The Ethics of Interpretation

This book discusses the ethical dimension of the interpretation of texts and events. Its purpose is not to address the
neutrality or ideological biases of interpreters, but rather to discuss the underlying issue of the intervention of
interpreters into the process of interpretation.
The author calls this intervention the “ethical” aspect of interpretation and argues that interpreters are neither
neutral nor necessarily activists. He examines three models of interpretation, all of which recognize the role that
interpreters play in the process of interpretation. In these models, the question of the truth or validity of
interpretation is dependent upon the attitude of interpreters. These three models are: (1) The principle of charity in
interpretation in the two different versions defended by Hans-Georg Gadamer and Donald Davidson; (2) The
production of truth, as developed by Paul Ricoeur and Michel Foucault; and (3) The regulative principle in
interpretation as formal validity claims – presented by Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas – and as benevolence or
love as an epistemic virtue – defended by Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher. The critical discussion
of these three models, which brings to the fore the different manners in which interpreters intervene in the process of
interpretation as persons, lays the foundations for an ethics of interpretation.
The Ethics of Interpretation will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in hermeneutics, 19th-
and 20th-century philosophy, literary theory, and cultural theory.

Pol Vandevelde is Professor of Philosophy at Marquette University, USA. He specializes in 19th- and 20th-century
European philosophy, theory of interpretation, critical theory, philosophy of knowledge, phenomenology, and
hermeneutics. He has translated or co-translated six books and is the author of three books including The Task of the
Interpreter: Text, Meaning, and Negotiation (2005) and Heidegger and the Romantics: The Literary Invention of
Meaning (Routledge, 2012, awarded the Prix Mercier from the Université de Louvain).
Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy

Philosophical Perspectives on Memory and Imagination

Anja Berninger and Íngrid Vendrell Ferran

Non-Ideal Foundations of Language

Jessica Keiser

Unconscious Networks
Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Artificial Intelligence
Luca M. Possati

Updating the Interpretive Turn

New Arguments in Hermeneutics
Edited by Michiel Meijer

Conservatism and Grace

The Conservative Case for Religion by Establishment
Sebastian Morello

The Ethics of Interpretation

From Charity as a Principle to Love as a Hermeneutic Imperative
Pol Vandevelde

The Nature and Practice of Trust

Marc A. Cohen

A Plea for Plausibility

Toward a Comparative Decision Theory
John R. Welch

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Studies-in-

Contemporary-Philosophy/book-series/SE0720
The Ethics of Interpretation
From Charity as a Principle to Love as a Hermeneutic Imperative

Pol Vandevelde
First published 2023
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158

and by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2023 Pol Vandevelde

The right of Pol Vandevelde to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without
intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-032-39015-4 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-39016-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-34800-9 (ebk)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003348009

Typeset in Sabon
by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.
Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: What Is the Ethics of Interpretation?

PART I
Two Versions of the Principle of Charity in Interpretation: Gadamer and Davidson

1 Gadamer’s Dialogical Interpretation 2 Davidson’s Radical Interpretation: Charity and Triangulation

PART II
Two Versions of a Poetics of Truth in Interpretation: Ricoeur and Foucault

3 Ricoeur’s Interpretive Truth: Attestation 4 Foucault’s Interpretive Truth: Parrhesia

PART III
Two Versions of What Regulates Interpretation: Validity Claims and Love

5 The Ethics of Discussion: Karl-Otto Apel’s Program

6 Benevolence or Love as Both a Moral and Epistemic Virtue

Conclusion: Love as a Hermeneutic Imperative

Works Cited
Index
Acknowledgments

This book is the result of several years of research and some of this research has been published in articles and book
chapters. These publications have been significantly reformulated, amended, rearranged, and complemented to form
a coherent project. Some of the material used in the first section of Chapter 1 was used, with significant differences
and with a difference purpose, in “Language and ontology,” in “Translators’ Introduction,” in Hans-Georg Gadamer,
Ethics, Aesthetics and the Historical Dimension of Language: The Selected Writings of Hans-Georg Gadamer
Volume II, ed. and trans. Pol Vandevelde and Arun Iyer. London: Bloomsbury, 2022, xi–xxiv. Some of the material
used in Chapter 3 was used, with significant changes and a different purpose in “Two French Variations on Truth:
Ricoeur’s Attestation and Foucault’s ‘Parrhesiastic’ Attitude,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 46,
1 (2015), 33–47 and “The Enigma of the Past: Ricoeur’s Theory of Narrative as a Response to Heidegger,” in
Hermeneutics and Phenomenology in Paul Ricoeur: Between Text and Phenomenon, ed. Scott Davidson and Marc-
Antoine Vallée. Dordrecht: Springer, 2016, 123–139. Some material used in Sections 5.1 and 5.3 of Chapter 5 was
used with significant changes in “Karl-Otto Apel’s Critique of Heidegger,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 38
(2000), 651–75 and in “Strengths and Limitations of Discourse Ethics: The Contribution of Karl-Otto Apel,”
Philosophy Today 54/2 (2010), 153–164 respectively. Some material used in Sections 6.2.1 and 6.3.2.1 of Chapter 6
was used with significant changes in “Charity in Interpretation: Principle or Virtue? A Return to Gregory the Great,”
American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 95, 3 (2021), 505–26 and “The Romantic Hermeneutic Ideal of
‘Understanding Better’ as an Ethical Imperative” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 94
(2020): 91–107, respectively.
As for any project of the size of a book, there are too many people to be thanked. I can only mention a few. The
overall formulation of the project of an ethics of interpretation was presented in five seminars at the Indian Institute
of Technology in Mumbai (IIT Bombay) at the invitation of Professor Arun Iyer in 2018. I want to thank him and
the institute for giving me this great opportunity of testing my ideas in a lively and rigorous forum. I also want to
recognize the help I received from my research assistants, Mehrzad Moin and Nicholas Korchowsky, whose critical
mind and attention to detail significantly contributed to the improvement of the manuscript. I also benefitted from
the judicious advice and editing of John Meech, with whom I discussed some parts of the book. I want to thank
Jonmarc Bennett for his help in composing the Index. Finally, two anonymous reviewers of Routledge provided
valuable comments for qualifying some claims and complementing some discussions.
Introduction
What Is the Ethics of Interpretation?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003348009-1

In this book I show how interpretation, whether of texts or events, has an ethical aspect due to the fact that
interpreters, no matter how serious and rigorous they may be, intervene in the interpretive process. While the
methodologies for interpreting texts and for interpreting events are quite different – I treated the case of the
interpretation of texts in a previous book (Vandevelde 2005) – the ethical activity of interpreting is in my view of
the same kind. The interpreters’ intervention is motivated and informed by the interpreters’ own experiences, in their
cultural and historical situations. This is the first ethical aspect of interpretation. At the same time, as an
intervention, interpretation takes place in a community, with its norms and values, for example about what truth is or
about truthfulness or about what is appropriate. Interpreters are submitted to these standards and norms, and will be
held accountable to them by the community, colleagues, and readers: Did they tell the truth or is it bad scholarship?
Are they sincere or are they promoting an ideology? Is it appropriate to offer such an interpretation? This is the
second ethical aspect of interpretation. Yet, these standards and norms remain relative to the community to which
interpreters belong. A claim to tell the truth is not a commitment to serve the truth. Sometimes, interpreters are
willing to challenge the standards and norms of their community for the sake of the work or the event they interpret.
This commitment to serve the work or the event and provide it with a future is the third ethical aspect of
interpretation. Interpreters can thus be attracted by a certain good – to keep the work or the event relevant and
meaningful – because this also serves the future of the community. This attraction which draws interpreters to want
the work to continue to be and to serve the work is what I call “love” or “benevolence.” What I propose in this book
is a hermeneutics based on love or benevolence, in which love functions as a hermeneutic imperative. Before I can
develop the argument and discuss the different ethical aspects of interpretation, the very notion of interpretation as
an intervention needs to be contextualized and clarified.
In the past decades, we have seen rather significant changes in how we approach philosophical or literary texts,
as well as events, whether it is the changes in the reading lists in university curricula or the removal of monuments
from public places. There is an acute sensitivity to perceived prejudices in how philosophical or literary texts have
been interpreted and how history has been taught. However one takes this perception, these changes remind us that
interpreters are involved in the process of interpretation and that this involvement affects the content of the
interpretation. The many new voices re-reading the canonic works of our culture and re-writing history from
different perspectives have challenged the commonsense view on interpretation. This view, whether it is about texts
or events, considers that interpretation is a meta-discourse about a text or an event that already has an identity of its
own through its articulation, in words and sentences (in the case of a text) or in physical movements and gestures (in
the case of an event). This commonsense view assumes that, no matter what the social and cultural situation of
interpreters is, they can claim to transcend their own social and cultural situation and can achieve a form of
neutrality in making explicit the articulation that the object already has.
The new voices and new approaches in the humanities in the last decades have depicted this view as ideological
insofar as interpreters who present themselves as neutral simply replicate the biases of the established views. The
idea that interpreters can transcend their own situation, it is claimed, is only a façade aimed, consciously or not, at
silencing alternate or underrepresented voices. The remedy that critics propose against these biases is precisely to
acknowledge the importance of the identity of the interpreters because this identity is determinant, either as a bias to
be countered or a former silence to be heard.
The purpose of this book is not to take side and defend any of the different views on interpretation but precisely
to examine the role interpreters play in interpretation – what I call their “intervention” – and thus the ethical aspect
of interpretation. Interpreters intervene in their interpretation and have an effect on how interpretation is done –
against the neutrality-thesis on interpretation – but this intervention is not necessarily ideological, either as a bias or
as a corrective to such bias. I characterize this intervention as “ethical” in order to show that interpretation needs to
be conducted in a certain attitude precisely in order to prevent it from being ideological, whether by default – neutral
interpreters are those who do not see their own assumptions – or by reaction – some standpoints are politically
legitimate whereas others are not.
I consider the fundamental question of what interpretation is to be twofold: First, how to move, on the one hand,
from the physics of reality (in the case of events) or the materiality of the letters (in the case of texts) to the
semantics of interpretation, on the other; and second, what the success criterion is that will determine whether the
interpretation is correct, valid, or admissible, whatever qualification we may choose. My concern is not about how to
interpret but about what is involved in the process of interpretation and what it consists of.
Regarding the first fundamental question of moving from physics to semantics, it is certainly beyond question
that the object itself, whether text or event, is a “something” that interpreters choose as their object. So, it exists and
is real. This is obvious in the case of texts, where words have been put into sentences and sentences into sequences
to form an articulation that we call an article, a treatise, or a novel. This also holds true in the case of actions or
events, in which a chunk of physical movements and gestures has coalesced into something that we can recognize
and investigate. This has led to the view that interpretation may disappear once it has done its work, so as to let the
object of interpretation “speak by itself,” as if interpretation were a neutral device, which would be more like an
adjuvant to the revelation of the object and the fact.
Yet, the minimal articulation that the object is “in itself” only becomes explicit when it is taken by another kind
of discourse, an interpretation. Because words only have a meaning when used within sentences and sentences only
mean something against a background determining who speaks and what may be meant, all these elements require
interpretation. Similarly, because the protagonists in an event had intentions when performing gestures and
movements, either individually or collectively, interpretation is the space of intelligibility where these elements fall
into place in a meaningful way so as to form an event. The terms used to characterize what interpretation does when
“taking” an object – that interpretation brings out or confers a meaning, a meaningfulness, or a significance – point
out the complexity of the relationship between interpretation and its object, as well as the difficulty of separating out
what comes from interpreters and what comes from the object.
Given that the relation between interpretation and its object is a relation between two articulations, interpretation
cannot be prescriptive: A second-order discourse (interpretation) cannot substitute itself for the text or the event,
which already has an articulation of its own. At the same time, interpretation cannot claim to be a mere description
of what the text or the event in itself means because neither the sequence of sentences in a text nor the physical
articulation in terms of events is powerful enough to dictate how interpretation should proceed. We thus have a
peculiar interaction between a first-order discourse that is re-articulated in its meaningfulness by a second-order
discourse, the latter being written for specific audiences, often distant from the original perspective, whose needs,
interests, and sensitivities change in the course of time.
We only need to think of how we relate to our own history, revisiting, as we say, what past events meant, as
indicated by the building of monuments and their removal at other periods of time, as well as by the re-writing of
our history books in the form of ever new accounts of the same texts or the same historical events. On the one hand,
there is no question that there is a “sameness” between the events commemorated by a monument at one time (thus
interpreted in a certain way) and lamented at another time by the removal of such monument (thus interpreted
differently). Similarly, interpreters of Plato, for example, whether trained in Anglo-Saxon philosophy, French
philosophy, or German neo-Kantianism, agree about “what” they interpret, despite the often incompatible meanings
they claim to find in Plato’s texts, leaving us with the impression that there are as many Platos as there are schools
of interpretation.
This fact that the relation between interpretation and its object is a connection between two articulations is
clearly at the origin of the richness of interpretation theory, allowing theorists of interpretation to adopt many
different views, for example on what interpretation is and consists of, or which articulation (of the object or of the
interpretation) takes precedence over the other, with all intermediary positions. Yet, it does not quite explain what
interpretation actually does and what guides it in its work.
One analogy may be useful to visualize the complexity of how interpretation relates to its object: The mapping
of a landscape, mapping corresponding to interpreting. Both the map and the landscape have their own articulation,
the map explicitly through discursive means and the landscape physically through its layout. Yet, as any map user
knows, there cannot be full adequacy between what is physical and what is discursive. The connection cannot be
simply a copying of components of the landscape into components of the maps, because the former only appear as
salient or specific through some attitude of observers, who see them as relevant and significant enough to be brought
out in a map. This even applies to the very notion of a “landscape,” as it is already the taking of some physical stuff
“as” a meaningful arrangement. For example, a map may only record specific parts of a forest if they are populated
by specific and valued species of trees or if it is the habitat of a valued species of birds. Otherwise, that specific part
of the forest will be merged in the overall green of the map.
Instead of a copy, the relation between a map and a landscape consists of an overall matching, attaching to each
other at the edges, serving a specific function, specified by the interests, needs, and goals of the map users (for
driving, biking, hiking, prospecting, military exercise, etc.). Neither does the map directly impress its own
articulation on the landscape nor does the landscape directly ordain the mapping. Yet, no matter how much the
mapping may be an articulation of the landscape, guided by the interests and needs of those who write and use the
maps, the map remains “about” the landscape, bound by it and locked onto it. Conversely, no matter how much the
landscape constrains and even directs the mapping, the landscape itself is not explicit enough to dictate how it will
be mapped. Mapping is neither prescriptive nor merely descriptive.
This analogy between map and interpretation points out the ambivalent status of the object mapped or
interpreted. A landscape has a physical layout and yet this layout cannot be directly accessed as such, neutrally,
independently of human interests, needs, and goals. By going to see a specific landscape and looking at it, visitors
will read off the physical layout in its specific aspects and saliencies according to their interests, needs, background,
etc. For example, do all the trees in that landscape belong to the same clump or are some of them distinctive? Are
these boulders just randomly scattered or are they already part of the greater Andes mountains? The same kind of
questions bear upon a text or an event. For example, the book containing the text that we know as The Odyssey is
not the work itself. The book is written, for most of us, in a translation and even if we read it in ancient Greek, we
will need to know what to do with it in order to make sense of it (that it is an ancient text, a fiction, a plot with a
thread, etc.). Before being written, it was part of an oral tradition in which this work also performed a political role
of “educating” Greece, as Plato says about Homer (Republic 606e, 1987, 463), providing not only the set of values
and models for a social life in times of constant wars, but also the standard of literary forms. The same question
applies to an event: What is World War I? People living through it did not have the same grasp of the “event” as
those who reconstructed the facts afterward. Sociologists studying the effects of the disappearance of a whole
generation in France in the aftermath of that war may not see the same event as political analysts studying the
reconfiguration of Europe caused by this war. There is thus a difference in status between the object that is to be
interpreted and the interpreted object, despite the fact that they are claimed to be the same.
Besides the question of moving from the physics of events to the semantics of interpretation, the second
fundamental question about what interpretation is concerns the existence of a success criterion by which to assess
the validity or correctness of an interpretation. The debate in interpretation theory tends to focus only on the
normative dimension of what interpretation says about its object: It must be true, admissible, valid, or do justice to
its object. Usually, the debate about the validity of an interpretation separates those who believe that there is one true
or correct interpretation of a text or historical event and those who claim that there may be several equally valid or
admissible interpretations of the same text or event.1 As Gadamer puts it, “one side believes that understanding and
interpretation are unchanging tasks and is only skeptical about the possibility of fulfilling these tasks; the other side
goes so far as to elevate ‘plurivocity’ to a methodological principle” (2022, 55). Both camps in fact agree that there
is an authority external to the text or the event. For the first camp, the authority is usually the author (through the
intended meaning) and we may surmise that, in the case of events, it would be the agents. For the second camp,
readers have authority through their response to the text in the way it is meaningful to them.
In the theory of interpretation focusing specifically on texts, there are variations in the first position, sometimes
called “monism” or “singularism,” according to the different understandings of what an author is. It can be the
historical writer (as the person who was the efficient cause of the work), the author (as a principle of unity behind
the work, allowing interpreters to make connections between works written by the same “author”), the posited
author (as what readers or interpreters imagine in order to build their own understanding), etc.2 There is as much
variation in the second camp, sometimes called “pluralism,” “critical pluralism,” “constructivism,” or “multiplism.”3
What is remarkable is that this opposition between monism and pluralism does not find much of an echo in the
practice of interpreters, who seem to accept that there are legitimate alternative translations or interpretations,
alongside pluralism, while still believing with monists that the original text itself is what guides and constrains those
translations and interpretations, as well as what allows interpreters and translators to criticize the works of others.
My critique of the debate between monism and pluralism in a previous book (2005) was pragmatic in the sense of
confronting theories of interpretation with what practitioners actually do in their practice of interpretation.
In the present book, I want to explain why this debate about the validity of interpretation is based on the false
assumption that the object to be interpreted is separated from interpretation, either because interpreters believe that it
is available as such prior to being taken as an object by interpretation (for most monists) or because interpreters
produce their own objects of interpretation through their perspectives, methodologies, targeted audiences, etc. (for
most pluralists). In the latter case, the text or the event is like a frame that needs additional layers so as to become
meaningful. The question of validity would thus be understood differently if we believe that there is only one
possible correct interpretation or if we believe that several interpretations may be correct.
For pluralists, validity, truth, admissibility are terms that do not bear upon the vertical connection between the
interpretive discourse and its object but rather upon the lateral connection between the interpretive discourse and the
audience in terms of relevance, significance, meaningfulness, and the like. The criterion of validity is not a success
criterion of interpreting an object correctly but rather a success criterion of offering an interpretation that will fit
within the overall social, cultural, and political discourses as, for example, validating (or failing to do so) some
groups’ experiences, giving voice to some underrepresented groups, etc.
For monists, validity is only meaningful, i.e., intelligible, as a qualification of interpretation on the basis of a
common level of meaning, usually called the “literal meaning,” to which interpreters can go back so that they can
assess whether this or that interpretation “correctly” renders the literal meaning available to all. Whether we believe
that the literal meaning is available as such at the surface of the words (of sentences in a text) or the physical
movements (of an event) or whether we believe that it is only a necessary support for interpretation, not available as
such independently of interpretation but not made up by interpreters, the literal meaning represents the commonly
available level of meaning on the basis of which it is possible, first, to see what interpreters did with it and how they
“interpreted” it and, second, whether what interpreters did is legitimate or valid or admissible. However, this notion
of literal meaning is fraught with difficulties.
It is usually believed that the “literal” meaning of a sentence is the sum of the meanings of the components of
that sentence, given the sentence markers, such as negation, conditional, conjunction, etc. But this could only work
if the individual components themselves had a literal meaning of their own, directly readable by anybody knowing
the language. What we call the “meaning” of a word is in fact a reconstruction made on the basis of how this word
has been used repeatedly in analogous contexts. It is what a particular linguistic community takes the word to mean,
given the present state of the linguistic system of the language used. Because contexts may change in the course of
time, based, for example, on changes in the sensitivity of the linguistic community, the meaning of a word can
change although the word is still there, the “same,” in some way, and yet different. For example, the meaning of the
word “man” has changed since the 1950s, losing its generic meaning of “human being,” which it had for centuries
after the Old English word wer (meaning “male human being”) disappeared. Now, the meaning of “man” has been
confined to the meaning of “male human being.” While for someone now, in US academe, the use of the word
“man” in the generic sense of “human being” would be perceived as insensitive, it would be an anachronism –
although commonly made – to characterize – solely on the basis of such usage – authors prior to 1950 as “gender
insensitive” or “sexist,” simply because writers prior to the 1950s would not have been understood (nor published) if
they had used expressions, such as “he or she,” “s/he” or “they” as anaphoric to a singular term. Similarly, we can
only determine the literal meaning of the expression “vegetable love” if we know when the sentence was written or
uttered and in what context. It may mean a love that is cultivated and grows, as in Andrew Marvell’s 17th century
poem “To His Coy Mistress” (Marvell, ND) or a love of vegetables in Barbara Kafka’s 2005 cookbook.
This view that the literal meaning of a word depends on the context was already recognized by the medieval
Christian Bible interpreters (who are usually not taken as pluralists!). As they theorized it, the text is made of
different layers of meaning and while the literal meaning, which they also called the historical meaning, is at the
basis of the other meanings, what is literal depends itself on the “spirit” in which the text is read. The literal meaning
of a biblical text will be quite different for readers who are Christian or pagan. Hugh of Saint-Victor listed the works
that one would need to have read in order to understand the literal meaning4. These medieval interpreters, especially
Gregory the Great, recognized a certain circularity in meaning.5 Meanings are understood in terms of other
meanings.
We find an interesting effort to avoid this circularity in E. D. Hirsch who proposes a distinction between
“meaning” and “significance,” the former being what the text says and the latter what readers may see in it (Hirsch
1967, 31). This allowed him to defend his own sophisticated version of monism insofar as interpreters are bound by
the literal meaning, which is available to all interpreters, even if they attribute a different significance to this
meaning. However, against this attractive distinction, it remains that the text’s literal meaning does not give itself in
its pure uninterpreted state but only in how it is meaningful – thus, in its significance – to those who read it. It is
because a text speaks to interpreters that they will try to find out what it means “literally.”6 This interpretation of the
literal meaning through its significance explains, for example, why some authors may move from fame to oblivion,
no longer “speaking” to us, and other authors considered passés may regain interest or may be rediscovered,
becoming actual again.
 Monism and pluralism often share a common rejection of the circularity of meaning, each side wanting to anchor
it in some recognizable foundation, whether it is what the text or the event literally means or whether it is the
meaningfulness or significance the audience will “read” into it. Yet, this circularity of meaning is hard to ignore for
the simple reason that the “meaning” of a text or a sentence or a word is not some form of “entity.” As mentioned
above, in the case of a word, the meaning is an abstraction as a reconstruction of the different uses of the word in
different contexts. Let us just read the meaning of “tomato” in the Webster dictionary, where it is said that a tomato
is “the usually large, rounded, edible, pulpy berry of an herb (genus Solanum) of the nightshade family native to
South America that is typically red but may be yellow, orange, green, or purplish in color and is eaten raw or cooked
as a vegetable.”7 Now, let us look at an empiricist description of a tomato, offered by H. H. Price who tells us that a
tomato is “a red patch of a round and somewhat bulgy shape, standing out from a background of other colour-
patches, and having a certain visual depth, and that this whole field of colour is directly present to my
consciousness” (1932, 3). This kind of empiricist description could be applied to an event too. A simple practical
test would quickly show that the Webster dictionary’s lexical definition or Price’s empiricist description are
abstractions. Ask any reader to determine what this definition or this description is about – what object it picks out –
and the time it will take them to guess will show that they are mentally entertaining several possible candidates that
may come close to this definition or this description.
This guessing minimally shows that the definition or the description does not “give” the tomato directly. The
first one is a “definition” and summarizes the common attributes that distinguish this fruit (considered practically by
most as a vegetable) from others. The second summarizes the sense data we experienced when seeing a tomato in
the form of a cluster. Thus, in order to understand the definition or the description, one already needs to have some
awareness of the “thing” called tomato or other things connected to it or analogous to it. In all cases, the basis for the
success of the definition or the description is practical. This level of experience is precisely what allows us to escape
the vicious circularity of definitions, which have to explain words by using other words assumed to be already
understood, as well as the vicious circularity of descriptions, which have to use referential terms whose referents are
assumed to be known (what “red” or “patch” mean. etc.).
If even the definition or the description of a so-called “object-word” like “tomato” already presupposes a level of
common understanding, this is even more so in the case of objects that are themselves an explicit articulation, such
as a sentence or a text or an event.8 The sentence “A tomato is a nutrient-dense superfood that offers benefit to a
range of bodily systems”9 cannot just be the sum of the individual components for the simple reason that any of the
components can mean many different things not related to what the person uttering the sentence meant. “Superfood”
does not refer to one unique “thing” or set of things. “Bodily” as a word means “of or related to the body” and does
not just refer to the physiology of human beings. The meaning of the words has to be understood “in the context of”
what the sentence or the text is meant to convey. The meaning of a word as an abstraction is rather a set of relations,
just as the meaning of an event is the set of the relations interpreters may see between the different components of
this event.
To say that the meaning of a word or an event is a set of relations points to two layers in what we call the
meaning of a text or an event. We can emphasize the set of relations as an entity – the result of these relations once
established, for example the meaning of a word as a semantic unit; or we can emphasize the establishing of the
relations as an active process – the verbal sense of “meaning,” for example when we say that a text or an event
“means” something. Besides the meaning that words have on their own in a sentence or a text (through grammatical
rules) or the meaning that physical movements and gestures conventionally have in specific connections (in an
event), the other layer of meaning consists in the manner in which the first meanings are taken. It is a reminder –
however obvious the case may be – that we do not understand the meaning of a sentence simply by reading the
words. We need to contextualize them or read them “in the context of” the sentence or the text in which they appear.
Any sentence, if left uncontextualized, can give rise to a multiplication of meanings to the point of absurdity or
poetry. Chomsky’s sentence “colorless green ideas sleep furiously” (2001, 15), which he meant as an example of a
non-sensical but grammatically correct sentence, can be re-contextualized, for example by being inserted in a poem,
as John Hollander and Angus Mclntosh did, independently of each other.10 The sentence then becomes
“meaningful,” in the minimal sense that a context gives traction to the readers’ search for meaning. Similarly,
understanding the Treaty of Versailles as an event cannot be confined to understanding the sum of the different
physical movements, gestures, intentions that constituted the event. All these components have to be “taken” “with
regard to” what was intended, what was achieved, what was set into motion, etc. What the Treaty “means” in the
verbal sense is not explainable by the “meanings” of the individual components of the event and yet, the meaning in
the verbal sense would not materialize without the meanings of the components.
We thus have a complex interaction between “meaning” as a semantic component – what the words individually
mean or what the physical movements individually mean – and “meaning” in the verbal sense of “meaning
something” – what the words in the specific concatenation of this sentence (or this text) together mean or what the
specific sequence of physical movements, gestures, and acts mean. Meaning in the verbal sense is mental insofar as
it is abstract and only exists in being communicated in some form of articulation. But it is not necessarily confined
to mental acts or mental states. When we say that an event “means” something, it is not intentional as what a specific
mind means or what a specific mind understands. This also applies to what writers mean, which cannot be confined
to the individual skull of the writer because of the public nature of the articulation provided by the writer. Such
public articulation, being intelligible and intersubjective, is also cultural and historical, all factors that cannot be
determined by an individual mind.
The term “sense” can name this interaction between the verbal notion of “meaning something” and the linguistic
or physical materialization of this “meaning something.” When we say negatively that something does not “make
sense,” we usually mean a non-sequitur or a gap between some meanings that we can detect and the overall context
in which they occur. The sense is what confers on the meanings of words (in a sentence or a text) or the meanings of
physical movements and gestures (in an event) their right place in a sequence that becomes meaningful, i.e., that,
literally, “makes sense” and thus can be understood at the mental level.
There is a certain interchangeability in English between “meaning” and “sense.” We can speak of the “meaning”
of the Treaty of Versailles, for example, but this meaning, as we saw, is not understood as a content in terms of units
of meaning, such as linguistic or logical meanings, but rather as the sense this event has or the sense it made, that is
to say, the role or impact or import of this treaty in the unfolding of events. Similarly, in the case of a word, when
we wonder whether the word has such meaning in the context of this sentence, we are not talking about the lexical
meaning as it can be found in a dictionary but about its use by someone in a specific context. The sense results from
the fact that the meanings of the words or of the physical movements are arranged in a certain way so that the
sentence or the event “means” something in the verbal sense of the word. As we saw above, this sense (as active
meaning based on the meanings of its components) can be intentional, as in the case of words or sentences (what
someone meant when using this word or this sentence) or non-intentional, as when we say that the Treaty of
Versailles meant the continuation of the trouble in Europe.
We become acutely aware of this difference between meaning (in the linguistic sense) and sense (as the result of
“meaning” in the verbal sense) when we translate from a foreign language. De Saussure reminded us that languages
are not nomenclatures or sets of designations referring to the same entities in the world so that there is no one-to-one
correspondence between words of different languages (de Saussure 1985, 144f). When trying to figure out the
meaning of a particular German word as written in a text, we realize that there is no single unique word in English
that would perfectly correspond to this German word. One important stage in learning a foreign language consists
precisely in abandoning the view that one could always find in one’s own native language the exact word that would
match this foreign word – this is usually called “translating in one’s language.” Instead, we have to find a word or a
paraphrase in English that will render not just the linguistic meaning of the German word but more importantly the
usage that this German word has in the context of the sentence in which it appears, which is what de Saussure calls
the “value” of the word (1985, 150f). We need to find a word in English that goes in the same sense as the original
German word.
Because the sense as the result of a meaning in the verbal sense bears upon the use of the word in a lived context,
it is not exclusively linguistic. Yet, because an active act of meaning can only be recognizable, identifiable, and thus
intelligible when articulated in linguistic meanings, the sense is not exclusively mental or psychological. We could
say that interpretation as what reveals the sense of a text or an event is a function (in the mathematical sense), which
assigns their meanings to the semantic units of a sentence or the components of an event. The advantage of using the
mathematical notion of function for describing the relation of meaning in the verbal sense with meaning as a
linguistic unit is that it avoids any psychologism or intentionalism that would reduce linguistic meanings to what a
mind or psyche “meant to say.”
As a function, interpretation retrieves from all the possible linguistic meanings of a word the specific one that is
to be assigned to this word used in this sentence and in this context; or it assigns to the different components of the
event their specific role, fitting with other events and other accounts given, so that we can make sense of this event.
By operating like a function (mathematically speaking), interpretation reveals what the text or the event “mean” (in
the active sense of the verb) and this is what we call the “sense.” The sense is thus the result or the yield of the
“function” of interpretation.
Because the sense does not exist in itself independently of any materialization, it cannot be substituted for the
semiotic articulation of this verbal meaning. Writers may well say after the publication of their work that a particular
interpretation misunderstood them or misrepresented them, but they can only add to what is published a new
articulation of what they meant in the form of an explanation or a qualification or a retraction. They cannot point to
their published words and claim that the sense of what they meant is self-evident in the words. This notion of
function applies even more clearly to an event, which becomes such only when the components coalesce into a
whole that gains saliency and forces itself on the historical stage as “meaning” something, given its place, causal
role, or recognition at a specific time.
The task of interpretation is to determine the sense of a text or an event or what a text or an event means.
Interpretation does this in the manner of a mathematical function that will assign to words and sentences or physical
movements and gestures their meanings, given the specific contexts in which they are used or appear. Because the
meanings of the components may change in the course of time and because what a context is is itself a matter of
evaluation or interpretation, the function cannot be rigid. First, it deals or operates with changeable “values”: What
the meanings of the components are and what the contexts are. The act of Gavrilo Princip takes a different sense
when “read” as the political assassination of the Archduke of Austria in Sarajevo in 1914, as an act of opposition to
an occupying force by a young radical, as an aggression by a pro-Serbia terrorist, or as the cause of the deaths of
twenty million people during World War I.
Second, the function itself can also change, that is to say: The arrangement of the individual meanings of a text
or the individual components of an event can vary. In the course of the years, some books have been banned from
circulation, whether because they were suspicious to some authorities, such as Descartes’s works, which were put on
the catholic Church’s Index prohibitorum librorum (“List of prohibited works”) for some years after his death, or
because their language is no longer admissible, such as Mark Twain’s (unless edited by Alan Gribben, 2011), or
because some aspects of the authors’ personal life is offensive to some audiences, such as Hemingway’s. In order to
account for this changeable nature of the function, we can exploit the connotation of “direction” that is included in
the word “sense.” “In the sense of X” means both “in terms of X” and “in the direction indicated by X.” This notion
of direction points out the fact that interpretation itself is situated in a certain time and in a certain historical and
cultural milieu, and this milieu will give interpretation its directional sense. The function, which is what
interpretation is and which operates in a historical and cultural milieu, yields a sense that is itself historically
situated.
We could say that the sense as the yield of a function is part of an orientation in the world, as Dilthey and Jaspers
understood the expression. Dilthey explains this orientation in the world by using a beautiful formula. He writes:
“Every square planted with trees, every room in which chairs are arranged, is understandable to us from the top of a
kid’s legs.” I have left this last italicized expression von Kindesbeinen ab in its literal meaning, whereas it is
normally translated by “from childhood” (1958, 208; 2002, 229–230). It is indeed from the top of a kid’s legs,
through our embodiment from early on, that we found our orientation in the world and it is at the measure of those
kid’s legs that the world and things made sense to us.
Given the particular way interpreters find their bearing in the world, the manner in which they will understand
the sense of a text or an event will distribute the specific meanings of the words used in the text or the specific
components of an event (physical movements, gestures, etc.) in a specific manner. The connotation of direction and
orientation in the world pertaining to the notion of “sense” puts this notion on the side of experience or of what is
“lived.” The sense is of the order of life. Jorge Semprun lamented the fact that the French language does not have an
active term to name the “lived” (in French, le vécu) – and the same can be said about English. We say “lived” in the
sense of what is passed, as that of which we had an experience. By contrast, Semprun notes, in German we can say
in the active sense Erlebnis and in Spanish vivencia. Both terms are transitive: a “living through.” The sense as the
yield of a function (understood mathematically) has this active and transitive characters of operating in life and
being an experiencing.
Instead of consisting in bringing out contents of meaning, interpreting the sense of a text or an event (in the
manner of a mathematical function assigning values to variables) consists in revealing a particular pattern of
relations that readers will understand as something that is experienceable in a meaningful way. Interpretation
revives, as it were, the setting up of the relations by revealing a pattern. We experience this negatively when we read
commentaries on particularly difficult writers, such as Hegel or Heidegger, which use the same kinds of words as
the authors themselves, giving us, readers, some contents of meaning but without showing us what it all “means.”
We are not shown patterns of relations that would allow us to connect these works to our experiences. In this case,
interpretation fails to revive the texts. In this regard, Gadamer describes how he, Leo Strauss, and other students
were fascinated by the young Heidegger in the early 1920s when he made Aristotle and other philosophers alive
again through his interpretation, making old texts speak directly to a contemporary audience (Gadamer 2022, 160).
The need for interpreters to take the meanings in a certain sense is also crucial in the case of literature. Let us
take E. E. Cummings’ verses

since your mind has walked into

my kiss as a stranger
 into the streets and colours of a town.
(1994, 68)

The sense of these verses is not given just by the sum of the meanings of the words, which would lead to a strange
picture of ascribing the physical function of “walking” to a mind and a physical space to a kiss. Interpretation needs
to assign particular meanings following the direction (“in the direction”) of the interpreter’s (and their readers’)
experiences. The sense that results is what is lived in what is described (the meaning in the verbal sense of what it
means), for example, in this case, the fact that a person can irrupt into the life of another person and emotionally
unsettle that life, taking possession of it like walking casually in an unknown city. When we understand such a sense
(whatever it may be), we redeem the linguistic meanings of the words used by E.E. Cummings in experiential terms,
given what we know about love and its expressions, emotions, and commotions.
Interpretation thus consists in redeeming linguistic meanings in terms of experience or assigning to linguistic
meanings the value of experiential terms. The sense resulting from this interpretation consists in taking words and
sentences in a certain direction indicated by lived experiences. This points to the active role of interpreters, who
disclose the meanings of what they interpret by intervening in the process of interpretation. This intervention is the
reason why it can be spoken of an “ethics” of interpretation. As announced at the beginning, I see three aspects of
this ethical nature of interpretation.

0.1 First ethical aspect: The involvement of interpreters

A first ethical aspect is that interpreters are present with their experiences in the text interpreted, as we saw.
Interpreters are not decoders or recorders of a text’s meaning or of an event but participate in the very activity of
interpreting by importing into it elements that do not strictly pertain to the text or the event, but assist in letting the
text or event speak to us in the present. They intervene in interpretation by using their experiences (with their
interests and needs, goals and aspirations) as the exchange values for the linguistic meanings they interpret. Or we
could say that they convert linguistic meanings found in the text into an account that speaks to them and their
readers, that is significant for them, in short, that “makes sense” to them. Interpretation is an activity, just as in the
case of drawing a map in the analogy used above.
Drawing a map is an activity involving decisions and choices, for example bringing attention to a particular
chunk of land for a particular purpose. So far, for example, we do not have detailed maps of the moon or Mars,
because we do not have stakes there and no headlines lamenting catastrophic events on Uranus, devastated by winds
of speeds over 500 miles an hour. This will change if we keep a presence in those faraway places and have stakes in
what will become “events” in these places.11 Mapping is thus a performance in the form of an intervention. The map
designers are “present” in their maps, as Google maps clearly show us by giving us the street viewpoint, as taken by
employees at a specific time and a specific place, no matter how much they try to disappear from the mapping.
Interpreters are similarly present in their interpretation. By their performance of providing an interpretation and
importing their experiences in the very activity of interpretation, they manifest certain needs and interests, usually
shared with the intended audience. They take a certain perspective, usually valued by their intended audience,
depending on what governs public discussion at the time. They use a specific conceptual framework, which may not
be the same as previous interpreters or interpreters from other cultures. For example, for German historians to speak
and write about what German civilians endured at the end of World War II was almost a non-existent task and, if
existing, it remained controversial until the 1960s, as we will see in Chapter 3. This shows that, through their
performance of presenting an account of an event publicly, interpreters intervene in the “political sphere,”
understood in the broad sense of the expression. Interpreters, like any scientific researcher, are not just technical
producers of knowledge, but also agents in society. This is the second ethical aspect of interpretation.

0.2 Second ethical aspect: Validity claims

Interpreters are not merely engaged in an activity of production – as if they were outside the social and political
realm and operated as simple components of a machinery to produce knowledge. Interpreters are also citizens whose
activities have a social and political impact on society. Interpretation takes place within a practice – for example,
history or literary criticism – and this practice is part of institutions, such as universities, which at the same time that
they exert power over those who operate within them also grant them power. Interpretation is “political” in the broad
sense of engaging the responsibility of interpreters as social and ethical agents. This engagement of their
responsibility takes the form of claims they make. For example, within the practice of history, historians claim that
what they say is true, that they are sincere, and that what they say is appropriate, given current norms in the
practice.12 It is precisely by factoring in the role of the interpreters into the process of interpreting that any criterion
of objectivity and truth can be determined and agreed upon. As a consequence, the notion of truth, validity, or
accuracy of interpretation is a matter of transaction.
The intervention of the interpreter in what is interpreted is not as provocative as it may sound. Researchers in the
sciences have long recognized their “presence” in the experiments they conduct, the protocols and methodologies
they devise in order to reduce such an intervention or measure it. Thus, accounting for the intervention of the
interpreter in interpretation itself is not without analogies to what the sciences do, as has been recognized by
physicists, such as Stephen Hawking and Niels Bohr. In fact, the term “intervention” comes from Bohr himself, one
of the founders of the quantum theory. By this, he names the interpretive aspect of research through the use of
measuring instruments in the experiments. Bohr, however, does not limit his view to the sciences, advocating
instead for its extension to other disciplines. He famously encouraged the abandonment of a strict separation
between subject and object when it comes to atomic objects because of what he calls “the unavoidable interaction
between the objects and the measuring instruments,” which, he says, “sets an absolute limit to the possibility of
speaking of a behavior of atomic objects which is independent of the means of observation” (Bohr 1958, 25).13 We
find an analogous formulation in Stephen Hawking. In a lecture on “The Origin of the Universe,” when addressing
the question of the existence of reality, he says:

We interpret the input from our senses in terms of a model we make of the world. One cannot ask whether the
model represents reality, only whether it works. A model is a good model if first it interprets a wide range of
observations, in terms of a simple and elegant model. And second, if the model makes definite predictions that
can be tested and possibly falsified by observation.
(Hawking 2015)

As bluntly stated in his book The Grand Design, “there is no picture- or theory-independent concept of reality”
(2010). That for which we have no model cannot be said to exist.
Such views clearly indicate that the view that reality is not accessible otherwise than through models or
descriptions (or interpretations) does not simply amount to a form of idealism according to which our descriptions
would prescribe its order to the world. Because interpreters dispense with any remainder of what reality would be
when not interpreted or before being interpreted, the object of interpretation, such as an event or a text, is not
available in its meaning independently of descriptions and interpretive procedures, and thus cannot serve as arbiter
in a conflict of interpretations, whether about monism or pluralism. There simply is no point of view from which it
could be seen that there was something, which later came to be interpreted in this or that way, as idealism still
supposes. Because we cannot appeal to a pristine object of interpretation free from all framework or context, there is
no sideways viewpoint that would somehow have in its scope, at the same time, the object itself when not yet
interpreted and the object once interpreted. There is also no basis for a relativism or pluralism of interpretation for
the same reason. If the object is not available as such prior to any description or interpretation, there is nothing over
against which one interpretation could be said to be relative. This means that the question of the validity of
interpretation cannot be framed in a vertical movement from a meta-discourse to its direct object but in a lateral
move from an interpretation engaging another interpretation to complete it, criticize it, correct it, or replace it
altogether.
This intervention takes the form of a “cutting up” of the text or the event or its “carving out.” This metaphor of
butchery comes to us from Plato’s Phaedrus (265e; 2022, 266) where it characterizes what philosophers do in their
conceptualization: They have to try to cut at the joints of reality. This metaphor of “carving” reality while avoiding,
as Socrates says, “the manners of a bad butcher” (kakou mageirou tropō, Phaedrus 265e; 2022, 266) is quite
different from the metaphor of mimēsis, which we also receive from Plato, and which led to the view of knowledge
as a “mirror of nature.” The metaphor of cutting up nature is far more interventionist insofar as it is not just taking
notes from nature or copying it but providing an account of it that is an eikōs logos (or muthos), as mentioned in the
Timaeus 29bc (1932, 53), which is usually translated as a “plausible account.” Our account of the world is a
plausible story in the sense of the best we can tell at the present time. However, it is not a “plausible” or
“resembling” account in the negative sense of only being a copy or a mirror image, compared to the true original
layout of nature, which would be assumed to be available as such. It is “plausible” in the positive sense of
“resembling” or “being like” that which cannot appear as such, so that the carving itself through concepts holds as
the natural layout of the world. Like a map in our previous analogy resembles the layout of the landscape by
representing it in a readable form (given the needs and interests of travelers), the carving-out through concepts is a
stand-in for nature or “represents” the natural order in the legal sense of “representing” someone in court. The other
analogy used above of a function indicated this interventionist aspect of interpretation as distributing meanings by
assigning a value to specific components, thereby “construing” its object. Interpretation is thus an eikōs logos or a
plausible account, understood as a stand-in for the object or a “representing” of the object.
Yet, because interpreters make claims to tell the truth, for example, or to be sincere or to fit the existing moral
norms, they are obligated by the rules of the discussion current in their practice and have to be able to justify the
interpretation they provide. The task of interpretation is thus not just to bring out the meaningfulness or significance
of a text, but also to explain why it is a legitimate description of what happened or of what a text means. Thus, while
it is only through the establishment of its meaning and through the explanation provided that an event or the content
of a text becomes accessible as what is susceptible to be referred to, interpretation makes the claim that the object is
only such, in its ontological status, once it has been interpreted and located in the broad sphere of reasons. This is
the transfer Plato describes in the Philebus. The ontological status of “what” the event “is” or what the text “means”
can only be assessed through the “reason for” the existence of this event or the meaning of this text, and this “reason
for” is what was called above the “sense,” as what holds together the different components of a text or an event. As
we will see, Gadamer (in Chapter 1) and Davidson (in Chapter 2) have used the Philebus in their reflection on the
status of human “discourse,” which they present as an account of reality claiming to be analogous to the very logos
or “order” of reality itself. The consequence of this view is that, first, interpretation must be susceptible to be
assessed in its validity (through the claims made by interpreters) but, second, the validity of an interpretation cannot
be assessed otherwise than from within the performance by interpreters when offering an interpretation.

0.3 Third ethical aspect: A commitment

So far, we have pointed out two ethical aspects of interpretation. The first ethical aspect of interpretation concerns
the import by interpreters of their own experiences in the interpreting process. They are not neutral devices simply
recording facts or events. They bring their backgrounds with them in terms of their own experiences when they enter
the realm of interpretation. They usually share the interests and values of their audience, uphold the standards and
methodologies of their scientific community, speak a language that has its own specific semantic and syntactic
configurations, within which they recast, rephrase, reformulate, or “translate” what they understand in the original
texts and documents they investigate.
The second aspect is the fact that interpreters as intervening in their interpretations are social agents making a
claim to interpret correctly, thereby conferring a normative character to interpretation. Because they effectuate the
research in a community of scholars and make the results of such research public through publications, they engage
their professional responsibility through their act and action of interpreting texts or events. This claim makes it
possible for them to transcend their own context or situation, not in the sense of being able to speak outside their
situation but in the sense of accepting to be scrutinized by others and to respond to criticisms.
However, inasmuch as they operate within a practice, claims originate from the professional side of interpreters,
not from their personal side. While the claims may make interpreters responsible to others, it is a professional
responsibility. They claim to tell the truth, but they do not have to be committed to serving the truth. We just have to
think of what we read coming from journalists to see this difference, and often just the name of the journalist or of
the news source tell us what political or economic interests their claims to truth actually serve. Similarly, interpreters
may say what is normatively right, but they do not have to be committed to do justice to what they interpret.
Academic practices, publishing practices, etc. exert significant pressures on interpreters to make them avoid certain
subjects or authors, deemed “problematic,” or to use particular approaches, considered socially sensitive. Claims are
thus always relative to the values current in the community of interpreters. A commitment goes further. This is the
third ethical aspect of interpretation.
The fundamental difference between a claim and a commitment is about the kind of objects they generate. As we
saw, a claim originates from a practice, such as an academic discipline, and with the set of values pertaining to that
practice it generates some obligations: Interpreters claim to tell the truth, for example, given the standards of truth in
the practice. As we know, each country has a certain standard of truth for recounting its own national history and
this standard of truth is not the same as when this history is recounted outside the country. The so-called “discovery”
of America by Columbus as told in many history textbooks in US high schools is recounted rather differently
outside the US, and the same goes for what happened to Armenians in the former Ottoman empire between 1915
and 1917 when this “event” is recounted within Turkey or outside. This indicates that the obligation generated by
claims within a practice (to render a text or an event “correctly” or “truly”) is relative to the practice.
Yet, sometimes interpreters break with their practice, telling us another story, showing that they are committed to
another standard of truth than the standard of their practice. We can explain this by saying that, beyond the claim to
truth, there is a commitment to the truth. The obligation originating from a commitment is not toward an existing
practice, but toward the future. Some historians want to preserve the event, keeping it alive, meaningful and
relevant. The future is not just the future of the work itself but the future of the community. It is because the
relevance of the work contributes to the well-being of the community that the work should be preserved. Thus, this
effort to keep something meaningful can be understood in two very different ways, albeit easy to confuse.
Meaningful can be understood as what makes sense for us now, in our present, given our interests, concerns, and
values. This is how we can understand (although not necessarily agree) that any country has a stake in how its own
history is recounted. However, this meaningfulness to the present does not do justice to the work or the event, as it
reduces what the work can mean or what the event can be to the tyranny of our own standards of meaningfulness
(through assent and dissent). Preserving the work or the event in this sense is not a commitment.
The second sense in which “meaningful” can be understood is with regard to the future of the work as well as the
future of the interpreters, instead of the present of the interpreters. While a claim is such within an existing practice,
generating an obligation, a commitment is nurtured by certain goals and values, which guide or attract those who
commit themselves to them. The obligation that comes from a commitment is thus not so much caused, as the
obligation coming from claims is, as it is set by the goal pursued. Instead of being causally generated, the obligation
arises teleologically. This is what the traditional notion of the “good” meant, since Plato. The obligation in a
commitment arises from being attracted to it. For example, this attraction to the good can make interpreters not only
claim to tell the truth, but also serve the truth. This was what Socrates expressed when he recommended “to go
wherever the argument, like the wind, leads” us (Republic 394d; 1987, 233). This is how some interpreters tried to
force into the discussion about national history some unpalatable facts, whether about Native Americans in the US
and the Armenians in Turkey. This commitment to the future of the works or the events is thus at the same time a
commitment of interpreters to their future, which they wish to inhabit because it would include, for example, the
appreciation of those so far unrecognized aspects of these works or the recognition of those unpalatable, so far
unspeakable facts and events. In fact, it is this existential commitment to their future as persons that nurtures
interpreters’ commitment to the future of the work.
The reason why a commitment to the good needs to be added to the more formal claim to truth is that the work
or the event only exists as far as their future has been secured and this future lies in their continued significance,
which is what interpretation provides. Interpretation is thus ethical not only in terms of the experiences imported by
interpreters in their task (first aspect) and not only in terms of the claim made, for example, to tell the truth (second
aspect), but also in terms of serving the future of the work or the event. It is only in keeping its intelligibility and
relevance, thus in adapting to ever new readers, that a text or an event remains “actual,” in the twofold sense of
“real” and “relevant,” and thus in the transactual sense of “real” because “relevant.” Many historians feel a debt to
the past and many researchers feel a debt toward what they investigate as well as an urge to do it justice. This is how
interpretation is both affirming its object – the thing to be understood – and serving the object in the sense of
responding to something that is asking to be revealed. These two aspects of a commitment to secure a future for the
work (or the event) and to serve the work indicate an affective dimension.
Heidegger considers that any understanding (and thus any interpretation) is always “attuned,” always carries an
affect in the ways interpreters are concerned by what they try to understand. Interpretation is always performed in a
certain affective state, which Heidegger calls a “mood” (Stimmung). The two features of a commitment in
interpretation (to assure the future of the work and to serve the work, contributing to its unfolding) also involve an
affective dimension, which correspond to what we call “love” or “benevolence.” For love means both wanting the
object of love to exist and putting oneself in a subservient position toward this object, nurturing it and fostering it. A
commitment to the truth is a love of truth, both a striving for maintaining the truth and a submitting of oneself to the
truth. This love as what both animates and guides interpretation guarantees the future of the work inasmuch as a
work only lives or an event only remains meaningful if it is interpreted. This confirms that interpretation does not so
much reveal the explicit meaning as it shows how a text or an event continues to make sense. By contributing to the
continued sense that a text or an event makes, interpretation belongs to the future of the work or the event.
One consequence of this attitude of love as commitment is that it has a return effect on interpreters. We already
saw that it is in fact a commitment to their own future that nurtures the commitment interpreters make to the work –
feeling a debt toward the past event or a duty to bring out the meaningfulness of a work. By being committed to the
future of the work, interpreters open themselves to be unsettled or transformed by what they understand. It is this
attitude that allows them to take the work or the event “seriously,” and this means to accept, before the practice of
interpretation has even started (with its methods, claims, and standards) to be questioned by the work or the event, to
be ready to revisit their own views, to change. Taking seriously means approaching the work or the event outside the
psychological attitude of either assenting to or dissenting from what the work or the event may mean.
 In history, this psychological attitude of assent or dissent has been devastating when it comes to cultural
encounters, which usually could only become such after the dominant culture had deemed the foreign culture a
genuine culture, that is to say, after the foreign culture had been granted some form of recognition as a meaningful
cultural object worth investigating – with assent and dissent about some aspects. Present-day interpreters must take
care not to appoint themselves referees of what makes or does not make sense, banning this book or promoting that
book, and promoting this author or banning that author, all according to their baseline of assent and dissent, but
rather attend to how their future community may benefit from an interpretation of the work.
Such interpretation requires that interpreters, by opening themselves to being solicited by what they interpret, be
also open to the possibility of being transformed by what they interpret. It does not mean, of course, to accept as true
what they interpret. It only means to take the first and initial step of letting the work or the event reveal its
meaningfulness by assisting it as much as possible – what Plato calls making our opponents “really stronger”
(Sophist 246 de; 1921, 75). After that first step, then the assessment of the validity of what the work means or what
the event is can begin. There is thus in this benevolence for the work, which consists in taking it seriously, an almost
spiritual aspect, insofar as interpreting as done by professionals within their practice may be a transformation of the
person doing the interpretation. While it is this ethical attitude of interpreters that lets a work be – speak to them
beyond assent and dissent – this ethical attitude itself can lead interpreters to being changed as persons, affecting
their life. This transformation is in line with what Aristotle says in the Nicomachean Ethics that acting well
(eupraxia) goes along with living well (euzōia) (Nicomachean Ethics 1098b, 1934, 37). In our case, it would mean
that interpreting well (which would qualify as an action under Aristotle’s definition, because it is also an action in
the community) is part of living a good life. This again confirms that the commitment to the future of the work is
nurtured by and correlated with the commitment to the future of the interpreters.
The three aspects of interpretation as ethical (interpreters using their own experiences to make sense of the work,
making claims within their practice, and projecting themselves in the future as guaranteeing the future of the work or
the event) justify the notion of an ethics of interpretation.
I present this ethics of interpretation by arguing through a critical examination of the views of authors who all
reject the view that an object of interpretation is available as such, prior to any description or interpretation, although
the alternatives they offer vary significantly. These authors have also recognized the importance of the attitude of
interpreters in the very process of interpretation. As in my previous book on The Task of the Interpreter (2005), I
will discuss the views of the authors chosen not exclusively in terms of the arguments they make but also in terms of
the relevance and fruitfulness of their views for solving specific problems. I will thus put these views to pragmatic
tests, such as how to explain the decade-long silence about the sufferings of German civilians at the end of World
War II or how to take seriously the views of Amerindian cultures that are so at odds with modern Western cultures
without necessarily adopting those views and thus holding them true ourselves.
I examine three models that have been presented to explain how the validity of interpretation is generated and
has to be assessed, while taking into account the attitude of interpreters: (1) The principle of charity in interpretation;
(2) The production (or poetics) of truth; and (3) The regulative principle in interpretation. Each of the three parts of
the book treats one of the three models. The first part discusses two versions of how the principle of charity has been
understood by Hans-Georg Gadamer and Donald Davidson. Although Gadamer does not explicitly use the notion of
charity in interpretation, he appeals to the “good will” of interpreters and considers interpretation as a form of
dialogue, which must be guided by a common good. Charity in this broad sense is the “spirit” in which interpretation
is made. Gadamer and Davidson, who interacted with each other, share the view that interpretation is “radical” to the
extent that it does away with any counterpart an interpretation may have, such as a “real” object to be interpreted.
Interpretation, in fact, construes its own object in the strong sense that there is no “real” object outside any
interpretation that could directly compete with the object construed by interpretation. An interpretation can only be
questioned by another interpretation in a lateral movement. Charity (Davidson) or good will (Gadamer) is the
principle guiding this competition among interpretations.
The second part examines how Paul Ricoeur and Michel Foucault offer two different versions of what can be
called a “poetics of truth,” in the sense that they focus on the existential “attitude” of interpreters, which they see as
productive of the truth of the interpretation offered. It is more than the spirit in which an interpretation is made, as
was the case with charity, because it specifies the situation from which interpreters speak, with their existential
baggage, as it were. Ricoeur calls this attitude “attestation”: Interpreters “attest” the truth of their account by
engaging their responsibility as those who can be believed. In his last lectures at the Collège de France, Foucault
calls it parrhesia (speaking the truth or truth-telling), as understood and practiced in the Hellenistic period, in order
to describe the connection between interpreters as persons and the validity of what they say: Interpreters produce the
truth by presenting themselves as “truth-tellers.” Both versions describe the presence of interpreters to the content
and validity of what they say.
 The third part focuses on the process of interpreting itself and examines two versions of what has been offered as
a regulative principle. The first version, defended by Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas, insists on the formal
process of argumentation, which involves validity claims, including a claim to normative rightness. Validity claims
compel interpreters to engage in a discussion with possible dissenters and to justify what they claim in an “ethics of
discussion.” The second version, defended, among others, by Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher,
considers that the guiding principle of the interpreter is benevolence or love, not in the sense of an external quality
of the person of the interpreter, such as an epistemic virtue, but in the sense of a constitutive part of the process of
interpreting. Compared to the spirit of charity or the existential attitude of interpreters, a regulative principle has
more efficacy because it is part of the process of interpretation itself, as what regulates it from the inside and gives it
traction. In addition, the second version of the regulative principle as love, which I consider to be the most fruitful
model, not only regulates but guides the process toward a good and is thus oriented toward the future, making
interpretation part and parcel of the future of the work or the event and converting a formal regulative principle into
a hermeneutic imperative. This book presents an argument for love as a hermeneutic imperative.

Notes
1. I examined this question in Vandevelde (2005, 1–14).
2. See Vandevelde (2005, 43f), Carroll (2002, 321–322).
3. In Michael Krausz’s terms, “multiplism” is “the ideal of a multiplicity of admissible interpretations,” as opposed
to “singularism,” which is “the ideal of a single admissible interpretation” (Krausz 2002, 1). Torsten Pettersson
defines “constructivism’’ as the position that “holds that interpretations of literary works are not accounts of their
objects but projections from critical stances and sets of values” (Petersson 2002, 217). Stanley Fish famously
claimed that readers or interpreters “do not decode poems, they make them” (Fish 1982, 342).
4. He mentions Genesis, Exodus, Joshua, Judges, Kings, and Paralipomena, the four Gospels and the Acts of the
Apostles, explaining: “These are the eleven books which seem to me to concern particularly history, besides those
that we properly call ‘historiographic’” (1880, col. 801A). For the quotations from works in foreign languages, if
no English translation is mentioned, the translations are mine.
5. See Vandevelde (2021).
6. For a discussion of this position, see Vandevelde (2005), 69f.
7. Websit: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tomato.
8. For the sake of clarity of purpose, I do not differentiate a sentence from a text here. While they are obviously
different and require different interpretive methodologies, they exercise the same contextualizing function: Just as
a sentence provides a context in which the individual meanings of the words have to fit, a text provides a context
within which the sentences will receive their coherence and consistency.
9. Website: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/273031
10. See Erard (2010, 422 and 425 respectively).
11. As Sartre reminds us, “a geological plication, a storm do not destroy”; there will only be destruction if there is a
“witness” who “can compare [the past] to the present in the form of a no longer” (1965, 8).
12. These claims are called “validity claims” by Jürgen Habermas (1984) and Karl-Otto Apel (1980), which they take
from the speech act theory and other linguists, such as Karl Bühler, as we will see in Chapter 5.
13. According to Aage Petersen, Niels Bohr frequently said: “It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find
out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature” (quoted in Bruckner and Zeilinger 2004, 323).
Part I
Two Versions of the Principle of Charity in
Interpretation
Gadamer and Davidson

DOI: 10.4324/9781003348009-2

The principle of charity in interpretation was articulated by Donald Davidson as part of his “radical interpretation.”
We find the same notion in Gadamer, who appeals to the “good will” of interpreters in his hermeneutics, which is as
radical as Davidson’s interpretation is. Independently of each other and in very different ways, they both reject the
view that there is any access to objects, whether texts or events, otherwise than through interpretation. What is
remarkably similar in their respective views with regard to interpretation is that both Gadamer and Davidson reject
the possibility of appealing to a pre-established or pre-existing ordered reality, in the traditional form of a substance
metaphysics. For both Gadamer and Davidson, reality is considered as a correlate of interpretation in the sense of
what gains its ontological relevance within interpretation, rendering reality a matter of transaction.
While claiming that objects are only accessible through interpretation, they adamantly deny that their views lead
to relativism or idealism and remain committed to a notion of reality that offers resistance to and imposes constraints
on our cognitive mind. Davidson presents his views on interpretation as “correspondence without confrontation”
(2001g, 137), by which he means that, although we are never directly faced with reality as an independently
articulated whole, we can still have confidence that our interpretations correspond to what is really the case so that,
as he says, “given a correct epistemology, we can be realists in all departments” (2001g, 137). Gadamer
characterizes interpretation as a “hermeneutic experience” or as an “event.” It is through interpretation that objects
(texts or events) come to offer saliency and significance to human beings. If the object of interpretation is not
external to interpretation but revealed through it, the subject doing the interpretation is in turn transformed in the
process.
The two versions of this kind of interpretation presented by Gadamer and Davidson most clearly present the
stakes and the challenges involved in interpretation with respect to the nature of the object of interpretation as well
as the responsibilities of interpreters regarding the content and validity of interpretation. By their radical claims, they
force issues into the discussion that arguably lie in the background of any interpretation. One of the advantages of
radical interpretation is that it avoids the psychologization of the process of interpreting with its ambiguities about
the difference between the private intentions of writers or agents, on the one hand, and their publicly available
intentional states, on the other hand. Both Gadamer and Davidson bypass the psychological intentions or intentional
states of the observed subject by substituting to the original meaning the construing of what makes sense to the
observer. Thus, both Gadamer and Davidson dispense with any retrieval of what was psychologically meant and
instead focus on how to make sense of what is observed. The hermeneuticist as well as the radical interpreter treat
subjects’ speech as an event that is contemporary with the interpreter. The advantage of comparing these two
authors is not so much that it may bridge two traditions, analytic and continental – though it may certainly have such
an effect – but rather to show what the differences are and how to resolve them. We are helped in this task by the
fact that they discussed each other’s views and attempted to foster a dialogue.1
Regarding their interactions and debates, there is, first, the remarkable fact that both wrote on Plato’s Philebus at
the beginning of their career. It was the topic of Davidson’s PhD in 1949 and it represents the second part of
Gadamer’s habilitation under Heidegger in 1929. The motivation for Gadamer to write on ancient philosophy was
his desire to secure the foundations of his own path of thinking while faced with the intimidating presence of
Heidegger. Davidson follows an analogical path. After studying classics, he became captivated by Quine’s
philosophical approach but did not feel competent enough at the time to write on a topic in the same field as Quine.2
As he explains in an interview, there was an hiatus in his studies because of World War II, when he was in the navy:
“When I came back, I did my dissertation on something I had already started, namely Plato’s Philebus, because I felt
that I didn’t know enough of the sort of thing that Quine was doing to write on his work” (Kent and Davidson 1993,
5; see also Natali 2007, 127). In this dissertation, Davidson cites Gadamer’s work in a footnote, calling it “an
important book on the Philebus,” before noting that “Gadamer views dialectic, not as a tool or method, but as
establishing the ethical hierarchy directly through its relation to the phenomena. He therefore speaks, not of Plato’s
ethical theory as being dialectical, but of the dialectic being ethical” (Davidson 1990, p. 36). However, as he
acknowledges, at the time he was writing his dissertation, “neither my German nor my Greek was very good (they
still aren’t), and so I unfortunately learned very little from Gadamer” (2005d, 263). Later on, after the English
translation of Gadamer’s work was published, he praised Gadamer’s work:

Not in English, not in German, not in French is there another book about the Philebus, or an edition or
translation, which concentrates on the ethical, methodological, and ontological thought in the dialogue.
Gadamer’s book is, as he plainly intended, not only an eye-opening account of what is to be found in Plato, not
only a stunning essay on the origins of objectivity in communal discussion; it is a demonstration of what the
interpretation of a text can be.
(Davidson 2005d, 262)

In an essay titled “Gadamer and Plato’s Philebus,” Davidson notes that they both started with Plato, specifically the
same dialogue Philebus, and ended with a focus on interpretation. Gadamer confirms this similarity: “More and
more what both of us mean by philosophy is what we find in Plato” (Gadamer 1997a, 433). Although Gadamer’s
path was, Davidson says, “already quite clear” at the time he wrote on the Philebus, his own path was somewhat
indirect. He writes:

The dialogue [Philebus] touched both of us near the beginnings of our professional careers, and it connects
with our present interests. The difference is that Gadamer appreciated from the start what was in the dialogue
for him, and though his views developed, and his interpretation of Plato underwent some change, he never
backed away from the thesis that free discussion is the source of human understanding, nor from his
recognition that Plato had revealed and exploited this truth. I, on the other hand, lost my fascination with Plato
over a period of decades, and only recently, and by a very different path from Gadamer’s, have come to grasp
some of what I dimly, if at all, understood the first time around.
(2005d, 264)

As he says, “I […] have, by what seems to me a largely accidental but commodius vicus of recirculation, arrived in
Gadamer’s intellectual neighborhood” (2005d, 261).3
When Davidson received the Hegel Prize from the city of Stuttgart in 1991, he again noted a similarity with
Gadamer. He was, he said, “unaware that the title I had given this talk was nearly identical with the English title of a
book of essays on Plato by another recipient of the Hegel prize, Professor Hans-Georg Gadamer” (2005c, 252).
Davidson’s title is “Dialectic and Dialogue” and Gadamer’s title was “Dialogue and Dialectic.” Here is how
Davidson summarizes his agreement with Gadamer:

We must conclude that it is only in interpersonal communication that there can be thought, a grasping of the
fact of an objective, that is, a shared, world. Not only is it the case that the aim of conversation is “shared
understanding”; we must also acknowledge that without sharing there is no understanding.
(2005d, 274)4

With regard to interpretation, I see two fundamental differences between them. The first pertains to the role of
language and the second to the status of interpretation itself. Regarding the former, Davidson writes in his essay on
the Philebus:

I am in agreement with almost all of this. Where I differ (and this may merely show I have not fully understood
Gadamer) is that I would not say a conversation presupposes a common language, nor even that it requires one
[…]. Coming to an agreement about an object and coming to understand each other’s speech are not
independent moments but part of the same interpersonal process of triangulating the world.
(2005d, 275)5
Davidson’s critique is directed at Gadamer’s apparent hierarchy that considers language as a presupposition for
understanding. However, in the text Davidson quotes, after Gadamer indeed says, “every conversation presupposes a
common language,” he adds “or better, creates a common language,” which he explains further down the page:
“Hence reaching an understanding on the subject matter of a conversation necessarily means that a common
language must first be worked out in the conversation” (Gadamer 1998, 378–379). Thus, in response to Davidson’s
critique, it can be said that if agreement requires the working out of a language, it does not seem to be the case that
language “precedes” the agreement.6 Gadamer insists that agreement is the starting point of any interpretation
(instead of non-understanding, as Gadamer faults Schleiermacher for believing). Thus, Gadamer would agree with
Davidson when the latter writes: “The basis of all social understanding is a background of thoughts on which we are
largely in agreement” (2005i, 245).
While both of these thinkers posit that language is linked to interpretation, for Davidson the link is secondary
and language functions only as a tool. This leads him to say quite provocatively that “there is no such thing as a
language,” before adding “if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed”
(Davidson 2005b, 474). By contrast, Gadamer claims that “being that is understood is language” (1998, 474). The
difference is about the mediation performed by language and the “more basic claim” that says that “thought itself
depends on language” (Davidson 2005d, 275), both of which Davidson rejects. Quoting Truth and Method, where
Gadamer says that “language has its true being only in conversation, in the exercise of understanding between
people [p. 404],” Davidson first remarks that “this saying of Gadamer’s goes far beyond the linguist’s insistence on
the primacy of spoken over written words, for it implies that it is only in the context of discussion that language
comes to have a content, to be language. (This is a view often attributed to Wittgenstein)” (2005d, 275). While for
Gadamer what things or events are is a matter of transaction in speech and dialogue, for Davidson it is an empirical
process of reacting to stimuli in the same environment as those with whom we communicate, what he calls
“triangulation.” The conclusion for him, against Gadamer, is that “thought and rationality are […] social
phenomena” (2005c, 255).
Besides their different approaches to the role of language, the second important difference concerns the status of
interpretation. In an essay on “Locating Literary Language,” Davidson takes issue with a passage from Truth and
Method, in which Gadamer says: “A text is understood only if it is understood in a different way every time.”7
Davidson asks: “Should we then agree with Gadamer when he says that what the text means changes as the audience
changes?” To this he answers:

I think not. There can be multiple interpretations, as Freud suggests, because there is no reason to say one rules
out others. Gadamer has in mind incompatible interpretations. It is true that every person, every age, every
culture will make what it can of a text; and persons, periods, and cultures differ. But how can a significant
relativism follow from a truism? If you and I try to compare notes on our interpretation of a text we can do this
only to the extent that we have or can establish a broad basis of agreement.
(2005f, 181)

There may be different interpretations of a text but given that they are about the same text, which is not accessible
otherwise than through interpretation, different interpretations are only different descriptions of what is claimed to
be the same. In fact, it is only in the communication between those interpreters that something like the “same” text is
referred to.
Gadamer briefly responded to Davidson on two occasions. In his first response to Davidson’s paper on Plato’s
Philebus (Gadamer 1997a), Gadamer does not address the basic disagreement Davidson expresses, but only talks
about their respective interpretations of the Philebus. In the second response to a paper by David Hoy that compares
him, Gadamer, to Davidson, Gadamer writes: “What is fundamentally at issue is not primarily science and
epistemology but […] the ‘ontology’ of life communicating itself through language” (Gadamer 2012, 37).8 This is
indeed the key. For Davidson, understanding is reached in communication through a mixture of causation and
inferences. In the case of Gadamer, understanding is not so much a matter of empirical conditions or of inferences
by interpreters in terms of beliefs, but rather a matter of dialogue through language. Because language is historically
sedimented, it allows history to permeate our thoughts and beliefs by inserting in them a layer of sense or meaning
that exceeds our conscious intentions and in part gives form to those very intentions. The issue for Gadamer is not
relativism9 at the epistemological level – the only one he says Davidson considers. It is not that different interpreters
have different understandings of the “same” text or utterance, but rather that texts and utterances, because of their
existence in language, will be carved out differently by interpreters who will see different aspects as salient or will
even see the boundaries of texts and utterances differently. Taking as an example the history of pre-Socratic thought,
Gadamer writes:

Every interpretation brings particular prejudices into play: In Joel the scientific religious prejudice, in Karl
Reinhardt the prejudice of the logical enlightenment, Werner Jaeger’s unexamined religious monotheism […],
and my own prejudices when I myself attempt to understand the ‘divinities’ in light of classical philosophy and
philosophical thought, inspired certainly by Heidegger’s exposition to the question of being.
(Gadamer 1989, 283)

These different perspectives are not various “takes” on what would be identical – the same text or the same
phenomenon. Each encounter is a “fusion of horizons” between the horizon of the interpreters and the horizon of the
object interpreted. Both subject and object come to be identified from within the fusion. Thus, the stability in
interpretation lies neither with interpreters – Joel, Reinhardt, Jaeger, and Gadamer have their own pre-Socratics –
nor with the texts or phenomena to be interpreted. Rather, the stability lies in the fusion, which is a dialogue opening
to other “fusions” by other interpreters. This is why Gadamer can say that “there thus cannot be a correct
interpretation ‘in itself’” (1990, 401; 1998, 397. Translation modified).10 Dialogue is the locus where all these
external historical forces come into play and can find an equilibrium in the sense that the interactions between
partners or between readers and texts allow the partners in dialogue to identify their own prejudices and reach an
understanding with others.
Through Gadamer’s response we can appreciate the difference between his phenomenological and hermeneutic
approach and Davidson’s logical analysis. In a logical analysis, interpretation is a purely synchronic process taking
place between an interpreter who builds a theory for understanding subjects, based on causal effects of a shared
environment and inferences of beliefs. Interpreting in this logical and analytic way is ahistorical inasmuch as the
interpreter Davidson considers himself neutral or irrelevant as a person, as if the logical analysis was performing
itself on its own in the manner of some form of calculus, however psychological it may be. By contrast, for Gadamer
the enterprise of understanding is historical through and through insofar as the interpreter Gadamer is present in the
interpretation with his historical and cultural thickness, being a full participant in an interaction or dialogue – in a
living language.
The first chapter will discuss Gadamer’s views on interpretation and the second will address Davidson’s version.
1 Gadamer’s Dialogical Interpretation
DOI: 10.4324/9781003348009-3

Gadamer is usually regarded as the founder of philosophical hermeneutics, as presented in his major work Truth and
Method in 1960, which makes the claim that interpretation belongs to the ontological make-up of things and events.
“Understanding” and “interpretation” are ontological categories that describe the situation of human beings in the
world. In a sense, he historicizes the mind to the extent that consciousness or the mind comes to be seen as being
always situated and always functioning within history. His version of radical interpretation takes the form of a
“dialogue” in which things and events receive their ontological valence as transactual products. Gadamer recasts the
views of the philosophers who influenced him, such as Wilhelm Dilthey, Edmund Husserl, and his teacher Martin
Heidegger, into a new and original program of interpretation. Yet, the philosopher who gave him his fundamental
insights about interpretation as dialogue is Plato.
Section 1.1 of this chapter will expound upon Gadamer’s views on language and how he came to grant language
an ontological valence with his claim that “being that can be understood is language.” In the second section, I
present and examine the view that interpretation is itself a “hermeneutic experience,” in which interpreters feel
addressed by the object they interpret and approach this object from their own historical and cultural situation. The
import and consequences of this view are that interpretation is dialogical and does not lead to a “better”
interpretation, compared to competitors, but to a “different” one.

1.1 Language and ontology

Gadamer made untiring efforts to salvage a concept of language against the dominant view in our tradition, which
has seen it as a means of communication through propositions. For Gadamer, it was a fateful decision to focus
exclusively on the kind of statement or logos which can be true or false, as Aristotle did when he privileged the
logos apophantikos as the site of truth: What we have understood as “proposition,” in the sense of a sentence which
says something about something and can be either an affirmation (kataphasis) or a negation (apophasis, On
Interpretation 16b–17a, 1983, 121). The exclusive focus on logos as the site of truth and the corresponding
dismissal of language as a mere accessory to thinking, which Aristotle simply calls ta en tē phōnē, the “things in the
voice” (On Interpretation 16a, 1983, 115), turns thinking into a kind of autonomous activity of the mind. The
metaphysical decision in ancient Greece of considering logos (which can also mean “speech” or “discourse”) as
“reason” was ratified again in Modernity when this activity was called the “acts of the mind,” which are considered
as independent in their execution from both the means used for articulating thought and the historical and cultural
life of those who engage in these “activities” of the mind. The logos that became the mark of the human being (as a
zōon logon echon, as Aristotle defines it, or animal rationale, as it was translated into Latin) became “reason”
understood as “rationality.” As a consequence, theoretical reason became the means of enlightenment, as opposed
to, for example, “practical reason,” which Aristotle himself had elaborated upon in his ethics.
Gadamer laments this separation of, first, thinking from life and, second, ethics from the good life – the euzōia
from the eupraxia, whose unity is what Aristotle calls “virtue” (aretē), in the sense of what leads to happiness
(eudaimonia) (Nicomachean Ethics 1098b, 1934, 37). Gadamer’s effort to reconnect what was not separated for
Plato and Aristotle is in no way a return to the Greeks or a renewal of Greek philosophy. It is rather an attempt to
“re-enact” what the Greeks experienced but without claiming to “re-live” it in a Diltheyan manner. The notion of
“enactment” (Vollzug) with its counterpart, “re-enactment,” comes from the early Heidegger and means re-
effectuating what went into the thought process of those philosophers we try to understand. This re-enactment may
be the hallmark of a philosophical hermeneutics, which does not aim at the reproduction of a content of meaning nor
at a revival of past views. Both retrieval and renewal would still be guided by current interests and could thus not
really challenge the present. The re-enactment that Gadamer pursues aims at freeing us from our own situation so
that we can envisage new possibilities for the many problems Gadamer mentions, whether about our treatment of the
environment, about the increasing power of the sciences in regulating our life, or about the kind of art we enjoy.
One way to fight this disconnectedness in our life or the loss of what Dilthey calls the “connection of a life”
(Lebenszusammenhang) is precisely to recover an understanding of language as a dimension in which we live and
articulate our thoughts, what Gadamer calls Sprachlichkeit. It is within this dimension of language that we can make
sense of the world around us and thus of ourselves. As Gadamer says, “language is the element in which we live, as
fishes live in water” (1997b, 22).11 We live in a world and, as Heidegger argued, “world” in fact means a dimension
of human existence (before being a place or a container), so that human beings themselves are such by having a
world and dwelling in it. Human beings have what Gadamer calls an “orientation in the world,” which takes the
form of a “dwelling” (Einkehr) in language (2022, 178). The dimension of language thus represents for human
beings the factum of being in the world with a transcendental sense, analogous to Kant’s factum of freedom: Just as
there would be no morality without freedom for Kant, there would be no meaningful world without language for
Gadamer. With such an ontological valence, the “dimension of language” includes more than language as a system
of signs, a faculty of the mind, or a propositional means of communication. Prior to the system of language, prior to
the individual units of language, there is a situation in the world in which people interact. As the fundamental
dimension in which people live, language carries with it a basic “agreement” [Einverständnis] among human beings
at the practical level, even before any word can be uttered.12
This view of language as that which embodies a fundamental agreement has significant consequences for the
task of interpretation. Gadamer takes issue with Schlegel’s and Schleiermacher’s view that non-understanding is at
the origin of understanding and interpretation. Instead, Gadamer claims that any disagreement is predicated on a
prior fundamental agreement:

We must deliberately disentangle the phenomenon of understanding out of the privilege given to the disruption
of understanding if we really want to bring into focus its place in the totality of our existence as human beings
and also our social existence as human beings. Agreement is presupposed where there is a disruption in
agreement.
(2022, 142)

To Schleiermacher’s view that interpretation starts with non-understanding, Gadamer replies with a question: “Is
there not in truth something like a ‘supporting agreement’ at the basis of all misunderstanding?” (1986c, 223).13
This original “agreement” that persists even when people disagree or are in conflict, specified as a dwelling in
language, represents a fundamental being-together with other human beings. When Gadamer says that “language is
dialogue” (2022, 180), it is not as a kind of conversation which one may initiate with another person, but rather as an
exchange which has started long before we were able to speak and in which we find ourselves, articulating our
common space (2022, 180). This is why Gadamer can say that “we are the ones who speak, none of us individually
and yet all of us – this is the mode in which ‘language’ exists” (2022, 151) or that “there is no first word,” for “to
talk of a first word is in itself contradictory” (2022, 151).
However fascinating and inspiring Gadamer’s views on language may be, critics have long wondered how much
ontological weight language may have. To speak of a “dimension of language” (Sprachlichkeit) seems more like a
promise for original views on language than the articulation of such views.14 For there are many questions
surrounding this new invented “concept” of Sprachlichkeit, which so baffled commentators that a neologism was
made up in English to translate it as a mysterious “linguisticality.” When Gadamer claims in Truth and Method that
language is an “experience of the world [Welterfahrung]” (1990, 442; 1998, 438) or that “whoever has language
‘has’ the world” (1990, 457; 1998, 453), it all sounded like a continuation of Heidegger’s pronouncements around
his motto that “language speaks” and we, human beings, just respond.15
Some of the essays Gadamer wrote on ancient philosophy and on language provide a significant complement to
Truth and Method with regard to the view stated strikingly there that “being is language [Sein […] Sprache ist]”
(1990, 490; 1998, 487) or “being that can be understood is language [Sein, das verstanden werden kann, ist
Sprache]” (1990, 478; 1998, 474). These essays show that such formulations are neither a qualification of being,
which would restrict the being in question to the being that is understood, thereby leaving a remainder, namely that
which would be, albeit not understood; nor do they specify a condition for “being” so that, for something to “be,” it
would need to be “understood.” Rather, the formula that “being that can be understood is language” is about the
bridge that allows things (what is) to be correlated to the life of human beings and the life of human beings to be
lived through interactions with things in the world. This is how we can understand what Gadamer explains in “Text
und Interpretation”:
 When I wrote the sentence ‘being that can be understood is language,’ the point was that we can never
completely understand that which is. This is implied insofar as everything that uses language always points
beyond that which reaches its expression. Everything that uses language remains as that which must be
understood, as that which comes to language.
(Gadamer 1984a, 28–29)

The “coming to language” is the threshold for reaching the sphere of being so that being and being understood (in
the sense of having come to language) are correlates and their sphere increases or decreases together.
What lies at the basis of these formulas is a connection between the ontological make-up of things (or the world)
and human beings so that language could be, as he characterizes it in Truth and Method, “the horizon of a
hermeneutical ontology” (1990, 442; 1998, 438). Plato offered Gadamer the means to articulate this connection. In
his meditation on the good, Plato showed, especially in the Philebus as read by Gadamer, that the goodness of things
– the good governing their make-up or their ousia – is the same good as what makes a human life a full unity.

1.1.1 The formative role of Plato

Plato occupies a special place in Gadamer’s work. In “Of Teachers and Learners,” he mentions Plato as one of his
four teachers (along with Hegel, Heidegger, and Jaspers) (Gadamer 2022, 162). By showing how in Plato the world
itself or things are “configured” by understanding without being reduced to what understanding produces, Gadamer
provides a background for Heidegger’s views on language but takes the idealistic accents of Heidegger’s views
away from a sovereign “understanding,” what Heidegger sees as a key component of human existence.
From the perspective of his intellectual biography, there is some irony in how Gadamer established himself as a
scholar of ancient philosophy. As he himself acknowledges, after finishing his dissertation and hoping to do his
Habilitation soon after, Heidegger’s critique of the quality of his work as a student in 1925, coupled with his
overpowering philosophical persona caused Gadamer to change his career path. He felt the need for a firm
foundation for his philosophical future, turning to philology and ancient philosophy under the guidance of Paul
Friedländer. He became, as he says, “well grounded in classical philology” (1997b, 12) and was “certified as a
classical philologist” after a state exam in 1927.16 The numerous essays he has written in this field certainly prove
that he succeeded in finding his bearings.17 As a matter of fact, he has provided the philological fundaments for
some of Heidegger’s insights into Plato’s and Aristotle’s philosophy but, more importantly, he has demonstrated the
continued relevance of ancient Greek philosophy for contemporary concerns and the need for contemporary
philosophy to re-examine its own history. Whether it is in his studies of practical philosophy or in his constant
efforts to recover Plato’s original views beneath the distortions caused by Aristotle’s critiques, which Gadamer
qualifies as “almost malevolent” (1980, 156), he shows us how much our technologically driven culture could
benefit, for example, from Plato’s consideration of the idea of the good. Through Plato’s considerations of the good,
Gadamer finds an original position for human beings. Instead of being confronted with a self-contained reality – a
world already made of well-delineated “things” – human beings are themselves part of the paste of things, as it were.
It is also in his reflections on Greek practical philosophy that Gadamer sees a way to bridge the gap between the
theoretical and the practical levels. Logos is not merely a theoretical account over against a world of things, as if
things were bereft of intelligibility prior to this account or as if they would be “irrational” when not placed under a
theoretical gaze. Rather, logos already inhabits the world of things at the practical level in which things are “good
for” something, so that praxis as an action in the world with or against other people also articulates the world and
thereby gives it a certain intelligibility, which can be discerned and made conceptual in a logos of thought as
discourse or argument.
In the process, Gadamer also finds his expanded notion of language as the achievement of logos, especially for
Plato: Both an articulation which comes from the mind (noūs) of human beings and an articulation of things, of their
ousia, which Plato explains through his theory of ideas or forms. Plato’s dialogue the Philebus (2001) has been
especially crucial for Gadamer, which was the object of the second part of his Habilitation under Heidegger in 1929
and published in 1931. This research definitely marked, if not oriented, the subsequent development of Gadamer’s
thought both as a continuation of and a counterpart to Heidegger’s thought.18 The Philebus gave Gadamer the means
for establishing a connection between reality and human life without reducing one to the other. This is where, I
submit, Gadamer found the ontological valence of the dimension of language, which serves as the basis of his future
claim that being is language. Let us briefly see how.
 Gadamer’s analysis of the Philebus is detailed and somewhat complicated. Without assessing the validity of
Gadamer’s interpretation of the dialogue, I will limit my focus on how Gadamer understands Plato as saying that
there is a logos in reality, which the human logos can comprehend, with the consequence for Gadamer that this
sameness of logos on the side of reality and on the side of the human mind is also the sameness of “being” and
“being understood.” In Plato’s myth about the making of the universe or of things, Gadamer stresses that the
demiurge or the god is not presented as the external originator of the world. In the Philebus, the mind of the world-
maker is one of the four components in the making of an ousia as the cause of the entity. In the Timaeus, besides the
cause that the god or world-maker is, there is also necessity, which, for example, can form triangles and other things.
This leads Gadamer to see a continuity between the logos as the ordering of reality and the human logos as
accounting for that order. The latter is an eikōs logos, a discourse that is an image or a “plausible” discourse, as it is
usually translated. It is an iconic discourse or what Gadamer calls a “theory,” in the sense of a view or a
contemplation.
I will focus on the Philebus and what I consider to be four hermeneutic decisions that Gadamer makes in his
interpretation, although he himself does not identify them as such.

