and language. Particularly interesting is his reading of the later Hegel, in which he emphasizes that Hegel can be read not as the abstract metaphysician he is often seen to be but as a philosopher engaged with hermeneutical issues.

In the following chapter, “Hermeneutics and History,” John H. Zammito explores the disciplinary self-constitution of history and the role of hermeneutics in that disciplinary constitution. Through this exploration, Zammito aims to show a way out of contemporary debates on the scientific status of disciplinary history. By investigating the views of Herder, Schleiermacher, Boeckh, Humboldt, Droysen and Dilthey, Zammito argues that the hermeneutical historicist’s attempt to give an account of the past is a cognitive undertaking and not a mystical one. The historian thus does not aim to relivethe past but to understand it. As Zammito’s exploration makes clear, such a view acknowledges the importance of the imagination in this practice, but at the same time ensures that this imagination is harnessed to interpretation, not unleashed fantasy.

Frederick C. Beiser also connects a contemporary debate to the period in which disciplinary history emerged. He starts his chapter on “Hermeneutics and Positivism” with the statement that the distinction between “analytic” and “continental” philosophy has a harmful effect on many areas of philosophy and that one of worst affected areas is the philosophy of history. Beiser notes that, starting in the 1950s, there was a sharp rise in interest in the philosophy of history among analytic philosophers in the Anglophone world, but that these analytic discourses almost completely ignored the German historicist and hermeneutical tradition. The main cost of this, Beiser argues, has been the sterility and futility of much recent philosophical debate, and in particular the long dispute about historical explanation. The dispute has been between positivists, who defend the thesis that covering laws are the sole form of explanation, and their idealist opponents, who hold that there is another form of explanation in history. One of the reasons this debate has now ended in a stand-off can be found in the neglect of alternative perspectives, and in particular that of the historicist and hermeneutical tradition. Beiser argues that if these perspectives had been taken into account by analytic philosophers, they would have recognized that there are goals and methods of enquiry other than determining the covering laws. Had they done so, their focus of attention may have shifted in the more fruitful direction of investigating the methods of criticism and interpretation that are actually used by historians. Beiser therefore concludes that the philosophy of history in the Anglophone world would be greatly stimulated and enriched if it took into account these issues and the legacy of the historicist and hermeneutical tradition.

In the subsequent chapter, “Hermeneutics: Nietzschean Approaches,” Paul Katsafanas explores several key points of contact between Nietzsche and the hermeneutical tradition. As Katsafanas notes, Nietzsche is deeply concerned with the way in which human beings interpret phenomena, but also draws attention to the ways in which seemingly given experiences have already been interpreted. By highlighting these two aspects, Katsafanas argues that it is not wrong to characterize Nietzsche as offering a “hermeneutics of suspicion,” as Paul Ricoeur suggested, but that this statement can easily be misinterpreted. As Katsafanas notes, the hermeneutics of suspicion is often understood as a stance which discounts the agent’s conscious understanding of a phenomenon and instead uncovers the real and conflicting cause of that phenomenon. Nietzsche is clearly doing more than this. According to Nietzsche, the fact that a conscious interpretation is distorting, superficial or falsifying does not mean that it can be ignored. On the contrary, these interpretations are of immense importance, because they often influence the nature of the interpreted object.

The following chapter, “Hermeneutics and Psychoanalysis,” also deals with one of the thinkers who Paul Ricoeur identified as developing a hermeneutics of suspicion, namely Sigmund Freud. In this chapter, Sebastian Gardner argues that there is an uneasy relationship between hermeneutics and Freud’s own form of interpretation. As Gardner shows, Freud may be regarded as returning to an early point in the history of hermeneutics, in which the unity of the hermeneutical project with the philosophy of nature was asserted. In line with this thought, which was abandoned by later hermeneutical thinkers, Freud can be seen as defending the idea that in order to make sense of human beings we must offer an interpretation of nature as a whole.