1.1.1.1 The connection between the mixture of life and the genesis of
things

The first decision Gadamer makes consists in connecting the two discussions that take place in the dialogue: One
about the make-up or genesis of things and a second about the make-up of life. The latter is the crux of Plato’s
dialogue, which is about the role of knowledge and pleasure in a good life and their respective importance, with
Socrates defending the view that life is a composition or a “mixture” of knowledge and pleasure.19 Inside this broad
discussion, Socrates broaches the question of the make-up or genesis of things or beings (ousia). In this discussion,
he also uses the notion of the “mixture” of entities, which is made by a world-maker or a demiurge out of several
elements. Both mixtures of the human life and of things are deemed “good” if they are mixed according to a good
measure or in a good proportion. Gadamer connects the two discussions (of a good life and the genesis of things)
and understands Plato as saying that the way things are produced (in a good proportion) is correlated with the way
human beings live their life (in a good proportion). There is thus for Gadamer an overlap between the ontology of
the world – at the level of how things are made by a demiurge – and the way human beings live their life.
The idea of the good provides the connection between these two orders: The being of things and human life. On
the side of things, the good is operative in their making as a good mixture. This leads Gadamer to see a difference in
how the idea of the good is presented in the Republic and the Philebus. In both instances, the idea of the good
provides the intelligibility of a thing. As a principle of intelligibility, the good is thus “beyond being” (epekeina tēs
ousias, 509b), in the sense that it is not “something,” it is not an ousia that could be an object. This principle of
intelligibility, however, is understood in two different ways, as a causal principle in the Republic and as a
teleological principle in the Philebus. In the Republic, the idea of the good is “the ground of the being of everything
and thus at the same time the ground of cognition of everything (508ff)” (1985a, 56; 1991a, 76). As such, it is a
“substantive determination of entities.” In the Philebus, while the good still “makes everything that exists
understandable in its being (Philebus 517c)” (1985a, 56; 1991a, 76–77), this principle is no longer causal but
teleological. Plato understands the good as being reflected “in” the thing. The idea of the good [idea tou agathou] is
not the “view of the good” [“Anblick” des Guten], as if there were something like the good that could be taken into
view, as if there were an idea of it that could have any causal effect in understanding a thing, as still suggested in the
Republic. Instead of a cause, the idea of the good is a “prospective view looking out for the good” [Ausblick auf das
Gute] (1991c, 143; 1986a, 28), as if the good were a subjective genitive: The good is an idea but in the thing (as a
good proportion) as what guides our look at the thing.20 Because the good is what makes a good proportion (and
thus a thing), when we have the good in view, seeking the good proportion in the thing, we are in fact looking at
what guided the demiurge when making things and the world. The idea of the good has become a “teleological
concept” or an “ultimate ontological principle,” precisely because it makes all entities intelligible: “It is only in this
ontological function that the idea of the good is in fact the ultimate basis of all processes of coming to an
understanding – not as a highest-level, universal eidos but as the formal character of everything that can really be
called ‘understood,’ which means, however, as the angle of vision to which the claim to understanding itself submits
itself” (1985a, 56; 1991a, 76–77). By having the good in view or being attracted by it, human beings are able to
understand what a thing is.
On the side of life, the good is operative in making life the “point of view” from which the thing is seen as good,
and this means understood. It is not just an epistemological characterization of the good as what makes things
intelligible. The good also connects things to life or connects the good of the thing with the good we pursue in life.
This is why Gadamer sees a relation between the two discussions in the Philebus about the genesis of things and the
make-up of a good life. As he says, the purpose of the second schema – life as a mixture of mind and pleasure –

is to explicate, conceptually, the perspective under which entities are produced or understood as things that are
produced. For this explication, then, a standpoint within the very intention of mixing is adopted. The mixture is
seen from the point of view of the mixer. Its constitutive moments are the structural moments of the good, as it
is understood as what the agent of the mixture has in view.
(1985a, 153; 1991a, 213)21

1.1.1.2 The mixture of things as a mixture of ideas

The second hermeneutic decision Gadamer makes in his reading of the Philebus consists in understanding the
“mixture” that produces a thing as a mixture of “ideas” or “forms” (eidē in the technical Platonic sense). Against
those who consider that Plato in the Philebus (as well as the Timaeus) had abandoned the theory of forms or ideas,
Gadamer strongly believes, first, that Plato never abandoned it, but more radically that he never held the view that
ideas are separated from the visible world. He faults Aristotle for having caricatured Plato’s theory as being of a
“two-world view,” probably as a convenient exaggeration by contrast with which he could present his own views
more easily. As Gadamer declares, “to oppose the common interpretation of Aristotle’s criticisms of the doctrine of
ideas, and to attack also the substance metaphysics of the Western tradition, has been the goal of my writing in this
area” (1997b, 34). Instead of an abandonment of the theory of form, the Philebus, Gadamer argues, is “an attempt at
theoretical explication of that doctrine” (1980, 140). He thus understands that the four components which Socrates
considers to be making up any thing (ousia) are in fact ideas so that a thing is a composition or mixture of ideas.
These four components or ideas are the infinite (apeiron), the finite (to peras), the mixture itself (summisgomenon),
and the cause (aitia). The four ideas, once mixed, keep something together as a being (ousia).22 As Gadamer
explains, “these four genera or eidē of the Philebus are obviously not a random selection from the totality of ideas;
rather they are the eidē basic to all ideational determinacy” (1980, 138).
The terms eidos and idea, which have been translated as “idea” or “form,” are interchangeable in common
ancient Greek usage. Eidos means the outward appearance of something – how something looks – and idea means
the external form that something has. Idea, Gadamer claims, contains a more pronounced emphasis on viewing or
looking, in the sense that the idea provides the perspective or the light in which something may be seen. He
understands Plato’s notion of “idea” as that which gives visibility to an entity or that which provides light and thus
allows something to appear. The idea is closely connected to the mind: It is a “having in view” (Blick auf die Idee).
Without the mind as the space of illumination where the thing will be understood in its truth, there would be no
appearing, no presence, and thus no ousia, no being. This is how the idea is a “precondition and presupposition in all
knowing” in the sense that, by having the idea in view, “I can subsume the appearances under the eidos common to
them, or perhaps better said, I can identify the appearances with their eidetic universality. This is the reason for the
assumption that there are ideas” (1985b, 146; 1980, 147) as the ideal unity of the many components that make up a
thing.
Plato can thus maintain that what truly exists is the idea of the thing because the idea is what provides visibility
to the thing and this means “presence.”23 This, for Gadamer, indicates the “inseparability of eidos from its visible
appearance” (1997a, 435) in the sense that ideas are “in” the thing, as what the mixture is made of or what gives it
“form,” and what gives the thing its visibility to the human mind. The metaphor of illumination confirms the
equivalence in terms of logos: The human mind is the space where the idea of the thing shines through, so that the
thing can be known in its ousia, allowing for a passage between the human mind (at the epistemological level) and
the world (at the ontological level). Before being the truth of a logos apophantikos, as in Aristotle (which we have
understood as “proposition”), the truth is a “shining forth,” ekphanestaton, which is how Heidegger understood a-
lētheia: Truth as disclosure or “unconcealment.”
To say that a being or ousia is a mixture of ideas shows for Gadamer that an ousia is not such by participating in
a single form outside this world. Insofar as forms or ideas provide the thing with its “form” (eidos) or its outward
aspect, they are “in” the thing as a mixture. If a good mixture is made of the four components mentioned above (the
infinite, the finite, the mixture, and the cause), the good itself is no longer a simple cause as it was suggested in the
Republic. If it is “beyond being” (epekeina tēs ousias), “the good is no longer the one” (1991c, 193; 1986a, 115), but
more like what keeps these four components together in harmony, which, as harmony, manifests itself as beauty,
symmetry, and truth. These are “the three structural components of the good, which appears as the beautiful”
(1991c, 193; 1986a, 115). Gadamer quotes Socrates, saying:

If we cannot catch the good with the aid of one idea [idea], let us run it down with three – beauty [kallei],
proportion [summetria], and truth [alētheia], and let us say that these, considered as one, may more properly
than all other components of the mixture be regarded as the cause, and that through the goodness of these the
mixture itself has been made good.
(Philebus 64e–65a, 2001, 391)

The good attracts the mind by being beautiful. This is what Plato describes as “the power (dunamis) of the good,”
which, in Gadamer’s words, “becomes visible in the growth (phusis) of the beautiful. The beautiful […] is not
something other than the good, but the good itself, as it is speakable and visible” (1985a, 150; 1991a, 208).24 When
the good is introduced into an entity [die Eingestaltung des Guten], what results is that the beautiful is brought out
[als Ausgestaltung des Schönen]” (1985a,150; 1991a, 208).25 This shows how the goodness of things is correlated to
or depends on the goodness of life, because it is the beautiful that gives traction to the human mind to pursue the
good and know – recognize as anamnēsis – what things are.26 “‘To shine’ means to shine on something, and so to
make that on which the light falls appear” (1990, 486; 1998, 482).
Gadamer gives some examples of this self-disclosure of what shines as beautiful within the space of illumination
of the mind or of the coming into being of a “mixture” which “becomes” something (an ousia) through its beautiful
appearing. Music, for example, is a mixture of different components in a good proportion, which brings out beauty:
“Out of the rushing flood of the audible, the numerically determinate relationship of the pure ‘tones’ comes to the
fore – harmony in music” (1991c, 194; 1986a, 117. Translation modified). The same applies to a meaningful
discourse: “In their function as letters, determinate lines of script emerge from the whole of the visible, and
phonemes from the rest of what is heard, each as the special articulation of meaning that it is” (1991c, 194; 1986a,
117). In general, this holds for life itself and the world:

That which lives is brought forth as an organic body (Philebus 29d), and the entire universe as a harmonic
order. These are raised out of the limitless flowing away of mere becoming (genesis) and are raised up into
being [ousia]. Its having been raised to ousia constitutes the intelligibility (noūs) or disclosure (alētheia) of the
cosmic order.
(1991c, 194; 1986a, 117. Translation modified)

Because the good attracts the mind and appears beautiful, the mind can in return produce a logos of being, once this
being or ousia appears as one, and this means a good one, shining forth for the human mind.
The view that an ousia or “being” is the result of a mixing takes away the mystery of being, understood as a
fullness (as opposed to nothing) or as a magical event (as opposed to non-being). Being is in fact the result of a
becoming and actually means “coming-into-being” [Werden zum Sein]: “It is being that has come to be [gewordenes
Sein]” (1991c, 192; 1986a, 114). Once a thing “has become” (is a good mixture, in Socrates’ metaphor), we have
something definite, an ousia or a being, which then “is.”

1.1.1.3 The cause as being in the thing

In his reading of the Philebus, Gadamer makes a third important hermeneutic decision concerning one of the
components of the mixture made by the demiurge. In Socrates’ doctrine of the four kinds, besides the infinite, the
finite and the mixture, there is the cause, which for Plato is the mind (noūs) of a demiurge. On the basis of the fact
that this cause is mentioned as one of the components of the ousia – thus not external to it – Gadamer sees it not as
an efficient cause (the demiurge’s mind), but as the “reason for” or the telos governing the making of the thing. This
distinction is important because it shows that, if we, in our human logos, understand this “reason for” (what a thing
is “good for”), we understand its logos coming from the demiurge as the good proportion of the mixture. As
Gadamer explains, what makes a thing definite or “one” for Plato is the fact that the mixture of the elements has
been made in the right way, that it is a good mixture, and this is described by measuredness or proportion, which,
Gadamer says, is the meaning of logos (1985a, 103; 1991a, 143).27 The logos as proportion in a good ousia is thus
amenable to being understood in a logos of the human mind and thus expressed as an “account” of what things are.
The logos as proportion thus nicely provides the linchpin between the ontological level and the epistemological
level, at which the human mind gives an account (logos) of this proportion by “understanding” “the perspective
under which entities are produced” (1985a, 153; 1991a 212–213).28 This sameness of logos indicates that we cannot
separate the epistemological perspective from the ontological perspective for the simple reason that the good at the
level of the production of entities cannot be differentiated from how it displays itself to the human mind as good.
The advantage of this interpretation is clear. Although the human mind obviously did not cause things to be, as
the demiurge did, it can in fact start from the encounter with what is and try to arrive at the demiurge’s mind by
understanding the telos of the making of mixtures. The temporality of the genesis can thus be hermeneutically
inverted. Because we do not have to get inside the mind of the demiurge, we can start with our human mind and
seek to understand what things are “good for,” that is to say, the good proportion which keeps the ousia as one. In
transposing a genesis of being into a “reason for” or transporting the production of reality (by a demiurge) into the
space of reasons, Gadamer can hermeneutically assimilate the logos insufflated by the demiurge into the ousia (as
the good measure of the mixture, which “constitutes the being of the entity [Seiende],” 1985a, 103; 1991a, 143) with
the logos the human mind gives of what the thing is good for. There is thus no difference, in principle, between
being and that which is understood. Gadamer can then conclude: “The ontological sense of ‘coming into being’
[‘Werden zum Sein’] is that of the comprehensibility and determinability [Verstehbar- und Besteimmbarsein] […] of
the being of the world in its becoming” (1985a, 100; 1991a, 138. Translation modified).29 Once the human mind has
grasped the good that a thing possesses, it has grasped “what” the thing is so that the logos produced by the human
mind (noūs) can claim to be a stand-in for the ousia. We have here the justification for Gadamer’s conviction that
understanding is not governed by a pre-established reality, which would order the interpretive work, and that
understanding still remains accountable to reality by being attracted to the good that lies in it.

1.1.1.4 Ratio as language

Gadamer makes a fourth fundamental hermeneutic decision in his reading of the Philebus. The logos – the good
proportion of the thing from the perspective of the demiurge and the grasping of this proportion by the human mind
– is language. The Platonic insight that there is already an articulation in reality (following the metaphor of a genesis
or mixture), which is not just intelligible but susceptible to becoming discursive in a human logos, lies at the
foundation of Gadamer’s views on the ontological claims language can make. Gadamer uses Socrates’ very words to
reinforce the connection between the logos as proportion and the logos as the dimension of language.
As Socrates explains in the Phaedo, he became disillusioned by the promise of other philosophers, such as
Anaxagoras, that the mind could know the true cause of things in the so-called “elements” (water, air, earth, fire) or
that reality could be contemplated directly, such as by looking at a solar eclipse directly. He then came to realize that
the mediation of a logos is needed, that he should, as Gadamer puts it, “investigate the truth as it is mirrored in the
logoi” (1980, 198). After following those we call the “pre-Socratics,” Socrates takes his “second best journey,”
which he characterizes as a refuge or flight into the logoi:

So it seemed to me that I should take refuge in theories [logous] and consider the truth of the realities in these
[…] Well anyway, that’s the way I started out and every time I put forward an argument that I judge to be very
strong, whatever seems to me to agree with this I take to be true, both regarding causes and all the rest, and
whatever doesn’t I take to be not true.
(Phaedo 99e–100a, 2017, 455–457)

As Gadamer insists, this “flight” or “refuge” into the logoi does not amount to abandoning the search for “the
alētheia tōn ontōn (truth of things).” It is only “the rejection in principle of naïve, unreflective methods of
investigating and explaining natural events” (1980, 198). It is merely an acknowledgment that this search for a
principle in things which remains the same is done through language.30
By understanding the ratio (logos) of a good thing as the logos that human beings can give of that thing,
Gadamer secures an alternative understanding of language to Aristotle’s powerful logicization of language as the
site of propositional thinking. We recall that Gadamer considered that one of his main tasks consisted in retrieving a
notion of language as connected to the practice of life. This effort goes in parallel with his effort to salvage Plato’s
notion of “ideas” from Aristotle’s mischaracterization of them as otherworldly entities. Gadamer can now claim that
understanding language as a dimension of human existence in fact reconnects with the ancient Greek experience of
language as presented in the Philebus: Logos is both the proportion of a good thing and the grasping of this
proportion. In these two functions, language as a dimension of existence underlies both the appearing of any being –
as what provides stability – and the articulation of the revelation of this being – as the fluid in which changes occur.

One can in fact find in language what Socrates seeks: A principle that remains the same, on account of which
the entity is conceived in what it always is. The identity of what one intends is presupposed as the sameness of
the eidos, and thus one conceives, in the unity of cause or reason, the manifoldness – previously beyond the
reach of comprehension – of the changing entity that presents itself differently to the senses from one time to
the next.
(1985a, 53–54; 1991a, 72–73. Translation modified)

It is against this Platonic background that we should read what Gadamer says in Truth and Method about
Sprachlichkeit. The dimension of language is, in fact, the translation of logos. It is both the form taken by the
grasping of reality and the proportion which lies in a thing, making it one and thereby allowing it to be, so that it can
be addressed, thought, and talked about. Gadamer himself connects Sprachlichkeit with “that ‘inner conversation’
which the Stoics called the logos endiathetos” (2007, 418). With this background in mind, it may be less shocking to
read in Gadamer that language is an “experience of the world [Welterfahrung]” (1990, 442; 1998, 438). We may
even hear an echo of the Philebus when Gadamer writes: “That which comes into language is not something that is
pregiven before language [kein sprachlos Vorgegebenes]; rather, the word gives it its own determinateness
[Bestimmtheit]” (1990, 479; 1998, 475). Even when Gadamer speaks of “the language that things have,” he adds a
Platonic corrective: This language “is not the logos ousias, and it is not fulfilled in the self-contemplation of an
infinite intellect; it is the language that our finite, historical nature apprehends when we learn to speak” (1990, 480;
1998, 476).
The striking assertions that “being is language, i.e., self-presentation [Sichdarstellen]” (1990, 490; 1998, 487) or
that “being that can be understood is language” (1990, 478; 1998, 474) now appear in their full significance. These
are not mere pronouncements by Gadamer but rather a complex and original conclusion won through a long
dialogue with Plato. Language is in fact the fabric of life, and this in turn lends credibility to some of Heidegger’s
mantra-like formulas about language. Gadamer’s discussion of the Philebus through the four hermeneutic decisions
we reviewed can be seen as an effort to retrieve a more nuanced Plato than presented in Aristotle’s interpretation and
to find a view on language that is more promising that the accessory to thinking that Aristotle defined as logos.
If language is an articulation of the world and if the dimension of language belongs to life itself as existence, it
means that our concepts, which do their work in our understanding of the world and of ourselves in an invisible
manner, can be made visible in their articulation.

1.1.2 The origin of concepts in life

Dilthey’s philosophy of life,31 which influenced the young Heidegger at the time Gadamer was studying with him,
gave Gadamer the means to articulate two views on concepts, which have remained constant in his works.32 First,
there is a fluidity in our ways of thinking and in our concepts, which themselves arise out of a life that is lived.
Second, this connection of concepts to life makes it possible to bring concepts back to life by tracing their genesis.
Only then can we understand what was meant by those concepts, and thus what kind of life was present in them.
Regarding the first view of the connection between conceptualization and life, although critical of Dilthey’s
notion of “lived experience” (Erlebnis), Gadamer only questions the psychological aspect of it, not its fundamental
core that there is a connection between what is real and what is experienced and thus between the subjects and their
history. Rephrasing Dilthey, Gadamer says that “the first condition of possibility of a science of history is that I
myself am a historical being, that the person studying history is the person making history” (1990, 226; 1998, 222).
As Gadamer explains the term, erleben (to experience) “means primarily ‘to be still alive when something happens.’
The word suggests the immediacy with which something real is grasped” (1990, 66; 1998, 61). What he criticizes in
Dilthey is that he also understands Erlebnis (lived experience) as “a yield or result that achieves permanence,
weight, and significance from out of the transience of experiencing” (Gadamer 1990, 67; 1998, 61) and this content,
Dilthey believes, can be objectified as “expression” of life. This is why Dilthey believes that interpretation can be
confined to retrieving a content of meaning (as an expression) by a “re-living” (Nacherleben), which consists in re-
effectuating the transitive living that yielded that which is to be understood. Yet, despite his criticism, Gadamer
keeps Dilthey’s fundamental insight into the active aspect of understanding as a form of re-effectuation or re-
enactment once the psychological connotations have been eliminated.
 This connection between life and what is real has a significant consequence for the status of concepts. This is the
second view Gadamer takes from Dilthey. Because they are part of the “methods” we use to explain phenomena,
concepts tend to be “invisible” as necessary tools – organon, in Aristotle’s sense – assumed not to interfere with
what they conceptualize. The most striking aspect of this blind faith in concepts is offered by the sciences, which we
tend to admire, with some good reasons, but which also sometimes tend to be dogmatic and claim to regulate all
aspects of life. We can see this dogmatism in the rhetorical use of the word “scientific,” when it is asserted that “a
scientific study has shown…” This use of science as an argument of authority leads to the confusion between
“science” as a method – which we all admire – and science as a doctrinal body of knowledge – which can be
questioned, like any other body of knowledge, as it is open to ideological bias and game of power.
After Dilthey, Gadamer saw with dismay how the dominance of the sciences took hold of the whole realm of
human affairs. He saw the rise of the sciences as a threat when they present themselves as the sole model of
“rational” discourse and thus the sole source and guarantee of the truth. While the focus on the propositional aspect
of language has increased the efficiency of communication and clarity of representations of facts and states of
affairs, the scientific discourse has also lost its allegiance and accountability to the lifeworld. It has become hostage
to the technological “progress” it generates.
Gadamer wants to show that the scientific discourse by its laser-like focus on specific aspects of reality – those
that are representable in quantifiable and measurable terms expressed in propositions – has become blind to its own
motivations, such as the desire to master nature and manipulate it for specific purposes.33 The reason for this blind
spot is precisely that these motivations are not measurable and quantifiable. Scientists abstract themselves from the
world they test in their experiments, as if they were not present as persons and citizens to their theories, hypotheses,
and measuring instruments; as if there were no “experience” in their “experiments,” as it were.34
This follows from Dilthey’s critique of the bloodless subject of modernity.35 By abstracting themselves from
their existential “experience of the world” and reducing this experience to a mere set of “experiments,” the scientific
subjects fall into a kind of schizophrenia. Because science does not give them the means to recognize that their
propositions are “contextualized,” let alone the means to assess the interests which motivate their research,36
scientists are susceptible to be guided by a will to power, whether economic or political and to pursue the mastery of
nature and the control of the many aspects of life while sincerely believing to be motivated only by the pursuit of
truth.
We thus have an unfortunate situation in which one discourse – the scientific logos – divorces itself from the
very logos of the articulation of the world at the level of human actions and interactions. As a consequence, this
discourse not only obeys its own logic but, because of its utility to political and economic forces, for which it cannot
account, it imposes its model and criteria on all “rational” discourses. By so doing, this scientific logos tends to
dismiss other forms of discourse, such as the human sciences, as “non-scientific,” as the “inexact sciences,” or as
having “ten percent scientificity,” as it was said within the Vienna Circle.37 This, then, forces those other discourses
to justify themselves “scientifically,” to use quantitative methods, to appeal to data, etc. at the expense of losing their
specificity as human sciences. The unilateral trust in what is “scientific” is forcing all forms of “understanding” into
the straight jacket of scientific “explanations,” as Dilthey saw.38 The human sciences are relinquishing their power
to bring to light the human “experiences” and thus the hermeneutic decisions at the basis of the theoretical
constructions of the sciences.
Faced with this situation, Dilthey offers a way to resist this scientistic intellectual imperialism and Gadamer
exploited these means of resistance in a remarkably successful manner. Dilthey showed that there is the possibility
of a genesis of concepts, which is not just a history of ideas but the retrieval of the historical dimension that concepts
have. Once we do this, we also take away from them their alleged self-evident nature. For the mechanism that the
scientific discourse uses – and the same can also be found in a philosophy presenting itself as a “logical analysis” –
is an erasure of the genesis of its concepts. Such an erasure of genesis is tempting for any discipline, as it allows the
discipline to present its concepts as “self-evident,” necessary, or directly called for by nature itself. If we can
counteract this dogmatic use of unquestionable concepts, we also loosen the grip that scientism has on “explaining”
what reality is.
What Dilthey showed and what Gadamer refined is that concepts can be traced back to the lived experiences out
of which they arose.39 As Gadamer warns us, “we only should not think […] as though philosophical concepts were
available in some warehouse to be simply hauled out from there” (2016d, 187). Rather, concepts themselves “have
always grown out of experience” (2016a, 6). They “develop out of the words of our language and thus carry, like a
mark on their forehead, the hour of their birth into the life experience of human beings” (2022, 34). Because of this
historical birth, there is the possibility, Gadamer says, to “follow the semantic life of language and this means: Go
back to the point where the concept emerges out of speaking itself, out of the ‘situatedness in life’ [Sitz im Leben]”
(2016d, 187). We can re-awaken the voice of history in our language and concepts.
Bringing concepts back to life by tracing their genesis means for Gadamer uncovering the hermeneutic decisions
that were made when concepts arose from the use of language. As he says, “what philosophical reflection discovers
is that there are pre-decisions in concepts that are so fundamentally hidden that one is somehow entrapped within
their interpretive horizon” (Gadamer 2016e, 6). Because we have become oblivious of those pre-decisions, we are
not making them and implicitly assent to them, letting them permeate our investigations. In Gadamer’s words, “with
any concept through which we think, a pre-decision has already been made, whose legitimacy we no longer verify”
(2016e, 6).
Tracing concepts back to life has the advantage of making us mindful that our concepts came from somewhere,
were born at some time, and were borne by some predecessors. We gain a lucidity on how much our concepts “carve
out” reality, following Socrates’ metaphor of butchery. Concepts intervene in reality, turning reality into a
transaction in the sense of what results from our interaction with the world.

In a concept something is put together [zusammengegriffen], combined together [zusammengefasst]. The word
says that the concept seizes [greifen], grabs [zugreifen], and puts together [zusammengreifen] and, in this way,
conceives [begreift] something. Thinking in concepts is thus an active thinking that is intrusive [eingreifend]
and far-reaching [ausgreifend].
(Gadamer 2016f, 232)

Being lucid about this intervention is what Gadamer calls a “deconstruction” in the Heideggerean sense of
Destruktion. Gadamer writes: “Let us now ask what is gained from the deconstruction [Destruktion], dismantling
[Abbau] and from the laying-bare [Freilegung] of the provenance of our conceptuality. I answer: The return to what
is originally Greek makes us aware of what is our ‘own’” (2022, 170). This non-Derridean “deconstruction” is a
manner of heeding Husserl’s call to “go back to the things themselves” by freeing “the historical provenance
[Herkunftsgeschichte] of terms” (1997b, 22).
Let us make two correctives to this genesis of concepts. First, negatively, the genesis of concepts is not a
deconstruction of their validity. It is not a suspicion about concepts, since we cannot do much in the world without
concepts. It only helps us realize that concepts are made and only have the validity or importance that we grant them
as tools. By unveiling their “historical provenance,” we only prevent them from solidifying, from becoming self-
evident, and thus desiccated in invisible tool to power. Second, positively, retracing this genesis, as Gadamer says in
the quotation above, “makes us aware of what is our own.” Let us unpack this second point in two steps.
The first step is that, by retracing the genesis of concepts, we bring them back to life, to the fluid field of human
experience, and, in so doing, we render, Gadamer says, “passable again the path from the concept to the word so that
thinking speaks to us again” (2016a, 235). Treading the path again between experience and concepts aims at making
our concepts less rigid than they tend to become and allows us to ask questions about the use of such concepts. We
can now say that the use of concepts is itself historical, and thus not neutral. We have rendered our concepts
dialogical again, re-entered them into the discussion, precisely because they arose from life and are permeated by a
logos of life, their static “logical” content being a “decision,” now susceptible to be re-examined.
After this first step, once the path from concepts back to experience has been re-opened, the second step consists
in thinking our own history by making explicit the pre-decisions at the heart of our concepts and, in this way, by
owning our history and being lucidly historical. As Gadamer notes, in the use of a term, the history involved is one
“in which the special terminology in philosophy is more or less covered over and in the background, and yet this
history still speaks within and along with that term” (1997b, 22). By practicing this deconstruction, which is “a duty
of critical thinking” (1997b, 18), we gain a “consciousness of the history of concepts” (1997b, 18).
Gadamer became a master in retracing the genesis of concepts and bringing them back to their living context.
For example, when discussing subjectivity, Gadamer reminds us after Heidegger that the word “subject” comes from
the Greek hupokeimenon and the Latin subiectum, both terms meaning “what lies at the basis.” This exercise does
not give us a truer concept of the subject but only allows us to have a feel for the kind of transformation that took
place when Descartes turned the subject from the sense of “what lies at the foundation” into a “thinking thing” that
thinks itself. By doing what Gadamer recommends, we have not substituted another concept for the concept of
subject, and we have not eliminated the notion of subjectivity. We have only opened up a gap in the obvious
character of subjectivity, which makes us aware of our own position as interpreters and of our own assumptions.
Because interpreters have to use concepts when interpreting, they bring their own history to the work or the
event they interpret. This “intervention” pertains to what Gadamer calls a fusion of horizons.
1.2 Interpretation as fusion of horizons or re-enactment

Gadamer borrows from Heidegger the view that interpretation derives from “understanding.” In Being and Time,
understanding is an ontological dimension of human existence insofar as human beings relate to their surroundings,
others, and themselves not causally (as in empiricism) nor through mental representations (as in
representationalism), but in a dimension of meaningfulness, what Heidegger calls Sinn or sense. As deriving from
this ontological dimension of understanding, interpretation then is not merely a device for finding meaning but an
experience, which thus involves the interpreters themselves. However, Gadamer has a fundamental disagreement
with Heidegger on the scope of understanding, which Heidegger presents from the perspective of the individual. For
Gadamer, understanding (and thus interpretation) is communal.
This disagreement is particularly acute when it comes to the manner in which understanding is articulated by
discourse or speech in Being and Time. As Gadamer acknowledged, “from early on, what was lacking for me in this
analysis was the experience one has of others, of their resistance, of their objection, and the guiding force that
originates here” (Gadamer 2016c, 115). As a student, he was similarly taken aback by Heidegger’s negative
formulations of any social dimension of human existence. “Heidegger always maintained the equiprimordiality of
authenticity and inauthenticity. In his lectures […] this always produced a surprising effect when he concluded his
rather wrathful analysis of ‘the They’ and of ‘idle talk’ with the reassurance: ‘All of this is said without any
pejorative meaning’” (2016c, 113).
Gadamer’s insistence on the communal aspect of understanding and interpretation led him to re-affirm, after
Plato, the articulating role of the dialogue. This goes against Heidegger’s ontological project, in which, as Gadamer
sees it, “the others could only manifest themselves in their own existence as a limitation.” For him, as he explains,
the others belong to the very process of understanding:

It was only when the others are starkly held up against me that the authentic possibility of understanding
opened up to me. To let the other stand against oneself – and it is from there that all my hermeneutic works
slowly arose – does not only mean to recognize in principle the limitation of one’s own project. It also
demands simply going beyond one’s own possibilities in a dialogical, communicative, and hermeneutic
process.
(Gadamer 2016j, 135)

Gadamer’s whole enterprise of hermeneutics is centered on reaching an understanding through dialogue. No matter
how much dissent there may be, it is always local, confined within the broad mutual understanding. We can
certainly disagree in a dialogue and may well engage in a polemic, but the very existence of dialogue prevents the
polemic from undermining the possibility of reaching an understanding. This is how Gadamer can maintain a claim
to universality for hermeneutics.40 Even when he has to acknowledge that his dialogues with Derrida never got
traction, he continues to see this as an accidental problem, not as a fundamental issue.41 Understanding may be
indeed an ontological constituent of human existence. Yet, it is a constituent of the social and historical existence in
connection with others.
Understanding, as a basic ontological feature of human existence, is an “event” or “happening” (Geschehen)
(Gadamer 1990, 3; 1998, xxiii. Translation modified),42 which is a notion he also takes from Heidegger. This notion
of “event” is central to Truth and Method and philosophical hermeneutics in general. As Gadamer notes, “I had
initially planned to publish [my book], not with the title Truth and Method, but with the title Understanding and
Event [Verstehen und Geschehen]. For it is not so much our doing that matters as what happens to us when thinking
leads us on the way of thinking” (2016i, 225). This is why the subject-object dichotomy is a false one, because both
subject and object originate from within understanding and interpretation. On the side of the object, being an object
is nothing else than being “disclosed” as an object through understanding and interpretation. On the side of the
subject, instead of being a free-floating mysterious device or a mind freely roaming the world, the subject is rather a
person engaged in a historical world and in dialogue with others.
As a form of understanding, interpretation thus goes far beyond the interpretation of texts, as in the traditional
romantic hermeneutics founded by Schleiermacher. It pertains to the ontological structure of human existence.
Interpretation is a “hermeneutic experience” (hermeneutische Erfahrung), which is the alternative he offers to the
philosophies of consciousness in the Diltheyan and Husserlian traditions. Because both the objects to be interpreted
as well as the interpreters themselves are historically situated and carry their historical and cultural backgrounds
with them, interpretation takes the form of an encounter between interpreters and objects in which both will be
transformed by the encounter. In order to name this encounter, Gadamer uses alternatively two expressions, which
characterize interpretation as being both an event and a dialogue. The most commonly used expression is “fusion of
horizons” and the other, less commonly used, is “re-enactment.” Although Gadamer tends to use them
synonymously to describe the dialogical and eventful aspects of interpretation, they emphasize two quite different
aspects of interpretation. The fusion of horizon is a retrospective, third-person perspective, on what happens in
interpretation. It accounts for the event seen after the fact. By contrast, re-enactment describes – in a first-person
perspective – the commitment interpreters make when rendering a work or an event meaningful again. Let us briefly
examine the stakes of each.

1.2.1 Interpretation as fusion of horizons

In general terms, the fusion is the resolution of a “tension between the horizon of the text and the horizon of the
reader” (1984a, 46). Interpreters come to the text with their questions and concerns, just as the text offers resistance
as a cultural entity with its own specific background. When described from the outside – from a third-person
perspective – interpretation thus looks like a fusion of these two horizons of the interpreter and of the object. Now,
the framework in which Gadamer operates is phenomenology, in which, as Husserl says, consciousness has
horizons. The fusion is thus the description of interpretation at the level of consciousness, those of the interpreter
and of the work or the event.
We already see here the ambiguity of speaking of the horizon of the work. In phenomenology, which is the
framework within which Gadamer operates, the horizon is a horizon of consciousness. This means that, in the case
of the work, the horizon would be the one of the work’s authors or the agents in the event. If it is really the horizon
of the work or the event, regardless of authors and agents, then it will have to be the horizon that interpreters – the
consciousness of interpreters – will reconstrue. As we will see, the other notion of re-enactment does not operate at
the level of two consciousnesses but at the level of the sense that the work (or the event) makes.
Let us, first, follow Gadamer’s argument before dealing with the ambiguity in the fusion of horizons. This notion
is connected to Gadamer’s view that interpretation has the structure of a question and answer: “That a historical text
is made the object of interpretation means that it puts a question to the interpreter. Thus, interpretation always
involves a relation to the question that is asked of the interpreter. To understand a text means to understand this
question” (1990, 375; 1998, 370). Through the logic of question and answer (1990, 375; 1998, 369), interpretation is
both “experience” – as reconstruction of the question – and “event” – it happens in the sense that a text or an event
challenges us so that we have to answer. As Gadamer explains,

a person who wants to understand must question what lies behind what is said. He must understand it as an
answer to a question. If we go back behind what is said, then we inevitably ask questions beyond what is said.
We understand the sense of the text only by acquiring the horizon of the question – a horizon that, as such,
necessarily includes other possible answers. Thus the meaning of a sentence is relative to the question to which
it is a reply, but that implies that its meaning necessarily exceeds what is said in it.
(1990, 375; 1998, 370)

The logic of question and answer is a peculiar logic in the sense that it is not transitive from a question that would
come first and an answer that would subsequently be provided. The question is actually framed by the interpreter so
that the question is what the answer posits as its motivation. This is what it means that the tradition makes a claim on
us: The interpreter in fact responds from being addressed (challenged, unsettled, or impressed) by the tradition.
Now, this means that the standpoint of the author to be interpreted can never be fully re-occupied as such, because
this standpoint of the author only exists within the response the interpreter provides. There is no re-living by the
interpreter of what happened to the author. Interpretation is thus not to be seen from the psychological perspective,
as a form of “transposing oneself into another person” or an “immediate participation with another” (Gadamer 1990,
387; 1998, 383). It is not “to get inside another person and re-effectuate his experiences [seine erlebnisse
nachvollziehen]” (1990, 387; 1998, 383. Translation modified). At the same time, it is also not an appropriation of
what was meant according to our own standards (1998, 305). “Transposing ourselves consists neither in the empathy
of one individual for another nor in subordinating another person to our own standards” (1998, 305).
These negative formulations reveal a fundamental dissymmetry in the fusion of horizons, which Gadamer
believes can be resorbed. Because the horizon of the author’s consciousness (or of the work) cannot be actively at
play, but only by proxy through interpreters, interpretation does not receive its impetus from the past, but from the
present of the interpreter. “Reconstructing the question to which the text is presumed to be the answer itself takes
place within a process of questioning through which we try to answer the question that the tradition asks us” (1990,
379-80; 1998, 374. Translation modified).43
One consequence of this dissymmetry, which Gadamer embraces, is that it grants a “productive” role to
interpretation. Instead of a re-effectuation of the original word to be interpreted, of a “mere reproduction”
(Nachvollzug) or “repetition” (Nachreden) of the original (1990, 477; 1998, 473), “understanding,” Gadamer says,
“is […] always a productive [produktiv] activity” (1990, 301; 1998, 296). It is a “re-creation” (Nachschaffen, 1990,
125; 1998, 119) or a “new creation” (neue Schöpfung, 1990, 477; 1998, 473) but, as he notes, “this re-creation
[Nachschaffen] does not follow a preceding creative act but the figure of the created work” (1990, 125; 1998, 119.
Translation modified).44 Yet, it is a new creation because, as an “event,” it moves beyond the particularity of the
object investigated and of the subject doing the interpretation. In short, even if interpretation responds to a claim
from the past, it receives its marching orders from the present: It is productive of sense and new experiences.
However, there is a second consequence of this dissymmetry, which makes the very notion of horizon unfit for a
fusion. The dissymmetry does not just grant the initiative to interpreters. It also makes their horizon elusive.
Interpreters reconstrue the horizon of the work they interpret but their own horizon is modified in this very
enterprise. “In fact,” Gadamer says, “the horizon of the present is continually in the process of being formed” (1990,
311; 1998, 306) and “the horizon of the present cannot be formed without the past” (1990, 311; 1998, 306). He even
candidly acknowledges: “There is no more an isolated horizon of the present in itself than there are historical
horizons which have to be acquired. Rather, understanding is always the fusion of these horizons supposedly
existing by themselves” (1990, 311; 1998, 306. Gadamer’s italics).
Despite the dissymmetry and the privilege of the interpreters’ horizon, Gadamer wants to maintain that
interpreters respond to a claim coming from the work. We thus have a complex relation of effect and counter-effect.
Instead of being a starting point, as authority, our position as interpreters is an effect, insofar as we are ourselves the
addressees of a claim coming from the text. And yet, we are those who interpret. The text we want to understand
speaks to us but within our own voice as interpreters. This is what the notion of wirkungsgeschichtliches
Bewusstsein, a consciousness exposed to the effects of history, is supposed to convey.45 Because the fusion “always
involves rising to a higher universality that overcomes not only our own particularity but also that of the other”
(1990, 310; 1998, 305), the “hermeneutic experience,” which is fundamentally the “structure” of consciousness
(1990, 352; 1998, 346), not only opens up consciousness to history, but carries consciousness beyond the present.
The consciousness exposed to the effects of history is a consciousness with all the apparatus of consciousness,
but it operates within a framework that has been opened by an event and is, as such, an “experience of sense”
(Erfahrung von Sinn. 1990, 387; 1998, 383). I may be the one who understands and interprets, but in the process the
interpretation has a return effect on me, so that I may initiate my own transformation, as it were. The event takes me
in its happening as a dynamic event of fusion of horizons that transforms my interpreting consciousness. To interpret
from within the event thus means, on the one hand, to pay attention to the historical situation of what we investigate
and, on the other, to be mindful of our own historical position. What allows history to have this articulating role in
interpretation is precisely language in the form of dialogue. This is how language can be the engine of history or, as
Gadamer says, “the experience of the world” (Welterfahrung) (1990, 442; 1998, 438).
However, the mediation of language in the fusion of horizons reveals a third consequence of the dissymmetry in
the fusion of horizons. We noted above that this dissymmetry granted a productive role to interpretation and a
privilege to interpreters. By giving a materiality to the exchange between interpreters and their object, language also
transposes the dialogue, which is supposed to be of the form of question and answer, into the form of an
“inscription.” On the one hand, because of the privilege of the interpreter, “the interpreting word is the word of the
interpreter; it is not the language and the dictionary of the interpreted text” (1990, 477; 1998, 473). The horizon of
the work is thus “inscribed” in the horizon of the interpreters. On the other hand, the horizon of interpreters being
historically situated and elusive as it changes with the unfolding of the event, is also inscribed. While this inscription
accounts for the aspect of an event in the fusion of horizons, it is more difficult to see how the inscription can also
account for the aspect of a living dialogue, which is the other aspect of interpretation as a fusion of horizons.
Gadamer came to see the challenge that Derrida’s views on the “inscription,” what he calls “writing,” represents
to any effort of interpreters to connect to a text or an event. There are two issues in the fusion of horizons that
Derrida’s skeptical challenge can help us identify more closely. The first one is about the “inscription” of the fusion
of horizons and the second is about how interpreters, once “inscribed” in the event of interpretation, can still claim
to interpret the same text instead of, for example, writing another text.

1.2.1.1 First problem: The inscription of the fusion of horizons

In some form or other, interpretation has to recover the living interaction that was taking place when someone wrote
something or when something happened. And yet, this “life” of the past occurrence is no longer. It is only available
to interpretation as inscribed in a work. There is thus a radical difference between interpreters dealing with other
people in a live situation and interpreters dealing with texts from the past. When dealing with people in a live
situation and if they are on a roughly equal social footing with interpreters and in the same cultural community,
interpreters can indeed fuse their own horizons with the horizons of those they interpret, who in turn can assert their
own horizon. When dealing with foreign cultures or works from the past, however, the privilege of interpreters
threatens the very notion of dialogue. In the case of foreign cultures, interpreters will have to make a decision,
however implicitly, and accept, first, that those people are indeed making sense in their strange practices and
unintelligible speech. Only after this hermeneutic pre-decision will interpreters, second, accept to grant a horizon to
those people. In the case of works from the past, because texts or events do not have a horizon in the same
psychological or mental sense as interpreters do, interpreters have the hermeneutic privilege of granting a horizon to
past works and of accepting to engage with them.
Now, with regard to cultural history, we know how tempting it is for those in power to burn books (if not the
writers altogether) or, now, ban books and writers. This indicates that any horizon a foreign people or a text or an
event may have will need to be found out – construed – by interpreters themselves. It thus seems that, in the fusion
of horizons, in one sense, there is a relation that is subsequent to the existence of the dialogue partners, and, in
another sense, the relation comes first, and it is within the encounter that each partner is assigned its status. This is
what exposed Gadamer’s “radical interpretation” to the charge of unwitting relativism, as leveled against him by
Davidson.
Gadamer perceived Derrida’s notion of “writing” and his subsequent notion of “deconstruction” (Gadamer 2022,
206) as a skeptical challenge to his philosophical hermeneutics: If there is an “inscription” of everything we say and
do in the factum of a pre-existing agreement or a preceding dialogue to which we connect when speaking and
thinking, interpretation by definition cannot recover this transcendental dimension. As a consequence, interpretation
would have to accept that it can never justify itself, that all its criteria of evaluation, standards of validity, and claims
to provide the “meaning” of a text are themselves interpretive. Interpreting would then only mean to append a new
text to the one allegedly interpreted. It could only be a “graft” (Derrida 1972, 377). This was Derrida’s fundamental
attack on presence – being present to one’s own thoughts, repeating the self-same content of meaning – and his
embrace of “dissemination” as a law of the redistribution of meaning, against any possibility of ideality in the sense
of a content repeatable across contexts without loss. This would mean that the “interpreting differently,” which
Gadamer opposes to the “interpreting better,” would lose its right to claim that the “difference” between
interpretations is still a difference between the “same” texts or events.
The issue is thus for Gadamer how to reconcile dialogue, which is a living interaction, involving the psychology
of participants, with an event, which is a happening that exceeds the psychology of the participants. How can a
dialogue be an event of coming to an understanding (Verständigungsgeschehen) (Gadamer 1984a, 24) if the
dialogue itself is inscribed? On the one hand, as we saw, a dialogue in the case of interpretation cannot be one
between two conscious entities or two subjects (“understanding is not a psychic transposition,” 1990, 398; 1998,
395). On the other, the work to be interpreted, as inscribed does not have a horizon in the same way that an
interpreter has one. Because of its inscription, a text has a free-floating identity with borrowable horizons, so to
speak:

What is fixed in writing has detached itself from the contingency of its origin and its author and made itself
free for new relationships. Normative concepts such as the author’s meaning or the original reader’s
understanding in fact represent only an empty space that is filled from time to time in understanding.
(1990, 399; 1998, 395)

Because the vertical trajectory of interpretation cannot cross the semiotic mediation and reach the voice of the author
on the other side (or the intentions of the agents in the event), there is no point at which interpretation can reach the
horizon of the work. We now see the underside of the productivity of interpretation if the horizon of the work or the
event is construed or inscribed in the horizon of the interpreters: Nothing may offer resistance to interpretation so
that interpretation may in fact create its own object.
It is thus one thing to say that no interpretation can be definitive so that, for example, history “must be written
anew by each new present” (Gadamer 1984a, 27). It is another thing to explain why we still call it “history” as being
about what really happened. The danger here is a kind of “future perfect fallacy,” in the sense of appealing to a
future perspective in order to deny the correctness or truth of an interpretation by saying something like this: The
present historical account is biased or incomplete because 20 years from now “it will have been shown” that
historians had prejudices or an ideology. This fallacy conflates the present of the interpreter with the future of the
critique by using the future to qualify now a present interpretation.46
Similarly, it is one thing to say that the notion of an understanding better is pointless in the sense that we would
need to know that over against which it is called “better” and, in the absence of the “what” in comparison with
which an interpretation could be deemed better, interpretation is left no other alternative than to be “different”: “We
understand differently, if we understand at all” (1990, 302; 1998, 297. Translation modified). Yet, it is another thing
to explain what the qualification “differently” means since this qualification itself assumes a common point of
reference between two interpretations. “Differently” cannot just be what an interpretation alone decides or construes.
This is why Gadamer speaks of a “claim” (Anspruch) made on us by the tradition, even if, in the inscription of
this claim, the voice is taken away from the tradition and reintegrated in the horizon of the interpreters. The claim in
fact consists in this – that “it has something to say to me” (1990, 367; 1998, 361). When he asks himself why he still
speaks of the fusion of horizons and not simply of the formation of one horizon, Gadamer claims that this projection
of a historical horizon, “different from the horizon of the present,” belongs to the hermeneutic approach “of
necessity” (1990, 311; 1998, 306).
He seems to believe that these issues pertain to the problem of application, which is crucial for hermeneutics:
“To understand a text always means to apply it to ourselves and to know that, even if it must always be understood
in different ways, it is still the same text presenting itself to us in these different ways.” He recognizes that, on the
one hand, a text of the tradition “puts a question to the interpreter” (1990, 375; 1998, 369) but that, on the other, “we
who are attempting to understand must ourselves make [the text] speak” (1990, 383; 1998, 377). The paradox
disappears, he believes, if interpreters are aware of their intervention. As he writes, “historical consciousness is
aware of its own otherness and hence separates [abhebt] its own horizon from the horizon of the tradition” (1990,
311; 1998, 306. Translation modified).47 While he notes that the projection of a horizon toward the object is “only
one phase in the process of understanding” (1990, 312; 1998, 307–307), he is confident that the fusion, while being
actually done by the horizon of the present – and how else could it be done? – transcends the historical horizon and
supersedes itself: “In the process of understanding, a real fusion of horizons occurs, which, with the projection of the
historical horizon, realizes at the same time the overcoming [Aufhebung] of this historical horizon” (1990, 312;
1998, 307). Because the horizon of the interpreters can transcend itself toward the past and transcend the past,
Gadamer notes that “this does not in the least relativize the claim to truth of every interpretation” (1990, 401; 1998,
398). However, because of the dissymmetry between the two horizons of the interpreter and the object and because
of the inscription of the work, it is not clear how the fusion can be both dialogue and event.
In order to counterbalance this dissymmetry between interpreters and work as well as the inscription of the
fusion of horizons, Gadamer introduces a new psychological notion, the “good will” of the interpreters.

1.2.1.2 Second problem: The good will of interpreters

“The speech of the interpreter is thus not a text, but serves a text,” Gadamer tells us (1984a, 45). This is somewhat
surprising, as the fusion as an event does not justify a psychological notion, such as “serving” the text. Derrida
explicitly pointed out the problem of using such a psychological notion in interpretation in order to counterbalance
the dissymmetry between interpreters and texts (or events) (Derrida 1984). Derrida did this from a skeptical
perspective during their encounter in Paris in 1981.48 In order to defend his “compromise” position between
dialogue and text, which he did not see as a compromise, Gadamer writes:

Good will means what Plato calls eumenes elenchoi [“well-meaning arguments”]. This means that we are not
seeking to be right and thus to detect the weaknesses of the others. Rather, we try to make the others as strong
as possible so that their statements become somewhat convincing. This attitude seems to me essential for all
coming to an understanding.
(Gadamer 1984b, 59)

Remarkably, in my view, he claims that the “good will” has nothing to do with ethics.49
The opportunity was too great for Derrida to resist, as good will sounds like an old-fashioned metaphysical
notion that can be traced back to Kant or Nietzsche. Derrida provokingly titled his response to Gadamer “the good
will to power.” If interpreters base their interpretation on their good will, we are back to psychological evaluations
and possible prejudices, all belonging to a self-affirmation, but then the goodness of the will falls by the wayside or
is qualified by the interests of the interpreters. In other words, the will must be good, but Gadamer does not say
where the “must” comes from and, in the absence of a clear answer, the will, Derrida infers, can only be a will to
power. While Derrida exaggerates Gadamer’s claim – the good will is precisely for Gadamer the opposite of a will
to power – Derrida indirectly points to the dual level at which Gadamer speaks. The very notion Gadamer uses to
describe interpretation is precisely to avoid a radical subjectivization of interpretation from the side of interpreters. It
is supposed to be a fusion, thus with some initiative on the part of the object’s horizon. Yet, when Gadamer calls
interpretation an “event” – it happens and establishes the dialogue partners as parameters of what is unfolding – he
puts this dialogue out of the hands of subjects and inscribes them into historical instances. This takes away much of
the human substance of the dialogue partners and turns them into functions of historical forces speaking “behind”
them or as a voice-over, as it were.
But now, this use of “good will,” which is extrinsic to both the dialogue and the event (the two features of
interpretation), introduces the supplementary fact of the attitude of the interpreters. Despite his criticisms of the likes
of Dilthey for having rendered interpretation too psychological, Gadamer finds himself appealing to a “virtuous”
interpreter, showing “good will” and willing to “serve” the text. He himself unwittingly acknowledges the weakness
of his position in his reply to Derrida, when he forcefully tries to reclaim the expression of “good will” as a principle
of charity, which he formulates as an effort “to render the other as strong as possible so that his statement becomes
clear” (Gadamer 1984a, 59), the “other” meaning the text in dialogue. Against Gadamer, we could say that charity
does not come from texts; it comes from persons. Moreover, it is a psychological attitude, which cannot belong to
the text.
Thus, as a result, however we look at the fusion of horizons, it is hard to see how to combine together, first, the
fundamental dissymmetry between the horizons of the interpreters and of the object, second, the “inscription” of
these horizons, and, third, the extrinsic psychological notion of the “good will” of interpreters. In the absence of
such a combination, it is not clear why the “understanding differently” that Gadamer promotes still deserves the
name of “understanding” or “interpretation,” for these terms carry a claim to lock onto an object and assume a
“sameness” of the object under the “difference” of how it is “interpreted.”
Now, when we look at Gadamer, the interpreter and at how forceful he is when defending his own
interpretations, we see a quite remarkable difference compared to what he says as a theoretician of interpretation,
retrospectively pondering over differences among interpretations. Retrospectively – from a third-person perspective
– it may be the case that every interpretation is a fusion of horizons and, as such, a “new production.” But this
manner of speaking belongs to the description. At the pragmatic level, when presenting his own views, Gadamer, the
interpreter, is not shy to claim to be “right” and “better” than other interpreters. We only have to look at how much
he defends Plato against Aristotle and takes issue with Werner Jaeger who sees a historical development in
Aristotle’s views (2022, 9f). Pragmatically, Gadamer as an interpreter clearly wants to bring the texts he interprets
back to life not merely by making them meaningful and relevant for his readers – in a fusion of horizons – but by
showing their “truth.” He wants to “re-enact” those texts. This notion of re-enactment is the second manner in which
he also describes interpretation. It is not really a departure from the notion of a fusion of horizons, but, in my view, a
more precise description of what is involved when an interpretation is offered or a more consistent account of what
it means that a dialogue is an event at the moment it is enacted.

1.2.2 Interpretation as re-enactment

Gadamer had rejected the notion of “re-enactment” in Truth and Method when it means re-doing what the author did
as a psychological process, either re-effectuating an act of meaning (Meinung)50 or “lived experiences” (Erlebnisse).
This would consist in “transposing oneself in another person” (1990, 387; 1998). Rather, as we saw, he claims that
interpretation is a “re-creation” (Nachschaffen, 1990, 125; 1998, 119) or a “new creation” (neue Schöpfung, 1990,
477; 1998, 473). Yet, we noted that these notions could not find their consistency in the framework of the fusion of
horizons. The notion of enactment fits better the characterization of interpretation as event and dialogue. Gadamer
himself recognizes that there is in the “fusion of horizons” a “mode of enactment” (Vollzugsweise, 1990 347; 1998,
341. Translation modified). It is in fact this enactment that can explain how a consciousness through a fusion of
horizons can be a consciousness exposed to the effect of history (wirkungsgeschichtlich) in the sense of being
permeated by history in its nature and being historically situated in its operation.
This notion of “enactment” comes from Heidegger. Gadamer was struck by how the early Heidegger made use
of the medieval distinction between the actus signatus – what is conveyed and thus named by the proposition – and
the actus exercitus – the performance of the act or the act in its exercise. This provides Gadamer with another way to
describe the event which is dialogical. Because language has an operation of its own, there is in a dialogue
something effectuated or happening, in addition to the individual contributions coming from the consciousness of
the dialogue partners. Dialogue partners are not only those who speak and mean something, but also those who are
staged and cast in a performance as part of the exercise of language itself. This is how interpretation – and
hermeneutics as a whole – can remain faithful to “the primacy of ethos over logos,” which Gadamer learned from
Plato and Aristotle. This, he says, “led me to the sense of performance [Vollzugssinn] that a dialogue has” (Gadamer
2016c, 118).51
The performative aspect in interpretation is due to language, not as inscription but as enactment. This
Sprachvollzug or “enactment of language” is not the performance of language in the sense of an act performed by
speakers but is language itself as an existential dimension of human beings. It is the event of language as dialogue.
This is how a dialogue can indeed be an event and thus how interpretation is both dialogue and event. Neither are we
those who enact language or perform speech acts nor is it language that “speaks” by itself. Because language
represents this dimension in which we dwell in a fundamental agreement with other people, making our world
common, the “enactment of language” is an event in which we are “staged” or, as Gadamer says, we participate in a
“play.”52 Understood in this manner, inscription is not a form of dissemination, as for Derrida, but a feature of
dialogue.53
When Gadamer states that being is language, it is thus not what Apel calls a “linguicism” (Apel 1963, 88), i.e.,
the fact that everything is language. Gadamer is himself adamant about this: “No, no! I have never thought and
never ever said that everything is language” (Gadamer 1997c, 286; 2007, 417). It is rather the recognition that it is
only within an articulation in words that something can gain saliency and enter the realm of what makes sense. It is
“insofar as it can be understood” that being “is language” (1997c, 286; 2007, 417). In response to Jean Grondin’s
question, “Is there then such a thing as nonlinguistic understanding,” Gadamer answers: “Doubtless there is” and to
Grondin’s next question “And would you still call this Sprachlichkeit?” Gadamer replies: “But yes! The language
made of words is only a special concretion of Sprachlichkeit. And the same also applies to gestures, for example”
(1997c, 289; 2007, 420. Translation modified).54
Gadamer grants that there is indeed an articulation at the basis of writing, reading, and hearing, thus recognizing
the legitimacy of Derrida’s general notion of “inscription.” “Is it not the case that something like a tendency to set
into a fixed form is always already included in the usage of words?” (2022, 183). There is thus a dimension of
inscription or of writing, what he calls Schriftlichkeit to the extent that language “inscribes” us into the fabric of life.
This inscription thus applies to both the work and interpretation. Because the fusion of horizons is inscribed, it is not
an event in the sense that it simply happens and is historical. It also re-inscribes interpreters and works, blotting out
the dissymmetry mentioned above by transforming interpreters into instances of a performance. By inscribing
interpreters within an enactment (interpretation) of what was already an enactment (the work) or the event to be
interpreted), Gadamer escapes the psychological Diltheyan re-living and the hyper-structuralist Derridean
dissemination.
Against Dilthey, the inscription as re-enacted is not of a fact or a content or a lived experience. It is not a “re-
living” of that which is expressed in words because the inscription or engram does not fix the “lived experience” as
a content (or an “expression,” as Dilthey would say). It is the inscription of a first enactment (in the work), which
was itself an inscription. Interpretation can thus repeat the event that the work or the historical event is, that is to say,
interpretation re-enacts the happening of the work or the event by connecting the present of the interpreter to the
present of the object interpreted. In this connection, the event (of a work) we interpret acquires a new future. The
inscription is thus not a substitution for the work, as if writing could reproduce the living dialogue which once took
place.
Against Derrida, the inscription of interpreters in a re-enactment is not a reduction of the subject to a play of
differences that would eliminate the very notion of subjectivity as a mere effect of language, as Derrida implies
when he labels the subject as a “function of language” (Derrida 1982, 15) or when he claims that “there is no outside
of the text [il n’y a pas de hors-texte]” (Derrida 1988, 136). Instead of introducing the anonymity of a linguistic
system in the living voices of the interpretation and the work, taking away their intentions in the process, inscription
in fact allows the dialogue that interpretation is to be enacted. In this re-enacted dialogue, the original inscription
(the work) is provided with a new future. It becomes a new creation. It can still be called a dialogue. It is just not a
dialogue with the work as past but with the work as a living work.
To Derrida’s emphasis on the dissemination of signs – which Gadamer examines in a masterful manner in his
essay “Hermeneutics on the Trail” (2016d) – Gadamer can then oppose the possibility, still through dialogue, to re-
enact the inscription. We recall that Gadamer saw a moment of “enactment” in understanding and that he also calls
the fusion of horizons an “enactment” (1990, 312; 307. Translation modified). Interpretation then is no longer about
contents of meanings – for example, what Plato actually meant or what the Theaetetus really means – but about
experiencing the thinking that was performed by Plato in the Theaetetus.
 About his interpretation of Kant, Heidegger says that it is “‘historically’ incorrect, granted! But it contributes to
the history of the present” [“‘historisch’ unrichtig, gewiß, aber sie ist geschichtlich”] (1989, 253). We can
understand this as an illustration of a re-enactment. Kant, like any author, does not have to be understood according
to current canons of scholarship, which always involve a fusion of horizons and thus an import by interpreters of
their questions and concerns to what they make the text say. While Gadamer may not assent to Heidegger’s notion
of Geschichte as a history of being, he accepts this notion of “history of the present,” within which we read past
texts, such as Kant’s, not by projecting onto them our questions and concerns – not by fusing our horizon with theirs
– but by letting them ask us questions and unsettle us. The re-enactment that we perform when interpreting Kant
thus keeps the goal of the fusion of horizons – we have to acknowledge that the text has horizons and makes a claim
on us from its own voice – but this “performance” or “enactment” that the work was can only be grasped as
performance if it is performed again, albeit in our present. In so doing, we do not appropriate the work in our own
terms. We rather assist the work so that it can now, in what is a future incarnation of itself, speak to us.
Interpretation as re-enactment accounts for the dynamism of the work, the fact that it was a performance when it
first appeared, had effects and influence. We cannot recover those specific historical features of the first
performance – its effects on the first readership or its influence at the time. However, we can bring ourselves back,
with our present, in the presence of this work. In so doing, we make ourselves open – susceptible to be questioned –
by this work through this future incarnation or materialization of the work that we make possible when re-enacting
it. Thus, instead of bringing the work into our present as the fusion of horizons suggests, interpretation as enactment
brings us back to the work, in the presence of the work, although by doing so we ourselves “stage” this enactment of
the work. But this staging, which is certainly not a retrieval of the work from its past, is also not a present version of
the work for our present sensibilities. It is rather a future stage of the work compared to the original.
I take this to be the key difference between the fusion of horizons and re-enactment. A fusion, it seems to me,
will of necessity be governed by the present of the interpreters. By contrast, a re-enactment is oriented toward the
future of the work by providing the work (or the event) another presence (as opposed to speaking to our present).
Yet, as we will discuss later, this orientation toward the future must be motivated in some way. A “good will” does
not suffice. Gadamer dismisses Dilthey’s notion of “sympathy,” which Gadamer considers to be “a form of love”
(1990, 236; 1998, 233) but this dismissal may need to be revisited, as we will do in Chapter 6.

Notes
1. I have compared some of their views in Vandevelde (2017).
2. About this connection, he writes: “Quine is, and has been since I took my first logic course with him some sixty
years ago, my teacher and inspiration” (Davidson 1999b, 80); see also: “My intellectual debt to him is greater
than to anybody else” (Kent and Davidson 1993, 5).
3. Let us note that the expression Davidson uses “commodius vicus of recirculation” – a pleasant neighborhood to
revisit – is the first sentence of Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce, Davidson having written an essay on “James
Joyce and Humpty Dumpty.” The passage in Joyce reads: “Riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore
to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs” (Joyce
2012, 3).
4. He elaborates on this point: “I accept Gadamer’s demonstration that the Philebus, more than any other of Plato’s
works, both illustrates and describes ‘the way we come to shared understanding,’ ‘the motives of a concern for
the facts of the matter in a shared world’” (2005d, 273).
5. Jeff Malpas comments on this quote (2002, 209) as well as David Vessey (2012, 34).
6. On a similar response, see Malpas (2002, 209).
7. Davidson cites the 1975 edition (New York: Crossroad, 275f). The revised translation (1998) reads: “We
understand in a different way, if we understand at all” (297).
8. On this, see Vessey (2012, 37).
9. McDowell has discussed this issue of relativism in Gadamer and Davidson from another perspective in
McDowell (2002, 173f).
10. See also: “It would seem that there is something absurd about the whole idea of a unique, correct interpretation”
(1990, 125; 1998, 120).
11. See also: “If we said that historically effected consciousness is realised in the dimension of language, this was
because the dimension of language characterises our human experience of the world in general” (1990, 460;
1998, 456. Translation modified).
12. As Gadamer explains, “language already contains an understanding of the world in those respects in which it
remains the same. For the words by which we designate things already have the character of a universality that
 remains the same. Every word has its meaning [Bedeutung], which is one, by comparison with the manifoldness
of what can be designated by means of it” (1985a, 52; 1991a, 70. Translation modified).
13. I will offer a defense of Schlegel and Schleiermacher in Chapter 6.
14. Gadamer himself in his “Reflections on My Philosophical Journey” notes: “As I look back today, I see one point
in particular where I did not achieve the theoretical consistency I strove for in Truth and Method.” He wonders
whether he has really shown “that the otherness of the Other is not overcome in understanding, but rather
preserved” (1997b, 41). His concern is about the connection between his concept of play and language. “What I
needed to do was go back to my concept of play once again and place it within the ontological perspective that
had been broadened by the universal element of the dimension of language” (1997b, 41. Translation modified).
15. In fact, as we will show, Heidegger may not be the main source for Gadamer’s views on language and Gadamer
can even help us understand Heidegger himself better. Gadamer provides some of the missing links for
understanding Heidegger’s pronouncements, especially with regard to the connection between language and
human life. As Gadamer notes critically, “in Being and Time Heidegger already appreciated the significance of
language for the analysis of existence. Yet, when he treats the meaning of language and discourse [Rede], it is all
essentially the explication of a monologue. This is so even when Heidegger is aware of it and insists that
discourse is addressed to someone” (2022, 173).
16. As he explains, “thus, faced with the superior force of Heidegger’s philosophical personality, I began to doubt my
philosophical aptitude and decided after my promotion to engage in a sustained study of classical philology in
Marburg” (1995, 403). On Heidegger’s evaluation of Gadamer’s work in 1925, see Grondin (2011, 140). About
Heidegger’s intimidating presence, Gadamer writes in one instance: The “genius” of Heidegger was
“overwhelming”: “This is why I became a classical philologist. I had the feeling that I would be overpowered by
the superiority of this thinking if I did not find my own proper ground on which I could stand perhaps more
firmly than this powerful thinker could himself” (Gadamer 2022, 160). The presence of Heidegger continued to
loom over Gadamer’s career even after the war. When he was rector of the University of Leipzig, for example, he
wrote: “Writing was a torment for me. I had the terrible feeling that Heidegger was standing behind me and
looking over my shoulder” (1997b, 15).
17. In his assessment of his work, Gadamer writes: “In my view, my studies in Greek philosophy are the part of my
philosophical works which most stand on its own” (1991a, 121). See also: “Hermeneutics and Greek philosophy
have remained the two main foci of my work” (1997b, 26).
18. In Robert Dostal’s words, “the Philebus is the single work that most decisively represents for Gadamer what
Plato is about […]. Plato and his Philebus represent for Gadamer the highest accomplishment of philosophy.
Most importantly, the Philebus shows us how philosophy is dialectical and how we can address that most
important of questions, the question of the good” (Dostal 2010, 23–24).
19. Gadamer reminds us that hēdonē, usually translated as “pleasure,” is in fact the “drive to live” (der Drang des
Lebens) (1991b, 125).
20. Gadamer notes that Plato only uses the word idea when it comes to the good and “never eidos” (1991c, 143;
1986a, 27).
21. As he explains further: “The “good” for an entity is not only a good that is good for something. It is not
something that it has but something that it itself is […]. When something is experienced as good, then it is
understood in relation to what it is good for and, just by that fact, is understood in its being. Thus, the ultimate
basis of this understanding, the good itself, is at the same time the understood possibility of existence [Dasein]
itself – what it can be. And that is: Something that understands itself in a unified way” (1985a, 58; 1991a, 79–80).
22. Here is Plato’s text: “Socrates: We said that God revealed in the universe two elements, the infinite [apeiron] and
the finite [to peras], did we not? […]. Let us, then, assume these as two of our classes [eidōn], and a third, made
by combining these two [summisgomenon] […]. Note the cause [aitia] of the combination and assume that as the
fourth in addition to the previous three” (Philebus 23c-d, 2001, 243). As we saw, the mixture explaining the
genesis of entities (made of the infinite, the finite, the mixture, and the cause) is an ontological schema, as
Gadamer says, in order “to gain access to the universal structural elements of being” so that “being is understood
as being produced or being determined” (1985a, 153; 1991a, 212).
23. As Gadamer explains, “this general ontological perspective also determines the sense of the doctrine of the Ideas.
What really is, is only the Idea – that is, that which makes up the unitary selfsameness of what shows itself and in
view of which, alone, the change in what shows itself to the senses is understandable. Thus, that it is the
‘presence’ [‘Anwesenheit’] of the idea in the individual thing that makes it exist is due to the fact that the
individual thing can be understood only in view of what it always is” (1985a, 100; 1991a, 139).
24. Gadamer quotes the Phaedrus to characterize the shining of the idea as beauty or the good as beautiful: “Beauty
lights up here in our world. It shines forth most of all, and it, most of all, stimulates love in us (ekphanestaton
 [esti] kai erasmiōtaton) (Phaedrus 250c). Thus it awakens in the lover the longing and passion for what is
higher” (1991c, 193; 1986a, 116).
25. Far from being an extraneous characteristic of an entity, the beautiful is “a relation of the whole, in its parts, to
itself: A beautiful proportion in visible dimensions, a beautiful demeanour and bearing in human action and being
– in both cases a harmony of the entity with itself, a completeness, a self-sufficiency” (1985a, 150; 1991a, 209).
26. This also explains why Gadamer grants ontological claims to art, the fine arts being called in German the
“beautiful arts” (schöne Künste).
27. Gadamer explains: “As we know, logos is a mathematical term that means ‘proportion’” (1980, 149). He follows
Toeplitz who sees in Sophist 251a a connection between logos as proportion and the question of being and not-
being. In this passage of the Sophist, Gadamer writes, “it is said specifically that the search for the proper concept
of Being and Not-being can be carried out only by pursuing the proportion of one to the other. And as a matter of
fact, the power of the logos to reveal the being of what is derives from the intrinsic interwovenness in it of Being
and Not-being, which are to be taken as Selfsameness and Difference, respectively” (1980, 149–50).
28. As Gadamer says, connecting the two logoi, “something that is addressed in its proportion is addressed in its
being” (1985a, 103; 1991a, 143).
29. Gadamer expresses this recuperation of an external efficient cause through an internal logos as telos as a
recuperation of a creation within knowledge: “The creation of the world by the demiurge (or, to say the same
thing, the knowing of the world by men) is every bit as much a kind of determination of the indeterminate, an
ordering of the unordered. Certainly, it is just as true in physics as it is in ethics that ordering is made possible by
reason or, better said, that reason perceives the possible order and is therefore able to undertake bringing it about
(1980, 192).
30. Gadamer makes this connection explicitly in Truth and Method when he writes: “As we know, the fact that the
human experience of the world takes place in the dimension of language [Sprachlichkeit] was already the guiding
thread followed by Greek metaphysics for thinking being since Plato’s ‘flight into the logoi’” (1990, 460 ; 1998,
456. Translation modified). See also Gadamer (2022, 168, 175). Gadamer explains further: “In my Platos
dialektische Ethik I worked out to what extent this investigation of reality as it is present in the logoi provides
access to the truth of what is, and how it serves in uncovering the true order of the cosmos. I also showed that
investigation of the logoi is the actual task which the whole tradition of early Greek philosophy set for itself, and
how Plato, in building upon this tradition, approaches this task mythologically in the Timaeus” (1980, 198).
31. Dilthey writes, for example: “Life is the basic fact that must form the starting point of philosophy. Life is that
with which we are acquainted from within and behind which we cannot go. We cannot bring life before the
tribunal of reason. Life is historical to the degree that it is apprehended as advancing in time and as emerging
productive nexus” (1958, 261: 2002, 280).
32. On Gadamer’s views on Dilthey, besides Truth and Method, see “The Problem of Dilthey: Between Romanticism
and Positivism” (2016h); “Dilthey and Ortega: The Philosophy of Life” (2016b); “Hermeneutics and the
Diltheyan School” (2016c).
33. After Husserl, Gadamer sees this model of scientific knowledge originating from Galileo’s mathematization of
nature, which assumed that the essence of science was constituted by “that which can be explained and
constructed according to rational laws. Thereby natural language lost its self-evident precedence” (1984a, 31).
34. Speaking about historical objectivism, but it would apply to sciences too, Gadamer writes: “This is […] the
naivety of historical objectivism: To accept such an overlooking of oneself [Absehen von sich selbst] […]. The
naivety of so-called historicism consists in the fact that […] in trusting the methodology of its own procedures it
forgets its own historicity [Geschichtlichkeit]” (1990, 304; 1998, 299. Translation modified).
35. Dilthey writes: “No real blood flows in the veins of the knowing subject constructed by Locke, Hume, and Kant,
but rather the diluted extract of reason as a mere activity of thought. A historical as well as psychological
approach to whole human beings led me to explain even knowledge and its concepts (such as the external world,
time, substance, and cause) in terms of the manifold powers of a being that wills, feels, and thinks” (1959, xviii;
1989, 50).
36. See Gadamer (2022, 42, 144).
37. See Gadamer (2016g, 37; 2022, 42).
38. Gadamer thus subscribes to Dilthey’s differentiation between “understanding” and “explanation,” but rejects
Dilthey’s effort to find a “method” for the human sciences, for truth is what specifies the concern of human
sciences. On Gadamer’s critique of Dilthey, see Grondin (2019, 260f).
39. In quite trenchant formulations, Dilthey writes: “We only understand by transferring our inner experience to an
external reality [Tatsächlichkeit] that is itself dead” (1959, 138, quoted in Jos de Mul 2019, 45). Nature itself “is
dead [and] alien to us.” It is “only the power of imagination” that “can give it an aura of inner life” (1959, 138;
 1989, 88). This means that what we see as the components of nature itself, like atoms, are such products of
imagination: They “are creations of scientific thought” (1959, 369; 1989, 202–203).
40. See Gadamer (1986b).
41. See Gadamer (2016d, 117f).
42. See also 1990, 314, 404, 469, 488; 1998, 309, 465, 484.
43. See also: “It belongs to genuine `understanding […] to recover the concepts of a historical past in such a way that
they also include our own conceptualization” (1990, 380; 1998, 374. Translation modified).
44. Or, as he puts it more forcefully, it is “nonsensical” (widersinnig) to consider understanding as “a second creation
[eine zweite Schöpfung], the reproduction [Reproduktion] of the original production” (1990, 172; 1998, 167),
which he criticizes Schleiermacher for doing in the ideal of “understanding better.” He also speaks of “a re-
creation of the creative act” (ein Nachbilden des schöpferischen Aktes) (1990, 191; 1998, 187), which is very
close to Ast’s formulation: “The re-creation of what had already been created” (Nachbilden des schon
Gebildeten) (Ast 1808, 187; see Szondi 1995, 106).
45. Jacques Taminiaux sees the origin of this Gadamerian notion in Heidegger’s lectures on Aristotle, which
Gadamer attended and in which Heidegger speaks of the Wirkung or “effect” that the past has on the future
(Taminiaux 2002, 184).
46. On this future perfect fallacy, see Vandevelde (2005, 31).
47. “Understanding proves to be a kind of effect [Wirkung] and knows itself as such” (1990, 346; 1998, 341). This is
why, as he says, “we designate the realization [Vollzug] of this fusion in a regulated way as the alertness
[Wachheit] of the historically effected consciousness” (1990, 312; 1998, 307. Translation modified).
48. See Forget (1984); Gadamer (1984a, 1984b).
49. As he says, “this is a pure statement of fact and has nothing to do with an ‘appeal’ and least of all with ethics.
Even unmoral beings make an effort to understand each other. I cannot imagine that Derrida does not really agree
with me on this point” (Gadamer 1984b, 59).
50. “As the mere re-enactment of a foreign act of meaning” (1990, 381; 1998, 375. Translation modified).
51. He also speaks of “the moment of enactment in understanding” (1990, 306; 1998, 301. Translation modified) or
“the form of enactment of the dialogue” (1990, 392; 1998, 388. Translation modified).
52. See Gadamer (1990, 107f; 1998, 101f).
53. As he writes, “to be sure, what comes into language is something different from the spoken word itself. But the
word is a word only because of what comes into language in it. Its own physical being exists only in order to
disappear into what is said. Likewise, that which comes into language is not something that is pregiven before
language; rather, the word gives it its own determinateness” (1998, 475; 1990, 479).
54. In this exchange between Grondin and Gadamer, we see why “linguisticality” does not really work for translating
Sprachlichkeit because we would have to speak of a “nonlinguistic linguisticality,” as Dostal puts it (2022, 130),
which would be, as he says, an “absurdity” (197).
2 Davidson’s Radical Interpretation
Charity and Triangulation

DOI: 10.4324/9781003348009-4

The theory of radical interpretation was explicitly formulated by Donald Davidson, influenced by Quine’s notion of
radical translation.1 Coming from the empiricist tradition of analytic philosophy, the radical interpretation he
defends is presented through a logical analysis quite different from the hermeneutic version Gadamer offers. Yet,
despite the differences in methodology, there are striking similarities between their views. As mentioned above,
Davidson, like Gadamer, started his academic career with a detailed study of Plato’s Philebus in his dissertation at
Harvard, in which he cites Gadamer’s work on the Philebus. In addition, he interacted with Gadamer, addressing
some of the differences he sees between their respective views, as we saw above.
I begin in the first section by examining how Davidson’s early work on Plato’s Philebus shaped some of his later
views on radical interpretation and brought him into the vicinity of Gadamer. In the second section, I present the
tenets and critical consequences of his version of radical interpretation, which consists in ascribing beliefs to the
people we interpret. I examine how the process of interpretation functions under the principle of charity and as a
triangulation between the observer’s mind, the observed subject’s utterances or actions, and the environment. In the
third section, Davidson’s notion of interpretation as an ascription of beliefs is submitted to the test of anthropology
in order to find out if charity as he understands it can escape the danger of ethnocentrism.

2.1 The formative role of Plato’s Philebus

In his essay of 1985, “Plato’s Philosopher,” which is also re-printed in the introduction to the publication of his
dissertation Platos’ Philebus (1990), Davidson offers a retrospective assessment of the connection between his
dissertation and his later work. Although it was not a focus of his dissertation, he came to see that the use of the
elenchus, or the refutation method used by Socrates in the Philebus, entertains similarities with his own coherence
theory of truth. After reading Gregory Vlastos’ work on Socrates (1991), Davidson realized, first, how central the
use of refutation is in order to reach the truth and, second, that the Philebus in fact enacts such a method of inquiry.
By defeating false beliefs, the elenchus secures a consistency of the remaining beliefs, which through their
coherence amounts to truth. As he writes, “the elenchus would make for truth simply by insuring coherence in a set
of beliefs if one could assume that in each of us there are always unshakable true beliefs inconsistent with the false”
(1990, 14). Accepting the assumption behind the use of the elenchus that coherence amounts to truth, Davidson
appropriates it for his own views: “When our beliefs are consistent, they will in most large matters be true” (1990,
14).
Besides this retrospective view that the Philebus prepared his coherence theory of truth, I see several other
connections between the way he interprets the Philebus and the views on interpretation he later develops. As in the
case of Gadamer, my focus is only on the possible connections between Plato’s dialogue and Davidson’s conception
of interpretation, and thus not on Plato’s dialogue as such. I review some aspects of his interpretation of the Philebus
that may have prepared his later views and show how congruent or different they are from Gadamer’s interpretation
of the Philebus.2
Like Gadamer, Davidson sees the unity of the Philebus as revolving around the main theme, “the nature of the
best life for man” (1990, 8), and all the parts of the dialogue are “directly related to this problem” (1990, 8),
including the theory of the genesis of things out of four kinds. As we recall, Socrates distinguishes four “elements”
which go into the composition of any being: The infinite [apeiron], the finite [to peras], the combining of the two
[summisgomenon], and the cause [aitia] of the combination. Only a good mixture produces an ousia, something as
definite, which then “is,” and it “is” because it reveals itself as a good mixture, it shines as that good mixture. In
Davidson’s terms:

We can, very roughly, think of these four sorts of entity as follows. An unlimited is any entity viewed merely
as determinable; a limit is a defining shape, proportion, or number; a mixture is any definite object –
metaphorically, it is a mixture of an unlimited and a limit. Somewhat less metaphorically, it is an entity whose
parts or aspects are fixed in relation to one another, as the good life is a mixture of pleasure and intellectual
elements. The fourth entity, the cause of the mixture, is the rational agency which creates the mixture.
(2005d, 268)

Like Gadamer, Davidson considers that the two discussions led by Socrates about the make-up of things and the
make-up of a good life are intimately connected.
Davidson also agrees with Gadamer about the nature of the ideas in the Philebus. As we recall, Gadamer
understands the four kinds or genera as “ideas” and thus rejects the view that Plato had abandoned the theory of
ideas by the time of the Philebus and the Timaeus.3 In fact, Gadamer considers the Philebus, which he sees as a late
dialogue written in close proximity to the Timaeus, to be an explanation of the theory of ideas, showing that ideas
are not completely separated from the visible entities but are in these entities as the components of the mixture.
Davidson is in agreement with Gadamer on these two points. First, as he says, “I do not see any reason to believe
that Plato ever abandoned his conviction that universals exist, and exist eternally, unchanged, out of space and time,
and that without them dialectic would be impossible” (Davidson 1990, 314–315).4 Second, the discussion of the
genesis of things is connected to the theory of ideas: “It is my thesis, then, that Plato was very definitely troubling
himself about the relation between the fourfold classification and the theory of ideas, and that he contrived the
former just to deal with the problems set by the latter” (1990, 305). Now, he draws a different conclusion than
Gadamer because he sees two changes in the Philebus with regard to the ideas.
The first change is about the status of ideas and the second about the link of participation between ideas and
particulars. With regard to the first change, in the Philebus ideas are no longer considered both epistemically
universal and ontologically particular. They are still presented as universal but only as classifiers and no longer as
“concrete or patterns,” as Davidson says (2005, 93–94).5 They thus no longer have an ontological role, like
“grandiose particulars or patterns which particulars must resemble to be good” (1990, 210). They only play an
epistemological role. Eidos, in its various occurrences rather means “class” and “none of these cases suggests the
special attributes given to the ideas in the Republic, Phaedo or Symposium” (1990, 303n).6 We can see this in the
fourfold classification or the genesis of things, where the functions of ideas “have been divided among several
discriminated elements” (1990, 11).7
The second change about the theory of ideas, linked to the first about the status of these ideas, concerns
participation. If ideas are no longer particulars, what makes an entity good, for example, can no longer be its
participation in an external idea of the good. As Davidson notes, a significant consequence of this change is that “we
must reject the view that a particular is good because it resembles a universal which is good (1990, 210). He thus
agrees with Gadamer about the status of the idea of the good in the Philebus, which is different than the one
presented in the Republic, where it functions as a cause.8 What makes an entity good is in the entity itself as the right
ratio in the manner in which it is composed so as to be a good mixture. “Having given up the ideas as the source and
explanation of value, Plato needed a new account, and this was provided by the concept of well-proportioned,
rationally generated mixture” (Davidson 2005d, 269). Davidson thus tries to explain that the universality of ideas,
which is to be understood epistemically and not ontologically, is compatible with the fact that we can know them by
recovering the principle – the ratio – of how these ideas are combined in a specific thing.
Remarkably, he offers a reading of the Philebus analogous to Gadamer on this point and with the same influence
on his subsequent views on interpretation. For Plato, entities have been made by a “maker,” a demiurge. Davidson
points out that, by contrast with the Timaeus, where the demiurge has models which could dispense with a causal
agent, there are no models for the demiurge in the Philebus, so that only the demiurge’s intention or design explains
the goodness of a mixture. “The expression of mind is always intelligence and purpose; wherever we find symmetry,
order, proportion, we must assume a mind as cause. Reason creates order and renders things intelligible because it is
a goal, a reason” (1990, 277). Although this demiurgic mind is out of the reach of human beings, the efficacy of this
mind can be found in the entity itself.
In Plato’s view, the mind of the maker as the cause of the entities is one of the four components of the mixture.
This means that when we understand – interpret – the “reason why” it was mixed in such a way, the intelligibility
we gain of a thing is the point of intersection between the mind of the “maker” (as a cause) and the telos of the thing
(as a ‘reason for”). By transposing the efficient cause – the demiurge’s mind – into a “reason for” – the purpose or
telos of the making – interpretation can substitute the interpreter’s mind for the demiurge’s mind, thereby bypassing
the workings of the demiurge’s mind. Or we could say that the demiurge’s mind is accessible through the
intelligibility this mind conferred on the thing made and this intelligibility is reached when we grasp the “cause” of
this entity, which is one of its four components.9 As Davidson says, “[the cause] provides a reason for the existence
of the entity. By a reason, I mean that the agent has a reason, that is a purpose. This purpose, or intention, is why the
agent creates the good entity. Such a reason or purpose provides the only true explanation which can be given for the
existence of anything” (1990, 160).10 An account of the intelligibility of an entity can claim to reach what that entity
really is.
For the later Davidson, it means that we can interpret radically. To interpret does not have to consist in
recovering the original intention of the maker. In the Philebus, the demiurge’s intention does not matter as such an
intention but only as the articulation in the mixture itself, which renders the entity intelligible. If interpreters recover
the ratio – the good measure – of the making of the thing, they recover the “reason for” the entity, which is the same
as what the world-maker had in mind when making – “mixing” – the entity. We can thus substitute for the cause of
an articulation (or the making of a good mixture, in our case) a “reason” for this articulation. We thus remain realist
because the “reason for” an entity has no competitor and is, if we keep this “reason for” coherent and consistent, the
same as what the thing is “in reality.”
We can see here the origin of the rejection later on of the scheme-content dualism, coming from Kant’s
opposition between concepts and intuition, and assuming that “it is possible to distinguish between the conceptual
element and the experiential element in thought” (1999d, 51). This dualism is precisely what Plato tried to avoid in
the Philebus. The demiurge’s mind, which is what any interpretation tries to recover, is only accessible in its effect:
the reason for the entity, which is the ratio of its good mixing or making. Recovering this ratio or reason for the
entity is all there is to do, without any remainder. The success of this enterprise depends on how this task of finding
the reason for the entity, which we could call an interpretation, is conducted. If it remains consistent and coherent by
refuting any element that is not so, interpretation reveals the intelligibility of the entity. Radical interpretation is in
fact Platonic.

2.2 Why interpretation needs to be radical

Several decades after his study of the Philebus, Davidson explicitly formulated his radical interpretation by building
on Quine’s program of radical translation. I will only focus on what is relevant to my focus on interpretation and
will treat Davidson’s “philosophy” as a whole, without specifically distinguishing his views on actions and events
and his views on interpretation in general.
When interpreting people, interpreters are not directly faced with “intentions,” “meanings,” or “beliefs” as if
these were objects of direct perception or grasp, available as such. Interpretation has to be radical and start with the
only empirical evidence directly available: “the linguistic behavior of speakers” (1999d, 41). Interpreters behave like
field linguists or anthropologists, who observe other people in an environment they share with them, trying to
determine what the observed subjects “mean” when they make noises or engage in kinds of behaviors.
Quine gave the famous example of “Gavagai!” as uttered by a native of a foreign people in front of a field
linguist when a rabbit passes by (1960, 29f). Not knowing the native language, field linguists have to correlate the
noise “Gavagai!” with what is going on in the environment and what beliefs could possibly be entertained in this
situation. Not being mind-readers, linguists can only come up with beliefs they would themselves form in the same
situation.11 They will try out different hypotheses and test them in different situations in order to select by
elimination what “Gavagai!” means, whether “rabbit,” “rabbit stage,” or “undetached rabbit parts,” to use Quine’s
expressions. Because an utterance is a behavior or an “action,”12 it can be described objectively as an empirical
matter. This is the basic method of a logical analysis as opposed to the hermeneutic stance we found in Gadamer.
Davidson, however, diverges from Quine insofar as Quine takes meaning to be linked to sensory criteria, what
he calls “stimulus meaning,” whereas for Davidson interpretation depends “on the external events and objects the
sentence is interpreted as being about” (2001g, 151). As he explains, “I balked at the idea that the locus of shared
meaning […] depended on the proximal stimulus, what Quine called the ‘stimulus meaning’; I thought it should be
the distal stimulus, the object or event or situation in the world speaker and hearer naturally shared” (1999d, 41).
This view is radical in at least two respects. First, it evacuates as irrelevant whatever speakers privately “think”
or “believe” and externalizes it in the form of behaviors.13 What speakers mean is not a function of what they
privately intend to say but of how their linguistic behavior correlates with their physical environment. Second, it
evacuates reality as that which could determine meaning because reality itself is whatever is articulated by subjects
in their behavior and language. Although this goes against direct realism that trusts in the existence of trees and
mountains or numbers and wave lengths, Davidson claims that he can recover these objects of direct realism within
the scope of interpretation. We can see him as making “coherent” the constructionism of some notable empiricists,
such as Hume and Mill. For Mill, a material thing is “a permanent possibility of sensation” (quoted in Ayer 1952,
141), a view to which the philosopher A.J. Ayer gave more edge when saying that a physical object is a “logical
construction” (1952, 123). Quine will add that physical objects are “posits” or “myths” and are, in their status, no
different than the gods of Homer for the ancient Greeks. While the Greeks spoke of the sun as the god Apollo
shooting his arrows, this view would be considered useless and thus insane in our system of beliefs, in which we
speak of a star emitting electromagnetic radiations.14
What is unsatisfactory in these views of “construction” (Ayer) or “myth” (Quine) is that they assume an
“empirical content” that needs to be “construed” or “conceptualized.” This is what Davidson calls a “third dogma”
of empiricism, besides the two dogmas Quine mentioned (about the analytic-synthetic distinction and about
reductionism).15 This third dogma alluded to above is the distinction between scheme and content. To say, as Quine
does, that a physical object is a myth, whether it is a god for the ancient Greeks or a star for us, amounts to treating
sense data or sensory content as an “unconceptualized input” and as “the ultimate source of evidence” (Davidson
1999c, 105). Davidson rejects this view: “I was clear from the start that unconceptualized ‘experience,’ sense data,
sensations, Hume’s impressions and ideas, could not coherently serve as evidence for beliefs: only something with
propositional content could do this” (1999c, 105).16 Radical interpretation wants to eliminate any remainder beyond
what is interpreted. That which is interpreted is not accessible otherwise than through interpretation and does not
exist otherwise than as the referent of a description. This means that once we reject the dichotomy between scheme
and content, the diversity of schemes or interpretations has no force in itself to lead us to conclude that there is a
diversity in reality itself. There is no basis for speaking of different schemes.
It is a reasoning by default, as it were. If you cannot provide an appeal to a reality that is not interpreted, you also
cannot make any claim about an entity changing, becoming a Greek god and, later on, a star. There may be different
interpretations but they are of necessity commensurable with each other (as the discussion already pragmatically
proves by mentioning the “same” entity becoming a Greek god and a star) and thus we know what differences there
are between them. For example, given the current intersubjective understanding of reality, if someone in suburban
America claims to find the intent of the gods in cutting chickens open, as the ancient Greeks did, that person will
have to respond to residential ordinances about noise and keeping animals on one’s property, state laws prohibiting
the suffering of animals, the reactions of animal rights activist neighbors, etc.
Because we cannot posit unknown events legitimating our descriptions, we cannot presume that a different
language or a different conceptual system (or “scheme”) would disclose different entities or events. Thus, because
we abandon the view that there is either a world fully articulated (in a substance ontology) or clusters of sense data
(for empiricism) both outside and independent of our descriptions, we also avoid the standpoint from which one
description could be seen as irreconcilable with another one. With no standpoint outside of descriptions, there is no
radically untranslatable conceptual schemes. His theory, Davidson claims, is thus set “forever apart from those that
describe mindless objects or describe objects as mindless” (2001e, 154), the former being, we may assume,
empiricism or idealism, which confer a conceptual frame on clusters of sense data, and the latter direct realism,
which takes objects as imposing themselves to the mind. Given that our descriptions of reality are governed by
standards of consistency and coherence, there is no reason to assume that reality is different from how we describe
it. In fact, he believes that his theory recovers the basic tenets of realism, one that is frictionless in the sense that the
mind is never confronted with reality. As he writes,

It is a mistake to think that because our concepts, which determine how we perceive and cope with the world,
are not dictated by anything more than our needs and interests, truth will forever elude us, or our vision must
be incurably warped. Despite the provincial provenance of our ideology, nature is pretty much how we think it
is. There really are people and atoms and stars, given what we mean by the words.
(2008, 1064)

Davidson sees in Benjamin Whorf’s and Thomas Kuhn’s views the acute expression of the scheme-content dualism
he rejects. Whorf suggested, for example, that the Hopi people may have a different metaphysics and Kuhn claimed
that different realities may be articulated by different paradigms in scientific research (Davidson 2001a, 184). Both
assume in their most radical formulations the possibility of different conceptual schemes articulating an
independently existing content. For Davidson, this is not possible because there is no reality accessible otherwise
than through descriptions. If there were two or more schemes, they would have to be commensurable (compatible or
mutually corrigible or complementary) due to the intersubjective nature both of the subjective (what the Hopi think
or what scientists model) and the objective (what reality is). We will come back to his criticism of Whorf in Section
3.3.
If we abandon this scheme-content dualism, it means that understanding other people cannot appeal to an
uninterpreted reality but has to face a circle. Since what the observed subjects mean is reached through observation
of the behavior of these subjects and the circumstances in which they are, the observer has to find out what the
observed subjects mean or say on the basis of what they believe, but the observer also has to determine what they
believe on the basis of what they mean or say.

The Interpreter’s problem is that what he is assumed to know – the causes of assents to sentences of a speaker
– is […] the product of two things he is assumed not to know, meaning and belief. If he knew the meanings he
would know the beliefs, and if he knew the beliefs expressed by sentences assented to, he would know the
meanings. But how can he learn both at once, since each depends on the other?
(2001g, 148)

The “principle of charity,” which had already been formulated by Quine, breaks into this apparent circle.

2.2.1 The principle of charity

As Davidson describes it, “charity is a matter of finding enough rationality in those we would understand to make
sense of what they say and do” (1999e, 600). It consists in this, that “we make maximum sense of the words and
thoughts of others when we interpret in a way that optimizes agreement” (2001a, 197) and we optimize agreement
on the basis of shared reactions to a shared environment.17 The principle of charity thus assumes that those we
observe share an understanding of the world that is roughly the same as our own understanding. In response to a
“hermeneutic” question by Thomas Kent, who took the principle of charity to mean that understanding supposes that
“we already must share a great body of common experience about language and about our being in the world,”
Davidson qualifies this “sharing” of a world not as a presupposition, which would introduce the historical dimension
of a “being-in-the-world,” as in Heidegger and Gadamer. The sharing is an acquisition through his “all-out”
externalism: “Externalism says there’s a connection between the contents of people’s thoughts and their causal
relations with the world itself. In fact, I would say if it weren’t for that, we wouldn’t be able to interpret anyone else.
It’s only because we share a world with others that we can get the hang of what they’re talking about” (Kent and
Davidson 1993, 7). So, it is not the world as shared that is a starting point, as for Gadamer, but the ascription of
beliefs to the observed subject, which has to assume a shared world. “Charity has two features: one is that you can’t
understand people if you don’t see them as sharing a world with you; the other is that you can’t understand people if
you don’t see them as logical in the way that you are – up to a point” (Kent and Davidson 1993, 7). As we can see
and as he recognizes, charity has nothing to do with caring for others: “The word charity is a misnomer because it’s
not a matter of being kind to people; it’s the condition for understanding them at all” (Kent and Davidson 1993, 7).
There are thus two sides in the principle of charity, which correspond to the two sub-principles of the principle
of charity: the Principle of Coherence and the Principle of Correspondence (2001c, 211). The former names the fact
that, when we observe the subjects we wish to understand, we assume that they are roughly correct in their beliefs
about what the world is, so that it cannot be the case that the subjects we try to understand have completely mistaken
beliefs about the world.18 As he says, “charity is forced on us: whether we like it or not, if we want to understand
others, we must count them right in most matters” (2001a, 197).19 In other words, when interpreting, we have no
choice but to consider that “most of the sentences a speaker holds to be true – especially the ones he holds to most
stubbornly, the ones most central to the system of his beliefs – most of those sentences are true, at least in the
opinion of the interpreter” (2001g, 149–150). It may be the case that some individual beliefs are false but since we
do not evaluate individual sentences of the observed knowers, but their whole system of beliefs, the coherence of the
interpretation will take care of those individual sentences and beliefs that have been misinterpreted or false.
Regarding the correspondence principle, charity means that I as an observer assume that observed subjects share
with me the same rough understanding of the world so that I would respond to the features of their environment
roughly in the same way and thus form the same beliefs that they form.20 Just as with the principle of coherence, we
have to assume that the observed subjects cannot be massive wrong in their beliefs, in the same way we, as
interpreters, have to assume that we are not completely wrong in our understanding of the world since it is the basis
of the ascription of beliefs.21 For charity “directs the interpreter to translate or interpret so as to read some of his
own standards of truth into the pattern of sentences held true by the speaker” (2001g, 148).22 By assuming that
observed subjects and interpreters roughly form the same beliefs on the basis of the same stimuli, the principle of
charity then allows interpreters to put themselves in the place of the observed subjects and to act as their proxies.
Interpreters can infer from the behavior of observed subjects what they, the interpreters, would believe if placed in
this situation and can then ascribe those beliefs to observed subjects.23
Davidson considers that the sentences interpreters formulate are a system that tracks the language or the
knowledge of the observed subjects. The interpreters’ sentences function like the numbers we assign to weights. We
use pounds and ounces or kilograms. The numbers do not matter in themselves because they only serve to track
weights. For example, we use correspondence tables to translate one way of tracking weight in pounds into another
way in kilograms. Analogously, we can have various translation manuals of the same behaviors or noises made by
people that we have observed, but this should not lead us to believe that our descriptions or translations have
misrepresented or missed altogether what the people observed meant or said. To say that there may be a description
that is correct or accurate or true in itself would only be possible if what people mean or say had a full articulation in
itself, independently of other subjects and the common objective world. This is precisely what Davidson’s theory
excludes: No content independent of any scheme. “Correct,” “accurate,” or “true” are descriptions made laterally
from one account to another that is deemed more coherent. What remains “invariant” among different interpretations
is precisely what we call the action or the event: “Invariances are ‘facts of the matter’” (1999e, 596).24 To consider
facts as invariant patterns of “empirical relations between a speaker, her sentences, and her environment” (1999e,
596) turns charity into a kind of computation and this may be why Davidson replaced the psychologically tainted
term “charity” with the more neutral term “triangulation.” Or we could say that triangulation is the mode of
operation of charity, explaining how the ascription of beliefs is made.

2.2.2 Interpretation as triangulation

Although at first, Davidson called his theory “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge” in 1983 and claimed
that his coherence theory is also a correspondence theory and a form of realism (2001g, 140), he came to qualify this
position. Under the influence of Rorty, he saw the paradoxical aspect of the words “coherence” and
“correspondence.” They give the impression that there is still a remainder of reality after the theory has provided
knowledge, as if what the theory offers is what we should content ourselves with, like a coherent account, or as if
there is something waiting to be known that is fully articulated before we can track it or find a correspondence to it.
To speak, as he himself did for a while of a scheme, such as coherence or correspondence, is still to suppose a
content that is accessible otherwise than through a scheme.25 This is what is always unpalatable in any story
presenting itself as “coherent” or “plausible,” for example about what “really” happened in the past (for historians)
or what is “really” the case (for scientists). While giving us an account, by saying that it is “coherent” or “plausible,”
their authors suggest at the same time that there may be another “truth of the matter” about what it “really” was. But
it is precisely this “really” that we want to secure.
Triangulation names this process of interpretation by making inferences about what observed subjects mean or
what an event is. Because it is a triangulation involving interpreters, observed subjects, and the environment,
nothing remains outside the process. What triangulation yields is the “truth,” without further qualification, such as
“coherent” or “corresponding to reality.” Triangulation consists of a process of ascribing beliefs to the observed
subject on the basis of the beliefs the observers have, and observers can ascribe such beliefs because they assume
that they inhabit roughly the same world as the observed subject. If I did not know what I think, I could not ascribe
any beliefs to others. And if the others did not inhabit the same world and react to it as I do, I would not know what
they believe.

We may think of it as a form of triangulation: each of two people is reacting differentially to sensory stimuli
streaming in from a certain direction. Projecting the incoming lines outward, the common cause is at their
intersection. If the two people now note each other’s reactions (in the case of language, verbal reactions), each
can correlate these observed reactions with his or her stimuli from the world. A common cause has been
determined.
(2001c, 212–213)26
The reason why there is a similarity of response on the part of the observer and of the observed subject is “evolution
and subsequent learning” (Davidson 2001c, 212): We are all homo sapiens and roughly perceive and think in the
same way, within the same range of perceptual discriminations and mental states.
As for Gadamer, interpretation for Davidson is not about retrieving thoughts or beliefs from behind the words
expressed. However, instead of a hermeneutic experience, it is an empirical process of offering an explanation or a
“theory”: it is “a theory for the interpretation of a speaker’s words, a theory that also provides a basis for attributing
beliefs or desires to that speaker” (Davidson 2004, 152). In triangulation, we thus have to navigate among the
knowledge of our own mind, the knowledge of others’ mind, and the knowledge of the common objective world,
which are the three horns of a triangle: The subjective, the intersubjective, and the objective. In order to understand
an utterance made by observed subjects, I make use of their behaviors as empirical indications of the kind of
reactions they have to an object or an environment that I also observe or could observe. I can then ask myself what
beliefs I would have if reacting to the same situation and environment. In short, the objective (what is out there)
causes stimuli that affect the subjective as well as the intersubjective and in the same way, so that the subjective (my
own beliefs) is also intersubjective (what others believe). Davidson writes: “It is only when an observer consciously
correlates the responses of another creature with objects and events of the observer’s world that there is any basis for
saying the creature is responding to those objects or events rather than any other objects or events” (2001c, 212).27
Because it is a triangulation, these three horns are not three independent starting points but rather three
interrelated perspectives. The objective event or environment is already mediated by the subjective, which is itself
intersubjective. Although the starting point of the theory is the observer’s standpoint, Davidson does not consider
this standpoint as an exclusively third-person perspective. Individuals have privileged access to their own thoughts
in the sense that they own them. Thus, the knowers I observe directly know what they mean, whereas I, as an
observer, can only infer what they mean from their behavior in given circumstances and from my own thoughts and
beliefs. However, this privilege of one’s own meanings and beliefs is weak. This is a point I will question in the next
section.
The reason why it may appear weak is that there is an interdependency of the subject, other minds, and the
objective world, I can only identify my own thoughts by the relationships my thoughts have with other people and
the objective world. My privilege is retroactive, so to speak – after I have had access to the thoughts of others, and
this access takes the form of a language, a culture, and a tradition:

Knowledge of one’s own mind is personal. But what individuates that state at the same time makes it
accessible to others, for the state is individuated by causal interplay among three elements: the thinker, others
with whom he communicates, and an objective world they know they share.
(2001, 203–204)

As a result, what is mine with regard to my thoughts is only the fact that I have them; the content of my thoughts is
very much public, for it depends on others and on a shared world.28
In such a view, objects, events, and actions are not something that happens at the ontological level, but referents
of descriptions, as what descriptions present. They are thus not directly “referred to,” but rather “presented” by
descriptions or “tracked.” As a consequence, nothing can exceed triangulation. In the churning of output that the
charitable machine effectuates, there is no remainder of reality that could lie outside of descriptions and could be
appealed to as correctives of interpretations or as a basis for the relativism of schemes. Sentences, then, do not so
much express beliefs or refer to states of affairs as they are correlated to beliefs and states of affairs. “Sentences held
true” are “the linguistic representatives of belief” (2001b, 201). They “face the tribunal of experience” not
individually as in a correspondence, but holistically: “They must face it together” (2001a, 193).
Davidson’s proposal of interpretation as triangulation offers several advantages for a theory of interpretation. A
first advantage is that it can solve the paradox that besets pluralism in interpretation, namely the fact that different
interpretations may be equally valid or true. The paradox arises due to the conflict between the pragmatic level of
offering an interpretation and the retrospective observation looking at already available interpretations. At the
pragmatic level, offering a new interpretation seems to involve the claim that the new interpretation is correct and
thus better than or different from the existing ones. However, to say that several available interpretations are equally
correct or true, as pluralism does, depends on a retrospective look that sees the differences between interpretations
while also seeing the sameness of the object of interpretation behind the differences of perspectives or
methodologies. It seems that different interpretations cannot be equally valid or true without qualifying the
perspectives from which they are different and without assuming that they share an element of sameness, which is
something pluralism cannot account for. We recall that this was Davidson’s concern about Gadamer’s view of
“understanding differently.”
 For Davidson, there may be new descriptions or interpretations of an event or an action, but triangulation
guarantees that these descriptions will be commensurate with other descriptions as better candidates or as
complements, with a smaller or a broader scope, etc. Thus, from the intersubjective point of view, which is also
mine, the world can be described differently and re-described without leading to a multiplicity of worldviews or a
pluralism of equally valid interpretations. Because there is no direct univocal link between the physics of an
environment (for example, for empiricism, clusters of sense data) and the semantics of what is meant (the sentences
used that present those sense data as a mere event or a meaningful action), the descriptors’ sentences are the
“tracking device.” Descriptions “keep track” of the changes and transformations that occur at the physical level. The
tracking is obviously a semantic device, but it does not claim to render the empirical content of the action or event
themselves.29 There is thus no real difficulty in the possibility that the “same” events can be described in different
ways without losing their individuality.
It is in fact the very notion of “sameness” that is crucial. It is not a sameness that immediately refers to the
“events” themselves, as if there were a valid possible starting point in the world, accessible and identifiable
independently of any description. “Sameness” belongs to the observers’ vocabulary, who establish the criterion of
what counts as similar. As Davidson notes, the criterion of similarity of response “cannot be derived from the
creature’s responses,” but “only […] from the responses of an observer to the responses of the creature” (2001c,
213). Because an “event” is only meaningful as the referent of a description and not as the direct cause of a
description, it is only from the perspective of a description that we can establish the “sameness” of anything. Thus,
just as in saying that two tables have the same length (in Davidson’s example) we do not have to posit that the
“same length” is an object existing somewhere, in the same way, when we say that two descriptions are about the
same event, we do not have to posit something like an “event” existing somewhere independently of any description
or interpretation.
As a category of interpretation, “sameness” is a device that our descriptions use to track events and is a manner
of speaking, in the literal sense: it is how we speak of events, as being the same or not. This is what a “description”
is and does, as illustrated by Davidson’s famous example in “Actions, Reasons, and Causes”: “I flip the switch, turn
on the light, and illuminate the room. Unbeknownst to me I also alert a prowler to the fact that I am home” (2001d,
4). We have four descriptions of something that is the same. As Davidson himself asks in a footnote, “the same –
what? ‘action,’ ‘event,’ ‘thing done’” (2001d, 5), that is to say, “sameness” as a descriptive category allows us to
track an action or an event through different descriptions, the action or the event being what is “invariant” among
the different descriptions.30 We recall that the objective is the result of a triangulation with the subjective and the
intersubjective. By adding descriptions, we just modify our ways of tracking objects or events. As such, having
different descriptions of an event is no different than moving from a description of atmospheric conditions in the
Fahrenheit degree scale to a description in the Celsius degree scale.
A second advantage of triangulation for interpretation theory, besides resolving the paradox of pluralism
assuming sameness, is that we also avoid relativism, whether it is a historical relativism and a relativism of
viewpoints, which would turn any notion of truth or validity of interpretation into an illusion. Triangulation, first,
avoids the problem of historical relativism simply because it is a logical analysis in which history has no place.
Interpretation is a process that is wholly synchronic, effectuated from the perspective of the interpreter with an
exclusively explanatory goal: to have a theory of what observed subjects mean with the understanding that what they
mean are the beliefs that the radical interpreter ascribes to them (Davidson 2005e, 143). This is why Davidson
criticizes Gadamer’s view that the meaning of what we say may have layers of sedimented past uses. Past authors
can only mean what current interpreters understand by substituting their current beliefs to those of past authors.
Second, there is no relativism of viewpoints either because, contrary to Gadamer, the interpreter does not have to
start from a living dialogue with other subjects in the give and take of a conversation or argument. Although
Davidson’s interpreter works within an intersubjective space – has a world of objects and a set of beliefs – what the
interpreter does is not strictly subjective, but rather asubjective. The interpreter operates as a machine in a non-
personal process of correlating input in terms of sense data, saliency of objects in the environment, etc., and output
in terms of plausible beliefs.31 We can even say with Ramberg that “there are no radical interpreters in the world”; it
is an “idealization.” “It is not a “her” (or a “him”) at all, but an “it,” a device embodying a mechanism designed to
run a particular process” (Ramberg 2003, 223). This “neutrality” in the sense of the “asubjective” character of
interpretation is legitimated by the fact that the ontological substance of events has been vacated: events cannot be
posited as explaining or justifying our sentences. Rather, it is only in the sentence about the event that we can
differentiate the event that is an action from the mere physical movements and gestures. This is how we can keep
our “unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false” (2001a,
198).
Despite these two advantages of triangulation (avoiding the paradox of pluralism and relativism), we can wonder
whether interpretation can be such an ahistorical and a personal process of triangulation. This is what I examine in
the next section by asking what the price of triangulation is when it comes to understanding a foreign culture.

2.3 Is the ascription of beliefs ethnocentric? An anthropological test

Can triangulation be reduced to a logical analysis? Can the building of a passing theory, aiming at making sense of
the observed empirical behavior of subjects and agents, be merely a “reconstruction,” an after-the-fact explanation,
in the manner of a logical analysis? This is what I would like to test, not so much in terms of arguments but in terms
of fruitfulness. Is it fruitful to discard as irrelevant the historical nature of the process of interpretation by flattening
out the historical thickness of our utterances and shrinking them to the expressions of states of mind and beliefs that
any people anywhere in the world could have, such as Plato and we, 21st century Americans?
At the surface, Davidson’s position appears paradoxical. On the one hand, there is such a privilege granted to the
position of the interpreters that interpretation is political in the minimal sense that interpreters have to retrieve from
their own set of beliefs those that would fit the specific situation of the observed subjects. In so doing, interpreters
have to navigate the nitty-gritty or grainy political landscape of real individuals and make the best they can of what,
at first, offers resistance to the mind, whether it is an utterance by a person or an event. On the other hand,
interpretation is presented as an ascription of beliefs that presents itself as input-output machine that claims to
establish what is the case. How, we could ask, can anybody claim to be able to travel across time and culture, and
claim that interpretation will do justice to what observed subjects actually meant?
Ian Hacking raised such worries about the dangers of putting so much stock on what interpreters infer. He sees
an ethnocentrism lurking in the principle of charity – the forerunner of triangulation – due to the privileged position
of the interpreter. “Charity” [… has] long been in the missionary vanguard of colonizing Commerce. Our ‘native’
may be wondering whether philosophical B52s and strategic hamlets are in the offing if he won’t sit up and speak
like the English.” There is, Hacking continues, a “linguistic imperialism” (Hacking 1975, 149) in this principle: “If
the native does not share most of our beliefs and wants, he is just not engaged in human discourse, and is at best
subhuman” (1975, 149). As Hoy puts it in reference to Hacking’s concerns, the principle of charity:

would lead to the Whiggish assumption of the superiority of the present science over past science, an
assumption that can lead to making past science so implausible as to be unintelligible. So instead of making the
other more intelligible to us, […] the principle, when used as a pragmatic constraint, would be likely to make
some central statements unintelligible. Hacking’s critique implies that the principle is potentially ethnocentric
and Whiggish.
(Hoy 1997, 123)

The politics of interpretation in this limited sense taints the word “charity” in the principle of the same name.
Charity is a misnomer not only because it is not about being kind to others, as Davidson recognizes, but also because
the actual privately held thoughts and beliefs of subjects observed can be bypassed and do not represent the telos of
interpretation. What is the “subjective” in the observed subjects is allegedly itself intersubjective and the ascribers of
beliefs can do their work just as observers of linguistic behavior or linguistic actions without having to “care” for
genuine personal interactions with the observed subjects. This is what I want to question: whether the subjective can
be characterized as always already intersubjective and thus whether there is a symmetry between the interpreter’s
beliefs and the observed subjects’ beliefs as well as a symmetry between the ontological layout of their respective
worlds. In order to formulate the question, I use the anthropological test of how to understand another culture. This,
in fact, brings us back to the original scenario used by Quine for presenting radical translation as the work of a field
linguist.
We recall that the strength of radical interpretation is that it avoids the content-scheme dualism and thus
dispenses with any remainder beyond what is interpreted. Without this remainder, there is nothing over against
which interpretations could be said to be relative or idealistic. In the absence of any such content, the real (what is
the case, an event or an object) is what it is as a referent of descriptions in the form of what is “invariant” in the
communication between descriptors or interpreters. A fact is an invariant pattern of empirical relations between
subjects, sentences, and their surroundings. Sameness or difference of what is interpreted is assessed within
communication.
I see three problems in Davidson’s radical interpretation and his rejection of conceptual schemes. The first one is
about the symmetry he sees in the process of triangulation between interpreters and observed subject; the second
concerns what he understands as a belief, which for him is of a propositional nature; and the third one is about
language, which he considers both as a mere means to communicate without any self-identity and as a criterion of
what it means to be rational.

2.3.1 First problem: The symmetry between interpreter and observed subject as a
retrospective illusion

I want to show that the symmetry Davidson assumes between interpreter and observed subject is in fact a
retrospective illusion, once communication between interpreter and observed subject has been successful and
interpretation has done its task. There are two aspects to this retrospective illusion of symmetry between observed
subject and interpreter. The first aspect concerns the object of the description, which, once understood by
interpreters, appears as the same object as the one the observed subjects refer to. The second aspect concerns the
observed subjects’ beliefs, which are claimed by interpreters to be understood when reframed within the interpreters’
set of beliefs. This allows Davidson to see the ascription of beliefs to the observed subjects as a mere means of
establishing what the observed subjects’ specific beliefs are.

2.3.1.1 First aspect of the first problem: The commonly agreed upon referent of different
descriptions

As we saw, for Davidson the objective world is one of the three horns of his triangulation. His assumption is that we
all share roughly the same articulation of the world and thus have roughly the same beliefs. He writes:

Our natural powers of discriminations are very much alike. The same objects, events, and properties are salient
to most of us; this shows in our behavior, behavior which is, in turn, salient for most of us. This double
salience makes triangulation possible, thus providing the ground for objectivity and the appreciation of error.
Indeed, it is triangulation that gives meaning to the concept of salience.
(2008, 1068–1069)

This symmetry between interpreters and observed subjects allows interpreters to project their own beliefs and values
onto the observed subjects. Now, Davidson makes it clear that “the aim of interpretation is not agreement but
understanding” (2001e, xix). Interpreters do not have to agree with the observed subjects in order to understand
them. Still, how far can disagreement go before affecting understanding? For there are circumstances, historical and
cultural, in which a disagreement exists not just about how to interpret the same event, but about what the event was
and even whether it was an event at all. How does radical interpretation get traction in those cases where there is no
understanding because one of the horns of the triangle – the “objective” – does not seem to be shared?
This would have significant consequences for Davidson’s framework, in which triangulation is possible only
because what interpreters think is interdependent of what the observed subjects think. Only under this assumption is
it enough to show how triangulation works from the observer to the observed subject for also showing that it would
also work from the observed subject to the observer as well, if the roles were exchanged, and thus for guaranteeing
that the subjective is always already intersubjective. But if triangulation were to lose one of its horns – the reliance
on a world commonly shared in its articulation –triangulation would no longer be reciprocal, but asymmetrical. As a
consequence, it would no longer be charitable for interpreters to extend to others what holds true for them. In so
doing they would in fact miss what observed subjects “really” refer to. Davidson himself acknowledges that
disagreement presupposes a basis of agreement so that interpretation only aims at making “meaningful disagreement
possible,” which requires “a foundation – some foundation – in agreement” (Davidson 2001a, 196–197). Can there
be such a fundamental disagreement about the shared so-called objective world such that, in the eye of the
interpreter, the views disagreed with fall into irrationality and thus into what can be dismissed?
I examine what I take to be a fundamental disagreement between countries belonging roughly to the same culture
and the case of a historical event: the chunk of physical movements and gestures that occurred in Turkey between
1915 and 1917, at the time still the Ottoman Empire, and involving the Armenians and the Turks. This chunk of
physical movements and gestures has been described either as a genocide, which cost the life of about one million
people or, officially in Turkey, as a legitimate military response by a state (the Ottoman empire) attacked by terrorist
groups and responding by exercising the right to defend itself. Could we not object to Davidson that these two
descriptions, in fact, do not refer to the same event and do not even claim to? For these two descriptions have
different temporal starting and endpoints – the Armenians will point out years of discrimination because of cultural
and religious differences and the effort by the state to homogenize the Ottoman (or Turkish) territory. The Turks will
emphasize the damaging conflict of World War I and the risk posed by the Armenian dissidents to a country allied
with Germany and under siege, some of the Armenians fighting with the enemies. The two descriptions also present
different numbers of casualties – the Armenians speak of 1 or 1.2 million people killed and the Turks mention
several hundred thousand people engaged in an attempt to fight and destabilize the state during a period of war, and
so on.
Because beliefs on either side are so overdetermined by cultural and historical factors, it seems that triangulation,
like charity, may not be able to work synchronically on the basis of a common objective world. In other words, it
may not be enough for the principle of charity to work from the observer to the observed subjects in order to show
that it would also work from the observed subject to the observer, if the roles were exchanged. A strong indication
of this is that an observer whom either side would regard as a “neutral” observer could not start by being an ascriber
of beliefs under the assumption that beliefs are merely propositional contents, and thus either true or false. Such a
neutral observer (or triangulator) would need to understand the historical background of those beliefs, on either side,
and this means: the perspectives, motivations, and goals of the people involved, along with the political
circumstances, the war, etc. On the basis of such differences in cultures and religions, it is not clear that a “pattern of
invariance” could be identified as common, which would qualify as an event recognizable by all parties. To deny the
genocide, as the Turkish government continues to do to this day, is not just to quarrel about a qualification of an
event. It is to deny the very existence of the event and to refer to another event (the defense by the state against an
attack on its sovereignty in times of war).
What the disagreement on what happened to the Armenians suggests is that the principle of charity or
triangulation is only plausible if both observers and observed subjects share the same historical and cultural
background so that their stock of beliefs is roughly the same. When such a cultural and historical background is not
shared, some beliefs also need to be interpreted before being ascribed. In such a case, by extending to others what
holds true for interpreters, interpreters could in fact prevent the observed subject from conveying whatever cannot be
formulated in the interpreters’ belief system. For it may happen that the observer’s stock of beliefs does not include
the observed subject specific beliefs. History is replete with instances of sufferings and oppressions that do not
register on the moral radar of others. This may not just be because of a lack of sensitivity on the part of the observers
but due to the fact that observers would not have a space in their system of beliefs to make sense of what others
experienced or expressed. Apparently, a majority of people in Turkey not only reject the idea of an Armenian
genocide, but the violence used against the dissenters suggests that they cannot even understand, i.e., form the belief,
that the Turks may have engaged in ethnic cleansing.32
This is not to say that no resolution can be found for what happened to the Armenians. We can grant Davidson
that no matter how different two peoples may be, they share roughly the same cognitive apparatus, range of
perception, and basic interests. In addition, their practices may be different, engaging in human sacrifice or, as we
heard from some of our elected officials after September 11, publicly defending torture on particular prisoners. Yet,
they still share what Jürgen Habermas calls the same grammar of justification (Habermas 1992, 138) in the sense
that they provide “reasons” for what they are doing, whether it is the wrath of the gods or national security. We can
also grant Davidson that his holism will allow interpreters to eliminate or correct some of the beliefs they have
formed that do not track what the observed subjects mean or know, as our societies have come to recognize the
wrongs they did to other communities in the past. The beliefs must be consistent with the large bulk of other beliefs.
Still, the problem in Davidson’s model is that his radical interpretation assumes the world to be broken down in
the same way for all possible interpreters. While recognizing that our concepts originate from “our needs and
interests,” he claims that these concepts “correspond” to how reality is broken down. It is his version of
“correspondence without confrontation” (2001g, 137), which he explains in the following quotation: “It is foolish to
deny that these divisions [made by our concepts] exist in nature, whether anyone entertains the thought. Even if no
one had ever had a concept, there would be species, though of course this is our concept and our word, born of our
interests” (2008, 1064).
Davidson sees an analogy between his own radical interpretation and Plato’s ideal, expressed in Phaedrus 265e,
of “dividing nature at the joints” (quoted in Davidson 2008, 1068), which we discussed in the Introduction.
Davidson sees three versions of this ideal of cutting at the joints. For the Greeks, “the joints were taken to be in
nature, a vast and organized hierarchy of structures to which thinkers should shape their concepts” (2008, 1068).
This view, however, “miss[es] the way the discriminatory powers of animals have been shaped by their needs”
(2008, 1068). In a second stage, individuals took the power to categorize the world. “Early conceptualization isn’t
arbitrary, but it is due to nature only in the sense that animals and their needs are the product of natural causes”
(2008, 1068). The third stage, which Davidson claims as his own, occurs when conceptualization is brought about in
a social setting in which “conceptualization and thought emerge in company with the development of language”
(2008, 1068). The “cutting up” or “carving out” of the world may be due to our needs and interests but it still is an
ordering of reality as it really is because of the triangulation that takes place through communication. This
triangulation will eliminate false beliefs with time.
The objection raised by my example of the Armenian genocide is that triangulation is always made by real
people living in real cultures so that triangulation may not transfer from community to community. We recall
Davidson’s necessary assumption that those who triangulate cannot be completely wrong in their system of beliefs
simply because it is structurally the very basis of triangulation. It seems, though, that even within the same set of
cultures and communities, such as Europe, there is the possibility that we can be massively wrong, for example on
the question of whether an event was or was not a genocide. This is one of the difficulties Turkey encountered when
seeking to become a member of the European Union, so far not surmounted.33 The assumption that objects and
events appear to all human beings roughly in the same way is connected to the second aspect of his assumption of
symmetry between interpreters and observed subjects: after assuming that they face the same environment, he also
assumes that they form the same beliefs.

2.3.1.2 Second aspect of the first problem: Similarity of beliefs as a retrospective

illusion

It may well be the case that, once the views of the observed subjects have been formulated in terms of the
interpreters’ set of beliefs, the observed subject’s beliefs seem to have been compatible with the interpreters’ beliefs
all along. But this may be a retrospective illusion because the logical analysis performed by the observer does not
allow for a consideration of the genesis of either the observed subject’s beliefs or the observer’s beliefs. The reason
for not considering such a genesis on either side is that Davidson assumes that the interpreter does not appear in the
triangulating process as a historically and culturally situated person but only as a logical device that performs a
neutral logical analysis. It is as if the observers had abstracted themselves from the process and functioned like a
machine that has no history so that what is triangulated cannot be taken in its historical specificity but only within
what the machine’s algorithm allows.
We can see this retrospective illusion in how Davidson understands the “intersubjective” pole of his
triangulation. The interpreter, we are told, is intersubjective insofar as I as a subject would not know what I believe
if I were not already part of an intersubjective process. Because “I live in the same world with [others], sharing
many reactions to its major features, including its values” (2001c, 220), I can both know what I think and what
others think. In his words, “if I did not know what others think, I would have no thoughts of my own and so would
not know what I think. If I did not know what I think, I would lack the ability to gauge the thoughts of others”
(2001c, 219–220).34 Knowing what others think or understanding others mean “attributing thoughts” to them and
this “is a matter of matching the verbal and other behavior of others to our own propositions or meaningful
sentences” (2001c, 213–214).
We need to distinguish two situations in which this symmetry of beliefs between observed subjects and
interpreters is at play. The first one is a situation in synchrony within roughly the same culture, such as the
American or European culture. The second is a situation between significantly different cultures, such as Western
and Amerindian cultures, whether in synchrony or in diachrony. Regarding the first situation, the symmetry may be
acceptable and may be working simply because people inhabit the same cultural world, “sharing many reactions to
its major features, including its values” (2001c, 220). In this case, we cannot be totally wrong in our understanding
of other people in our own culture.
The second situation that I want to examine in some detail is the encounter with a significantly different culture.
This will test Davidson’s claim that the sentences that the observer formulates only serve to track the beliefs or
knowledge of the observed subject. The question I ask is whether the privileged position of the interpreter as the
ascriber of beliefs will not miss or dismiss the beliefs of another different culture as irrational or unintelligible, in
those situations where habits and beliefs are so at odds with those of the observers. Can the principle of charity (or
triangulation) escape the tyranny of the one who sets up the rules of the description game and avoid ethnocentric or
ideological biases in ascribing beliefs to the observed subject?
I want to show that, contrary to Davidson’s claim, the interpreter’s referential framework does more than
tracking or translating the beliefs of the observed subject. It is in fact what allows the beliefs of the observed subject
to gain their public recognition35 and to count as genuine beliefs. If this is the case, it is the opposite of charity (in its
customary sense) to use one’s own system of beliefs as the referential framework for making sense of the others’
beliefs. For what the principle of charity in fact forbids is precisely to have one’s own system of beliefs radically
challenged by beliefs that are too strange or uncomfortable to be accommodated in terms of one’s own system.
Against Davidson’s understanding of charity, I contend that charity should precisely provide the possibility of such a
challenge in the sense that interpreters should be ready to let their own system of beliefs be questioned by what they
discover. In order to make this argument, I show in the next section that there is an ambiguation in how Davidson
understands a belief and I contend that we cannot equate the beliefs explicitly formulated by an interpreter – the only
ones Davidson recognizes – with the beliefs that are enacted in the experiences of the observed subject.

2.3.2 Ambiguation in the notion of belief

Davidson understands a belief as a mental state that has a propositional form (he also speaks of propositional
attitude, 2001j, 95). A belief is thus susceptible to be either true or false.36 This is a rather common view in
contemporary analytic philosophy. However, as many philosophers have noted, a belief can only be such as part of a
larger group of related beliefs. “The cat is on the mat” is only intelligible as a propositional belief if we have other
beliefs about cats, mats, and cats’ behavior. Without further information, the sentence expressing a belief that “the
sun has been cut” could hardly qualify as a belief, as we are at a loss to figure out what is actually believed. To name
this holistic aspect of belief, Quine uses the expression “web of beliefs,” Searle speaks of a “background,” and
Davidson on occasion speaks of a “system” of beliefs: “One must have a large number of beliefs if one is to have
any. Beliefs support one another, and give each other content” (Davidson 2001h, 124). This is the basis for his
holistic or “coherent” view on truth. Beliefs are thus not individuated in themselves. They “are individuated and
identified by their relations to other beliefs” (2001h, 124).
If there is a “system” of beliefs supporting any single belief, this opens the door to a hermeneutic question about
the genesis of this system, as Gadamer has done, and the correlate question about the historicity of truth, as we saw
above. Davidson avoids the question of history by considering the mental state of believing as being intersubjective.
I can only know what I mean if I have been in interaction with others, reacting to the same saliencies in the
environment. Without communication with others there would be no regularities in the flux of my mental states that
would make them susceptible to lock onto specific features of my environment accurately or “truly.” This is where,
for Davidson, language manifests itself as the public representation of mental states and beliefs. “Not that an agent
knows directly what he believes, wants, intends in some way that reduces observers to mere detectives. For though
he can often say what is on his mind, an agent’s words have meaning in the public domain; what his words mean is
up to the interpreter as well as to him” (2004, 183). A mental state is thus, for Davidson, what can be called an
“extended” mental state, not isolatable in the skull of one person.
I would like to show the arbitrariness of this hermeneutic decision by Davidson to consider a belief exclusively
as a “state” of believing without considering the background of the believing.

2.3.2.1 Explicit v. implicit beliefs

If someone’s belief can be identified by interpreters through triangulation and the concomitant ascription of the
beliefs the interpreters would have in the same circumstances, to say that a belief is a mental state is accepting not
only that it is an extended mental state (at least, common to the observed subjects and the interpreters) but also that
it is in itself a relationship, built or generated precisely by triangulation. As a matter of fact, we can appeal to
Davidson himself to clarify what a belief is. He writes about truth that it “is not a property of sentences; it is a
relation between sentences, speakers, and dates” (2001e, 43). Belief, which as a proposition is either true or false, is
also relational. My belief that the cat is on the mat results from my triangulating some object in relation to some
other object (the objective horn of the triangle) and what I have learned from other subjects about cats and mats,
seeing how they reacted to these objects (the intersubjective horn). A belief is thus a mental state only in the sense
that the triangulating of objects in the world and the previously internalized reactions of others to those same objects
are presently “represented” in my mind, in the sense of “connected” or put into relation. A mental state is thus more
a process than a state and triangulation is more the forming of beliefs as relationships than the mere identification of
a belief.
Once we consider triangulation as a process of forming beliefs instead of merely identifying beliefs as states of
mind, we can see that there are two layers in a belief. There is, first, the belief as a mental state considered in its
propositional content: “that x is y,” which is either true or false. It is an explicit belief. But before a belief is explicit,
there is, second, the process of believing or forming the belief through intersubjective triangulation. This is an
implicit belief as part of a practice or enacted in a practice of interacting with objects and other people in a shared
environment. While an explicit belief is a representing of the propositional content – it is a belief-that – which
consists in assenting to it or denying it (or adopting it or rejecting it) and can be manipulated by a logical calculus,
the implicit belief is entangled in the way people live and interact – it is a belief-in.37
The implicit beliefs manifested by a practice, at the level of experience, are implicit simply because the people
engaging in the practice and having meaningful experiences may not be able to formulate in propositional terms
what they seem to believe. Yet, the very fact that they engage in the practice manifests the beliefs they have. Those
beliefs at the implicit level of practices are enacted but not reflected upon. They belong to a process of “believing
in” or “creed,” what in French is named croyance. They have at least two functions. One is that they provide a form
of knowledge as practical – a know-how; the other consists in providing a form of trust in our world, insofar as
implicit beliefs provide a sense of reliability, making the world in which we live familiar and productive as a matrix
of attitudes and behaviors. By contrast, the explicit beliefs are a “believing that” as representing a propositional
content. While we, Moderns, tend to think that we are enlightened and do not have creeds or croyances, like those
belonging to other cultures or unenlightened people, I side with Bruno Latour (1996) in claiming that the beliefs we
hold true, “scientifically” established, have been formed on the basis of implicit beliefs in the world of experience
that Husserl already called a “lifeworld.”
If we accept these two levels of beliefs, explicit beliefs – those that are of a propositional form – are not primary,
fallen from the sky or automatically loaded to the mind of any member of the species homo sapiens through
evolution. Explicit beliefs – propositional attitudes – rely on and are generated by practices of people living together
in a community and sharing a specific set of implicit beliefs regarding how the world has been carved out, with its
saliencies and values. Once we recognize this, triangulation then names two different processes. The first one is a
process of interpreting at the level of explicit beliefs – the only one Davidson acknowledges when interpreters
triangulate the observed subject’s reactions and the environment. The second one is a practice of implicitly
triangulating other people in our environment as living in a community of shared understanding and values.
Davidson acknowledges this level of non-reflective triangulation in the case of animals: “Animals associate events
and objects sensed with the responses of other members of the herd. This is triangulation in its pure state” (1999a,
731).
If Davidson only focuses on explicit beliefs of a propositional form, which, he argues, animals and young
children lack, it is because, it seems, he overlooks how (explicit) beliefs are formed within practices and become
institutionalized and normalized, for example the ways we use sidewalks and walkways, instead of walking across
lawns, backyards, or streets, or the ways we eat different kinds of food with different kinds of utensils. For all these
practices, observers can try to figure out what beliefs we must have when engaged in them, although we ourselves
enact those beliefs without necessarily being reflectively aware of them.38 When living in the same community, we
simply overlook this practical level of beliefs because they are shared and we tend to consider, as Davidson does,
that only those beliefs that are explicit and propositional are beliefs. When encountering a foreign culture, however,
anthropologists cannot start at the level of explicit beliefs but have to find regularities in the practices they observe
and which, often, have not been theorized and reflected upon by the natives. Triangulation for anthropologists
consists in making explicit what was implicit in the practices observed, which themselves resulted from some form
of triangulation by the natives when growing up in their culture. Anthropologists thus triangulate what was already
the result of a previous triangulation by the natives.
This points to the blind spot of anthropologists, of which many of them are acutely aware. This blind spot has
two sides. First, the triangulation they practice has as its object not a single and stable object in the form of a belief,
but a belief-forming process, which itself took the form of a triangulation by natives when growing up in their
culture. Second, by using their own beliefs to triangulate, anthropologists, in fact, rely not on a set or a system of
explicit beliefs, but, before that, on the process of forming their own beliefs in their own culture, for example,
Western. If they want to understand the consistency and coherence of the natives’ beliefs, they have to suspend the
truth of their explicit beliefs and accept that their own system of beliefs was itself generated by certain practices in
the Western culture that are not shared by the natives. Without this awareness of the genesis of their explicit beliefs,
that is to say, of the fact that they have implicit beliefs, interpreters would triangulate the explicit beliefs of the
natives on the basis of the interpreters’ implicit beliefs, enacted in their Western practices, and would miss the
implicit beliefs of the natives enacted in their native practices.
The advantage of distinguishing explicit and implicit beliefs is that anthropologists, for example, who try to
make explicit the beliefs of the people they observe, can consider the natives’ beliefs as genuine beliefs without
themselves assenting to these beliefs and without calling those beliefs false. This explains why, at the surface,
anthropologists may appear to the common person as cultural relativists insofar as they describe any cultural
practice as a legitimate one and thus as a reasonable if not rational one, whether it is about spirits inhabiting forests
or rites, such as genital cutting, or, in the past, head-hunting and cannibalism. This superficial view on the attitude of
anthropologists already unveils the two meanings of “belief.” Insofar as they try to understand, anthropologists have
to assume that the natives’ beliefs are genuine beliefs, consistent in the course of time, and commonly shared among
members of the tribe. On the other hand, they themselves do not always assent to all of those beliefs and may even
find some of them abhorrent.
We can see the ambivalence of anthropologists when it comes to reporting and describing significantly different
beliefs in the attitude of Miguel León-Portilla in his book Aztec Thought and Culture. For most of the book, he
shows convincingly and in detail the richness and sophistication of the Aztec culture, thus subscribing to the view
that the Aztecs had genuine and complex beliefs. However, at the end of his book, which can be called a tribute to
the Aztec culture, he addresses very briefly and for the first time in the book the practice of human sacrifice. He
remarkably qualifies it as “barbarism” and opposes it to the other, positive, aspect of the Aztec culture, which he
praises as an attempt “to discover the meaning of life on an intellectual plane” (1963, 177). Not only does he qualify
the co-existence of these two sides in the Aztec culture as “a mixture of humanism and barbarism,” but he even
compares the co-existence of these two sides in the Aztec culture to the Nazi “culture”: “These almost diametrically
opposed attitudes toward life and the universe existed side by side – a situation similar to that of Nazi Germany in
our time, where a mystico-militaristic world view and a genuinely humanistic philosophy and literature coexisted”
(León-Portilla 1963, 177). While accepting that the Aztecs’ beliefs are genuine ones, León-Portilla wants to separate
out those that are morally acceptable to him and his time from those that are not. This attitude is rather remarkable
and not widely shared by anthropologists, who, in their practice, tend to refuse both the alternatives presented by
Davidson – a genuine belief is either true or false – and by León-Portilla – some genuine beliefs are barbaric. What
do these anthropologists then “believe” if they investigate abhorrent practices, such as human sacrifice or
cannibalism, without condemning them, like León-Portilla, as barbaric?
What allows anthropologists to take an ambivalent attitude is that, in their work, pragmatically, they do not
consider the observed subjects’ beliefs merely in propositional terms but also in terms of practices. They can thus be
quite sympathetic to the peoples they observe and with whom they interact but without adopting the views of those
people. If anthropologists did not make this distinction, they would have to substitute their own explicit beliefs for
what they take the observed subjects to believe and, as a result, anthropology would be mostly a repertory of false
beliefs. This is exactly what anthropologists try to avoid, which they would regard as ethnocentric. We can then say
that, pragmatically, anthropologists do not take the natives’ beliefs as true but do not dismiss those beliefs as false,
non-genuine, or irrational either.
The consequence is significant. If we consider that the implicit beliefs, which constitute a practice and, overall, a
culture, generate explicit beliefs, we cannot assume a symmetry between explicit beliefs among different cultures, as
Davidson does, for the simple reason that different cultures do not necessarily share the same implicit beliefs.
Ascribing explicit beliefs to the observed subjects of another culture would in fact ignore the “experience” of the
observed subjects or the “sense” of what they feel. It would miss the very culture of the observed subjects. This also
means that, even if something has become intelligible by being formulated by an interpreter, such as an
anthropologist who makes the beliefs of the observed subject explicit, it does not mean that this “something” is, by
the same token and at the same time, “experienced” as the observed subjects experience it. Now, with time spent in
an Amerindian culture, for example, we, Westerners, could experience phenomena in a similar way as them, just as
they could be part of a Western industrialized society, as many already are. But in the bridging of the two cultures
and through the intelligibility gained by this bridge, we and the Amerindians have been changed. We have acquired
not only new explicit beliefs but also new implicit beliefs allowing us to have new “experiences.” This is how
people can adopt a new culture.
I would like to illustrate the difference between explicit and implicit beliefs by examining the challenge that
cultures, which have been evolving outside the Western orbit, represent.

2.3.2.2 The interpretive challenge of Amerindian cultures

The encounter between Europeans and Amerindians represented quite a challenge for understanding and
interpretation. Claude Levi-Strauss was fascinated by an episode which for him showed how different the criteria
may be by which people of different cultures, such as the European and the Amerindian cultures, assess the
otherness of the other. As he described it, the question for the Europeans when arriving in the Americas in the 16th–
17th centuries was to figure out whether the natives had a soul, and this meant whether they were human or some
subform of humanity or higher form of animality. By contrast, the natives wondered whether these Europeans were
human or spirit. He recounts how a tribe in the Greater Antilles had captured a European man, drowned him, and
waited to see whether his body would decay (quoted in Viveiros de Castro 2014, 50). For the Europeans, the soul (or
the mind) is a sign of humanity and for the Amerindians the body is. These two tests of “otherness” or these two
forms of ethnocentrism indicate the significant difference that may exist between peoples, for example about what it
means to be human and thus what it means to have the capacity to have beliefs and to be rational. The very stating of
the problem through the two episodes – determining whether an entity has a soul, as Europeans endeavored to do,
and determining whether the body is of a human being or a spirit, as the tribe in the Greater Antilles did – already
indicates that ascribing beliefs to the observed subjects relies on an antecedent decision that the observed subjects
are susceptible to have genuine beliefs. Ascribing beliefs thus means not only projecting one’s own beliefs but also
setting the criteria of what counts as a belief by determining who can be a belief-holder.
The Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro has written extensively on the Amerindians’ views on
nature and culture, mostly in Brazil (Viveiros de Castro 2011a, 2011b, 2012, 2014, 2015). He sketches a distinction
between considering the beliefs of the Amerindians genuine and legitimate, on the one hand, and taking a stance on
the truth or acceptability of those beliefs, either assenting to them or rejecting them, on the other. He argues that
anthropologists need not believe themselves what the natives believe in order to take the natives’ beliefs seriously.
This means that once a belief is recognized as genuine, one does not then have to determine whether it is true or
false. Viveiros de Castro thereby offers an alternative to Davidson’s radical interpreter model and claims that
anthropologists have to put their own beliefs up for questioning if they want to understand. Only by being mindful
of their presence in the studies and thus mindful of their own set of implicit beliefs can anthropologists hope to
discern what is genuine in others’ beliefs.

2.3.2.2.1 AMERINDIAN PERSPECTIVISM

In his studies of Amerindians in Brazil, Viveiros de Castrro came to the realization that Amerindians understand
what human beings are and what the world is in a rather different manner than we do. For example, they do not
make a strict distinction between the human realm and the animal realm or between what we call “nature” and
“culture.” Instead, for them, there is no “unified non-human domain,” which would be, for example, the animal
domain or the spirits domain: they have “no submerged notion meaning ‘non-human animal’’ (in our sense of
‘animal’)” (2012, 78) and no “common substantive […] definition” of what is non-human. The meaning of “non-
human” for Amerindians is contextual. It names a perspective and not an ontological status.
For example, Viveiros de Castro describes the ways of thinking of the Wari people. “Wari” is the name of the
tribe but this ethnonym, as is the case in many tribes, means in wari language “the we,” “we ourselves.” Instead of a
name that refers to something, for example to a group, “Wari” is a deictic: it self-designates. In addition to this
pragmatic sense of being a deictic (and not a name with a stable and constant referent), the word Wari names the
position or moment or phase of being a subject. It is what Viveiros de Castro calls perspectivism: being Wari means
having the perspective of a subject or agent:

the Amerindian words which are usually translated as ‘human being’ and which figure in those self-
designations do not denote humanity as a natural species, that is, Homo sapiens. They refer rather to the social
condition of personhood, and – especially when they are modified by intensifiers such as ‘true,’ ‘real,’
‘genuine’ – they function less as nouns than as pronouns. They indicate the position of the subject; they are
enunciative markers, not names.
(2012, 97)39

The deictic nature of the name Wari and the perspectivism it carries mean that being Wari (being human in the sense
of being a subject or agent) is a stage and not a state. To be human, in other words, is not an ontological category,
for example based on a substance, as in our Western, mostly substance ontology, but a function or a perspective on
the world, which can be taken by humans but also by animals when they are in the position of subjects or agents, for
example when hunting. And if the prey of such animal when this animal is in the position of Wari is a human being,
the human being when threatened or killed is no longer a Wari but has become “animal” or prey. As Viveiros de
Castro explains,

the Wari’ (Txapakuran) word applied to “animals,” karawa, has the basic meaning of “prey,” and as such may
be applied to human enemies: the contrastive pair wari/karawa, which in most contexts may be translated as
 “human/animal,” has the logically encompassing sense of “predator/prey” or “subject/object” – humans
(Wari,’ i.e., wari’) can be the karawa of predators, animal, human, and spiritual, who are in their predatory
function or “moment” defined as wari.
(2012, 79)

It is not merely an exchange of role between agents and preys, for example, but it more fundamentally concerns
what it means to be human (wari). The perspective creates the subject. In the perspectivistic ontology of the Wari
people, animals see themselves as Wari and see humans as prey or spirits. As Viveiros de Castro explains, “every
being to whom a point of view is attributed would be a subject; or better, wherever there is a point of view there is a
subject position […]. Amerindian perspectival ontology proceeds along the lines that the point of view creates the
subject, whatever is activated or ‘agented’ by the point of view will be a subject” (2012, 99).40 Viveiros de Castro
quotes Gerhard Baer: “Human beings see themselves as such; the Moon, the snakes, the jaguars and the Mother of
Smallpox, however, see them as tapirs or peccaries, which they kill’ (quoted in 2012, 100). If jaguars see humans as
peccaries, it is not that jaguars are “humans in disguise” and humans are peccaries in disguise but “rather that they
are humans because they are subjects (potential subjects)” (2012, 100). Whether they are, in our descriptive terms,
human or animal, entities for the Wari constantly cross the border between nature and culture, depending on the
circumstances in which they find themselves.41 In Viveiros de Castro’s words, “culture is the subject’s nature; it is
the form in which every subject experiences its own nature […] Salmon are to (see) salmon as humans are to (see)
humans, namely, (as) humans” (2012, 100). Nature and culture are thus not “ontological provinces,” as in Western
culture, but “exchangeable perspectives and relational-positional contexts; in brief, points of view” (2012, 47).
In Amerindian cultures, the perspective is given with the bodily forms, which are, according to Viveiros de
Castro, “schemata” used to make sense of what is happening and situate the perspective in the unfolding of the
events. Instead of being, first, a physiological entity, the body is the seat of “affects, in the old sense of dispositions
or capacities which render the body of every species unique: what it eats, how it moves, how it communicates,
where it lives, whether it is gregarious or solitary” (2012, 113). This is why it is a schema: it is a “bundle of affects
and capacities” (2012, 114) or an “assemblage of affects or ways of being.” This gives the body a “performative”
character (2012, 125). The body enacts the ways of living in the world and is, in this sense, the site of a “habitus”
(2012, 113). This explains how the body as the space of a habitus “is at the origin of perspectives” (2012, 114), for
example, subject or object, hunter or prey.42 As perspectives on the unfolding of actions and events, being human or
being animal thus changes with the position of the body in these actions and events. This is what it means that being
human or being animal are “deictic ‘attributes.’” As such, they are “immanent in the viewpoint, and move with it”
(2012, 100).
Having schemata, animals have a soul or spirit, which is “an intentionality or subjectivity formally identical to
human consciousness, materializable, let us say, in a human bodily schema concealed behind an animal mask”
(2012, 48). This commonality between humans and animals, lying in the fact that their bodies are schemata
performing their “being-in-the-world,” means that the performance by their body is the same: “Animals see in the
same way as we do different things” (2012, 113) but, due to the differences in their bodies, “what changes is the
world that they see” (2012, 107). Because “animals and spirits see themselves as humans,” “they perceive
themselves as (or become) anthropomorphic beings when they are in their own houses or villages and they
experience their own habits and characteristics in the form of culture – they see their food as human food (jaguar see
blood as manioc beer, vultures see the maggots in rotting meat as grilled fish etc.)” (2012, 47–48).
Just as there is no conception of the body as a mere physical thing in Amerindian thought, there is no place for a
conception of the mind as the separate container of thoughts or feelings.43 Because bodies are the site of
perspectives or what anchors perspectives, “much of what we would tend to associate with the ‘mind,’ such as
‘culture’ and ‘knowledge,’ is considered by Amerindians to be an attribute of the body, as something that happens
in, to and through the body” (2012, 123).44 He gives the example of the Piro people for whom “the act of putting on
clothes” does not aim at covering the body but at “animating […] the clothes […] filling the clothes, activating
them” (2012, 136). When shamans or sorcerers put on animal skin or other animal attributes, this animal clothing is
an “instrument” used “to travel the cosmos” (2012, 136), analogous to what we do when diving:

The intention of donning a wet suit is to be able to function like a fish, to breathe under water, not to conceal
oneself under a strange covering. In the same way, the bodily “clothing” which, amongst animals, covers an
internal “essence” of a human type, is not a mere disguise, but their distinctive equipment, endowed with the
affects and capacities which define each animal.45
From this conception of mind, Viveiros de Castro draws two consequences. First, in the Amerindian cultures, “there
are no representations in the universe, but only perspectives” and, second,

there is no ontological dualism of spirit (or ‘meaning’) versus matter (or ‘things’); there is no such thing as a
‘non-physical’ (mental) world, and therefore there is no ‘physical’ world. That is why, as many ethnographers
have remarked, Amerindians take thinking and acting as co-extensive; thoughts and actions happen in the same
ontological space; the meaningful and the material are aspects of one single reality.
(2012, 124)46

2.3.2.2.2 A TEST FOR THE ASCRIPTION OF BELIEFS

The way Amerindians experience their world and the entities inhabiting this world, including themselves, what
Viveiros de Castro calls their “perspectivism” – which is a set of implicit beliefs – is a direct challenge not only to
our substance ontology but also, and more importantly, to what we consider a genuine belief, as opposed to
nonsense or absurdity. As Viveiros de Castro puts it, “our traditional problem is how to connect and universalize –
individual substances are given, relations have to be made – the Amerindians’ is how to separate and particularize –
relations are given, substances must be defined” (2012, 126). It is not that Amerindians have different
“representations of the same world” (2012, 107), compared to how we or animals see it, but that the world they see
is different, as is the world animals see. In this perspective, there is no Davidsonian dualism of scheme and content.
As Viveiros de Castro clarifies,

I am not suggesting that Amerindians “cognize” differently to us, or that their “mental” categories are different
to those of any other human being […]. For my own part, I am inclined to think that Amerindians think exactly
‘like us.’ But I also think that what they think, that is, the concepts that they deploy, the ‘descriptions’ that they
produce, are very different to our own – and thus that the world described by these concepts is very different to
ours.
(2015, 18)

If we were to use Davidson’s logical analysis for dealing with the natives’ beliefs, anthropologists would have to
choose between two equally anthropologically unpalatable sets of alternatives. In the first alternative, they would
have to decide whether the natives’ beliefs are genuine beliefs or nonsensical practices and, in the second
alternative, whether those beliefs that are genuine are true or false. Davidson grants that

there are contrasts from epoch to epoch, from culture to culture, and person to person, of kinds we all
recognize and struggle with; but these are contrasts which with sympathy and effort we can explain and
understand. Trouble comes when we try to embrace the idea that there might be more comprehensive
differences, for this seems (absurdly) to ask us to take up a stance outside our own ways of thought.
(2001c, 40)

To Davidson we could reply that the term “difference” he uses in the quotation is a relative term. When the Wari
people say that peccaries are human, for example, is it a difference in belief, in this case a false belief or is it a
difference in rationality, this view not being even a belief but non-sense? In the same way, what does Davidson
exactly mean by “taking a stance outside our own ways of thought”? If we take a synchronic view and do a logical
analysis, as Davidson does, it is indeed impossible to take a stance outside our ways of thought. We just have to
follow the injunction of the principle of charity of “recognizing our own norms of rationality” in the speech and
behavior of those we try to understand and “these norms include the norms of logical consistency, of action in
reasonable accord with essential and basic interests of the agent, and the acceptance of views that are sensible in the
light of evidence. (1999e, 600). By that set of norms and standards, not many beliefs in the system of Amerindian
cultures will pass the test. If we cannot recognize those norms in what we observe, Davidson is not shy of
dismissing what we observe and exclude it from rationality and even beliefs:

we know what states of mind are like, and how they are correctly identified; they are just those states whose
contents can be discovered in well-known ways. If other people or creatures are in states not discoverable by
these methods, it cannot be because our methods fail us, but because those states are not correctly called states
of mind – they are not beliefs, desires, wishes, or intentions.
 (2001i, 40)

In this synchronic and logical analysis, we are in fact asking a typical Western person, acculturated in a scientifically
driven industrialized society, whether beliefs that do not conform to our scientific understanding of the world and
our mores are true. The starting point of the investigation prevents anything not conforming to the standard of the
interpreter to pass the test of truth or even register as a possible candidate for truth. Starting with our own set of
explicit beliefs, as in Davidson’s framework, means that we have no entry point in a foreign culture other than our
overall picture of our own culture. This will exclude in principle that we could ever have an overall understanding of
the foreign culture. “If we cannot find a way to interpret the utterances and other behaviour of a creature as revealing
a set of beliefs largely consistent and true by our own standards, we have no reason to count that creature as rational,
as having beliefs, or as saying anything” (2001e, 137).
We can represent the two levels of belief and what is involved in any privileged position of the descriptor in
Figure 2.1.
Figure 2.1 The two levels of belief in Western and Amerindian cultures
Western culture Amerindian culture
• Explicit Peccaries are not human Peccaries are human
belief (when
formulated
in
propositional
form)
• Implicit Natural entities determine the possible Relations determine what entities are
belief (when relations between them
enacted in
actions and
behaviors)
• Practice The scientific understanding of the world Being in the position of subject in the unfolding of a
generating distinguishes different kinds of entities; particular event makes that entity human; being in
implicit natural entities, such as peccaries, cannot the position of object, for example a human being
beliefs migrate to another species, such as homo hunted by a jaguar, makes that entity an animal (a
sapiens prey)

The ascription of beliefs as described by Davidson is one-sided and ethnocentric because this ascription is
unwittingly blind to the fact that the beliefs ascribed to others are in fact generated by the implicit beliefs of the
interpreters, who will of necessity interpret the beliefs of the observed subjects as if they were generated by the same
cultural practice as the one of the interpreters. The ascription of beliefs is thus not a neutral transfer of beliefs,
originating from a common stock of beliefs that anybody would have. In ascribing beliefs to natives, interpreters
would in fact surreptitiously substitute their own cultural practices to the observed subjects’ cultural practices. While
Davidson clearly states that interpretation consists in understanding others and not necessarily agreeing with them,
the criterion used to determine that something is a belief, which can be evaluated as true or false, or whether it is
non-sense is set by the interpreters themselves. In synchrony and in the same cultural community, as we saw above,
the background of common beliefs and values may guarantee to some extent that what counts as rational – a genuine
belief – or irrational – nonsense or insanity – is commonly agreed upon by the majority in that community but this
common background, what Davidson does not even recognize, is clearly not present when encountering a foreign
culture.47
By professional training, as it were, anthropologists want to take native thought “seriously” (Viveiros de Castro
2015, 24), albeit without having to believe what Amerindians believe. One way to do this, which Viveiros de Castro
rejects, consists in distinguishing the content of what natives think and the way they think it, as Levi-Strauss did.
While the views of Amerindians on animals as being human in some circumstances does not inform us about
animals, in Levi-Strauss’ approach, these views inform us about the Amerindian worldview. He writes: “Myths do
not say anything capable of instructing us on the order of things, on the nature of reality, the origin of man or his
destiny” (1971, 571, quoted in Viveiros de Castro 2015, 29). Yet, myths tell us much about the people who believe
in those myths and how the human mind works. This is how Lévi-Strauss can say of the thought of other cultures
that it belongs to a “wild mind,” in the sense of “untamed” by the West, as the title of his book says, L’esprit
sauvage, crudely translated into English as The Savage Mind (1966). As Viveiros de Castro critically describes this
position, “one can thus oppose the referential vacuity of myths to their diagnostic richness: to say that peccaries are
human does not ‘say’ anything to us about the peccaries, but is highly telling about the humans who say it” (2015,
29). This in fact “consists in reducing indigenous discourse to a set of propositions, selecting those that are false (or
alternatively, ‘empty’) and producing an explanation of why humans believe in them, given that they are false or
empty” (2015, 29. Viveiros de Castros’ emphasis).
Although such an approach is willing to give consideration to the native thought, it divorces the thought natives
entertain from the world they inhabit by assuming that this world is the one we, the interpreters, consider it to be. Or
it separates out what I distinguished above, the explicit belief (in propositional form), which anthropologists can
formulate, from the implicit beliefs enacted in the cultural practices at the level of how the natives experience the
world themselves. In such an approach, we assume that we, Westerners, do not have implicit beliefs, which formed
our explicit beliefs, so that our beliefs, free from culture and history, are about how the world is in truth. On this
basis, we disconnect the native thought from our own thought by a pre-decision that our own thought cannot be
questioned because it is about the real world as it is or that our explicit beliefs, being true, are not generated by the
implicit beliefs of our practices. By adopting Levi-Strauss’ attitude, as Viveiros de Castro says ironically, “the world
is saved: the peccaries are saved, the natives are saved and, above all, so is the anthropologist” (2015, 29) in the
sense that Levi-Strauss makes sure from the start that he will not be questioned or unsettled in his understanding of
the world. Natives cannot shake the ground under his preferred version of the world, which is “saved” only at the
expense of the natives’ world.
Against Davidson but also Levi-Strauss’ “wild mind,” which dismisses the content of what the natives think and
values the manner in which they think this false content, Viveiros de Castro contends that there is another way to
take the natives’ thought seriously without adopting them. Negatively, we have to refrain from “explaining,
interpreting, contextualizing, or rationalizing native thought” (2015, 24). Doing so amounts to “neutralizing” their
beliefs by emptying them of any significance in our own framework. In order to refrain from explaining away, we
have to abandon the universals we are familiar with as a starting point in order to guard what we study from being
merely an instantiation of such universals. As Viveiros de Castro writes, “one ought to put in parentheses all
questions of whether and how native thinking illustrates universal processes of human cognition” (2015, 24).
Against Davidson, “it is not a matter of taking native thought as an expression of opinion (the only object for belief
and disbelief) or as a set of propositions (the only possible objects for truth judgments)” (Viveiros de Castro 2015,
25). Doing so would mean that a culture can be equated with a system of beliefs or that it is “a kind of dogmatic
theology” (2015, 25). Treating a culture in terms of propositions would force anthropologists, as mentioned above,
to point out errors, illusion and thus turn anthropology into “an epistemic teratology” (2015, 25) in the sense of a
study of abnormalities in the ways of knowing.
The positive way to take their beliefs and thoughts seriously, Viveiros de Castro says, is “to think the native
thought” and this means “to deploy it, drawing out its consequences, and verifying the effects that it can produce on
our own thinking” (2015, 24).48 In other words, being charitable to Amerindian cultures consists in considering their
beliefs as genuine beliefs that we could have if we were living in a framework different from our own: “One might
opt […], say, to think other thought simply (so to speak) as an actualization of as yet unsuspected virtualities of
thinking” (2015, 25). For example, to say that peccaries are human, in fact, “affirms something about the concept of
humanity. It affirms, among other things, that the notion of ‘human mind’ and the indigenous concept of sociality
include the peccaries in their extensions – and this radically modifies these concepts’ intension in relation to our
own” (2015, 30). For anthropologists, this amounts to putting their own ways of experiencing the world up for
grabs, as it were, wondering what it would mean – what sense it would make – to experience peccaries as being
human.

2.3.2.3 Why anthropologists cannot be radical interpreters

We can explain further what Viveiros de Castro means by “thinking the native thought” if we contrast this
‘thinking” with Davidson’s radical interpreter. We recall that for Davidson, “the point of the principle [of charity] is
to make the speaker intelligible, since too great deviations from consistency and correctness leave no common
ground on which to judge either conformity or difference” (2001g, 148). Even stronger: “Seeing rationality in others
is a matter of recognizing our own norms of rationality in their speech and behavior. These norms include the norms
of logical consistency, of action in reasonable accord with essential and basic interests of the agent, and the
acceptance of views that are sensible in the light of evidence” (1999e, 600). As we saw in Viveiros de Castro’s
studies, “consistency” and “correctness” are interpretive or “hermeneutic” concepts. If anthropologists do not want
to dismiss the natives’ views as “inconsistent” and “false,” they have to be different from a radical interpreter in at
least two respects.
The first difference between Davidson’s radical interpreter and anthropologists, such as Viveiros de Castro,
consists in being mindful of their own presence and role in the process of interpretation, instead of taking themselves
to be neutral triangulating devices, merely recording events and reactions of others to events. Viveiros de Castro’s
descriptions of Amerindian “cosmological perspectivism” allow anthropologists to suspend the beliefs they assent to
as the standard by which they assess intelligibility and consistency. Their presence in their studies becomes a
pragmatic one insofar as, by disconnecting their own beliefs from their own world (that peccaries are not human),
they do not insert such beliefs in their own interpretation, “as if,” Viveiros de Castro says, “it were necessary (or
essential) to explain why the Indians believe that peccaries are human whereas in fact they are not” (2015, 30). This
is how anthropologists can bring us out of our own ways of thinking and help us understand how another people
thinks differently. We can be led to experiencing things and events as the natives experience them. The question is
not about moving from one conceptual scheme (ours) to another (the Amerindian one). The question is not about the
truth of the belief, which would have to be assessed over against the world of the interpreters, who occupy the latest
development of a scientific understanding of the world, as in Davidson. The question is rather about “what the
Indians are saying when they say that peccaries are human” (2015, 31).
The second difference between anthropologists and radical interpreters is that the former do not blot out the
difference between their culture and the cultures studied but intensify it. Through interactions and dialogue, we can
understand the Amerindian ways of thinking and they can understand ours. However, the ways of experiencing the
world or the “forms of life,’ to use Wittgenstein’s term, have not become assimilated in the process, but instead, the
cultural differences have been made more glaring or intensified. Among other things, the Amerindians point to
another “metaphysical” approach to the world, one that is not made of entities that were subsequently put into
relations, but a world made of relations, which produce entities. In this sense, as we saw, for the Amerindians
“‘human’ is a term designating a relation, not a substance” (2014, 59) and this means that “if everything and
everyone can be human, then nothing and no one is human in a clear and distinct fashion” (2014, 70).
The perspectivism of Amerindian thought – the possible occupation of different points of view, moving from
subject (agent) to object (prey) – goes hand in hand with what Viveiros de Castro calls “multinaturalism” or an
ontological consideration that the “same” entities can morph into other entities. This correlation between a “quasi-
epistemological notion of perspectivism” and a quasi-ontological multinaturalism is not relativism because there are
criteria by which Amerindians can know who is what, when, and in what respect. As Viveiros de Castro graphically
shows,

If a human begins to see, as a vulture would, the worms infesting a cadaver as grilled fish, he will draw the
following conclusion: vultures have stolen his soul, he himself is in the course of being transformed into one,
and he and his kin will cease being human to each other. In short, he is gravely ill, or even dead. In other words
(but this amounts to the same thing), he is en route to becoming a shaman.
(2014, 70–71)

Figure 2.2 shows what a charitable triangulation may be, compared to Davidson’s version.
Figure 2.2 Different types of ascriptions of beliefs
Ascriptor of beliefs Observed beliefs
Davidson Ascription of explicit beliefs The explicit belief “peccaries are human”
is a false belief
Levi- Ascription of explicit beliefs Considering the explicit belief
Strauss “peccaries are human” as a false
Explanation of why Amerindians think this belief
Valuing the way of thinking this
belief as an object of investigation
Vieiros Suspending one’s own explicit beliefs by The implicit beliefs enacted in
de becoming aware of one’s own implicit beliefs (as experiences form the perspectivism
Castro shaped by a Western, scientifically driven view of the Amerindian culture and lead
of the world) through intercultural dialogue to the belief that “peccaries are
human”
Thinking the Amerindian thoughts from the
 inside of their culture and asking oneself what it The Amerindian cultures offer an
would mean to believe that peccaries are human alternative “cut up” of the world

Analyzing a foreign culture can make us aware of our own standpoint and of the need to step back from it if we
really want to take the native thought seriously. As manifested by Viveiros de Castro’s careful and lucid approaches,
Amerindian thought asks us to do this self-examination and to step back from “our own ways of thought” to make
our own beliefs and convictions at the explicit and propositional level “not operable” in order to understand, at the
level of implicit beliefs enacted in our experiences, what seem to be very different ways of experiencing what a
human and an animal are. Contrary to Davidson’s alternative, the choice is not between explicitly believing what we
have always thought and explicitly believing what Amerindians think. Once the first kind of “belief” has been made
non-operable, we can see the “consistency” of what Amerindians think or do and how this is “correct” or “true” in
their world. When taken in a static manner, asking anthropologists to “take up a stance outside” their “own ways of
thought” – our implicit beliefs – would sound strange as we do not see clearly what this would mean. However,
when taken in the context of a living dialogue with Amerindians, this awareness of our own ways of thought is vital
if we want to be charitable to the natives and understand them on their own terms.

2.3.3 Ambiguation of the concept of language

The third problem I see in Davidson’s radical interpretation concerns the status of language, which appears
paradoxical at first, if not provocative. On the one hand, he rejects any notion of language as a system that would
have any mediating function in our contact with the world: “There is no such thing as a language, not if a language
is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed” (2005b, 107). Yet, on the other, he uses
language as a criterion of what counts as a belief and a thought: “Thought itself depends on language” (2005d, 275)
so that languageless creatures, infants or animals, strictly speaking, do not have beliefs or thoughts or rationality. Let
us see how compatible these two aspects of language can be and how to assess such a view.

2.3.3.1 Language as public manifestation of beliefs

As we saw, radical interpretation wants to keep together the two claims that, first, the conceptualization of reality
originates from human interests and needs but, second, there is no alternate conceptual scheme than the one we
have, as long as it is consistent and coherent. This is how radical interpretation claims to recover through
interpretation our “unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or
false” (2001a, 198). Davidson considers thoughts to be “social phenomena” (2005c, 255) insofar as our thoughts
both arise from triangulation and serve as the basis of triangulation. “Our thoughts neither create the world nor
simply picture it; they are tied to their external sources from the beginning, those sources being the community and
the environment we know we jointly occupy” (1999a, 732). These two aspects of thoughts of being social in their
origin and efficacious in our understanding of the world and others make them interdependent with language, which
is the public manifestation of beliefs. “Our thoughts and words carry us out into the world; this is why we can have
true and false beliefs and say what is false as well as what is true. This connection with the world can be established
only by shared reactions to a shared environment” (2005d, 275). Because of this interdependency, there is “no
puzzle about priorities” between language and thought: “the abilities to speak, perceive, and think develop together,
gradually” (2005g, 141).
However, language only plays a representative role in making beliefs publicly manifest and thus guaranteeing
that the creature who has those beliefs is rational. Influenced by Wittgenstein and the impossibility of a private
language, Davidson sees language as what publicly manifests our beliefs and our thoughts: As quoted above,
“sentences held true” are “the linguistic representatives of belief” (2001b, 201). Language thus arises from
communication, which is primary.

Languages were not bestowed on mankind; until people talked there were no languages. The ultimate goal in
speaking cannot be to get the language right, but to be understood, for there is no point to language beyond
successful communication. Speakers create the language; meaning is what we can abstract from accomplished
verbal exchanges. It follows that a language cannot have a life of its own, a life apart from its users.
 (2005c, 258)

It may be true that “without language, thoughts have no clear shape”; yet, this shape that “language gives them
emerges only in the context of active communication” (2005i, 249).49 As he borrows the view from Quine, an
utterance is a behavior of a linguistic nature and is nothing else than a social event that can be observed and tracked:
“Uttering words is an action, and so must draw for its teleological explanation on beliefs and desires” (2001e, 161).
Being the public manifestation of beliefs is not the same as being a mediation for beliefs. Any mediation at the
heart of beliefs would threaten the radicality of interpretation and turn interpretation into a hermeneutics. Instead of
ascribing beliefs, interpretation would consist in retrieving what subjects meant, as in the case of hermeneutics.
Davidson sees at least two reasons why we can dispense with linguistic mediation. First, language may not be
present, as in situations of unknown languages where agents communicate through non-linguistic means and cues.
Yet, the absence of language does not prevent subjects from communicating, and this means triangulating “objects”
and others, and ascribing beliefs to other subjects. Second, language may be used nonliterally, as in metaphor, irony
or sarcasm, and those nonliteral uses do not preclude understanding. Even when people misspeak, as in the case of
malapropism, we can still understand them.50 There is thus no reason to grant language any form of autonomy or
any mediating function. Davidson writes:

Of course, language reflects our native interests and our historically accumulated needs and values, our built-in
and learned inductive dispositions. But this fact hardly supports the claim that language seriously distorts or
shapes our understanding of the world; the influence, such as it is, goes the other way. The most we are entitled
to say is that as individuals we happily inherit culturally evolved categories we personally did little to devise.
In this case, language does not distort; rather, society gives us a leg up on coping with the environment it partly
constitutes.
(2005g, 129)

Instead of a mediation, language is rather to be thought of as an organ (2005g, 132). This view was defended by
Karl-Otto Apel, from a pragmatist perspective of Peircean provenance, but Davidson takes it from Noam Chomsky,
who calls language a “mental organ,” which Davidson qualifies as “the organ of propositional perception” (2005g,
135).51 In the title of one of his essays, “Seeing through Language,” which sounds so hermeneutic and Gadamerian,
the “through” is not a “through” in the sense of a mediation, but the “through” in the sense of “by means of”:
“Seeing with the organ of language.” As he explains,

language is not a medium through which we see; it does not mediate between us and the world […] There is a
non-metaphorical point to my title. There is a valid analogy between having eyes and ears, and having
language: all three are organs with which we come into direct contact with our environment. They are not
intermediaries, screens, media, or windows.
(2005g, 130–131)52

By responding to objects within an intersubjective framework, we conceptualize objects and understand others,
language being just a means in the triangulation: “We perceive the world through language, that is, through having
language” (2005g, 141). He can thus dismiss language altogether as we quoted him above. “There is no such thing
as a language […]. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea
of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases” (2005b, 107).53
One convenient consequence of this view on language is that there is no opacity of thought due to the mediation
of language. In triangulating, thought and language are a matter of manifestation at the level of behaviors. As
Davidson explains, “the primitive triangle, constituted by two (and typically more than two) creatures reacting in
concert to features of the world and to each other’s reactions, thus provides the framework in which thought and
language can evolve. Neither thought nor language, according to this account, can come first, for each requires the
other” (2005g, 141). At the same time that this entanglement of the objective (the world), the subjective (what I
believe), and the intersubjective (what others believe) makes thought “essentially social” (2005h, 159), it also turns
language into a mere tool, devoid of any intrinsic epistemic worth. Yet, language plays a significant role in
triangulation because it is the public guarantee that what is conveyed is actually a belief or a thought.

2.3.3.2 Language as a criterion of rationality

Despite the fact that language is not a mediation, it is quite crucial for interpreters because it is the criterion by
which they will determine whether the creatures they interpret are rational or not. Only creatures who possess a
language, Davidson argues, can have beliefs and thoughts. While we can communicate non-verbally with other
people, the only reason why we do it and ascribe beliefs to them is because they have otherwise the capacity to have
beliefs and interpret us. We can know that this is the case because others can manifest this capacity through speech,
even if we do not understand the kind of speech they have. We thus have a peculiar connection between, in
descending order, rationality, thought, belief, and language.
At the most external level, language represents a belief in public by giving it an efficacy in human interactions.
At the second level, a belief is only such if it is part of a larger set of beliefs. Davidson gives the example of the
English sentence “the gun is loaded,” which, first, publicly manifests the belief of someone – it is the public
criterion through language – and, second, this belief is part of “endless interlocked beliefs” (2001e, 158), such as “a
gun is a weapon”, “it is a more or less enduring physical object,” etc. (2001e, 158). In other words, “one belief
requires many beliefs, and beliefs demand other basic attitudes such as intentions, desires, and, if I am right, the gift
of tongues” (2001j, 96). At the third level, a thought “is defined by a system of beliefs” although it “is itself
autonomous with respect to belief” (2001e, 157). Because sentences and thoughts “have a location in the logical
space,” rationality, at the fourth level, consists in grasping the logical relationships among sentences and among
thoughts, for example by understanding that, “if ‘The gun is loaded and the door is locked’ is true, then ‘The door is
locked’ is true” (2001e, 158). As he explains, “to be a rational animal is just to have propositional attitudes” (2001j,
95).
Now, all these stages are determined as such by the interpreters but in two different orders. There is a sequential
order that is first in appearance: noises, such as “Gavagai,” count as a sentence if this sentence represents a belief; it
represents a belief if it is part of a system of beliefs in which consistency and coherence can be detected, what
amounts to a thought; if thoughts are detected, the entity making the noise “Gavagai” has to be deemed rational.
However, this sequential order is first only in appearance. What precedes this sequential order is another
classificatory order: can the entity making the noise “Gavagai” be classified as being worthy of being interpreted?
The criterion used to decide this question is whether the entity has speech. Thus, the sequential order is only
followed if allowed by the classificatory order. Ultimately, it is the communication between interpreters and
observed subjects in language and thus language itself that lies at the basis of the ascription of beliefs, thoughts, and
rationality. This is why language is both secondary and necessary. It is secondary to communication inasmuch as a
behavior can be interpreted without actual use of language, but it is necessary because possessing language is the
condition for observers to enter into communication with the observed subjects in the first place.
Davidson formulates this view as the fact that beliefs (and with it, thought and rationality) can only be ascribed
to those entities who are also interpreters. “A creature cannot have thoughts unless it is an interpreter of the speech
of another” (2001e, 157).54 This significantly raises the bar for being susceptible to be interpreted. One needs to be
deemed worthy of being interpreted, and this will be decided by interpreters, for whom being worthy of being
interpreted amounts to being able to triangulate back in a manner that is intelligible to interpreters. Davidson
mentions four requirements.
First, the candidate for interpretation needs to have a concept of an objective world: “Communication depends
on each communicator having, and correctly thinking that the other has, the concept of a shared world, an
intersubjective world. But the concept of an intersubjective world is the concept of an objective world, a world about
which each communicator can have beliefs” (2001j, 105). Second, the candidate who has a concept of a commonly
shared objective world, needs to have the concept of truth and falsity: “Someone cannot have a belief unless he
understands the possibility of being mistaken, and this requires the contrast between truth and error – true belief and
false belief” (2001e, 170). Third, the candidate needs to know what believing means: “In order to have a belief, it is
necessary to have the concept of a belief (2001j, 102). And fourth, the candidate needs to be a language-endowed
entity: “In order to have the concept of belief one must have language” (2001g, 102). As Davidson candidly
acknowledges, “I happen to believe […] that men and women are alone in having language, or anything enough like
language to justify attributing propositional thoughts to them” (2001g, 96).
The net result is that if no language is detected in the observed entity, for example in a dog, no genuine
communication can take place and the ascription of beliefs is not warranted so that triangulation will not start. Dogs
just do not think and do not have beliefs. Davidson acknowledges that animals or infants can triangulate, as
mentioned above. Animals are “equipped to correlate the responses of the others with events and situations they
jointly distinguish” (1999a, 731). The difference between animals’ triangulation and humans’ triangulation only lies
in the “base line of communication between agents,” namely when this base line “becomes as thick as language”
(1999a, 731). Commenting on Norman Malcolm’s description of a dog chasing a cat and the cat climbing up an oak
tree, Davidson rejects the view that the dog believes or “thinks that the cat went up that oak tree” (2001j, 98).
Because a belief is such only within a system of beliefs, we would need to grant many more beliefs to the dog
beyond plausibility:

Can the dog believe of an object that it is a tree? This would seem impossible unless we suppose the dog has
many general beliefs about trees: that they are growing things, that they need soil and water, that they have
leaves or needles, that they burn. [….] without many general beliefs, there would be no reason to identify a
belief as a belief about a tree, much less an oak tree.
(2001j, 98)

I would like to question this reduction of language to the public manifestation of common beliefs by using again
anthropology. Davidson himself offers us the connection between his model of radical interpretation and this
question about the encounter with a significantly different cultural world, such as the Amerindian world through his
criticisms of Benjamin Whorf’s views on “linguistic relativity,” the so-called “Whorf-Sapir hypothesis.” While
Davidson attacks Worf’s strong version of his “linguistic relativity principle,” I consider that a weak version of this
principle escapes the force of Davidson’s argument. Whorf can indeed be faulted for some exaggerated claims but
he also showed how working on bridging the Western cultural world (with its languages) with the Amerindian world
(with its languages) contributes to a broadening of “our” cultural world.
Davidson puts Whorf’s views in the same camp as Kuhn’s view on “paradigms” of science and faults these
views as an example of the “scheme-content dualism” (Davidson 2001a, 190), as mentioned above. Davidson
(2001a, 190) gives a truncated nine lines quotation from Whorf, with elision points, which he presents as being from
“The Punctual and Segmentative Aspects of Verbs in Hopi,” although the last four lines are in fact from “Science
and Linguistics.” In the first part (from “The Punctual and Segmentative Aspects of Verbs in Hopi”), Whorf says
that “language produces an organization of experience” and in the last part (from “Science and Linguistics”) he
explains his “new principle of relativity” as stating that “all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to
the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated”
(Whorf 1956, 214). Davidson comments: “Here we have all the required elements: language as the organizing force,
not to be distinguished clearly from science; what is organized, referred to variously as ‘experience,’ ‘the stream of
sensory experience,’ and ‘physical evidence’; and finally the failure of intertranslatability (‘calibration’)” (2001a,
190). This is for Davidson the scheme-content dualism fallacy: “It is essential to this idea that there is something
neutral and common that lies outside all schemes” (Davidson 2001a, 190).
Whorf’s claim that language determines our thought or determines conceptuality is easily defeated as both
circular and self-contradictory. As Davidson points out, it is self-contradictory because “Whorf, wanting to
demonstrate that Hopi incorporates a metaphysics so alien to ours that Hopi and English cannot, as he puts it, ‘be
calibrated,’ uses English to convey the contents of sample Hopi sentences” (2001a, 184). What is claimed to be
untranslatable within the Hopi culture would be made intelligible, i.e., translated into English. And it is circular
insofar as the thought that language determines thought must itself be determined by a language so that Whorf’s
own language (English) would determine Worf’s thought (about the determination of thought by language). These
loose ways of writing explain the impatience of Davidson. However, charity in interpretation asks us to make more
effort and see whether anything may be salvaged from Whorf’s views.
If we distinguish – what Whorf himself does not do – a strong and a weak version of linguistic relativity and
dismiss the strong one – that language determines thought – the weak claim – that language influences thought –
which is quite strong on its own, remains worthy of consideration, precisely as a challenge to Davidson’s allegedly
neutral ascription of beliefs.
Some of Whorf’s formulations are clearly infelicitous and convey exaggerated claims, which subjected them to
Davidson’s (as well as Steven Pinker’s attacks, Pinker 1994, 48f). Here is how Whorf defines his principle of
linguistic relativity: it “means, in informal terms, that users of markedly different grammars are pointed by their
grammars toward different types of observations and different evaluations of externally similar acts of observation,
and hence are not equivalent as observers but must arrive at somewhat different views of the world” (1956, 221).
The strong and problematic claim is that the grammar of a language determines the type of cognition speakers may
have. However, the passage can also be understood as defending the weaker thesis that the grammar of a language
influences the type of cognition speakers may have by making them more attentive to specific saliencies in their
environment, which have a name in their language, privileging “different types of observations and different
evaluations.” In the quotation above, the notion of “different views of the world” can mean, in the strong sense, that
people speaking different languages live in different worlds or, in the weak sense, that they may see the world
differently.55
In the following quotation, Whorf makes a good argument for the weak thesis, coming quite close to Davidson’s
own views:

We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate form
the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the
world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds – and this
means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe
significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way – an agreement
that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language.
(Whorf 1956, 213)

We saw above that Davidson uses the same Platonic notion of “cutting up” or “carving out” nature and also assents
to the view that our concepts originate from our needs and interests, not directly from nature. Unfortunately, in the
sentence following the quotation above, Whorf undermines his own argument by exaggerating it: “The agreement is,
of course, an implicit and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely obligatory; we cannot talk at all except by
subscribing to the organization and classification of data which the agreement decrees” (Whorf 1956, 214. Whorf’s
emphasis). The passage Whorf himself emphasizes is what is problematic in his strong thesis, which he sometimes
formulates as the fact that there are “illusory necessities” in our “common logic” “which are only at bottom
necessities of grammatical pattern in Western Aryan grammar” (1956, 269). He seems to suggest that languages
with grammatical categories of substantives and verbs, for example, lead speakers to see “substances” and “forces”
or “attractions.” 56
To say that language “influences” thought (instead of “determines”) only means that language makes speakers
more attentive to those features of the world that their language already names or integrates in its grammar. It only
means that “language produces an organization of experience” (1956, 55) and “is a classification and arrangement of
the stream of sensory experience which results in a certain world-order, a certain segment of the world that is easily
expressible by the type of symbolic means that language employs” (1956, 55). In one felicitous formulation of the
weak thesis, Whorf writes:

It may even be in the cards that there is no such thing as ‘Language’ (with a capital L) at all! The statement that
‘thinking is a matter of language’ is an incorrect generalization of the more nearly correct idea that ‘thinking is
a matter of different tongues.’ The different tongues are the real phenomena and may generalize down not to
any such universal as ‘Language,’ but to something better-called ‘sublinguistic’ or ‘superlinguistic’ – and not
altogether unlike, even if much unlike, what we now call ‘mental.’ This generalization would not diminish, but
would rather increase, the importance of intertongue study for investigation of this realm of truth.
(1956, 239. Whortf’s emphasis)

The advantage of “intertongue study” is precisely to liberate us from the influence our native language may be
exercising on our ways of thinking. As Whorf explains, “Western culture has made, through language, a provisional
analysis of reality and, without correctives, holds resolutely to that analysis as final. The only correctives lie in all
those other tongues which by aeons of independent evolution have arrived at different, but equally logical,
provisional analyses” (1956, 244). Intertongue studies in fact mean, against Whorf’s own strong version of linguistic
relativity, that we can transcend the boundaries of our own native language and build bridges with other cultures,
expanding our understanding of the world by being able to see that there are other ways of “cutting up” nature.
Whorf’s weak thesis, stating that language influences thought, can in fact be used to question Davidson’s
assumptions in formulating his content-scheme dualism. Davidson considers that there is only one carving out of the
world as what is invariant among the different descriptions we make of the world. Alternate conceptual schemes are
not possible. Because beliefs are either true or false, the cohabitation of different systems of beliefs can only be
temporary until some of the competing beliefs are refuted, leaving only one set of coherent and consistent beliefs.
Whorf, for his part, does not appeal to a strictly synchronic perspective that would posit, for example, two
conceptual schemes, English and Hopi, over one content, over against which the two schemes would appear relative
or “uncalibrated.” Although he was not careful enough to so state, Whorf speaks after the cultural encounter, when
he has made the effort to understand the Hopi language and the Hopi people, and has experienced how different the
Hopi perspective on some phenomena is. Whorf mentions the case of waves, which the Hopi language does not refer
to as a single object – “a” wave – but as a vibratory phenomenon, a “waving” (1956, 52). Once the work of “inter-
tongue” studies has been done, by Whorf and others, we can have a feel for such differences. Because it is the study
of the differences between the two languages that allows us to have such a feel for how different the articulation of
the world offered by either language is, it is false to say, as Davidson criticizes Whorf, that the two perspectives in
English and Hopi are incommensurable or unintelligible to each other. Whorf’s work shows exactly the opposite
since he explains to us what the differences are.
However, what makes these differences between languages and between the articulations of the world they offer
“commensurable” is Whorf’s (and other linguists’ and anthropologists’) work. It is within their studies and thanks to
their studies that a bridge has been built between the two views, Hopi and Western. Yet, this is a retrospective and
constructed view, making the Hopi’s perspective intelligible. The fact that the Hopi’s views on some phenomena
have been made intelligible through inter-tongue studies does not mean that, before the study was made, either the
Hopi could have experienced what Whorf experienced or that Whorf could have experienced what the Hopi
experienced. This is what Davidson misses. He inverts the whole process and considers that, if there is
communication, then the two cultures must be sharing the same articulation of the world: “In my view, what makes
communication possible is the fact that many of the same objects, events, and aspects of the world are salient to
humankind, frequently eliciting observably similar responses” (Davidson 1999b, 82). Whereas communication for
Davidson only reveals the same common understanding of the world, it is the opposite for Whorf. The
communication between Whorf and the Hopi does not so much reveal sameness between the two communities as it
constitutes sameness.
The difference between communication as revealing sameness and communication as constituting sameness is
connected to the two aspects of a belief I distinguished above. For Davidson, a belief is explicit in the sense of
exclusively propositional and for Whorf, although he does not say so explicitly, a belief is not only propositional but
is also part of a practice, as an implicit belief. The Hopi, when engaging in their practices, may have never
formulated the proposition that waves are a vibratory phenomenon. Yet, in their cultural practices, they perceive
waves as such vibratory phenomena and thus implicitly believe it. These beliefs are enacted in the way they live and
thanks to Whorf they are made explicit. Now, Whorf may be able to formulate the beliefs of the Hopi once
understanding has been reached and the Hopi may formulate Whorf’s Western beliefs as well. Yet, to repeat,
successful communication does not mean that each counterpart could have experienced, before the encounter, what
the other was experiencing. The fact that communication between them may allow each counterpart to make the
beliefs of the others explicit does not guarantee that each counterpart can share those beliefs in the sense of assenting
to them or adopting them, for example seeing in a lake a “waving” vibratory phenomenon for Whorf or a law-
governed physical phenomenon for the Hopi.
If making beliefs explicit can only be based on understanding the implicit beliefs leading to the formation of
those explicit beliefs, language plays a stronger role than giving explicit beliefs their public face, as in Davidson. It
also points to aspects that the interpreters’ language cannot account for, simply because some of those aspects in the
native implicit beliefs have no place in the “linguistic space” of the interpreters. If we agree that language does not
determine thought or beliefs, it remains that language can influence how we experience the world by making us
attentive to the saliencies that our language represents in its grammar and semantics, through its use in the practices
in which people grew up and are accustomed to. In principle, we could experience the world as the Hopi do if we
lived with them for some time. Yet, in this case, what will allow us to experience a “waving” on the lake will be the
Hopi language or the paraphrases we can make of it in English on the model of what the Hopi words point to.
Language in this sense of articulating implicit beliefs is not just the synchronic system of English or Hopi but the
diachronic thick cultural vector that allows people to navigate their lived experiences in shared cultural practices. It
is language as enculturated or language as entangled in forms of life.
I want to pursue this claim by Whorf that language “organizes” or “cuts up” the “flux of impressions,” at the
level of what I call the implicit beliefs enacted in practices. I use again Viveiros de Castro, especially one of his
studies on the Yawalpiti (an Arawak people from the Upper Xingu region in Brazil), titled “Outline of a Yawalpiti
Cosmology” (2011b). In this study, Viveiros de Castro describes the system of suffixes the Yawalpiti use to name
the complex perspectives that can be taken on people and animals. This system of classification of living entities
shows how entities, which for us would be stable ones, are susceptible to a certain metamorphosis or a certain
ontological change, turning those entities into processes that undergo increase or decrease in several respects. For
example, their language uses four modifiers of names of people or animals, which situate them in a system of
gradation and opposition. These four suffixes are: -kumã, -rúru, -malú, and -mína.
Viveiros de Castro gives the example of úi which means “cobra.” The word can be modified in four different
ways to name different aspects of a cobra or different stations at which a cobra can be located: úi-tyumá (which is an
allomorphe of -kumã) means cobra spirits; úi-rúru means venomous cobras; úi-malú names non-venomous cobras;
and úi-mína designates animals similar to cobras (2011b, 28). As viveiros de Castro explains, “the class úi [cobra]
[…] is divided into: ‘big, brave, invisible’ cobras (-kuma); ‘true’ cobras (-rúru); ‘useless, bad cobras’ (malú);
‘animals looking like cobras’ (-mína). These modifiers name a gradation, respectively, the “excessive,” the
“authentic,”, the “inferior,” and the “similar” (2011b, 29). Besides expressing a gradation, these suffixes also
represent “a system of flexible oppositions […]: -kuma is opposite -rúru as the ‘monstrous’ versus the ‘perfect; -
kumã is the archetype by contrast with -mína as the ‘existing one,’ and so on” (2011b, 29).57
We can see that these suffixes indicate a rather peculiar “cut up” of the “stream of impressions” Whorf mentions,
granting entities a certain versatility in terms of gradation and opposition. It is a “wild” ontology. Clearly, this
ontology is not a mere effect of language, as Whorf in his strong thesis seemed to believe, as if language had an
efficacy of its own, “determining” thought. Yet, language clearly influences thought in the minimal but fundamental
sense that, for understanding the metaphysics of the Yawalpiti, we need to understand their language, which will in
turn make us sensitive to this “gradual process ontology.” It is by learning their language that anthropologists can
reach out to the enacted implicit beliefs of the Yawalpiti and make them explicit. Then, in turn, instead of
substituting their own Western explicit beliefs for those of the natives, anthropologists can try to “think” those
beliefs themselves, for example understanding what it would mean for them to face a jaguar-kumã (the perfect one)
instead of a jaguar-rúru (the monstrous one). Because language and thought develop together, language as the
articulation of thought cannot be stripped out of thought as the skin of a fruit can be spitted out to enjoy the fruit
itself. The thought of the Yawalpiti people that there is a jaguar-kumã in the vicinity cannot be grasped outside the
system of gradation and opposition expressed by these four suffixes.
Through inter-tongue studies, we can bring out what is specific in a culture and also reveal in return how specific
the beliefs of the interpreters’ own culture are. Translating the four suffixes, as Viveiros de Castro did in Portuguese
or here in English, shows what is specific in the language of the Yawalpiti as well as what is specific in our
Portuguese or English language. This contrast allows us to identify some of the Yawalpiti’s implicit beliefs and, by
the same token, make us aware of the genesis of our own implicit beliefs about people and animals. By following
the indications provided by the language of the Yawalpiti through what Whorf calls “intertongue studies,” we may
learn how to think differently.