In “Hermeneutics and Phenomenology,” Benjamin Crowe explicates some of the fundamental insights and arguments behind the phenomenological hermeneutics developed by Heidegger and brought to maturity by Gadamer. Crowe shows how Heidegger opened up a radically new dimension of hermeneutical inquiry, because his conception of hermeneutics as a phenomenological enterprise intended to be a primordial science of human experience in its totality, and in this way took hermeneutics far beyond its traditional purview. By building on Heidegger’s approach, Gadamer developed this thought further, thinking through the distinctive role and value of humanistic inquiry in an age that prized exactitude and results above all else.

In “Hermeneutics and Critical Theory,” Georgia Warnke focuses on the critique of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics by Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth, two thinkers from the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Warnke starts her investigation by returning to Horkheimer’s description of critical theory and shows how these ideas form the basis of Habermas and Honneth’s philosophical framework. Taking Horkheimer’s framework as his starting point, Habermas seems to see many virtues in Gadamer’s philosophical ideas. Gadamer’s theory, for instance, begins with the social and historical situation, and in this way provides an alternative to the self-understanding of those forms of social science that assume they can extract themselves from the context. Habermas and Honneth nevertheless see Gadamer’s attitude to reflection as a problem, because his emphasis on the prejudiced character of understanding seems to give precedence to the authority of tradition and immediate experience instead of emphasizing the importance of reason and reflection. As Warnke shows, Gadamer’s response to this critique consists of showing that the dichotomies between reason and authority and between reflection and experience are not as stark as Habermas and Honneth suppose. We can, for instance, only question the authority of aspects of our tradition on the basis of other aspects, such as inherited ideals and principles that we do not question, just as we can only reflect on our experiences if we do not begin by distancing ourselves from them. Full transparency is therefore not possible.

In “Hermeneutics: Francophone Approaches,” Michael N. Forster focuses on the French contributions to hermeneutics during the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. In the first part of the chapter, Foster argues that the roots of German hermeneutics were largely French. German hermeneutics, for example, arose partly as a response to certain assumptions of the Enlightenment, one of which was the Enlightenment’s universalism concerning beliefs, concepts, values and sensations, etc. According to Forster, this anti-universalism of German hermeneutics was largely a French achievement and was exported from France to Germany. In particular, Montaigne and the early Montesquieu and Voltaire had developed an anti-universalist position, which emphasized, for example, profound differences in mindset between different cultures and periods.

In the second part of the chapter, Forster focuses on some key figures within twentieth-century French philosophy who contributed to the development of hermeneutics, despite not describing themselves as hermeneutical thinkers. One of them is Jean-Paul Sartre, who gave a central role to interpretation in his early existentialism developed in Being and Nothingness, where he included what Forster calls a hermeneutical theory of radical freedom: although we do not create the world itself, we do create the meanings or interpretations through which we become acquainted with it.

Paul Ricoeur is the only French thinker Forster discusses who not only contributed to hermeneutics but also regarded himself as a hermeneutical thinker. Forster, however, does not seem to regard Ricoeur’s philosophy as very attractive. According to Forster, Ricoeur’s most important contribution to hermeneutics lies in his development of the concept of a “hermeneutics of suspicion,” in this way drawing attention to the fact that three major philosophical developments in the nineteenth century, namely Marx’s theory of ideology, Nietzsche’s method of genealogy and Freud’s theory of the unconscious, can be classified as forms of hermeneutics. It is, however, somewhat strange that Forster does not give much attention to the way in which Paul Ricoeur, as the only philosopher he discusses who also regarded himself as working in the hermeneutical tradition, described his own philosophical project as a hermeneutical one. In particular, Ricoeur’s idea that understanding and explanationshould not be regarded as opposites but rather as being dialectically connected, perhaps deserved more attention.

In “Hermeneutics: Non-Western Approaches,” the topic of which is rich and broad enough to be the subject of a companion of its own, Kai Marchal explores the question of whether modern hermeneutics is necessarily a Western phenomenon. As Marchal points out, philosophers in Western academia only rarely examine reflections on interpretation from non-Western traditions. Marchal therefore offers a very short overview of some of the most important scholars and texts on interpretation from non-Western cultures, while at the same time pointing toward the problem that arises from the use of the word “non-Western,” insofar it refers to a multitude of cultures and worldviews which do not have much in common. Instead of presenting an overview of the different hermeneutical theories and practices around the globe, Marchal therefore focuses on one particular example: the history of Confucian interpretive traditions in China.