2.4 Conclusion

The promise of triangulation was that the limited political aspect of interpretation – due to the interaction between
interpreter and observed subjects – would be duly corrected or kept in check by the very process of triangulation,
which is effectuated by a disembodied device, simply tracking objects through inferences. However, this neutrality
is only such under a twofold massive assumption: first, that observed subjects are only registered as utterance-
makers or, more accurately, noisemakers and behavior-producers and, second, that observed subjects are mere
replicas of the observers. The latter part of the assumption is legitimated by the commonality of responses to stimuli
and beliefs, which means that what is interpreted can only be a variation of what interpreters already know. Given
that triangulation is always performed by real concrete individuals within their own historical situation, the twofold
assumption, first, prevents observed subjects from being considered in turn as concrete individuals within their own
cultural practices; second, it also puts interpreters out of the reach of observed subjects, who cannot challenge
interpreters as partners in a dialogue could, following Gadamer’s model. Thus, the neutrality of triangulation is such
only in name and cannot prevent the whole process of interpretation to fall into the political, in the sense of the
polemic – as “linguistic imperialism,” “ethnocentrism,” and all the rest.
For Gadamer, interpretation is an “experience” as a dialogue that is nurtured by the lives of the people in
interaction and may in fact be more charitable to the thickness of the subjects’ thoughts and desires, hopes and
sufferings than Davidson’s allegedly neutral (if not mechanical) process of interpretation. About reading people such
as Gadamer, Davidson said, not so charitably, “the trouble is, as so often in philosophy, it is hard to improve
intelligibility while retaining the excitement” (2001a, 183). What he means is that fascinating formulas and
appealing views become quickly and disappointingly pedestrian when translated into intelligible propositions. The
question for Gadamer would not be about choosing either excitement or intelligibility, but about the price of
intelligibility. If intelligibility means missing the complexity of understanding and the thickness of experience, it
may also mean eliminating the caritas or love that could be expected from a principle of charity.

Notes
1. On this, see Malpas (1992, 11f).
2. I thus cannot follow Carlo Natali’s affirmation that “we cannot find in Davidson’s dissertation a sure and explicit
starting point for the themes of the mature Davidson, as we have seen in the case of Gadamer” (Natali 2007,
132). I would qualify the claim he makes when he writes: “Davidson did not explicitly put to use the results of his
 doctoral work in his subsequent research and indeed explicitly claims to have forgotten them for years and to
have returned to them only at the end of his philosophical itinerary” (Natali 2007, 141–142). Davidson does not
say that he “forgot” but that he “lost” his “fascination with Plato over a period of decades” (2005d, 264).
3. August Diès shares this view, wondering whether “it is not plausible, following the very text of the Philebus” that
the four “genera or kinds of being, genē or eidē tōn ontōn, are also ideas or intelligible forms” (Diès 1959, CXII).
4. As he explained, “I cannot see how there can be the slightest doubt that Plato intends us to believe that the
unlimited, the limit, and the mixture are generic ideas, for he expressly uses the terminology taken from the
discussion of generic ideas to talk about them” (1990, 180).
5. As he explains, “universals may exist, but if they do, they no longer, in the Philebus, have the properties once
assigned them by Plato: they are not single models in some mysterious sense indivisible, they are not necessarily
the ‘essence’ of good things, and they do not share the characteristics of particulars such as tallness, beauty, and
goodness, because they are such characteristics” (1990, 315–316).
6. He adds: “It is interesting to note the degree to which the words idea and eidos have disappeared from the crucial
passages of the Philebus in favor of neutral terms like to hen and monados” (1990, 303).
7. “In the Philebus, if I am right, the functions performed by the ideas in the earlier dialogues are divided, some
being performed by the monads of the section on division (which I have called the ‘ideas of the Philebus’) and
others being performed by different elements of the fourfold classification” (1990, 305).
8. “In the Republic we are led to think of the ideas, particularly the idea of the good, as the source of all that is real.
The ideas are therefore generative, a source of existence. In the Philebus, the ideas no longer have this power or
function: they are neutral classifiers, known, of course, only to the mind, but powerless in themselves to bring
anything into existence. Mind has become the sole mover, as well as the source of value. […]. I think it is no
accident that the return, in the Philebus, to the early, purely epistemic, use of ideas, is accompanied by a return to
the elenctic method” (Davidson 2005d, 270).
9. In Davidson’s words, “we may therefore speak of the agent as a maker (demiourgos, 27B), whose intention
precedes his creation (27A). Where design exists in the universe, there is no accident; the intelligibility of the
world is the outcome of design” (1990, 269). Order cannot be accounted for mechanistically and Plato, according
to Davidson, did not consider that mechanistic explanations are real explanations. “If the universe embodies
order, it is because it is an expression of purpose […] The real explanation is in terms of intelligent purpose”
(1990, 277).
10. In fact, Davidson sees this as a “confusion” on the part of Plato between the efficient cause of the good and the
property of being good, which we have to correct: “He [Plato] sometimes confuses an ingredient of a good entity
with the property which constitutes its goodness, so we note now that he sometimes confuses the efficient cause
of the goodness of a good entity with the property which constitutes its goodness” (1990, 262–263). As he notes,
“a property is not an efficient cause or agent” (1990, 262). To rephrase Plato, “we could say, if we pleased, that
this property was the ‘cause’ of the goodness of the entity which had it; but this use of ‘cause’ does not imply
causation: the words ‘reason for’ would serve as well” (1990, 262).
11. This puts an emphasis on what Davidson calls “empathy”: “The idea was that we translate a native’s observation
sentence by imagining what we would say if we were placed as he is when he utters the sentence” (1999d, 59).
12. “Uttering words is an action” (Davidson 2001e, 161).
13. As he explains, “externalism has to do with your history and things that exist outside of you that make a
difference to what you can think or what you are thinking at a given moment.” As he concludes, “So, I am an all-
out externalist” (Kent and Davidson 1993, 6).
14. Here is a long quotation by Quine, but worth its provocation: “As an empiricist I continue to think of the
conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience.
Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries – not by definition in
terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. For
my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer’s gods; and I consider it a scientific
error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in
degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical
objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device
for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience” (Quine 1990, 212). Although provocative,
Quine’s views may not be as radical as they sound. Atomic physics as any other science does not even care about
the common objects of our daily life, such as cats and trees. What many sciences describe cannot be perceived by
the naked eye, for example molecules, genes or gamma rays, but require instruments, laboratories, and a whole
institution determining the parameters of scientific research (See Latour and Woolgar 1986; Latour 1996). This
element of construction explains why Quine calls them “myths.”
15. In Quine’s words, “modern empiricism has been conditioned in large part by two dogmas. One is a belief in some
fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of
fact, and truths which are synthetic, or grounded in fact. The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each
meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience”
(Quine 1990, 197).
16. As he explains, by attacking the “dualism of scheme and content,” “my target was the idea that on the one hand
we have our world picture, consisting of the totality of our beliefs, and on the other hand we have an
unconceptualized empirical input which provides the evidence for and content of our empirical beliefs” (1999c,
105).
17. As he explains, “the principle of charity says that in interpreting others you’ve got to make their thoughts hold
together to a certain extent if you’re going to see them as thoughts at all, because that’s what thoughts are like.
They have logical relations to one another […] The principle of charity really just formulates the recognition of
the necessary element of rationality in thought. Thoughts have propositional contents, and propositional contents
are in part identified by their relations to each other” (Kent and Davidson 1993, 7).
18. “The Principle of Coherence prompts the interpreter to discover a degree of logical consistency in the thought of
the speaker” (2001c, 211). As a consequence, “it becomes impossible correctly to hold that anyone could be
mostly wrong about how things are” (2001g, 151).
19. This means that “it is impossible for an interpreter to understand a speaker and at the same time discover the
speaker to be largely wrong about the world. For the interpreter interprets sentences held true (which is not to be
distinguished from attributing beliefs) according to the events and objects in the outside world that cause the
sentence to be held true” (2001g, 150).
20. The interpreter takes the speaker “to be responding to the same features of the world that he (the interpreter)
would be responding to under similar circumstances” (2001c, 211).
21. As Davidson explains, “any particular belief or set of beliefs about the world around us may be false. What
cannot be the case is that our general picture of the world and our place in it is mistaken, for it is this picture
which informs the rest of our beliefs and makes them intelligible, whether they be true or false. (2001c, 213). Or,
put more succinctly, “in sharing a language, in whatever sense this is required for communication, we share a
picture of the world that must, in its large features, be true” (2001b, 199).
22. “We have no choice, Quine has argued, but to read our own logic into the thoughts of a speaker” (2001, 149).
23. We can see these interpretive mechanisms also at play in Davidson’s recasting of Tarski’s views. For any
sentence of the observed subject’s language manifesting what they mean or what they believe – for example,
“Gavagai” – interpreters will formulate a corresponding sentence in their own language. Although the
interpreters’ language may be different from the observed subjects’ language, a sentence expressing what
interpreters would themselves believe (if prompted by the same circumstances as the observed subjects) holds as
a translation of the noises the observed subjects made in the observed conditions or, in technical terms, as the
truth conditions of the sentence. “When the interpreter finds a sentence of the speaker the speaker assents to
regularly under conditions the interpreter recognizes, the interpreter takes those conditions to be the truth
conditions of the speaker’s sentence” (2001g, 149).
24. “Each of us can think of his own sentences (or their contents) as like the numbers; they have multiple relations to
one another and to the world. Keeping these relations the same as far as possible, we can match up our sentences
with those of a speaker, and with the attitudes of that speaker, in different ways without changing our minds
about the facts. Just as endless sets of numbers allow us to keep track of the same complex structures in the
world, so our sentences can be used in endless different ways to keep track of the attitudes of others, and of what
they mean […]. The facts are the empirical relations between a speaker, her sentences, and her environment. This
pattern is invariant” (1999e, 596).
25. In his “Afterthoughts” to the article “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge” (of 1987), Davidson
expresses regret for having called his theory a coherence and correspondence theory. He agrees with Rorty’s
criticism that what he is doing in fact consists in rejecting both the coherence and the correspondence theories
(2001g, 154).
26. As he notes, “it takes two to triangulate. Until a base line has been established by communication with someone
else, there is no point in saying one’s own thoughts or words have a propositional content. If this is so, then it is
clear that knowledge of another mind is essential to all thought and all knowledge (2001c, 212–213).
27. As he explains further, “all creatures classify objects and aspects of the world in the sense that they treat some
stimuli as more alike than others. The criterion of such classifying activity is similarity of response” (2001c, 213).
28. See also: “Our thoughts are ‘inner’ and ‘subjective’ in that we know what they are in a way no one else can. But
though possession of a thought is necessarily individual, its content is not. The thoughts we form and entertain
 are located conceptually in the world we inhabit, and know we inhabit, with others. Even our thoughts about our
mental states occupy the same conceptual space and are located on the same public map” (2001c, 218). As Rorty
explains, commenting on Davidson’s views, none of the three poles of the triangulation can exist without the
other two: “The point of this doctrine is that you cannot get along with just holistic inferential relations between
beliefs and statements (as coherence theories try to do) nor with atomic relations of being-caused-by (as realists
fixated on perceptual reports try to do). You have to play back and forth between causation and inference in a
way which does not permit any of the corners of the triangle to be independent of any of the others” (Rorty 1998,
70). Triangulation is an effort to connect utterances to objects or events and this connection allows observers to
track those objects and events in the intersubjective space – in “a shared environment” (Davidson 2005d, 275).
29. As Hoy puts it, using Ramberg’s interpretation of Davidson, “all the interpreter needs to assume is that the
speaker has beliefs and intentions. The radical (as opposed to the ordinary) interpreter does not make any
assumptions about the empirical contents of these beliefs and intentions” (Hoy 1997, 121).
30. As he acknowledges, this view was first presented by Elizabeth Anscombe: “Anscombe had claimed that if a man
poisons the water supply by pouring the contents of a bucket into a reservoir with the intention of killing the
inhabitants of a town, then he performs just one action, though ‘under different descriptions’” (1999d, 37).
31. As Ramberg puts it, “the radical interpreter registers assertive utterances under descriptions that involve no
reference to the specific semantic properties of the utterance, and she registers the occasion of assertions under
detailed and full descriptions […] that capture potential environmental saliencies […]. The result is an
empirically confirmed theory that assigns semantic properties to agent’s words and a specification of the agent’s
intentional states” (2003, 222).
32. The Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, Noble Prize of literature, was prosecuted for “insulting Turkish identity” after
saying in an interview with a Swiss newspaper that one million Armenians and thirty thousand Kurds had been
killed in Turkey in 1915 (Pamuk 2009, 312). The charges were dropped in 2006, apparently because of
international pressure. In 2007, a UN exhibit about the genocide in Rwanda was indefinitely postponed because
Turkish officials objected to a sentence in a document of the exhibit referring to the death of one million
Armenians in Turkey. Even the deletion of the expression “in Turkey” did not sway Turkish officials
(https://www.reuters.com/article/us-rwanda-un-exhibit/u-n-genocide-exhibit-delayed-after-turkey-objects-
idUSN0934951820070410).
33. Another example is the unlawfulness in some European countries, such as Germany and Austria, of denying the
existence of the holocaust, although this is arguably only one belief about one event among others. Presumably,
this event is weighted in those countries in such a manner that someone who would not accept its existence could
not meaningfully live in the same community as those who do. The issue is about the magnitude or the range of
those beliefs presenting or denying events. For there is nothing in Davidson’s framework to assign a weight to the
observed subject’s beliefs since it is assumed that they are the same as those the interpreters would have. It is thus
not inconsequential for interpreters to have one or two beliefs wrong if these beliefs have a particular weight in
the system of beliefs and thus present or do not present specific events.
34. See also: “So knowledge of other minds and knowledge of the world are mutually dependent; neither is possible
without the other” (2001c, 213).
35. Davidson acknowledges the gradual nature of the knowledge we can have of others’ beliefs. Although he insists
on the commonality of beliefs between observer and observed subject, he adds: “I do not want to suggest that we
cannot understand those with whom we differ on vast tracts of physical and moral opinion. It is also the case that
understanding is a matter of degree: others may know things we do not, or even perhaps cannot. What is certain is
that the clarity and effectiveness of our concepts grows with the growth of our understanding of others. There are
no definite limits to how far dialogue can or will take us” (2001c, 219).
36. Perception, for example, is also propositional: “When we look or feel or hear we believe” (1999a, 732).
37. This sense of belief as a belief-in in fact comes from the original meaning of “belief” in Modern English.
According to Wilfred Cantwell Smith, “literally, and originally, ‘to believe’ means ‘to hold dear’: virtually, to
love.” (Cantwell Smith 1979, 105). The word belongs to the same family as the German belieben, lieb (dear,
beloved), Liebe (love) (105). It corresponds to the Latin libet, “it pleases.” (106). As Cantwell Smith writes, “the
word ‘believe’, then, began its career in early Modern English meaning ‘to belove’, ‘to regard as lief’, to hold
dear, to cherish” (106). Later on, in the 16th century, this sense of “belief” is replaced by “faith.” This original
meaning of belief only remains in the expression “believing in,” in the sense of trusting something or someone,
having faith in them.
38. This points to the inadequacy of characterizing beliefs as propositional attitudes since people can have beliefs
without being able to spell out the content of those beliefs. Yet, the very fact that they engage in the practice
manifests the beliefs they have. Those beliefs at the implicit level of practices are “enacted,” we could say, but
 not necessarily reflected upon. Yet, for observers our implicit beliefs manifested by our behaviors may reveal our
cultural identity.
39. He mentions another case, the Campa people. They call themselves “Ashaninka,” so that now “well-meaning
NGO people,” as Viveiros de Castro says, also call them that. As he explains, “the root shaninka means
‘kinsperson’; ashaninka means ‘our kinspeople.’ This is what Campa people call themselves as a collectivity
when contrasting themselves to others, like viracocha, ‘Whites,’ simirintsi, ‘Piro,’ etc.” As he remarks, “it is easy
to imagine how strange it may sound to the Campa to be called ‘our kinspeople’ by a viracocha, a white person,
who is anything but a relative. It is more or less like if I were to call my friend Stephen ‘I,’ because that’s what he
calls himself” (2012, 98).
40. He writes: “Terms such as wari (a Txapakuran word), masa (a Tukanoan word) or dene (an Athapaskan word)
mean ‘people,’ but they can be used for – and therefore used by – very different classes of beings: used by
humans they denote human beings; but used by peccaries, howler monkeys or beavers, they self-refer to
peccaries, howler monkeys or beavers” (2012, 99). Peccaries are pig-like animals.
41. “To say, then, that animals and spirits are people, is to say that they are persons, and to personify them is to
attribute to non-humans the capacities of conscious intentionality and agency which define the position of the
subject. Such capacities are objectified as the soul or spirit with which these non-humans are endowed” (2012,
99).
42. “Any being which vicariously occupies the point of view of reference, being in the position of subject, sees itself
as a member of the human species. The human bodily form and human culture – the schemata of perception and
action ‘embodied’ in specific dispositions – are deictics, pronominal markers of the same type as the self-
designations discussed above. They are reflexive or apperceptive schematisms […] by which all subjects
apprehend themselves, and not literal and constitutive human predicates projected metaphorically (i.e.,
improperly) onto non-humans” (2012, 100).
43. Viveiros de Castro quotes Graham Townsley who explains that, in Amerindian thought, there is “no place for
‘mind’ (as an inner storehouse of meanings, thought and experience quite separate from the world)”; rather,
mental events are associated with “animate essences which can drift free from bodies and mingle with the world,
participating in it much more intimately than any conventional notion of ‘mind’ would allow” (1993, 456, in
Viveiros de Castro 2012, 124).
44. Viveiros de Castro mentioned an amusing anecdote involving the French missionary and anthropologist Maurice
Leenhardt in New Caledony, telling one of his Canaque old friend: “In short, we introduced the notion of spirit to
your way of thinking?’ to which the Canaque friend responded “Spirit? Bah! You didn’t bring us the spirit. We
already knew the spirit existed. We have always acted in accord with the spirit. What you’ve brought us is the
body” (quoted in Viveiros de Castro 2015, 258–259). Viveiros de Castro understands this as saying that what was
new to the natives was the body as universal within a species, instead of being the anchor of particularities (2015,
259).
45. Viveiros de Castro writes: “The model of spirit is the human spirit, but the model of body are the bodies of
animals […] All bodies, including the human body, are thought of as garments or envelopes; but you never see
animals donning this human ‘clothing.’ What you see are humans donning animal clothes and becoming animals,
or animals shedding their animal clothing and revealing themselves as humans” (2012, 122).
46. “Bodies are not things, souls are not representations; by the same token, both body and soul are not things (for
there are no anti-things, i.e., representations), and they are not representations either (for there are no anti-
representations, i.e., things). Body and soul are precisely perspectives: the body is the site of perspectives; the
soul, that which the point of view has put in the subject position […] body and soul, just like nature and culture,
do not correspond to substantives, self-subsistent entities or ontological provinces, but rather to pronouns or
phenomenological perspectives” (2012, 125).
47. Let us note that even in synchrony and in the same cultural community, it may happen that an individual’s beliefs
have to endure a quarantine of irrationality – think of reformers or original researchers – before being recognized
as rational later on. It is also the case that strange beliefs held by some sects co-exist with the rationality of an
industrialized and scientifically driven society. In this regard, let us note that Davidson does not consider a belief
irrational by itself: “No factual belief by itself, no matter how egregious it seems to others, can be held to be
irrational. It is only when beliefs are inconsistent with other beliefs according to principles held by the agent
himself – in other words, only when there is an inner inconsistency – that there is a clear case of irrationality.
Strictly speaking, then, the irrationality consists not in any particular belief but in inconsistency within a set of
beliefs” (2004, 192). Yet, the problem remains because consistency is itself open to interpretation. Certain
totalitarian states normalized the view that opposing the state’s policies, which is claimed to represent the will of
the people, was insane so that the holders of such insane beliefs needed to be confined to psychiatric institutions
 or to be “re-educated” so as to get their mind rid of those irrational beliefs. It was not so much that the dissidents’
beliefs were false, in which case the state would have had to present counterevidence and counterarguments in
the name of a commonly held standard of truth. These thoughts or beliefs were simply dismissed as insane or
irrational.
48. This sounds very Foucauldian insofar as doing historical analysis pertains to a history of the present, as we will
see in Chapter 4.
49. See also: “As they try to understand each other, people in open discussion use the same words, but whether they
mean the same things by those words, or mean anything clear at all, only the process of question and answer can
reveal” (2005c, 255).
50. If someone says “the pinochle of success,” in Mark Singer’s example mentioned by Davidson, we understand
what is meant (Davidson 2005b, 89).
51. Davidson also cites Steven Pinker who wrote a book titled The Language Instinct (1994). However, he does not
follow Pinker and others in their belief in a language of the brain, a so-called “mentalese,” as this reifies another
mediation. The “mental” is for him only a conceptual category. It is a means for us to categorize objects and
make sense of the world and other subjects around us.
52. The passage elided reads: “We do not see the world through language any more than we see the world through
our eyes. We don’t look through our eyes, but with them. We don’t feel things through our fingers or hear things
through our ears. Well, there is a sense in which we do see things through – that is, by dint of having – eyes”
(2005g, 130).
53. Such a view on language eliminates any convention from the explanation of communication: “We should give up
the attempt to illuminate how we communicate by appeal to conventions” (2005b, 107).
54. As he explains, “interpretation is not irrelevant to the teleological explanation of speech, since to explain why
someone said something we need to know, among other things, his own interpretation of what he said, that is,
what he believes his words mean in the circumstances under which he speaks. Naturally this will involve some of
his beliefs about how others will interpret his words” (2001e, 161). See also: “In order to be a thinking, rational
creature, the creature must be able to express many thoughts, and above all, be able to interpret the speech and
thoughts of others” (2001j, 100).
55. We can again see the ambivalence of Whorf’s formulations in the following quotation: “Every language is a vast
pattern-system, different from others, in which are culturally ordained the forms and categories by which the
personality not only communicates but also analyzes nature, notices or neglects types of relationship and
phenomena, channels reasoning, builds the house of his consciousness” (1956, 252). While to say that language
“ordains the forms and categories” through which we understand the world is a strong thesis, granting language a
determination of how we think, we can also emphasize the weak aspect that language with its grammar and
categories influences how one “notices or neglects types of relationship and phenomena.”
56. He writes: “Necessities for substances which are only necessities for substantives in certain sentence positions,
necessities for forces, attractions, etc. which are only necessities for verbs in certain other positions, and so on.
Science, if it survives the impending darkness, will next take up the consideration of linguistic principles and
divest itself of these illusory linguistic necessities, too long held to be the substance of Reason itself” (1956, 269–
70). Yet, in another passage, he makes the claim that “human beings are all alike in this respect. So far as we can
judge from the systematics of language, the higher mind or ‘unconscious’ of a Papuan headhunter can
mathematize quite as well as that of Einstein”; but then he follows with a strong claim: scholars and tribesmen
“are as unaware of the beautiful and inexorable systems that control them as a cowherd is of cosmic rays (1956,
329).
57. See also Serra (2021).
Part II
Two Versions of a Poetics of Truth in Interpretation
Ricoeur and Foucault

DOI: 10.4324/9781003348009-5

The two forms of radical interpretations we examined above dispensed with the notion of a reality independent of
interpretation while at the same time reformulating the truth as a product of interpretation through a “fusion of
horizons” (Gadamer) and a constant “triangulation” (Davidson). This second part focuses on the production itself
within interpretation and examines two models of interpretation as a poetics of truth. Paul Ricoeur’s model of
attestation and Michel Foucault’s model of “truth-telling” or parrhesia. In their very different ways, both Ricoeur
and Foucault dedicated much effort to provide an account of truth that goes beyond the truth of sentences and
propositions, and indeed beyond the hermeneutic situation as well. They want to go beyond a formalism of rules of
speech or arguments as well as beyond the general framework of hermeneutics. Interpretation offers a stand-in for
the object interpreted. Both want to integrate the attitude of the one who speaks into the very notion of truth, thus
turning truth into an existential process. The “poetics of truth” that they promote, combining the existential position
of the speaker and the historical circumstances of utterance, escapes, they claim, historicism or relativism.
The truth has to involve the person who presents something as true. It is not a return to Heidegger’s notion of
truth as disclosure, but it is certainly a recognition that truth is part of a practice so that something, such as an
interpretation of a past event, is “made true” by those who present it and take it under their responsibility as persons.
Ricoeur uses the expression “attestation” to name this existential component of truth and Foucault appeals to the
ancient Greek practice of “telling the truth,” parrhesia, to emphasize the connection of truth to a practice. Although
to a different degree, both Ricoeur and Foucault acknowledge the connection between truth (at the level of
discourse), politics (at the level of a practice), and ethics (at the level of the personal commitment of those who
interpret).
Admittedly, there is some irony in treating Ricoeur and Foucault together as operating in a common enterprise.
The irony is not so much due to the fact that they were at one time in competition for replacing Jean Hyppolite at the
Collège de France, Foucault obtaining the position and Ricoeur going to the University of Louvain, where he taught
for several years. It is also not so much the fact that, while living in the same city of Paris and frequenting the same
circles of intellectuals, they did not meaningfully interact with each other. While Ricoeur makes several references
to Foucault’s works, they are rather general and meant to separate his own position from what Foucault does.
Foucault for his part mostly ignores Ricoeur’s work, never engaging with his views or discussing them, only
mentioning his name in passing on a few occasions. Rather, the irony is that Ricoeur represents hermeneutics – in all
its forms, endeavors, and achievements – whereas Foucault from the start rejected hermeneutics – in both its method
and ambition – claiming that his “archaeology” offered a more rigorous and fruitful method. However, in his last
lectures at the Collège de France, Foucault seems to have a change of heart and uses the expression “hermeneutics
of the subject” as the title of his 1982–1983 lecture course and as the suggested name of his own enterprise of re-
examining the question of the subject in ancient Greek and Roman thought during the Hellenistic period and early
Christianity. I begin by first considering the work of Ricoeur, before turning to that of Foucault in the subsequent
chapter.
3 Ricoeur’s Interpretive Truth
Attestation
DOI: 10.4324/9781003348009-6

Ricoeur has written extensively on hermeneutics, the theory of interpretation, as well as on many philosophers
dealing with interpretive issues. Besides his theoretical work on interpretation, he was also an interpreter of the
Bible and wrote several essays in biblical hermeneutics. For my purpose, I will only focus on his views on the
interpretation of the past, which pertain to his theory of narratives.1 What motivated Ricoeur’s reflections on history
and narrative is what he calls the “enigma” of the past (Ricoeur 1985, 141; 1988, 77), namely the fact “that the past,
which is no longer, has effects, exerts an influence, an action [Wirkung] on the present” (1985, 141; 1988, 77). He
also refers to it as a “paradox”: “The paradox of the historical past in its entirety lies here. On the one hand, it is no
longer; on the other, the remains of the past hold it still present-at-hand [vorhanden]” (1985, 141–142; 1988, 77).
Heidegger remained one of the main sources of Ricoeur’s multiple efforts to circumscribe such an enigma. As he
writes in the third volume of Time and Narrative, “there is no way I can measure my debt as regards the ultimate
contribution of Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology to the theory of time” (1985, 131; 1988, 71). Yet, at the
same time, Heidegger has also been a challenge to Ricoeur, and it is in part to address this challenge that Ricoeur
refined his theory of narrative.
Heidegger presented at least two views on history. The first view, developed in Being and Time, is one that
Ricoeur examines and criticizes at length in both Time and Narrative and in History, Memory, Forgetting. It
concerns history as an existential condition of human beings, which precedes and allows for the possibility of
historiography. The second view accounts for history as a happening or an event in which human existence and
anything historical become possible. Such an event, as that which opens history itself, escapes historiography.
Although Ricoeur does not discuss this second notion of history in reference to Heidegger, he does reflect on the
notion of event when he makes the distinction between event and “historical fact.”
The challenge for Ricoeur is the break Heidegger establishes in history. In Being and Time, it is the break
between existential time – the being-historical (Geschichtlichkeit) of human existence as an ontological condition –
and cosmological time or vulgar time, which is the time measured and dated. Later on, Heidegger adds a further
break between what makes historical time possible – the “event” – and what falls within historical time. In both
cases, Ricoeur wants to re-establish a continuity. Regarding the first break, there are, Ricoeur argues, traces of the
past that help us connect the time that is datable and measurable with existential time – the historical condition of
human beings. Regarding the second break, and without discussing Heidegger specifically, Ricoeur wants to keep a
referential link between “facts” and the “event.” The former are that which historians can establish, interpret, and re-
interpret in different ways. Concerning the latter, as he says about the incompletion of the work of memory, the
“event” functions as an “ultimate referent” [référent ultime] (2000, 227; 2004a, 179) of historical narratives or as
their “receding horizon” (2000, 537; 2004a, 413).
In the first section, I examine the distinction Heidegger makes between the past that is definitely gone and the
past that still matters to us as the basis for Ricoeur’s distinction between facts, which are established by
historiographical research, and the event, which is an always receding horizon. In the second section, I test the
plausibility and fruitfulness of these two distinctions against some “events” related to “German suffering” at the end
of World War II: The bombings of German cities and the abuse of German women by Red Army soldiers in 1945,
whose recognition as facts took time. These test cases show that there was a “delay” between the happening of these
events and their becoming “historical facts” many years later. This delay points to a form of discontinuity in the
form of an “oblivion” for a time, which may represent a challenge for Ricoeur. In the third section, I show how
Ricoeur’s notion of “happy memory” can resolve this problem by transforming the “sense” of the past through
forgetting and forgiveness.
3.1 Heidegger’s distinctions in their Nietzschean flavors

The first Heideggerean distinction Ricoeur uses comes from Being and Time. 2 There are, Heidegger says, two
aspects of the past: the past that is gone and is no longer, what he calls Vergangenheit – the past as past – and the
past that is still relevant and meaningful to us, bearing upon the present, what he calls das Gewesene or Gewesenheit
– the past that “has passed” (1984, 393; 1962, 445). In opposition to the past that is gone and is no longer, what “has
passed” is “still unfolding” [das noch Wesende] (Heidegger 1998, 103). In Being and Time, “being-historical”
[geschichtlich] is an existential feature of human existence (Dasein). Accordingly, anything “historical” [historish]
is always within the clearing opened by human existence in its being-historical. As a result, the historical is always
an existential qualification made by human beings (in the present) for the sake of their future. Thus, if the past is still
relevant to us now, it is because it belongs to “being-historical” [Geschichtlichkeit] as the very temporalization of
human existence, linked to care and being-toward-death.
The view of the past as simply elapsing originates from ordinary or vulgar time as what is caught within a series
of nows that fade away. In fact, for Heidegger, past events are within a past existence, which he calls “an existence
[Dasein] that has been there” [Da-gewesenes Dasein] (1984, 393; 1962, 445). As a consequence, and as Heidegger
has often repeated, historiography [Historie] is the history that we narrate and thus the expression of our
interpretation or understanding of the happening that took place [Geschichte]. However, the happening, as a
condition of possibility for “historical facts,” always escapes those facts precisely because it is the unfolding of such
facts. This points to the close connection between “what is” and temporality or between “being” and “time,” as
canonically embedded in the work of 1927, insofar as time is considered as the unfolding or happening that allows
for something to be.
In Memory, History, Forgetting, Ricoeur reformulates this Heideggerean distinction as an “opposition between
the having-been of the authentic past and the elapsed past that escapes our grasp” (2000, 395; 2004a, 300). This
“having-been,” Ricoeur says, “causes a problem to the extent that it is not observable, whether it is the having-been
of the event or the having-been of the testimony. The pastness [passéité] of an observation in the past is not itself
observable, but memorable” (1985, 284; 1988, 157). We thus have an absence that is both negative – to the extent
that things, people, and events are “no more” – and positive – to the extent that they have been and endure through
the traces they have left. “Absence would thus be duplicated into the absence that is targeted by the present image
and the absence of things past as far as they are gone, compared to their ‘having-been’” (2000, 367; 2004a, 280).
The first absence is of the past in its “being no more” and the second is of the past that has left traces.
Because of his unilateral view of the past, Ricoeur argues, Heidegger leaves unresolved “the problem […] of the
relationship between the fundamental time of Care, the temporality directed toward the future and toward death, and
‘vulgar’ time, conceived as a succession of abstract instants” (1985, 220; 1988, 120. Translation modified). This
strict distinction between cosmological time and existential time creates “a gap between having-been and the past
[…] insofar as what, in fact, opens the way for an inquiry into the past are visible remains” (1985, 144; 1988, 79). It
is within “vulgar” time – the sequence of nows – that we have visible traces of the passage of time and on the basis
of these traces we can reconstruct the “passing” of time or its bearing upon us. Thus, against Heidegger, Ricoeur
tries to show that being-historical [Geschichtlichkeit] is “the bridge that is erected within the phenomenological field
itself between Being-toward-death and world-time” (1985, 177; 1988, 96) or between mortal time, which is oriented
toward the future, and cosmological time, which Heidegger dismisses as a sequence of nows.
The second distinction concerns the difference between an event and a fact. Heidegger makes this distinction in
the 1930s when meditating on the link between “being” and “history.” He speaks of Ereignis, “event,” which he
differentiates from facts and actions that fall into historical times and can be recorded, recollected, interpreted, and
re-examined. This leads him to speak of a “history of being” [Seinsgeschichte], which is not a history taking being
as its object but being itself as happening. Human existence is not only a clearing, as is the case in Being and Time,
but is itself already within the openness of another clearing: Human existence is seen as being within a history of
being. The history of being consists of events [Ereignisse], which are openings of history and thus never susceptible
to be objects of historical narratives. They in fact make history possible by causing new ways of seeing and
evaluating things and the world in general. As such conditions of possibility, they are not explainable by what they
make possible. Heidegger mentions the arising of Greek philosophy as a first beginning and he claims that in our
technological world we are in transition toward another beginning.
This “history of being,” which Heidegger introduces in the 1930s, is even more radically discontinuous than in
Being and Time, and it adopts a view of history as rupture, with each rupture being a “beginning” [Anfang] and
opening of history.3 Heidegger speaks of a “first” and “another” beginning. The “other” beginning is not a “new”
beginning, which would still be in continuity with the previous one, but “other” and thus unknown.4 Given that the
“beginning” is an event that opens the framework within which things and people gain significance and become
“what” and “who” they are, the “other” beginning holds the promise or the threat of being “radically” different from
the previous one, the one we know and are familiar with.
Although Ricoeur does not discuss this second distinction in relation to Heidegger, but rather to historians like
Henri-Irénée Marrou or Pierre Nora, he agrees that the event is different from the fact and has a specific status: “The
fact is not the event, itself given to the conscious life of a witness, but the contents of a statement meant to represent
it. In this sense, we should always write: the fact that this occurred” (2000, 227; 2004a, 178-179). The fact is
propositional: It is the fact “that” this and that happened. By contrast, the event is what functions as the “ultimate
referent” (référent ultime) (2000, 227; 2004a, 179) of historical discourse or the counterpart, the vis-à-vis (2000,
228; 2004a, 179), which Ricoeur also expresses in German as the Gegenüber, as understood by Karl Heussi. This
“counterpart” (vis-à-vis) exercises a “claim” on the historical past. It is “the claim of a Gegenüber no longer in
existence today on the historical discourse that intends it,” as well as a “power of incitement and rectification in
relation to all historical constructions, insofar as these are considered to be reconstructions” (1985, 335; 1988, 184).
By functioning in our historical narratives as the ultimate referent, the event in some sense preserves this past that is
no longer under the form of a past that “has been” or “has passed.” As such, the event can also provide correctives to
the narratives about the past.

It is to preserve this status of counterpart [vis-à-vis] of historical discourse that I distinguish the fact as
‘something said,’ the ‘what’ of historical discourse, from the event as ‘that about which one talks’ [la chose
dont on parle], the ‘that about which the historical discourse speaks’ [le ‘au sujet de quoi’ est le discours
historique].
(2000, 228; 2004a, 179. Translation modified)

Heidegger’s distinctions between the two notions of the past and between fact and event, as well as Ricoeur’s
adoption of these distinctions, can be connected to Nietzsche’s views on history as presented in the second
“Untimely Consideration,” titled “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” (1972, 239–330; 1997, 57–
123). As both Ricoeur and Heidegger note,5 Nietzsche considers history as that which human beings do for their
own purpose. This is what he calls the “force of the present” [die Kraft der Gegenwart] (1972, 289–290; 1997, 94.
Translation modified). It is the present, he says, that guides how the past will be preserved so that any history is a
history of the present. This expression, which Heidegger uses in Being and Time: Geschichte der Gegenwart (1984,
393; 1962, 445), means that those who recount the past are not just engaged in an activity of recounting, but are
always part of the past itself as it is recounted, insofar as they impress their own present and future upon it:
“Knowledge of the past has at all times been desired only in the service of the future and the present” (1972, 267;
1997, 77). Telling the history of the past is thus always, in different degrees, doing a history of the present in the
sense of manifesting what kinds of questions, problems, or issues we have with the past and manifesting what kinds
of perspectives, methods, or approaches we use when engaging with the past. Although objectively directed at what
is no longer, the recounting of the past also tells us who we are as narrators. “If you are to venture to interpret the
past you can do so only out of the fullest exertion of the force [Kraft] of the present: Only when you put forth your
noblest qualities in all their strength will you divine what is worth knowing and preserving and what is great in the
past” (1972, 289–290; 1997, 94. Translation modified).6 History is made in the present and is predicated on a radical
break with the past to the extent that the past is always interpreted and reconstructed. It is the recounted history that
matters to the present, whether positively – enhancing the present and the future – or negatively – hindering and
impeding them. What we call the past is in fact what the present allows it to be. Nietzsche writes: “That life is in
need of the services of history […] must be grasped as firmly as must the proposition […] that an excess of history
is harmful to the living man” (1972, 254; 1997, 67). History can be a “disease,” what he calls a “historical disease
[historische Krankheit]” (1972, 327; 1997, 121) when there is an excess of it.
Yet, Nietzsche considers that history can be useful in three respects: “History pertains to the living man in three
respects: It pertains to him as a being who acts and strives, as a being who preserves and reveres, as a being who
suffers and seeks deliverance” (1972, 254; 1997, 67). Corresponding to these three aspects of human beings are
three kinds of history. First, there is a monumental history, which celebrates past achievements and gives “models,
teachers, comforters” (1972, 254; 1997, 67). This helps people of action reach happiness in the expectation that they
too will find “a place of honor in the temple of history” (1972, 255; 1997, 68). Second, antiquarian history is the
preservation and veneration of the past as an act of giving thanks for one’s own existence, but also as “a simple
feeling of pleasure and contentment over the modest, rude, even wretched conditions in which a man or a nation
lives” (1972, 262; 1997, 73). Third, critical history is a way of “breaking up” and “dissolving” a part of the past by
“bringing it before the tribunal, scrupulously examining it and finally condemning it” (1972, 265; 1997, 75–76).
 While Ricoeur makes reference to Nietzsche and uses some of Heidegger’s views, the fundamental problem he
has with both of them is twofold. First, the strict separation Nietzsche and Heidegger see between the past that is no
longer and the past that is still unfolding suggests that the latter is the only one that matters; and, second, the
separation they make between the event as irruption of a novelty, on the one hand, and facts that can be documented
and recounted, on the other, suggests that the latter can never account for the former. While Ricoeur agrees with
Heidegger that the past that is gone (or the event) cannot be retrieved as such, Ricoeur is adamant that narratives can
actively build a bridge and thus be themselves such a bridge between the past that is no longer and the past that is
still relevant, on the one hand, and between the event that has “actually” happened and the historical facts that can be
established by historians, on the other. Historical narratives may thus resolve the “enigma” of the past. Instead of
simply referring to events that would pre-exist the historical constructions, narratives actively “represent” the past
that is gone (or the event) so that the event is both that which is “presented” within the narrative and that which
motivates the narrative. Although the event cannot be a mere “referent,” it can be an “ultimate” one and, although it
is not the “object” of a narrative account, it can be the “counterpart” or Gegenüber of such a narrative.
Ricoeur sees two features of narratives that work together to secure an active “bridging” in the form of a
“representing.” Because narratives are made of language and include an element of composition, configuration or
fiction, we must, first, recognize that historical narratives cannot be a direct match of what has happened, even
though narratives claim to form a representation of what has taken place. As Ricoeur tells us, we have to guard
“against the illusion of believing that what we call a fact coincides with what really happened” (2000, 226; 2004a,
178). However, there is, second, an “assertive vehemence [véhémence assertive]” (2000, 367; 2004a, 280) in
historical accounts in the sense that historians claim to render past events in their truth.
When we say that several different narratives can be generated from the “same” event, this can be understood in
two different ways: Either something in the event itself is given in possibly different manners or, because events do
not have a stable “essence,” they can be “cut up” or “carved out” in different ways – out of the same mass of
movements, gestures, and words – and reconfigured in different fashions. In this second way, in which events do not
have a stable essence, it is not so much that historians interpret the same event differently or rediscover the same
event afterward, as if it had remained dormant in the meantime. Rather – and far more strongly – historians do not
“discover” events, but “invent” them by determining specific discrete sequences (in the mass of movements,
gestures, and words) as facts. The documents historians provide as well as the explanations they give differentiate
their invention from a mere fabrication and distinguish history from fiction. Ricoeur does not want to embrace this
second option but is not fully satisfied with the first one either.
The test that Ricoeur uses to approach the past is a formulation by Leopold Ranke: to recount events “as they
really [eigentlich] happened,” which Ricoeur discusses in the third volume of Time and Narrative as well as in
Memory, History, Forgetting (2000, 363; 2004a, 278). Unwittingly, Ranke expresses what Ricoeur calls the
“enigma” (2000, 366; 2004a, 279) of historical representation and implicitly acknowledges as insufficient two naïve
options: first, a simple adequacy between the historical narrative and what took place and, second, a simple
heterogeneity between them so that historical narratives would be mere “possible versions” of what took place.
Against the first option, there is an obvious difference between the physics of movements and gestures – at the level
of actions and events – and the semantics of those movements and gestures – at the level of words in narratives.
Actions and events are not made of words or narratives and even if narratives attempt to reenact the past, there is no
direct route from narratives to events. There is thus an element of “difference” between narrative and what is
recounted.
Against the second option, there is an obvious sameness between the actions and events, on one side, and the
narratives recounting them, on the other: Historians, and other chroniclers of the past, claim that what is recounted in
their respective narratives is “the same” as that which actually took place. In fact, Ricoeur sees in Ranke’s
formulation a way to reconcile similarity and heterogeneity (or “sameness” and “difference”) between what took
place and the historical narrative. Ranke uses the preposition “as” or “such as” to qualify the task of historians,
which consists in rendering events “as” they really happened. The “as” mediates sameness and difference through an
analogy. Reformulating Ranke’s expression “as they really happened,” Ricoeur writes: “In the analogical
interpretation of the relation of taking-the-place-of or representing, the accent has shifted from ‘really’ to ‘such as.’
Better: Really has meaning only in terms of such as” (1984a, 35).
Because we have “sameness” – to recount what actually happened – we cannot simply say that a “recounting” of
past events amounts to a loss or entails a loss, as this would mean that past events had an internal meaning at the
moment they occurred, which would be missed, in part, by the re-telling. Because we have “difference” – insofar as
the recounting is not the event – we cannot simply say that a continuity exists between the events that took place and
the retelling that followed them. The genre of analogy, thus, has the task of maintaining both sameness and
difference without relying on loss or continuity. It is the “analogy” at work in the narrative itself – the “as” in
Ranke’s expression – that is supposed to preserve the sameness of the physics of actions and events in another genre
(speaking and writing) and another register (rendering the meaning of what took place). While the goal of a
historical narrative is to say what actually happened, the criterion of the truth cannot be in the events themselves,
which cannot speak by themselves.
Events have to be established through documents and proofs; they have to be understood and explained; and they
have to be presented in a narrative. These are the three phases of historical investigation, as Ricoeur takes this from
Michel de Certeau (1975). There is, first, a documentary phase, in which evidence is gathered and proofs are
adduced by examining and comparing documents. The second phase consists in providing an understanding and
explanations by organizing the evidence and the proofs in an intelligible manner so that causal links and other forms
of connections appear. With patterns appearing, with causal links and connections between facts, actions, motives,
etc., a thread reveals itself, linking the elements discovered in the documentary phase. The third “representing”
phase is the properly narrative phase, consisting in the composition and writing of the account, providing a story of
what happened. This third phase is a “representing” because it gives a public existence to the “facts” inchoately
appearing in the documentary phase and coalescing in a pattern in the understanding/explanation phase. Once put
into a narrative, with its temporal structure, its semiotic means of articulation, and its semantic contents chosen by
historians, facts are not only established but presented in a convincing manner to readers as having “really” been. As
Ricoeur writes: “This threefold frame [membrure] remains the secret of historical knowledge” (2000, 323; 2004a,
250).
It is the third phase, the representing phase, that we need to scrutinize. It is the actual writing of the account or
the literary or narrative configuration that captures the past by transporting its “historical reality” into an analogical
narrative equivalent.7 Quoting Michel de Certeau, Ricoeur sees history as a “scriptural” or “literary” representation
(représentation scripturaire, représentation littéraire) (Ricoeur 2000, 302; 2004a, 234). He writes: “Things would
be more simple if the scriptural form of historiography did not contribute to its cognitive value, if the
explanation/understanding was complete before being communicated in writing to a public of readers” (2000, 360;
2004a, 275–276).
Ricoeur invents two French words, représentance (representing, representation) and lieutenance (standing-in) in
order to name what a narrative accomplishes. He understands représentance as the translation of the German word
Vertretung (a notion he borrows from Karl Heussi). It names the fact that historical narratives render the past “such
as it really happened” without being a representation as Vorstellung (1984a, 35). On the one hand, “things must have
happened as they are told in the present narrative” (1985, 279; 1988, 154. Ricoeur’s emphasis) but, on the other,
“the ‘really’ is only signified by the ‘such as’” (1985, 280; 1988, 155). Thus, we have the facts such “as” they
“really” took place. “Representing [représentance] […] means […] the reduction to the same, the recognition of
alterity, and the analogizing apprehension” (1985, 285; 1988, 157). “Representing” (représentance) consists in
offering an equivalent of what took place – a lieutenance – but by the same token, Ricoeur says, it provides an
“increase of being” or an “increase of sense” or an “increase of meaning [surcroît d”être, surcroît de sens,
augmentation de signification]” (2000, 369; 2004a, 567).
In the process of representing, the historians’ active representation grants narratives both an epistemological and
an ontological status. On the epistemological side, narratives contribute to our knowledge of the past by articulating
the sense of what took place. If narratives can play an epistemological role and contribute to our knowledge of the
past, they must be more than a “version” of what took place; they must be more than one account among other
possible ones. Historical narratives must in some sense “be” what actually took place on the ontological side, insofar
as they give past events a form of existence for us. Because facts and actions are not composed of words and
sentences, the ontological claim of narratives must be that something “narrative-like” can be found in facts and
actions. Insofar as the past is made of actions, events, and experiences, it has a narrative structure. In this regard,
Ricoeur does not hesitate to speak of life as having a pre-narrative quality or action as being a “potential narrative”
(1991, 30).
Ricoeur is very much conscious of the danger of a “narrativization” that would de-realize actions and events,
reducing them to stories told.8 This is the “problematic” aspect of the “representing” made by narrative or the stand-
in that historical narratives offer of the past (2000, 473; 2004a, 363). As we saw, it is even “an enigma,” precisely
because of the analogical transfer that takes place from the past, as it has happened, to the representation we can
make of it: “What do we mean when we say that something really happened? This is the most troublesome question
that historiography puts to historical thinking” (1984a, 1).
Ricoeur addresses the dangers of narrativization in Memory, History, Forgetting, while at the same time
reiterating his conviction that events and actions only reach their full articulation once they are re-told. He puts into
place a rather attractive device made of two basic components. The first one is that a narrative is made of semiotic
means and the second is the attitude of the one who writes the narrative, what he calls a being-in-debt and
attestation.9 Because the events are not directly presentable but must be reconstructed, it is the historians’ attitude of
being-in-debt – and of attesting to the truth of what they say – that serves as a complement to the semiotic means of
the narrative or a “supplement” to the narrative.10
This attitude of the historian is implicitly acknowledged by both authors and readers of history books in the form
of a tacit agreement or a “contract” (pacte) according to which readers should read the historical account “as if the
things recounted did happen” (Ricoeur 2000, 339; 2004a, 261). It is analogous to the contract between authors of
fiction and their readers. Readers of fiction are told, usually on the cover of the book, that what they are going to
read is “not true” and they agree to read it in the mode of an “as if” – as if it were true or, as Coleridge, quoted by
Ricoeur, calls it, they agree to a “willful suspension of disbelief” (2000, 339; 2004a, 261). In the case of historical
accounts, the suspension of disbelief takes the form of a suspension of suspicion: “The reader willingly suspends his
disbelief, his incredulity, and he accepts playing along as if – as if the things recounted did happen” (2000, 339;
2004a, 261). This also means that the contract raises expectations in readers and makes promises to them (2000,
359; 2004a, 275). The analogy between narrative and event opens a possible epistemic gap because events are not
accessible otherwise than through narratives. It is only through other narratives that a historical account can be
criticized. Thus, what makes a historical narrative true must come from within the narrative in the form of the
attitude of the interpreters.
One such attitude of interpreters is a feeling of a debt as an existential component. Historians have a debt to the
past, toward “what once was the case [à ce qui, un jour, fut]” (Ricoeur 1985, 253; 1988, 143). In Time and
Narrative, Ricoeur makes an analogy with painting and quotes Cézanne who felt a debt “with respect to a vision
which takes for him the significance of a logos which precedes him, which (pre)occupies him” (Carr, Taylor,
Ricoeur 1991, 187). Like a painter, the historian attempts “to ‘render its due’ to what is and to what once was
[rendre son dû à ce qui est et ce qui fut]” (Ricoeur 1985, 272; 1988, 152). It is this being-in-debt that constitutes “the
existential possibility of representing [représentance]” (Ricoeur 2000, 473; 2004a, 363. Translation modified).
Ricoeur writes: “We tell stories because in the last analysis human lives need and merit being narrated. This remark
takes on its full force when we refer to the necessity of saving the history of the defeated and the lost. The whole
history of suffering cries out for vengeance and calls for narrative” (1983, 143; 1984b, 75).
Being-in-debt can certainly give its dynamics to a narrative account and thereby allow for a passage between
action and narrative, so that the narrative configuration locks onto the past. The signifying aspect of what historians
do in their selection, wording, and perspective remains subservient to their goal of representing the past. This is what
Ricoeur believes when he writes: “It is here that the coupling between being-in-debt – an ontological category – and
standing for [représentance] – an epistemological category – proves to be fruitful, to the extent that standing for
raises to the epistemological level of the historiographical operation the enigma of the present representation of the
absent past” (2000, 474; 2004a, 364).11 Still, being-in-debt is an existential attitude and is blind toward its object. A
previous decision has already been taken in favor of feeling in debt and thus the feeling itself, while attesting to the
past, does not guarantee that justice is done to the past or, at least, does not guarantee a single way of doing it
justice.
If there is a being-in-debt, there must also be an addressee of the debt: a “whom” to whom we are indebted or to
whose past we are indebted. In addition, there must be a modality – a debt is essentially what must be recognized –
and can thus be felt in different modes. In fact, the notion of debt may grant too much weight to those who feel the
debt and thus to those who tell the narrative. As we know, historians have had in the course of time rather different
appreciations of what a debt involves. After all, it was in the name of a debt that the Serbian propaganda in the
1990s justified the “ethnic cleansing” of Muslims in Kosovo. They appealed to the battle of Kosovo in 1389 in
which the Ottomans killed all males and raped all females (this is not “historically attested”).12 Could they not use
Ricoeur’s own words and say that they attempted “to save the history of the vanquished and the losers” (1983, 143;
1984b, 175)?
The same uncertainty about what a debt is and to whom it is owed is also illustrated by the controversy of the
Armenian genocide mentioned above, which Turkey has officially consistently denied until now. This shows, in my
view, that it is not enough to say, as Ricoeur does, that “the whole history of suffering cries for vengeance and calls
for narratives” (1983, 143; 1984b, 175). This cry does not suffice to validate narratives by guaranteeing that they are
about what “actually took place.” Ricoeur himself implicitly recognizes this when he writes: “It is possible to
compose several plots about the same incidents (which thus do not deserve any more to be called the same events)”
(1985, 446; 1988, 248. Translation modified). The sentence in parentheses in the quotation above is the key. If
several accounts can be given of an event, and if these different accounts can claim to be about “the same” event,
what are the constitutive elements of an “event” as such? What in an event can represent a resistance, or what Sartre
calls the “coefficient of adversity” for the multiple narratives that can represent it?
Ricoeur came to recognize this weakness in his account when writing: “It has to be acknowledged: The notions
of counterpart [vis-à-vis], stand-in [lieutenance] constitute more the name of a problem than of the solution. In Time
and Narrative III I confined myself to proposing a ‘conceptual articulation’ for the enigma of adequacy by
lieutenance” (1983, 366; 1984b, 208–209). This recognition led him to complement the notion of debt with the
notion of attestation.
The notion of attestation is introduced in its technical sense in Oneself as Another. Ricoeur even says that it is
the “password” (le “mot de passe”) of the whole book (1990, 335; 1992, 289). Attestation is the manifestation by a
speaker or writer of the veracity of what is said or written. It is a certification of one’s good faith, of the fact that one
can be believed. As such, attestation is a “nondoxic” assurance in the sense that attestation is not manifested in the
mode of a “believing that” but rather in the mode of “believing in,” as in the case of a witness: “The witness believes
what he says and we believe in his sincerity” (1991, 382). Because it is not about statements but about an attitude
toward statements, attestation redoubles the truth of the statement as a commitment. This commitment in fact
produces truth. When applied to the self, “attestation is the sort of confidence or assurance (nondoxic
epistemological status) that each of us has of existing (ontological status) on the mode of self (phenomenological
status)” (1991, 382).
In Memory, History, Forgetting, Ricoeur expands the role of attestation beyond the issue of selfhood and applies
it to narratives about the past. It is still about attesting oneself, but in relation to what one says, for example when
presenting an account of events. Providing a narrative, as in the case of historians, is seen as an action that is
imputed to the speaker or writer. “What I expect from my close relations is that they approve of what I attest: That I
am able to speak, act, recount, impute to myself the responsibility for my actions” (2000, 162; 2004a, 132).
Attestation could thus resolve the tension in Ranke’s formulation “as they actually happened” between the
“analogy” (“as”) and the “sameness” (“actually”), and integrate the “actually happened” in the “such” of the
grammar proper to the historical discourse. The past is “attested” by historians. Understood in this way, attestation
functions as what holds together the three phases of the historical reconstruction mentioned above. Attestation is
manifested by the “testimonial dimension of the document” (2000, 364; 2004a, 278), so that documentary proofs are
adduced in order to establish the facts. “We have nothing better than testimony and the critique of testimony in order
to substantiate the historical representation of the past” (2000, 364; 2004a, 278). If challenged, technically,
historians can exhibit the documents used (first phase) and present the explanatory procedures employed, leading to
intelligibility so that an explanation is provided (second phase). But historians also attest to their own character as
truth-tellers, and thus to their ethical stance13 in the writing of a narrative, which offers the “représentance” (third
phase):

It is together that scripturality, comprehensive explanation, and documentary proof are capable of accrediting
the truth claim of historical discourse. Only the movement that moves back from the art of writing to the
“research techniques” and “critical procedures” is capable of raising the protest to the rank of what has become
a critical attestation.
(2000, 363–364; 2004a, 278)

The belief in historians – the trust we have in them – redoubles the truth of their statements – we believe that their
historical narratives are true.
Attestation is the production of truth at two levels and at the same time. As endorsing the historians’ capability, it
is an “alethic mode” (mode aléthique [ou véritatif]) – here I am, as a truth-teller – and as accompanying my
statements it is an “epistemic mode of assertions” (2004b, 140), which makes the historical account an “attestation
to reality” (attestation de réalité) (2000, 363; 2004a, 278). Far from being extrinsic to the narrative, the existential
attitude of historians belongs to the narrative “voice” that retrospectively gives an ontological status to what is
recounted. This existential attitude can perform this remarkable feat through the credence we give the voice and,
thus, such as in the case of historians, attest to their moral status as truthful and trustworthy storytellers. Ethics gives
narratives their valence as “true representations” of what has taken place.
The combination between the narrative itself and the attitude of the historian is supposed to remedy the danger of
complete narrativization and prevent historical narratives from being mere privileged or favorite versions of history.
This combination is supposed to offer an alternative to Heidegger’s strict separation between the past as being no
longer and the past as still unfolding. Ricoeur wants to keep the two aspects in some form of relation while
accepting that one of the two – the event as it “actually” happened – is not directly given or not directly accessible,
but rather manifests itself only at the horizon of narrative representation.
The mediation provided by the narrative is dynamic in a twofold direction: from the event to the facts and from
the facts to the event. Regarding the first direction, we have “traces” left by the event or the having-been of the
event, which points to a “counterpart” that can be felt as a “debt” and serve as a basis for correcting historical
accounts. In the other direction, from the fact to the event, we have the work of the historians, which attempts to
“present” that which took place through a construction, and we have the historians’ claim that the narratives they
offer are about what “really” took place. This is the “assertive vehemence” (véhémence assertive) in historiography
mentioned above (2000, 367; 2004a, 280), through which historians vouch for what they say and present themselves
as responsible for such accounts. They attest to the truth of what they say, and this attestation involves their
painstaking work of a “representing” that is documented, supported by evidence, tightly knit together in a narrative
for developing an argument.
The table below represents Ricoeur’s apparatus in which he differentiates the facts from the event, on the one
hand, and their referential connection, on the other. We have a correlation between that which cannot be directly
presented (in the left column) and that which is referred to and can constrain historical accounts (in the right
column): Historians establish the facts with the qualification that they are reconstructions and thus not, “in
themselves,” what happened. Attestation as an activity of writing connects the two and guarantees that the “facts”
“refer” to the “events” (Figure 3.1).
Figure 3.1 The difference between event and facts
Event Facts
really happened are recounted
belongs to the past that is gone belong to the past that is still relevant
is an ultimate referent are reconstructed
is a counterpart (vis-à-vis, Gegenüber) are represented
is an always receding horizon are propositional
|________________________________________|
Attestation
as a making-true (an “alethic” mode)
as an activity of writing (a production or poetics of truth)

The ethical nature of attestation consists in this: That the performance by a real person in specific circumstances
binds the account given – the représentance or stand-in – to the normative realm of human interactions. The ethical
component redoubles the truth of the narratives and makes them true in the sense that the narratives’ truth (as
correspondence to facts) is produced by the attitude of the historians as truth-tellers. Attestation consists in saying:
“Here I am!” thus presenting oneself as responsible for the correlation between what took place – the event – and the
narrative that functions as the representation of the event.
What is remarkable in attestation is that it is not a supplementary fact to the narrative given, but the very
production of the narrative. This also creates a possible ambiguity or points to a hesitation on the part of Ricoeur,
which Foucault will brush aside (as we will see in the next chapter). Ricoeur does not want to say bluntly that
historical narratives make what is narrated true but that the truth of historical narratives is under the umbrella of the
historians’ attitude. Their attitude “warrant” the truth of the narratives. This is due to the fact that events are unstable
referents. Because the past that is gone cannot speak by or for itself but only to the extent that it matters and is
relevant, events cannot force their own articulations otherwise than by being established and documented as fact.
Yet, given that there is no counterpart to historical narratives than another narrative and no counterevidence other
than one presented in a narrative, the truth cannot be contained in the narrative itself. Events can be “represented” in
different ways, given the different kinds of relevance they may have for different audiences. Thus, the historians’
representations of events do not offer variations on commonly known events. Rather, it is their historiographical
representation that is a making-true. This is what “attestation to reality” (attestation de réalité) (2000, 363; 2004a,
278) means and why attestation is an “alethic mode.”
As such, the historical account is part of a poetics of truth in the sense that historical accounts are “made.” They
are produced not simply because they are written, but because past events manifest themselves as what “actually”
happened under the responsibility of historians who attest to both the truth of the narrative and the fact that they are
truth-tellers. The poetics of truth in Ricoeur is thus torn between its subjective and objective genitives: between a
production of truth (objective genitive) through narratives and truth being productive of narratives (subjective
genitive). This ambiguity reverberates in the attestation of the truth itself, either as interpreters presenting
themselves as truth-tellers (objective genitive) or presenting themselves as guarantors of the truth revealing
(attesting) itself in the narratives (subjective genitive).
Because the event cannot present itself directly but can only be represented, attestation is, as a making-true of
what happened, a making of history: “The phenomenology of testimony led the analysis of attestation to the
threshold of doing history” (2000, 510; 2004a, 392). Yet, because we have a correlation between events as ultimate
referents and historical facts, Ricoeur can still maintain for historical narrative a claim to truth as universal or as
correspondence: the claim to render the past such as it “really” was. It is not an attainable correspondence, only a
claim that there is a referent beyond the representation and that such a referent can offer correctives to historical
narratives. Although attestation is a poetics of truth insofar as it contributes to the production of the historical
narrative, attestation still claims to refer to the event that actually happened.
In what follows, I would like to pursue this question of the connection between “facts” and “events,” or the
question of whether the poetics of truth, against what Ricoeur wishes, does not also lead to a politics of truth. I
choose some “events” that took place at the end of World War II belonging to “German suffering.” Over the many
years that followed World War II, these events went “unrepresented” and were thus denied the status of “historical
facts.” My question, then, is about the nature of this delay between the “happening” and the recognition of what
happened as a historical fact.

3.2 “German suffering” as fact or event

When it comes to German suffering during World War II, there seems to have been a “forgetting” of the “facts” for
several decades. It is only in the 1960s that some historians brought back to memory what German civilians
endured, for example during the bombings of cities in Hamburg and Dresden or the systematic rape of two million
women by the Soviet troops in 1945. Forgetting is part of history and Ricoeur has treated this issue, inserting the
word itself in the title of his monumental work on History, Memory, Forgetting. Forgetting even seems to be
intrinsic to narratives: we recount by selecting what is meaningful and intelligible to us and omitting what is deemed
irrelevant. Being forgotten obviously does not mean being nonexistent. What is forgotten can be brought back to
memory. Narratives play that mediating role of swinging back and forth between the meaningful and the forgotten,
allowing the past to emerge and re-emerge as that tension between the “no longer” and the “still relevant.”
I select two instances: The bombings of German cities by the allies, such as Hamburg in 1943 and Dresden in
1945, when they were mostly inhabited by civilians and represented little military value, and the abuse of German
women by the Red Army soldiers in Berlin as documented in the anonymous diary A Woman in Berlin (2005). This
violence toward civilians has been documented – recorded and archived – but it has taken a long time for them to be
publicized or discussed – Ricoeur would say “represented” – and thus recognized as “historical” facts.
Regarding the first case, it was not until decades after the bombings of German cities that people like W. G.
Sebald and others presented these events as facts.14 In his book, aptly titled On the Natural History of Destruction,
he states:

the [British] Royal Air Force alone dropped 1 million tons of bombs on enemy territory […] 131 towns and
cities [were] attacked, some only once and some repeatedly, many were almost entirely flattened […] about
600,000 German civilians fell victim to the air raids and 3.5 million homes were destroyed.
(Sebald 2003, 3)

For example, in 1943 the Royal Air Force and the US army launched the “Operation Gomorrah” against Hamburg,
the goal of which was “to destroy the city and reduce it as completely as possible to ashes” (2003, 26). Sebald
vividly describes how 10,000 tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs were dropped on residential areas,
writing:

Within a few minutes huge fires were burning all over the target area, which covered some 20 square
kilometres, and they merged so rapidly that only quarter of an hour after the first bombs had dropped the whole
airspace was a sea of flames as far as the eye could see […]. The fire, now rising 2,000 metres into the sky,
snatched oxygen to itself so violently that the air currents reached hurricane force […] the flames […] rolled
like a tidal wave through the streets at a speed of over 150 kilometres an hour.
(2003, 27)

According to Richard Overy, these raids in Hamburg killed 37,000 people, forced 900,000 people to evacuate, and
destroyed 61 percent of the city’s houses and apartments (2014, 144). In the case of Dresden in 1945, as Overy
notes, the raids “were undertaken in the full knowledge that these cities were filled with civilian refugees from
farther east, and that their destruction was likely to cause not just dislocation but high casualties as well” (2014,
213). 75,000 houses were destroyed, more than one third of all the houses of the city, and, as the best estimate,
25,000 people were killed after “4,000 tons of bombs were dropped on a single target in less than twenty-four hours”
(Overy 2014, 214). Although all of this was part of the records and annals, this destruction, Sebald writes,

seems to have left scarcely a trace of pain behind in the collective consciousness [of Germany], it has been
largely obliterated from the retrospective understanding of those affected, and it never played any appreciable
part in the discussion of the internal constitution of our country […]. It never became an experience capable of
public decipherment.
(2003, 4)

It took several decades for these “events” to be recognized as “facts” that could be publicly discussed.
Kurt Vonnegut was in Dresden as a prisoner of war during the bombing, finding refuge with his German guards
in a slaughterhouse. After the war he wanted to write about his experiences, but it took him many years to finish the
book, publishing SlaughterHouse-Five in 1969. As he writes in the 1994 “Preface,” the book is

a nonjudgmental expression of astonishment at what I saw and did in Dresden after it was firebombed so long
ago, when, in the company of other prisoners of war and slave laborers who had survived the raid, I dug
corpses from cellars and carried them, unidentified, their names recorded nowhere, to monumental funeral
pyres.
(1994, xii)15

The second case of “German suffering” is presented by the diary of a German woman who related her experiences
for two months during the occupation of Berlin by Soviet troops in 1945. Her diary documents the daily looting and
rapes, and her efforts to survive among the destruction and the repeated abuses. Her diary is one testimony to the
violence inflicted upon women in times of war. According to Antony Beevor, two million German women were
raped in 1945, 100,000 in Berlin alone (Beevor 2005, xx). The diary was first published anonymously in an English
translation under the title A Woman in Berlin in 1954. As Hans Magnus Enzensberger, the editor of the finally
republished book of 2002, explains, “it took five more years for the German original to find a publisher [in 1960]
and even then the company, Helmut Kossodo, was not in Germany but in Switzerland” (Enzensberger 2005, xi). It is
only in students’ circles in 1968, as Enzensberger explains, that the diary began to circulate again in photocopies.
When Enzensberger tried to re-publish it in 1985, the author refused to grant permission to a second edition and
remained opposed to it as long as she was alive. Only in 2001, after she died, could he work on a new edition, which
includes passages omitted in the first edition.
However, despite the fact that there was a “document” by a witness and victim, the event could not and would
not become fact until much later. As reported in The New York Times, “the second publishing [in 1960] caused such
an uproar in German society, where it was said to ‘besmirch the honor of German womanhood,’ that the author
never revealed herself and refused to authorize further editions.”16 As Enzensberger explains,

German readers were obviously not ready to face some uncomfortable truths, and the book was met with either
hostility or silence. One of the few critics who reviewed it complained about the author’s “shameless
immorality.” German women were not supposed to talk about the reality of rape; and German men preferred
not to be seen as impotent onlookers when Russians claimed their spoils of war.
(Enzensberger 2005, xi)

This is manifested by the attitude of the author’s fiancé after his return. She gave him her diary to read so that he
could understand what happened to her. He read for a while but returned it to her, claiming not being able to
decipher her handwriting and the abbreviations. For example, he pointed to the abbreviation “Schdg.” and asked her
what it meant. She writes: “I had to laugh: ‘Schändung,’ of course – rape. He looked at me as if I were out of my
mind but said nothing more” (Anonymous 2005, 260). He would leave some time later. She could only note that
“for him I’ve been spoiled once and for all” (2005, 259). Here is what the author of the diary has to say about this
attitude of men:

These days I keep noticing how my feelings toward men – and the feelings of all other women – are changing.
We feel sorry for them; they seem so miserable and powerless. The weaker sex. Deep down, we women are
experiencing a kind of disappointment. The Nazi world – ruled by men, glorifying the strong man – is
 beginning to crumble, and with it the myth of ‘Man.’ In earlier wars men could claim that the privilege of
killing and being killed for the fatherland was theirs and theirs alone. Today, we women, too, have a share.
That has transformed us, emboldened us. Among the many defeats at the end of this war is the defeat of the
male sex.
(2005, 42–43)

In addition, the diary reveals many of the ambiguities of war and what people have to do just to survive. “I only
know that I want to survive – against all sense and reason, just like an animal” (Anonymous 2005, 261). It was not
merely a gender war, all men on one side as predators and all women on the other as victims. As the author of the
diary notes, there was no official Soviet policy to organize or encourage the abuses. To the contrary, Soviet generals
were appalled that their soldiers would mingle with the enemy. The author also meets and speaks with several Soviet
officers who are shocked by the abuse, but do not have the authority or the means to stop them. Furthermore, there
were many women in the Red Army, including officers, who did not do anything against the abuses that happened
right beneath their noses. “We’re amazed to see so many women soldiers, with field tunics, skirts, berets, and
insignia. They’re regular infantry, no doubt about it. Most are very young – small, tough, their hair combed back
smooth” (2005, 69).
Despite being women, these Soviet soldiers did not have any sympathy for what was happening to German
women. As the author recounts it, when on one occasion she was being raped by two soldiers, “the door opens. Two,
three Russians come in, the last a woman in uniform. And they laugh” (Anonymous 2005, 53). For these Russian
women, German women, as the author notes, are “nothing but rubble women and trash” (2005, 248).17 All this
makes the diary, written by a perceptive and intelligent person, a document that cannot be easily categorized and,
through the ambiguities it reveals, all parties are made to feel rather uncomfortable.
For us today, there is no question that these “terrible things” “really” happened. What is in question is the nature
of the delay in the crossing over from – in Ricoeur’s terms – the “event” to the “fact,” in its slow, painful, and
political journey. There are many possible “reasons” and motivations that can be given for this delay. An obvious
external reason is that, after the war, given the devastation the Nazis had inflicted on the rest of the world, there was
not much sympathy left for the Germans. German suffering seemed like an oxymoron. Even in 1969, Vonnegut who
described the massacre of German civilians had to face the accusations of shifting the focus away from the genocide
of the Jews, as he himself recounts: “I have no regret about this book, which the nitwit George Will said trivialized
the Holocaust” (1994, xii). There was also an internal reason. The Germans themselves were trying to rebuild their
identity in shame, guilt or denial of what had happened in the previous decades. As a woman says, quoted by the
author of A Woman in Berlin: “We can’t complain [….] We brought it on ourselves” (Anonymous 2005, 254).
Sebald speaks to this German attitude, detailing how

There was a tacit agreement, equally binding on everyone, that the true state of material and moral ruin in
which the country found itself was not to be described. The darkest aspects of the final act of destruction, as
experienced by the great majority of the German population, remained under a kind of taboo like a shameful
family secret, a secret that perhaps could not even be privately acknowledged.
(2003,10)

Sebald mentions the testimony of a Swedish man who traveled through Hamburg by train after the end of the war.
When passing through a part of the city completely destroyed, he was identified as a foreigner in the train full of
Germans only because he looked out through the window (2003, 31).
These two cases of German suffering illustrate quite powerfully Nietzsche’s point about the “force of the
present”: History can be useful or harmful, so that, in the latter case, forgetting can be a remedy against the
poisoning of too much history or of a history that is too much to bear. These cases also illustrate the nuanced
similarities of Heidegger’s and Ricoeur’s view that there is no direct link between the past “that is no longer” and
the past that is still relevant to us, nor between the event as “what cannot give itself directly” and the historical fact
that the narrated account represents. In addition, these cases also illustrate Ricoeur’s view that it is only when
articulated and recounted, for example by Sebald or the published diary of an anonymous author, that the aspect of
“having actually happened” of the event gains its force and irrupts onto the public stage as a legitimate “fact.” What
was controversial in all of these cases did not concern the “events” themselves, which had all been experienced by
many people and even described by some, but their recounting insofar as this recounting presented these events as
historical “facts,” that is, as facts that come to weigh on the present and elicit future responses and considerations.
In some respect, these cases lend support to Ricoeur’s views on représentance or historiographical
representation, which can only become a stand-in for the events within the existential attitude of those historians
who feel a debt toward the past and feel compelled to attest to the events by daring to write the reports. These
“representations” by historians are, in fact, a production or a poetics of truth but also, as the controversies indicate, a
politics of truth. Again, what is “political” is not that these events have been “politicized,” which would still assume
the precedence of something like an event, available as such and then colored through a political lens later. What is
political is rather the process through which something becomes a fact: the very writing of history. These cases show
quite powerfully that the writing of history is in fact the making of history. It was not until the 1980s and 1990s that
this past could be “ascribed” to, and owned by, the Germans so that their “suffering” became “legitimate,” as it
were.
These two cases of German suffering lend further support to Ricoeur’s view that there are two absences about
the past: “Absence would thus be duplicated into the absence that is targeted by the present image and the absence
of things past as far as they are gone, compared to their ‘having-been’” (2000, 367; 2004a, 280). The past as it was
in its “being no more” – or the events in their negative status of being gone [révolus] (the first absence) – can only
be tracked by the historical facts that we can establish – their positive remaining and persistence in mattering
precisely because they “have been” (the second absence as referred to by the “representing”). While in these cases
the “facts” eventually emerged, as we say, the delay was not merely temporal, but a process of coming to terms with
what happened. It is in this sense that the “representation” (Sebald’s and the diary’s publication) produces an
“increase of being” (2000, 369; 2004a, 567). The narratives do not clothe the naked “having-been” of the past but
allow this past to be attested to in its having been in the manner in which it appears to us as “being no more.” In this
manner, the “suchness” of the narrative – the “such” in the expression “such as it was” – which neither replaces nor
merely represents the “actually happened” – in fact allows “what actually happened” to reach its public presence and
thus to be accessible. In this process we also perceive the “assertive vehemence” in the work of Sebald and in the
anonymous author’s diary, and even surmise the anger, frustration, and humiliation that must have consumed them.
Now, the question that Heidegger could retrospectively ask Ricoeur is whether the past that is “no more” or the
event can still function in our discourse as the ultimate referent so that our historical narratives, in some sense,
preserve this past that is gone as what “has been,” what “has passed,” or what has left traces of its passage. For the
historical representation is a movement from the fact to the event, not the other way around, as Ricoeur would like it
to be. The Heideggerean objection to Ricoeur can be formulated as follows: Regardless of the fact that historians
may feel a debt toward the past or may want to attest to the past, what they render in their narratives is an account in
terms of what the event itself has made possible so that the event itself eludes recounting. This was Heidegger’s take
on Nietzsche’s “history of the present.” In other words, we do not face facts or establish them from an absolute point
of view – Ricoeur would agree – but always from our own questions, concerns, and interests – Ricoeur again would
agree.
However, this also means that some events may change our perspectives and sometimes our values so that the
establishing of facts, which is subsequent to the event, may have been influenced by the event, if it is significant, as
World War II certainly was. If this is the case, then the facts cannot “refer” to the event, however ultimately this
reference may be, since it is on the basis of the facts established that there is a meaningful talk of what the event they
point to may be. It is a logical problem. If the event is what is retrospectively referred to by the facts once
established, the establishment of the facts cannot be governed by the event itself. To speak of an “ultimate referent”
or an “always receding horizon” contains the same ambiguity pointed out above about the poetics of truth as either a
production of truth (by historical narratives) or a productive truth. Because the event cannot be presented but only
retrospectively pointed to, the event does not have any causal efficacy with regard to the facts as they are
established, understood, and narrated. It happens, and by happening it opens a certain set of conditions – material,
historical, existential – which in turn make possible some forms of articulation, such as the talk of a “natural history
of destruction” by Seebald. Heidegger’s “thinking of the event” is the recognition that our ways of thinking have
been produced so that, in order to make sense of the event, we have to accept our ungrounded position in the event
and our arbitrary situation in history.
We could say, in defense of Ricoeur, that he uses the event as a “regulative idea,” as that which is necessary to
posit in order to be able to speak of a “fact,” given our capacities to understand. However, Ricoeur himself seems to
reject this view. When using Heussi’s view that the Gegenüber, as a counterpart, can provide “incitement and
correction,” Ricoeur criticizes Heussi for still thinking in a Kantian mode and seeing the Gegenüber as a “limiting-
concept” (1984, 38). Since Ricoeur rejects the alternative of the event as a regulative idea, it is not clear how the
event fits with the facts. Because the activity of the event itself as an ultimate referent or as a corrective of narratives
is measured solely in terms of facts, strictly speaking, it is not the event that “serves” or “functions” as a referent, as
Ricoeur claims. The event can only appear in terms of facts and thus “after the fact,” as what the facts track. The
event itself thereby escapes narratives altogether.
 Is Nietzsche, then, right in his pronouncement that history is always of the present? It seems indeed that the
delay inscribed in the possibility of speaking about some events, such as those described above, is not due to the
events “needing time” to be revealed but to the “force of the present.” The time needed is on the side of those who
reconstruct what has happened, not on the side of the event. Some people try to speak about the event but cannot,
either because they cannot find a voice or because they cannot find an ear for what they attempt to articulate. The
delay in the German suffering becoming “fact” points to the ethical and political nature of the present of recounting
history because the recounting of history is the making of history.
However, Nietzsche’s point about the history of the present, which seems to dismiss Ricoeur’s appeal to an
“ultimate referent,” also casts suspicion on Heidegger’s talk about the “event” as a “beginning” of history and, thus,
on the notion of rupture as maker of history. In one respect it is true that the history of the present will of necessity
include ruptures because the present changes. That is, the present of the 21st century US is not the same present as
the one of the 1950s Germany. These ruptures, though – against Heidegger – are not external to the writing of
history, as if motivating them, but are themselves configured within and by the writing of history. Against
Heidegger’s sometimes apocalyptic tones regarding the event as “another beginning” about which we can say
nothing,18 Nietzsche points to new moments of beginning in the present, in our present, so that we are not merely at
the receiving end of such “events,” but are their co-authors, just as Aristotle says that we are, individually, sunaitioi,
a “co-cause” or being partly responsible for our character (Nicomachean Ethics 1114b23, 1934, 152). In a similar
manner, while the events befall us, we are also a correlate cause of these events.19 Nietzsche’s views can show how
Ricoeur’s notion of attestation can point to a possible explanation of the ambiguous status of the “event” as
“referent” of historical discourse, but not presented in such a discourse.
We thus have to accept, following Ricoeur’s lead and despite his resistance, that attestation, by transforming the
reference to events into an activity, is moral and political. People engage their responsibility when they give
narratives so that the fact is what the narrative presents and attestation is the attitude of the historian to vouch that
the fact “actually happened” as an event, as opposed to being a mere fabrication or ill-guided reconstruction. This
attitude and the narratives produced guarantee the continuity between the fact and the event. When it comes to
historical facts, attestation then is not so much an attitude governed by an ultimate referent (as if it were the ultimate
target of narratives) nor is it unfolding against the horizon “always receding” (as if the event was looming over our
narratives of the facts). Attestation is rather the management of the power the events, for example of World War II,
have on the victims and on us. It is an attitude of telling what happened with the awareness that what we recount has
been opened by the event itself, with its new political ordering (who qualifies as victim or not), its new moral order
(what counts as wrong compared to a genocide), and its new epistemic order (are all truths, for example about
German suffering, genuine truths worth telling?). The delay in recounting some events, such as the suffering of
German civilians, is itself a testimony to the force of the present of those who recount (Nietzsche) and to the
disclosing power of the event, producing means of articulation but not susceptible to be articulated by these means.

3.3 Happy memory

One may surmise that the reason for Ricoeur’s rejection of the notion of an event as a regulative idea is that there is
an incompleteness at the core of the notion of narrative – which includes fiction, configuration, and the possibility of
various configurations – and of debt and attestation. This incompleteness makes any totalization (conveyed by a
regulative idea) incompatible with the openness of narratives. Narratives are directed at the future and their openness
is structural. There is narrative only because it can be re-written, continued, amended, or written over. Narratives
thus seem to be antithetical to a regulative idea that could, from the start – before the narrative has even started –
anticipate its end. The same goes for the existential attitudes of being in debt and attestation. There cannot be an
anticipation of the entity to which debt could be owed, just as there cannot be an anticipation of what attestation
could be about. As attitudes, they depend on the circumstances and they are responses instead of initiatives. Because
they are responses, what guides them are neither “ideals” nor “rules,” but a sense of duty – the duty to tell the truth –
and courage – the courage to tell such a truth. Both narratives and the existential attitudes of being in debt and
attestation thus involve an intrinsic vulnerability and a risk on the part of individuals who do not know how the
narratives they offer will be “received” nor what will happen to them when attesting to the truth of what they say.
There is in fact a correlation between what Nietzsche calls the “power of the present” and the power of the event.
As mentioned above, feeling a debt to the past and attesting to the past are attitudes that manifest the vulnerability of
people who feel addressed by an event or called upon to testify and attest. This vulnerability, which makes people
susceptible to being seized by the power of the event, also makes their response unpredictable. This means that the
power of the present is not exclusive of a power of the event, even if it is in the present that the event can speak to
us. For debt and attestation as attitudes of assenting to our vulnerability entail that, even when I speak and attest, I
am already entangled in the narratives of others. As he is pressed by Sorin Antohi in their dialogue about Memory,
History, Forgetting, Ricoeur says:

One must know how to tell one’s own story as seen by others. That is to say, for me to let myself be narrated
by the other. Not only for me to narrate myself otherwise (one can always do that, arrange and gather the
elements in another fashion), but to agree to let mimesis be produced by the other. That is difficult.