After this first part, Marchal changes the scope of his investigation and focuses on the possibility of a dialogue between Western and non-Western hermeneutics. As Marchal shows, Western hermeneutical thinkers from the eighteenth century, such as Herder and von Humboldt, engaged with non-Western thought and languages, while most representatives of twentieth-century hermeneutics highlighted the Greek roots of European culture and emphasized the idea that we are tied to this heritage. Many non-Western philosophers, however, have engaged with ideas that were formulated by Heidegger and Gadamer. Nevertheless, such non-Western philosophers often unfold their understanding of European philosophical problems in their own terms. Furthermore, they are encouraged to do so by Gadamer’s claim that understanding is necessarily determined by the past. Marchal concludes his short introduction to non-Western approaches to hermeneutics by emphasizing the value of engaging with hermeneutical thinkers from other traditions. This engagement may result in an awareness of the Other’s understanding of ourselves against the backdrop of their traditions, and even in becoming open to the possibility of a radically different outlook on things.

In a chapter on “Hermeneutics and Literature,” Jonathan Culler aims to answer the question of why the tradition of modern hermeneutics has not figured significantly in the study of literature. Culler starts his investigation by noting that in literary studies there is a distinction between hermeneutics and poetics: while hermeneutics asks what a given text means, poetics asks about the rules and conventions that enable the text to have the meanings and effects it does for readers. Poetics and hermeneutics therefore work in different directions: hermeneutics moves from the text toward a meaning, while poetics moves from effects or meanings to the conditions of possibility of such meanings. In his historical overview of literary criticism, Culler highlights two important evolutions that enable us to explain the absence of modern hermeneutics within contemporary literary studies. The first is the revolution in the concept of literature in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In this period, the concept of literature as mimesis shifted to a concept of literature as the expression of an author. Although this means literary criticism no longer assesses works in terms of the norms of genres, of verisimilitude and appropriate expression, most discussion of literature nevertheless remains evaluative rather than interpretive. The change in the conception of literature, however, also inspired German thinkers such as Johann Gottfried Herder and Friedrich Schleiermacher to propose a general hermeneutics, as opposed to the special hermeneutics that had focused on biblical or Classical texts. Once the mimetic model of literature is displaced by an expressive model, Culler writes, the question of what a work expresses also arises.

The arguments about what kind of meaning a work might be taken to embody or express seldom draws on this hermeneutical tradition. One of the reasons for this is the second evolution that Cullers highlights, which occurred in the twentieth century when hermeneutics itself changed. Modern hermeneutical thinkers such as Dilthey, Heidegger and Gadamer shifted their focus to the understanding of understanding. In this way, their hermeneutical theories offer little guidance on interpretation or in distinguishing valid interpretations from invalid ones.

In “Hermeneutics and Law” Ralf Poscher starts from Hans-Georg Gadamer’s claim that hermeneutics in general could learn from legal hermeneutics. Poscher, however, disagrees with Gadamer about what exactly can be learned. As Poscher summarizes, Gadamer thought that what could be learned from the law is that an element of application must be integrated into the concept of interpretation. Poscher, however, disagrees with Gadamer’s idea that hermeneutics is a monistic practice consisting of interpretation, and he argues that what can be learned from law is that hermeneutics is a set of distinct practices that are of variable relevance to different hermeneutical situations. Poscher develops this thought by exploring the different hermeneutical activities in which a lawyer must engage when applying the law to a given case, such as legal interpretation, rule-following, legal construction and the exercise of discretion, and he highlights the important distinctions between these different means for the application of the law to a specific case. To prove the point that hermeneutics is not a monistic practice but rather a complex whole of different practices applicable to hermeneutics in general, Poscher draws some minor parallels between the different hermeneutics applied in law and in art. These parallels are often very clear, although the fact that they are often reduced to brief remarks means that Poscher does not really engage with debates on the interpretation of art. Nevertheless, these remarks do indicate that such a profound comparison between legal hermeneutics and the hermeneutics of art could be an interesting subject for further investigation.

In the final chapter, “Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences,” Kristin Gjesdal explores the question of how best to conceive of the relationship between philosophy and other sciences through the lens of hermeneutical theory and practice. Gjesdal reveals that different responses can be given to the question of what hermeneutics is, and she explores the various answers. First, she outlines the Heideggerian-Gadamerian conception of hermeneutics, in which philosophy is identified with hermeneutics and hermeneutics is identified with ontology. According to Gjesdal, this tendency is concerning because it takes no interest in the different challenges emerging from within the different areas of the human sciences, nor does it acknowledge different subfields of philosophy or textual interpretation. When looking for an answer to the question of how the relationship between hermeneutics and the human sciences might be understood, an investigation of hermeneutics in its early, Enlightenment form, seems to be more fruitful, Gjesdal argues. Through such an investigation, Gjesdal shows that hermeneutical thinkers such as Herder, Schleiermacher and Dilthey combined an interest in hermeneutical theory with hermeneutical practice and in this way can be seen as an inspiration to explore our understanding of the relationship between philosophy and the other sciences. Philosophy would then no longer be seen as the king among the sciences, and our thinking about the relationship between philosophy and the human sciences would start with a more modest attitude and a willingness not simply to teach but also to learn from neighboring disciplines.

It is clear that for a large share of the contributions to this companion, the history of hermeneutics itself and the way in which this history has been constructed by later hermeneutical thinkers is under investigation, leading to new insights into contemporary debates. In this way, this companion as a whole can be seen as engaging with the question of what hermeneutics is, with the various approaches leading to the formulation of different answers to this question. Furthermore, the different readings of the history of hermeneutics also means that a number of contributions go beyond the traditional understanding of hermeneutics, drawing attention to thinkers who are not commonly associated with the field. In this way, the approach to hermeneutics does not remain limited to an investigation of the works and ideas of those thinkers who are generally understood as belonging to the hermeneutical tradition, which also makes the relevance of hermeneutical thinking to diverse contemporary disciplines and debates more apparent. Although the diverse contributions to this companion engage with the fundamental question of what hermeneutics is in different ways, this book as a whole will probably not serve as a good introduction for someone who is not already familiar with philosophical hermeneutics and its history to some extent. Some of the contributions are successful in offering the reader a clear introduction to the subject and discipline they discuss, but this is not always the case, with some authors presupposing a lot of prior knowledge on the subject. Nevertheless, for those already familiar with the subjects discussed, several contributions to this companion will offer the reader fruitful insights and perhaps provoke thought that invites further research.

Scott Davidson, Marc-Antoine Vallée (Eds.): Hermeneutics and Phenomenology in Paul Ricoeur

Hermeneutics and Phenomenology in Paul Ricoeur: Between Text and Phenomenon Book Cover Hermeneutics and Phenomenology in Paul Ricoeur: Between Text and Phenomenon
Contributions to Hermeneutics, Volume 2
Scott Davidson, Marc-Antoine Vallée (Eds.)
Springer
2016
Hardcover 93,59 €
XIX, 215

Reviewed by: Leen Verheyen (University of Antwerp)

Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy can be characterised as a continuous dialogue. By discussing theories of both his contemporaries and key figures in the history of philosophy, Ricoeur has developed a philosophical thinking with an exceptionally broad scope. Hermeneutics and Phenomenology in Paul Ricoeur: Between Text and Phenomenon focuses on the two philosophical methodologies that are most decisive for Ricoeur’s thinking and concentrates especially on the interaction between these two.