Sorin Antohi concludes: “Yet that is how notions such as forgiveness, loss and reconciliation are, it seems to me,
related. They have a kind of common ground,” to which Ricoeur adds: “Yes, that’s it” (2005, 24).
This recognition of our vulnerability to the way the past can be recounted seems to me, first, to show the limits
of attestation (which was itself a complement to the notion of debt) and, second, to point to the need for another
attitude or a mode in which the response to the debt and attestation are effectuated. As I argue in the third part, it
must be an attitude of benevolence or love. Ricoeur does not develop this benevolence but points to its need in
Memory, History, Forgetting, when he introduces the notion of forgiveness, which is a manifestation of love, and
when he speaks of a “happy memory.”
Ricoeur titled the “epilogue” to Memory, History, Forgetting “difficult forgiveness” (2000, 591; 2004a, 457). He
himself acknowledges the extraneous place of this epilogue on forgiveness: “In truth, I only recently identified this
presumed tie between the spirit of forgiveness and the horizon of completion of our entire undertaking. It is clearly a
consequence of rereading. Has the presentiment of this tie guided me from the beginning? Perhaps” (2000, 643;
2004a, 494). In his discussion with Sorin Antohi, he even says that forgiveness is “strictly speaking […] not part of
the book. It is an epilogue, which was asked of me as a matter of intellectual honesty” (2005, 8). He remarkably
adds: “As for the epilogue, do with it as you will” (1985, 24).
Besides its place in the book, there is also the paradoxical fact that Ricoeur very much doubts that forgiveness
can ever play any political role. He bluntly states that “there is no politics of forgiveness” (2000, 635; 2004a, 488) or
that, paraphrasing what he calls Kodalle’s “disturbing observation,” “peoples do not forgive” (2000, 629; 2004a,
485). The problem as he sees it seems to be for him the necessary institutionalization that forgiveness would have to
go through in order to be politically efficacious. He speaks in this regard of “the sometimes monstrous failure of all
efforts to institutionalize forgiveness” (2000, 634; 2004a, 488).
There is thus a tension. On the one hand, Ricoeur does not see how to articulate the problematic of forgiveness to
the problematic of history and memory, but, on the other, he has a “presentiment,” as he calls it, or a wish that
forgiveness may, or must, play a role. What I argue here is that forgiveness in history allows for what Ricoeur
wishes for but does not articulate himself: a “happy memory.” As he says, “what I do know […] is that the object of
the entire quest [in the book] merits the beautiful name of happiness” (2000, 643; 2004a, 494); and he explains
further: “I can say after the fact that the lodestar of the entire phenomenology of memory has been the idea of happy
memory” (2000, 643; 2004a, 494).
The link between forgiveness and the entire problematic of History, Memory, Forgetting could be that
forgiveness can help lead to a happy memory, thus serving as a remedy to what Nietzsche calls “the poison of
history” (referring to those instances where the role of history is excessive). Forgiveness can do this by transforming
the past. Ricoeur himself gives us the means to articulate such a transformation. He has shown that the past is
essentially a “sense,” which is “produced” by narratives under the burden of a debt and through an attitude of
attestation. It is through the narratives we tell about the past that it can come to “make sense.” As “sense” the past is
alive in the living memory that people have of it. Thus, the past in its pastness is transformable. Yet, neither the
existential attitude of debt nor the attitude of attestation can orient the “sense” of the transformation. Both debt and
attestation, while clearly ethical, are also political. Forgiveness is of another order. It can have the effect of leading
to a transformation of the past into a shared past between former perpetrators and former victims. Because the past is
essentially a “sense” and a sense is for the present, the past dwells in the sense it makes to us in the present given the
future we envisage. Thus, in its essence, the past is open, asking for narratives and thus for transformation.
When we speak of forgiveness, it is usually in the context of acts and actions. Ricoeur owes the connection
between action, history, and forgiveness to Hannah Arendt who in The Human Condition emphasizes both action
and the political potential of forgiveness. She sees the frailty of action – one of the three key notions of the book,
besides labor and work – as residing in part in its irreversibility.20 Action can limit, if not erase, the power people
have of being free agents. When people act, they are liable to the consequences of their actions, many of them
unforeseen at the time of the action. As a result, they can become prisoners of such actions or, as Arendt puts it, “our
capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would
remain the victims of its consequences forever, not unlike the sorcerer’s apprentice who lacked the magic formula to
break the spell” (Arendt 1998, 237). Forgiveness offers us a remedy though. “The possible redemption from the
predicament of irreversibility – of being unable to undo what one has done […] is the faculty of forgiving” (Arendt
1998, 237). It frees the perpetrators from the consequences of their actions and sets them free from the shame or
guilt of being criminal. As the Greek of the Gospel says, it “lets them go” (aphiemai).
Ricoeur shares Arendt’s wish that the social energy generated by forgiveness in personal encounters be
harnessed into a political process, but he also shares Arendt’s reservation that, because forgiveness is always a one-
to-one, semi-private relationship, there cannot be such a relationship between groups or communities. As a result,
forgiveness cannot be institutionalized. In addition, for Arendt, forgiveness is motivated by love, and love, she
believes, has no place in politics. Ricoeur summarizes his agreement with Arendt when he says:

Imputability constitutes in this respect an integral dimension of what I am calling the capable human being. It
is in the region of imputability that fault, guilt, is to be sought. This is the region of articulation between the act
and the agent, between the “what” of the action and the “who” of the power to act – of agency. And this
articulation, in the experience of fault, is in a sense affected, wounded by a painful affection.
(2000, 597; 2004a, 460)

We thus have a connection between, first, history, which is made of actions by agents, second, the burden this
memory can have on future actions, and, third, the need to unburden agents from the consequences of their actions.
The latter will allow agents to be freed from history so that the past can become a “shared” past, common to the
descendants of both victims and perpetrators, victors and vanquished, oppressors and oppressed. The happy memory
Ricoeur mentions would be this possibility to come to see the past as a common past through the work of history,
memory, and forgiveness. The issue is thus one of transformation.
There is, first, the transformation of both the perpetrators and the victims, which happens in forgiveness. Both
can become free, the former from the consequences of their actions and the latter from the shame and resentment
caused by the harm done. If forgiveness were possible in history, there would be a second transformation at the level
of groups or communities, in which the past would be transformed into a shared and common object of a collective
memory. Forgiveness could thus lead to a “happy memory,” even of horrific events, if the “sense” of the past is
transformed. Memory could deserve the qualification of “happy” if it prepares a new future, free from the brutality
and shame of the past but informed of them. This means that, if forgiveness is possible in history, it is not primarily
a matter of releasing past perpetrators from the consequences of their deeds. Rather, and most importantly, it is
about the self-transformation of the descendants of both the victims and the perpetrators. With such a self-
transformation comes a transformation of the past in its sense, which can be remembered as bearing a common
future for the descendants of both perpetrators and victims – and thus, in a derivative sense, for the perpetrators and
victims themselves.
Now, forgiving is not forgetting. Nietzsche considers that there is a “remedy” (Gegenmittel) to the “poison” of
history or the “historical disease” when there is an “excess” of it. Besides appealing to art and religion as possible
remedies, which he calls the “suprahistorical,” he mentions forgetting, which he characterizes as the “unhistorical”
(1972, 326; 1997, 120). He explains: “It is possible to live almost without memory, and to live happily moreover, as
the animal demonstrates; but it is altogether impossible to live at all without forgetting.” What matters, he continues,
is “to determine […] the boundary at which the past has to be forgotten if it is not to become the gravedigger of the
present” (1972, 246–247; 1997, 62).
We saw how the “forgetting” of what is deemed irrelevant or not “presentable” is almost intrinsic to a narrative
account for the sake of what is meaningful and intelligible to us. Yet, we also saw how dynamic this combination of
narrating and forgetting is. Insofar as there is a mutual relationship between what is established and what can be
retrieved from the forgotten past, the forgotten is not what is blotted out for ever, but is always relative to what is
presentable, and this means intelligible for the present and at present. For example, Ricoeur wants to unmask the
falsehood of forgetting in the form of amnesty if it means amnesia. The forgotten is rather more like an archive to
which we can go back when in need, so as to reawaken the past. Being forgotten is thus not a state, but rather part of
a movement of swinging back and forth between the meaningful – what concerns us – and the irrelevant – what is of
no concern to us.
Because of this lateral movement between the past and the present, in which the past operates as a “sense,”
forgiveness can be a process that allows us to retrieve a meaningful present from the congealed past of blood and
suffering. To the extent that forgiveness “forgets” the association between the perpetrator and the past action, it is
also the Gegenmittel or remedy that could allow for “another” beginning for a community. Forgiveness, thus, does
not forget the past action but may provide a happy memory of such action. The nature of the past as being accessible
to and available as narratives allows the past to have this fluidity of being no more and yet still relevant or of being
congealed in guilt or shame and yet being susceptible to be re-interpreted within a happy memory. Both the poison
that the past can be, according to Nietzsche, and the remedy that forgiveness can be, according to Arendt, assume
that the past that hurts but can be healed is about the “sense” of events.
This notion of the past understood in terms of “sense” or “meaning” is at the heart of Ricoeur’s sixth and last
lesson of a seminar given in 1997 at the Collège international de philosophie, under the title “La marque du passé”
(“The mark of the past”). Ricoeur draws attention to the fact that the word passé in French is a substantivized
adjective, which he wants to preserve: the “pastness” (passéité) or the “character of what is past.” What memory is
about, as Aristotle says – and Ricoeur quotes him several times in the essay – is “of the past.” The past is, thus, not
an object completed and left to itself, but always adjectival, always linked to memory, as what memory even
“establishes,” in the sense in which we speak of établir les faits, to assess and establish the facts. Memory is also in
the present and for the future, so that we can ask, Ricoeur says, “what we are making of our memory for today and
for tomorrow [ce que nous faisons de notre mémoire pour aujourdhui et pour demain]” (1998, 18). The way in
which we envisage our future thus has an effect on the way we apprehend our past.
Ricoeur puts the effect that the perspective of the future has on the perspective of the past in connection with the
notion of debt, in which he sees the potential of forgiveness: “Debt is the burden that the past places on the future. It
is this burden that forgiveness would like to relieve” (1998, 25). Debt, in fact, transforms the past from a rigid object
or content into its adjectival essence: The past is a sense and the sense can be re-interpreted and changed. With a
changed sense, it is the event itself that is converted:

If indeed facts are indelible [ineffaçables], if what has been done cannot be undone and if we cannot make it
the case that what has happened has not, by contrast, the sense of what has happened is not fixed once and for
all. Besides the fact that the events of the past can be interpreted otherwise, the moral burden associated with
the debt toward the past can be increased or alleviated depending on whether the accusation confines the guilty
individual in the painful feeling of the irreversible or whether forgiveness opens the perspective of a
deliverance from the debt, which amounts to a conversion of the very sense of the event.
(1998, 29)

This illustrates how the perspective of the future retroactively acts upon the interpretation of the past (1998, 29).
Ricoeur concludes the essay by borrowing Dilthey’s words in order to emphasize the creation of history that
necessarily takes place anytime one engages in “doing history,” writing: “It is not possible to ‘do history’ without
also ‘making history’ [Il n’est pas possible de “faire de l”histoire” sans aussi “faire l’histoire”]” (1998, 31). We
recall that Gadamer also quoted this passage.
Ricoeur’s understanding of the past in terms of the sense it has and thus with the possibility for this sense to
change offers a response to his own dismissal of the use of forgiveness in politics. Following Arendt, as we saw, he
suggested two reasons why forgiveness does not have a political efficacy. First, because of the semi-private nature
of forgiveness, an institution by definition will fail to meet this first condition. Second, because of the unconditional
nature of forgiveness, an institution, which has to rely on discussion and deliberation, will fail to meet this second
condition. Now, Ricoeur can be understood as responding to his own objection in the following manner. Regarding
the first objection, if the past is of the order of the sense or meaning, and if forgiveness allows for a transformation
of such a sense, such a transformation cannot be performed privately by one individual or by a small group, but
needs to have a social dimension in the form of a dialogue. Yet, it is not the institution that performs the forgiveness.
The institution will only be the framework within which such forgiveness – as the transformation of the sense of the
past – can start or be initiated. Thus, the institution does not replace the semi-private aspect of forgiveness. It only
allows individuals to have a framework within which they are given the opportunity to forgive (this was one of the
goals of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa after the end of apartheid, at least as Desmond
Tutu, its chair, understood it).
Regarding the second objection, because forgiveness consists of a transformation, it is of necessity a process that
endures in time and cannot be a punctual moment. This aspect of process, as I have argued elsewhere,21 also holds
true for personal forgiveness of one individual toward another. Because of this duration, forgiveness is not a simple
“act” of the form “I forgive,” but rather a process of transformation that may lead someone to say, “I forgive.” The
act itself is unconditional, but the process needs an institutional support in order to unfold. When we differentiate the
framework of forgiveness (the institution) from the form forgiveness takes (a process that unfolds in time and needs
time), we can see that forgiveness is not the institution and, thus, forgiveness is not given by the institution, but
facilitated by it. For descendants of victims or of perpetrators, the happy memory is in fact a work of memory, which
is done in the present and made possible by forgiveness. The transformation operated by forgiveness on persons is a
transformation of the past itself into its sense.
 Let me briefly give an example of how such a change of the sense of the past is possible. Once in a conference in
France, dedicated to the memory of the victims of deportation during World War II, a participant told me that he lost
his father when he was a very young child in 1943. His father was part of the resistance movement and was arrested
and then executed by the Nazis. Several decades later the son was consulted by the authorities of his father’s
hometown, Rochefort, about the blueprint of a street plaque dedicated to his memory. After seeing the blueprint, the
son told them that the plaque should read “executed by the Nazis,” not “executed by the Germans,” as originally
planned.22 This distinction, made by someone who lost his father when he was a little child, who is thus a victim
too, in one obvious sense, does not change the “facts” – his father was executed by soldiers wearing the German
uniform – but in another existential sense it changes how the “event” bears upon him and other French people, as
well as, by association, upon the Germans. There is in this distinction a certain forgiveness – the Nazis are not the
Germans – and thus a certain rupture in the unfolding of history: What the Nazis did will not cause a reaction toward
the Germans. Against Heidegger’s understanding of the event but in accordance with Ricoeur’s views of it, this
rupture is within the understanding of the event, not outside of it. The plaque dedicated to the resistant will not
merely be part of monumental history – as a mausoleum to the past – nor antiquarian history – as if consumed by the
past – nor critical history – as if condemning the past – but part of a liberation process and a new beginning. The son
of the victim and other French people can work with Germans, as they do now in maintaining the concentration
camps in Germany and organizing visits. In this preservation of the memory of the past, the past has now become
common to both French and Germans as their shared collective memory in a new community.

Notes
1. I have discussed Ricoeur’s theory of narrative in Vandevelde (2008, 141–162, 2013, 244–259).
2. I have discussed their views on the past in Vandevelde (2016).
3. Heidegger makes a connection between these ruptures and what he calls “origin” [Ursprung] in “The Origin of
the Work of Art.” He qualifies art as what “lets truth originate [entspringen]” (Heidegger 1971, 77; 1977, 65) and
thus as an Ur-sprung, an origin or a primal leap. “Whenever art happens [geschieht] – that is, whenever there is a
beginning [Anfang] – a thrust enters history, history either begins or starts over again [fängt Geschichte erst oder
wieder an]” (Heidegger 1971, 77; 1977, 65).
4. I have examined this transition and the difference between “another” and a “new” beginning in Vandevelde
(2012, 176–177).
5. Ricoeur commented on this work in Ricoeur (1985, 423–433; 1988, 235–240; 2000, 377–384; 2004a, 287–292);
Heidegger in Heidegger (1962, 448; 1984, 396; 1996, 524f).
6. Lucien Febvre said in the same manner: “The past is a reconstitution of societies and human beings of the past by
people and for people who are engaged in the network of human realities of today” (quoted in de Certeau 1975,
18). As Michel de Certeau explains, “a reading of the past, however controlled it is by the analysis of documents,
is conducted by a reading of the present” (1975, 31).
7. As Ricoeur says, “history is quasi-fictive once the quasi-presence of the events presented ‘before the eyes of’ the
reader by a lively narrative supplements through its intuitiveness, its vividness, the elusive character of the
pastness of the past” (1985, 345; 1988, 190).
8. I have discussed this issue in Vandevelde (2008, 2013a).
9. “Debt” (Schuld) is another notion that is central in Heidegger. Ricoeur already mentions it in the third volume of
Time and Narrative. I have discussed and differentiated these two notions of debt and attestation in Vandevelde
2013a.
10. Ricoeur himself characterizes représentance as suppléance, which the English translation renders as
“supplementation” or “supplement” (2000, 367; 2004a, 567).
11. As he explained, “to resolve this enigma, I elaborated the concept of standing-for or taking-the-place-of,
signifying by this that the constructions of history are intended to be reconstructions answering to the need for a
Gegenüber. What is more, I discerned between the function of standing-for and the Gegenüber that is its correlate
a relation of indebtedness which assigns to the people of the present the task of repaying their due to the people
of the past – to the dead” (1985, 284–285; 1988, 157). Ricoeur insists on the existential aspect of this debt: “This
category of standing-for or of taking-the-place-of – reinforced by the feeling of debt – is ultimately irreducible to
the category of reference” (1985, 284–285; 1988,157).
12. See Govier (2002, 34). See also Todorov (2003, 239–240).
13. I have examined the ethical and political nature of attestation in Vandevelde 2015a.
14. As Seebald notes (2003, 10), there had been some writings about the devastation, like Heinrich Böll’s novel The
Angel Was Silent, written at the end of the 1940s, but the novel was only published in 1992.
15. The narrator explains: “I was working on my famous book about Dresden. And somewhere in there a nice man
named Seymour Lawrence gave me a three-book contract, and I said, ‘OK, the first of the three will be my
famous book about Dresden.’ The friends of Seymour Lawrence call him ‘Sam.’ And I say to Sam now: ‘Sam –
here’s the book.’ It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a
massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is
supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds” (Vonnegut 1994, 17–18).
16. Website: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/28/style/28iht-aread30-berlin.6379850.html.
17. This expression “rubble women” [Trümmerfrauen] will remain for naming those German women who cleared the
ruins and prepared the reconstruction of Germany.
18. I have discussed the notion of the “other beginning” in Vandevelde (2012, 175f).
19. See Ricoeur (1990, 115–116; 1992, 94).
20. The other aspect of frailty of action is its unpredictability. Arendt considers promise in the form of treatises,
contracts, etc., as such a remedy to unpredictability. “The remedy for unpredictability, for the chaotic uncertainty
of the future, is contained in the faculty to make and keep promises” (Arendt 1998, 237).
21. See Vandevelde (2007, 2013a, 2015b).
22. I want to thank Serge Chupin for sharing this story with me. The plaque says: “Avenue Maurice Chupin (1918–
1943) Mort pour la France Fusillé par les nazis le 3 septembre 1943.” (https://www.sudouest.fr/charente-
maritime/rochefort/la-memoire-de-maurice-chupin-honoree-8394799.php).
4 Foucault’s Interpretive Truth
Parrhesia
DOI: 10.4324/9781003348009-7

Besides Ricoeur, Michel Foucault is another philosopher who presents a view of interpretation that includes the
attitude of the interpreter and redefines truth as a practice, which includes political and ethical aspects. The main
focus of this chapter is Foucault’s project of a “hermeneutics of the subject,” which he developed in his last three
lectures at the Collège de France from 1981 to his death in 1984. Using the Greek words, Foucault says that aletheia
(truth), politeia (politics), and ethos (ethics) always go together. We mentioned earlier how little intellectual contact
there had been between Foucault and Ricoeur. The same is true of Foucault’s relations to Gadamer, his
contemporary,1 despite many common concerns and a common influence received from Heidegger.
Foucault acknowledges the latter on a few occasions, for example when saying: “Heidegger has always been for
me the essential philosopher […]. All my philosophical development has been determined by my reading of
Heidegger […]. Nietzsche and Heidegger, this was a philosophical shock!” (Foucault 2001a, 1522). Indeed, anyone
who has read Foucault from The Order of Things (1994) to his last lectures at the Collège de France on the
hermeneutics of the subject (1982–1984), can only marvel at how much Heidegger’s influence must have been at
play in his views and at how few references are made to him. When Foucault examines the genealogy of the subject
in The Hermeneutics of the Subject, answering a question from the audience, he says:

Let’s say that there have not been that many people who in the last years – I will say in the twentieth century –
have posed the question of truth. Not that many people have posed the question: What is involved in the case
of the subject and truth? And: What is the relationship of the subject to truth? What is the subject of truth, what
is the subject who speaks the truth, etcetera? As far as I am concerned, I see only two. I see only Heidegger
and Lacan. Personally, myself, you must have heard this, I have tried to reflect on all this from the side of
Heidegger and starting from Heidegger.
(2001c, 182; 2005, 189)

Despite this common Heideggerean influence and the commonality of many of their philosophical concerns,
Gadamer and Foucault did not interact with each other. While Gadamer made some general references to Foucault,
Foucault did not return the favor. The index of his massive, more than 3,400 pages long, Dits et écrits does not even
list Gadamer. The reason for the lack of interaction may be due to the fact that they saw themselves on opposite
sides when it came to philosophical investigation: Gadamer founded a “philosophical hermeneutics” while Foucault
rejected and dismissed hermeneutics for most of his career. While Gadamer put much of the emphasis on
“dialogue,” Foucault’s main focus was on “discourse” and, later on, “practices.”
Yet, despite their profound differences, they still offered two original approaches to interpretation as being
anchored in language and their approaches have several commonalities and share the same goal of avoiding the two
extreme views that language is an “expression” of some mental content and the language used causes a
“dissemination” of any intention. In addition, they view language in its use by speakers, in its performance, but a
performance that is not scripted, as pragmatics theorizes it. The performance that Gadamer and Foucault present,
independently of each other, is a living one – a dialogue for Gadamer and a drama for Foucault. What they
reintroduce in the speech act is, in a sense, the perlocutionary that the speech act theory had not theorized. But they
reintroduce it not as external to speech, as if it were a mere effect on listeners, but precisely as what gives traction to
speech and has a return effect on speakers. For both Gadamer and Foucault, speaking means accepting a position of
vulnerability, of not knowing at the moment of speech what the result will be. Dialogue, Gadamer tells us, may take
an abrupt turn, putting the speaker on the spot as someone who must respond to questioning, who must answer the
inquisitive demand of interlocutors. For Foucault, speaking is a “drama” that requires courage on the part of the
speaker for being put on the stage of a representation, which consists in telling the truth. In both cases of dialogue
and drama, the speaker is transformed by the speech.
Because Gadamer’s and Foucault’s own interpretations are made through language – the interpretation they
perform and the works they wrote – and because the object of their investigation is of a linguistic form – documents
or books – they apply their views on speech as event to their own task as interpreters. Understanding (Gadamer) or
analysis (Foucault) is an event as well. To say, as they do, that their own investigation is an event, Geschehen or
événement, is not just the view that an account “takes place” at some time and, thus, in an obvious sense, “happens,”
nor the view that there may be a “performative” aspect to thinking or speaking such that an “act” of interpretation or
speech “happened.” The view they both defend is a two-prong approach. First, the ontological make-up of things is
permeated through and through by language (Gadamer) or is formed discursively (Foucault). Second, their own
enterprise of description is also historically situated. Thus, their own discourse tries to account for the singularity of
what they investigate from the vantage point of the singularity that their discourse represents.
This leads them to reject the commonsense approach, so entrenched in philosophy, that the object of
investigation is static and has an intrinsic self-identity independently of any discursive framework in which this
object becomes salient to human concerns. They thus accept the view that there are multiple accounts –
“interpretations” for Gadamer and “discursive formations” for Foucault. However, against historicism or relativism,
they both claim that the “what” that is interpreted or discursively formed cannot be appealed to as an independent
entity over against so-called multiple accounts. Interpreters and investigators operate from their present and bring
their present with them when approaching their object of investigation. Both reject a direct realist view – according
to which we can recover what really happened and what was really meant – and a reconstructive view – according to
which we project our own questions and ideas onto what we investigate. Both recognize that the correlation between
the investigation and the object of investigation is in fact productive of history. When we investigate what is no
longer present, we make history. This new approach has significant consequences for what we call the truth by
accounting for the place of the concrete investigator in the discourse about truth.
In the first section, I examine the background of Foucault’s views on hermeneutics, which he rejected in his
earlier works but came to adopt when naming his last important project on subjectivity. In the second section, I
discuss his hermeneutics of singularity, which tries to attend to the singularity of the object of interpretation instead
of treating it as a variation of some universal notion, such as subjectivity, madness, criminality, etc. In so doing,
thinking about a past object, as Foucault does, offers us new ways to learn about how to think differently about our
present. In the third section, I examine how Foucault describes the subject as a practice in the Hellenistic period,
with a focus on the practice of truth-telling, or parrhesia.

4.1 The ambivalent status of hermeneutics

There is an apparent paradox in Michel Foucault’s attitude toward hermeneutics. While critical of its goal and
method, he exemplifies at its best the qualities of a rigorous interpreter, whether in his powerful descriptions of
some periods of Western culture or in his painstaking interpretation of Hellenistic philosophy. Foucault’s views on
hermeneutics can be divided into three periods: (1) In The Order of Things, hermeneutics is presented as a kind of
discourse that can be dated in its arising and thereby relativized in any universal claim it can make; (2) In
Archaeology of Knowledge hermeneutics is mentioned as a method of investigation that archaeology criticizes and
claims to overcome; and (3) In his genealogy period, for example in The Hermeneutics of the Subject, hermeneutics
is co-opted as a new approach to the self.
In The Order of Things, Foucault uses the word “hermeneutics” in two different senses. He characterizes the age
of the Renaissance as the age of hermeneutics and describes the new discipline of hermeneutics in the 19th century –
what he calls “exegesis” – as a form of compensation for the treatment of language as an autonomous object.
Regarding the Renaissance, Foucault argues that in the 16th century the prominent role played by similitude in order
to make sense of the world was made possible by the combination of hermeneutics and semiology. By hermeneutics
he means “the totality of the learning and skills that enable one to make the signs speak and to discover their
meaning” (1994, 29). These two aspects of hermeneutics and semiology represent in fact what will become the
discipline of hermeneutics in the 19th century. Without detailed descriptions, for example of its origin in Ast and
Schleiermacher and further development in Dilthey, Foucault only mentions hermeneutics under the name of
“exegesis” as a discipline that arose when people like Raynouard, Bopp, or the Grimm brothers focused on the
organic unity of specific natural languages and turned these languages into new “natural” objects of scientific
investigations in philology or linguistics. The treatment of language as a mere object of investigation caused what
Foucault calls a compensation. This compensation took the form of a “formalization,” which started to find
application in the human sciences, of a “literature,” which became a particular use of language that resists theory,
and of “exegesis.” Exegesis or hermeneutics experienced a renewal of interest due to the fact that languages are not
only organic unities but are also embedded in a tradition and have acquired in the course of time layers of social and
cultural influences that can be “interpreted.”
Besides treating hermeneutics as a discipline, Foucault also takes issue with the very method of hermeneutics in
the Archaeology of Knowledge. By tracing the genealogy of hermeneutics in his diachronic perspective in The Order
of Things, Foucault had already contextualized the “rigor” and “principles” of the discipline and showed that the so-
called discipline of hermeneutics was rather an effect of the disappearance of discourse as it was prominent in the
Classical Age. Archaeology of Knowledge mounts a full-fledged attack on the hermeneutic method. The objection
Foucault raises is that hermeneutics is driven by an impetus to cross the level of signs and retrieve behind them the
level of meaning, whether intentional or unconscious. Hermeneutics, Foucault says, is “an interpretive discipline”
that aims at disclosing “another, better-hidden discourse” (1972, 139) and becomes in the process “allegorical”
(1972, 139), one “thing” – signs – referring to another “thing” – meaning. As linked to this impetus that defines it –
the “understanding better” of Schleiermacher and Dilthey – hermeneutics raises a paradoxical claim to universality.
On the one hand, when dealing with entities, it is compelled to function at a level of description that aims at doing
justice to the entity under investigation by attending to its specificity and its historical context, that is to say, by
attending to its singularity and to that which makes it irreplaceable. On the other hand, the hermeneutic description
makes a claim to universality by showing that this singularity and irreplaceability can be made intelligible to all; as a
result, it is transferrable or translatable into another contemporary context. There is universality precisely because
there is a passage from one level of meaning – signs – to another level – what they mean for us. In this way, we can
still read Homer or make sense of the History of the Peloponnesian Wars, for example. This universality of the
hermeneutic enterprise is paradoxical because the whole motivation for interpreting Homer or the Peloponnesian
Wars is precisely to recover the specific features, characters, and originality, that is: the singularity of these
phenomena. Now, this singularity, it seems, can only be reached when translated into another framework of
reference – the interpreter’s or the audience’s framework. This was roughly the same criticism Gadamer levelled
against Dilthey’s notion of “re-living” (Nacherleben) a work of the past.
Instead of attempting to go back to the arising of meaning and locating it as a psychological moment, even if
unconscious, which is manifested by autonomous signs, as hermeneutics does, archaeology treats meaning as an
event that can be described in its conditions of possibility. Since signs are treated in their materiality, archaeology is
not constrained by the boundaries of particular works or the self-identity of intentions. In its comparison between
works of biology and works of philology, and without following what “authors” may have meant, archaeology
renders irrelevant any effort to recover an author’s meaning, to understand authors better (as the hermeneutics of
Schleiermacher does) or differently than they understood themselves (as in Gadamer’s hermeneutics). Archaeology
“is not an interpretive discipline: It does not seek another, better-hidden discourse. It refuses to be ‘allegorical’”
(1972, 139). Because archaeology deals with the materiality of sources and is committed to “the intrinsic description
of monuments” (1972, 7), its description is “purged of all anthropologism” (1972, 16). This also means that signs
are bound to their historical conditions and do not exert their semiotic function across centuries.
This focus on the material and historical conditions of knowledge allows the archaeological description to escape
the tyranny of both the propositional level of thought and the ontological nature of things. Regarding the
propositional level, Foucault argues that what he calls “statement” allows him to reach the level of an “event” that
“neither the language [langue] nor the meaning can quite exhaust” (1972, 28). The regularities that archaeology
describes among statements or between statements and objects lead to “discursive formations” that generate, in the
mathematical sense of a matrix, intentions and meanings. Human beings themselves are shaped by these discursive
formations and, thus, are not in charge or in possession of such formations.
Regarding the ontological nature of things, archaeology brings to the fore a level of “sense” that escapes the
level of things or that can, in Foucault’s terms, “dispense” with things (1972, 47). The analysis of discursive
formations can reveal that an apparent “stability of things,” which are manufactured under different material and
historical conditions, does not prove that things belong to the same “order” of things. Foucault gives an example
mentioned by Adam Smith after visiting a pin factory. A single worker, as would have been the case in the classical
age, could produce between 1 and 20 pins a day, whereas if, as Smith saw in a factory, the production is broken
down into 18 operations and if these 18 steps are distributed among 10 workers, these 10 workers can produce
48,000 pins a day, thus the equivalent of 4,800 pins per worker (compared to between 1 and 20 before
industrialization) (Smith 2007, 8–9, cited in Foucault 1994, 224).2 For Foucault, this means that the pin produced by
an artisan before industrialization and the apparently same pin manufactured on an industrial scale rely on two
different discursive formations.
This claim of archaeology to reach a level that is below subjectivity and below things, as well as the hope to
escape hermeneutics, runs against the significant limitations of the results that archaeology can show. While
Foucault clearly does not want to describe what he calls “the spirit or science of a period,” his “positivistic” attitude
of description is compromised in The Order of Things by his “hermeneutic” decision to choose his own fields of
investigation. He himself wholeheartedly acknowledges that, had he chosen other fields, the results may have been
different. He even accepts the objection he raises to himself: “Could not pre-Lavoisier chemistry, or Euler’s
mathematics, or Vico’s history have invalidated all the analyses to be found in The Order of Things?” (1972, 158).
He grants that his analyses are limited because he wanted to focus on “one region of interpositivity” (1972, 159). By
“interpositivity” he means an intersection of positive data coming from different disciplines or areas of knowledge,
like those he chose for The Order of Things (life, labor, language) and at different periods of time: the Renaissance,
the Classical Age (17–18th century), and modern times (19th until mid-20th century). For example, he showed that
the classification of living entities in 18th century natural history was made according to the same rules of
representation as enunciated by general grammar so that natural history in fact used a grammar of classification. To
require that his limited analysis be corroborated by other fields of investigation (such as chemistry, mathematics, or
history) would be, he argues, to require that he describe a Weltanschauung, i.e., precisely that which he rejects. “The
horizon of archaeology, therefore, is not a science, a rationality, a mentality, a culture; it is a tangle of
interpositivities whose limits and points of intersection cannot be fixed in a single operation” (1972, 159).
According to Foucault, the goal is not to offer a unity of the objects of investigation but to celebrate their diversity
by identifying several configurations. “Archaeological comparison does not have a unifying, but a diversifying,
effect” (1972, 160).
If the results of archaeology are only valid for the fields chosen by the archaeological method and cannot be
extended to other fields and, thus, cannot be submitted to the scrutiny of other disciplines, it seems that archaeology
is ill-named. For the way the investigation is presented in The Order of Things, at the very least, suggests a kind of
rigorous historical investigation that ought to be able to respond to objections and counter-examples, even if they
come from fields other than those examined by Foucault. If now, as Foucault acknowledges in Archaeology of
Knowledge, the results are only valid for the fields investigated and no generalizations should be made to other
fields, we are in fact dealing more with the genealogy of a discipline, like economy, biology, or linguistics, than
with a systematic study of regularities leading to discursive formations.
As a consequence of these limitations of the archaeological method, the term “quasi-transcendentals” seems to
be misused. By this term Foucault wanted to characterize “Life, Labour, and Language” as the three general
“categories” organizing the three epistemai or systems of knowledge of the Renaissance, the Classical Age, and
Modernity. These three categories were used as an alternative to “the transcendental field of subjectivity” (1994,
250). If, as Foucault later acknowledged, chemistry, mathematics or history could be governed by other categories
than life, labor, and language, then these latter categories seem arbitrary, fulfilling an ad hoc function, rather than
being “quasi-transcendentals.”
It may be this drastic limitation of the claims of archaeology that led to a change of focus in Foucault’s works
toward a genealogy. This came with the paradox that genealogy can better and more successfully accommodate the
hermeneutic method that archaeology had previously rejected. Foucault uses the genealogical method on a variety of
topics, such as the prison system and the techniques utilized to shape and mold the individual. He came to find the
unifying theme of his investigations in the “practice of the self.” This is what he calls “the hermeneutics of the
subject,” which represents a third phase, after the archaeological and the genealogical periods. Let us note that the
distinction of these three periods is about a rather short period of time, given Foucault’s untimely death at the age of
58. Between the publication of Naissance de la Clinique in 1963 and his last lectures in 1984, there are only twenty-
one years. While methodologically useful, the three “periods” within these twenty-one years cannot be strict
separations.
In a retrospective self-interpretation in the lecture course Le gouvernement de soi et des autres of 1982–1983,
Foucault discerns three axes in his work: the axis of things, of behaviors, and of modes of being a subject. The first
axis corresponds to his archaeological period, but he claims retrospectively that in fact what mattered to him at the
time were the experiences people have, through which they live and investigate. He was interested in determining
the extent to which these experiences during the Renaissance, the Classical Age, and the 19th century were forms of
“knowledge” (savoir) as a matrix of bodies of knowledge (connaissances). Archaeology is a form of historical
analysis, but one that focuses on the forms of veridiction (2008a, 6–7; 2008b, 5–6). By “veridiction” Foucault means
the fact that before that which is said can be assessed as true – the dictum as verum – there needs to be a true saying
– a dicere that is verum. Things were thus central, but only insofar as they were articulated by discourses with their
respective regime of truth.
The second axis of behaviors corresponds to Foucault’s genealogical period when the focus is on the forms of
power that are at play in the manner in which behaviors are categorized and made controllable. Foucault applies this
method to the prison system and the techniques that shape and mold the individual so as to render, as the formula
goes, bodies docile. In this genealogical period the axis is constituted by the different forms of savoir, i.e., a matrix
of bodies of knowledge, understood as a set of norms in a society that distinguishes that which is normal from that
which is deviant. Despite the use of the word “power” or the expression “power/knowledge,” Foucault says that he
was not interested in a history of domination but rather in what he calls a historical analysis of procedures of
governmentality. The forms of savoir are also a matrix of behaviors in the sense that this savoir leads to techniques
and procedures that regulate behaviors. In his investigations of themes such as madness and incarceration, the focus
was also, he retrospectively claims, on the kind of experiences that were associated with madness or criminality as
well as the kind of experiences the institutions of psychiatric hospitals or the prison system made possible for those
in the institution and outside.
The third axis of his work is about the modes of being a subject, or the care of the self, what Foucault himself
calls “the hermeneutics of the subject.” This third axis is not about a theory of the subject or a theory of subjectivity,
but rather about a historical analysis of the pragmatic of the self. The “practice of the self” or the “care of the self,”
which was also the title of the third volume of the History of Sexuality, can be seen, retrospectively, as already being
an inverted form of the work done in his previous studies. To the outside structures in which things find their order,
that is, around the first axis of things in the archaeological period, there correspond experiences through which
subjects can make statements that are validated. Things offer a space of experience or an occasion for experience
through which the subjects form themselves. The world or the things are thus not well-delineated entities, but that
which offers trials and suffering, pleasure and joy, and it is through these experiences that things and subjects gain
their stability, albeit in ephemeral and transient formations (Foucault 1994, 386). To the institutions that render the
self docile, that is, around the second axis of behaviors in the genealogical period, there corresponds a self that
forms itself through these institutions and through the experiences made possible by such institutions.
Such a retrospective re-interpretation allows Foucault to claim, as he does in Le gouvernement de soi et des
autres, that in his early work on madness he was certainly not interested in the phenomenon of madness as an
invariant object across centuries, nor as a series of attitudes toward madness across time. All along, he says, his
interest had been in madness as an experience in European culture. He retrospectively sees this experience along the
three axes mentioned above: an experience as a form of savoir and thus as a matrix of connaissances (medical,
sociological, psychological), as a form of normativity and thus as a matrix of behaviors (what is deviant in society,
what is normal, what is the proper attitude toward the normal and the deviant), and as a form of being a subject and
thus as a matrix of modes of being for the subject (to be normal with regard to being mad) (2009, 5; 2011, 3).
He even claims that his later focus on parrhesia, i.e., telling the truth as a practice of the self, was already
included in his previous work as answering the following question: “From which practices, through which types of
discourses has one tried to tell the truth about the mad subject or the delinquent subject? From which discursive
practices has one constituted as object of possible knowledge the speaking subject, the laboring subject, the living
subject?” (2009, 5; 2011, 3). In all three axes, Foucault’s investigation remarkably proceeds without appealing either
to progress and continuity or universals and invariants. Instead, it focuses on ruptures. In each, Foucault brings out
the contingency or the event-character of what he describes, and he does this to the greatest degree in the third axis,
the hermeneutics of the subject as presented in his last lectures at the Collège de France from 1982 to his death in
1984.
His sympathetic use of the term “hermeneutics” for naming his own enterprise in his last lectures, despite his
rejection of hermeneutics in his archaeology and genealogy, is not a change of heart on his part but rather a
subversive use of the term “hermeneutics.” He needs the term because the key aspect of the practice of the self in the
Hellenistic period is indeed interpretation, and Foucault’s “readings” and “analyses” of the texts of this period are
neither merely “archaeological” nor merely “genealogical,” but rather interpretive in nature. However, it is a non-
traditional hermeneutics, which focuses on the singularity of this practice of the self. It is Foucault’s wager that there
is a manner of interpreting that does not “translate” the object of interpretation into another medium, but remains
focused on the event, seen as undifferentiated from that which is interpreted. He attempts to interpret the practice of
the self in the Hellenistic period without reference to later practices and outside our current framework of reference,
which is centered around the subject of rights as developed by liberalism. I call this method a “hermeneutics of
singularity” in order to name the interpretive enterprise – hermeneutics – and its subversive aspect – singularity – an
enterprise that is different from the other two, archaeological and genealogical methods.
The expression “hermeneutics of the subject” that Foucault uses is ambiguous. By this, he characterizes the kind
of practice of the self he discovers in the Hellenistic period: Subjects “interpret” themselves. He also uses the
expressions “the subject’s exegesis of himself” (Foucault 2001c, 288; 2005, 301) or “the hermeneutic attitude
towards oneself” (Foucault 2001c, 483; 2005, 503). However, the expression “hermeneutics of the subject” suggests
rather strongly that it also names Foucault’s own enterprise along the third axis of the modes of being a subject.
4.2 A hermeneutics of singularity

In his last lectures, Foucault does not investigate the essence of subjectivity or a history of the subject in Western
thought. Instead of an epistemological approach that would put Socrates’ gnothi seauton (“Know thyself”) in
continuation with Descartes’ cogito sum (“I think, I am”), Foucault’s specific and idiosyncratic hermeneutics
focuses on the experience of the self: The self sees itself, experiences itself, and forms itself. In such a view of the
self as a practice (instead of a substance or an essence), the world and others are part of an experience within which
a self comes to form itself. The goal is not to “interpret” the self, but to accompany its disclosure to itself, as it were,
by following the experiences through which a self comes to understand itself or manifest itself. This is more a
“hermeneutic attitude” than a hermeneutic method, and it allows Foucault to revisit historical practices, such as
askesis or parrhesia in the Stoics, in order to show that they are in fact “practices of the self.” Parrhesia, for
example, is a practice of truth-telling or being true to oneself. This experience of the truth, or this relation between
subject and truth, makes it clear that the self does not lie in anything that is stable or fixed beneath the level of
experience, but rather the self consists of a set of experiences so that, as such, the self is a practice.
The hermeneutics of the subject provides a method of investigation that deals with “objects” that do not pertain
to archaeology, in the sense that the experience of the self is different from a discursive formation at the basis of an
object. Besides disrupting the common views on the self, that either the self only arose with modernity or that there
is a continuity between Socrates and Descartes, Foucault’s hermeneutics also tempers some of his own
pronouncements in The Order of Things. There he said that even human beings are a discursive formation, which
was only theorized in the 19th century with the newly established social and human sciences, leading him to the
conclusion that the notion of “human being” is in fact a 19th century invention. At the end of the book, Foucault
even predicts an end of this notion of human being, writing that “man will return to that serene non-existence in
which he was formerly maintained by the imperious unity of discourse” (1994, 386) or even more provokingly:

If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no
more than sense the possibility […] were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at
the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in
sand at the edge of the sea.
(1994, 387)

The notion of the practice of the self, thus, not only offers an alternative to any traditional metaphysics of the self,
but also mitigates Foucault’s own views about his apocalyptical breaks between epistemai taking place outside the
experience of the self (in his archaeological period) as well as his focus on structures of power that subdue the
subject outside its experience (in the genealogical period). Foucault’s hermeneutics comes to recover its original
humility of being an adjuvant to something that shows itself or somebody who attests to its own self.
We can identify at least two goals in his last lectures at the Collège de France on the “hermeneutics of the
subject”: First, to attend to the singularity of the object of interpretation (in this case, the kind of subjectivity that
was at play in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy) so that it is not a variation of what we already know; and,
second, to focus on the event in thought in such a way that we also realize how we think by thinking about a past
object. In order to reach these two goals, Foucault makes two crucial hermeneutic decisions. The first is to immunize
himself against the interpretive continuity between, on the one hand, the ancient Greek and Roman understanding of
“subject” and, on the other, what we, within the liberal tradition, understand by that term. As in The Order of Things
and Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault tries to find a level of description beneath the level of well delineated
entities that can be observed and categorized. This protects him against the traditional gesture of hermeneutics,
wherein the specificity of that which is interpreted is presented through a kind of translation that is amenable to what
interpreters and their audience can understand. Such a “hermeneutic” presentation generates a continuity that only
exists within the retrospective perspective. Against continuity, Foucault pursues a form of interpretation that will
treat its object – subjectivity in the Hellenistic period – as isolated and insulated from contemporary views.
Foucault’s second hermeneutic decision concerns the kind of “history” he pursues. Foucault’s concern is not just
historical or philological. Because he is not interested in a continuity between past and present, “history” for him is
not merely about the past but also about our present. By showing the rather original ways the ancient Greeks and
Romans used to approach something, being a subject for instance, Foucault also points out what is missing in our
contemporary views. The fact that he provides such a vibrant account of these long gone practices makes them alive
again by pointing to their absence, as it were. This hermeneutics of the subject, thus, indirectly shows the way in
which we can apply to ourselves what Foucault discovers in the Hellenistic period. By showing the singularity of a
practice in the Hellenistic period, Foucault also claims that, by doing so, he isolates the event-character of thought.
The history he pursues liberates our ways of thinking by making available alternative modes of thought. When he
shows that being a subject in the Hellenistic period was a practice made of exercises and meditations and was
therefore a “production” or a “poetics” of subjectivity, he also points out how very different our ways of
understanding subjectivity could have been and how they are still susceptible to change. This is not about
appropriating Hellenistic views or envisaging a revival of Stoicism. It is neither retrieval nor renaissance, but it is
rupture. By creating a rupture in the continuity between the past and the present, interpretation unsettles the present
and may allow for alternative modes of thought to become available.
The aim of the hermeneutics of singularity consists in approaching the event of the thought that developed in the
Hellenistic period through interpretation but without losing the event-character of what is interpreted. We have
encountered the notion of event in Gadamer, Heidegger, and Ricoeur. Foucault certainly is an heir to this tradition.
The event of thought means that thinking takes place in specific conditions, historical, cultural, economic, and is
thus not only accountable in terms of contents of thoughts (judgments, propositions, works). To understand what the
ancient Greeks thought, for example, only in terms of propositions and judgments would consists in ascribing to
them what we currently would think if using the words they used. While this is widely done in some circles, for
example in many translations of Plato’s works in the Loeb Library, in which Plato appears as a fellow analytic
philosopher concerned with the same logical and epistemological issues as 20th century Anglo-American
philosophers, what is missed in the process is precisely the “event” or the happening of these thoughts at that time in
ancient Greece. In short, what is missed is their singularity or what makes these thoughts unique as those thoughts
instead of those ascribed by the interpreters. We recall that Gadamer’s notion of re-enactment aimed at recovering
the event-character of the work.
The effort to recover a singularity may seem paradoxical since Foucault mentally travels from the 20th century
Paris back to Ancient Greece and Rome. It could be objected that he brings his own world with him – its gaze, its
assumptions, and ways of interpreting. If this objection were to hold, we would be forced to ask, “how is this
different from Schleiermacher’s ‘understanding better’ or Gadamer’s fusion of horizons?” Foucault’s answer is to
present the hermeneutics of the subject that he finds in the Hellenistic period as also being part of a history of the
present. He writes about his own method in “What is Enlightenment?”:

This criticism is not transcendental, and its goal is not that of making a metaphysics possible: It is genealogical
in its design and archaeological in its method. Archaeological – and not transcendental – in the sense that it
will not seek to identify the universal structures of all knowledge or of all possible moral action, but will seek
to treat the instances of discourse that articulate what we think, say, and do as so many historical events. And
this critique will be genealogical in the sense that it will not deduce from the form of what we are what it is
impossible for us to do and to know; but it will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we
are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think.
(2001d, 1393; 1984a, 46)

This kind of investigation – looking for singularities – is a style of philosophizing that aims at conveying the
meaning of any phenomenon under investigation, but a meaning that is of a specific kind: It is a meaning that is,
Foucault tells us, “variable, historical, and never universal” (2001c, 444; 2005, 462). He qualifies such an effort to
find the singularity of an event as a “parrhesiastic attitude,” considering it as a possible philosophical attitude in our
present time. This focus on singularity led him to situate the objects of his investigation in their own specific
historical contexts – whether analysis of wealth, life, language (in the first axis of his work) or madness, prison,
sexuality (in the second axis) or subjectivity (in the third axis).
We can identify three levels at which we can use the term “event” across the different periods of Foucault’s
thought. The first sense of “event” is methodological and pertains to the way Foucault treats the different discourses
or utterances that he examined in the archaeological period. They are “statements,” which he understands as
“events” and not “documents.” But in the course of his development, Foucault came to realize more and more that
his own approach consisted in “turning into events” that which he investigated. This is the second sense of “event,”
mainly in the genealogical period, in which his analysis slows down the continuity and progress of history in order
to detect the “events” that have ruptured it. He calls this a “procedure of analysis” and created in French the word
événementialiser, “to turn into event” (2001b, 842) to name this kind of analysis. Such an analysis “produces
events” or “turns into an event” that which it analyzes. Finally, besides using the notion of “event” to name the
object of his investigation and the approach he chose for investigating such an object, he also theorizes his own
work as a “pragmatics,” seeing his own works as “events.” This is the third sense of “event,” which he characterizes
as a “dramaturgy” (2001a, 574). His own works, he says, set something on stage and “dramatize” what he
investigates. It means that, when looking at Foucault’s own works, we can see their pragmatic nature as an event, in
the sense that the setting up of the drama in which what these works investigate unfolded. Let us examine each of
these three levels of “event.”

4.2.1 The object of investigation as an event

In The order of Things and Archaeology of Knowledge Foucault uses the notion of event to characterize the specific
difference of a “statement” compared to a sentence, a proposition, or a performative.

We must grasp the statement in the exact specificity of its occurrence; determine its conditions of existence, fix
at least its limits, establish its correlations with other statements that may be connected with it, and show what
other forms of statement it excludes […] the question proper to such an analysis might be formulated in this
way: What is this specific existence that emerges from what is said and nowhere else?
(1972, 28)

Giving as an example the sentence “dreams fulfill desires,” which has been used by Plato and Freud among others,
he argues that, although we have the same sentence (once translated) and the same proposition, which made the
translation possible, we have two different statements (1972, 103). Plato and Freud think within two different
frameworks, share a different understanding of what a human being is, and do not use the same “methods.” Plato’s
dialectic is not Freud’s positivist psychology of consciousness. We can see the difference between Plato’s and
Freud’s statements by using the four parameters Foucault mentions in The Archaeology of Knowledge in order to
identify a statement.
The four parameters of a statement are: (1) The referential, (2) The subject, (3) The associated field, and (4) The
material conditions. The starting point of a statement is not a “referent” that would be assumed to exist in its self-
evident status as universal and, as such, susceptible to be “referred to,” attracting a statement about it. Rather,
Foucault says that discourses produce a “referential” in the sense of a range of objects or a kind of objects that are
brought into existence, precisely by being taken as referents by such discourses. Even though Plato and Freud may
indeed utter the same proposition when speaking about dreams, the referential of their statement is different: Plato’s
interest in the psyche and passions, on the one hand, and Freud’s interest in drives and the unconscious, on the other.
What Foucault wants to emphasize is that, by describing what has been said as an event, we offer an additional
layer of description to what the history of ideas or the history of a discipline can do. Once we focus on the event of
the arising of sentences and discourses in time, the referent of those sentences loses its stable and self-evident aspect
and comes to be seen as the object produced by those sentences:

A statement is not confronted (face to face, as it were) by a correlate – or the absence of a correlate – as a
proposition has (or has not) a referent, or as a proper noun designates someone (or no one). It is linked rather to
a “referential” [référentiel] that is made up not of “things,” “facts,” “realities,” or “beings,” but of laws of
possibility, rules of existence for the objects that are named, designated, or described within it, and for the
relations that are affirmed or denied in it.
(1972, 91)

The second parameter of a statement is the subject as the instance at the origin of the statement. This subject is
neither a psychological subject, which would, for example, utter a sentence, nor a transcendental subject of
propositions guaranteeing their validity. If Plato and Freud can only mean something by what the referential of their
statements makes possible, Plato and Freud are not simply subjects as authors of their own thoughts, in the sense of
“the cause, origin, or starting-point of the phenomenon of the written or spoken articulation of a sentence” (Foucault
1972, 95) or the “meaningful intention which, silently anticipating words, orders them like the visible body of its
intuition” (1972, 95). The subject of the statement is not “identical with the author of the formulation” as its origin
and guarantee. Authors are rather placeholders, as those who themselves have been made possible by a certain set of
circumstances and a certain kind of discourse to utter the sentences they did and be understood as meaningful and
relevant. The subject has in fact been prepared, has been granted its status and given voice by a certain discursive
practice, of Greek thinking (in the case of the subject Plato) or 19th–20th century European scientific clinical
discourse (in the case of the subject Freud). As a place-holder, the subject of a statement is “a particular, vacant
place that may in fact be filled by different individuals” (1972, 95). For the kind of investigation Foucault conducts,
the issue is no longer to find out what was meant, but rather to determine “what position can and must be occupied
by any individual if he is to be the subject of it” (1972, 96).
The third parameter is an associated field. A statement does not stand in isolation but is part of a set of other
statements that are linked to practices. For example, the notion of “homicidal mania,” which appeared at the end of
the 19th century (Foucault 1978, 7), could be talked about – and thus be meaningful – because of the arising of a
new field or a new discourse, psychiatry. Foucault claims that the proposition including the phrase “homicidal
mania” is dated in its birth. The consequence is that, when seen in its historical situation – as a statement – it also
loses its validity across time and, in this case, has indeed lost it – we no longer use this notion. The statement has a
repeatability that is limited by the field with which it is associated and cannot be repeated outside such a field.
Foucault can then claim that the statements he identifies in the Classical Age are not only different from statements
made in the 19th century, but that they could not have been made in the 19th century. “One cannot speak of anything
at any time” (1972, 44). With regard to Plato’s and Freud’s statement “dreams fulfil desires,” the “associated field”
of Plato’s “psychology is rather different from the associated field of Freud’s positivist psychoanalysis. For
example, what Pato calls thumos, which is the part of the soul mediating between reason (logos) and desires
(epithumia), partakes in both reason and desires, thus neither a mere drive nor a mere desire. There is no exact
correspondence to this in Freud’s psychology.3
The fourth parameter is about the material conditions. The materiality of the statement does not only consist in
the words said and recorded, but also in the social, economic, and political conditions that obtain at the time of the
utterance. It is precisely because of these material conditions that the term “archaeology” can be used meaningfully.
Although it is not a task of digging anything material, it is a task of uncovering conditions of possibility that lie
behind the statement so that the event of its production can be isolated, identified, and described. Again here, the
material conditions for Plato’s statement in an ancient city governed by the values of constant warfare are very
different from the material conditions of Freud’s statement at the time of the flourishing of the experimental
sciences.
The advantage of treating statements as events is that both the thing and the word are “bracketed” and the trap of
the reference is avoided: We are not dealing with a word referring to a thing or a concept having an extension,
regardless of time and history. As Foucault says, “from the kind of analysis I have undertaken, words are
deliberately absent as are things” (1972, 48). Or more forcefully:

What, in short, we wish to do is to dispense with “things.” To “depresentify” them [de-présentifier] […]. To
substitute for the enigmatic “treasure” of things anterior to discourse, the regular formation of objects that
emerge only in discourse. To define these objects without reference to their ground in things [sans référence
au fond des choses], but by relating them to the body of rules that enable them to form as objects of a discourse
and thus constitute the conditions of their historical appearance.
(1972, 47–48. Translation modified)4

The analysis of statements, then, is a historical analysis, but one that avoids all interpretation: “It does not question
things said as to what they are hiding, what they were “really” saying, in spite of themselves, the unspoken element
that they contain […]; but, on the contrary, it questions them as to their mode of existence […] what it means for
them to have appeared when and where they did – they and no others” (1972, 109). In our example above, Plato
could not mean what Freud meant and vice-versa.
This focus on statement instead of sentences or propositions allows Foucault to speak of a “historical a priori.”
This paradoxical formulation aims at identifying a condition of possibility for discourse, but one that is not logical or
formal. It is not “a condition of validity for judgments,” but “a condition of reality for statements” (1972, 127). By
this he means “the conditions of emergence of statements, the laws of their coexistence with others, the specific
form of their mode of being, the principles according to which they survive, become transformed, and disappear”
(1972, 127). When investigating these conditions of emergence, we in fact investigate the “archive” of a certain
discursive era and this investigation is properly called an “archaeology of knowledge.” The “archive” is supposed to
name “that which, at the very root of the statement-event, and in that which embodies it, defines at the outset the
system of its enunciability […]. It is that which defines the mode of occurrence of the statement-thing; it is the
system of its functioning” (1972, 129).5
Critics have rightly pointed out the methodological difficulty that this archaeology cannot be applied to the
present so that the analysis it provides does not account for the ground on which it stands. Foucault wholeheartedly
acknowledges the first point: “It is not possible for us to describe our own archive, since it is from within these rules
that we speak, since it is that which gives to what we can say – and to itself, the object of our discourse – its modes
of appearance, its forms of existence and coexistence, its system of accumulation, historicity, and disappearance”
(1972, 130).
Regarding the second point – the position from where he speaks – Foucault’s views have shifted quite
significantly. At the time of The Archaeology of Knowledge he responded that it was not his task to determine the
standpoint from which he speaks but a task for his interpreters and critics.

For the moment, and as far ahead as I can see, my discourse, far from determining the locus in which it speaks,
is avoiding the ground on which it could find support […] its task is to make differences: to constitute them as
objects, to analyse them, and to define their concept.
(1972, 205)6

He simply claimed for his own discoveries a certain positivity that can serve as a “diagnosis” (1972, 206).7 As a
correlate of this diagnosis, he also accepts the fact that his own discourse is not anchored, but remains free floating,
even with regard to its relevance. “I accept that my discourse may disappear with the figure that has borne it so far”
(1972, 208).
Later, he came to theorize his own situation and specify the kind of diagnosis he was doing. He did this in two
steps: in presenting his analysis as a way of treating objects as “events” and in arguing that his own works are a
“pragmatics,” dramatizing some phenomena and thereby contributing to “the thinking of one’s own history” (1984b,
15; 1985, 9). The first step of “turning into events” (événementialisation) is the second sense in which Foucault uses
the term “event,” besides the sense of “event” used in the archaeological method.

4.2.2 Analysis as a “production of events” (événementialisation)

Foucault characterizes his overall enterprise as an effort “to treat the instances of discourse that articulate what we
think, say, and do as so many historical events” (2001d, 1393; 1984a, 46). This is the second sense in which
Foucault uses the term “event.” He invents the word événementialisation (2001a, 842) to name this process of
“making something an event” or “turning something into an event.” He calls it a “procedure of analysis.” This
methodological principle of interpretation consists in injecting ruptures in what may appear as the continuity and
linearity of a historical development. “I consider history as a succession of fragments, a succession of chance
occurrences [hasards], of violences, of ruptures” (2001a, 82).
I see four components in this interpretive strategy of ruptures. First, it consists in “causing a singularity to irrupt:
to show that it was not necessary after all, it was not so self-evident after all that mad people were recognized as
mental patients; it was not so self-evident after all that the only thing to do with delinquents was to incarcerate them”
(2001a, 842). Instead of having a linear causal explanation, we can now see many connections, which Foucault calls
a “multiplication of finer causes” (démultiplication causale). For example, the practice of incarceration as an event
can be analyzed through the process of penalization, of internment, of imprisonment proper to criminal justice, etc.
(2001a, 842).
Second, and negatively, the strategy of rupture undermines our position in time as a reference point from which
we can look back at history as that which preceded us and prepared us. The problem of taking oneself as a reference
point is that past epochs are viewed as preparing us through what look like tentative and misguided preparatory
steps. This is often how disciplines tend to see their pre-history: They have evolved by unmasking previous views as
pseudo-science, discarded theories have been supplanted by new ones, and interpretations are progressing toward a
telos of better methodological rigor and accuracy. Besides reducing the past to a glorification of the present, the
privilege of hindsight also confines the past to be a variation of what we know so that the past is tamed and rendered
innocuous, as what can be safely discarded for a better present.
Third, and positively, the strategy of ruptures unmasks our own contingency by taking away any self-evidence
our science, theories, and unassailable concepts – truth, madness, subject of rights – may have. This takes the form
of neutralizing “referents” or what Foucault calls a “rupture of self-evidence” against a “historical constant” or
“anthropological universals” (2001a, 1453). In Foucault’s methodology it means “to reject ‘madness,’ ‘deliquency’
or ‘sexuality’ as universals” (2001a, 1453).
Fourth, the interpretive strategy of événementialisation also aims at bracketing the subject as the author of
statements or discourses so that the works Foucault investigates are manifestations of practices within which a
subject is constituted. Thus, the événementialisation shifts the focus away from that which subjects represent in their
mind and toward practices: for example, what did people do with the mad, the delinquents or the sick (2001a, 1453–
1454). “What matters is to take as a homogeneous domain of reference not the representations that human beings
have of themselves, not the conditions that determine them without them knowing it, but what they do and the
manner in which they do it” (2001a, 1395).8
This method of analysis that works by turning objects of investigation into events is not historicism, but,
Foucault argues, the opposite. Historicism presupposes a universal, whereas his “problem” is, he says, “totally the
opposite. My starting point is the decision, which is both theoretical and methodological, that says: Let us suppose
that universals do not exist, and then I ask history and historians: How can you write history if you do not accept a
priori that something like the state, society, the sovereign power, the subjects exist?” (2004, 5).9
We have analyzed two senses in which Foucault uses the notion of “event”: First, to characterize the object of
his investigation and, second, to name his method of analysis. There is a third sense in which Foucault speaks of
“event,” to which we now turn our attention.

4.2.3 Interpretation as a dramaturgy of events

Because he rejects traditional hermeneutics, which, he claims, tries to recover another speech hidden behind the text
investigated, he also rejects – without mentioning it – any “fusion of horizons” between the object to be interpreted
and the interpreter, which is how Gadamer understands the “hermeneutic experience.” What Foucault gives us – the
result of his analysis – is itself part of an event, what he calls “an event in thought” [un événement dans la pensée].
At the beginning of his lectures on the Hermeneutics of the Subject, examining the care of the self in antiquity, he
writes:

What I would like to show you, what I would like to speak about this year, is this history that made this general
cultural phenomenon (this exhortation, this general acceptance of the principle that one should take care of
oneself) both a general cultural phenomenon peculiar to Hellenistic and Roman society (anyway, to its elite),
and at the same time an event in thought [un événement dans la pensée].
(2001c, 11; 2005, 9)

This notion of “event in thought,” as we saw, comes from Heidegger’s “history of the present,” who himself took it
from Nietzsche. Foucault recognizes that his genealogy is Nietzschean in its inspiration and design. He appropriates
Nietzsche’s view of history as being for the sake of the present and understands this standpoint as a recognition of
one’s own contingency when speaking and thinking. Instead of being a critique or a critical investigation, the
question Foucault asks is rather in reference to Kant’s question about the enlightenment, “What is our present?
[actualité]? What is the present field of possible experiences?” (2001a, 1506). Foucault calls it “an ontology of the
present, an ontology of ourselves” (2001a, 1506).
In this third sense of event, Foucault can now respond more convincingly to his readers who wondered from the
beginning about his own situation and standpoint. In The Archaeology, as we saw, he said that it was not his
question or problem. But later on he agreed to answer this question by characterizing his own discourse, as he does
in L’usage des plaisirs, as a “pragmatics.” His studies are, he says, a “philosophical exercise” whose stakes are “to
learn to what extent the effort to think one’s own history can free thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable
it to think differently” (1984b, 15; 1985, 9).
Foucault already said in The Archaeology, as we saw, that his works are a “diagnosis.” Now he makes this
characterization more specific: It is a diagnosis of our present and he performs this diagnosis as a “pragmatics.” He
writes:

I am not interested in the eternal, I am not interested in what does not change, I am not interested in what
remains stable under the shimmering of appearances. I am interested in the event […]. It is here again
Nietzsche who was the first, I think, to define philosophy as the activity that helps us know what is going on
and what is going on now. In other words, we are permeated by processes, movements, forces. We do not
know those processes and forces and the role of the philosopher is probably to be the diagnostician of those
forces, of diagnosing the present time [l”actualité].
(2001a, 573)

As a diagnosis of the present, Foucault directly links the object of investigation to the investigator or, more
accurately, he connects the event of some discursive practices to the event of the analysis. By taking into
consideration the position of the speaker – for example, Foucault’s position – when analyzing a phenomenon,
Foucault performatively, as it were, shows what is involved in any investigation. We mentioned Husserl’s concern
about an “oblivion of the subject” and Gadamer’s analogous concern of taking ourselves as interpreters out of the
picture. Here is how Foucault explains his “remedy” to this oblivion (to use Nietzsche’s terms of a “remedy” to the
“poison” of history):

In my books I try to grasp an event that seemed to me, that seems to me important for our present times
[actualité] while being an event of the past. For example, about madness, it seems to me that, at one point,
there was in the Western world a separation between madness and non-madness. At another moment in time,
there was a certain manner of grasping the intensity of the crime and the human problem caused by the crime.
It seems to me that we repeat all those events. We repeat those events in our present time and I try to grasp
what the event is under the sign of which we were born and what the event is that continues to permeate us.
(2001a, 574)

This remedy to the oblivion of the subject goes farther than a fusion of horizons. Foucault connects the truth of what
is said with the historical situation of utterance or emergence, as we saw in his first two senses of event, and, now,
he adds a third term: the ethos of the speaker or investigator. This is how his “pragmatics” works by acknowledging
in the investigation the three forces of aletheia, politeia, and ethos. This means, remarkably, that Foucault as an
author is also part and parcel of what he is doing and saying. As was the case for the “statement” in The
Archaeology, the subject of discourse is a placeholder that is made possible by rules of discourse in a specific set of
material conditions. This applies to Foucault as a subject as well.

My book is a fiction, pure and simple: It is a novel, but I am not the one who invented it. It is the relationship
of our present time and its epistemological configuration to all this mass of statements. As a result, the subject
[Foucault] is indeed present in the totality of the book, but it is the anonymous “one” who speaks today in all
that is said.
(2001a, 619)

However, he further grants an efficacy to this pragmatics so that it is not just a pragmatic way of analyzing. The
analysis itself has pragmatic effects in the world. His analyses, he says, “will separate out, from the contingency that
has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think” (2001d,
1393; 1984a, 46). Let us see how this pragmatics functions.
His books, Foucault says, are part of a “dramaturgy” insofar as they present a “dramatization of events” (2001a,
574) or an “intensification” of phenomena. We saw that in fragmenting history he turned some discourses into
events. Now, he presents these events as “dramas” of thought, not in the sense that his works re-enact the drama of
people in the past, who were caught in the discourses and practices of medicine or psychiatry, for example. Rather,
his works dramatize some events – the arising of natural history or the emergence of the discourse of psychiatry and,
by so doing, he intensifies the objects he investigates in the sense of making them salient, branding them as
noticeable, taking them out of the tranquil continuity of a discipline. He offers a “dramatic of discourse” (2008a, 66;
2008b, 68).
This has significant consequences for what we call the “truth.” While in phenomenology the fact that
consciousness is always “consciousness of” already forced some rearrangement of epistemology and ontology,
Foucault goes much further. Linked to the disappearance of rigid referents characterized by universality, truth is,
before being a property of judgments and propositions, what “emerges” from practices. History, Foucault says, is
“the history of the emergence of the games of truth [jeux de vérité]. It is the history of ‘veridiction’ understood as
the forms according to which the discourses that are susceptible to be true or false find their articulation on a domain
of things” (2001a, 1451). As already mentioned, the truth of “homicidal mania” emerged from within the newly
established discipline of psychiatry in the 19th century and has since then disappeared. The truth is produced. It is a
process that he calls “alethurgy”: “Alethurgy would be etymologically the production of truth, the act through which
truth manifests itself” (2009, 5; 2011, 3).10 Thus, to the dramaturgy of the analysis there corresponds an “alethurgy”
on the side of the statements, which turns truth into a ritual of production or a “solemn ritual of truth-telling” (2008a,
62; 2008b, 64) that binds speakers to their statements or utterances. Foucault sees the “alethurgic forms” as an
alternative to the “epistemological structures,” which are more familiar to how we understand truth (2009, 5; 2011,
3). In such a dramaturgy (as an analysis of discourse) and alethurgy (as production of truth through statements),
speakers cannot be considered merely as those who want to say something or intend or mean something. They,
rather, participate in this alethurgy so that this production of truth is also a pragmatics: Speakers are performers on
the stage of thinking or protagonists in the event of speech.
If the truth is of statements, which are not propositions but events, and if these events are themselves “produced”
by a certain methodological attitude that turns its objects into events, the truth has an ontological link to history.
Truth itself is of the order of the event.

Truth does not belong to the order of what is, but of what happens, of the event. Truth is not discovered
[constatée] but elicited [suscitée]: production instead of apophantics. Truth is not given through the mediation
of instruments. It is provoked by ritual; it is drawn by ruses, it is caught on occasions: strategy and not method.
Of this event thus produced before the individual who is lying in wait for it and who is struck by it, the
relationship is not of the object to the subject of knowledge. It is an ambiguous relationship, reversible,
bellicose of mastery, of domination, of victory: It is a relationship of power.
(2001a, 1562)

As any social process, this pragmatics has its own mechanisms of power, determining the place and status of
speakers and what their situation in time allows them to say. Power is not negative but a necessary component of
anything human beings do. When people speak and act, they exercise and are submitted to different forms of power
given their status, the institutions in which they operate, the political structures in which they evolve, etc. The drama
of producing truth is thus political as it takes place within the public sphere. Truth as political is also ethical as an
intrinsic component of any action, and this includes the action of thinking. It is thus not a morality that has been
scripted according to some principles but rather the social and normative dimension in which people interact, what
Foucault calls “modes of subjectivation” or modes of being a subject.
As unfolding in time, the “drama” of discourse is thus linked to the kairos (2001c, 367; 2005, 384) in such a way
that speakers are not only bound to their own utterance but also to the consequences of what they say (2008a, 56;
2008b, 56). Speaking up transforms speakers not just because they are speaking the truth, but because the utterance
transforms the situation of that utterance, opening up “a certain number of effects that are precisely not known”
(2008a, 63; 2008b, 66). While this production or poetics of truth produces meaning, this meaning is of a specific
kind: It is a meaning that is, as mentioned above, “variable, historical, and never universal” (2001c, 444; 2005, 462).
This is due to the focus on the singularity of what is investigated and the recognition of the singularity of the
investigation itself. We thus have a hermeneutics of singularity within a thinking of the present. We attend to what is
historically unique – it is thus “historical” – but viewed from our present – it is thus “variable.” The combination of
the singularity of the subject with the singularity of the object can dispense with universality – it is thus “never
universal” – because this is not what the analysis aims at bringing to the fore. “Variable” and “never universal” are
not to be understood negatively but positively as what we see as “unique” in the past from our perspective, which is
also seen as contingent.
This entails that the modality of the truth-telling proper to the thinking of the event will be “polemic,” as
Foucault says in Le courage de la vérité. The meaning to be given to a phenomenon will locate this phenomenon in
its unique historical place (“variable” and “never universal”). “Polemic” is thus also to be understood positively as
that which questions existing descriptions of phenomena by adding new descriptions to them. We multiply the
descriptions, but do not create competing accounts of the “same” phenomena. We rather carve out things and facts
in different “discursive objects” or as different matrices of experience. This alethurgy as production of truth goes
with a pragmatics of thinking.
This applies to Foucault’s works too. They have an efficacy, which makes these works “eventful.” Foucault
writes “I would like to write books that are bombs [des livres bombes], that is to say, books that would be useful
precisely at the moment when someone writes them or reads them. Afterward, they would disappear […]. Books
should be kinds of bombs and nothing else” (2001a, 476). The efficacy of his works consists in a liberation of the
objects and the subjects. In the case of objects, when seen within such a pragmatics, as staged and dramatized, they
are protected from being assessed and judged according to present standards given present interests. In the case of
subjects, once we acknowledge that the event as a singularity cannot be separated from the thinking of the event, and
thus that our own thinking has an “event-character,” we have a chance to think as if we were outside our present or,
rather, as if we saw our present from another, for example Greek, perspective. We see our present within history and
this gives us, as we have already seen, “the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or
think” (2001d, 1393; 1984a, 46). This opens a new manner of considering the subject: Subjectivity is a practice, to
which we turn after examining Foucault’s relation to hermeneutics and what his hermeneutics of singularity can
achieve.
4.3 Subjectivity as a practice

When applied to the subject, the hermeneutics of singularity is not an investigation of the essence of subjectivity or a
history of the subject in Western thought. The object investigated lies below the level of what could be a stable
structure of the self (a substance or an essence of selfhood). The goal is not to “interpret” the self from the outside
but to accompany its disclosure to itself, as it were, by following the experiences through which a self comes to
understand itself or manifests itself. Positively, the hermeneutics of the subject shows quite powerfully that the
world and others are part of experiences, and it is within such experiences that a self arises or that a self finds itself
as the point of intersection of these experiences.
His archaeology had already pointed out the superficiality of an epistemological approach that would put
Socrates’ “know thyself” in continuation with Descartes’ “I think therefore I am,” for example. Now, Foucault’s
specific and idiosyncratic hermeneutics can explain that the difference between Socrates and Descartes is about
practices of subjectivity. To be oneself in Hellenistic times is, according to Foucault, both an object of technē – there
are exercises that one can do in order to build a self – and the result of experiences and trials through which one is
tested and transformed. After Descartes, to be a subject means to be the guarantee of the truth as the certainty of a
representation. Foucault suggests that our own understanding of ourselves is in fact a practice, albeit one we do not
recognize.
In such a hermeneutics of the self, both the subject and the world (or objects) are constructed in the very sense
that they are interpreted. At the same time, once we see the “construction,” we simultaneously deconstruct it: In the
Stoic askesis, for example, and without delving into the details, there is indeed an effort to refrain from the pleasures
of the world but once we see it as a practice, askesis appears more as an attitude of non-participation in the world as
it goes. Epictetus, quoted by Foucault, proposes the following exercise when holding one’s own child in one’s lap:
“Repeat in a whisper, for yourself […] ‘tomorrow, you, the child I love, will die’” (2001c, 414; 2005, 433). Foucault
insists that this kind of meditation does not consist in anticipating a possible terrible future and steeling oneself for
facing it. Rather, it consists in acting now as if the worst-case scenario had already materialized. Thus, the non-
participation means not letting oneself become engulfed in what can impede or create an attachment for the self.
This kind of “meditation” is not a “thinking about something” in our contemporary sense. The Latin meditatio is the
translation of the Greek meletē, which is very close to gumnazein, to exercise or train oneself, to practice. Meditation
is “an exercise of the subject in which, through thought, he puts himself in a fictional situation in which he tests
himself” (2001c, 341; 2005, 358). The test of oneself through life, things, and events will have the effect of
transforming the self so as to be able to face the situation anticipated.

The meditation is not […] a game the subject plays with his own thought, with the object or possible objects of
his thought. It is not something like eidetic variation, as we would say in phenomenology. A completely
different kind of game is involved: not a game the subject plays with his own thought or thoughts, but a game
that thought performs on the subject himself. It is becoming, through thought, the person who is dying or
whose death is imminent.
(2001c 340; 2005, 357–358)

In order to illustrate this hermeneutics of the subject as a mode of thinking singularity, I will address one specific
practice of the self, which is relevant to the question of interpretation: parrhesia or telling the truth.11 Foucault
reflected upon it in his last three lecture courses at the Collège de France from 1981 to 1984, as well as in a seminar
on “Discourse and Truth” at Berkeley in 1983, published under the title Fearless Speech. My interest is in
Foucault’s understanding and use of parrhesia, especially when he considers the parrhesiastic attitude to be a
possible contemporary philosophical attitude, most likely his own,12 and thus as the attitude of interpreters.

4.3.1 Parrhesia as a practice for interpreters

The word parrhesia is made up of pan, which means “everything,” and rheo, which means “to tell.” It has a
pejorative and a positive meaning. Pejoratively it means to tell everything and anything. Positively, it means telling
the truth when it matters. It came to be translated into Latin as oratio libera (free speech), licentia (licence), but
generally as libertas, the etymon of our “liberty” (2008a, 46; 2008b, 46). For the French translation, Foucault uses
the word franc-parler, a term that also has a connection to freedom, but which Foucault does not mention. “Franc”
names the Germanic people that invaded France and gave the country its name, Frankreich, “the realm of the
Franks.” Frank means “the free people” so that to speak “frankly” means to speak like a free subject.
Foucault shows how parrhesia evolved in Greek thought from Euripides and Thucydides to the Hellenistic
period. It started out as a political attitude associated with democracy; any citizen needs to have this parrhesia, that
is, they need to speak up and participate in the affairs of the city. This entails trying to convince fellow citizens of a
particular view or course of action. With this comes a risk of not being heard or of causing jealousy among fellow
citizens, as it is susceptible to being misused by those who want to influence others through rhetoric and flattery, the
two enemies of truth-telling. Progressively, parrhesia moves from the public sphere of politics, where one addresses
the assembly of citizens, to the private realm of morality or the face-to-face situation of personal interactions. It is a
move from parrhesia as an activity linked to government to parrhesia as an activity linked to the soul of the one
who governs (2008a, 279; 2008b, 303), even if he only governs himself. The question Foucault asks is: “How are
truth-telling and governing (governing oneself and others) linked and connected to each other?” (2001c, 220; 2005,
229).
The different practices of telling the truth about oneself in the Hellenistic period took different forms: the
examination of one’s own conscience, as in the Pythagoreans or the Stoics, or exchanges of moral or spiritual letters,
as exemplified by Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, or personal diaries serving as recollection or meditation on what
was experienced (2009, 5–6; 2011, 4). What matters in truth-telling as a practice is that, first, there is a technē or a
technical procedure of speaking freely and appropriately, and second, there are ethical and political aspects to this
truth-telling. Telling the truth about oneself as part of the practice of the self cannot be confined to oneself but is
linked to others and to the circumstances in which it is appropriate to do so. This involves risks and exposure on the
side of the speaker. Telling the truth about oneself is also a moral obligation or a duty one has toward oneself as well
as others. It is “the frankness, freedom, and openness that leads one to say what one has to say, as one wishes to say
it, when one wishes to say it, and in the form one thinks is necessary for saying it” (2001c, 356; 2005, 372). In this
respect, according to Foucault, parrhesia is one of the best manifestations of the three dimensions that, as we saw,
are intertwined in any phenomenon: aletheia (truth), politeia (power), and ethos (morality).
In The Courage of Truth, Foucault distinguishes the “parrhesiastic” philosophical attitude or the parrhesiastic
philosophical discourse from other intellectual attitudes (2009, 63–65; 2011, 66–69). We already saw that truth is
not a mere epistemic qualification of a statement but an event, in the sense that someone produces a statement in a
public sphere. In the summary of the lecture course The Courage of Truth, Foucault associates each of the
components of aletheia, politeia, and ethos with three dimensions of human beings – knowledge, power, and subject
(Savoir, Pouvoir, Sujet) (2009, 317; 2011, 346) – and the corresponding three “disciplines”: (a) Truth as a mode of
veridiction concerns the discourse of knowledge; (b) Power concerns the problems of governing others and oneself;
and (c) Ethos concerns the “ethical elaboration of a subject” (2009, 317; 2011, 346).
The parrhesiastic attitude tries to be mindful of this balance of truth, power, and ethics, and thus accepts the
event-character of what is said or done. This event character means that, for the parrhesiastic attitude, what matters
is the non-repeatability of a phenomenon. Because truth is produced, it takes place within a historical, cultural,
economic context, and cannot be freed from political ramifications or implications. At the same time, precisely
because it is produced, truth is carried by a person – asserted, defended, contested – who functions almost like a
vector in a political landscape but, different from a formal vector, the person is also an ethical agent, navigating
institutional structures (academic, editorial) and accepting to be a truth-teller.
The import of parrhesia as a form of alethurgy is thus not to be sought in the internal structure of speech nor in
its finality (2008a, 56; 2008b, 56). Rather, it is to be found in “the effect that the truth-telling can produce on the
addressee and the return effect that the truth-telling can produce on the speaker from the effect produced on the
addressee” (2008a, 56; 2008b, 56). What does this mean? The speaker is capable of truth, and this means that the
speaker is susceptible to being transformed by the truth. This is how veridiction names a true act of speech through
which the subject has been transformed by speaking the truth so that the statement has been made true. By making a
true statement the speaker manifests that he asserts it and, thus, “thinks it, values it and considers it himself as being
authentically true” (2008a, 62; 2008b, 64). In terms that sound very Ricoeurian, Foucault writes: “This solemn ritual
of truth-telling in which the subject engages what he thinks in what he says, where he attests to the truth of what he
thinks in the utterance of what he says is what is manifested in this scene, this kind of jousting [joute], this
challenge” (2008a, 62; 2008b, 64). He calls this double truth or this re-doubling of the truth a contract (pacte)
between the speaker and his utterance. This contract says: First, here is the truth and, second, here I am as the one
saying it (2008a, 62; 2008b, 65). We recall that Ricoeur also uses the same term of pacte between the historian and
the readers.
In its pragmatics, the parrhesiastic attitude stages the speaker in a dramatic of discourse in order to produce truth.
This is how this attitude can be measured according to the three parameters of truth (corresponding to an alethurgy),
power (corresponding to a pragmatics), and ethics (corresponding to the drama of discourse as a mode of
subjectivation). I would now like to show what this combination of truth, power, and ethics means when we
consider, for example, a statement of an interpreter. I reconstruct what a parrhesiastic statement is or what it means
that a statement is not only propositional (susceptible to be true or false), but also situated in a social context (it is
“political”) and inscribed in a context of normative relations between subjects (it is “ethical”).

4.3.2 A parrhesiastic statement

Foucault’s hermeneutics of singularity offers us the means to locate the event-character or the singularity of a
phenomenon – like a statement – while at the same time turning the non-repeatability of this phenomenon – for
example, the Hellenistic parrhesia – into an absence that remains alive for us insofar as it questions and even
disrupts our views, for example about statements. I use as a motivation for my reconstruction the brief comparison
Foucault himself makes between parrhesia and performatives, when he suggests that the pragmatic of discourse
should be complemented by a “dramatic of discourse” (2008a, 66; 2008b, 68). Expanding on his views and using
terms he did not. I see four parameters as being paramount for accounting for a parrhesiastic statement13, which are
categorized as follows: psychological, existential, eventful, and transformative. I will briefly explain each of these
parameters of a parrhesiastic statement.
The first parameter is psychological in the broad sense. Parrhesia includes the fact that the speaker is capable of
truth, and this means that the speaker is susceptible to being transformed by the truth. The truth is not a value of
statements but is produced by someone, and this is why I use the term “psychological.” Parrhesia is both a telling of
the truth and a transformation of those who tell the truth by speaking up. This transformative dimension is what
Foucault, by and large, calls spirituality, and which he finds lacking in our contemporary account of truth. He uses
the expression “Cartesian moment” to name the change that took place in our tradition when truth became an
epistemological matter.

If we define spirituality as being the form of practices which postulate that, such as he is, the subject is not
capable of the truth, but that, such as it is, the truth can transfigure and save the subject, then we can say that
the modern age of the relations between the subject and truth begins when it is postulated that, such as he is,
the subject is capable of truth, but that, such as it is, the truth cannot save the subject.
(2001c, 20; 2005, 19. Translation modified)14

The second parameter of a parrhesiastic statement is existential in the broad sense. As we saw in the previous
chapters, the authors studied so far agree with this existential aspect of interpretation due to the intervention of
interpreters in the interpretation they present. Parrhesia includes a personal commitment that goes beyond what is
called the “speaker’s meaning,” intention, or even the Habermasian or Apelian claim to truth, which is inscribed in
any communicative action. The commitment implied in parrhesia is not merely an accountability that would consist
in being prompted to justify what one has said, but rather an attestation of someone who says: “Here I am and this is
what I say, come what may.” This stance or commitment is turned toward others and concerns less the content of
what is said than the fact that it has been said. Speakers accept the consequences of what they say and of the fact that
they have said it. This is why I use the term “existential.” The personal attitude of the speaker is central to the truth
being said, and this is a dimension totally absent from a performative, like “I promise,” wherein the status of the
speaker is coded and institutionalized, as Foucault says. When saying “I promise,” for example, we place ourselves
under an obligation to do what is said, but our personal relation to our statement is irrelevant; the relationship is only
institutional. In parrhesia such an indifference of speakers toward their statement is not possible (2008a, 61; 2008b,
64) because the truth of the statement is re-doubled by the truth of the fact that the speaker asserts it and, thus,
“thinks it, values it and considers it himself as being authentically true” (2008a, 62; 2008b, 64).
The parrhesiastic attitude is an intellectual discipline of suspending – in the phenomenological sense, despite
Foucault’s suspicion toward phenomenology – the factual historical continuity that exists between our present and
the past. Although we take our present as a point of reference, we do not use it as a perspective or as a measuring
rod. The reason for this suspension of intellectual continuity is that the factual historical continuity tends to lead us
to look back at the past in a retrospective illusion: As if we are at the end of an evolution or the result of a progress
coming from the past, making us see the past as what led to us as its telos, preparing us as its achievement. This
epochē allows the gaze to escape its own historical inscription in a tradition. Against the phenomenological
reduction, though, the goal is not to bring what is “reduced” to some form of evidence. On the contrary, the goal of
the parrhesiastic attitude is to provoke discussion by countering accepted views and to propose an alternate view.
This is the implication of the modality of truth-telling proper to the parrhesiastic attitude, as “polemic,” instead of
“hermeneutic,” as in Gadamer or Ricoeur. Let us see how.
With regard to interpretation and in the case of Gadamer, the polemic aspect that is at the heart of Foucault’s
views on interpretation could not be more at odds with the whole enterprise of philosophical hermeneutics as
centered on reaching an understanding. Although Gadamer wants to do justice to the singularity of the object of
investigation, he maintains a claim to universality for the hermeneutic experience itself. The truth is reached in a
dialogue. In addition, no matter how different interpretations may be, the fusion of horizons guarantees the
compatibility even among radically different interpretations. Dissent is thus always local for Gadamer, confined to
the broad mutual understanding of the existing dialogue.
In the case of Ricoeur, while there is a clear affinity between parrhesia (as alethurgy, pragmatics, and drama of
discourse) and attestation, which are both existential attitudes, they differ with regard to their polemic ambitions, so
to speak. Ricoeur’s attestation continues the ideal of hermeneutics of bridging differences and assuring continuity
between the temporality of the investigator – the present – and the temporality of the object investigated – present or
past. In this regard, attestation builds a tradition and offers itself as the cement of such a tradition. Ricoeur’s poetics
of truth is thus political only in the limited sense that historians “produce” truth. However, the role of counterpart
that the event plays allows historians to claim universality in the form of an ideal correspondence to fact. The claim
to universality is even inscribed in the “assertive vehemence” (2000, 367; 2004a, 280) of their accounts that “refer”
to the events as they “really” happened. Attestation as existential and ethical transcends the politics of writing
history and remains committed to the existence of a referent, however “ultimate” it may be.
For Foucault, while the fact that meaning is variable – and thus generates polemic – also means that it is a
variation on our present, which, as such, gives us alternatives and new possibilities, it in fact and essentially liberates
our present. When it comes to interpretation, parrhesiasts like Foucault do not so much engage in dialogue with a
good will (as in Gadamer) or attest (as in Riceour) as they dare offer their views in the dual meaning of having the
audacity to do so and challenging us in our received views. It is not attestation, because the parrhesiastic attitude
does not include an obligation of justifying oneself toward other people. The justification is rather toward oneself
and to the circumstances and the event. It is not about reliability toward others, but courage toward the
circumstances. It is as if the present were told from the perspective of the past, so that the present is seen itself as an
event, in its flux and contingency, in its uncertainty and arbitrariness, all features that attestation attempts to
eliminate.
The third parameter of a parrhesiastic statement is the event. An utterance is not only performed by someone but
is eventful in the sense that speakers inscribe themselves within a set of specific circumstances, in the broad political
sense, and with a set of ethical ramifications that concern them as subjects and others with whom they interact. This
is the kairos (2001c, 367; 2005, 384) or the event-character of the utterance that gives the act of speaking its proper
social and political dimension. By being linked to the moment – the kairos – speakers expose themselves to the
circumstances and accept the consequences of the utterance they make. “Parrhesia is to be situated in what links the
speaker to the fact that what he says is the truth, and to the consequences that follow from the fact that he spoke the
truth” (2008a, 56; 2008b, 56). Speaking up entails risks for the subject, of alienating a powerful leader or a friend,
for example, and requires courage for taking the risks and facing the consequences of one’s speech (2008a, 63;
2008b, 66). Whereas a performative works according to rules in which there is no risk and no unpredictability,
parrhesia irrupts in a situation, “opens [it] and makes possible a certain number of effects that are precisely not
known. Parrhesia does not produce a coded effect, but opens an undetermined risk” (2008a, 60; 2008b, 62). We
could say that to the institutional character of the performative there corresponds the total singularity of parrhesia
and to the act-character of the performative there corresponds the event-character of parrhesia. This means that the
institutional status of the speaker that is crucial for a performative – only the chairperson can say felicitously “the
session is open” – has its parrhesiastic counterpart in courage: “Parrhesia is the free courage by which one binds
oneself in the act of telling the truth. Or parrhesia is the ethics of telling the truth, in one’s risky and free act”
(2008a, 64; 2008b, 66). These aspects of risk and courage reinforce the dramatic nature of discourse given that “the
event of the utterance affects the mode of being of the speaker” (2008a, 66; 2008b, 68).
When it comes to interpreters, the courage concerns the relation to the moment. Interpreters, at one point or
another, have to decide whether they want to follow the fashion of what is publishable and what publishers can sell
or whether they are ready to sacrifice some fame for pursuing, with more time and difficulties, what they think
should be presented to the public. The politics of publishing and the pressures on academics and administrators can
be such that it is easier to go with the flow. In this regard, James Loewen (2007) offers a powerful indictment of the
collusion between publishing houses and politics in how history textbooks for US high school students are, first,
written and, then, selected by school review boards to the point of falsifying aspects of American history. To go
against this would require academic courage.
The fourth parameter of a parrhesiastic statement as I have reconstructed it, is a transformation. Parrhesia aims
at an intensifying of the truth for the sake of advising a leader or a friend or, in the case of the Epicureans, for the
sake of increasing benevolence and friendship among those who can tell the truth. This is why I call this aspect
“transformative.” As with veridiction, the transformation concerns both the subject and the truth. On the side of
subjects, insofar as subjects not only present themselves as truth-tellers but become such subjects within an
experience of truth-telling, clearly indicates that the self does not lie in anything that is stable or fixed under the
level of experience, but rather consists of a set of experiences and, as such, is a practice. The subject practices modes
of subjectivity and is nothing beyond those practices. This is why Foucault calls the practice of telling the truth or
being true to oneself a “process of intensifying subjectivity” (Foucault 2001a, 1619), which he also explains as the
fact that “the parrhesiast is the one who asserts his own freedom as an individual who speaks” (2008a, 63; 2008b,
65).
On the side of truth, as the other pole of the transformation, before being a property of statements, truth is, first
of all, what is produced by individuals, and it is in this production that individuals become subjects. Truth is thus not
primarily a matter of connaissance (or object of knowledge), which would render the subject a subject of truth, but a
matter of savoir (or matrix of knowledge) as a basic framework within which individuals act, interact, and speak.
Both truth and subject are effects of a process circumscribed by the four parameters mentioned above:
psychological, existential, eventful, and transformative, and the singularity of each – subject and truth – results from
the specific balance between the three dimensions of aletheia, politeia, and ethos. In the drama of veridiction, the
event of speaking leads to the arising of the subject as a courageous risk-taker who seizes the kairos and speaks up
to make a difference.
When it comes to interpretation, Foucault certainly illustrates at its best this fourth parameter. The three periods
that are usually distinguished in his work in the short span of his academic career shows his willingness to amend
his views in order to remain true to the phenomena. The choices of his themes, whether incarceration or sexuality,
indicate his recognition of his responsibility to the moment and his courage to pursue them. More striking with
regard to truth is, despite the provocation that his works caused, the sobriety of his attitude as a researcher, always
providing huge amounts of evidence for what he says and avoiding claims exceeding what he can support, thus
sparing his readers of the cheap outrage and moralizing that are so irresistibly tempting for many who deal with the
kind of issues Foucault treated.
The net result of Foucault’s hermeneutics of singularity is to provide us now with what Ricoeur calls
“comparables,”15 which I illustrated with the parrhesiastic statement. For example, the fact that the truth of a
statement in our philosophy of language or linguistics is no longer envisaged as being mingled with power and
morality (politeia and ethos) suggests to us that these modalities may still be there, albeit forgotten or concealed.
The case of history textbooks studied by Loewen, as mentioned above, shows how truth can become so politicized
that it can lead to the falsification of parts of history because of a lack of ethos on the part of historians, state review
board members, and parents.
This dual focus of the hermeneutics of singularity on variable meanings and on comparables, and thus on what is
historically unique but can serve as a comparable for us now, constitutes a subversive hermeneutics. When we speak
of “universals” about notions like “truth” or “ethics,” we commit ourselves to a specific view about the “entities” of
“truth” or “ethics” and their relationship to “history,” which is a history that offers different variations on what is
“the same” (a universal truth). By contrast, when starting with practices, like parrhesia, even if we call it a practice
of telling the truth, we do not commit ourselves to a universal definition of “truth,” although we do not deny it
either. Indeed, we are non-committal on this “issue.” As Foucault notes when defending his method in Naissance de
la biopolitique, by not assuming universals and examining practices, we can be conceptually free from the
prejudices of the tradition and see what history gives back to us (2004, 5, 21–22).
The question that remains is about what attracts the parrhesiast to the truth. Why to be a truth-teller? What
regulates the practice of truth-telling that interpretation is? In the next part, I examine this question of what gives
traction to the truth.

Notes
1. I have compared some of their views in Vandevelde (2018).
2. Smith writes: “I have seen a small manufactory of this kind, where ten men only were employed, and where some
of them consequently performed two or three distinct operations. But though they were very poor, and therefore
but indifferently accommodated with the necessary machinery, they could, when they exerted themselves, make
among them about 12 pounds of pins in a day. There are in a pound upwards of 4,000 pins of a middling size.
 Those 10 persons, therefore, could make among them upwards of 48,000 pins in a day. Each person, therefore,
making a 10th part of 48,000 pins, might be considered as making 4,800 pins in a day. But if they had all wrought
separately and independently, and without any of them having been educated to this peculiar business, they
certainly could not each of them have made 20, perhaps not 1 pin in a day” (2007, 9).
3. Let us note that Francis Fukuyama has revived this Platonic notion of thumos to characterize the demand for
recognition that he detects in current social and political trends in American society (Fukuyama 2018).
4. See also Foucault (1972, 63).
5. As he explains further, “the archive defines a particular level: That of a practice that causes a multiplicity of
statements to emerge as so many regular events […]. It reveals the rules of a practice that enables statements both
to survive and to undergo regular modification. It is the general system of the formation and transformation of
statements” (1972, 130).
6. See also: “Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: Leave it to our bureaucrats and our police
to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write” (1972, 17).
7. On “diagnosis,” see Tiisala (2015), who argues that “all the remarks on archaeology as a diagnostic project,
ranging from 1966 to 1984, constitute an essential strand of continuity throughout Foucault’s philosophical
career” (669).
8. These practices cover three domains: The mastery over things, the actions over others, and the relationships to
self. To these domains there correspond respectively the axis of knowledge, the axis of power, and the axis of
ethics, what Foucault expresses by the three terms of aletheia, politieia, and ethos: “How have we been
constituted as subjects of our knowledge, how have we been constituted as subjects who exercise or are submitted
to relations of power; how have we been constituted as moral subjects of our actions?” (2001a, 1395).
9. Thus, the investigation does not examine history to see whether history “gives me, reflects back to me something
like madness” and to conclude that it does not so that “therefore madness does not exist.” As Foucault insists,
“this was not the reasoning. This was not the actual method” (2004, 5). Rather, he explains, “the method
consisted in saying: Let us suppose that madness does not exist. Then, what is the history that we can make of
these different events, of these different practices that apparently are ordered around this something assumed to
be madness? It is thus the opposite of historicism that I would like to establish. Not questioning the universals by
using history as a critical method, but starting from the decision that universals do not exist in order to ask what
kind of history we can write [quelle histoire on peut faire]” (2004, 5).
10. We recall that Ricoeur also speaks of an “alethic mode” about attestation.
11. Foucault’s notion of parrhesia has been applied to different fields like information technology and the ethical
problems it offers (Capurro 2006, 175–186), to management (Barratt 2011, 105–113), psychological development
(Frank Macke 2007, 157–180), education (Peters 2003, 207–223 as well as Raaen 2011, 627–641). It has also
been applied to the relationship between politics and scholarship (Steel 2010, 49–68). Parrhesia has also been
presented as Foucault’s turn to ethics so that his late works are his own Socratic “apology” (Franek 2006, 113–
134). It has been interpreted in a feminist framework as a strategy of resistance to power or as a mode of
friendship. On the strategy of resistance to power, see Henderson 2007, 423–451. On parrhesia as a mode of
friendship, see Mclaren (2006, 195–201). Parrhesia has been appropriated by theology (Hovey 2007, 63–81) and
race theory (Novak 2006, 25–43).
12. This is also the view of Thomas Flynn who has a chapter titled “Foucault as Parrhesiast” in his book Sartre,
Foucault, and Historical Reason, Vol. 2 A Poststructuralist Mapping of History (2005, 260f).
13. These are different than the parameters of a statement as understood by Foucault in his archaeology period as the
new parameters are about what makes a statement “parrhesiastic.”
14. In Fearless Speech, a seminar held at Berkeley, Foucault suggests a comparison between parrhesia and Cartesian
evidence, writing: “Since Descartes, the coincidence between belief and truth is obtained in a certain (mental)
evidential experience. For the Greeks, however, the coincidence between belief and truth does not take place in a
(mental) experience, but in a verbal activity, namely parrhesia. It appears that parrhesia, in this Greek sense, can
no longer occur in our modern epistemological framework” (2001b, 14).
15. Ricoeur uses this term, which he borrows from Marcel Detienne (2008), in his book Sur la traduction (2004b).
Part III
Two Versions of What Regulates Interpretation
Validity Claims and Love

DOI: 10.4324/9781003348009-8

In the positions defended by Ricoeur and Foucault, we saw how the interpreter’s position has to be integrated in the
truth of the interpretation so that interpretation is a practice of making true by engaging one’s own responsibility,
either as attestation or as the courage to tell the truth. I would like to continue this line of thinking and “radicalize”
the position of the interpreter in its ethical nature. We saw that Ricoeur could not draw what he needed out of
attestation but only provided a guideline for any historical narrative: a striving to do justice to what is recounted. It is
only when he alluded to a “happy memory” that he acknowledged the need for a “forgiving” attitude when
recounting the past so that the sense of the past can be transformed and lead people to have a “happy memory,” even
of terrible events. In the case of Foucault, his radicality leads him to use moral categories, such as the courage to tell
the truth, one function of which was in Hellenistic times to nurture benevolence. I want to expand this “moral”
aspect and transform it into a genuine ethical component of interpretation that is not merely confined to a
characterization of interpretation.
I will examine two models that ascribe an ethical status to interpretation through the very process of interpreting.
The ethical status of interpretation is not just the responsibility of interpreters, as in the radical interpretation model
of the first part, and it is not in the attitude of the interpreters to guarantee the truth, as in the second part. Rather, the
ethical aspect pertains to the process of interpretation itself. The first version of this model derives from Apel’s and
Habermas’ “ethics of discussion,” which recognizes in any communicative action, such as interpretation, formal
rules of discourse and validity claims, among them a claim to normative rightness. While these claims are formal,
they regulate the discussion or, in our case, interpretation and guarantee that the process follows basic rules of
discussion, such as a claim to be intelligible, to tell the truth, to be truthful, and to abide by what is normatively
right. Apel and Habermas speak of an “ethics of discussion” to name these formal rules that regulate discussion
without guaranteeing or securing any content, the latter being what the consensus decides. The other version of this
model considers benevolence or love as what drives and guides the pursuit of truth, both with regard to the object to
be interpreted and other interpreters. This model is also regulative but instead of appealing to formal rules of
discourse, it appeals to the notion of the “good” that drives the pursuit of truth and gives it traction. It is an attempt
to retrieve the affective love that is implied in the principle of a formal “charity” and to treat this love as a virtue that
is both epistemic and moral. Gregory the Great, Pierre Rousselot, and the early German romantics, especially
Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher, offer different variations of this model.
5 The Ethics of DiscussionKarl-Otto Apel’s Program
DOI: 10.4324/9781003348009-9

When we speak of the ethics of interpretation, we could wonder whether interpretation does not fall under the same
rules as discourse or discussion and, thus, whether the ethics of interpretation is not a particular case of an ethics of
discussion as the one proposed by Karl-Otto Apel in collaboration with Jürgen Habermas. Apel’s program is to
derive ethical norms as well as their ultimate foundation from the very pragmatics of discussion. Let us discuss what
the ethics of discussion is and whether an ethics of interpretation can be derived from it.
Apel has often been associated with Habermas, and both have been considered to be the main representatives of
the second Frankfurt School. Although not entirely inappropriate, this categorization does not do justice to Apel’s
specific project, whether in his relationship to the Frankfurt School or to Habermas. Apel first became known in
Germany for introducing the work of Charles Sanders Peirce and American pragmatism in general (Apel 1967). He
then applied this pragmatic perspective and offered a program to “transform” philosophy into what he calls a
“transcendental pragmatics.” This was his monumental work, Towards a Transformation of Philosophy, published
in two volumes in 1973 (1973a, 1973b).1 Since 1988 Apel engaged in what can be called a third phase of his
program, what he calls an ethics of discussion and of responsibility.
Apel’s overall project parallels Habermas’ project. For many years they both taught at the University of
Frankfurt and organized some academic events and seminars together. They also heavily borrow from each other in
their respective works. It is only with their late research on the ethics of discussion that the differences between them
became more acute.2 The major point of contention among the vast number of points of agreement concerns the
possibility for an ultimate foundation of, among other things, moral norms, which Apel defends and Habermas
rejects. Habermas speaks instead of the quasi-transcendental features of discussion, which, indeed, lead to an ethics
of discussion, but do not warrant an ultimate foundation.3 He prefers to speak of a detranscendentalization of
philosophy. For the purposes of the task at hand, I will mainly focus on Apel’s views.
When it comes to interpretation theory, Apel entertains a relationship with hermeneutics that is both somewhat
marginal, because he does not consider himself part of the movement, and somewhat fundamental, because he has
been deeply influenced by it and tries to retain the key acquisitions of hermeneutics while striving toward a
transcendental project. Apel characterizes Heidegger’s project in Being and Time as a “radicalization of
hermeneutics,” which he wants to “transform” into a transcendental pragmatics. He believes that American
pragmatism theorized the necessary semiotic mediation in any human speech or thought. Pragmatism may close the
gap between analytic philosophy (of Wittgensteinian provenance) and the continental approach (of Heideggerean
provenance).
In the first section, I examine Apel’s critique of Heidegger’s radicalization of hermeneutics and his subsequent
differentiation between the question of the constitution of meaning, which is historically situated, and the question
of the justification of the validity of this meaning, which is a matter of arguments claiming to transcend specific
historical situations. The second section examines Apel’s transformation of philosophy into a transcendental
semiotics through the rules of argumentation. In the third section, I present his, as well as Habermas’, views that
formal validity claims at the level of discourse can constitute a substantive ethics of discussion and lead to the
resolution of issues or problems, for example in cases of a conflict of interpretations. In the fourth section, I test their
views by discussing the ethical aspect of Andrew Jackson treatment of the Cherokees.

5.1 Apel’s critique of Heidegger’s radicalized hermeneutics

Apel’s comparisons between Wittgenstein’s views and Heidegger’s hermeneutics were among the first to try to
bridge the gap between the analytic and continental traditions. Apel is largely indebted to two tenets of
Wittgenstein’s philosophy: the argument against a private language and the very notion of a language game. The
impossibility of a private language is understood by Apel as the fact that one cannot follow a rule alone and just
once. As Wittgenstein asks, somewhat rhetorically, “Is what we call ‘obeying a rule’ something that it would be
possible for only one man to do, and to do only once in his life?” (Wittgenstein 1953, 80, n. 199). Such an
impossibility of a private language renders irrelevant the basic claim of post-Cartesian philosophy that the evidence
of a private internal experience can serve as the criterion that, for example, I think or that I have a determinate
representation. Wittgenstein does not deny the existence of a subjective certainty regarding private experiences.
“What is denied, actually, is only the fact that this certainty could be immediately qualified, from an epistemological
point of view, as being purely subjective and […] be granted an epistemological primacy over the intersubjectively
valid knowledge of the external world” (Apel 1991, 30). Any claim that we make to know something is linked to a
language shared with others and thus to “the observance of rules which is under public supervision” (31).
Apel adopts Wittgenstein’s notion of a language game, according to which the use of signs is part of a form of
life. For any use of signs presupposes a rule and since a rule, in being a rule, cannot be followed just once and by
one single person, the use of signs presupposes a community of sign users involved in a language-game understood
as the mingling of language and praxis. Apel acknowledges that there are two ways of describing a language game:
either as a form of behavioristic description or by emphasizing the participation of the descriptor in what is
described. Apel is more sympathetic to the second option:

Basically, all the attempts to distance oneself from and to objectify behavioural criteria and institutional
contexts cannot gloss over the fact that the starting-point of the description (the question raised, the cognitive
interest) is dependent upon a self-understanding, no matter how prereflective this might be, and also that the
cognitive gain from the quasi-objective description lies in the deepening of this self-understanding.
(1998i, 29)

If we forgo the behaviorist understanding of Wittgenstein and acquiesce in a participation of the observer in what is
described, there remain two fundamental questions, according to Apel, which Wittgenstein neither raised nor solved.
The first question bears on the weight that history or tradition exercises on language games. Wittgenstein might
well recognize that language games appear and are modified according to “the history of nature” (See Apel 1991,
35), but he does not investigate the extent to which language games concretely depend on the history of a tradition
or are a crystallization of a tradition. This is what Apel wants to do in order to complement Wittgenstein’s program.
On this point, Apel argues, hermeneutics can complement Wittgenstein’s views and make explicit the mechanisms
of understanding involved in other disciplines or “language games.” The interpretive moment that takes place in any
descriptive language game (and eminently in philosophy) represents the object of hermeneutics. Specifically,
hermeneutics has the task of investigating “the interpretation of the meaning of linguistically handed-down word
meanings or concepts” (1998i, 111) in the sense of “the achievement of intersubjective agreement which is operative
in every interpretive application of language” (1998i, 111).
The second question that Wittgenstein does not examine deals with the status of the language game that would
describe other language games. The question Apel raises is about philosophy and its status with regard to two
aspects: First, how can a language-game, for example philosophy, relate to other language games in order to
describe them? And, second, can such a philosophically descriptive language game be critical? Not being able to
answer these questions indicates for Apel an intrinsic weakness, which jeopardizes the very function of philosophy.
Against Wittgenstein, Apel wants to maintain a special status for philosophy: “[The descriptive] language-games
ought to be constructed and, in particular, the question should be raised as to whether, and if necessary, how such
hermeneutic language-games differ from the normal descriptive language-games that are concerned with the
description of non-human nature” (Apel 1998i, 30). In other words, philosophy must enjoy some form of privilege
among other language games and the question is what kind of privilege and to what extent.
With regard to Heidegger, Apel sees him as the philosopher who profoundly reflected upon the weight and
power of language as a mediation in a tradition. He also considers Heidegger as the one who drove philosophy to
paralysis in his late philosophy when he turned to poetry and transformed philosophy into a listening to the voice of
being. Apel wrote his dissertation on Heidegger, specifically, as the subtitle says, on “An Epistemological
Interpretation of Martin Heidegger’s Philosophy,” which he defended in 1950.4 He continued his discussion of
Heidegger’s philosophy in the following years, setting it against Wittgenstein’s thought in order to show some of the
fundamental assumptions made by neo-positivism, as well as the challenges these views represent for Heidegger’s
radicalized hermeneutics.5 These innovative attempts to bridge the two traditions of analytic and continental
philosophy offer Apel a powerful tool to question the presuppositions of early analytic philosophy: a positivistic
stance that ignores the historical situation of the thinker and ends up in a methodological solipsism, allowing
philosophers to consider themselves as the representatives of any thinker anywhere in the world and in history. This
early form of analytic philosophy also offered a naïve view of knowledge as an immediate grasp of reality by
overlooking the mediation of signs.6
Let us review the aspects of Heidegger’s hermeneutics that Apel uses and criticizes. Since Apel generally
discusses Heidegger by comparing him with other philosophers, I take the liberty of expanding and complementing,
with comments and quotations, Heidegger’s views on those points that are germane to Apel’s critique7.
Apel wholeheartedly acknowledges that he does not claim to offer a thorough treatment of Heidegger’s
philosophy, taking into consideration all the nuances and the detailed accounts provided by the ongoing publication
of Heidegger’s complete works (the Gesamtausgabe). He is interested in the general thrust of Heidegger’s
philosophical endeavor as presented essentially in Being and Time. Apel narrows further his consideration of
Heidegger by focusing on what he believes is Heidegger’s most significant impact on contemporary philosophy.
According to Apel, Heidegger’s philosophy first exerted its influence through a philosophy of existence with its
ideal of “authenticity” or through its “fundamental ontology,” answering the question of the meaning of being
through a hermeneutics of existence. Subsequently, Apel claims, Heidegger’s influence consisted in his questioning
and deconstruction of Western metaphysics, already hinted at in Being and Time, a metaphysics which has led to a
technological instrumentalization of the world (Apel 1989, 131ff.). In the 1980s, Apel tells us that Heidegger is seen
as a thinker in a “post-metaphysical” era who has offered a “de-transcendentalization” of philosophy, which can be
found in French and Italian postmodernism, in Richard Rorty’s neo-pragmatism, and even in Thomas Kuhn’s new
philosophy of science. It is within such a contemporary interest for a post-metaphysical thinking that Apel reads or,
as he says, “re-constructs” Heidegger’s philosophy, delineating what he, Apel, believes is a fruitful account of how
meaning is constituted and identifying what is missing, that is: the possibility of justifying the validity of such a
meaning.
Apel subscribes to one of the basic tenets of Heidegger’s hermeneutics: Meaning (Sinn) is neither what pertains
to things independently of human involvement, nor what human beings project on an unformed world, nor an entity
or a realm of entities floating between human beings and things. Meaning is the possibility for things to be
articulated by humans. In other words, meaning is the susceptibility for things to matter to human beings and to
make sense to them.
Apel also agrees with Heidegger in his suspicion that traditional metaphysics forgets being, insofar as traditional
metaphysics overlooks the fact that entities (or beings) are revealed (erschlossen) as what they are in a situation of
human praxis. Such an oblivion of being led metaphysics to consider presence-at-hand (Vorhandenheit) as the only
basis on which objectivity and truth could be grounded. By contrast, the primacy of meaning and the subsequent
correlation between understanding and a being affected by what already makes sense speak in favor of another type
of ontology. This ontology is that of readiness-to-hand (Zuhandenheit), where entities are not primarily objects of a
theoretical gaze, but things of concern in the everyday world. Using this distinction between an ontology of
readiness-to-hand (Zuhandenheit), where the pragmatic aspect is central, and an ontology of presence-at-hand
(Vorhandenheit), where objectivity is the key, Apel forcefully shows, especially in the early analytic philosophies of
logical atomism and logical positivism, a tendency to consider the world around us as a set of entities that can be
made available in a technical and instrumental manner. Apel can then show, using Heidegger, that such a technical
and instrumental approach to things in the world is the manifestation of an ontology of Vorhandenheit, blind to its
own metaphysical presuppositions. By flatly denying metaphysics as meaningless, the early analytic philosophy was
thus simply trying to elude any possible critique.
Apel further subscribes to Heidegger’s attempt to articulate the difference between things and human beings, the
former being what can be logically, empirically, and pragmatically made available and the latter, human existence –
what Heidegger calls Dasein – resisting this mode of availability. There are two advantages to this distinction
between how things are encountered and for the sake of whom they are used. The first advantage is that, by raising
the question of the “for-the-sake-of-whom” of any attempt to make things available, the hermeneutics of being
offers an alternative to an ontology of Vorhandenheit that would apply the categories holding true for things, which
are merely present-at-hand (vorhanden), to human beings themselves, for the sake of whom this making available in
fact takes place. What makes humans distinct from things is their mode of Being: They are free to relate to their own
being. As Apel puts it, this power to relate to one’s own being “is not only the ‘reason’ why an entity can be
encountered by human beings (why they are ‘conscious’ of it, but also and more precisely the reason why such an
entity can appear to them ‘as something’ (in a meaningful involvement)” (1973a, 301). By bringing to the fore the
fact that any categorization takes place for the sake of human beings and by drawing attention to the possibility that
they can become themselves available objects, a hermeneutics of being reveals the danger of a technical and
instrumental thinking.
The second advantage of the distinction between categories of entities and the specific mode of human existence
is the integration of a historical perspective. By linking the understanding of things to the understanding human
beings have of themselves, Heidegger’s hermeneutics of being can integrate history – the self-understanding in a
historical situation – into a pragmatics – the use of things for the sake of human beings. This is something that
neither American pragmatism nor the late Wittgenstein did. This integration of history into a pragmatics is made
possible by the fact that both the understanding of things and self-understanding are discursive: The way we
understand ourselves at a certain period of time influences the way things are understood.
What Heidegger’s and Apel’s conceptions of language have in common is thus the acceptance that language has
a pragmatic dimension as discourse in addition to its more specific dimension as a linguistic system. Heidegger and
Apel also agree, more importantly, on the primacy of the pragmatic and discursive aspect over the more systematic
and linguistic aspect. In Apel’s own terms, there is in Heidegger “the primacy of language as ‘discourse’ […] over
language as ready-to-hand or even merely present-at-hand in the world” (Apel 1963, 56). In short, they agree on the
priority of discourse over language. Discourse is a capacity or a competence: It is the active articulation of the
significance of the world which opens the framework in which the world can “matter” and language is the linguistic
system or the natural language spoken at a certain time in a certain community.
Apel summarizes his agreement with Heidegger’s hermeneutics as follows:

All understanding, whether it is in everyday life or even in the sciences, has its pre-structure which is
conditioned by time and history. To this pre-structure there belongs a “pre-understanding” of the world and
this pre-understanding is always already linguistically articulated in the sense of a “public interpretation” of the
world of existence.
(1989, 140)

The pragmatic involvement of speakers takes precedence over any semiotic autonomy a language might have as a
linguistic system. Signs themselves are just tools, pieces of equipment – Zeigzeug, as Heidegger says (1962, 109;
1984, 79) – which explicitly raise a totality of equipment into our circumspection so that, together with it, the
worldly character of the ready-to-hand announces itself. “Signs always indicate primarily ‘wherein’ one lives, where
one’s concern dwells, what sort of involvement there is with something” (111; 80). Similarly “in significance itself
[…] there lurks the ontological condition which makes it possible for human existence [Dasein] […] to disclose
such things as ‘significations’” (121; 87) and “[t]o significations, words accrue” (204; 161).
Despite his deep agreement with Heidegger, Apel’s main criticism, as I see it, is about a fundamental weakness
in a philosophy that understands itself as a radicalized hermeneutics. It is about the historical situation of the one
who does the investigation. Heidegger sees this “being-in-the-world” as a contingent a priori that cannot be
transcended and remains opaque to further investigation, preventing any transcendental perspective. This historical
situation itself, in fact, functions as a quasi-transcendental in Heidegger’s philosophy. As such, it does not offer any
basis for a critical stance either on itself or on other historical situations. Such an absence was not necessary, given
Heidegger’s framework. Apel contends that hermeneutics did not have to take a historicist turn and could have
maintained a critical perspective. Human existence (Dasein) names both a structural field of relationships and my
particular existence. If, Apel says, Heidegger had emphasized the intersubjective aspect of human existence, a
universal claim to reach a consensus based on intersubjective validity could be possible. Through its intersubjective
character, discourse could then be a competence that every person possesses, instead of being for Heidegger just the
factual articulated situation where I find myself.
Heidegger himself hints at such a transcendental possibility when he makes a distinction between an
“existentiell” self-understanding, which is how people concretely understand themselves in a factual situation, and a
philosophical “existential” understanding which is supposed to radicalize the former. The radicalization effected by
the “existential” understanding suggests the possibility of a critical hermeneutics. Such a critical aspect was virtually
included in the character of “formal indication” (formale Anzeige) of the existentialia (understanding, affectedness,
and discourse). This indicates that the level of reflection necessitated by the use of these general concepts is
fundamentally different from an understanding of being which is immanent in a factual and historical situation.
The critical aspect, however, founders immediately when Heidegger ignores the intersubjective character of
discourse in order to reach an existential perspective and, dogmatically, confines the “existentiell” understanding to
inauthenticity, thereby folding back on a heroic and personal conquest of one’s own existence. Such an authentic
“existential” self-understanding is, as Heidegger puts it, “a reticent self-projection upon one’s ownmost Being-
guilty, in which one is ready for anxiety” (Heidegger 1962, 343; 1984, 296–297). The articulation of such an
authentic openness is reticence or silence (Verschwiegenheit, 343; 296).
By conflating the “existentiell” level of the public interpretation with what the “they” says, Heidegger implicitly
denies the public interpretation its capacity to become a rational procedure for reaching a consensus on what an
“existential” self-understanding can be. The public interpretation does not constitute for Heidegger a dimension
where objectivity can be reached through public discussion and the exchange of arguments. Instead, the public
interpretation is reduced to a loose web of common opinions, current views, and accepted dogmas, representing
something like a Nietzschean herd mentality. In such an existentialist emphasis, the public interpretation even
constitutes a threat to existential authenticity.
The over-emphasis on the existentialist aspect of a discursive existence turns the hermeneutics of the facticity of
being-in-the-world into a hermeneutics of temporality and history (Apel 1991, 67). This leads Heidegger to
downplay the theoretical aspect of a discursive procedure for reaching a consensus and to move away from what
Apel characterizes as “the quasi-theoretical systematization of his fundamental ontology” (1973a, 249–250).
Such a choice made by Heidegger, Apel claims, does not do justice to the critical power discourse can have as a
communicative competence. Heidegger then implicitly accepts what Apel considers to be three consequences, which
he sees as the deficits of hermeneutics. The first deficit is about the quasi a priori status of the historical situation in
which human beings exist. Apel insists on the fundamental difference between a factual success in bringing to the
fore our own presuppositions when we speak and a claim to do so. The latter is a specific characteristic of
philosophical discourse understood as a critical instance of other discourses. Historically and factually, Heidegger’s
hermeneutics is correct: Any philosophy is dependent on its cultural and historical situation. Virtually, however, the
claim that philosophy makes is precisely to transcend its own factual and historical situation. By not making these
distinctions, Heidegger accepts language as a factual institution but does not consider that language can also be a
“meta-institution” (1998i, 119).
The second deficit in Heidegger’s radicalized hermeneutics is the fact that he conflates the question of the
constitution of meaning (Sinnkonstitution) with the question of justifying the validity of such a meaning
(Geltungsrechtfertigung). For Heidegger, the question of validity is itself inscribed in the historical situation of the
interpreter and is another form of the constitution of meaning. This is analogous to Wittgenstein’s refusal to grant
philosophy a special status as a language game, maintaining instead that philosophy is at the same level as other
language games. Apel believes that, if we do not distinguish between the question of how meaning is constituted in
experiences, for example, and the question of how to justify its validity, then there is no possibility for different
people to reach, on the basis of objective criteria, an intersubjective agreement on the validity of the understanding
of the world. By not making this distinction, Heidegger seems to confine the justification process to a contingent
affair in a particular historical situation. Such a reduction of the justification process amounts, in Apel’s words, “to
effectively removing any transcendental claim and making plainly historical the quasi-transcendental problem of the
constitution of meaning in a lifeworld” (1989, 133). Against Heidegger, Apel holds that only the process of
justification can offer an intersubjective procedure for reaching an agreement on the universally objective validity of
the understanding of the world.8
The third deficit Apel sees in Heidegger’s hermeneutic philosophy concerns truth. Heidegger exaggerates the
divide between the ontology of “readiness-to-hand” (Zuhandenheit) and the ontology of “presence-at-hand”
(Vorhandenheit). As we saw, the ontology of Zuhandenheit emphasizes the engagement of any theoretical attempt in
a praxis of life, while the ontology of Vorhandenheit yields “objectivity” in the sense of a representation of things
according to laws. Heidegger considers the second one to be dependent on the first, a view Apel endorses. However,
Apel cannot follow Heidegger when he posits that the ontology of Vorhandenheit, which seems deprived of a world,
is deficient and that the ideal of objectivity is only contingent on a specific pre-understanding of the world. Against
the strict separation between the ontologies of Zuhandenheit and Vorhandenheit, and thus against the subordination
of the predicative truth to the hermeneutic truth, Apel holds, first, that it is between the two poles of Zuhandenheit
and Vorhandenheit that the world has been interpreted in what has become the sciences of the Western tradition:
The understanding of things with an intersubjective validity. Such an understanding tries to bracket any merely
subjective presupposition of the significance of the world but does not abstract from any engagement in praxis or
any interest guiding knowledge.
As a consequence, although Heidegger recognized the dual synthesis in our grasp of things – a hermeneutic
synthesis as a pre-understanding and a predicative synthesis as a propositional content – he considers the predicative
synthesis as a surface effect of the former, thus depriving it of any real autonomy. The propositional truth of
judgments, for Heidegger, is subservient to the unveiling proper to the situation of human existence as a clearing,
what he calls aletheia or disclosure. By his emphasis on the dimension of existential pre-understanding and his
contention that pre-understanding grounds propositional truth, Heidegger can consistently deny any distinct
privilege to the propositional truth, compared to the moment of revelation in a pre-predicative setting. Heidegger not
only reduces the propositional truth – what he calls the “apophantic ‘as’” – to an existential or historical revelation –
what he calls the “hermeneutic ‘as’” so that the process of justification or the process of validation is subservient to
the opening that is proper to human existence. He also considers that justifying a claim is not different from
constituting the meaning leading to a claim. For Apel, this move is not only unwarranted, but also politically and
morally disastrous. If truth is subservient to some event of disclosure, there are no means to assess the validity of the
pre-understanding.
Worse still, by reducing the propositional truth to a pre-predicative revelation, Heidegger does nothing less than
relativize truth to a particular historical situation in which things are revealed for particular concerns. The truth and
falsity of judgments are thus relative to the context in which such judgments are made. The fact that in Heidegger’s
framework there is no procedure for reaching an objectivity that is intersubjectively validated is seen by Apel as “a
deficit in [Heidegger’s] thinking regarding the constitution of objectivity or the claim to intersubjective validity of
scientific experience, which is associated with the constitution of objectivity” (Apel 1991, 42). If we relativize the
predicative truth to the hermeneutic truth, Apel believes, the claim present in any discourse will be confined to the
context of the utterance manifesting such a claim and cannot transcend such a context. In such a “diachronic
relativism” there is, then, no possibility of eliminating subjective biases in an effort to reach a consensus because
such effort to reach a consensus could only be the particular and contingent response human existence gives to a
particular and contingent situation. Rationality itself is, thus, nothing other than a historically situated and contingent
argumentative procedure. Any attempt at emancipation is thereby sacrificed and humanity is surrendered to a
historical destiny.
This is how Heidegger comes close to Wittgenstein who, while wanting philosophy to play the role of a therapy,
reduces it to one factual habit or form of life among many others. As Wittgenstein claims, “philosophy may in no
way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it […]. It leaves everything as it is”
(Wittgenstein 1953, 49, n. 124). In an analogous manner, Heidegger, who in Being and Time nicely reconciles
Husserl’s notion of consciousness with a world in which one lives and claims for philosophy the task of a
destruction of metaphysics, later came to see philosophy itself as caught up in the destiny of the Western tradition.
Denying any critical function to philosophy, Heidegger let his philosophy be guided by a fascination for poetry and
etymology, as if language had an enlightening power on its own.
The approaches of the late Wittgenstein and the second Heidegger, Apel believes, lead to the self-destruction or
the “paralysis” (Apel 1991, 68) of philosophical reason. The cause of the shortcomings of such enterprises, however
powerful and fascinating they may be, lies in their view that we cannot retrocede beneath the factual and contingent
ground of the “lifeworld.” For Heidegger, this lifeworld is a world or a historically constituted tradition. The
lifeworld is thus de facto granted a quasi-transcendental function and the a priori can only be contingent. Apel calls
Heidegger’s stance an oblivion of the logos (Logosvergessenheit) (1998c, 119), analogous to the oblivion of being
that Heidegger lamented. Just as Wittgenstein does, Heidegger leads philosophy to an impasse, marked by a
“linguicism” (Linguizismus)9 that his later philosophy brings to an extreme form, a philosophy which increasingly
becomes a hermeneutics of poetry and of language.
In order to compensate for the weaknesses of Heidegger (and Wittgenstein) with respect to the question of
validity or the status of philosophy, Apel attempts to make the notion of language more robust. The dimension of
language, which already synthesizes and mediates our relations to things, others, and ourselves at the practical level,
does not have to be a thick historical sedimentation. For Apel, it is an a priori dimension or, as he characterizes it, a
dimension behind which one cannot retrocede. Before I, as an individual, can relate to things, others, or myself, I
must go through a language community that already represents a mediation for any means I may have to understand
things, others, or myself. However, in opposition to Heidegger or, later on, Gadamer, this dimension of pre-
understanding is not, for Apel, an opacity that can never be pierced through. In a manner somewhat similar to the
late Husserl, Apel sees this a priori as a condition for the possibility of knowledge and truth. Language is analogous
to the measuring tools of scientists. It is necessary and it mediates, but it does not have in itself a density that can
stop us from striving for truth. We recall that Davidson also saw language as an organ.
Appealing to the way American pragmatism has described the mediation of signs, Apel “transforms” this
pragmatic use of signs into a practice of argumentation that includes its own validity claims. Although
argumentation with its validity claims is performed in language, and thus in concrete situations of discourse, the
validity claims themselves transcend the empirical circumstances of discourse and make the speakers accountable
beyond the contingent situation of utterance.

5.2 Toward a transformed transcendental philosophy

Apel believes that the history of philosophy can be reconstructed in the light of three paradigms of first philosophy,
claiming that language represents the third paradigm (Apel 1994, 83–111, 112–131). The first paradigm is
represented by Aristotle for whom first philosophy is seen as an analysis of the essence of things and rests on an
ontology. In the trichotomy that Aristotle makes in his treatise On Interpretation between things (pragmata), mental
representations (pathemata), and voices (phonē), the first element is both the starting point of any investigation as
well as the telos of rational representation. Despite numerous debates on the status of words, such as in Plato’s
Cratylus, or figures of speech, in several Aristotelian treatises, Greek philosophy in general does not seem to have
manifested a keen interest in elaborating a specific conception of language that would include more than sounds or
signs or that would perform a task greater than communication. Only with the Romans, and through the reflection
and the practice of translation, Apel claims, did the lingua Latina come to represent the specificity of a natural
language. Such a bracketing of the specificity of a natural language might explain the fact that Aristotle’s trichotomy
was rather understood as a dichotomy between things and thoughts so that the philosophical debate focused on how
things can be known. What lies at the core of Greek philosophical reflection is a concern for concepts, whether they
are extralinguistic, like Plato’s ideas, or whether they are the affections of the soul, in the sense of Aristotle’s
pathemata. Apel sees the tendency of Greek philosophy to abstract from linguistic mediation as an attempt to
safeguard conceptual representations and to guarantee communication. Because words are mere vectors, thoughts
are preserved by concepts and thus not altered when conveyed in language. Such a step is a crucial one for
philosophy, representing the threshold of rationality.
The second paradigm of first philosophy appears with Descartes. Philosophy defines itself as an analysis of
consciousness, seemingly inverting the Greek emphasis on things. The fundamental presupposition of this second
paradigm is that a private internal experience can be the criterion for what is certain or what is evident. “What is
certain […] is not the existence of things or people in the external world, but only the fact that I, here and now,
believe I perceive something” (Apel 1991, 29). External things are thus the inferences I draw from my
representations, which are immanent in consciousness. With significant reformulations, Kant brought this second
paradigm to its completion, a completion with a critical epistemology understood as a transcendental philosophy.
This second paradigm gives philosophical discourse its status as a critique of any other discourse as well as its
foundation in an ego that is not itself interpretive.
A third paradigm of first philosophy appears with the arising of analytic philosophy, on the one hand, and with
the development of continental hermeneutic philosophy, on the other. First philosophy becomes an analysis of
language as a semiotics in the sense that “language is the crucial condition for the possibility and validity of our
knowledge of the structure of the world” (Apel 1994, 83). In this respect, Apel sees a convergence between, on the
one hand, the early Wittgenstein’s claim that philosophy is a critique of language or that “the limits of my language
mean the limits of my world” and, on the other, Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms or Heidegger’s view on
language as the “house of being.” Pragmatism served as a mediation in this convergence.
Situating himself in the third paradigm, Apel attempts both to radicalize it as well as to integrate the other two
paradigms. He adamantly wants to retain what Greek philosophy achieved, which claimed that what matters is
knowing what is as it is. Yet, against the Greek approach, he takes sides with Kant who reformulates Aristotle by
putting the focus on the conditions for the possibility of thoughts, claiming for a particular language game the status
of a “critique” of knowledge. However, against Kant, Apel shows some sympathy for Hamann and Herder, Kant’s
contemporary critics, as well as for Wilhelm von Humboldt. To a certain extent, he agrees with Hamann who wrote
that “without language we would have no reason” (quoted in Apel 1994, 93) or that “reason is language, namely
logos” (quoted in Apel 1994, 93). Similarly, Apel is sympathetic to Humboldt’s view of language as “an intellectual
instinct of reason” (quoted in Apel 1994, 94). Along with these authors, Apel wants to show that we cannot abstract
from the linguistic nature of concepts. However, against these critics and against some tendencies in hermeneutics,
he also claims that such a recognition of the a priori of language does not mean a reduction of concepts to a specific
linguistic system. By endorsing this third paradigm of first philosophy, he wants to transform philosophy into a
semiotic philosophy and, by radicalizing it, to maintain a transcendental aspect.
As mentioned above, American pragmatism has mediated the convergence between analytic and continental
hermeneutic philosophy. In his semiotic transformation of philosophy, Apel draws heavily from a theory of semiosis
that Morris and Peirce made central in their works. Apel actually introduced Peirce to the German audience through
lengthy introductions to the German translations of Peirce’s works. According to Morris’ notion of semiosis, a sign
has a triadic structure: a syntactic structure linking signs together, a semantic structure linking a sign to an object,
and a pragmatic structure linking a sign to its user. Apel joins Peirce in drawing three consequences from this triadic
structure: (1) Every knowledge of something as something involves the mediation of material sign vehicles:
Cognition is “an interpretation of something as something which must be mediated through signs” (Apel 1998i,
101); (2) For signs to have a representational function for a consciousness, the existence of a real world must be
presupposed; such a real world, in principle, must be thought of as being representable, and that means knowable;
(3) Every representation of something as something by a sign involves an interpretation by a real interpreter.
Although relying on the theory of semiosis presented above for the most crucial aspects of his thought, Apel
significantly reformulates it by making the third structure – the pragmatic level – the axis of the whole triadic
structure. He purports to show that the system of a specific language in its syntactic and semantic structure is
embedded in the pragmatics of the communication that obtains in the community speaking the language. This allows
him to transform philosophy semiotically into what he calls a transcendental semiotics, parallel to Habermas’
“universal pragmatics.” Signs in fact constitute an a priori dimension. As we saw, they are at the same level as sense
organs or technical instruments used by scientists for investigating natural objects. This makes language a
“corporeal a priori [Leibapriori] of knowledge” (Apel 1998i, 48). However, since signs are of necessity
intersubjective, they do not compete with any content of thought that could be entertained privately or by a specific
group of people.
What might lead one to believe that natural languages represent as many world-views or, on the other side of the
intellectual spectrum, that scientists deal directly with the real world, is the ambiguity of the semantic dimension:
“Semantics” can name both a constitutive part of a linguistic system and the meaningful articulation of the real
world. In the first sense, “semantics” means the abstract dimension of a language-system that allows one to
designate objects within the framework opened by this system. To the extent that it is an internal component of a
system, this kind of semantics can be reduced to syntax. In the second sense, “semantics” represents an integrated
dimension where the objects designated within the system are linked to real objects in the world. Semantics in this
second sense is linked to a pragmatics and thus to intersubjective communication.
Apel can then integrate the Heideggerean hermeneutic synthesis, which is always already performed in the
lifeworld in the way we relate to things, others, and ourselves, into the communication between the members of the
linguistic community. The former represents the “public interpretation” (Heidegger) while the latter represents the
public validity of knowledge. In this way, the praxis of communication can transcend the hermeneutic synthesis
even though the praxis needs such a synthesis in order to be communicative. This shows that the only level beneath
which one cannot, strictly speaking, retrocede is not, as Heidegger believed, the factual situation of human existence
or a specific epoch of being, but the argumentative presuppositions that are enacted in the use of language (Apel
1991, 49).
After Habermas, Apel adds to Chomsky’s notion of “linguistic competence” (in the sense of a capacity to master
the specific syntactic and semantic system of a natural language like English) another competence: A
“communicative competence,” which encompasses the linguistic competence (Apel 1994, 64. See also 84). Such a
communicative competence is precisely what enables us to lock the usage of a language onto the pragmatic relation
to things and other human beings. It also allows us to learn other languages and translate one language into another.
Apel can then make the following claim: When I refer to some object, I am not only referring to what the particular
words and syntactic configurations available in English “mean,” as a designatum, which would be different in
French or Chinese. While the object of reference has to be mediated by a designatum – what my linguistic system
allows me to designate – the designation that the signs allow is also what I, as an individual, want to refer to. It is
also a denotatum as a real object referred to by a real person. The designatum is made possible by my linguistic
competence and the denotatum is made possible by my communicative competence. This dual competence explains
why the semantic components of languages can be influenced by a reflection on one’s own language or the
interactions between native speakers and foreigners. Our language changes and our use of language changes as well,
such as when we adopt new words and discard other words, or when words acquire new meanings and lose other
meanings.
A natural language is thus ascribed a dual function. First, through a natural language, a world of meaning or a
meaningful world is opened, which is spontaneously endowed with an objective and intersubjective validity as a
common world. This is Heidegger’s “hermeneutic synthesis.” Second, language assumes a transcendental function
in the sense that, besides disclosing entities, it also guarantees the conditions of possibility (or the foundation) and
validity (or criteria) of meaning (or truth). This is the public validity of knowledge.
By linking together the fact that real subjects act and think in the world with the fact that any meaningful project
of action or thought is of necessity mediated through language, Apel can show that thinking is de facto a particular
articulation of signs. The transcendental subject that, in its Cartesian as well as Husserlian incarnation, said “I
think,” can be redescribed as an “I speak” so that it becomes a semiotic or pragmatic instance. Apel can then replace
the Kantian synthesis of apperception with intersubjectivity as a community of speakers, combining the historical
perspective of Heidegger with the mediation of signs of Wittgenstein and Peirce, while also retaining a
transcendental aspect. The advantage is that this instance of speech is both individual, since words do not align
themselves in neat sentences, but have to be put together by someone, and at the same time this instance is
intersubjective: What I think is only meaningful when articulated through signs. I have to borrow from others the
very means I need to articulate my individual thoughts.10
The fact that language is not only an indispensable tool for articulating anything meaningful, but that this
articulation is of an argumentative nature, is the crux of Apel’s – and Habermas’ – project. Because the semiotic
dimension of language as mediation is embedded in the pragmatic dimension of real people as sign users, speaking
is not only an act of speech, as in Austin’s and Searle’s theory of speech acts (1969). Speaking is also an action – a
“communicative action.”11 By making an utterance, I perform a linguistic act and a pragmatic action of producing
something new in the world that is made public so that I bear some responsibility for its production and am
accountable for it. I must then be able, if prompted, to justify such a production. Different from Searle’s view, this
claim is not limited to a rule of the speech act but is a rule of the social interaction. Because I make a claim, I must,
in principle, be ready to justify what I said. The mediation of signs or language as a corporeal a priori, thus, not only
transforms the “I think” into an “I speak,” but this “I speak” is in fact an “I argue” (1996, 317).12 “Already at the
level of the mutual understanding of the meaning of our linguistic expressions there must already be presupposed a
claim of validity for the meaning of our expressions” (Apel 1989, 165).
Validity claims represent the genuinely pragmatic and transcendental dimension of speech. After Habermas,
Apel lists four validity claims present in any act of speech: a claim to intelligibility, a claim to truth, a claim to
truthfulness, and a claim to normative rightness (Apel 1980, 54–55).13
The first claim to intelligibility (Verständlichkeit) is obvious: Anybody who speaks must want to say something,
have something relevant to say and be intelligible to others.14 Without this claim, a speaker could not be taken as a
speaker. When I say something and mean it, I assume that I can be understood, and I tacitly posit the possible
understanding of what I say, if I mean it. Apel defines it as follows: “A claim to linguistically articulated meaning,
about which it must be possible, in principle, to reach a consensus between all possible discourse partners” (1998g,
238) or “a claim on the inter-subjectively sharable meaning of [speakers’] speech-acts as a pre-condition of all
further validity claims” (1998f, 207).15
The second claim is a claim to truth (Wahrheitsanspruch), linked to the propositional content of what is said.
Whenever someone says something, we take that individual to be telling the truth. This is the basis for any
communication and any community. This claim links the speaker to the “objective” world as a set of states of
affairs, so that failing to satisfy this claim amounts to saying something false or absurd.
The third claim is about being truthful or sincere (Wahrhaftigkeitsanspruch). This claim is linked to the
intentions with which speech acts are performed, thus to the “subjective” world of the speaker, so that failing to
satisfy this claim amounts to lying, manipulating, seducing, etc.
The fourth and final claim involved in any act of speech is a claim to normative rightness (Richtigkeitsanspruch).
It is linked to the intersubjective conditions in which the speech act is performed, thus to the “normative” world so
that anybody who says something implicitly claims that what is said or done fits the circumstances, is appropriate,
etc. Not fulfilling this claim means saying something improper, out of line, morally reprehensible, etc.
Habermas summarizes these claims, omitting the first one, when he states:

It belongs to the communicative intent of the speaker (a) that he perform a speech act that is right in respect to
the given normative context, so that between him and the hearer an intersubjective relation will come about
which is recognized as legitimate; (b) that he make a true statement (or correct existential presuppositions), so
that the hearer will accept and share the knowledge of the speaker; and (c) that he express truthfully his beliefs,
intentions, feelings, desires, and the like, so that the hearer will give credence to what is said.
(Habermas 1984, 307–308)16

Habermas calls those claims “universal claims” to the extent that they manifest the “communicative competence,”
which is precisely the object of a “universal pragmatics” (1976, 209, 255). He gives the example of the following
request made by a professor to a student: “Please bring me a glass of water.”

The student could reject this request by contesting any of the three validity claims: (a) “No. You can’t treat me
like one of your employees,” thereby contesting that the action of the professor is right in the given normative
context; (b) “No. You really only want to put me in a bad light in front of the other seminar participants,”
thereby contesting that the professor means what he says […]; (c) “No. The next water tap is so far away that I
couldn’t get back before the end of the session,” thereby contesting the truth of propositions the professor has
to presuppose in the given circumstances.
(Habermas 1984, 306–307)

Failing to satisfy any of these validity claims amounts to what Apel calls a “performative contradiction,” in the sense
that speakers, by not living up to the claim implicitly made would thereby deny the very condition for the possibility
of uttering what they say. In a performative contradiction, the propositional content of one’s claim is contradicted by
the claim involved in the very speech-act conveying such a proposition. Apel gives some examples of such
performative contradictions. In the statement “I hereby assert that I do not exist,” my act of utterance contradicts the
fact that I do not exist17; in the statement “I hereby assert as true (i.e., intersubjectively valid) that a consensus
regarding that which I assert cannot be expected in principle,” my commitment to the truth of what I say contradicts
the content of what I said, namely that in principle a consensus could not arise about what I say18; or in the
statement “We must in fact all concede that we are in principle not in the position of abstracting from the individual
peculiarities and shortcomings of our existence,” the communal character of the act of assertion contradicts the
stated fact that we cannot reach such a communal level.
Validity claims at the level of discourse represent a moment of idealization at the very moment I speak from
within a particular situation by anticipating an “ideal communication community” (Apel) or an “ideal speech
situation” (Habermas). No matter what the historical or cultural situation is in which actual speakers find
themselves, and no matter what language they speak, when speaking as persons with other persons, they are bound
to be intelligible, to tell the truth, to be truthful, and to be normatively right. In Apel’s terms, I anticipate “an ideal
community” “that would basically be capable of adequately understanding the meaning of [my] arguments and
judging their truth in a definitive manner” (1998b, 280).19 This does not entail that I must be factually understood in
order for my claim to be intelligible and make sense. For example, many prophets, visionaries, revolutionaries, or
discoverers had to wait to find their audience, and this lack of factual audience did not stop them from speaking
intelligibly. But the reason why they could speak intelligibly, although they were not understood at the time of their
utterance, and – we may expect – were even rejected or repressed, is that they posited an audience in the form of an
ideal communication community that would in principle understand them fully (see Apel 1998d). This anticipated
ideal community functioned “as an instance of judging or controlling the meaning of the rules followed by the
revolutionaries of human form of life” (1994, 103).
Now, as regulative, validity claims are not going to secure a solution to our social problems on which all
members of the community would come to an agreement. They are strictly formal. Truth, truthfulness, and
normative rightness may be filled by different empirical contents. Human sacrifices in ancient times were made by
people who, we assume, could redeem these different validity claims and thus did it with the agreement of the
members of their community (or most members at least), whether about the truth that the gods are thirsty for blood,
believing in this supernatural order and holding this practice to be right. However different peoples’ views may be
on what truth is or what is right, they operate with the same “grammar” of justification, as Habermas says (1992,
138), and we may assume that this is how we came to understand their religion and social practices. It may also have
been how we could engage in a conversation with them, precisely about the empirical content of what they call
“truth” and “normative rightness.”
The claims only give traction to the discussion and force speakers to go beyond their own particular interests.
The traction validity claims give to the discussion consists in expanding the breadth of what speakers are
accountable for. Speakers can be questioned about the intelligibility and truth of what they say, as well as about their
own sincerity and the normative rightness of what they say. Although, ultimately, the consensus will determine the
truth of the matter or the “morality” of the decisions under discussion, the discussion leading to these decisions and
consensus is regulated and, to this extent, protected against the arbitrariness of manipulation, coercion, or
dogmatism.
Let us note that even violating the claims and shaking up the establishment, starting a revolution, breaking
taboos, or speaking about the unspeakable are predicated on these validity claims. Breaking conventions of what is
normatively right presupposes the claim to normative rightness. In short, whether it is by abiding by these claims or
violating them willingly, these validity claims represent a level in argumentation and speech that is quasi-
transcendental for the very reason that these claims pertain to any speech act and thus transcend the contexts of
speech. In this sense, in any speech act that presents itself as intelligible and rational, the claim that is made binds
the speaker to argumentation, that is to say, to defend what has been said and thus interact with others on the basis of
what is said. This is how, when performing a rational and intelligible speech act, I in fact argue.
To summarize my reconstruction of Apel’s thought, the transformation of philosophy he has achieved takes
place in three steps. The first one consists in showing that language is uncircumventable to the extent that the use of
signs represents an a priori dimension as a condition of possibility for any thought and any intelligible action.
Apel’s enterprise can thus claim to have integrated the fundamental breakthroughs of the language game theory, of
hermeneutics, and of American pragmatism. The second step represents Apel’s own genuine contribution. As an a
priori, language also conceals a transcendental dimension to the extent that this language is only such once used by
people in a community. Language as communication and as a priori unveils the possibility of reflection and thereby
opens the door for transcending one’s own factual language or communication community. This transcendence is
explained by Apel as the fact that any argument used, any word uttered meaningfully, as well as any action that
claims to be intelligible, and which is articulated in a natural language in a factual and historical community, always
already presupposes an ideal community that is unlimited and functions as a regulative idea. As a consequence, in a
third step, the anticipation of an ideal community functioning as a regulative principle binds the rational speaker or
the rational agent to abide by basic elementary norms in the form of validity claims. Reformulated or “transformed”
in this way, which is Apel’s genuine transformation of philosophy, the transcendental subject “I argue” (1996, 317)
becomes a transcendental language game and this language game corresponds to a universal or transcendental
pragmatics of language-communication or the indefinite community of interpretation.20
In this semiotic transformation of philosophy in a transcendental way, the ontological primacy characteristic of
Greek philosophy is preserved to the extent that the real is that which can be known in principle by an ideal
community, even if, factually, it will never be known absolutely.21 The modern Cartesian epistemological primacy
radicalized by Kant is also preserved through the transcendental transformation of the real community. The
transformed community is not disconnected from the real one insofar as the communication community, functioning
as the transcendental subject, is also an object of science, at the level of the social sciences in the broad sense. The
transcendental subject of science is thus the real historical subject. At the same time, such a real historical subject of
science can only be adequately understood “if it is treated as the potential subject of science […] and if its historical
reality is always both empirically and normatively critically reconstructed in the light of the ideal of the unlimited
communication community that is to be realized in society” (Apel 1998i, 140).
With this ideal of communication (including its validity claims), Apel believes that he offers a significant
complement to Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s hermeneutics, adding a normative component or showing that
hermeneutics is normative. Through validity claims, and especially the fourth one (the claim to normative rightness),
hermeneutics becomes a form of ethics of discussion. It is not the view that hermeneutics becomes ethics by asking
and framing ethical questions or that traditional ethics includes an interpretive “hermeneutic” component. Rather,
the claim is much stronger: In interpreting, there is an ethical component linked to the status and obligation of the
interpreter. Because the act of interpreting includes validity claims that go beyond the context of utterance, it
involves not only the speaker but also the person as an agent in a community. The speech act theory taught us that
speaking is doing; transcendental pragmatics teaches us that speaking is acting in a community among other fellow
partners of communication and action, and is, to this extent, ethical. The ethics of discussion is a consequence of the
reformulation of thinking as speaking, then as arguing: Now, to argue means to be ethical.

5.3 The ethics of discussion

Rorty raised the following objection to Apel’s and Habermas’ transcendental program: “Pragmatists like me can’t
figure out how to tell whether we are understanding a justification as just a ‘justification for us’ or as a ‘justification,
period.’ This strikes me as like trying to tell whether I think of my scalpel or my computer as ‘a good tool for this
task’ or as ‘a good tool, period’” (Rorty 2000, 13). Rorty explains further:

Unlike Apel and Habermas, the moral I draw from Peirce is that we philosophers who are concerned with
democratic politics should leave truth alone, as a sublimely undiscussable topic, and instead turn to the
question of how to persuade people to broaden the size of the audience they take to be competent, to increase
the size of the relevant community of justification. The latter project is not only relevant to democratic politics,
it pretty much is democratic politics.
(Rorty 2000, 9)

For Apel the difference between a justification just for us and a justification without qualification consists in the fact
that there are two dimensions present in any speech act or action, as we saw: an empirical content and an
idealization in the form of the validity claims mentioned above.
Regarding the empirical content of validity claims, Apel and Habermas agree with Rorty, as well as with with
Heidegger and Gadamer, when these authors reject the traditional model of an isolated transcendental subject and
instead put the emphasis on the fact that we are social and historical beings, trying to find our ways in a world that
preceded us and which we cannot really master. Things happen and events occur that contribute to the formation of
meanings. However, besides the meaning that is constituted, and which indeed often exceeds what individuals
intended, there is an idealization involved in these validity claims, which Apel describes as the difference between
the question of the constitution of meaning and the question of its justification, as we saw. This difference did not
present a problem for traditional transcendental philosophy up to Husserl in the period of Ideas I (1998), simply
because a meaning constituted transcendentally was ipso facto transcendentally justified. However, since the subject
is now, according to Apel, a user of signs and thus intersubjective, the question of the constitution of meaning has to
be uncoupled from the question of the justification of such meaning.
Now, if the two questions are uncoupled, the risk is to grant the realm of action and events the privilege of being
immune from scrutiny, the question of justification being a secondary business, like the afterthought of history.
Goethe would then be right, as he said in his Maximes in a not uncharacteristically provocative manner: “People of
action are always without conscience. Nobody has more conscience than those who observe” (1907, 42, n. 241).22
Apel wants conscience or morality to be more than the luxury of those who observe history and his response to
Goethe would consist in saying that action in itself is already accompanied by claims on the side of the agent, so that
the process of justification only makes explicit what was already implicitly involved in action itself. What
justification provides is, according to Apel, an intersubjective procedure for reaching an agreement on the
universally objective validity of the understanding of the world.23
Apel mentioned in a seminar, which I attended, another exchange which he had with Rorty in a conference in
Vienna in 1985. Pressed to respond to a question about the foundation of ethics, Rorty answered: “It is only a matter
of common sense. For I am American. We only have to persuade the others of the fact that the way we chose is the
right one.” Rorty justifies this as follows:

To be ethnocentric is to divide the human race into the people to whom one must justify one’s beliefs and the
others. The first group – one’s ethnos – comprises those who share enough of one’s beliefs to make fruitful
conversation possible. In this sense, everybody is ethnocentric when engaged in actual debate, no matter how
much realist rhetoric about objectivity he produces in his study.
(Rorty 1989, 44–45)

Apel, who after high school had volunteered with his entire class in the German army and fought in World War II
from 1940 to 1945, told us, his students:

A bit perpelexed I asked him the following question: “And I am German. It is only a matter of common sense.”
I meant that at the time of the Third Reich common sense was called among us “the healthy national
sentiment” [das gesunde Volksempfinden]. It was in invoking this national sentiment that the principle of the
democratic state was put into question […]. I meant that the universal principles of a postconventional
morality, called upon to legitimate positive law itself, for example by insisting on something like human rights,
these principles were invalidated quite successfully in the name of a consensus about the specificity of a “We.”
(1988, 409)

Apel sees such a faith in common sense as what can lead to a “paralysis of the ethical principles” and he claims that
this is what, linked to materialism and opportunism, led to a “failure of the ‘intellectual elite’ in the Third Reich”
(1988, 410).
Yet, the question remains of how we move from “We, the Germans of the Third Reich” to “We, who have a
liberal tradition guaranteeing basic democratic principles and human rights.” In part due to his personal experience
in his youth of indoctrination, repression and terror, Apel rejects Rorty’s solution of a simple lateral move from one
form of community to another through engagement and conversation. Not only is there no guarantee that we will
reach what Rorty characterizes as “the widest possible intersubjective agreement” (Rorty 1998, 63), but there is also
no guarantee that this agreement will fall on the right side of the divide between liberal tradition and totalitarianism.
Rorty wants to dispense with the normative dimension that, Apel contends, is structurally embedded in the very
process of discussion. Once we consider the validity claim as a moment of idealization, it appears that the
provisional ethnocentrism is in fact parasitic to such universalization.
This is, Apel argues, something that neither Heidegger’s existentialist stance, according to which we are thrown
into the world, nor Rorty’s pragmatist view, according to which we have to start where we are, can provide. Instead
of being confined to the situation we inherited, we can transcend it, Apel contends. And the transcendence is not an
additional act to what we do or say, but is already virtually in the act itself in the form of the validity claims
mentioned above:

If I cannot deny something without actually contradicting myself and if, at the same time, I cannot ground it
deductively without formal petitio principii, then what I cannot deny or deductively ground belongs to those
transcendental pragmatic presuppositions of argumentation that one has already recognized for the language
game of argumentation to remain meaningful.
 (1976, 72f)

These presuppositions of argumentation therefore represent a dimension beneath which one cannot retrocede. They
are uncircumventable (unhintergehbar). Rorty’s views of a justification that would be just “for us” is for Apel a
performative contradiction, precisely because it denies the idealization moment that makes of it a justification; “we”
can only claim that something is a justification if it transcends the limited sphere of “our” community. Not doing so
would amount to saying, “This is a justification for us, but it may not be for you.” This is not a rational justification
because it does not claim to be acceptable to the other side. It is simply a stament of motives or of purposes.
The first three validity claims discussed above (to intelligibility, truth, and truthfulness) are minimally ethical
inasmuch as they include a normative component. The fourth validity claim, the claim to normative rightness, is
explicitly a moral claim since, as Habermas explains, it links the speaking or acting subjects to the normative realm
in which they live with others and interact with them through their utterances and actions. Apel develops this ethical
aspect of argumentation in a program that he calls “the ethics of discussion,” which was published in his book
Discussion and Responsibility. The Problem of the Transition Toward a Postconventional Morality (1988).
Apel presents his ethical theory as a two-layer ethics, an ethics of discussion and an ethics of responsibility.
There is, Apel says, an “ethics of logic” (1998i, 259) that lies in “any human word (in fact, more precisely, with any
action that is to be intelligible)” (1998i, 140). Given the claims we make automatically as soon as we speak or act,
we implicitly acknowledge that any strategic use of arguments, any effort to cheat or manipulate are always
predicated on the normal use of arguments and are parasitic on the normal use. This ethical logic of argumentation
makes it the case from the start of the discussion that “human beings can never be Hobbesian wolves in the sense of
a merely strategic interaction” (1988, 351).
In this ethics we are not dealing with a derivation of an ethical obligation from a proposition (an “ought” from an
“is”), but detecting in the “is” at the propositional level a pragmatic “ought” that makes the “is” intelligible. This
ethical component is found through reflection on the conditions of possibility for expressing the proposition. Even
merely asking the question “Why be moral?” places the subject of the utterance in the normative realm:

Anybody who asks seriously such a question (“Why?”) has already entered the field of argumentative
discussion, which means that he can then, by reflecting on the meaning of his action, be convinced that he of
necessity has already recognized the rules, and this means the norms of rational and cooperative argumentation
as well as, thereby, the ethical norms of a communication community.
(1988, 353)

Apel believes that this ethical component in the very claims to validity offers an ultimate foundation for morality,
because these ethical components cannot be denied without performative contradiction. “The ultimate foundation
does not consist in deducing the being-rational from something else, but in demonstrating through reflection that if
we deny the recognition of the norms of reason, it leads to a performative self-contradiction” (1988, 354). This
dimension of argumentation belongs to an “a priori perfect” (apriorisches Perfekt, 355), which transposes the
“always already” of Heidegger, consisting in a historical situation we cannot transcend, into the logical dimension of
argumentation.
Apel considers that formal validity claims in fact commit speakers or agents to moral norms that will allow them
to find a consensual solution to the problem under consideration. While validity claims are formal, they lead to an
implicit acceptance of moral norms. Here is how Apel describes his project of ethics in two parts, A and B.

Part A of ethics must anchor the principle of ethics in the ideal of an ideal communication community, an ideal
which is presupposed and anticipated counterfactually without any possible contestation by those who argue.
By contrast, Part B has the task to take into consideration the counterfactual character of the anticipation […]
of the ideal, to the extent that this anticipation is the problem of a historical ethics of responsibility.
(1988, 134)

Apel lists three principles of the ethics of discussion as deriving from the idealization at the heart of the validity
claims:

1. All possible discourse partners must acknowledge each other as having equal rights in representing their
interests by arguments; 2. All possible discourse partners are supposed to bear equal co-responsibility for
identifying and solving problems of the life world through argumentative discourse […] 3. If the need for
solving moral problems through argumentative discourse arises, then, if possible, practical discourses have to
 be established.
(2001, 48)24

These principles of the ethics of discussion regulate how the discussion is to be conducted. They do not determine
what the outcome of the discussion will be, but they commit speakers or agents to strive toward the ideal of finding
some concrete forms of universalization. While in principle there is no ultimate foundation on which to decide, for
example, how pollution should be regulated, the rules of discussion already narrow the options. It is expected that
the transcendental procedural norms of discussion will only allow through their grid those principles that are indeed
to the benefit of all.25 As Apel says, “those material norms have to be established that in case of their being
generally obeyed probably will have consequences that could be acceptable to all affected persons” (2001, 49).
This second part leads to an ethics of responsibility, which is already announced in Apel’s second and third
principles mentioned above. He contends that the universalization and the reversibility of roles, which the ethics of
discussion secures and guarantees, also commit the discussion partners to a co-responsibility toward the measures,
decisions, or norms they will form through consensus. In Apel’s words, the discussion partners are committed to a
“possible and hoped for concretization of the principle of universalization” (Apel 1988, 451). Different from Kant,
the universalization is not performed by a single subject, but by a community. What ought to be done is thus not
deduced from a categorical imperative. Rather, one submits to a reversibility of roles and one finds oneself caught in
a shared responsibility toward the solution on which one works in a community. Such responsibility consists in

first, guaranteeing in all we do and say the survival of the human species as the real communication
community and, secondly, realizing the ideal community in the real communication community. The first goal
is the necessary condition for the second and the second gives its meaning to the first, a meaning that is already
anticipated in any argument.
(1988, 141)26

This ethics of responsibility is a “provisional ethics” that allows “to pass from the existing conditions to the
realization of the conditions that will allow for the application of the ethics of discussion” (134).
The second part of ethics leading directly to the foundation of moral norms has led to a controversy between
Apel and Habermas. They disagree on the extent of the power validity claims can have at the level of discourse.
Habermas does not follow Apel who believes that the validity claims embedded in the rules of argumentation yield
an ultimate foundation and the basis for a transcendental philosophy. As Habermas clearly and succinctly puts it,
Apel “wants to show that any subject capable of speech and action necessarily makes substantive normative
presuppositions as soon as he engages in any discourse with the intention of critically examining a hypothetical
claim to validity” (Habermas 1990, 82). Against such a view, Habermas writes: “It is by no means self-evident that
rules which are unavoidable within discourse can also claim to be valid for regulating action outside of discourses”
(93). Such a transfer would require, according to Habermas, at least a separate justification. For Apel claims that
from the necessary presuppositions of argumentation one can:

a) ground directly, i.e., without the detour through the foundation of a principle of universalization,
fundamental moral norms, b) demonstrate an existential obligation to be moral and c) complete morality
through an obligation, on the basis of an ethics of responsibility, to realize morality historically.
(Habermas 2003, 64)

Trying to draw basic moral commitments from the level of argumentation represents for Habermas a confusion
between the ethics of discussion, which should only have formal principles regulating the discussion, and substantial
morality. Habermas thus discards part B of Apel’s ethics, the ethics of responsibility, if it is presented as
immediately following from the ethics of discussion, as Apel claims. In general, Habermas qualifies as “stubborn”
Apel’s retention of the transcendental-pragmatics’ claim to ultimate justification (Habermas 1990, 93).27

5.4 The ethics v. the politics of discussion: The case of Andrew Jackson

In order to show how effective the claims to validity are and what link there is between the claims to validity and an
ethics of discussion or an ethics of responsibility, when applied to a concrete situation, I would like to examine how
we can assess the attitude of President Andrew Jackson when he refused to enforce a decision made by the Supreme
Court in the case of Worcester v. Georgia in 1832. This test is both about Jackson’s actions – whether they are
ethical or not – and about our interpretation of this historical event – whether there is an ethics involved in
interpretation or guiding interpretation. Let us start with the ethics of what Jackson did.
This situation involved the Cherokees in Georgia, who rejected the Indian Removal Act that required that they
move west of the Mississippi and who had to contend with several measures that the state of Georgia had taken to
dismiss their rights and to seize their land where gold had been found. The Cherokees sued and the Supreme Court
eventually decided that Georgia’s laws violated previous treaties signed with the Cherokees. However, Georgia did
not abide by the decision, which had been written by Chief Justice John Marshall. Placed before this breach of the
decision of the Supreme Court by a state, Andrew Jackson famously said: “John Marshall has made his decision;
now let him enforce it.”28 This inaction by the federal government led to the final eviction of the Cherokees and
what has been called the “Trail of Tears” to Oklahoma, during which thousands of Cherokees died.
What is transcendental about that? This certainly manifests the strength and limitation of the validity claims:
They regulate the conversation but do not guarantee a positive outcome, for it may happen that norms are
implemented at the expense of some people or groups of people. Yet, it remains that Jackson did not abolish the
validity claims and thus the justification process. As H. W. Brands tells us, Jackson justified his decision of not
sending troops to Georgia by claiming that his troops would never aim their guns at other white people in order to
defend Indians. Brands writes:

To preserve the Cherokees as a tribe – to enforce Marshall’s decision – would have required raising and
sending federal troops to Georgia, stationing them there indefinitely, and ordering them to shoot white
Georgians who threatened the Indians. Jackson realized that American democracy simply wouldn’t sustain
such a policy. It was one thing to threaten to use force to preserve the Union; in such an endeavor he could
expect broad support from the people who would actually do the fighting. It was another thing to ask white
citizens to risk death protecting Indians. They wouldn’t do it.
(2005, 493)

The claims have not been eliminated. No matter what the practical considerations were at the times and no matter
how paternalistic Jackson was, the rules of argumentation transcended his context of utterance and action, and are
thus quasi-transcendental features of speech and action. Jackson felt compelled to justify what he did and he did not
limit the justification to a “justification for me, Andrew Jackson” or “for us, white people.” He spoke as president in
the name of the Union. This supports the idealization moment at the core of the validity claims. Yet, while
redeeming validity claims, Jackson also did harm to the Cherokees.
This case strongly speaks against the direct link Apel sees between claims to validity, the ethics of discussion,
and the ethics of responsibility. Jackson is still rated in surveys as being among the ten best presidents and his
position can be defended in terms of Realpolitik or in terms of national interest. After all, Jackson could even find
some retrospective support in a statement made by Condoleeza Rice in Foreign Affairs in 2000 about US foreign
policy, that “there is nothing wrong with doing something that benefits all humanity, but that is, in a sense, a second-
order effect” (Rice 2000, 46). If it is a second order effect to do good, maybe Jackson was right that hurting the
interests of the Cherokees was also merely collateral, as a second-order effect for the sake of the Union. Indeed, he
himself even felt responsible for the fate of the Cherokees and was convinced that if they stayed in the proximity of
whites, they would be annihilated.29 He thus believed that he shared a responsibility for the Cherokees’ future. In
other words – and paradoxically – Jackson did in fact redeem his validity claims by justifying what he did.
This fact that one can be seen as being in the right or as one of the ten best presidents in US history, on the one
hand, while doing harm, on the other, supports Habermas’ skepticism toward Apel’s part B of an ethics of
responsibility. The rules of argumentation may entail a formal ethics of discussion, but they cannot be the
foundation for the moral norms of practical discourses, such as politics. Jackson and the Cherokees could agree
about the claims to truth, truthfulness, and normative rightness, but they would disagree on what these notions of
truth and especially normative rightness mean. What Jackson saw as right for the Union was seen as wrong by the
Cherokees. With this link between rules of argumentation and ethical norms severed, transcendental philosophy, by
losing any claim to ultimate foundations, also loses its name and should be part of what Habermas has called a de-
transcendentalization of philosophy.
We could still say with Habermas that Jackson violated the basic principles of the ethics of discussion that states
that all people who can contribute to the discussion have to be included. However, Jackson could counter-argue that
his paternalistic attitude of excluding the Cherokees from the discussion was “right” because it was what was best
for the Union at the time and he was convinced that Indians could not live side by side with whites. In his mind, it
was for the good of the Cherokees themselves, in order to prevent their annihilation, that they had to move out of
Georgia and be forced to re-settle in an isolated “Indian territory,” where they would be separate from whites. They
had to be excluded from the decision about their own fate, Jackson could have argued, precisely in their own
interest.
For there are circumstances in which people are excluded from the discussion. Convicted felons in many states
cannot vote. In this case, the argument is that, by living in a democratic system and having representatives who
passed laws taking away the right to vote from felons, these convicted felons, by breaking the law, indirectly
subscribed to their own civic demotion. It thus means that the very notions of inclusiveness or equal status or
relevant contribution, which are at the core of the ethics of discussion, are themselves the result of hermeneutic
decisions and thus, we may think, the result of a discussion and interpretation. While it is not a vicious circle to have
principles of discussion generated by discussion itself, there is the need for another component to make sure that the
principles of the discussion will not include arguments for arbitrarily excluding some participants.
Let us recall that the claim to rightness is what allowed Apel and Habermas to even speak of an ethics in the first
place. But if this normative rightness comes in different flavors, if what is right can be argued to be a second order
effect, or even if, as we heard officials of the Bush administration argue publicly, torture is normatively right for our
post-September 11th circumstances, it means that the formal aspect of the claim does not have the teeth Apel and
Habermas thought it had. When John Yoo and Jay Bybie wrote the famous “Torture Memo,” addressed to Alberto
Gonzales on 1 August 2002, redefining torture as physical pain “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying
serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death,”30 they in fact claimed
that they were normatively right.
Habermas’ skepticism about a direct link between the ethics of discussion and an ethics of responsibility can be
broadened to a skepticism about the direct link between the formal moment of idealization in the claims to validity
and the ethics of discussion. Simply put, it means that discourse ethics does not follow directly from the idealization
at the core of the claims to validity, since these claims are morally blind while being ethically binding, as illustrated
by Jackson’s case. Normative rightness as a formal claim does not necessarily commit to inclusiveness in the
discussion and recognition of all relevant contributions.
The main problem of the ethics of discussion is the conflation between a validity claim and a commitment. We
may agree that the claims Apel mentions are present in any speech act and stabilize the communication in a
community. It is another issue to establish a direct causal link between the validity claims made when speaking and
the commitment made by the speaker. This is because validity claims and commitment belong to different orders,
the former to the rules of discourse and the latter to the conviction of persons who give their assent to those
conventionally accepted rules and borrow them to say what they want to say. However, there is no perfect
isomorphism between the level of discourse, where validity claims are present, and the level of personal
commitment. As we saw in Jackson’s case, validity claims are not free from interpretation. Before validity claims
can be binding and compelling the real speaking persons to abide by truth, truthfulness, and normative rightness, an
interpretation has already taken place about what truth, truthfulness, or normative rightness may mean in the specific
context in which speakers and agents find themselves. This means that the “formal” claim in fact assumes the
substantial determination that truth, truthfulness, and normative rightness have in the specific community of
speakers. Jackson, for example, could probably not envisage that his conception of rightness, which was governed
by the state of the Union, could violate any right of the Cherokees, who were not part of the Union.
In sum, in a given community in synchrony Apel is correct and, as a member of that particular community, when
I speak, I in fact argue, because my allegiance to the conventional mental states current in my community is taken
for granted and does not need to be made explicit. In synchrony and in the same community, there is a guarantee that
speakers implicitly recognize the same validity claims. This guarantee, however, does not originate from the
pragmatic use of language only, but also from a shared background. With a different background, then – for
example, through interactions with the Chrokees – the differences in the socialization processes and cultural
practices fill validity claims with different “interpretations” of what intelligibility, truth, truthfulness, and rightness
may be, so that the formal aspect of the validity claims does not guarantee a common discussion and may instead
allow the dominant discourse (or the dominant interpretation) – such as Jackson’s – to substitute itself for the
Cherokees’ discourse.
I thus only agree in part with Habermas when he says that “the validity claimed for propositions and norms
transcends spaces and times, but in each actual case the claim is raised here and now, in a specific context, and
accepted or rejected with real implications for social interaction” (Habermas 1992, 139). What is questionable is his
contention that a distinction can be made in concepts like truth, rationality, and justification between their
“grammatical role” which is universal, and their interpretation, which can be relative to cultures: “Although they
may be interpreted in various ways and applied according to different criteria, concepts like truth, rationality, or
justification play the same grammatical role in every linguistic community” (1992, 138). Viveiros de Catro’s studies
 of Anerindian cultures as well as Michel Foucault’s work in The Order of Things (Foucault 1994) showed that
different “contexts,” what Viveiros de Castro calls “perspectivism” and Foucault epistemē, can generate drastically
different forms of intelligibility and thus different understandings of what the truth is.
What the ethics of discussion does not account for is the commitment of speakers or agents. This commitment is
an attitude and more than a claim made by those who participate in the discussion. One such attitude in particular is
paramount for interpretation: a benevolence toward others or even a love for others, which can make the notion of
commitment powerful enough to engage discussion partners in a discussion that is not merely formally sound but
also ethically shared and thus owned as common. This is what the next chapter presents.

Notes
1. A part of which has been translated into English and re-printed by Marquette University Press in 1998i. The
complete translation is available in French, of which I translated the second volume (Apel 2010).
2. See Habermas (1990, 93), Apel (1991, 66).
3. As Habermas notes, the extensive agreement between Apel’s project and his was at its apex at the time of the
publication of Knowledge and Interest in 1968 and gave place to critical differences with the publication of
Between Facts and Norms in 1992. See Habermas (2003, 44).
4. The full title is: Dasein und Erkennen. Eine erkenntnistheoretische Interpretation der Philosophie Martin
Heideggers (Existence and Knowledge. An Epistemological Interpretation of Martin Heidegger’s Philosophy;
Bonn 1950, unpublished).
5. He wrote two articles dealing extensively with Heidegger, which were published in his book Transformation der
Philosophie (1973a): “Wittgenstein und Heidegger: Die Frage nach dem Sinn von Sein und der
Sinnlosigkeitsverdacht gegen alle Metaphysik” (1973c, 225–275); “Heideggers philosophische Radikalisierung
der ‘Hermeneutik’ und die Frage nach dem ‘Sinnkriterium’ der Sprache” (1973d). In 1989, he offered a study
of Heidegger and transcendental philosophy: “Sinnkonstitution und Geltungsrechtfertigung. Heidegger und das
Problem der Transzendentalphilosophie” (1989). (An abridged revised version has appeared in English under the
title “Meaning Constitution and Justification of Validity: Has Heidegger Overcome Transcendental Philosophy
by History of Being?” (1998c)). In 1991 he published an article reexamining his comparison between
Wittgenstein and Heidegger: “Wittgenstein und Heidegger: Kritische Wiederholung und Ergänzung eines
Vergleiches” (1991, 27–68). An abridged revised version appeared in English under the title “Wittgenstein and
Heidegger: Language Games and Life Forms,” in Apel 1998h, 122–159. All these essays are available
unabridged in French (Apel 2010).
6. See especially Apel (1973a, 276–334).
7. A first treatment of this critique appeared in Vandevelde (2000).
8. See Apel (1989, 154).
9. To be accurate, Apel does not use the word Linguizismus in relation to Heidegger, but in relation to one of his
followers, Johannes Lohmann, who has attempted to integrate Heidegger’s ontology into linguistics (Apel 1963,
88).
10. Language can thus be put at the level of what Apel calls a “meta-institution” of all dogmatically established
institutions” (1998i, 119) in the sense that language allows a critique of any form of life or any human project. He
writes: “As a meta-institution, [language] represents the instance of criticism for all unreflected social norms and,
at the same time, as the meta-institution of all institutions, it always represents a normatively binding instance
which does not abandon the individual persons to their merely subjective reasoning, but rather it compels them to
participate in intersubjective communication on social norms as long as they maintain communication” (119).
Language as a meta-institution would then grant semiotics the status of an instance determining the condition of
possibility for any knowledge and permit semiotics to replace the transcendental subject of Cartesian and
Husserlian provenance.
11. The expression of “communicative action” was coined by Habermas in his effort to build a theory of such
communicative action, to which Apel largely subscribes (see Habermas 1984).
12. See also Apel (1994, 156).
13. Apel recognizes that Habermas is “the discoverer of the validity claims as the ‘unavoidable presuppositions’ of
argumentation” (Apel 2003, 176). See also Habermas (1976, 205). They developed the notions of validity claims,
bringing together the rules spelled out by the speech act theory of J. L. Austin and John Searle, on the one hand
(especially the rules for an assertion), and the linguistic theory of Karl Bühler, on the other. They broadened this
notion of speech act to a social action in their “universal pragmatics” (Habermas 1976) and “discourse ethics”
(Apel 1988) respectively. In the speech act theory of J. L. Austin and John Searle, two of the rules of a speech act
 of assertion are to tell the truth and to be truthful. The notion of normative rightness has also been touched upon
by the speech act theory and in the “maxims of conversation” spelled out by Paul Grice. All this was only a
matter of formal rules, determining whether the speech act is felicitous or not, succeeds or not. On Apel’s
reformulation of Searle’s theory of speech act, see Apel (1976, esp. 53–80). On validity claims, see among other
places Apel (1980, 54–55; 1998g, 238–39).
14. This is analogous to Grice’s rule of relevance.
15. Habermas uses analogous terms: “In communicative action a speaker selects a comprehensible linguistic
expression only in order to come to an understanding with a hearer about something and thereby to make himself
understandable” (1984, 307. Habermas’ italics).
16. Habermas’s and Apel’s notion of “normative rightness” is not just about being felicitous or successful, but about
fitting the normative realm of speakers. Speakers claim that what they present is not only true, but also
appropriate to the situation at the time of the interpretation. This explains why speakers can be challenged not
only about the truth of what they say but also, even if what they say is true, about the appropriateness of bringing
up this topic or this perspective.
17. Let us note that this is how Hintikka offers an interpretation of Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” (Hintikka
1963).
18. Or: “I hereby assert as true that I am not obliged in principle to recognize all possible members of the unlimited
community of argumentation as having equal right” (Apel 1990, 43).
19. The same holds true for solitary thought: “The validity of solitary thought is basically dependent upon the
justification of verbal arguments in the actual community of argumentation” (Apel 1998i, 258).
20. This community is indefinite since “it has to be capable, in principle, of functioning as subject of an ultimate
consensus about sign-interpretation and thus about all conceivable truth-criteria” (1994, 156).
21. In Apel’s terms, the real is “the indefinitely knowable that can never be factually known definitely” (1994, 156).
22. “Der Handelnde is immer gewissenlos; es hat niemand Gewissen als der Betrachtende.”
23. See Apel (1989, 154).
24. Habermas has a somewhat different and weaker formulation. He wants to keep these principles exclusively
formal, without presuming what the content of these principles may be. He formulates four such principles of the
ethics of discussion, which are four unavoidable pragmatic presuppositions: “1) Inclusivity: No one who can
make a relevant contribution can be excluded from participating); 2) Equal distribution of communicative
freedom: All have the same opportunity to make a contribution; 3) Sincerity condition: The participants must
mean what they say; 4) Absence of contingent threats, whether external or inherent to the structure of
communication: The yes/no position of the participants toward the criticizeable claims to validity must be
motivated only by the convincing force of obvious reasons” (Habermas 2003, 49).
25. As he says, “this means that the a priori and universally valid principle of the ethics of discussion delegates to
practical discourses the concrete justification of norms as being fallible and thus constantly subject to revision.
For these practical discussions represent the only framework within which the people concerned or those who
represent them have the means to bring their concrete interests in the process leading to mutual understanding
and consensus” (1988, 219–220).
26. In other words, the one “who [enters] the field of discussion by asking a serious question does not only
automatically accept an equality of status [Gleichberechtigung] for all virtual partners of the discussion, but also
something like a solidarity in the responsibility to find a solution for the problems under consideration in the
ideal communication community, which is counterfactually anticipated” (1988, 451).
27. On Apel’s response and critique of Habermas, see Apel (1998a, 175ff).
28. See Brands (2005, 493).
29. According to Brands, “Jackson was sincere – paternalistic but no less sincere for that – in saying he had the best
interests of the Indians at heart” (490). Jackson even spoke of “the just claims of these people” (492).
30. The “Memorandum for Alberto Gonzalez, Counsel to the President, August 1, 2002” was signed by Jay S. Bybie,
Assistant Attorney General (https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB127/02.08.01.pdf, p. 1, accessed
1/31/2021). See also https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2004/06/08/memo-offered-justification-
for-use-of-torture/17910584-e7c3-4c8c-b2d1-c986959ebc6a/ (accessed 1/31/2021). John Yoo acknowledged in
a piece for UC Berkeley News, 4 January 2005 that he “helped draft the main memo defining torture.”
https://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2005/01/05_johnyoo.shtml (accessed 1/31/2021).
6 Benevolence or Love as Both a Moral and
Epistemic Virtue
DOI: 10.4324/9781003348009-10

In this chapter, I present and defend another mechanism that gives traction to interpretation. It is not through the
regulative function of formal validity claims but through the pursuit of the good. We found this notion already at
work in Gadamer when he borrowed from Plato the notion of dialogue and the import of being guided by a certain
idea of the good or to have an attitude of benevolence or to manifest a “good will.” We also saw how Donald
Davidson, who knew Plato well, formulated an analogous principle of charity in interpretation in order to maximize
agreement. At the same time, we noted the limitations of this “charity” in interpretation when predicated on an
ascription of beliefs. The notion of the good was also implicitly at work in Ricoeur’s notion of attestation and
Foucault’s use of parrhesia. However, these two attitudes remain existential and extrinsic to the process of
interpretation. What I examine here is a notion of benevolence that is both an attitude of the interpreter (as the
principle of charity, attestation, and truth-telling are) and what guides interpreters. Whereas validity claims function
causally insofar as proposing an interpretation pragmatically engages interpreters to tell the truth, benevolence is an
attitude that responds to an attraction: to do justice to the work to be interpreted. Instead of a causal process – claims
making it the case that an engagement is made toward the truth, for example – benevolence is part of a teleological
process as a response to something that asks to be recognized, such as a work or an event. As an attitude, then,
benevolence or love is not merely a quality or a “virtue” of the interpreter in strict epistemic terms but is also a
moral virtue of the interpreter. Benevolence or love does not only concern the manner in which interpretation is to
be conducted. It is also about what drives interpreters.
As we saw in Davidson’s ascription of beliefs and in Apel’s and Habermas’ validity claims, interpreters can
always confine themselves to a preferred description or one that suits current trends without considering other
aspects of the object or the whole object. Interpreters can stop in their account once it is coherent and consistent or
they can focus on aspects that are fashionable at a given period of time. A benevolence toward the object can
prevent reducing things to what we can know of them by making interpreters sensitive to the distinction between
what something is and the fact that it is. In our intellectual endeavors, we tend to focus on the “what” something is,
which is a view Descartes formulated and which became a basic tenet of modern science: We need to know what
something is in order to assess its existence.1 The attitude of benevolence toward objects is the recognition of the
fact that they are. As benevolence or love, this recognition also consists in wanting them to be and this means
serving them. These are the two threads of love: Wanting the object of love to exist and, at the same time,
responding to this object as if under a command to serve it.
In an amusing formulation, Edmund Husserl imagines what it would mean from the perspective of the object to
be submitted only to a partial account. Here is the object’s protest, in the very voice of the object:

There is still more to see here, turn me so you can see all my sides, let your gaze run through me, draw closer
to me, open me up, divide me up; keep on looking me over again and again, turning me to see all sides. You
will get to know me like this, all that I am, all my surface qualities, all my inner sensible qualities.
(2001a, 41; 1966, 5)2

This is certainly how historians can be motivated to revisit the past and bring the same events, well documented
earlier, into a new light because of the cry coming from the past, as we saw in the case of Sebald or the anonymous
author of A Woman in Berlin. “Benevolence” or “love” will serve as the theme of this chapter.
In the first section, I begin by examining the possibility of treating this benevolence (both toward the object and
other interpreters) as an epistemic virtue, as understood in virtue epistemology. In the second section, I retrace some
important stages in how benevolence or love has been understood in epistemic terms: in the exegesis of Gregory the
Great in the Middle Ages and in the neo-Thomism of Pierre Rousselot. This discussion shows against Davidson that
charity in interpretation needs to be more than a principle – it is a virtue – and against virtue epistemology that
charity cannot just be an epistemic virtue but also needs to be a moral virtue. In the third section, I discuss the
connection that early German romanticism, especially Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher, established
between interpretation and love, which they expressed with the motto that interpretation is an “understanding better”
than the original authors understood themselves. The early romantics did not use this formula to name a
“meliorative” understanding, as they have usually been understood, in the sense that interpreters would look
retrospectively at a work with all the knowledge they have acquired and claim to know what was meant better than
the author. Rather, the “understanding better” is an ethical understanding that promotes the work to its future and
provides the work with its continued life. For practicing this kind of interpretation in the mode of an “understanding
better,” love is required as what guarantees that interpreters themselves belong to the future of the work and thus to
the work itself.