The book is divided in four parts, each consisting of three to four chapters written by leading Ricoeur scholars. The first part of the book, From Existentialism and Phenomenology to Hermeneutics, provides a contextual background by examining some of the most significant sources of Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology. In the first chapter, “Ricoeur’s Early Approaches to the Ontological Question”, Marc-Antoine Vallée focuses on the existentialist influences on Ricoeur’s early approach to the ontological question. Although the understanding of the ontological question in Ricoeur is usually based on Ricoeur’s text The Conflict of Interpretations (1969), Vallée shows that before this text, Ricoeur considered the ontological question from a different point of view, in which the difference between, on the one hand, Heidegger and Sartre and, on the other, Jaspers and Marcel plays a central role.

In the second chapter, “Distanciation and Epoché: The Influence of Husserl on Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics”, Leslie MacAvoy shows that Ricoeur’s thinking is a hermeneutics that is capable of a critique of ideology. By pointing at the relation between Ricoeur’s conception of distanciation and Husserl’s conception of epoché, MacAvoy makes the differences between Gadamer’s and Ricoeur’s conception of hermeneutics visible. MacAvoy shows that Ricoeur’s philosophy can be characterised as doing hermeneutics without forgetting Husserl. Referring to the Gadamer-Habermas debate, MacAvoy argues that, because of the importance of distanciation or epoché, Ricoeur’s hermeneutics is better able to offer the possibility of a critique of tradition or ideology than Gadamer’s.

The final chapter of the first part is “Thinking the Flesh with Paul Ricoeur”, in which Richard Kearney suggests new directions for a carnal hermeneutics based on Ricoeur’s writings. Kearney shows that, while Ricoeur developed a phenomenology of the flesh in his early works, this focus disappears when Ricoeur in the 1960s starts concentrating more exclusively on a hermeneutics of the text. Starting from some reflections in Ricoeur’s final writings, which attempt to reanimate a dialogue between his initial phenomenology of the flesh and his hermeneutics of language, Kearney suggests new directions for a carnal hermeneutics in which the insights of a philosophy of embodiment and a philosophy of interpretation are brought together.

The second part of the book, Hermeneutic Phenomenology of the Self addresses the questions of the self and of our belonging to the world. In the chapter “Identity and Selfhood: Paul Ricoeur’s Contribution and Its Continuations” Claude Romano challenges Ricoeur’s idea that selfhood can be conceived as a form of identity. However, Romano does not suggest that Ricoeur’s conception of selfhood should be abandoned, but argues that we should seek a better way of understanding the relationship between selfhood and our qualitative identity.

“From a Genealogy of Selfhood: Starting from Paul Ricoeur”, the fifth chapter, explores the idea that otherness is constitutive of selfhood. Although Ricoeur distinguishes different kinds of otherness in Oneself as Another, Carmine Di Martino focuses on the otherness at work in the intersubjective relationship. By putting Ricoeur’s thought in dialogue with the works of Axel Honneth, René Spitz, and Jan Patočka, Di Martino shows how our belonging in the world is marked fundamentally by our relationships with others.

In the final chapter of the second part, “The World of the Text and the World of Life: Two Contradictory Paradigms?”, Michaël Foessel focuses on language and narrative as constitutive elements of our belonging to the world. By showing that reading is not only the interpretation of an objective meaning but also a central element of the understanding of the self, Foessel makes clear that textuality constitutes a fundamental dimension of our being in the world.

Hermeneutic Phenomenology of Tradition, Memory and History, the third part of the book, examines another aspect of alterity that constitutes the self, namely the influence of the past. In “Word, Writing, Tradition” Michael Sohn, just as Leslie MacAvoy, starts from the Gadamer-Habermas debate about tradition, but has a different approach from MacAvoy. Sohn demonstrates that the concept of tradition Ricoeur formulates within this debate goes back to Ricoeur’s earlier writings, specifically his critical engagement with French structuralism and philosophy of language. In this way, this chapter shows how Ricoeur’s philosophical ideas not only build on phenomenology and hermeneutics, but also arise to a great extent from his discussion with other schools of philosophy.

In the eighth chapter, “Involuntary Memory and Apprenticeship to Truth: Ricoeur Re-reads Proust”, Jeanne Marie Gagnebin joins Richard Kearney’s search for a carnal hermeneutics. Starting from Ricoeur’s interpretation of Proust in Time and Narrative, Gagnebin shows that Ricoeur’s reduced attention to embodiment in his later work results in an interpretation of In Search of Lost Time, in which the corporeal dimension of memory present in Proustian descriptions is not sufficiently emphasised.