6.1 Epistemic virtue in virtue epistemology

Virtue epistemology significantly reshaped Anglo-American epistemology by claiming that knowledge is not just a
matter of beliefs being true and appropriately justified, but also about how these beliefs are acquired. Virtue
epistemology presents itself on the model of virtue ethics3 and combines the two fields of epistemology and ethics
by introducing into epistemology the qualities or traits of the knower. This model is motivated by what are seen as
certain shortcomings of traditional epistemological theories, such as the view of knowledge as justified true belief.4
Among the varieties of virtue epistemologies, one is particularly relevant to my topic, namely, the one that considers
virtues in a more traditional sense as qualities of the knowers. I will thus not consider what has been called the
“virtue-reliabilists,”5 who define virtues as faculties, which are necessary and reliable for producing beliefs, such as
good memory and good hearing.6 Rather, I turn to the “virtue-responsibilists,”7 who take a more robust view on
virtues and see them as qualities of the knower, instead of just faculties. Linda Zagzebski has pioneered this branch
of virtue epistemology and presented it in its clearest and most elaborate form.8
By virtue, these latter epistemologists mean an acquired excellence of the knower (as opposed to innate), which
requires training, experience, and effort (in contrast with skills). Virtues also include a motivation to do something
and require some successful outcomes. As Zagzebski summarizes these features, virtue is “a deep and enduring
acquired excellence of a person, involving a characteristic motivation to produce a certain desired end and reliable
success in bringing about that end” (2000a, 458). In this version of virtue epistemology, the focus is on beliefs and
their properties, but with the inclusion of the character traits of the people who form and hold those beliefs. As
Battaly notes, Zagzebski “thinks knowledge is a state of belief arising out of acts of intellectual virtue” (Battaly
2001, 116). When we link together beliefs and the virtues of the knower, a justified belief becomes then, for a virtue
epistemologist such as Zagzebski, “what a person who is motivated by intellectual virtue, and who has the
understanding of his cognitive situation a virtuous person would have, might believe in like circumstances” (1996,
241).
This widening of the scope of epistemology has consequences so far reaching that knowledge itself is redefined.
Zagzebski sees this new version of knowledge as an alternative to what she calls “the machine-product model” of
knowledge, that is to say, the view that knowledge is a mere product of a machinery or the view that, as she puts it,
“the state of true belief […] is the output of a valuable cause” (2003a, 14). By contrast, in virtue epistemology
“knowledge is related to the knower not as product to machine but as act to agent” (2003b, 16) or, in another
formulation, “knowing is not related to the knower as product to machine, but is an intrinsic part of the knowing
agent” (2009, 113). Without going into the complexities of the theory and only with an interest in what can be
applied to the theory of interpretation, I will only focus on one question: Can a “virtue” be qualified as “epistemic”
while being completely free from any moral value, as often claimed in virtue epistemology? Or, more simply: Can a
non-virtuous person be a virtuous knower?
The connection between epistemic virtue and the pursuit of a good life, which is the avowed goal of Zagzebski’s
version of virtue epistemology, in my view, creates a tension in how we conceive the knowledge of something (or
the interpretation of something, in my case). I question the separation between virtues and knowledge, which for
Zagzebski, are causally connected. In her view, knowing is a “state” of the knower’s mind and can be explained in a
strictly causal manner. The virtues operate as causes so that the state of knowing is caused by “acts” of virtue.
Knowing is “an act in which the knower gets credit for achieving truth” (2003a, 12). The tension I see consists in
this: On the one hand, a mental state of knowing is punctual and individual, as a temporal slice in the life of the
mind. But, on the other, that to which the state is connected – the virtues of the knower pursuing a good life – are
social and historical to the extent that virtue was acquired through a practice of interactions with other people in the
course of time. Some of the virtues Zagzebski stresses, “intellectual autonomy and courage, intellectual carefulness
and fairness, and open-mindedness” (2001, 5), are all social virtues.
I see this tension to be twofold. First, in such a view, virtues can only be on the side of the cause of the state of
knowledge. If knowers are virtuous only insofar as they have knowledge or if virtues are epistemic only insofar as
the knowledge was produced by virtuous behavior, it is not the knowledge itself that is properly virtuous. Second, a
significant consequence of this is that some kind of knowledge may be detrimental but still virtuous if produced by
virtuous knowers. Or, seen from another perspective, knowers can be virtuous insofar as they have the qualities that
lead to the production of knowledge even if these knowers behave unethically in non-epistemic fields. The general
question is thus how the “state” of knowledge, as punctual and occurring in the privacy of an individual’s brain, can
be qualified as virtuous in the sense of linked to a good life or, in Zagzebski’s terms and in her framework, in the
sense of “intimately connected to moral value and the wider values of a good life” (2003a, 26). Zagzebski clearly
wants to establish such a connection between knowledge and “the good life” (2003a, 12) or between, in her terms,
“the epistemic good” and the “moral good” (2003a, 12).
Regarding the first tension, Zagzebski acknowledges a possible disconnect between a state of knowing and the
“wider values of the good life,” when she says: “Having knowledge in my sense is compatible with having an
ulterior motive such as the desire for praise, money, or social status” (2000b, 218). She discusses this question by
using some examples: the greedy lawyer motivated to seek the truth, the nosey person intent in finding detrimental
information on her neighbor (but who has the required intellectual virtues to find those facts) and the medical
researcher only interested in fame (but displaying all the qualities of an excellent researcher). She concludes that,
despite their ulterior motives, which may not lead to reliable knowledge in the long term, they can be said in those
particular instances of knowledge to manifest intellectual virtues and thus be virtuous knowers. As she explains
further,

as long as they are motivated to get the truth, their motive may qualify as virtuous even though if they were
asked why they desire truth, they will not say that they value truth for its own sake, nor that knowledge is an
intrinsic part of a life of eudaimonia, but that it is a means to such things as money or fame. Hence, the greedy
lawyer, like the ambitious researcher or the nosey neighbor, may have knowledge on my definition.
(2000b, 218)9

These examples of the greedy lawyer, the nosey neighbor, and the ambitious researcher may not be the best for
testing the connection between epistemic virtue and moral values, because they only present a conflict between, on
the one hand, intent, which is private and psychological (being greedy, nosey or interested in fame) and, on the
other, publicly available results (espistemic success). The private nature of motives and intentions makes it either a
matter of ascription of beliefs by others through interpretation or a matter of first-person perspective available
through introspection, both of them problematic. On the side of ascription, determining that someone is curious or
craves for fame, for example, is rarely conclusive because interpreters, not being mind-readers, often do their
assessment from the perspective of their own historical and cultural situation. What one calls a bias – for example,
discrimination on the basis of gender or ethnicity in higher education employment – may be considered a legitimate
intention – as preferential treatment – in another cultural milieu or historical period of time. Similarly, an interest in
fame may be motivated by a desire to represent a marginalized group and gain notoriety as a representative of that
group.
Introspection of first-person mental states does not fare better. The introspection of one’s intention (for example,
to pry on others’ privacy or to strive for fame) is directly correlated to the lucidity on the side of those who do the
self-examination. As we have all experienced in our surroundings, people who are more lucid about their possible
ulterior motives tend to feel guiltier, while those who are blind to their own selfish motives, otherwise obvious to the
people around them, seem to be in some sort of moral fog or bliss.
The second tension consists in the fact that researchers can be excellent professionals – virtuous knowers in
strictly epistemic terms – but serving dubious interests, for example of their country and, thus, producing detrimental
knowledge. Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr, both founders of quantum theory who were also friends in their
early years, present such difficult cases. Besides being the remarkable researcher he was, Heisenberg was also part
of the Nazi nuclear weapon program and Bohr as a researcher also became an adviser to those working on the
Manhattan project to build an atomic bomb. Bohr and Heisenberg conducted their research not only for the pursuit
of truth but also because of the needs of their respective social and political worlds, apparently embracing their
respective role as “good citizens.” They thus implicitly acknowledged that, as scientists, they were not just pure
scientific minds but actual agents in the social context in which they lived, guided by a certain idea of the good. The
knowledge they produced was not merely theoretical but consisted in making a bomb.
Let us immediately make two points clear. First, what is ethical or not is not science as a theory, which is, in the
case of quantum theory, mostly mathematical. Second, the view is not that scientists (or interpreters) have to be
moral in order to be good scientists (or interpreters), as current trends in social media, the entertainment industry,
and academe do, which tend to glorify and vilify public figures of the present or the past, according to current
standards of morality and from one news cycle to the next or from one president’s administration to the other. The
question is not about private morality but about the connection between the task we perform as knowers (or
interpreters) and the good that attracts us to perform our task as we do or, as Aristotle pointed out, the question is
about the connection between living a good life (euzōia) in doing what we do well (eupraxia) (Nicomachean Ethics
1098b, 1934, 37). In other words, the question is whether someone can be a virtuous knower, as both Bohr and
Heisenberg certainly were in strict epistemic terms, when the knowledge they produced is so problematic. These
examples also illustrate the first tension mentioned above, namely the fact that it is not knowledge per se that is
virtuous.
By separating the epistemic aspect of a virtue from its moral aspect, virtue espistemology sees the virtues of the
knower as only including features of the knower’s manner of knowing and leaves out of account the attitude toward
the object of knowledge and other knowers. In this regard, virtue epistemology continues the empiricist assumption
not only about knowing as a state of mind, but also about the objects being well delineated entities, even if we are
only aware of them through the causal effect they have on our faculty. While virtue epistemology usually lists open-
mindedness or perseverance as epistemic virtues, which lead knowers to make efforts to examine more aspects of a
phenomenon and continue investigating beyond a merely coherent account, these virtues are not directly linked to
the objects to be known. They are only linked to the psychological mindset of the knowers. It is not really the object
that attracts them. They are rather moved by their motivation, as it were. Similarly, open-mindedness includes
listening to other researchers, but knowledge itself does not include a benevolence toward them. It thus seems that,
despite Zagzebski’s wish to escape the input-output model of knowledge, being a virtuous knower can just be about
the mechanics of knowing or interpreting, to which some features of the knowers are added.
If we want to speak of virtues of the knower, it seems to me that we need to go beyond an empiricist causalist
framework and extend knowing (or interpretation) beyond a discrete and punctual state or an act of the mind and
consider it as an activity, which takes time and involves a connection to the object to be known and other knowers
(or interpreters). This is why I contend love as an epistemic attitude, first, provides unity and traction to epistemic
virtues like open-mindedness and fairness and, second, accounts for the attraction to the object.

6.2 Benevolence or love as an epistemic attitude

The history of the role of love in knowledge is rather rich and it is worth retracing some important stages in this
history. The capacity to be astonished by the very fact that things are is the very definition of philosophy that dates
back to ancient Greek times. It is a simple attitude of taking into account the fact that things exist before we know
them, but it has the significant consequence of putting knowledge in a subservient position. In the conclusion of his
lecture course Fundamental Problems of Phenomenology of 1919/1920, Heidegger understands philosophy as “a
love for wisdom” (Die Liebe zur Weisheit) literally: “Understanding lies in love [in der Liebe ist Verstehen]” (1993,
168),10 so that to understand is to love in the sense that, as Heidegger explains in Besinnung, “love” is “the will that
the beloved be in the sense that it finds its essence and unfolds in it” (1997, 63).11 Acknowledging that things exist
counter-acts, so to speak, the construction that is intrinsic to knowledge (or interpretation) by reminding us that
knowledge was made possible by an antecedent original fact, namely the givenness or the existence of the thing
under investigation, so that knowing “what” the object is cannot fully account for the fact “that” the thing exists.
While for Descartes the first fact is the “I think,” which for Galileo means having plans in our mind (in terms of
theory and hypothesis), once we take an attitude of benevolence toward things, the first fact is precisely “that” things
are, that they are “given” to the subject, as Husserl says, so that our knowledge can then strive to doing them justice.
As mentioned above, Plato already recognized that the truth, in order to be fully such, needs to be illuminated by
the good (Republic VI, 509b, 1987, 107). Just as light is what gives visibility to things, in the same way, “that which
gives their truth to the objects of knowledge and the power of knowing to the knower, you must say is the idea of the
good, and you must conceive it as being the cause of knowledge and of truth in so far as known” (Republic VI 508E,
1987, 103–105. Translation modified). Plato is quite clear that the good is not itself something to be known. It is not
an entity or a thing but rather what attracts the knowledge of things. The truth needs to be valued for it to exercise
fully its effects. This requires from people an attitude of benevolence for them to look for the truth, be interested in
it, be willing to seek it, and to live up to it.
 Philosophy as this love of wisdom and knowledge as guided by the idea of the good also entail that benevolence
is directed at other people or other knowers. This is inscribed in Socrates’ dialectic method in which the dialogue
has a dynamism of its own. When discussing particular topics, what is required, Plato says, is “scrutinizing them in
well-meaning arguments [en eumenesin elenchois] and employing questions and answers without ill-will [aneu
phthonōn]” (“Epistle 7” 344b; 1952, 541). The one who speaks, such as Socrates, is “put on the stage” of a public
discussion, can be challenged, and has to account for whatever objections or counterarguments are presented. This
means that the quality of the dialogue depends on the ethical stance of the speakers. By contradistinction with
rhetoric, where the goal is to gain assent – we could say “to persuade” – the goal of the dialogue is to offer
arguments and evidence – we could say “to convince.” Dialogue partners thus have to be supported instead of
manipulated. We should even make the arguments raised by our opponents stronger, Plato tells us:

Our first duty would be to make them [our opponents] really better [beltious], if it were in any way possible;
but if this cannot be done, let us pretend that they are better, by assuming that they would be willing to answer
more in accordance with the rules of dialectic than they actually are. For the acknowledgement of anything by
better men is more valid than if made by worse men.
(Sophist 246 de; 1921, 75)

This is, Plato says, how “the light of intelligence [of phronēsis]” “bursts out” (344b).
This Platonic notion of the good was formulated in terms of a “transcendental” in the middle ages. Anything that
exists must have attributes that transcend or cut across all categories. Among the most commonly mentioned
transcendentals, we find the One, the True, and the Good (unum, verum, bonum). In order to be such, any thing must
be one (as opposed to null, non-existent, or as opposed to several). It must also be true (in the sense of susceptible to
be known, with the possibility of error, and thus falsity), and good (in the sense of motivating our inclinations or
drawing our interest). While the One is the most basic feature of a thing because it is the very foundation of what we
call a thing or “something,” the most crucial is the good, because without it we would not have access to the truth in
the sense that we would not seek it. The truth must attract for it to be the truth. This view was central in the medieval
Christian interpreters of the Bible.
In order to illustrate the role of the good in interpretation, I briefly examine the rather remarkable version of the
hermeneutics of Gregory the Great, who argues that the pursuit of the good, which is for him charity, leads us
beyond the letter of the written text.

6.2.1 Gregory the Great: Charity as an epistemic and moral virtue

While “exegesis” is supposed to be the explanation of the meaning of words and sentences, the early Fathers of the
Church realized that, in order for the Bible to reveal its full force, readers needed to be in a certain spirit so that the
text read or heard is not reduced to dead letters – because the letter kills, as Saint Paul said (2 Corinthians 3:6)– but
is vivified by the spirit. Gregory the Great was in this regard one among the most “radical” interpreters, something
which brought him great fame in the middle age for his allegorical interpretations. In what follows, I will discuss his
views in comparison with virtue epistemology.
In his Morals on the Book of Job (1979) and his Homilies on Ezekiel (1971), Gregory the Great uses the notion
of charity as a virtue12 in his interpretation of the Bible and considers that it is what guides interpreters, both in the
sense of what is needed for understanding a particular biblical text – we need to be benevolent and let ourselves be
challenged by the text – and in the sense of what interpretation pursues – we interpret guided by what we take to be
the good in our life and in our community. These two aspects grant the virtue of charity a twofold status. It is an
intellectual virtue as what interpreters are supposed to manifest in their task of interpretation, but it is also a moral
virtue because interpreters are also agents in a community and their act of interpreting is an action guided by the
good, the two leading to a good life.
The very reason for a discipline of exegesis is that the biblical text contains different layers of sense or meaning,
as the Fathers of the Church recognized.13 After Origen, Gregory distinguishes the literal, the moral, and the
allegorical senses, while other Fathers of the Church added an “anagogical” sense. By and large, the literal sense is
what the words of the text refer to. It is not, however, just the meaning of the concatenation of the words on the page
but the intention expressed by this concatenation. This literal sense is also called historical, in the etymological sense
of the Greek histereo, as researching. It is what the narrator could have seen, the historical realities. There is a truth
of history, as Gregory states (veritate historiae, 1971, book 1, homily 12, line 1).14 The moral sense is what this
literal sense teaches us: how to act. The allegorical sense (which Gregory sometimes calls “typical” as being about
the type of Christ) is what is announced by the literal sense. For example, in Ezekiel’s vision of the chariot of
Yahweh in the Old Testament, made of four creatures, it was largely accepted in the medieval Catholic Church that
these four creatures “announce” – are an allegory for – the four evangelists of the New Testament. The anagogical
sense is about the eternal realities to which contemplation gives access. Augustine of Dacia put it succinctly: “The
letter teaches us what happened, allegory what to believe. The moral sense tells us what to do, the anagogical sense
what to strive for [littera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria, moralis quid agas, quo tendas anagogia].”15 There are
significant variations in how many kinds of senses or meanings there are, how they are distinguished, and even how
they are named. Gregory is mostly interested in the duality of the historical and the allegorical senses or the carnal
and the spiritual senses. “For the Book of the Holy Scripture is written in the inside by allegory [intus […] per
allegoriam] and in the outside by history [foris per historiam]. Inside through spiritual understanding, but outside
through the simple sense of the letter” (1971, bk.1, hom. 9, l. 590–591).16
Gregory considers allegory not only as a sense but also as a method of interpreting. He sometimes calls it a
machina: “Allegory makes for the soul, which is situated so far away from God, something like a machine in order
for the soul to be raised toward God” (1963, paragraph 2, line 14). Like other Fathers of the Church, he understands
the Old Testament as prefiguring the New so that the Old must be read from the perspective of the New, from what
is announced in the Old. This is why, fundamentally, an allegorical reading of the Old Testament is needed like a
machine for pulling the meaning out of it. Gregory finds an indication of this prefiguration in the vision of Ezekiel,
that of the chariot of Yahweh. Ezekiel saw a wheel within a wheel. This means, for Gregory “allegorically,” that “in
the letter of the Old Testament there lies hidden through allegory [per allegoriam] the New Testament” (1971, bk.1,
hom. 6, l. 223).
His allegorical interpretations are motivated by a pastoral concern in order to show the richness of the biblical
texts. In this regard, reading the Bible is not just an intellectual exercise of understanding the text but pursues the
increase of charity or love. His Homilies on Ezekiel, for example, were originally delivered as sermons in Rome in
593.17 Reading the text in a certain spirit means for Gregory being guided by charity or love. This is due to how the
literal sense is conceived. As we saw, it is not the sum of the lexical meanings of the words included in a sentence,
but rather something meant. It is thus not enough to read. One must connect with the one who meant something,
which is the “intention of the letter” (intentionem litterae) (1979, Bk 23, par. 7, l. 6), animated by the spirit of
charity.
Now, the spirit does not lie exclusively in the text, as if encapsulated in the page and waiting to be released. The
spirit is also what animates readers, who can only understand the literal sense (what is meant) if they participate in –
are animated by – the same spirit – as the one that animated those who wrote these words. The need to be in a
certain attitude in order to do justice to the object of interpretation was felt by the Christian Fathers of the Church in
its full acuity. They spoke of the “spirit” that interpreters need to share.18 Because the words as animated by the
spirit exude charity, charity always trumps the material – Gregory says “carnal” but we would say philological –
aspect of words. This explains how the words animated by the spirit and promoting charity increase the charity of
the readers, who then confer back to the text this increase in spirit, and thereby transform the text itself (although not
in its material form) and render it more meaningful, more significant.
The qualification of allegory as a machina fits this layering of the text, which Gregory sometimes compares to
the building of a house. Remarkably, although consistently, he can say that the literal meaning is both at the
foundation of the house and “put” at the foundation by allegory itself. We need to posit a literal meaning in order to
understand what is meant, but this “posit” is made in a certain spirit of charity. Thus, he can say, at one time, that we
lay the historical foundations [primum quidem fundamenta historiae ponimus]” (1979, “Epistola ad Leandrum,” l.
78) but, at another time, that this “placing” is a positing, “engineered” by allegory: “Because in the salvation of the
faithfuls, faith comes before the works, we put forward the typical interpretation as a solid foundation [typicam
signifationem velut solidum fundamentum praemittimus]; the construction of all the works in moral and historical
interpretation is based upon it or follows it” (Petrus de Caua 1963 Prologus Ch. 8, l. 215).19 This is consistent with
how Gregory understands charity. As commonly accepted, it is both a love of God and a love of neighbor but, as
Gregory insists, it is through the latter that we can learn the former: “It is in the love of neighbor that we must learn
how to reach the love of God.”20
The charity in interpretation is both an attitude toward the text, coming to it in a certain “spirit,” and an attitude
toward other human beings as being guided by a certain idea of the good. I submit that this twofold aspect of charity
in interpretation can be extended to the interpretation of any text, beyond the Bible. Charity renders interpreters open
to how the text may transform them and this transformation is guided by the good they pursue in interpreting,
thereby contributing to this good. Charity is thus both epistemic, as a device of interpretation, and moral, as a
concern for the text and other human beings. Because interpreters are members of a community and interpret from
within it and for it, the epistemic virtue in fact serves the moral virtue – to become better people – but the moral
virtue only informs the epistemic virtue – reading is at the service of life – and does not replace it.
Gregory expresses this combination of moral and epistemic aspects in the virtue of an interpreter as a
cooperation between text and reader, which he presents in his Homilies on Ezekiel, among others. He characterizes
this cooperation as a mutual enrichment: “The divine text grows with the reader [divina eloquia cum legente
crescunt]” (1971, lib. I, hom. 7, l. 140). He explains this mutual growth by saying: “Because divine words grow with
the reader, for the deeper each understands them the deeper they penetrate into him […] because if the minds of the
readers have not attained the heights, divine words, as if in the depths, lie there not understood” (1971, lib. I, hom. 7,
l. 140–141).
While this cooperation between text and reader may be understood in a weaker sense, according to which readers
find in the biblical text what they can appropriate to the extent of their abilities, Gregory defends a stronger version.
When read, the text itself grows in the sense that it “becomes” a biblical text only when it is put to use by the
readers. Obviously, readers did not write the Bible. However, they participate in the authorship of the text in some
way when furthering the text and putting it to use. “When a reading of the holy scripture is sought, it is found at the
measure of what becomes of the person by whom it is sought [quaesita sacra lectio talis invenitur, qualis et fit ipse,
a quo quaeritur]” (1971, lib. I, hom. 7, l. 331). In this somewhat convoluted formulation, we see that, first, the
reading is “found”; second, readers are “transformed”; and, third, the text that is found is found by the transformed
readers, not the beginning readers. The text is not merely discovered as if lying there in wait of readers and it is not
made up or fabricated either. It is, in the original Latin sense, invenitur, invented. And the invention is precisely the
cooperation – or the mutual growth – between text and reader. On the side of the readers, there is a subjective
growth insofar as the text changes their attitude, and this has a return effect on the text, which then offers a more
sophisticated meaning – the objective growth. “You find as much to make progress in the sacred text as you have
become better yourself with it” (1971, lib. 1, hom. 7, l. 140). The text itself becomes richer.21
From this, Gregory draws three apparently paradoxical but consistent consequences, which may be made more
salient in their originality when contrasted with Aquinas’ views on interpreting the Bible, who himself was well
informed of Gregory’s position.22 First, we have to accept and even rejoice at the multiplicity of valid interpretations
of the bible.

In the interpretation of sacred scripture one need reject nothing that is not opposed to sound faith. For, as from
one piece of gold, some fashion necklaces, others rings, and others bracelets, so from the one knowledge of
sacred scripture various exegetes through innumerous interpretations compose various ornaments, as it were,
which all however contribute to the splendor of the heavenly spouse.
(1982, Book III, epistola 62, l. 39–42)

While this view on the multiplicity of senses in the biblical text is not controversial, as we saw, there are strong
differences of views on the cause of this multiplicity. Aquinas, for example, also accepts a multiplicity of meanings
in the biblical text and even quotes Gregory on this point. However, he takes issue with Augustine’s position (and
thus Gregory’s) that this multiplicity originates from allegory.23 For Aquinas, not only do words mean something
but the things themselves, as intended by God, can mean other things. As he explains, “these senses are not
multiplied because one word signifies several things but because the things signified by the words can be themselves
the signs of other things [ipsae res significatae per voces, aliarum rerum possunt esse signa].”24 Contrary to
Augustine and Gregory, it is thus not the literal sense that can be interpreted differently. Rather, the things, by
meaning other things, produce a spiritual sense. Aquinas sees a strict hermeneutic separation between the literal
meaning (expressed by the words and intended by God) and the spiritual meaning (coming from what the things as
created by God mean). This separation between the two senses allows for a multiplicity of senses at the spiritual
level but, because the spiritual meaning is not an interpretation of the literal meaning, this multiplicity of senses
remains expressed by – and thus confined to – a unified literal sense.
A second consequence of Gregory’s views is that a misunderstanding or a wrong interpretation of the biblical
text can be claimed to be right if it contributes to an increase of charity.

But if seeking the virtue in the divine words he has understood them differently from him by whom they were
proffered, albeit he seeks the edification of charity [aedificationem caritatis] beneath another’s meaning, the
words which he reports are the Lord’s [Domini sunt verba quae narrat], because God speaks to us through the
whole of scripture solely in order to attract us to the love of Him and our neighbor.
 (1971, lib. 1, hom. 10, l. 216–220)

This view, which gives charity or love precedence over the correctness of an interpretation, was already present in a
less provocative form in Augustine, who wrote in De doctrina christiana: “Anyone who derives from them [the
Scriptures] an idea which is useful for supporting this love but fails to say what the writer demonstrably meant in the
passage has not made a fatal error, and is certainly not a liar.”25 He compares a reader being in error but with good
intentions, for example in order to “build up love,” to “a walker who leaves his path by mistake but reaches the
destination to which the path leads by going through a field.”26 Although Augustine immediately adds that this
person should be corrected, he certainly considers that a “correct” interpretation is not enough: “Anyone who thinks
that he has understood the divine scriptures or any part of them, but cannot by his understanding build up this double
love of God and neighbour, has not yet succeeded in understanding them.”27 For Aquinas, by contrast, because of
the separation between the literal and the spiritual senses, it does not belong to “allegory” to finesse or make up for
any mistake in understanding the literal sense.
There is a possible third consequence, even more controversial, in Gregory’s views on interpretation, which is
stated in Librum Primum Regum, if we accept that the core of this work is Gregorian. There we read that the text can
be dispensed with in the name of contemplation. “Contemplation,” it is said, “is the power through which the
Scripture, had it not been composed, would be composed [contemplatio enim virtus est, non solum per quam ipsa
scriptura condita recognoscitur, sed per quam nondum condita conderetur].”28 This suggests that the text of the
scripture can be re-configured anew by readers through contemplation. The mutual growth would turn readers into
co-authors of the Bible, as it were. Although provocative, this view is consistent with Gregory’s conviction that, as
mentioned above, the work of charity for neighbors is what leads to the love of God, and not the other way around.
In this instance too, Augustine offers a milder version of this claim when he writes that “a person strengthened by
faith, hope, and love, and who steadfastly holds on to them, has no need of the scriptures except to instruct others.”29
While Gregory tempers the radicality of this view by acknowledging that there is a sense meant by God both in
creation (at the level of things, res) and in the Scriptures, Aquinas considers, as we saw, that this unified divine
intention in things and in the words cannot allow an allegorical reading through charity to take precedence over the
written text and is insufficient as a teleological principle for interpreting the text. Now, Aquinas has to strengthen the
literal sense as including metaphors and figures of style, all being intended by God. For example, he explains that
speaking of the arm of God does not mean “that God has such a member, but only what is signified by this member,
namely operative power.”30 This figurative sense, he claims, is the actual literal sense. Against Aquinas, though, we
can see by this example that God’s intention in the words cannot, in fact, escape interpretation because this “literal”
sense has to be read in a “certain spirit.” The sense is only literal insofar as it is historical, but this “history” is in
need of a background, as Gregory acknowledged.
These three consequences drawn by Gregory are paradoxical and provocative but they are consistent due to two
correctives he adds. First, there is the Christian premise that there is a well-delineated order in the world, created by
God, within which we approach objects. The object of interpretation may grow, change, or be transformed with
interpretation, but this always occurs within the boundaries of God’s intention. Second, the growth of the reader and
the text Gregory speaks of is the growth of the community guided by charity or love. It is not that individual
interpreters have a license to read what they want into the text. Only when the community of readers grows in its
understanding of the text does the text itself grow. Charity keeps interpreters in the position of those who serve the
spirit, as it were, and precisely for this reason can override the text.
With regard to the differences between Gregory and Aquinas, who quotes him abundantly, while they are
significant, they remain differences of perspectives. Aquinas offers a more causalist model – God as the cause of the
meanings of words and of things – and Gregory favors a more teleological model – charity as guiding readers in
producing a richer or “truer” interpretation. Thus, even if, for Gregory, the object of interpretation grows, changes,
and is transformed with interpretation, it is always within the boundaries of God’s intention.
This is a significant corrective to the growth of the reader and the text. The growth is in fact the growth of the
community guided by charity or love. Given Gregory’s pastoral concerns, he saw reading as aiming at becoming
better toward others and God, as being “elevated” by the text, as he sees it allegorically in Yahweh’s chariot, which
in Ezekiel’s vision rises with the readers. Such is the virtue of charity in interpretation as advocated by Gregory,
who does not subordinate the epistemic aspect to the moral aspect. His views allow us to redefine what it means to
be a virtuous interpreter and a virtuous person. These are not states of mind but actions on both sides, even on the
interpretation side.
When we give back to charity its original meaning of love as caritas, as Gregory does, we can properly speak of
love as an epistemic virtue,31 which does not “cause” states of interpreting, as in the causal model mostly adopted in
virtue epistemology, but guides the activity of interpreters, which takes place in a community with other human
beings. This epistemic love also resolves the problem of the tyrannical ascribers of beliefs in Davidson’s model,
whose radicality dispenses them from retrieving what the observed subjects “really” mean and could easily lead
radical interpreters not to “care” for them. For charity or love is not a principle, as it is for Davidson, who evacuates
as irrelevant whatever speakers internally “think or “believe,” externalizing their intentions in the form of behaviors
in a specific physical environment, correlated to their utterances.
The basic difference between charity as a principle and charity as a virtue is that the former is a mental process
through which interpreters determine what beliefs to ascribe to those whose utterances they want to understand. This
principle does not involve any “feeling” for those interpreted and functions almost like a device in a machine of
interpretation, based on an input-output model of knowledge within a strictly empiricist and causalist framework. By
contrast, for Gregory, an epistemic virtue in interpretation, which allows for a mutual growth of text and readers, can
free the text from institutional dogmas fixing the literal sense (as Aquinas would like to do) and bring the doctrine
back to the community of interpreters, transforming the epistemic virtue into a moral virtue – the virtue of good
members of the community.
This view that love is required for knowledge found many different expressions. One that I find particularly
instructive is the version offered by the French neo-Thomist Pierre Rousselot in the early 20th century.32

6.2.2 Pierre Rousselot: Love as a mode of knowledge

Rousselot borrows from medieval metaphysics the distinction between the essence of things and their existence,
essentia and esse, and thus the distinction between the “what” that something is (the quid est) and the fact that it is
(the quia est). He draws some remarkable consequences from these views with regard to knowledge, which are, I
contend, valid for interpretation. For medieval metaphysics, the esse of things originates from God and this makes
the difference between our knowledge, which is of “things,” and divine knowledge, which is of the “form” of things.
Things (or being, ens, or object) are only for us – “things” are for the soul, Rousselot writes, while God is only
dealing with forms. Our knowledge posits things while at the same time recognizing its subservience to an
antecedent esse and its longing for the form of that which it grasps as a thing. Rousselot writes: “The first word of
the soul is neither Cogito [I think] nor Sum [I am] but Est [it is]” (2008, 109). To the assertion of its power that our
mind makes when knowing what things are, there corresponds an attitude of humility: acknowledging that
knowledge is only possible because of a first givenness of the thing. This attitude of humility is at the same time an
attitude of love because love means to want the object of love to be. This is why for Rousselot knowledge is based
on love.
As he explains, “there are two elements [moments] in human intellection, the attitude element and the knowledge
element – or again: the sympathy moment (connaturalitas) and the representation element” (2008, 136). By
connaturality he means that, because the being (esse) of the thing comes from God, I can know the thing by way of
nature, as recognizing the thing as created by God. As he writes to Blondel, “it has appeared certain to me for a long
time that […] under all knowledge per notionen [through concepts] […] there is a certain knowledge per
connaturalitatem [through connaturality]: This is the a priori condition of true knowledge” (2008, 117). But
Rousselot pushes the connaturality further and says that the per modum naturae (by way of nature) is in fact a per
modum amoris (by way of love): “Every knowing [connaissance] is defined by love” (2008, 119). Because our
conceptualization depends on a prior givenness of the things to be known, our conceptualization, in order to be
successful, needs to be made in a certain attitude of gratefulness for this givenness, thus by way of love.:
“Conception is made possible by a prior relation of the soul to being, per modum amoris, cupiditatis [by way of
love, of desire]” (115).”33
As he describes it, “to know is chiefly and primarily the grasp and embrace in oneself of another, capable of
grasping and embracing you; it is to live of the life of another living” (1908, xviii). “Living of the life of another
living” means a kind of dual epistemic attitude on the part of the knower: First, to do the epistemic work to the best
of one’s abilities and, second, but at the same time, to accept that what is presently knowable may appear richer to a
different knower who would have access to other perspectives than those presently given. There is always the risk
that some aspects may have been left out of knowledge, that some perspectives may have not been considered, that
there may be a “remainder” in knowledge (2008, 162). Things may be richer and more meaningful than they
presently appear and there may be other modes through which they may be given, of which I am not yet aware. Love
is what guides me in trying to apprehend things without grasping them in available categories.
Love as Rousselot understands it is not a state of knowing but a process of striving to reconcile the two epistemic
attitudes: At the same time that knowers construe the object of investigation (through their conceptualization), they
also need to recognize the intrinsic incompleteness of the thing and the need for completion. This desire for
completion or this benevolence for the thing puts into motion a process of knowing that is attracted by the
completion of the object. “Incompleteness was intrinsic” to the sensible world (2008, 76). It does not have “an esse
totalized extra mentem, completed, finished, wrapped up, in itself” (76). And this intrinsic incompleteness is due to
the fact that “humanity” is intrinsic to the world (76), that is to say, world or things are for the soul or the mind.
Rousselot can then say: “I above all wanted to bring to light the inanity, from a Thomist perspective, of the
opposition between intellection and life. I wanted to show that intellection is only fully itself if it is action in the full
sense” (quoted in de Lavalette 1965, 129). And this life is desire: “The desire of the soul (lived knowledge) is what
generates the affirmation of being (conceptual knowledge)” (2008, 116).
This striving for knowledge takes the form of a love for humanity. Rousselot suggests that the other perspectives
on an object are not merely structural components pre-inscribed in my horizon and already included implicitly as a
hologram in the particular perspective I now have. These other aspects are what another ideal subject would see and
this ideal subject, which is not God – God does not know the thing, but the form – is in fact made of other human
subjects, the totality of them. The whole of the object is what humanity would see as the sum of all possible human
perspectives. This is what Rousselot calls “Humanity” or the “Angel-Humanity.” As he explains, “the sensible
world must be conceived as essentially referring not to a singular humanity, which would totalize it in actuality, but
to the idea of Humanity, which wants it as an end […] but as a purely regulative and really unrealizable end, since
the Angel-Humanity cannot be” (2008, 76).
In order to account for this super-subject, Rousselot, first, follows the traditional model of potentiality-actuality,
according to which the other unseen possibilities of the object are in potentiality in the object and they have been (or
are) in act for God, who knows the thing in actu, in its form before I can see it from my perspective. My partial
seeing is both subsequent and consequent to His. At the same time, Rousselot modifies this traditional Christian
view and offers an alternative to the traditional actuality-potentiality distinction, in which God is on one side of the
divide while we are dealing with partially realized potentialities. In this alternative, actuality does not pre-exist
positively, which is a view on potentiality we will also encounter in the romantics. At the level of potential aspects
of the object of knowledge, there is a totality other than God’s view and it is the regulative idea of an Angel-
humanity, which is human and not divine. This is not a formal regulative idea because, despite being ideal, it is
human and something I could virtually be at the very moment I perceive from my perspective. He does not explicitly
state this, but suggests it:

Love does not make us judge falsely objects first seen in clear light; it colors the very light or the very
atmosphere, in which we see objects. It makes us draw forth, as by nature, a new term of knowledge. I would
say, in Scholastic terms, that it elicits a new faculty of abstracting and prescribes for the knowing subject a new
formal object.
(2008, 120)

Love is about willing that the loved object exist. It is an attitude of letting the object be more than what I can
presently see of it right now, of letting it unfold before my eyes before rushing to categorize and classify it. In this
sense, love guiding the subject does not offer the anticipation of a totality of the object, which totality the subject
can only see piecemeal. Love rather allows the object to reveal itself to the limit of what humanity could see in it. As
Rousselot explains, “it does not mean that things are only as far as they are the actual object of the perceptions of the
soul (which is false), but rather that to affirm the reality, the entity of a thing, is to affirm, whether one wants it or
not, the possibility that this thing enters in combination with the synthesis of intellectual apperception” (2008,
110).34
At the same time that it is a love for things as a kind of epistemic benevolence, love is also a desire for the
completion of myself through other subjects. It is not a link between an actual imperfect subject knowing partially
and an ideal subject who would know the whole, since it is the same subject. Love is rather what guides the actual
imperfect subjects in the process of knowing so that the actual subjects know how inexhaustive their knowledge is
and strive toward completion. It is a desire for completion because I feel that the subject who now sees (myself right
now) is also striving toward being a better interpreter who would see more of the object (from more perspectives).
This is how the love or benevolence for other knowers and the love or benevolence for the object converge.
What love does, whether it is love for an object or for another person, is to unhinge the knowers from their
system of beliefs. It is their own attitude towards things that brings with it its own anticipation of completion and the
more disposed they are, the more sympathetic and loving even, the more sophisticated the completion will be. Since,
however, the completion is made by other interpreters’ perspectives, a love for things is predicated on a love for
those bearers of as yet unknown perspectives. This does not mean that my human knowledge is only a stage toward
a completion that another ideal subject would enjoy. It means that knowledge (or interpretation) is the way itself in
which the object appears and, at the same time, knowing (or interpreting) is a process of transformation of the
subjects themselves. The completion of the object is, thus, the ethical responsibility of knowers as a self-
transformation. I become a knower by being drawn to other knowers who may complete or correct my perspectives
on a thing and this completion of the thing manifests my being drawn to the thing.
Whether it is love for another person or an object, love gives the knower “new eyes,” as Rousselot puts it. The
“new eyes” love gives them do not so much open to something different than what is seen, as they provide
confidence in the subjects’ knowing faculties that what is seen is indeed as it is seen. Love “makes us draw forth, as
by nature, a new term of knowledge” (1998, 120). Just as any belief comes with “eyes” tagged on the object so that
the object is “posited by the knower,” what prevents beliefs from making a claim on the existence of the thing are
those other eyes that other knowers have. These new eyes sustain the process of completion of the thing, that is to
say, allow for the knowledge of the thing by recovering the “that it is” under the guidance of what it is.

6.3 Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher: Understanding better as an ethical

stance

The epistemic role of love received, in my view, its most convincing form in early German romanticism, especially
with Schleiermacher and Friedrich Schlegel, the founders of romantic hermeneutics. They secularized love, freeing
it from religious assumptions and generalizing it to any form of interpretation. As Friedrich Schlegel clearly asserts,
“without love there is no sense; the sense, the understanding relies on love” (1964, 350–351). I will focus on one
feature of love as what gives traction to understanding in the sense of the striving to “understand better” than authors
understood themselves.35 The romantics do not understand the qualification “better” as a backward-looking attitude,
claiming to know about the genesis of the work, its situation in the cultural world, and the influences it has exerted
after its arising. Understanding better is not trying to outdo the work to be interpreted and supersede its author. It is
rather a forward-looking enterprise insofar as interpretation contributes to the continued life of the work and
attempts to keep the author as one of our contemporaries who can still challenge us and unsettle our established
views, giving us the opportunity to think differently. However, interpretation is not only motivated by a desire to
understand texts but also by the need to understand reality and the world.

6.3.1 The incompletion of the world

Schlegel and Schleiermacher reject the traditional idealist view that there is a remainder after our mind has done its
work, for example in the form of a thing in itself that would be knowable by another kind of intellect. At the same
time, they are not satisfied with a naïve realism that would exclude from knowledge the intervention of the knowers.
They found a way to reconnect mind and world by developing a notion of reality that tries to avoid the dichotomy
between a fully delineated set of natural entities, in a strong realist position, and a mental construction coming from
the human mind, in a strong idealist view. Mind and world are not in a frictionless parallel relationship, as in
traditional idealism, the mind producing a version of the world. But mind and world are also not like gears in mesh
in a mechanistic model, the world being the driver gear (as in naïve realism). The romantics offer an alternative to
the opposition between realism and idealism and the separation between epistemology and ontology. Plato gives
them the means to reject both the strict substance ontology of a fully articulated whole, enjoying its proper
intelligibility and prescribing its rules to interpretation, and the strict idealistic view that the world is a mere version
produced by an interpretive mind. Plato also gives them the means to recognize reality as what guides interpretation.
It is in this broader ontological context that the romantic “understanding better” can be fully assessed.
The romantics want to offer an alternative to Kant, who, in his re-assessment of human capacities, limits those
capacities to grasping what the human cognitive apparatus allows them to understand, leaving out of reach what
things may be “in themselves.” Sharing Plato’s goal of reconciling Heraclitus and Parmenides (the complete
instability and the rigid stability of being), the romantics offer a conception of reality or the world as fluid or, as they
say, “in becoming,” but of such a kind that human reason or thinking is a component of this becoming as a
contributing factor. They were particularly struck by the Timaeus, even if Schlegel thought that it was not fully
authentic. Schlegel understood Plato as telling us, first, that the world originated from chaos so that creation
consisted in giving order to this chaos by insufflating a spirit into it; and, second, that the human mind can reconnect
to this “spirit” that went into the formation of the world because what this spirit did was to transform chaos into a
world that makes sense and is still “in becoming.” Thus, recovering the sense that the world makes, which is
something the human mind can do, amounts to reconnecting to the spirit of creation. Schlegel writes: “World as
chaos and chaos for the world. The universe is eternal and unchanging but the world of the cosmos is in eternal
becoming” (1981, 198 n. 48).
This is why Plato was for the romantics one of their key dialogue partners. As Schleiermacher acknowledges,
“there is no author who influenced me and initiated me in what is most sacred not only in philosophy but in human
beings in general in such a manner as this divine man” (Schleiermacher 1996a, vii). Plato is a “romantic
philosopher,” Schlegel tells us (1962, 284, n. 1055). Along with Schleiermacher, he elaborated the project of
translating Plato’s works, although he never realized the project, leaving the task to Schleiermacher. What the
romantics, especially Schlegel, find in Plato is threefold.
First, they see in his philosophy a confirmation of their view about the inability of what is sensible or material to
impose its own intelligibility on us. There is, in things and the world, a native incompleteness that asks for
understanding, not just to get a hold of them, but also to provide them with the framework that will give them
stability so that they can matter to us and appear. This means not only that the essence of an object is for
consciousness, in classical phenomenological fashion, or “for the soul” in Rousselot’s formulation. It also means
that the object is of the nature of consciousness because it is of the order of the spirit or Geist. Schleiermacher
writes, commenting on the Philebus and the fact that the noūs, the mind or spirit, is a component of any entity as a
mixture: “It is only the spirit that confers on things their reality” (1996a, 309).
A second aspect that the romantics appreciate in Plato is the dialogue form. Schlegel shares Schleiermacher’s
view that Plato’s true and genuine philosophy is in his dialogues and not in an esoteric teaching. A dialogue has two
important features. The first one is its unfinished nature. This fits the incompletion of the world and the fact that
reality is not merely “existing” as matter, but instead received its order or its sense from a spirit acting upon chaos so
that we, human beings, in our dialogue can keep this spirit alive. Our dialogue completes the world or brings it to its
completion. This is how they see Plato as a “progressive thinker” (Schlegel 1964, 212), both with regard to his
philosophy and the presentation of his philosophy. As Schlegel explains, “the skeptical spirit of his dialogues, which
forms itself and completes itself progressively is the most fruitful and instructive counterpart to the dogmatic
striving which hurries into a system” (1964, 212). Instead of giving us an explanatory account of the world, Plato
makes us acutely sensitive to that which cannot be presented but which motivates our thinking. “The whole form of
the Platonic work lies in the principle of the relative unpresentability [Undarstellbarkeit] of what is highest” (1964,
214).
The second important feature of a dialogue is its philosophizing-together, what the romantics call
“symphilosophy.” Thinking is communal. Plato’s dialogues are, Schlegel says, a “manifestation of the thinking by
oneself in a community” (1964, 210). Because our thinking contributes to the becoming of the world, this becoming
is of humanity, of which we are, individually, the fragments. Thus, the open-ended nature of any dialogue (first
feature) reflects the “infinite” nature of any interpretation, which itself mirrors the incomplete nature of any human
work and of the world in general. Thinking-together or symphilosophy (second feature) is our contribution to the
becoming of the world.
A third important point that the romantics see in Plato is that he is the one who saw the “productive” or “poetic”
nature of understanding, which produces an eikōs logos (as mentioned in the Timaeus), which has been translated as
“plausible account” and names the discourse we, human beings, can offer about the genesis of the world or of
things. Because there is no other access to what reality is other than through an account (logos), our logos is also an
“iconic” discourse, rendering reality with a “surplus” of sense or an “iconic increase” through the means we use to
describe this reality. The romantics admire Plato for using all discursive resources to compose his “iconic
discourse.” As Schlegel says, Plato’s philosophy is a Mischung, an interconnection of all possible genres of prose:
history, rhetoric, criticism, the law (1958, 112–113). He is the “Shakespeare of Greek prose” (1981, 160, n. 883)
who “made use of every genre of art and science available at that time for that purpose” (1958, 125).
Instead of understanding this “plausible account” or plausible story only in epistemic terms, describing an
ontological order that has its own “logic” or logos, the romantics, anticipating Gadamer, understand this plausible
account as an explanation of the telos pertaining to the making of the world. They thus circumvent a strict causalist
model of a creator as a prime mover and instead focus on the sense pertaining to the making of the world. The eikōs
logos thus transfers the “cause” of the world or of things into the “reason for” the existence of the world or of things,
as we saw Gadamer and Davidson also do, and also under the influence of Plato. The romantics thus reject the view
of a creator separated from the world and carving out the world in a set of substances that have a meaning in
themselves. As described in the Philebus, the cause of the making of the world is not external to the world, as a pre-
existing prime mover before any movement had ever been made. The cause is one of the constituents of the world –
one of the components of the “mixture” made by the world-maker. The notion of “spirit,” which is central to
Schlegel and Schleiermacher, is to be understood in this schema. Analogous to the mind of the world-maker, which
is in the world and in things as their cause, the spirit is “in” the world and can be accessed by the human mind.36
The eikōs logos of human beings is thus not merely a plausible or probable account, as if it were a mere
“plausible story.” The logos that the human mind produces renders the cause of things in the sphere of reasons by
understanding the telos of the demiurge as a reason for the world. Schlegel calls the eikōs logos an “allegory” (1964,
39)37 or a “symbolic thinking,” insofar as it can claim to reveal what the divine mind “meant” by recovering the
“spirit” that animates the world and things. This is why Schlegel can say that “all knowledge is symbolic” (1964, 9)
or that “we can only speak symbolically of nature” (1963, 290 n. 1127). He explains this last statement as follows:
“As reality is absolute intelligence and nothing is real outside intelligence, thinking this real with a consciousness of
this real (which is a knowing) can only be presented symbolically” (Schlegel 1964, 93). This symbolic thinking as a
reformulation of Plato’s eikōs logos takes the form of a human “discourse,” which presents itself as an image of the
articulation of the world by transforming the “spirit” lying in the make-up of the world into a set of “reasons for.”
Because what is revealed to us is the effect of things on us, there is, as Schleiermacher claims, an interplay
between a world of things in its materiality and the work of the spirit in its spiritualization. “What you […] intuit
and perceive is not the nature of things, but their action upon you. What you know or believe about the nature of
things lies far beyond the realm of intuition” (1988, 25).38 The mind is thus part of reality as the spirit that forms it
into meaningful entities. There is thus no native incompatibility between mind and world and thus no need for
bridging the physics of reality with the semantics of the mind. Knowing for human beings, which consists in trying
to access the spirit that informs things and the world, cannot be a mere epistemic matter. It is a matter of life. As
Schleiermacher says,

knowing is never simply a personal consciousness but is the totality of all personal existence and is therewith
reason itself. Thus, knowing is the pure coinciding of reason with being […] Nothing can proceed from being
as such than what also has its subjective grounding in reason as such […] What we find instead is a reciprocal
action in which both [reality and reason] endure.
(1996b, 17)39

This native compatibility between mind and world also means, from the perspective of human beings, a
complementarity. The mind or reason can complement a world that is natively “in becoming” and this complement
that the mind offers reality is a “completion” of reality, albeit always to be done and never definitive.
In fact, there is incompletion both on the side of the world and on the side of the human beings. “The world is
incomplete,” Schlegel tells us (1963, 421, n. 1222; 1964, 42) or “in an infinite becoming” and is “the incarnation of
an infinite fullness and multiplicity” (1964, 400). He is well aware of the provocation of his view: “Our concept of
perfection (completeness, Vollkommenheit) is the same as in other philosophers. Just that we take the components in
reverse rank; for them the unity is the main point and the infinite multiplicity only an accessory element” (1964,
401). Instead, he argues, “philosophy must […] begin by liberating us from the appearance of the finite and the
belief in things and teach us to adopt the perspective of the infinite fullness and multiplicity [Mannigfaltigkeit]”
(1964, 335). This incompletion is not a lack but the very dynamism of the real as animated by the spirit.
This holds true of human beings themselves. The human being is “an infinite animal” (ein unendliches Thier,
1962, 453, n. 234) or “a constant becoming” (1964, 42). As a consequence, human consciousness is itself
“fragmentary” 40 and leads to the polemic character of philosophy or understanding in general. On the one hand, the
task of consciousness, whether as interpretation or philosophy, is infinite, and, on the other, reality itself is of a
progressive nature, uncompleted until understood. Thus, to say that “the form of philosophy is infinite” (1964, 93)
means both that “the tendency of philosophy goes toward the absolute” (1964, 11) and that this is due to a “nostalgia
[Sehnsucht] for the infinite” (1964, 11). We only have a “symbolic thinking” (Plato’s eikōs logos), which reveals an
incomplete world and makes any truth relative (1964, 93), i.e., polemic, not because of a multiplicity of possible
approaches to the same reality but precisely because reality is unfinished. Here is how Schlegel summarizes the
problem: “The three statements: All truth is relative, all knowledge is symbolic, philosophy is infinite – immediately
lead to a deduction of the polemic method, which is proper to philosophy” (1964, 93). The task of philosophy is to
provide the completion of reality, of that which originated from chaos and is ordered by a spirit.41
The fact that consciousness is infinite because it has to deal with an unfinished reality requires knowledge to be
productive. Thinking itself is what Schlegel calls Dichtung (poetry) or Poesie. By this, he means the productive
aspect of understanding or knowledge in general. It is a poetry or poetics of knowledge understood in the broad
sense of an invention of meaning and a configuration of reality, whether this configuration is literary or scientific.
To call knowledge or thinking Dichtung, first, reminds us of the configurative role thinking plays as a component of
the becoming of reality. Because the latter is “incomplete,” the spirit that animates it needs to be awakened. To the
real as “in becoming” there needs to correspond a “progressive” thinking, one that produces an “iconic” discourse
about reality and lends voice to the spirit at work in reality. This is the origin of the notion of a “poetry of nature”
(Naturpoesie), which Schlegel describes as an “unformed and unconscious poetry which stirs in the plant, radiates in
light, laughs in a child, shimmers in the bloom of youth, glows in the loving heart of women” (1967, 285).
If there is such an “unformed” articulation in reality (by a spirit), interpreting it or thinking it needs to be
“inventive.” There is a need for a poetics of knowledge or a poetics of truth. Truth needs to be “invented,” according
to the German sense of the word erfinden, “to invent,” which is neither a mere discovery of what is already fully
articulated nor a mere fabrication of what did not exist before. We recall that Gregory the Great uses the Latin verb
invenitur to express his view that the Scriptures are “found” (or “invented) by readers when enlightened by the
spirit. This is also, as we saw, a sense Paul Ricoeur exploited in his theory of narratives, writing: “One has to return
to the beautiful [French] word inventer (“to invent”) in its twofold meaning, which entails at the same time to
discover and to create” (Ricoeur 1975, 387–388). Dichtung as an invention of meaning is an “iconic” discourse.
Schlegel even speaks of a “transcendental” poetry, which would reconcile not only philosophy and literature, but
even these two disciplines with the sciences. 42 As Schlegel writes in his Transcendentalphilosophie, “human beings
poetize the world, as it were. It is just that they do not quite know it” (1964, 105).
In this framework, poetry – in the broad sense of literary invention – enjoys a place of choice in romanticism.
The poetry as produced by poets is in fact the manifestation of the poetry of nature. It is a second configuration,
providing an iconic increase to reality, which was already articulated (by a spirit). The poetry of nature and the art of
poetry are thus the two poles of a general translatability of the world. “The true beginning,” Novalis says, “is poetry
of nature. The end is the second beginning and is artistic poetry” (1960, 536, n. 50; 1997, 57, n. 44. Translation
modified). This is the meaning of the famous “romanticization” of the world advocated by Novalis: “The world
must be romanticized […]. Romanticization is nothing but a qualitative potentialization […]. To the extent that I
confer a higher meaning to what is common, a secret aspect to what is habitual, the dignity of the unknown to what
is known, the appearance of infinity to the finite, I romanticize it” (1960, 545, n. 105; 1997, 60, n. 66. Translation
modified).
Novalis offers a telling example of what the Dichtung of science consists of. He distinguishes six different
manners in which a stone can be classified:

A stone can be treated: 1. in relation to its subjective origin – or its determination in our faculty of
representation […]; 2. in relation to its objective origin or formation […]; 3. in relation to the time of the
planets […]; 4. in relation to the space of our earthly body […]; 5. in relation to its connection with the other
natural bodies or its political nature […]; 6. in relation to our private goals.
(2007, 209–210, n. 67)

This alternative mode of classification is both polemic – challenging an established one – and irenic – asking for a
bridge between alternative modes of classification across disciplines, such as mineralogy and politics, a connection
still problematic today, whether about the impact of mining on the environment or the political strives to control the
extraction of ore. Novalis gives us a poetic classification both in the sense of a production of meaning and a
configuration: It situates stones in another framework of reference, allowing them to reveal themselves differently.
At the same time, we become sensitive to the poetry of nature insofar as we see the possible variegated aspects
of reality, how a thing like a stone can be taken out of its commonsense framework – a well-delineated substance –
and be re-assembled in another framework of reference (the history of the formation of rocks or the politics of
mining). This poetics of truth takes things out of their brute material aspect with a pre-established stability and turns
them into interactive or transactional objects, as it were. Things are completable because they are inhabited by a
becoming, which receives its dynamics from the spirit. It is against this background of how the romantics understand
the connection between mind and world that we can really understand the originality of their hermeneutics and
especially of what it means to understand better.

6.3.2 Romantic hermeneutics

Hermeneutics arose with the Reformation and the need to have a critical method for securing the correct texts as
well as a philological method to understand the meaning of words as used at the time they were written. While
Schleiermacher is usually considered to be the founder of what has been called “romantic hermeneutics,” Friedrich
Schlegel played no small part in it, although he did not have the methodical skills of Schleiermacher for exposing
it.43 Interpretation could no longer be, as allegory was in antiquity and in the middle age (as we saw in Gregory), a
creative transfer and free application of texts. Interpretation makes claims to scientificity through methods and
focuses on the materiality of the text in its philological aspect.
One of the key mottos of romantic hermeneutics is to secure an “understanding better” than the one the original
authors had of their work. Here is how Schleiermacher defines this task: “The highest perfection of interpretation
consists in understanding an author better than he could answer for himself” (1977, 325).44 I want to show, first, that
“understanding better,” as proposed and elaborated by Friedrich Schleiermacher and Friedrich Schlegel, is not a
backward-looking and unilaterally psychological understanding effort, but a forward-looking process of
understanding both the author in what was meant (at the mental or psychological level) and the text in what was said
(at the textual or philological level). It is an attempt to secure for the works their continued life and for the authors
their potential to address us as contemporaries. What guides interpreters in their future-oriented task is benevolence
or love, both for the object of interpretation – the work – and for the author of the work. Schlegel speaks of “a
hermeneutic imperative” (1981, 69 n. 95), which has two sides: First, because the work is considered to be an
activity, interpretation “augments” it, as Schleiermacher says, or brings it to its “second power,” according to
Schlegel; and, second, for the work to speak in its own voice while being continued by interpretation, interpreters
need to put themselves in a certain attitude of benevolence or love, which has to supplement any method used in
order to guarantee the future of the work. Benevolence or love protect the work from being constricted in pre-
established categories and allow it to challenge interpreters.

6.3.2.1 “Understanding better” as a future-oriented elevation of the

work45

Schleiermacher qualifies understanding better as “an augmented understanding” or “elevated understanding”

(erhöhtes Verständnis) (1977, 324).46 Yet, this elevation or augmentation – one could say “supplementation” – is
not a meliorative understanding, which would consist in a psychological process in which interpreters would use
what they have learned about the work (for example, how it was prepared by other works or what influences it
exerted afterward) to make the claim that their retrospective look provides a better understanding than what original
authors understood themselves as doing.47 It is along those lines of a meliorative understanding that Gadamer
understands Schleiermacher and claims against him that “understanding is not […] understanding better, either in
the sense of superior knowledge of the subject because of clearer ideas or in the sense of fundamental superiority of
conscious over unconscious production” (Gadamer 1998, 297). The alternative Gadamer famously offers, as we
saw, is an “understanding differently”: “We understand in a different way, if we understand at all” (Gadamer 1998,
297).48
Instead of a meliorative understanding, the romantics see understanding as what grants the author a present voice
and makes this voice as strong as possible to the point that interpreters may speak “better” than the original authors
spoke but with the original voice of the author and for the purpose of addressing us now. “Better” means providing
the work with an efficacy greater than it would have without interpretation. Interpreters answer or respond for the
author in the sense that they have the task of making the work speak to readers now, in the present and moving
toward the future. The understanding better is thus not merely about the text or merely about the person of the
author. The interpreter has an allegiance to both. As interpreters, we want to understand what the authors meant at
the mental level but through the discursive means they chose at the linguistic level, given what the language they
used conveys. In Schleiermacher’s words, understanding “proceeds from two entirely different points:
Understanding by reference to the language and understanding by reference to the one who speaks” (1986, 68,
Fragment 992). The former is usually called the grammatical interpretation, through which interpreters account for
the text but which, alone, “forgets” the author (1986, 68), and the latter is called the technical (or psychological)
interpretation, which accounts for what the author meant but, when used alone, “forgets” the language (1986, 68).
With regard to the grammatical interpretation, Schleiermacher considers that language “determines the thought
of all individuals” (1998, 10). Human beings need language to articulate their thoughts.49 To this extent, they “are
[…] in the power of the language they speak. They and their whole thinking are a product of language” (2002a,
71).50 Schleiermacher thus recognizes two aspects of language, first, as a specific natural language and, second, as a
capacity or an organ of thought in general. Given the first aspect, “no knowledge in two languages can be regarded
as completely the same” (quoted in Bowie 1998, xxi). Given the second aspect, language is “the organ of the person,
in the service of the person’s individuality” (1998, 94. Translation modified).51 Yet, what matters to interpreters,
however, is neither the specific linguistic system alone (because there is no autonomy on the side of language) nor
the general capacity alone (because human beings think within language).52 In sum, language does not exist outside
of its instantiations but “reveals itself” (1998, 10) in the author’s utterances or in “the means whereby the individual
communicates his thoughts” (1998, 10). The reason why grammatical interpretation focuses on language is thus only
because it is the “location” or the “inscription” of the author’s utterances.
We have the same qualification on the psychological side. Interpreters do not seek the authors’ thoughts before
they were written down, but try to identify the thoughts as articulated in the words used by the authors. The work is
the materialization of this interdependence between thought and language. We can say that the work is what the
author thought in the language used in the work or, alternatively, the work is that which is written as meant by the
author. This explains why the two interpretations, grammatical and psychological, cannot be autonomous and run
parallel to each other. The two methods cannot be used sequentially for the simple reason that the psychology of the
author or what the author intended is not merely located in the mind of the author but is articulated in the words
interpreters read. Hermeneutics is thus neither about mind reading – all on the side of psychology – nor about
philology – all on the side of language, but about the specific articulation in language of what the author meant.53
The two methods are mutually integrated in each other – “each presupposes the other,” Schleiermacher insists
(1998, 94)54 because they are “completely equal” (1998, 10).55
This integrated use of both methods (grammatical and technical) is what Schleiermacher calls “divination,”
which he sometimes describes as the fact that an interpreter has to “put himself ‘inside’ the author” (1986, 64) or
“put himself […] in the position of the author” (1986, 113). These characterizations can easily be misunderstood as
if it were a mere psychological process of re-doing what the author did psychologically when writing, as Gadamer
understands Schleiermacher. However, if we keep in mind Schleiermacher’s insistence on the interdependence of
the grammatical and the psychological methods, divination cannot just be exclusively psychological. Just as
language does not speak by itself but as the concretion of a historically situated set of sentences, authors do not
simply “download” a mental content of meaning from their minds onto a set of words and sentences; rather, they
produce a specific arrangement of words and sentences that convey specific contents of meaning. Divination is
precisely the interpretive process of identifying such a specific arrangement as produced by the author and as
carving out a specific content of meaning in the language used at the time. This even applies to the Bible.
Schleiermacher criticizes those “who derive their religion wholly from someone else or cling to a dead document by
which they swear and from which they draw proof” (1988, 50). These two readings, Schleiermacher claims, miss the
spirit, the former by abstracting from the words written, thereby losing the spirit expressed by the language, and the
latter by abstracting from the author, thereby losing the spirit expressed by the act of writing. As he powerfully and
provocatively declares, “every holy writing is merely a mausoleum of religion, a monument reminding us that a
great spirit was there that no longer exists” (1988, 50. Translation modified).
The combination of the grammatical and the psychological interpretations is a reformulation of the hermeneutic
circle as formulated by Friedrich Ast before Schleiermacher. The hermeneutic circle consists in interpreting the parts
by anticipating the whole and the whole by anticipating the parts. As Ast formulates it, “the fundamental of all
understanding and knowledge is to find the spirit of the whole from the individual components and through the
whole to grasp the individual components” (1808, 178). They each presuppose each other: “As the whole cannot be
thought with the individual component as its member, the individual component cannot be thought without the
whole as the sphere in which it lives. None comes before the other” (179). Ast gives the example of antiquity, which
cannot be known in its spirit, as a culture, without a knowledge of the individual manifestations of this spirit in the
works of writers. Similarly, “the spirit of a writer cannot be grasped without the spirit of the whole antiquity” (179;
see Szondi 1995, 104).
Schleiermacher sees his two interdependent methods of interpretation – grammatical and psychological – as
giving us the means to break into the hermeneutic circle and to navigate it. On the one hand, a work is a whole
insofar as it is made of paragraphs and paragraphs are made of sentences, which are themselves made of words. On
the other hand, a work itself is a part of literature as a body of works and a part of the author’s life as a totality of
experiences.56 It is by navigating this hermeneutic circle that we can understand authors “better” than they
understood themselves precisely because this “understanding better” is circular and not transitive. It does not consist
in returning to any original moment, either in the author’s mind or in the state of the language used at the time of the
creation. The object of understanding is not a conceptual content – what the author meant or what the words say –
but the active configuration of thought in the language of which the work is a site. Schleiermacher reminds us that
“thought is to be treated neither as something objective nor as a thing, but as an act (factum)” (1986, 43). This
factum of thought is not just a fact in the sense of a result that would be available as such in a work, as if a work
were a set of propositions with a definite conceptual content. The factum of thought means that thought “has been
made.” Because a thought is the result of a making – a factum – it can only be understood by another activity –
understanding – that will re-make the first activity. This can only happen in a forward-looking effort to re-create the
exchange that took place between what an author thought and what the text says. Understanding consists in re-
effectuating the author’s thoughts, given what we know about the language the author used in a particular context
for a particular audience or readership. This is what Schleiermacher means when he says that interpreters should put
themselves “inside the author.” Instead of re-doing psychological acts, as Gadamer understands Schleiermacher as
doing, understanding consists in re-effectuating the combination that took place in the work to be interpreted
between what was meant and what was said. This is in fact very close to Gadamer’s own notion of re-enactment.
Because “understanding better” is dealing with something that “has been made” (a factum), understanding better
cannot mean improving the work by going beyond it, which would only be possible if the work were taken as a
product. In this regard, each of the components alone (grammatical and psychological) could just be understood as
mere contents, and thus improved, in a meliorative understanding – how the author could have written better or how
the author could have thought better. However, the combination of the two components, because it is dynamic, can
only be “re-effectuated” in a forward-looking way. “Understanding better” in fact treats the work as an event, which
is the combination, in the active sense of a making, of what is said in a work and what is meant by the author. As
Ast describes it, understanding consists in the “re-creation of what had already been created” (Nachbilden des schon
Gebildeten) (1808, 187). Instead of a superiority over the author who could be superseded by a meliorative
understanding, understanding better is an effort to keep the work alive as that place of exchange between language
(as used) and intentions (as articulated in language). Re-effectuating the activity that the work itself is keeps the
work alive and allows it to speak again, to find a new audience, to remain meaningful.
Interpretation gives the work a new lease on life, breathes new life in it, keeps it relevant for a new readership.57
This productive aspect of interpretation reveals the collaboration of interpreters as those who contribute to the
continued life of the work. To the extent that the interpreter intervenes in the work and pertains to the work’s
“activity,” the interpreter (or the reader in general) is a “broadened author [erweiterter Autor],” as we can read in
Novalis (1960, 470). Because of this intervention of interpreters in the work itself, as activity, the task of
understanding cannot be accomplished only through methods of interpretation, but requires a certain existential
attitude on the part of interpreters, which Friedrich Schlegel and Schleiermacher developed as “love.”

6.3.2.2 Love as a hermeneutic imperative

Because the “understanding better” consists in augmenting the work or elevating it, as Schleiermacher says, and
because the work itself is an activity, interpretation cannot be regulated by the ideal of reaching a full understanding.
To the extent that interpretation is part of the life of the work and interpreters are “broadened” authors of the work
they interpret, what guides interpreters can only be a benevolence or love for the work. Love means both wanting
the object of interpretation to be and putting oneself as interpreter in the position of serving the text and letting it
reveal itself. In such an attitude, interpreters intervene in the process of interpretation as those who want to keep the
work alive and, at the same time, respond to the work by serving it. The “hermeneutic imperative” mentioned by
Schlegel (1981, 69 n. 95) is an imperative of love, both for the work and for the author.
Schleiermacher and Schlegel were certainly influenced by the role that Plato grants love in knowledge. As we
saw, Plato recognizes that, because objects do not have in themselves the principle of their intelligibility, they
cannot immediately reveal their truth if the truth does not attract knowers in the first place. Truth needs to be
illumined by the good so as to be valued and able to exercise its effects fully. The romantics understood this
attraction exercised by the good as what leads to the truth in its two directions: toward the object of interpretation
and toward the authors of the work.
Because the work is an event in which something was “made,” namely the transformation of what an author
wanted to say into what the author wrote, the divination on the part of interpreters can only do justice to this event if
interpreters are attracted to the work. Interpretation requires, in Schleiermacher’s words, “enthusiasm”
(Begeisterung). “To the extent [that] a text does not arouse enthusiasm it is insignificant” (1998, 23–24). In its
etymology, the English word “enthusiasm” means being “in the divine” (en-theos), inspired as enthralled by the
divine. The German word Begeisterung means being permeated by the spirit, in this case the spirit of the work. The
term is interesting both in German and in English as it indicates a transformation of the person, in our case,
interpreters, who are literally “seized” by a force or transported into another dimension. This “enthusiasm” or this
being enthralled by the work is motivated by love, which Schlegel describes as “the intellectual intuition of life” and
which he explains as acting both on the object and the subject: “One sees in love the beauty of the world and love
sees in human beings the infinity of the human being” (1981, 218, n. 191). In the first part of this statement,
speaking about the effect of love on the object, we can see a close connection to Novalis’ notion of
“romanticization” insofar as love gives us a heightened sense of the reality around us. Love acts on things, not
simply by adding a layer on a pre-existing world, but by configuring the world and, in the process transfiguring it.
As we saw, the romantics adopt the view they find in Plato, namely, that the world originates from the
combination of mind and matter (or chaos). They equate the transformation of matter or chaos into an intelligible
entity (a world) with an act of love, which is, for them, a divine act.58 What needs to be revealed is the active arising
of things out of chaos, which is not a creation in the causalist model of a prime mover but the generation of
intelligibility. As moving the mind to act upon matter, love is “the divine spark through which the dead universe is
animated and through reason nature raises itself to the divinity [Gottheit]” (1981, 199 n. 48).59 Just as two human
bodies can produce a new body – a child – through love, mind and matter can give rise to a world, articulated,
animated, and alive. Schleiermacher expresses this connection by saying that “life is love and creation is love”
(2002b, 109n).60 Reason alone would not be able to reconnect to the spirit permeating the becoming of things. For
reason itself needs to gain traction and what gives it traction, Schlegel says, is a “capacity of desire”
(Begehrungsvermögen) in us. This desire is “the source, the beginning, the root of consciousness” (1964, 217) and
this source is “a longing, […] a striving, […] love” (1964, 218).61 By loving the world, human beings can rekindle
the love that lay at the origin of the world when matter was transformed into intelligibility. Love is nothing less than
a “causality in totality” (Schlegel 1991, 53):

Through love everything started, through love everything will be accomplished. Who has recognized this
principle in himself, who has thereby become a creator, can make clear to himself the original fact. Love is the
point of indifference, the core in us [der Indifferenz Punkt, der Kern].
(1991, 53)

This insufflation of intelligibility into matter as an act of love has as a correlate that any object is “the shell of the
mind” (1964, 350). As we saw, the object is not an outside counterpart to consciousness as a non-ego or mere
matter, but what concerns and addresses consciousness. As endowed with an inner meaning (Sinn), the object is in
fact a subject, what Schlegel calls a “counter-subject” (Gegen-ich) and even a “thou” (ein Du). Things, he writes,
“are not non-ego outside the ego; not merely a dead, dull, empty, sensible reflection of the ego, which limits the ego
in an unintelligible manner, but […] a living, potent counter-ego, a thou” (1964, 337). He gives the example of
perception. Perceiving an object cannot just mean encountering inanimate stuff and categorizing it in manners that
make sense to us, human beings. Perception is rather a dialogue between two subjects. Through perception, Schlegel
writes, “the sense [of the object] immediately shines, the thou [the object] speaks in the moment the essence in its
totality is understood by the ego, addresses the ego [of the object] and manifests to the ego the essence of its
existence” (1964, 350).62 Because knowing is an encounter between spirits (Geister), those of the knowing subject
and of the object, love is what will lead the knower to let the object reveal itself. Schlegel writes:

This immediate perception of sense [Sinn], the meaning [Bedeutung], which is the basis of the proper
understanding, is a proper connection of separate but similar spirits, a loving becoming-one of the ego with
what the object of the ego is, the thou. And to the extent that we can very well call “love” this perception and
grasping of the ego of the object, this marriage of the perceiving ego and the perceived spirit, we can formulate
the proposition, Without love there is no sense; the sense, the understanding rely on love.
(1964, 350–351)

In his Brouillon zur Ethik, Schleiermacher describes love as a virtue in the sense of an attitude (Gesinnung) (1981,
132). The loving attitude of understanding or the benevolence toward objects in fact decenters interpreters insofar as
they are in the subservient position of receiving or being given an object, as opposed to “grasping” or “construing”
it.
These views have significant consequences for interpretation. Instead of being an appendix to a pre-existing
object, interpretation is a process within which an object is “presented.” Interpretation thus belongs to the work not
only by revealing the sense that this work makes but by complementing the work, which is, at its core, a fragment.
In order to perpetuate the work and provide it with its future, interpreters need to acknowledge their own non-
understanding so as to serve the work. These two aspects – the work as a fragment and non-understanding as a
condition for doing justice to the work – correspond to the two sides of love: First, to want the object of love to be
and, second, to respond to what is loved and put oneself in the position of serving it.

6.3.2.2.1 THE WORK AS A FRAGMENT

The notion of fragment has become a cliché of romanticism, as it names the infinity of interpretation, the striving for
an unreachable absolute, or the delight in incompleteness. This notion of fragment is sometimes associated with the
fascination the romantics have for ruins and the nostalgia for what has been lost. Yet, what is fascinating about
ruins, for example, are not so much the ruins as such, as a sign of what has been lost (of an absence), but rather what
the ruins allow us to see: The joinings of an edifice or the remnants of how a past life was structured and can thus be
understood.63 When seen “romantically,” that is to say, “understood,” ruins in fact make present and bring the past
back to life, but in a different incarnation.
As we saw, the work is an event of having been made and, as such, an activity. To be a work means to remain
such an activity. It thus belongs to the very being of a work as activity to be continued. Interpretation reveals this
fact that the work is fundamentally a fragment, not so much in the sense that it is incomplete before being
interpreted, but rather in the sense that it can be interpreted because it is incomplete and asks to be completed. The
same holds true for texts, and Schlegel sometimes describes what a critique does as fragmenting the work and
turning it into ruin, but with a positive goal. The critic ideally “will only divide the whole [of the work] into
elements [Glieder] and masses and pieces, but never dismantle it in its original components [Bestandteile], which
are dead in relation to the work because they are no longer unities of the same kind as comprised in the whole”
(1967, 140). Just as understanding a work better is not a mere addition grafted onto a pre-existing content of
meaning, a fragment does not designate the result of a breaking away from a previous whole. Like understanding
better, the fragment is oriented toward the future and in fact justifies the understanding better as what will complete
it and perfect it, in an ontological sense, by treating it first as a fragment and thus fragmenting it.
As the future of the work depends on interpretation, the fragment is, positively, an invitation or incitement to be
continued (or completed) so as to find its efficacy (readership, influence, etc.). Thus, when envisaged from its
reached efficacy, i.e., the future of the work, the work is unfinished as a fragment. This is how, Schlegel argues, “all
critique is divinatory. To complete a project is about the same as completing a fragment” (1963, 49, n. 308). For
him, ideal critics “will complete the work, rejuvenate it, configure it anew” (1967, 140). This accounts for both the
universality of the work (as understandable by all and part of a culture or tradition) and the individuality of the work
(as bound to its historical situation) as generating this future,64 thus both for the historical writer and the continued
author. Interpretation brings the work to completion by furthering it, giving it a second life in a different age for a
new readership.
Any work, such as Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, which was considered as the ideal of the romantic work, can only
find its efficacy (readership, influence, etc.) when readers or interpreters lend it a life and complete it and thus when
they treat the work as unfinished or as a fragment. Schlegel sometimes called his review of Wilhelm Meister his
“Übermeister” (written in one word) (1985, 140). As Antoine Berman shows, it is a commentary “on” or “about”
Wilhelm Meister – first sense of über – but also a way of bringing this novel “beyond” its context of origin – second
sense of über – by granting it a new life (Berman 1992, 107–108). In a third sense, über also means an
intensification of the work, augmenting or maximizing the work by bringing it to its second power, as we will see
below.
This view of the work as a fragment can be qualified as polemic and irenic. The polemic aspect refers to the
provocation of questioning both the metaphysical notion of the work (as a well delineated entity that is now
supposed to have porous boundaries) and the self-identity of the author (to the extent that the boundary between
author and interpreter becomes blurred). This polemic aspect can be seen as postmodern and is a clear antecedent of
Derrida’s notion of graft (Derrida 1972, 377) – to interpret is to graft a new text onto an existing one. However, even
when Derrida uses the motive of the hedgehog,65 to which Schlegel compares the fragment – the hedgehog, Schlegel
says, only has one idea (1967, 197, n. 206) – Derrida abandons the very ideal of completing the work and instead
focuses on an anonymous process of a différance, which makes the subject an effect of language and eliminates the
counterpart of the letter – of the “signifier” – which the romantics call the “spirit.” While there is no “outside-of-the-
text,” no hors-texte, according to the Derridean slogan (Derrida 1988, 136), and thus no need to reconcile letter and
spirit, romantic hermeneutics dedicated itself to doing just that. The polemic aspect in fact concerns the status of
interpretation, which will never find a clear unshakable ground for what it does. Because the work is fragmentary,
interpretation cannot detach itself from the work, hovering over it to see it in its identity before interpreting it.
Identifying the work is in itself interpretive. Thus, there will always be different ways of interpreting, different
perspectives, different focuses. Any interpretation will be questionable, open to suspicion about the interpreters’
motives, methods, goals, etc.
Yet, once we consider that the work in itself is never and never was a unity but is fragmentary in its very
essence, what looks polemic, seen from the unstable (unjustified) status of interpretation, also looks irenic when
seen from the unfinished status of the work: Interpretation can bring peace insofar as interpretation can allow a work
to speak and find its voice precisely by completing it. To the polemic nature of interpretation, which will never be
justified by the work itself, there thus corresponds the irenic nature of interpretation in filling a gap in the work, in
keeping the work alive by interpreting it and completing it. The work as a fragment means that the work needs
interpretation to reach its efficacy. As an activity, the work is only alive if interpreters nurture this life and sustain it.
In paradoxical terms, the activity that a work is – as energeia – is only such if new potentialities are granted to it and
this potentialization of the work is precisely what interpretation effectuates for the romantics.
The romantics use two senses of potency – the metaphysical Aristotelian sense of potentiality and the
mathematical sense of power. Against Aristotle’s understanding of potency, though, the potentialities of the work
are not pre-determined by a corresponding actuality that would logically precede the potentialities themselves (We
saw an analogous use of potentiality in Rousselot). Because the romantics do not subscribe to a given order of the
world, naturally carved out and made of well-delineated substances with fixed essences, there is for them no telos
inscribed in potentiality. This is why they can say that interpretation is a maximization of the power of the work or a
raising of the work to its second power, in the mathematical sense. As Schlegel writes, “the true critique consists in
becoming the author at the second power [die wahre Kritik ein Autor in der 2te Potenz]” (1963, 106, n. 927). He
uses the formula “all critique = x2” (1963, 55, n. 362). Once interpreters intervene in the work, as Schleiermacher
says, the interpretive task becomes “infinite” “because it is an infinity of past and future that we wish to see in the
moment of the utterance” (1998, 23).
Novalis complements the raising of the work to the second power for finding its ideal with another mathematical
operation, which he calls a “logarithmicization.” His famous notion of “romanticization” includes the two
operations, a “qualitative potentialization” by interpretation, which elevates the work, makes it more relevant and
vibrant, and, afterward, a logarithmicization, which consists in reformulating the second power of the work
(provided by interpretation) in terms that make this potentiality familiar and intelligible. Interpretation has to make
clear, in other words, how the raising to the second power was accomplished and give a logarithm of the operation.
Novalis writes: “This operation [of romanticization] for what is higher, unknown, mystical, infinite is
logarithmicized through this association. It takes on an ordinary form of expression […]. Raising and lowering by
turns” (Novalis 1960, 545, n. 105; 1997, 60, n. 66. Translation modified). The Interpretation is thus invasive and
violent as a fragmentation; but, as a logarithmicization, interpretation is also “completing” the original work through
this “lowering” of the second power.
“Characteristic” (Charakteristik) is the term Schlegel uses to name the task of interpretation. It consists in
finding the “ideal” of the work (Schlegel 1967, 183), as in the case of Schlegel’s review of Goethe’s Wilhelm
Meister. The ideal of the work is not outside the work but resides in the potentialities that the work as activity
already implicitly includes and that the critique will reveal, re-energizing the work, leading it “beyond” (über) its
present materialization. “A critique should not judge works according to a general ideal but seek the individual ideal
of each work” (1981, 270, n. 197). It is an effort to account for both the universality of the work (as understandable
by all and part of a culture or tradition) and the individuality of the work (as bound to its historical situation).
As we saw, the fact that a work is a fragment in need of completion derives from the more fundamental aspect of
reality itself as being accessible to us only in the sense we see in it. For our eikōs logos or “symbolic thinking” to
gain traction, it needs to be mindful that interpretation belongs to the work precisely because the work is a process of
exchange between the author’s mind and the language spoken by the author. To understand means to be able to
retrace this exchange and, by re-doing it, to maintain the work in its status as a factum, as something made. By “re-
making” the work, interpreters will keep the spirit of the work alive, the spirit being the exchange between the
author’s mind and the letters written down.

6.3.2.2.2 THE PRODUCTIVE ASPECT OF NON-UNDERSTANDING

When Schleiermacher says that non-understanding or misunderstanding is the starting point of hermeneutics, he
does not mean this as the state of an absence of understanding. As he writes at the beginning of his “General
Hermeneutics,” “hermeneutics rests on the fact [factum] of the non-understanding of discourse” (1998, 227). The
factum here again is to be understood as verbal, as the result of an activity: Non-understanding “has been made.”
Readers realize that they, in the active sense, are “not understanding” a text. As in the case of the fragment, instead
of an absence of understanding, it is an existential experience of a lack and, as such, a motivation to understand.
Non-understanding as an activity is connected to an “understanding better,” which is another activity.66
Friedrich Schlegel, who shares Schleiermacher’s view, repeats the motto: “To criticize means to understand an
author better than he understood himself” (Schlegel 1981, 168 n. 992), which he explains as follows:

In order to understand someone, you first have to be more intelligent than he is, but then also just as intelligent
and then just as stupid. It is not sufficient to understand the real meaning of a confused work better than the
author understood it himself. You must also comprehend the confusion, including its principles, and be able to
characterize and even reconstruct it.
(1963, 63, n. 434)

This confirms the active nature of non-understanding, which is an attitude that interpreters can deliberately adopt so
as to let themselves be questioned by the text. The lack in non-understanding as an attitude and the “better” in
“understanding better” are both motivated by a desire, a wanting to understand. “The business of understanding
should not only begin where understanding is uncertain, but with the first beginning of the enterprise of wanting to
understand an utterance” (1998, 228).
Schlegel even wrote an apology for “incomprehensibility” (Über Unverständlichkeit). He argues for the
fruitfulness of a certain incomprehensibility when it puts the reader or the interpreter in an attitude in which they can
be solicited by the work, instead of attempting to take control over the work by leading it where they feel secure.
Incomprehensibility is an attitude of vulnerability that allows the work to reveal itself in its power or potentiality.
Schlegel writes:

But is incomprehensibility really something so unmitigatedly contemptible and evil? […] verily, it would fare
badly with you if, as you demand, the whole world were ever to become wholly comprehensible in earnest.
And isn’t this entire, unending world constructed by the understanding out of incomprehensibility or chaos?
(1967, 370; 2003, 305)

We see here again the influence of the Timaeus. As an eikōs logos, i.e., our understanding of the world or of things
brings out intelligibility out of chaos by providing the “reason for” the world or things.67 Yet, because there is
always a “spirit” that ordered what we can understand, and because we can only understand this spirit in terms of the
“reasons for” things or the world, and thus only in our own logos, there is a fundamental non-understanding of the
spirit and this non-understanding haunts our understanding.
Like the two sides of a fragment – product of a fragmentation and invitation to be completed – understanding
and non-understanding are not two different stages of a single process, but rather two poles between which
interpreters can navigate. Instead of a linear intellectual process of moving from non-understanding to understanding
– on the meliorative sense of understanding better – it is a movement back and forth. Schlegel speaks of a
“progressive incomprehensibility” (Progressive Unverständlichkeit) (1975, 216).68 Each of the two poles –
understanding and non-understanding – can also each have a positive and a negative valence. On the side of
understanding, a positive one, we can speculate, is one that is successful. A negative one stays at the surface of the
work and only states “what the matter actually is, where it stands and must stand in the world” (1967, 140).
On the side of non-understanding, we also have, as Schlegel says, “a merely negative and a positive non-
understanding” (1963, 129 n. 89).69 A negative non-understanding, we can surmise, is merely a failure to
understand. More interesting is the positive non-understanding. It is an attitude of accepting to be disconcerted by
the work or solicited by it. This is violent because it forces the work to break open.70 He writes: “When
understanding and non-understanding touch each other there is an electric shock. This is called polemic” (1967,
401). Some interpretations are able to render a work incomprehensible, compared to how it has been received until
then, and, by doing so, liberate the work and make it alive again. For example, Patrice Chéreau and Pierre Boulez’s
production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle at the 100th anniversary Bayreuth festival in 1976 situated the old German myth
back into the industrial revolution, pitting the industrialists against the proletariat in an “update” of the mythology,
as it were. This production literally freed Wagner’s work from the canon by making it incomprehensible – this is the
polemic aspect: It is not the Ring as we knew it, and several musicians at first refused to play71 – but it allowed the
work to continue living by giving license to future productions to break from the tradition. The same goes for
translations, which keep the original work actual.72
This continued life is obviously not necessarily progress but only a new pull exerted in the tension or
polarization between understanding and non-understanding. What matters in this pendulum movement is the
movement itself and thus its dynamics. There is no final stage that can be reached for a work to be understood, either
 backward, striving to recover an original intent, or forward, striving to give the definitive interpretation. The work is
an activity or, as Heidegger says, a “setting-into-work” in the sense of an entry-into-work, in the etymological Greek
sense of energeia as en-ergon. Non-understanding can thus be intensified and cultivated, precisely for the sake of
doing justice to the work to be interpreted by maintaining it in the dynamic state of a fragment.
These two aspects of interpretation, treating the work as a fragment in order to secure its future and non-
understanding as a guarantee that the work will speak in its own voice within interpretation, allow the object as
interpreted to hold as the object that is interpreted. These two aspects represent the two sides of a hermeneutic
imperative of love. Now, benevolence or love does not deliver the truth or validity of an interpretation and does not
guarantee it. It only renders interpreters conscious of their vulnerability: both with regard to the need that a work has
to be continued or completed and with regard to the danger for interpreters to supplant or replace the author. This
hermeneutic imperative of love is a responsibility for the authors (responding for them and helping them speak
better for a new audience) as a response to the work (wanting the work to continue to be and responding to its
fragmentary nature).