The endeavour to connect embodiment to meaning is also present in the next chapter, “Memory, Space, Oblivion”, in which Luis António Umbelino shows that memory is not only a temporal experience, but also has an important spatial dimension.

A different approach to Ricoeur’s thinking about the past is offered by Pol Vandevelde in his chapter “The Enigma of the Past: Ricoeur’s Theory of Narrative as a Response to Heidegger”. In this chapter, Vandevelde tests the fruitfulness of Ricoeur’s conception of narrative as the guaranty of continuity between event and historical fact, by examining some events at the end of WWII and the nature of the delay that took place between the happening of these events and their recognition decades later as historical facts.

The last part of the book is dedicated to the Challenges and Future Directions for a Hermeneutic Phenomenology. In the first chapter of this final part, Marc de Launay focuses in “The Conflict of Hermeneutics” on Ricoeur’s permanent hesitation between two different approaches to hermeneutics, hermeneutics as philosophy and hermeneutics as method. According to de Launay, Ricoeur’s intention to reconcile these two different hermeneutics cannot be maintained in the end.

In “Intersectional hermeneutics” Scott Davidson states that Ricoeur’s commitment to structuralism poses a serious challenge for his hermeneutics. To surmount this problem, Davidson develops the interesting alternative in which intersectional theory takes over the role previously played by structuralism.

The two final chapters of the book both focus on Ricoeur’s hermeneutical theory of truth. Sebastian Purcell approaches this topic in “Hermeneutics and Truth: From Alètheia to Attestation” by contrasting Ricoeur’s approach with Heidegger’s, while Todd Mei constructs a unified theory of truth from various texts of Ricoeur.

It is clear that the book consists of very different approaches to Ricoeur, and in particular to the question of the interaction between his hermeneutics and his work in the school of phenomenology, both in terms of philosophical disciplines, framework and objectives. In this way, this book offers a good sample of the broad scope of Ricoeur’s philosophy, his historical relevance and the possible future of his thinking. The collected essays all stand on their own, although interesting parallels can be drawn between some of them, resulting in an enriched view on both the influence on and interaction of different philosophical schools in Ricoeur’s philosophy and between the different philosophical disciplines Ricoeur practiced. Although this book shows well Ricoeur’s attempt to find a certain cohesion between many different philosophical approaches and assumptions, the overarching theme of the book is not everywhere equally present. Some of the texts are able to offer a very clear account of how the interrelation between hermeneutics and phenomenology is at work in the development of some of Ricoeur’s philosophical idea’s, but other texts seem to address this question barely or not at all. Therefore, the central question of the book is maybe not dealt with explicitly enough in all the different chapters. Although the individual quality of the different essays in the book is outstanding, which makes the book already worth reading, this book therefore does not quite work as whole. The different chapters rather seem to offer a puzzle the reader needs to bring together to gain insight in the complex and diverse ways in which phenomenology and hermeneutics interact in Ricoeur’s thinking. This puzzle does justice to the complexity of this central question, but a more profound elaboration of the central topic would have been beneficial.

Andrew Inkpin: Disclosing the World: On the Phenomenology of Language

Disclosing the World: On the Phenomenology of Language Book Cover Disclosing the World: On the Phenomenology of Language
Andrew Inkpin
The MIT Press
2016
Hardcover $43.00
381

Reviewed by: Leen Verheyen (University of Antwerp)

Is there a need for a phenomenological approach in the philosophy of language? According to Andrew Inkpin’s Disclosing the World, phenomenology indeed offers a better account of the way we experience and perceive language than most contemporary philosophical approaches to language do.

In his exposition of the need for a phenomenology of language, Inkpin refers to certain kinds of experience that most contemporary philosophical approaches to language are unable to  apprehend, mostly due to “antecedent assumptions about what language should be like – the degree of systematicity or the form it should have, the epistemological function it is desired or perceived to play, how it connects with philosophy of mind or metaphysics, and so on – in a way leaving them peculiarly insensitive to the factors that speakers might perceive to be at work in different kinds of linguistic phenomena’ (p.4). Instead of drawing on some ‘ideal’ of language, Inkpin takes our experience of language as his starting point. By doing so, Inkpin wants to come to an understanding of language as ‘a process of articulation in the public space that plays a constitutive role in human actions and thought’ (p.5).

In his phenomenological approach to language, Inkpin elaborates a ‘minimalist conception of phenomenological method, defined by the basic commitment (…) to describe accurately how things appear or manifest themselves’ (p. 6). The development of this phenomenological conception draws extensively on the work of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Ludwig Wittgenstein. By combining the philosophical ideas of these three thinkers, Inkpin tries to come to a unified view, claiming that these three positions have the potential to complement one another. In particular, Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, offers a framework in which two aspects of language, the presentational and the pragmatic, are further developed by using Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein respectively.

The first part of the book sets out this Heideggerian framework and focuses on the ‘role Heidegger sees language having in the broader phenomenon of disclosure and a pattern of commitments that characterize his conception of language as a phenomenological one’ (p.25) As Inkpin himself notes, it is not obvious to focus on Sein und Zeit when discussing Heidegger’s view on language. Indeed, language became increasingly central in Heidegger’s philosophical work and his earlier work Sein und Zeit ‘had treated language as peripheral to his overall philosophical project and discussed it only in a dispersed and fragmentary manner’ (p.25). However, in Sein und Zeit Heidegger emphases the foundational role of understanding equipment in everyday practices. According to Inkpin, this yields a better account of the pragmatic aspect of language which will disappear in Heidegger’s later writings, but which is surely central to lived human experience of language.

In this first part, Inkpin addresses the role played by language in disclosure. Inkpin concentrates on Heidegger’s phenomenological conception of the world and his account of how human understanding of the world takes a determinate form, culminating in language. According to Inkpin, ‘Heidegger’s conception of language belongs to an overall picture of intentionality that centers on and is shaped by his idea of Dasein as being-in-the-world’ (p.54). Heidegger thus does not consider language as something with an inside-outside topology, but respects the various processes and phenomenal relations it is involved in. Starting from the idea that ‘in describing some phenomenon one must respect its character as unified whole’ (p. 55), Heidegger rejects attempts to conceive language in terms of symbolic forms, categories of meaning or the logic of propositions, because ‘picking out one of these aspects as the “essence of language” cannot yield a philosophically adequate understanding of language’ (p.55). Language is to be understood as embedded in the world.

After explaining the more general features of the Heideggerian framework Inkpin considers Heidegger’s view of the disclosing function of linguistic signs. According to Inkpin, Sein und Zeit ‘brings together two distinct factors in the articulation of lived meaning (…) each of which clearly features in our prereflective experience of language and has implications for the inferential properties that linguistic expressions manifest in sentential contexts’ (p. 90). Linguistic signs are thought of as bearers of both presentational and pragmatic sense. Linguistic signs are entities that ‘can reveal features of the world to us through either a proper appreciation of their presentational implications or a grasp of their pragmatic utility’ (p.90). However, Heidegger does not offer a detailed conception of each kind of sense, which leaves open the question of how the relation between presentational and pragmatic sense is to be understood. Inkpin therefore explores these two aspects by drawing on the philosophical works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Ludwig Wittgenstein respectively.

In the second part of the book, Inkpin therefore tries to come to a better understanding of the presentational aspect of language by discussing Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s view on language. This view considers language as a kind of ‘incarnate sense’, meaning that sense is generated by embodied agents living their lives. According to Merleau-Ponty, the use of linguistic signs is inseparable from what makes them meaningful: ‘the word, far from being the simple sign of objects and of meanings, inhabits things and is the vehicle of meanings’ (p.97). For Merleau-Ponty, language is primarily expressive behaviour and shares various features with painting. In literary language use, but also in translation, we are ‘attentive to the role of linguistic form in anchoring specific associations or nuances of meaning’ (p.153). In these kinds of contexts, linguistic signs are experienced ‘as literally the means of which thoughts are composed, as expressive “materials” that embody certain constraints’ (p.153). In this way linguistic signs can be seen as bearers of presentational sense.

Although Merleau-Ponty’s view on language offers the possibility to fill in one of the gaps that remained in the Heideggerian framework, Merleau-Ponty’s focus on expressive and creative language use seems to downplay the use of established language . At this point, Wittgenstein is brought in to discuss the pragmatic sense of linguistic signs. In contrast to both Heidegger and Merleau Ponty, Wittgenstein did not consider himself a phenomenologist. Without trying to interpret Wittgenstein as a phenomenological philosopher, Inkpin states that his conception of language is compatible with a phenomenological one. Therefore, Wittgenstein’s notion of language-games can be considered a way to understand the pragmatic sense of linguistic signs. In particular, the later Wittegenstein’s claim that practice constitutes meaning can be seen compatible with the approaches of both Heidegger and Wittgenstein, who both stressed the embeddedness of language in human practice and experience.

Combining Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein, Inkpin comes to an overall picture that ‘sees languages as embedded in human practice, in embodiment, and in their own semiotic horizon’ (p. 225). Within this framework the relation between pragmatic and presentational sense ‘should be thought of as one of symbiotic complementarity’ (p.227). According to Inkpin, the combination of these two distinct aspects of sense articulations provides a basis for explaining different kinds a phenomena related to the experience of language. This claim results in three important implications.

Firstly, Heidegger’s conception of the world questions the traditional opposition between realism and idealism. According to Heidegger, there is no gap ‘between the way the world appears to us in the perspective of our projects and the way the world is “in itself”, because ‘the expression ‘Being-in-the-world’ marks genuine and direct contact with our surroundings’ (p.234). Therefore, language does not have to be seen as representations that are standing between us and real objects, but as a way of being in contact with them. The embeddedness of language in other phenomena implies ‘that knowledge of language is not sui generis, but is intrinsically bound up with more general awareness of the world’ (p.243-244).

Secondly, the phenomenological approach shows the limitations of the semantics approach – the more mainstream philosophical approach to language. Semantics cannot be seen a self-sufficient functionality, because linguistic meaning is ontologically and functionally embedded in the world. Furthermore, the phenomenological approach shows that language should not be overrationalized and that thinking of language as a systematically ordered whole misrepresents the specific modes of intelligence that language use embodies.

Thirdly, Inkpin suggests that his descriptive phenomenology of language can be complemented with the explanatory approach of 4E cognitive science (approaches in cognitive science that emphasize the importance of the embodiment, embedding, enaction and extension of cognitive processes). Just as Inkpin’s phenomenology, 4E cognitive science is attentive to the role of things outside the head in understanding cognition. But the availability of a theory capable to offer some explanation  could make us wonder whether there is still need for a purely descriptive phenomenological approach to language. But Inkpin claims that 4E cognitive science needs phenomenological description of our experience of language, because this description has a role to play in identifying the constituent parts of embedded/enactive/extended cognitive systems.

Inkpin’s book therefore succeeds in showing the value of a phenomenological approach to language in relation to both mainstream approaches in philosophy of language and cognitive science. Inkpin’s approach points out the embeddedness of language and shows the need to complement the prevalent semantics approach with a phenomenological one. Furthermore, Inkpin stresses the need to see phenomenology and 4E cognitive sciences as complementary, undermining the unnecessary competition between science and philosophy. Inkpin grounds his approach on the work of three respected thinkers and tries to explain their ideas as clear as possible, while at the same time assigning them a place in his bigger framework. He does not try to give an overview of already existing phenomenological theories of language, but rather elaborates his own philosophical framework, building in Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein. This makes Disclosing the World much more than an interesting introduction to the philosophical ideas of these three thinkers on language. Inkpin’s book offers an interesting perspective on what a phenomenology of language could  be and why it should be necessary. Although it is not always as accessible as one would like it to be, this book is certainly a must read for everyone interested in philosophy of language.