Notes
1. Descartes writes: “According to the laws of true logic, we must never ask about anything whether it is unless we
first know what it is” (1967, 526).
2. The object, Husserl also says, “cries out to us: ‘Here I am, in my very person, now, in the present’” (2004, 86–87)
or, as formulated in Ideas II, “the Object, as it were, wants to be an object of attention, it knocks at the door of
consciousness taken in a specific sense (namely, in the sense of attention), it attracts, and the subject is
summoned until finally the Object is noticed” (1989, 231).
3. On the connection between these two fields, see, among others, Crisp (2010).
4. On how virtue epistemology broadens this traditional view of knowledge, see Zagzebski (1996).
5. See Battaly (2008).
6. For this branch of virtue epistemology, which includes, among others, Ernest Sosa (2007), Alvin Plantinga
(1993), and John Greco (2000), there is not much of a difference between virtue, skill or competence.
7. See Battaly (2008), 644.
8. On how she differentiates her approach from the reliabilist virtue epistemologists, see Zagzebski (1996), 10f.
9. See also 1996, 311–319.
10. He also notes: “Love as motivation ground of phenomenological understanding. Necessarily co-given in its
enactment sense [Vollzugssinn]” (1993, 185). On the different mentions of love by Heidegger, see Schuback
(2012).
11. Liebe ist der Wille, dass das Geliebte sei, indem es zu seinem Wesen finde und in ihm wese. As love of wisdom,
philosophy “loves” Being: “This, that being ‘be,’ is the beloved of philosophy” (1997, 63). For other examples,
see Schuback (2012).
12. He speaks of the virtus caritatis in, among other places, Expositio in canticum canticorum (1963) 20, 402.
13. On this, see the magisterial and monumental work by Henri de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale (1959).
14. I use the English translation by Theodosia Gray, which I modify on occasion (Gregory 1990).
15. Quoted in Nicholas of Lyra (1879, col. 28D).
16. Let us note that allegorization was already practiced in ancient Greece and there are instances in the Hindu
tradition as well. The need for allegorical readings is motivated by the dual aspect of what is said or written:
There is, first, the meaning expressed by words and sentences but there is also a possible sense that those
sentences can or cannot “make” to readers. There is thus a need for a transfer of what is described, for example in
Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, to the life of readers or listeners, or for a free “application” in the sense of a forward-
looking transfer from a sense whose intention is not in question – texts are variegated “expressions” of antecedent
intentions – to the life of readers or listeners where the sense remains alive.
17. See Markus (1996, 52–54); Banniard (1986, 477–479). For example, in his letter to Leander, opening his
Homilies on Job Gregory compares what a commentator of the Bible should do with the flow of a river. When a
river reaches a valley, it flows into it and, after filling it, returns to its course. In a similar way, if commentators
see the possibility of edifying the readers they should let their commentary flow into this “valley” and after
sufficiently instructing the readers, return to the normal course of their commentary (1979, Epistola ad Leandrum,
l. 96–100).
18. As Aquinas put it, “the duty of every good interpreter is to contemplate not the words, but the sense of the words”
(Officium est enim boni interpretis non considerare verba sed sensum) (quoted in Razinger 1988).
19. Let us note that this work is now no longer regarded as a work written by Gregory himself. At first, it was
 believed that his secretary Claudius wrote it. For it was common for Gregory to deliver his homilies orally, which
were then set in writing by others. Adalbert de Vogüé, who translated it into French defended its authenticity but
came to change his mind later on and argued that the author was probably Peter Divinacello, a monk from Cava
(See de Vogüé 1996). This work is now listed in the Corpus Christianorum series under “Petrus de Caua (olim
Gregorius Magnus).” It is believed, though, that this work in its core comes from Gregory’s teachings, as Francis
Clark notes: “There is in In I Regum a substantial core of genuinely Gregorian material, used by the medieval
author as the framework on which to construct his own fabrication” (Clark 1998, 1–2).
20. In proximi amore discitur qualiter peruenire debeat ad amorem Dei (1999, Book 2, homily 26, paragraph 3, page
220, line 58).
21. Pier Cesare Bori has offered arguments defending this stronger view (Bori 1987, 59f).
22. According to Leo Elders, there are more than 2,500 quotations or references to Gregory in Aquinas’ work (Elders
2018, 193).
23. Summa Theologiae, Part 1, Question 1, article 10, reply to objection 1 (1993).
24. Summa Theologiae, Part 1, Question 1, article 10, reply to objection 1 (1993).
25. De doctrina christiana, Lib 1, cap. 36, l. 4 (De doctrina christiana, ed. R.P.H. Green. Oxford Scholarship online)
(https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/0198263341.001.0001/acprof-9780198263340-
chapter-2).
26. De doctrina christiana, Lib 1, cap. 36, l. 21–26.
27. De doctrina christiana, Lib 1, cap. 36, l. 1–4.
28. Librum Primum Regum expositionum libri vi, bk 3, ch. 171, l. 3475.
29. De doctrina christiana, Lib 1, cap. 39, l 1.
30. Summa Theologiae, Part 1, Question 1, article 10, reply to objection 3 (1993).
31. Roberts and Wood, for example, speak of “love” as an “epistemic virtue” in their description of Goodall’s work
with chimpanzees (Roberts and Wood 2007, 148).
32. He was killed in Verdun in 1915 at the age of 37. Andrew Tallon and I have edited and translated several of his
works, published by Marquette University Press.
33. “The relation […], the solidarity is given even prior to being” (Rousselot 2008, 116).
34. This is the case even when the thing does not exist. As Rousselot explains, “‘This is not’ is equivalent to: ‘One
would be wrong to believe that this is.’ But this affirmation, like all others, presupposes the affirmation of the
existence of the whole, for it could be explained in this way: ‘Someone who would see the whole of being would
not see this there’” (170).
35. On the origin of the notion of “understanding better,” see Behler (2002, 117f).
36. With regard to the understanding of Plato, this means, as Gadamer also holds, that there is no separation between
Plato’s realm of ideas and the real world. Schleiermacher writes: “In Plato, eidos, idea, and genos are
synonymous. The first two refer to form, the third to kind. Thus, the first two refer to the common element in the
individual, the third to the unity of productive power, and all three are posited alike in their synonymous usage”
(Schleiermacher 1996b, 29). As he explains, “the being of types [Gattungen] does not exist outside the being of
kinds and of individual things; rather it exists in and with them, and they exist through it” (1996b, 29).
37. Strictly speaking, he equates allegory with eikōn.
38. Schleiermacher explains further: “If the emanations of light – which happen completely without your efforts –
did not affect your sense, if the smallest parts of the body, the tips of your fingers, were not mechanically or
chemically affected, if the pressure of weight did not reveal to you an opposition and a limit to your power, you
would intuit nothing and perceive nothing” (1988, 25).
39. For Schleiermacher the theologian, the view that the world is chaos when not enlivened by the spirit informs his
understanding of the role of religion. Religion is genuinely understood when we pay heed to one of its possible
etymologies as a “reconnection,” which Schleiermacher qualifies as “intuition”: Religion “wishes to intuit the
universe, wishes devoutly to overhear the universe’s own manifestations and actions, longs to be grasped and
filled by the universe’s immediate influences in childlike passivity” (1988, 22). See also: “Recall how in
religion everything strives to expand the sharply delineated outlines of our personality and gradually to lose them
in the infinite in order that we, by intuiting the universe, will become one with it as much as possible” (1988, 53).
40. Consciousness itself is a “derived” consciousness, “something fragmentary” because “we are only a part of
ourselves and precisely through this singularity and separation the derived consciousness differentiates itself”
(1964, 392).
41. As Schlegel says, “if the absolute truth were found, the business of the sprit would be accomplished, and it would
need to stop being. For the spirit only exists in activity” (1964, 93).
42. See Beiser (2003, 15).
43. Josef Körner went so far as to claim that Schlegel should be credited with the development of a scientific
hermeneutics. For an attempt to identify the specific contributions of Schlegel to Schleiermacher’s development
of hermeneutics, see Patsch (1966). See also Forster (2011), 46.
44. Or, in another formulation, “one must understand as well as and better than the author” (1977, 94). As
Schleiermacher explains, “since we have no direct knowledge of what was in the author’s mind, we must try to
become aware of many things of which he himself may have been unconscious, except insofar as he reflects on
his own work and becomes his own reader” (1986, 112). See also: “Complete understanding grasped in its
highest form is an understanding of the utterer better than he understands himself. Partly because it is in fact an
analysis of his procedure which brings to consciousness what was unconscious to himself, partly because it also
conceives of his relationship to language via the necessary duplication which he himself does not distinguish in
it” (Schleiermacher 1998, 266). On the basis of these excerpts, I cannot follow Michael Forster when he claims
that there is a difference between how Schlegel and Schleiermacher understand the “understanding better.”
According to Forster, Schleiermacher “means […] something less ambitious than Schlegel does – roughly, just
that the rules of word-usage and grammar which an author usually masters implicitly should be known explicitly
by his interpreter. And Schleiermacher is in general strikingly reluctant to impute unconscious mental processes
to people” (Forster 2011, 58). As indicated in the quotation above, however, Schleiermacher explicitly says that
interpreters have to bring “to consciousness what was unconscious” to the authors themselves.
45. A first shorter treatment of this topic was presented in Vandevelde (2020).
46. He also says that understanding is an augmentation of the work (Erhöhung, quoted in Frank 1977, 361).
47. This kind of meliorative understanding was already mentioned by Kant, who saw the possibility of understanding
Plato better than he understood himself. Kant writes: “I note only that when we compare the thoughts that an
author expresses about a subject, in ordinary speech and in writings, it is not at all unusual to find that we can
understand him even better than he understood himself, since he may not have determined his concept
sufficiently and hence sometimes spoke, or even thought, contrary to his own intention” (Kant 1997, 396 A314).
In such a meliorative “understanding better,” Kant claims an epistemic superiority over Plato’s actual intent
insofar as Kant situates the work in a broader conceptual context – but it could be a broader historical or cultural
context – in a retrospective manner with the advantage of hindsight. Ernst Behler mentions the amusing fact
that when Kant objected to Fichte when the latter claimed that Kant’s philosophy was in agreement with his,
Fichte threatened Kant to interpret him “according to the spirit” and thus “better” than he, Kant, understood
himself (Behler 2002, 117n).
48. Manfred Frank interprets Schleiermacher’s “understanding better” on Gadamerian lines, claiming that
“understanding ‘better’ cannot mean understanding more truly or correctly but only differently and more richly”
(Frank 1997, 40). While Frank is right in protecting Schleiermacher from a psychological interpretation, there is
another alternative than an “understanding differently,” as we will see.
49. Human beings “cannot think anything with full determinacy that would lie outside the boundaries of language”
(2002a, 71).
50. As he explains, “the form of their concepts, the manner and the limit of their capacity to be connected is
prescribed to human beings by the language in which they were born and grew up” (2002a, 71).
51. As Neschke says, for Schleiermacher, language is “the manifestation of the productivity of the spirit, of the spirit
of a nation” (2008, 49).
52. “All human beings who are free thinkers, intellectually independent also form language” (2002a, 71).
53. As Ada Neschke puts it, the individual discourse “reveals itself as a conditioned spirit, that is to say, a historical
spirit,” which “uses the space of language” (2008, 49).
54. See also: “Neither language nor the individual as productive speaking individual can exist except via the being-
in-each-other of both relationships” (1998, 229).
55. “Understanding is only a being-in-one-another of these two moments (of the grammatical and psychological.
1.The utterance is not even understood as an act of the mind if it is not understood as a linguistic designation,
because the innateness of language modifies the mind. 2.The utterance is also not understood as a modification of
language if it is not also understood as an act of the mind, because the ground of all influence of the individual
lies in the mind, which itself develops by utterance” (1998, 9).
56. “First, each work is a part of the sphere of literature to which it belongs, and together with other works of similar
merit it forms a body of literature. This body of literature helps one to interpret each work with reference to the
language. Second, each work is also a part of the author’s life, and together with his other acts it forms the totality
of his life. Thus, it is to be understood only from the totality of the person’s acts, inasmuch as it is of influence
upon his life and is in keeping with it” (1986, 202).
57. This aspect of romantic hermeneutics was eminently brought to the fore by Walter Benjamin (2008).
58. In his introduction to his translation into French of the Philebus, Auguste Diès qualifies the mixture made by the
demiurge as a “sexual union” and the entity as “the result of this union”: “Metaphorically, there is between the
two general principles of any existence, apeiron and peras, a marriage, a sexual union, meixis, and the result of
this union is the generation of a product (ekgonon), the appearing of an existence no longer eternal, like the
principles, but mixed and begotten (meiktē kai gegenēmenē ousia, 27b)” (Diès 1959, xxx).
59. Schlegel even criticizes Plato for not deriving the mind (Verstand) from love. If he had done so, he would also
have solved the problem of matter instead of considering the existence of an eternal matter, which “due to its own
laws, limits and conditions the divine artist in his creation [Bildung]” (1964, 218). Plato would have achieved the
“completed idealism” [vollendeten Idealismus] “if he had grasped consciousness in the original form, as love, and
derived the mind [Verstand], reason from love” (1964, 219).
60. As he explains, “love is reason which wants to become soul, the entering of reason into the organic process, in
the same way as the entering of matter into the organic process is a wanting to become body” (Schleiermacher
2002b, 109); or “love is reason in its action upon nature” (2002b, 111).
61. We find analogous formulations in Schleiermacher: “In order to intuit the world and to have religion, man must
first have found humanity, and he finds it only in love and through love” (1988, 37–38).
62. As Benjamin, influenced by Romanticism will later say, each object has its own language (2008).
63. See Hamacher (1996, 244–245).
64. See Beiser (2003, 23).
65. See Derrida (1990).
66. Gadamer is thus mistaken in his critique of Schleiermacher, contesting the alleged priority that Schleiermacher
grants to non-understanding and claiming against Schleiermacher that non-understanding itself supposes a
fundamental basis of agreement. In fact, Schleiermacher says explicitly the same in his Dialektik: “Disagreement
of any kind presupposes the acknowledgment of the sameness of an object, as well as the necessity of the
relationship of thought to being […] For if we take away this relationship of thought to being there is no
disagreement, rather, as long as thought only remains purely within itself, there is only difference” (Dialektik,
132–134, quoted in Bowie 1998, xxvii).
67. As Forster points out, Schlegel connects the “confusion in texts” and “the consequent need to recognize” it to
“the chaotic nature of the reality that texts aim to characterize” (Forster 2011, 62). He quotes Schlegel: “It is a
high and perhaps the final step of intellectual formation to posit for oneself the sphere of incomprehensibility and
confusion. The understanding of chaos consists in recognizing it” (Schlegel 1963, 227, n. 396).
68. See Frischmann (2005, 355).
69. See Behler (1993, 280).
70. As Hermann Patsch understands this positive non-understanding, “to understand an author better than he
understood himself means to surpass him along the line of what he intended, to interpret him according to the
spirit, without violating the letters he used. This means at the same time to become aware of the historical
presuppositions we can know about his thesis and to consider the circumstances. This thus means to remain
conscious of the infinity of what is allegedly thought insufficiently (in a classical work) and thus of the non-
understanding that is inherent in one’s own understanding” (Patsch 1966, 460). Bowie connects this impossibility
of full understanding with ethics. He writes: “There is […] an ethical obligation to come to terms with the fact
that we can never claim fully to understand the other, even though we always must understand in some measure if
we can engage in dialogue or attempt to translate” (Bowie 1998, xxx).
71. As Barry Millington describes this production, Chéreau “set the action in an industrialised society, with a hydro-
electric dam taking the place of the free-flowing Rhine; there were also occasional 20th-century costumes and
props […]. The incisive social critique of Chéreau's production was regarded by some of the ultra-faithful as an
outrage, and created a scandal of unprecedented proportions. Performances were disrupted by jeering and
whistling, and confrontations between supporters and opponents spilled over from the foyer to the grounds of the
Festspielhaus and even to local guesthouses” (Millington 2013).
72. Carlos Fuentes writes in his review of Edith Grossman’s new translation of Don Quixote: “Nothing harder for the
traduttore, if he or she is not to be seen as the traditore, than to render a classic in contemporary idiom yet retain
its sense of time and space […]. Edith Grossman delivers her “Quixote” in plain but plentiful contemporary
English […]. This “Don Quixote” can be read with the same ease as the latest Philip Roth and with much greater
facility than any Hawthorne. Yet there is not a single moment in which, in forthright English, we are not reading
a 17th-century novel. This is truly masterly: the contemporaneous and the original co-exist” (Fuentes 2003).
Conclusion
Love as a Hermeneutic Imperative

DOI: 10.4324/9781003348009-11

As we have discussed throughout this book, interpreters come to a text or an event not as neutral truth-seekers or
non-participating evaluators, but with their own questions and interests, biases and hopes. Almost of necessity, they
will read some of those in the events or texts they interpret. We do not see Plato or Lincoln now as people did just
50 years ago. Similarly, history textbooks and reading lists of literature and philosophy in US academe have been
dramatically altered in recent decades. Interpreters thus have much latitude in choosing the focus of their
interpretation and the methods they will use. Because they have to contribute to the speaking of the event or text,
lending it a voice without which the event or the text would not register as such, it is very easy as well as tempting
for them to confuse their own interests (aesthetic or political) with what the event or the text means. They can just
impose their own voice and prevent an event or a text from being fully deployed – from being “better understood,”
in the romantic sense. The reverse side of this danger is that, by importing their own experiences into the process of
interpretation, they can also make the text or the event meaningful again, granting it a continued life. Of this
“intervention” of interpreters in what they interpret we have examined three models.
In the first model, charity or good will was understood as the principle according to which interpretation is
supposed to be made (or should be made). Yet, as I claimed, neither Davidson’s ascription of beliefs nor Gadamer’s
fusion of horizons are charitable enough. In the case of Davidson, the beliefs of the observed subjects are ascribed to
them by interpreters. Charity determines not only which beliefs of the observed subject are true or false but also
whether they are genuine beliefs. Gadamer’s model of good will, seeing interpretation as a fusion of horizons in a
dialogue is far more charitable. Yet, the fusion of horizons is more the retrospective description of interpretation as
an event – from a third-person perspective – than an account of what interpreters claim to do when interpreting –
from their first-person perspective. Gadamer’s other description of interpretation as enactment, which he does not
fully expound, is far more promising, as it presents interpretation as giving us in a living form the first event that the
work or the event was. Re-enactment makes the past work alive again.
The model of the production of truth in its different forms in Ricoeur and Foucault fully recognizes the
existential nature of interpretation. This second model is not about the “principle” according to which an
interpretation is supposed to be made but about the “attitude” of interpreters when interpreting. Interpreters
participate in the process of interpretation and their role not only contributes to the meaning of the text or the event –
it is a “meaning for” – but also determines the criterion of the truth of their interpretation: They attest to such truth
(for Ricoeur) or they are truth-tellers (for Foucault). However, two issues remain unresolved in this model. The first
one is illustrated by the delay I described in recognizing (interpreting) German suffering at the end of World War II.
Neither attestation nor truth-telling can give its impetus to interpretation, for example, to decide to interpret. Ricoeur
may say that historians feel a debt and Foucault that parrhesia as truth-telling is supposed to take place “at the right
moment,” at the kairos, or that truth-tellers have the courage for the truth, but it is not in the purview of such
attitudes to initiate the interpretation. Attestation and truth-telling are attitudes adopted once interpretation has
started, that is to say, once interpreters have been drawn to the object or have had the benevolence to see it as such
an object.
The second unresolved issue is that the feeling of debt or the virtue of courage are within the purview of the
interpreters who have this feeling or this virtue. This feeling or virtue, we may surmise, has been shaped and
nurtured by what is of interest to interpreters and by their own convictions. Attestation and truth-telling may be
ethical, but they are morally blind inasmuch as they do not qualify that which is attested or that which is said.
Virtuous interpreters may produce harmful interpretations. When rector of the University of Freiburg in 1933,
Heidegger “attested” to the “greatness” of the Nazi party, even if his understanding of Nazism had little in common
with what the party leaders meant. Sartre, I would grant, was a “truth-teller,” being part of all social and political
conflicts of his time as a public intellectual with “courage.” Yet, he was considered as a disaster by many
intellectuals in Eastern Europe because of his support for the Soviet Union, whose regime oppressed them, and, later
on, by intellectuals in China, when Sartre shifted his support toward Mao’s version of communism.
The third model we examine takes the teleological aspect of interpretation as its focus in the form of a
teleological principle guiding interpreters. In the first version discussed, Apel and Habermas present this teleological
principle as a quasi-transcendental component of interpretation itself in the form of validity claims, which function
as a mechanism within the performative activity of presenting an interpretation. However much the formal aspect of
such claims performatively makes interpreters obligated toward truth, truthfulness, and normative rightness, this
quasi-transcendental mechanism does not guarantee that the interpretation presented, while redeeming those claims,
serve the common good. Validity claims do not amount to a commitment. As my example of President Andrew
Jackson illustrates, Jackson could redeem these validity claims within the political practice at the time, however
much it may reek of Realpolitik, and thus hold his ground in justifying his treatment of the Cherokees politically,
while failing them morally. As with attestation and truth-telling, we have in validity claims an ethical dimension but
not necessarily a moral one because the obligation generated by validity claims is relative to the practice where these
claims operate.
The second version of this model, love as a hermeneutic imperative, is, in my view, the most promising. Love
functions as what both motivates interpreters (animating them for the sake of doing justice to the object) and
regulates the process of interpretation (attracting interpreters to secure the future of the work). In this regard, love
involves a commitment to serve the work. It is thus more substantial than charity or good will (as a principle in our
first model). Love is also more than an existential attitude of attestation and truth-telling (in our second model)
because it leads interpreters beyond the confines of the present of the interpreters and is directly linked to the future
of the work. Love also goes beyond formal validity claims by making interpreters not just obligated by the rules and
validity claims of a practice, but also committed to the continuation of the work.
Love gives a dynamics to the interdependence that the three models, each in its own way, recognize between the
object to be interpreted and interpretation, and this in two ways or in two moments. The first moment at which love
enters into interpretation is in giving an object to interpretation. There is a minimal articulation in the physical
gestures and movements that constitute what will become an event and there is a minimal articulation in the words
and sentences that will constitute a text. Sometimes, this first layer of articulation is called the literal meaning, in
some sense of literal. Yet, the minimal articulation of this first layer is not powerful enough to dictate or even direct
interpretation. We need to know what was meant by those who engaged in these physical movements or uttered
those words and sentences. The givenness of the object, which is supposed to be contemporaneous with
consciousness being intentional (in canonic phenomenology) still depends on an attitude of benevolence on the part
of those to whom an object is supposed to be “given.” We can see this in what “interpreters” in social media and on
TV do, which have become our “news.” While presenting themselves as journalists just recording what is “given” to
them, some of them cobble together bits of movements or fragments of speech and construe “alternate facts” or
“fake news.” Most news headlines are, in different degrees, deceptive for the sake of enticing viewers to read more
and be submitted to more advertisement. Or they interpret decisions or statements made by public figures in the
lights of the ulterior motives these journalists assume them to have. While the naive trust in a “literal” meaning of a
text or an event is usually based on the unconscious presuppositions of interpreters, many “journalistic takes” on
statements made by public figures or events are also based on the presuppositions these journalists have (because of
their political leanings, their economic interests, their career goals, etc.).
In order to find the drive to look for what was meant by these gestures and movements or words concatenated on
the page, interpreters need to be animated by a care for what happened or what the text means. There is a need for a
will to understand. The pursuit of the truth is thus not only motivated by events and texts themselves, but also by an
attitude of love on the part of interpreters. As we saw above, there are two moments in this benevolence or love. The
first one is the will that the object exist, that is to say, that, out of a magma of gestures and movements, a meaningful
event arises or that, out of a whirling of words and sentences, a meaningful text appears. This provides a framework
for “givenness” by making interpreters open to and ready for such openness. The different events we mentioned,
whether the suffering of German civilians during World War II or the Armenian genocide, needed to register on the
radar of interpreters, who were attracted to those events, with the courage to force these issues on the public
consciousness.
The second moment at which love also enters in interpretation is in serving the object in order to guarantee its
future. It is thanks to interpreters that texts or events are not left to their fragmentary nature and continue to be
relevant. Readers’ interests and concerns change in the course of time. Interpretations are ways of revisiting the past
and re-writing history – on the side of events – and revisiting the canon of literature or philosophy – on the side of
texts. It is not only readers’ concerns and questions that change. Methods of investigation and research also change
in the course of time, as well as standards for what counts as an interpretation, which vary with different social and
political contexts. If we are still interpreting Plato or Toni Morrison (on the side of texts) and the Civil War or the
bombing of Hiroshima (on the side of events), there lies hidden in the constancy of the object a love for this kind of
objects – so that they remain talked about, remembered – and thus a will that they continue to exist as objects of
interpretation. What drives interpreters to do so is what I call a hermeneutic imperative of love, qualifying the
“hermeneutic imperative” Friedrich Schlegel mentions. I see three requirements in this overall imperative of love,
which can be called the three ethical imperatives of interpretation.

1 First imperative

The first imperative is negative, as a step back, in order to refrain from assuming that the people involved in the
event or writing the text had the same kinds of beliefs the interpreters would have in the same situation. This
imperative corresponds to the first ethical aspect of interpretation mentioned in the introduction. Interpreters use
their own experiences to make sense of what texts and events mean. Texts and events are – and need to be – re-
interpreted in the course of time. Interpreters thus need to be mindful of their own presence and role in the process
of interpretation. They are not mind-readers or transcribers of facts, merely recording events or meaning intentions.
Instead of being neutral, they of necessity reconstrue the beliefs of the people involved in the events or the meaning
of the texts to be interpreted. They thus need to be aware that their beliefs come from their own specific historical
and cultural milieu, and that the beliefs of those engaged in events or writing texts may be different, belonging to a
different time period or a different culture. This is the fundamental weakness of interpretation as an ascription of
beliefs, as Davidson sees it, which assumes a symmetry between the interpreters’ beliefs and the observed subjects’
beliefs.
The step back from a-historicism is, at its core, a step back from our philosophical tradition, which, since
Aristotle, insisted on the symmetry between the proposition (what he calls the logos apophantikos) and the structure
of things (pragmata) inasmuch as the logical subject of the proposition corresponds to the substance and the
predicate of the proposition corresponds to the accident, the copula rendering at once the logical connection between
the two and the existential status of the state of affairs. From then on, philosophy became a “mirror of nature,” as
Rorty famously unmasked it (1979). What this tradition caused was the specification of any belief as a “belief-that,”
what I called above an “explicit” belief, which is of a propositional nature, susceptible to be true or false. What was
unwittingly excluded was the possibility for experience to have its own implicit articulation insofar as it “makes
sense” and is the locus of what people “believe in,” with its implicit character and its trust. These beliefs-in
articulate in a loose way what becomes the sense of experience, rendering our behaviors and use of things
meaningful. We saw examples of such implicit belief-in in our discussion of Amerindian cultures and how Davidson
tended to reduce any implicit belief-in to explicit beliefs or “beliefs-that.” We too have implicit beliefs, manifested
by our culture, in the familiarity we have with our environment, in the ways we use tools, and the social habits and
customs that allow us to relate to other people.
Even when interpreting someone who claimed to speak in propositions, such as Frege, we realize that we cannot
directly access the propositional content of what they wrote without also understanding the words they use in the
sense these words had for them, as well as understanding their context, their interests, and their goals. For example,
we have at least four different translations of the term Bedeutung, which usually means “meaning,” as used in
Frege’s famous essay “Über Sinn und Bedeutung” (1892). Originally, the title was translated by Herbert Feigl as
“On Sense and Nominatum” (Frege 1990); later on, Max Black translated it as “Sense and Reference” (Frege 1984);
in the re-print of Max Black’s translation in Frege’s Collected Papers (Frege 1984), the editor Brian McGuiness
changed the title to “Sense and Meaning,” speaking of a “gentle harmonization” (Frege 1984, viii); and Ernst
Tugendhat suggested “significance” as a better translation (Tugendhat 1970, 180). This indicates that, even in
Frege’s case, there is also an implicit moment – a belief-in – in his explicit logical belief, manifested by how he
understood and used the word Bedeutung, given the meaning the word had in his time. If the implicit moment of
belief-in is already present in the writing of a logician, it is all the more present in the case of those who do not try
by profession, as it were, to make everything explicit.
When interpreting we thus have to be mindful of this dual aspect of beliefs both in those we try to understand
and in our own understanding of these beliefs. An event or a text are not just a set of explicit beliefs as if the
narrative produced by the interpreters were a mirror of what happened or what was meant. With regard to those we
interpret, interpretation cannot be reduced to extracting contents of thoughts or of meaning, as if what people do or
write were fully contained in the explicit beliefs expressed. The explicit belief conveyed by “vegetable love,” as
mentioned above, cannot be read from the words alone. We need to know something about the author, the context,
the time period, etc., that is to say, we need to figure out what the author “believed in,” in terms of the practices in
which he or she was engaged, either in a 17th century poem or in a 2005 cookbook.
The step back that is required for interpretation is precisely for interpreters to be mindful, first, that they
themselves have implicit beliefs or beliefs-in, of which they may not be conscious, because of the experiences they
have had in their own culture; second, that the beliefs they make explicit are a reconstruction so that the explicit
beliefs as formulated by interpreters – what this event or this text means – belong to the interpreters’ discourse and
may not belong as such to the agents in the event or the author of the text. They thus cannot assume that their own
experiences are the same as those of the people they interpret.

2 Second imperative

The second imperative, as a consequence of the first, is to qualify the interpretation reached. Even when interpreters
are confident that they have understood (interpreted) the beliefs of those they interpret, they know that
understanding (interpreting) in terms of explicit beliefs is not the same as sharing the same implicit beliefs and
having the same experiences as the people interpreted. Doing so would amount to take away the specific originality
of what is interpreted, flattening it out on the plane of the interpreters’ framework, as we saw in our discussion of the
challenge that Amerindian cultures present to anthropologists. Making something intelligible, in other words, which
is what interpreters endeavor to do, is not the same as “experiencing” this something. This second imperative
corresponds to the second ethical aspect of interpretation in that interpreters make validity claims but within the
specific framework of their practice. They claim, for example, to say something true but this does not amount to a
commitment to serve the truth. The interpreters’ work helps us understand what the people they interpret believe in –
at the level of their practices – in terms of a belief-that (as formulated above) but this transfer by interpreters of a
belief-in into a belief-that does not give us the “experience” that goes with the belief-in. It may give us an indication
or it may point to what is different in our culture, etc.
What is required to satisfy this second imperative of realizing that an interpretation does not give us the
experience interpreted but may lead us to it consists in suspending the use of universals we are familiar with as a
starting point of our interpretation. If we want to come as close as possible to the experiences of the people we
interpret (in an event or a text), we have to guard what we study from being merely an instantiation of what we
already know and may consider universal. We have to refrain from using what we know as the standard by which to
describe what other people do or write.
Plato is not a fellow 21st century colleague concerned about internalism and externalism and Aristotle was not
worried about possible world semantics. We thus cannot only focus on the explicit beliefs we detect in the Greek
text after we have translated it. We also need to try to figure out what the Greek experience was when a word like
ousia, which customarily means landed property of a farmer, was used about a thing, as Gadamer taught us.
Guarding against our “belief in” universals was the avowed goal of Michel Foucault. In his studies of periods of the
past, as we saw, he aimed at neutralizing “referents,” as part of what he calls a “rupture of self-evidence” against a
“historical constant” or “anthropological universals” (2001a, 1453). This is also what Viveiros de Castro, following
Foucault, encourages anthropologists to do: “To put in parentheses all questions of whether and how native thinking
illustrates universal processes of human cognition” (2015, 24).

3 Third imperative

The third imperative of interpretation consists in taking seriously the beliefs and thoughts of those interpreted by
considering their beliefs as genuine beliefs that interpreters could have if they were living in the framework as those
interpreted. This corresponds to the third ethical aspect of interpretation as a commitment to serve the object
interpreted and guarantee its future. This ideal of taking seriously was already what Husserl recommended when
understanding others: We have to re-effectuate what was meant. He uses the words “re-experiencing” (nacherleben),
“understanding again” (nachverstehen), “producing again” (nacherzeugen), or “re-effectuating” (nachvollziehen)
(See 1954, 371; 1970 361). This is not a psychological process of getting into the head of people. It is rather a re-
effectuation of the event or the text itself, as if we were involved in it, in Gadamer’s sense of re-enactment. Just as
we only understand a mathematical formula once we are able to think through the steps that led to the formula and
can say “Now, I see it,” in the same way we can try to understand what the Treaty of Versailles meant or what Being
and Time is about and say “Now, I understand,” even though we may not be interested in the psyche of the people
involved or the author of the book.
In order to satisfy this imperative, interpreters need to alter their attitude in two ways. First, they need to be able
to interpret without either assenting or dissenting, thus without either adopting or rejecting the beliefs they study. In
order to reach this non-committal interpretation, interpreters need to make their own explicit beliefs and convictions
“non-operable,” so as to be able to see the “consistency” of what the people interpreted think or do, and how this
“makes sense” in the world of these people. The second alteration to their attitude consists in being open to think
differently. This is how interpreters can bring us out of our own ways of thinking and help us understand how people
of the past thought differently, leading us to experiencing things and events as those people experienced them.
Heidegger’s characterization of his interpretation of Kant mentioned above can be understood in this way when
he said that his interpretation was false by the standard of the history of ideas (“historisch” unrichtig) but that it was
right by the standard of living history (geschichtlich), when we make Kant speak to us (1989, 253). This is also what
Michel Foucault meant when he said that his studies were a “philosophical exercise” “to think differently” 1984b,
15; 1985, 9). Viveiros de Castro also describes this “thinking differently” in the case of anthropology as an attempt
“to deploy” the native thinking (2015, 24) in order to let it affect the way we think. By doing this, interpreters
recognize their presence in their investigations not only methodologically but also existentially: They have to put
their own ways of experiencing the world up for grabs, as it were, wondering what it would mean – what sense it
would make – to experience what the people they interpret experience. They not only suspend the beliefs they assent
to and agree not to insert such beliefs in their own interpretation; they also accept to be unsettled in their
understanding of the world, at the level of their implicit beliefs, and thus possibly accept to be transformed by
acquiring new implicit beliefs.
Can we as humanities scholars honor this third imperative of interpretation by choosing not to glorify or
condemn authors but to genuinely engage and learn from them – even when those lessons may invite a reckoning
with past failures of our communities? Can we fruitfully engage authors and figures who are “problematic” or
“unpatriotic” when viewed from one side of the cultural-political divide or the other? Can we serve our students by
introducing them to these genuine encounters with sometimes uncomfortable otherness? Against the tyranny of
assent or dissent, a hermeneutics of love enjoins us to step back from our own “neutral” and “ahistorical” positions,
render a best-possible interpretation of the other, and take seriously what the other believes in. At the same time, we
can hope to bracket our own beliefs for the sake of genuine engagement, whether those beliefs appear as assenting
or dissenting with respect to the beliefs of the other. Such a hermeneutics will neither exclude the other nor meet
them in a kind of totalitarian agreement.
The three imperatives of interpretation mentioned above can protect us from such a politicization of
interpretation and help us regain a basis for solidarity. Solidarity is precisely the attitude in which we do not try to
blot out the difference between the people we interpret and ourselves. We do not try to make them like us, but
instead we intensify the difference so as to be drawn into their world and questioned in our implicit beliefs,
experiencing the shaking of the intellectual ground under our feet. This requires courage, and what nurtures this
courage is benevolence or love with its commitment to keep the work or the event alive, to secure a future for it, and
thus to serve the work for the sake of the future of the community. This is what love as a hermeneutic imperative can
achieve.
Works Cited

Anonymous. 2005. A Woman in Berlin. Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary. New York, NY: Metropolitan
Books.
Apel, Karl-Otto. 1950. Dasein und Erkennen. Eine erkenntnistheoretische Interpetation der Philosophie Martin
Heideggers. Bonn, unpublished.
———. 1963. Die Jdee der Sprache in der Tradition des Humanismus von Dante bis Vico. Archiv ftir
Begriffsgeschichte, Vol. 8. Bonn: Bouvier.
———. 1967. Der Denkweg von Charles S. Peirce. Eine Einführung in den amerikanischen Pragmatismus.
Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
———. 1973a. Transformation der Philosophie, Vol. 1, Sprachanalytik, Semiotik, Hermeneutik. Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp.
———. 1973b. Transformation der Philosophie, Vol. 2, Das Apriori der Kommunikationsgenmeinschaft. Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp.
———. 1973c. “Wittgenstein und Heidegger: Die Frage nach dem Sinn von Sein und der Sinnlosigkeitsverdacht
gegen alle Metaphysik,” in Apel 1973a, 225–275.
———. 1973d. “Heideggers philosophische Radikalisierung der ‘Hermeneutik’ und die Frage nach dem
‘Sinnkriterium’ der Sprache,” in Apel 1973a, 276–334.
———. 1976. “Das Problem der philosophischen Letztbegründung im Lichte einer transzendentalen
Sprachpragmatik,” in Sprache und Erkenntnis. Festschrift für G. Frey, ed. Bernulf Kanitscheider. Insbruck:
Institut für Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Innsbruck, 55–82.
———. 1980. “Zwei paradigmatischen Antworten auf die Frage nach der Logos-Auszeichnung der menschlichen
Sprache,” in Kulturwissenschafien. Festgabe für Wilhelm Perpeet zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Heinrich Lützeler,
Gerhard Pfafferott, Eckart Strohmaier. Bonn: Bouvier, 13–68.
———. 1988. Diskurs und Verantwortung. Das Problem des Übergangs zur postkonventionellen Moral. Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp.
———. 1989. “Sinnkonstitution und Geltungsrechtfertigung,” in Martin Heidegger: Innen-und Aussenaussichten,
ed. Forum für Philosophic Bad Homburg. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 131–175.
———. 1990 “Is the Ethics of the Ideal Communication Community a Utopia? On the Relationship between Ethics,
Utopia, and the Critique of Utopia,” in The Communicative Ethics Controversy, ed. Seyla Benhabib and Fred
Dallmayr. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 23–59.
———. 1991. “Wittgenstein und Heidegger: kritische Widerholung und Ergänzung eines Vergleichs,” in Der Löwe
spricht… und wir können ihn nicht verstehen, ed. Jürgen Habermas. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 27–68.
———. 1994. Selected Essays, Vol. I, Towards a Transcendental Semiotics, ed. Eduardo Mendieta. Atlantic
Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.
———. 1996. Selected Essays, Vol. 2: Ethics and the Theory of Rationality, ed. Eduardo Mendieta. Atlantic
Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.
———. 1998a. From a Transcendental-semiotic Point of View, ed. Mariana Papastephanou. Manchester:
Manchester University Press.
———. 1998b. “Can an Ultimate Foundation of Knowledge be Non-metaphysical?” in Apel 1998a, 81–102.
———. 1998c. “Meaning, Constitution and Justification of Validity: Has Heidegger Overcome Transcendental
Philosophy by History of Being?” in Apel 1998a, 103–121.
———. 1998d. “The A Priori of the Communication Community and the Foundations of Ethics: The Problem of
Rational Foundation of Ethics in the Scientific Age,” in Apel 1998a, 225–300.
———. 1998e. “The Communication Community as the Transcendental Presupposition for the Social Sciences,” in
Apel 1998a, 136–179.
———. 1998f. “Regulative Ideas or Truth Happening? An Attempt to Answer the Question of the Conditions of the
Possibility of Valid Understanding,” in Apel 1998a, 183–215.
———. 1998g. “The Self-Recuperative Principle of a Critical-Hermeneutic Reconstruction of History,” in Apel
1998a, 232–242.
———. 1998h. “Wittgenstein and Heidegger: Language Games and Life Forms,” in Apel 1998a, 122–159.
———. 1998i. Towards a Tramformation of Philosophy, trans. G. Adey and D. Frisby. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette
University Press.
———. 2001. The Response of Discourse Ethics to the Moral Challenge of the Human Situation as Such and
Especially Today: Mercier Lectures, Louvain-la-Neuve, March 1999. Leuven: Peeters.
———. 2003. “Wahrheit als Regulative Idee,” in Reflexion und Verantwortung. Auseinandersetzungen mit Karl-
Otto Apel, ed. Diedrich Böhler, Mattias Kettner, and Gunnar Skirbekk. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 171–
196.
———. 2010. Transformation de la philosophie II, ed. and trans. Pol Vandevelde. Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf.
Aquinas, St. Thomas. 1993. The Collected Works of St. Thomas Aquinas, Electronic Edition Past Masters.
Charlottesville, VA: InteLex Corp.
Arendt, Hannah. 1998. The Human Condition. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
Arndt, Andreas. 1996. “Schleiermacher und Platon,” in Friedrich Schleiermacher 1996a, vii–xxii.
Aristotle. 1934 [1926]. Nicomachean Ethics, trans. H. Rackham. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
———. 1983 [1938]. On Interpretation, in The Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, trans. Harold Cooke.
The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Ast, Friedrich. 1808. Grammatik, Hermeneutik und Kritik. Landshut: Jos. Thomann.
Augustine. De doctrina christiana, ed. R.P.H. Green. Oxford Scholarship online
(https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/0198263341.001.0001/acprof-9780198263340-
chapter-2) (accessed 12/2/2020).
Ayer, A.J. 1952. Language, Truth, and Logic. New York, NY: Dover.
Banniard, Michel. 1986. “Iuxta uniuscuiusque qualitatem. L’écriture médiatrice chez Grégoire le Grand,” in
Grégoire le Grand, Colloques internationaux du CNRS. Paris: CNRS, 477–487.
Barratt, Edward. 2011. “The Art of Critique,” Tamara: Journal for Critical Organization Inquiry, 9 (1–2): 105–113.
Battaly, Heather. 2001. “Thin Concepts to the Rescue: Thinning the Concepts of Epistemic Justification and
Intellectual Virtue,” in Virtue Epistemology: Essays on Epistemic Virtue and Responsibility, ed. Abrol
Fairweather and Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 98–116.
———. 2008. “Virtue Epistemology,” Philosophy Compass, 3/4: 639–663.
Beevor, Antony. 2005. “Introduction,” in Anonymous 2005, xiii–xxii.
Behler, Ernst. 1993. German Romantic Literary Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2002. “La théorie de la compréhension de Friedrich Schlegel,” trad. Denis Thouard, in Symphilosophie. F.
Schlegel à Iena, ed. Denis Thouard. Paris: Vrin, 109–131.
Beiser, Frederick. 2003. The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Benjamin, Walter. 2008. Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik, ed. Uwe Steinmer. Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp.
Berman, Antoine. 1992. The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany, trans. S.
Heyvaert. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992.
Bori, Pier Cesare. 1987. L’interpretazione infinite. L’ermeneutica Cristiana antica e le sue trasformazioni. Bologna:
Il Mulino.
Bohr, Niels. 1958. Essays 1932–1957 on Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge, Vol. II, The Philosophical
Writings of Niels Bohr. Woodridge, CT: Ox Bow Press.
Bowie, Andrew. 1996. From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German Literary Theory. New
York, NY: Routledge.
———. 1998. “Introduction,” in Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism, and Other Writings, ed.
and trans. Andrew Bowie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, vii–xxxvi.
Brands, H. W. 2005. Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times. New York, NY: Doubleday.
Brukner, Caslav and Anton Zeilinger, 2004. “Information and Fundamental Elements of the Structure of Quantum
Theory,” in Time, Quantum and Information, ed. Lutz Castell and Otfried Ischebeck. Berlin: Springer, 323–
354.
Capurro, Rafael. 2006. “Towards an Ontological Foundation of Information Ethics,” Ethics and Information
Technology, 8: 175–186.
Cantwell Smith, Wilfred, 1979. “The English Word ‘Believe,’” in Faith and Belief. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 105–127.
Carr, David, Charles Taylor, Paul Ricoeur. 1991. “Discussion: Ricoeur on Narrative,” in On Paul Ricoeur.
 Narrative and Interpretation, ed. David Wood. London: Routledge, 160–187.
Carroll, Noël. 2002. “Andy Kaufman and the Philosophy of Interpretation,” in Is There a Single Right
Interpretation? ed. Michael Krausz. University Park, PA: Pennsylvannia State University Press, 2002, 319–
344.
Chomsky, Noam. 2001 [1957]. Syntactic Structures, 2nd ed. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Clark, Francis. 1998. “Authorship of the Commentary In I Regum: Implications of A. de Vogüé’s Discovery,” Revue
Bénédictine, 108: 61–79.
Crisp, Roger. 2010. “Virtue Ethics and Virtue Epistemology,” Metaphilosophy, 41, 1–2: 22–40.
Cummings, E. E. 1994. Selected Poems, ed. Richard Kennedy. New York, NY: Liveright.
Davidson, Donald. 1990. Plato’s Philebus. Harvard Dissertations in Philosophy. New York, NY: Garland
Publishing.
———. 1999a. “Reply to Dagfinn Føllesdal,” in Hahn 1999, 729–732.
———. 1999b. “Reply to W. V. Quine,” in Hahn, 80–86.
———. 1999c. “Reply to John Mc Dowell,” in Hahn 1999, 105–108.
———. 1999d. “Intellectual Autobiography,” in Hahn 1999, 3–70.
———. 1999e. “Reply to Richard Rorty,” in Hahn 1999, 595–600.
———. 2001a. “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” in Davidson 2001e, 183–198.
———. 2001b. “The Method of Truth in Metaphysics,” in Davidson 2001e, 199–214.
———. 2001c. “Three Varieties of Knowledge,” in Davidson 2001f, 205–220.
———. 2001d. Essays on Actions and Events. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
———. 2001e. Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 2001f. Subjective, lntersubjective, Objective. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
———. 2001g. “A Coherence Theory of Truth,” in Davidson 2001f, 137–157.
———. 2001h. “The Emergence of Thought,” in Davidson 2001f, 123–134.
———. 2001i. “The Myth of the Subjective,” in Davidson 2001f, 39–52.
———. 2001j. “Rational Animals,” in Davidson 2001f, 95–105.
———. 2004. Problems of Rationality. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
———. 2005a. Truth, Language, and History. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
———. 2005b. “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs,” in Davidson 2005a, 89–108.
———. 2005c. “Dialectic and Dialogue,” in Davidson 2005a, 251–260.
———. 2005d. “Gadamer and Plato’s Philebus,” in Davidson 2005a, 261–276.
———. 2005e. “James Joyce and Humpty Dumpty,” in Davidson 2005a, 143–157.
———. 2005f. “Locating Literary Language,” in Davidson 2005a, 167–182.
———. 2005g. “Seeing Through Language,” in Davidson 2005a, 127–142.
———. 2005h. “The Third Man,” in Davidson 2005a, 158–166.
———. 2005i. “The Socratic Concept of Truth,” in 2005a, 241–250.
———. 2008. “The Perils and Pleasures of Interpretation,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199552238.001.0001.
de Certeau, Michel. 1975. L’écriture de l’histoire. Paris: Gallimard.
de Lavalette, Henri. 1965. “Le théoricien de l’amour,” in Mémorial Pierre Rousselot, Recherches de sciences
religieuses LIII, 3: 126–158.
de Lubac, Henri. 1959. Exégèse médiévale, Vol. 1–2. Paris: Aubier.
De Mul, Jos. 2019. “Leben erfasst Leben: Dilthey as a Philosopher of (the) life (Sciences),” in Nelson, 2019, 41–60.
Derrida, Jacques. 1972. Marges de la philosophie. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit.
———. 1982. Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
———. 1984. “Guter Wille zur Macht (I). Drei Fragen an Hans-Georg Gadamer,” in Forget 1984, 56–58.
———. 1988. “Afterword,” in Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc, ed. Gerald Graff. Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press, 1988, 111–160.
———. 1990. Was ist Dichtung? Qu’est-ce que la poésie? What is Poetry? Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose.
de Saussure, Ferdinand. 1985. Cours de linguistique Générale, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. Paris:
Payot.
Descartes, René. 1967. Oeuvres philosophiques de Descartes, Vol. II. (1638–1642), ed. Ferdinand Alquié. Paris:
Garnier, 1967.
Detienne, Marcel. 2008. Comparing the Incomparable, trans. Janet Lloyd. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
de Vogüé, Adalbert. 1996. “l’auteur du commentaire des rois attribué à Saint Grégoire: un moine de Cava?,” Revue
Bénédictine 106, 3–4: 319–331.
Diès, Auguste. 1959. “Notice,” in Plato, Oeuvres complètes, tome IX, 2e partie, Philèbe, ed. and trans. Auguste
Diès. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, vii–cxii.
Dilthey, Wilhelm. 1958. Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften, in Wilhelm Dilthey,
Gesammelte Werke, Nachgelassenes und Briefe, Vol. VII, Stuttgart: Teubner; Gottingen: Vandenhoeck and
Ruprecht.
———. 1959. Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften. Versuch einer Grundlegung für das Studium der
Gesellschaft und der Geschichte, Vol. 1, Stuttgart: Teubner; Gottingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht.
———. 1989. Introduction to the Human Sciences, Selected Works, Vol. 1, ed. Rudolf Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
———. 2002. The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences, Selected Works, Vol. III, ed. Rudolf
Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Dostal, Robert. 2010. “Gadamer’s Platonism and the Philebus: The Signfiicance of the Philebus for Gadamer’s
Thought,” in Hermeneutic Philosophy and Plato: Gadamer’s Response to the Philebus, ed. Christopher Gill
and François Renaud. Sankt Augustin: Academia, 23–40.
———. 2022. Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: Between Phenomenology and Dialectic. Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press.
Eichner, Hans. 1967. “Einleitung,” in Schlegel 1967, xii–lxxii.
Elders, Leo. 2018. Thomas Aquinas and His Predecessors: The Philosophers and the Church Fathers. Washington,
DC: Catholic University of America Press.
Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. 2005. “Foreword,” in A Woman in Berlin. Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A
Diary. New York, NY: Metropolitan Books, ix–xii.
Erard, Michael. 2010. “The Life and Times of ‘Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously,’” Southwest Review, 95, 3:
418–425.
Fish, Stanley. 1982. Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Flynn, Thomas. 2005. “Foucault as Parrhesiast,” in Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, Vol. 2, A
Poststructuralist Mapping of History. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 260–282.
Forget, Philippe (ed.). 1984. Text und Interpretation. Munich: Wihelm Fink Verlag.
Forster, Michael. 2011. “Friedrich Schlegel’s Hermeneutics,” in German Philosophy of Language: From Schlegel to
Hegel and Beyond, ed. Michael Forster. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Oxford Scholarschip Online.
Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan
Smith. New York, NY: Pantheon Books.
———. 1978. “About the Concept of the ‘Dangerous Individual,’” trans. Alain Baudot and Jane Couchman, 19th
Century Legal Psychiatry, 1:1–18.
———. 1984a. “What is Enlightenment?” (“Qu’est-ce que les Lumières?”), in The Foucault Reader, ed. P.
Rabinow. New York, NY, Pantheon Books, 32–50.
———. 1984b. Histoire de la sexualité 2. L’usage des plaisirs. Paris: Gallimard.
———. 1985. History of Sexuality, Vol. 2, The Use of the Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley. New York, NY: Vintage
books.
———. 1994. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York, NY: Vintage.
———. 2001a. Dits et écrits II, 1976–1988, ed. Daniel Defert, François Ewald, and Jacques Lagrange. Paris:
Gallimard.
———. 2001b. Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).
———. 2001c. L’herméneutique du sujet. Cours au collège de France. 1981–1982, ed. Frédéric Gros. Paris:
Gallimard/Seuil.
———. 2001d. “Qu’est-ce que les Lumières?” in Foucault 2001a, 1381–1397.
———. 2004. Naissance de la biopolitique. Cours au Collège de France (1978–1979), ed. Michel Senelart sous la
direction de François Ewald et Alessandro Fontana. Paris: Seuil/Gallimard.
———. 2005. Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–1982, trans. Graham Burchell.
New York, NY: Picador.
———. 2008a. Le gouvernement de soi et des autres. Cours au Collège de France. 1982–1983, ed. Frédéric Gros.
Paris: Gallimard/Seuil.
———. 2008b. The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France 1982–1983, trans. Graham
Burchell. New York, NY: Picador.
———. 2009. Le courage de la vérité. Le gouvernement de soi et des autres II. Cours au Collège de France. 1984,
ed. Frédéric Gros. Paris: Gallimard/Seuil.
———. 2011. The Courage of Truth (The Government of Self and Others II); Lectures at the Collège de France,
1983–1984, trans. Graham Burchell. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Franek, Jakub. 2006. “Philosophical Parrhesia as Aesthetics of Existence,” Continental Philosophy Review, 39:
113–134.
Frank, Manfred. 1997. The Subject and the Text. Essays on Literary Theory and Philosophy, ed. Andrew Bowie,
trans. Helen Atkins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Frege, Gottlob. 1892. “Über Sinn und Bedeutung,” Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, 100: 25–
50.
———. 1948. “Sense and Reference”, The Philosophical Review, 57: 209–30.
———. 1984. “On Sense and Meaning,” trans. Max Black, in Gottlob Frege, Collected Papers on Mathematics,
Logic, and Philosophy, ed. Brian McGuiness. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 157–177.
———. 1990.“On Sense and Nominatum”, trans. Herbert Feigl, in The Philosophy of Language, 3rd ed., ed. A. P.
Martinich. Oxford, NY: Oxford University Press, 186–198.
Frischmann, Bärbel. 2005. Vom transzendentalem zum frühromantischen Idealismus: J.G. Fichte und Fr. Schlegel.
Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh.
Fuentes, Carlos. 2003. “Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes translated by Elizabeth Grossman,”
https://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/02/books/tilt.html, accessed 2/24/2021.
Fukuyama, Francis. 2018. Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment. New York: Farrar,
Straus, and Giroux.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1975. Truth and Method. New York, NY: Crossroad.
———. 1980. Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato, trans. P. Christopher Smith. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
———. 1984a. “Text und Interpretation,” in Forget 1984, 24–55.
———. 1984b. “Und dennoch: Macht des Guten Willens,” in Forget 1984, 59–61.
———. 1985a. “Platos dialektische Ethik,” in Gesammelte Werke, Vol 5, Griechische Philosophie I. Tübingen:
Mohr.
———. 1985b. “Platos ungeschriebene Dialectik,” in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 6, Griechische Philosophie II.
Tübingen: Mohr, 129–153.
———. 1986a. The Idea of the Good, trans. P. Christopher Smith. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
———. 1986b. “Vorwort zur 2. Auflage,” in Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 2, Hermeneutik II Whatheit und Methode,
Ergänzungen, Register. Tübingen: Mohr, 437–448.
———. 1986c, “Die Universalität des hermeneutischen Problems,” in Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 2, Hermeneutik II
Wahrheit und Methode. Ergänzungen, Register. Tübingen: Mohr, 219–231.
———. 1989. “Reply to my Critics,” in The Hermeneutic Tradition; From Ast to Ricoeur, ed. Gayle Honniston and
Alan Schrift. New York, NY: State University of New York Press, 273–297.
———. 1990 [1960]. Wahrheit und Methode. Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik. Tübingen: Mohr.
———. 1991a. Plato’s Dialectical Ethics: Phenomenological Interpretations Relating to the Philebus, trans. Robert
Wallace. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
———. 1991b. ‘Platos dialektische Ethik – beim Wort genommen’, in Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 7. Tübingen: Mohr,
121–127.
———. 1991c. “Die Idee des Guten zwischen Plato und Aristoteles”, in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 7, Griechische
Philosophie, Plato im Dialog. Tübingen: Mohr, 128–227.
———. 1995. “Paul Friedländer”, in Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 10. Tübingen: Mohr, 403–405.
———. 1997a. “Reply to Donald Davidson,” in Hahn 1997, 433–435.
———. 1997b. “Reflections on My Philosophical Journey,” in Hahn 1997, 2–63.
———. 1997c. “Dialogischer Rückblick auf das Gesammelte Werk und dessen Wirkungsgeschichte,” in Gadamer
Lesebuch, ed. Jean Grondin. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 280–295.
———. 1998. Truth and Method, 2nd ed. revised Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall. New York: Continuum.
———. 2007. “A Look Back over the Collected Works and Their Effective History” (Interview with Jean Grondin),
in The Gadamer Reader: A Bouquet of the Later Writings, ed. Richard Palmer. Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press, 409–427.
———. 2012. “Reply to David Hoy,” in Hahn 1997, 129–130.
———. 2016a. Hermeneutics between History and Philosophy, The Selected Writings of Hans-Georg Gadamer,
Vol. I, ed. and trans. Pol Vandevelde and Arun Iyer. London: Bloomsbury.
———. 2016b. “Dilthey and Ortega: The Philosophy of Life (1985),” in Gadamer 2016a, 91–102.
———. 2016c. “Hermeneutics and the Diltheyan School (1991),” in Gadamer 2016a, 103–24.
———. 2016d. “Hermeneutics on the trail,” in Gadamer 2016 a, 179–208.
———. 2016e. “Is there a Causality in History?,” in Gadamer 2016a, 3–12.
———. 2016f. “On the Beginning of Thought,” in Gadamer 2016a, 227–246.
———. 2016g. “The History of the Universe and the Historicity of Human Beings,” in Gadamer 2016a, 25–42.
———. 2016h. “The Problem of Dilthey: Between Romanticism and Positivism,” in Gadamer 2016a, 73–90.
———. 2016i. “The Turn in the Path,” in Gadamer 2016a, 221–225.
———. 2016j. “Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity, Subject and Person,” in 2016a, 125–137.
———. 2022. Ethics, Aesthetics and the Historical Dimension of Language, The Selected Writings of Hans-Georg
Gadamer, Vol. II, ed. and trans. Pol Vandevelde and Arun Iyer. London: Bloomsbury.
Goethe, Johann Wolgang von. 1907. Maximen und Reflexionen, Schriften der Goethe-Gesellschaft, ed. Erich
Schmidt and Bernhard Supjan, Vol. 21. Weimar: Goethe-Gesellschaft.
https://archive.org/details/goethemaximenun00goetgoog/page/n7/mode/2up?ref=ol&view=theater. Access
8/15/2022.
Govier, Trudy. 2002. Forgiveness and Revenge. London: Routledge.
Greco, John. 2000. “Virtues and Vices of Virtue Epistemology,” in Epistemology: An Anthology, ed. Ernest Sosa
and Jaogwon Kim. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 468–476.
Gregory the Great. 1963. Expositio in canticum canticorum. Corpus Christianorum. Series Latina 144. Turnhout:
Brepols.
———. 1971. Homiliae in Hiezechihelem prophetam, Corpus Christianorum. Series Latina 142. Turnhout: Brepols.
———. 1979. Moralia in Iob, Corpus Christianorum. Series Latina 143, 143A, 143B. Turnhout: Brepols.
———. 1982. Magistri Registrum Epistolarum. Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 140. Turnhout: Brepols.
———. 1990. The Homilies of Saint Gregory the Great on the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel, ed. Juliana Cownie,
trans. Theodosia Gray. Etna, CA: Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies.
———. 1999. Homiliae in evangelia. Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 141. Turnhout: Brepols.
Grondin, Jean. 2011. Hans-Georg Gadamer: Une biographie. Paris: Grasset.
———. 2019. “Dilthey’s Hermeneutics and Philosophical Hermeneutics,” in Interpreting Dilthey, ed. Eric Nelson.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 252–265.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1968. Erkenntnis und Interesse. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
———. 1976. “Was heisst Universalpragmatik?” in Sprachpragmatik und Philosophie, ed. Karl-Otto Apel.
Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 174–272.
———. 1984. The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1, Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans.
Thomas McCarthy, Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
———. 1990. “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification,” in The Communicative Ethics
Controversy, ed. Seyla Benhabib and Fred Dallmayr. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 60–110.
———. 1992. Postmetaphysical Thinking. Philosophical Essays, trans. W. M. Hohengarten. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
———. 2003. “Zur Architectnik der Diskursdifferenzierung. Kleine Replik auf eine grosse Auseinandersetzung,” in
Reflexion und Verantwortung. Auseinandersetuzgen mit Karl-Otto Apel, ed. Diedrich Böhler, Mattias
Kettner, and Gunnar Skirbekk. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 44–64.
———. 2005. “Hermeneutic and Analytic Philosophy: Two Complementary Versions of the Linguistic Turn,” in
Truth and Justification, trans. Barbara Fultner. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 51–82.
Hacking, Ian. 1975. “Donald Davidson’s Truth,” in Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy? Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 129–156.
Hahn, Lewis Edwin (ed.). 1997. The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Chicago, IL: Open court.
———. 1999. The Philosophy of Donald Davidson. Chicago, IL: Open Court,
Hamacher, Werner. 1996. Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Hawking, Stephen. 2010. The Grand Design. Copyright 2010 by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. Posted
by arrangement with Bantam Books, an imprint of the Random House Publishing Group, a division of
Random House Inc. https://content.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,2017262,00.html Accessed 12/28/2017.
———. 2015. “Origin of the Universe.” http://www.hawking.org.uk/the-origin-of-the-universe.html. Aceessed
12/28/2017.
Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York, NY: Harper
Collins.
———. 1971. “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Alfred Hofstadter. New York,
NY: Harper & Row, 15–87.
———. 1977. “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” in Holzwege. GA 5, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann.
Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1–74.
———. 1984. Sein und Zeit. Tubingen: Niemeyer.
———. 1989. Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), GA 65, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. Frankfurt
am Main: Klostermann, 1989.
———. 1993. Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (1919/1920), GA 58, ed. Hand-Helmuth Gander. Frankfurt am
Main: Klostermann.
———. 1996. Nietzsche, Vol. 1, GA 6.1, ed. Brigitte Schilbach. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann.
———. 1997. Besinnung, GA 66, ed. F.-W. von Herrmann Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann.
———. 1998. Logik als die Frage nach dem Wesen der Sprache, GA 38, ed. Günter Seubold. Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann.
Henderson, Gae Lyn. 2007. “The ‘Parrhesiastic Game’: Textual Self-Justification in Spiritual Narratives of Early
Modern Women,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 37: 423–451.
Hintikka, Jaakko. 1963. “Cogito, Ergo Sum as an Inference and a Performance,” The Philosophical Review, 72, 4:
487–496.
Hirsch, E. D. 1967. Validity in Interpretation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Hovey, Craig. 2007. “Free Christian Speech: Plundering Foucault,” Political Theology, 8, 1: 63–81.
Hoy, David C. 1997. “Post-Cartesian Interpretation: Hans-Georg Gadamer and Donald Davidson,” in Hahn 1997,
111–128.
Hugh of Saint-Victor. 1880. Eruditionis disdascalicae libri septem. Patrologia Latina 176, ed. Jacque-Paul Migne.
Paris: Garnier.
Husserl, Edmund. 1954. Die Krisis der Europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie.
Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, Hua VI, ed. Walter Biemel. The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff
———. 1966. Analysen zur passiven Synthesis. Aus Vorlesungs- und Forschungsmanuskripten 1918-1926, Hua XI,
ed. Margot Fleischer. The Hague: M. Nijhoff.
———. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr. Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press.
———. 1989. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book,
Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer. Dordrecht:
Kluwer.
———. 1991. Cartesian Meditations. An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns. Dordrecht: Kluwer
Academic Publishers.
———. 1998. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book,
General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. Fred Kersten. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
———. 2001. Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis. Lectures on Transcendental Logic, trans.
Anthony Steinbock. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
———. 2004.: Wahrnehmung und Aufmerksamkeit. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1893–1912), Hua XXXVIII, ed.
Thomas Vongehr and Regula Giuliani. Dordrecht: Springer, 2004.
Joyce, James. 2012. Finnegan’s Wake. London: Wordsworth.
Kafka, Barbara. 2005. Vegetable Love. New York, NY: Artisan.
Kant, Immanuel. 1997. Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kent, Thomas and Donald Davidson. 1993. “Language Philosophy, Writing, and Reading: A Conversation with
Doanld Davidson,” Journal of Advanced Composition, 13, 1: 1–20.
Krausz, Michael. 2002. “Introduction,” in Is There a Single Right Interpretation? ed. Michael Krausz. University
Park, PA: Pennsylvannia State University Press, 2002, 1–8.
Latour, Bruno. 1996. Petite réflexion sur le culte moderne des dieux faitiches. Le Plessis-Robinson: Synthélabo
Groupe.
Latour, Bruno and Steve Woolgar. 1986. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
León-Portilla, Miguel. 1963. Aztec Thought and Culture: A Study of the Ancient Nahuatl Mind, trans. Jack Emory
Davis. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1966. The Savage Mind. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
———. 1971. L’ homme nu. Paris: Plon.
Loewen, James. 2007. Lies My Teachers Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. New
York, NY: The New Press.
Lyotard, Jean-François. 1988. The Différend. Phrases in Dispute, trans. G. Van Den Abbeele. Minneapolis, MN:
University Press of Minnesota.
Macke, Frank. 2007. “Sexuality and Parrhesia in the Phenomenology of Psychological Development: The Flesh of
Human Communicative Embodiment and the Game of Intimacy,” Journal of Phenomenological Psychology,
38: 157–180.
Malpas, Jeff. 1992. Donald Davidson and the Mirror of Meaning: Holism, Truth, Interpretation. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
———. 2002. “Gadamer, Davidson, and the Ground of Understanding,” in Gadamer’s Century: Essays in Honor of
Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Jeff Malpas, Ulrich Answald, and Jens Kertscher. Cambridge, MA: The MIT
Press, 195–216.
Markus, R. A. 1996. Signs and Meanings: World and Text in Ancient Christianity. Liverpool: Liverpool University
Press.
McDowell, John. 2002. “Gadamer and Davidson on Understanding and Relativism,” in Gadamer’s Century: Essays
in Honor of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Jeff Malpas, Ulrich Answald, and Jens Kertscher. Cambridge, MA:
The MIT Press, 173–194.
Mclaren, Margaret. 2006. “From Practices of the Self to Politics. Foucault and Friendship,” Philosophy Today, 50:
195–201.
Marvell, Andrew. ND. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44688/to-his-coy-mistress. Accessed 8/21/2022.
MedicalNewsToday. ND. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/273031
Merriam Webster Dictionary. ND. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tomato.
Millington, Barry. 2013. “Patrice Chéreau and the Bringing of Dramatic Conviction to the Opera House,” The
Guardian 8 October 2013 https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/oct/08/patrice-chereau-by-barry-
millington, accessed 2/24,2021.
Natali, Carlo. 2007. “Due dissertazioni scritte in fretta. Gadamer e Davidson sul “Filebo” di Platoni”, Méthexis, 20
(2007), 113–143.
National Security Archive. ND. https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB127/02.08.01.pdf, p. 1, accessed
1/31/2021).
Neschke-Hentschke, Ada. 2008. “Matériaux pour une approche philologique de l’herméneutique de Schleirmacher,”
in André Laks et Ada Neschke (eds.), La naissance du paradigme herméneutique. De Kant et
Schleiermacher à Dilthey. Lille: Presses univesitaires du Septentrion, 2008, 43–69.
New York Times. 2007. “A Woman in Berlin by Anonymous,” June 28, 2007.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/28/style/28iht-aread30-berlin.6379850.html.
Nicholas of Lyra. 1879. De commendatione sacrae Scripturae in generali, Patrologia Latina 113, ed. Jacques-Paul
Migne. Paris: Garnier.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1972. Die Geburt der Tragödie, Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen I-III (1872–1874), ed. Giogio
Colli, Mazzino Montinari. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
———. 1997. Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R.J. Hollingsdale. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Novak, David. 2006. “Engaging Parrhesia in a Democracy: Malcom X as a Truth-teller,” Southern Communication
Journal, 71, 1: 25–43.
Novalis. 1960. Schriften, Vol 2, Das philosophische Werk I, ed. Richard Samuel. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer.
———. 1997. Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. Margaret Mahony Stoljar. Albany, NY: State University of
New York Press.
———. 2007. Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia: Das allgemeine Brouillon, ed. and trans. David W. Wood.
Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Overy, Richard. 2014. The Bombers and the Bombed: Allied Air War over Europe. 1940–1945. New York, NY:
Viking.
Pamuk, Orhan. 2009. D’autres couleurs, trans. Valérie Gay-Aksoy. Paris: Gallimard.
Patsch, Hermann. 1966. “Friedrich Schlegels ‘Philosophie der Philologie’ und Schleiermachers frühe Entwürfe zur
Hermeneutik: Zur Frühgeschichte der romantischen Hermeneutik,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 63,
4: 434–472.
Peters, Michael. 2003. “Truth-telling as an Educational Practice of the Self: Foucault, Parrhesia and the Ethics of
Subjectivity,” Oxford Review of Education, 29, 2: 207–223.
Pettersson, “Torsten. 2002. “The Literary Work as a Pliable Entity: Combining Realism and Pluralism,” in Is There
a Single Right Interpretation? ed. Michael Krausz. University Park, PA: Pennsylvannia State University
Press, 2002, 211–230.
Petrus de Caua (olim Gregorius Magnus). 1963. Librum Primum Regum expositionum libri vi. Corpus
Christianorum Series Latina 144. Turnhout: Brepols.
Pinker, Steven. 1994. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. New York, NY: HarperCollins.
Plantinga, Alvin. 1993. Warrant and Proper Function. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Plato, 1921. Theaetetus – Sophist, trans. Harold N. Fowler. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
———. 1932 [1929]. Timaeus, in Timaeus, Cleitophon, Critias, Menexenus, trans. R. G. Bury. The Loeb Classical
Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———. 1952. Epistles, in Timaeus. Critias. Cleitophon. Menexenus. Epistles, trans. R. G. Bury. The Loeb Classical
Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———. 1987. Republic, trans. Paul Shorey. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———. 2001. The Philebus, in The Statesman, Philebus, Ion, trans. Harold Fowler. The Loeb Classical Library.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press [1925].
———. 2017. Phaedo, in Euthyphro. Apology. Crito. Phaedo, trans. Chris Emlyn-Jones and William Preddy. The
Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———. 2022. Phaedrus, in Lysis, Symposium, Phaedrus, trans. Chris Emlyn-Jones. Cambridge, The Loeb Classical
Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Price, H. H. 1932. Perception. London: Methuen.
Quine, W. V. O. 1960. Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
———. 1990. “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” in Classics of Analytic Philosophy, ed. Robert Ammerman.
Indianapolis, IN: Hacket Publishing, 196–213.
Raaen, Finn Daniel. 2011. “Autonomy, Candour and Professional Teacher Practice: A Discussion Inspired by the
Later Works of Michel Foucault,” Journal of Philosophy of Education, 45, 4: 627–641.
Ramberg, Bjorn Torgrim. 2003. “Illuminating Language: Interpretation and Understanding in Gadamer and
Davidson,” in A House Divided: Comparing Analytic and Continental Philosophy, ed. C. G. Prado. New
York, NY: Humanity Books, 213–234.
Ratzinger, Joseph Cardinal. 1988. “Biblical Interpretation in Crisis: On the Question of the Foundations and
Approaches of Exegesis Today” https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/biblical-interpretation-in-crisis-
on-the-question-of-the-foundations-and-approaches-of-exegesis-today-10146. Accessed 8/20/2019
Reuters. ND. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-rwanda-un-exhibit/u-n-genocide-exhibit-delayed-after-turkey-
objects-idUSN0934951820070410.
Rice, Condoleeza. 2000. “Promoting the National Interest,” Foreign Affairs, 79, 1: 45–62.
Ricoeur, Paul. 1975. La métaphore vive. Paris: Les Éditions du Seuil, Coll. “Points.”.
———. 1983. Temps et récit, Vol. 1. Paris: Les Editions du Seuil, Coll. “Points.”
———. 1984a. The Reality of the Historical Past. The Aquinas Lecture. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University
Press.
———. 1984b. Time and Narrative, Vol. I, trans. Kathleen Blarney and David Pellauer. Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press.
———. 1985. Temps et récit 3, Le temps raconté. Paris: Les Editions du Seuil, Coll. “Points.”
———. 1988. Time and Narrative Vol. 3, trans. Kathleen Blarney and David Pellauer. Chicago, IL: The University
of Chicago Press.
———. 1990. Soi-même conune un autre. Paris: Les Éditions du Seuil, Coll. “Points.”
———. 1991. “L’attestation: entre phénoménologie et ontologie,” in Paul Ricoeur. Les avatars de la raison
herméneutique, ed. Jean Greisch and Richard Kearney. Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 381–403.
———. 1992. Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
———. 1998. “La marque du passé,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, 1: 7–31.
———. 2000. La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli. Paris: Les Éditions du Seuil, Coll. “Points.”
———. 2004a. History, Memory, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blarney and David Pellauer. Chicago, IL: The
University of Chicago Press.
———. 2004b. Sur la traduction. Paris: Bayard.
———. 2005. “Memory, History, Forgiveness: A Dialogue Between Paul Ricoeur and Sorin Antohi,” Janus Head
8, 1: 14–25.
Roberts, Robert C. and W. Jay Wood. 2007. Intellectual Virtues: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
———. 1989. “Solidarity or Objectivity?” in Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation, ed. Michael Krausz.
 Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 167–183.
———. 1998. “Davidson between Wittgenstein and Tarski,” in Critica: Revista Hispanoamericana de Filosofia, 30,
80: 49–71.
———. 2000. “Universality and Truth,” in Rorty and His Critics, ed. Robert Brandon. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1–
30.
Rousselot, Pierre. 1908. L’intellectualisme de saint Thomas. Paris.
———. 2008. Essays on Love and Knowledge, ed. Andrew Tallon and Pol Vandevelde, trans. Andrew Tallon, Pol
Vandevelde and Alan Vincelette. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1965. Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel Barnes. New
York, NY: The Citadel Press.
Schlegel, Friedrich. 1958. Wissenschaft der europäischen Literatur, Vorlesungen, Aufsätze und Fragmente der Zeit
1795–1804, ed. Ernst Behler. Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, Vol. 11. München/Paderborn/Wien:
Ferdinand Schöningh; Zürich: Thomas-Verlag.
———. 1963. Philosophische Lehrjahre (1796–1806), ed. Ernst Behler. Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, Vol.
18. München/Paderborn/Wien: Ferdinand Schöningh; Zürich: Thomas-Verlag.
———. 1964. Philosophische Vorlesungen (1800–1807) erster Teil, ed. Jean-Jacques Anstett. Kritische Friedrich-
Schlegel Ausgabe, Vol. 12. München/Paderborn/Wien: Ferdinand Schöningh; Zürich: Thomas-Verlag.
———. 1967. Charakteristiken und Kritiken I (1796–1801), ed. Hans Eichner. Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel
Ausgabe, Vol. 2. München/Paderborn/Wien: Ferdinand Schöningh; Zürich: Thomas-Verlag.
———. 1975. Philosophische Lehrjahre II 1796–1806. Nebst philosophische Manuskripten aus den Jahren 1796–
1828, ed. Ernst Behler. Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, Vol. 19. München/Paderborn/Wien:
Ferdinand Schöningh; Zürich: Thomas-Verlag.
———. 1981. Fragmente zur Poesie und Literatur, erster Teil, ed. Hans Eichner. Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-
Ausgabe, Vol 16. Munich/Paderborn/Vienna: Ferdinand Schöningh; Zurich: Thomas Verlag.
———. 1985. Die Periode des Athenäums, ed. Raymond Immerwahr. Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, Vol
24. Munich/Paderborn/Vienna: Ferdinand Schöningh; Zurich: Thomas Verlag.
———. 1991. Transcendentalphilosophie, ed. Michael Elsasser. Hamburg: Felix Meiner.
———. 2003. “On Incomprehensibility (1800),” in Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics, ed. J. M. Bernstein.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 297–307.
Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 1977. Hermeneutik und Kritik, ed. Manfred Frank. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
———. 1981. Brouillon zur Ethik (1805–1806), ed. Hans-Joachim Birkner. Hamburg: Felix Meiner.
———. 1986. Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts, trans. James Duke and Jack Forstman. Atlanta, GA:
Scholars Press.
———. 1988. On Religion: Speeches to its Cultural Despisers, trans. Richard Crouter. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
———. 1996a. Über die Philosophie Platons, ed. Peter Steiner. Hamburg: Felix Meiner.
———. 1996b. Dialectic or, The Art of Doing Philosophy: A Study of the 1811 Notes, trans. Terrence Tice. Atlanta,
GA: Scholars Press.
———. 1998. Hermeneutics and Criticism, And Other Writing, ed. and trans. Andrew Bowie. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
———. 2002a. “Über die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens,” in Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Erste Abteilung,
Vol. 11, Akademievorträge, ed. Martin Rössler. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 65–93.
———. 2002b. Lectures on Philosophical Ethics, ed. Robert Louden, trans. Louise Adley Huish. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Schuback, Marcia sá Cavalcante. “Heideggerian Love,” in Phenomenology of Eros, eds. Jonna Bornemar and
Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback. Huddinge: Södertörns högskola, 2012, 129–152. https://www.diva-
portal.org/smash/get/diva2:524777/FULLTEXT01.pdf accessed 11/14/2018.
Searle, John. 1969. Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sebald, W. G. 2003. On the Natural Histmy of Destruction, trans. Anthea Bell. London: Penguin Books.
Serra, Alice Mara. 2021. “Variations circonstancielles: différencitation de l’autre chez les Amérindiens,” Études
phénoménologiques – Phenomenological Studies, 5: 39–57.
Smith, Adam. 2007. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Metalibry, digital edition
https://www.ibiblio.org/ml/libri/s/SmithA_WealthNations_p.pdf. Accessed 1/11/2021.
Sosa, Ernest. 2007. A Virtue Epistemology. Apt Belief and Reflective Knowledge, Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Steel, Brent. 2010. “Of ‘Witch’s Brews’ and Scholarly Communities: The Dangers and Promise of Academic
Parrhesia,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 23, 1: 49–68.
SudOuest. ND. https://www.sudouest.fr/charente-maritime/rochefort/la-memoire-de-maurice-chupin-honoree-
8394799.php.
Szondi, Peter. 1995. Introduction to Literary Hermeneutics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Taminiaux, Jacques. 2002. Sillages phénoménologiques: Auditeurs et lecteurs de Heidegger. Bruxelles: Ousia.
Thucydides. 1960. The History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. R. W. Livingstone. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Tiisala, Tuomo. 2015. “Keeping It Implicit: A Defense of Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge,” in Journal of the
American Philosophical Association, 1, 4: 653–673.
Todorov, Tzvetan. 2003. Hope and Memory: Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Tugendhat, Ernst. 1970. “The Meaning of ‘Bedeutung’ in Frege,” Analysis, 30: 177–189.
Twain, Mark. 2011. Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn: The NewSouth Edition, ed.
Alan Gribben. Montgomery, AL: NewSouth Books.
UB Berkley News. ND. https://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2005/01/05_johnyoo.shtml (accessed
1/31/2021).
Vandevelde, Pol. 2000. “Karl-Otto Apel’s Critique of Heidegger,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 38: 651–
675.
———. 2005. The Task of the Interpreter: Text, Meaning, and Negotiation. Pittsburgh, PA: The University of
Pittsburgh Press.
———. 2007. “Le pardon communautaire est-il possible? Le problème posé par Disgrâce de J.M. Coetzee,” Revue
de Théologie et de Philosophie, 139: 65–77.
———. 2008. “The challenge of the ‘such as it was’: Ricoeur’s Theory of Narratives,” in Reading Ricoeur, ed.
David Kaplan. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 141–162.
———. 2012. Heidegger and the Romantics: The Literary Invention of Meaning. New York, NY: Routledge.
———. 2013a. “Le fondement ontologique du récit selon Ricoeur: mimesis, dette et attestation,” Studia
Phaenomenologica, XIII: 244–259.
———. 2013b. “Forgiveness in a Political Context: The Challenge and the Potential,” Philosophy and Social
Criticism, 39, 3: 263–276.
———. 2015a. “Two French Variations on Truth: Ricoeur’s Attestation and Foucault’s ‘Parrhesiastic’ Attitude,”
Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 46, 1: 33–47.
———. 2015b. “Les enjeux et les difficultés du pardon communautaire,” in Cathy Leblanc, Le pardon à l’épreuve
de la déportation. Lille: Le Geai Bleu Éditions. 99–121.
———. 2016. “The Enigma of the Past: Ricoeur’s Theory of Narrative as a Response to Heidegger,” in
Hermeneutics and Phenomenology in Paul Ricoeur: Between Text and Phenomenon, ed. Scott Davidson and
Marc-Antoine Vallée. Dordrecht: Springer, 123–139.
———. 2017. “Historicizing the Mind: Gadamer’s ‘Hermeneutic Experience’” Compared to Davidson’s ‘Radical
Interpretation,’” in Phenomenology and the Primacy of the Political, ed. Véronique Fóti and Pavlos Contos.
Springer, 87–106.
———. 2018. “Dialogue or Drama? The Event of Interpretation in Gadamer and Foucault,” in Paul Fairfield and
Saulius Geniusas (eds.), Relational Hermeneutics: Essays in Comparative Philosophy. London: Bloomsbury,
131–148.
———. 2020. “The Romantic Hermeneutic Ideal of ‘Understanding Better’ as an Ethical Imperative,” Proceedings
of the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 94 (2020): 91–107.
———. 2021. “Charity in Interpretation: Principle or Virtue? A Return to Gregory the Great,” American Catholic
Philosophical Quarterly, 95 (3): 505–526.
Vessey, David. 2012. “Gadamer and Davidson on Language and Thought,” Philosophy Compass, 7 (1): 33–42.
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2011. The Inconsistency of the Indian Soul: The Encounter of Catholics and Cannibals
in 16th-century Brazil, trans. Gregory Duff Morton. Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press.
———. 2011b. A inconstância da alma selvagem. São Paulo: Cosac Naify. Online
https://joaocamillopenna.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/castro-eduardo-viveiros-de-inconstc3a2ncia-da-alma-
selvagem.pdf. Accessed 7/9/2021.
———. 2012. Cosmological Perspectivism in Amazonia and Elsewhere. Manchester: HAU Network of
Ethnographic Theory.
———. 2014. Cannibal Metaphysics: For a Post-structural Anthropology. Minneapolis, MN: Univocal Publishing.
———. 2015. The Relative Native: Essays on Indegineous Conceptual Worlds. Chicago, IL: Hau Books.
Vlastos, Gregory. 1991. Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Vonnegut, Kurt. 1994. Slaughterhouse-five or the Children’s Crusade: A Duty-dance with Death. New York, NY:
Delacorte Press.
Washington Post. ND. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2004/06/08/memo-offered-justification-
for-use-of-torture/17910584-e7c3-4c8c-b2d1-c986959ebc6a/ (accessed 1/31/2021).
Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1956. Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Worf, ed. John B.
Carroll. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953. Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. New York, NY: Macmillan
Company.
Zagzebski, Linda. 1996. Virtues of the Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2000a. “The Virtues of the Mind,” in Epistemology: An Anthology, ed. Ernest Sosa and Jaekwon Kim.
Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000, 457–467.
———. 2000b. “Responses,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 60, 1: 207–219.
———. 200i. Virtue Epistemology. Essays on Epistemic Virtue and Responsibility. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
———. 2003a. “The Search for the Source of Epistemic Good,” Metaphilosophy, 34 1/2: 12–28.
———. 2003b. “Recovering Understanding,” in Knowledge, Truth, and Duty: Essays on Epistemic Justification,
Responsibility, and Virtue, ed. Matthias Steup. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. DOI:
10.1093/0195128923.001.0001
———. 2009. On Epistemology. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Index

action 3, 18, 22, 65n25, 69, 73, 78, 81–83, 99–102, 105, 123n30, 125n42, 131, 134, 136–140, 142, 156–158, 185,
189, 196–197n8, 215–217, 219–222, 224, 226–228, 232n11, 232n15, 242, 248, 250, 256–257, 275n39,
277n60, 278n71; communicative, and communication 192, 199, 216, 221, 232n13; frailty of 156, 162n20;
linguistic, and utterance 84, 109, 121n12, 224, 228; moral 175; and narrative 141 (see also narrative) ;
physics of 138; and praxis 35; see also agency; agent; praxis
agency 70, 125n41, 157; see also action; agent
agent 5, 15, 26, 38, 51, 72, 83, 91, 97–98, 101, 105–106, 112, 120n9, 121n10, 126n47, 157, 190, 221–222, 225,
230–231, 237, 239, 242, 284; causal, and cause 72, 121n10; and communication 109, 112; ethical 15, 190
(see also ethics); free 156; intention of 56, 123n31; rational 220; social 18; see also action; agency
allegory 243, 244, 246, 247, 256, 260, 275n37; allegorical 167, 242, 243, 247; see also sense
Apel, Karl-Otto 23, 24n12, 61, 109, 192, 199, 280; and the ethics of discussion 201–216, 218–233
Aquinas, St. Thomas 245–249, 274n18
Arendt, Hannah 156–158, 160, 162n20
Aristotle 13, 22, 153, 159, 212–213, 239, 269, 283, 285; and Gadamer 31–32, 35, 38–39, 43–45, 59–60, 67n45
Ast, Friedrich 67n44, 166, 263–264
attestation 23, 129, 140, 142–146, 153–156, 162n13, 192–193, 197n10, 199, 234; and debt 154–156, 162n9; to
reality 143, 145 (see also reality); and truth 131, 142, 145, 280–281 (see also truth)
Augustine 243, 246–247

Banniard, Michel 274n17

Barratt, Edward 197n11
Battaly, Heather 236, 273n5, 273n7
Beevor, Antony 148
Behler, Ernst 275n35, 276n47, 278n69
Beiser, Frederick 276, 278n64
belief 29–30, 70, 73–74, 76–81, 83–97, 100–112, 115–119, 121n15, 122n21, 123n29, 123n28, 124n35, 124n37,
125–126n47, 126n51, 126n54, 197n14, 217, 222, 236–237, 257, 282–287; ascribing, ascription of, ascriptor
of, attributing 69, 77–79, 83–85, 87, 90, 92, 96, 100, 102, 107, 109–112, 114, 122n19, 234, 238, 248–249,
279, 283; empirical 121n16; explicit 92–96, 102–103, 107, 117–118, 283–286 (see also belief-that); implicit
92–97, 100, 102–104, 106–107, 117–119, 124n38, 283–284, 286–287 (see also belief-in); -in 143, 284, 285
(see also implicit belief); plausible 83; propositional 91, 93, 116 (see also proposition); symmetry of 90;
system of web of 74, 77, 88–91, 104, 111, 116, 124n33, 252; -that 92, 283, 285; see also explicit belief
benevolence 1, 21–23, 155, 194, 199–200, 234–235, 240–241, 273, 280–282, 287; toward the object 22, 235, 252,
260, 267; for others 231, 235, 240, 241, 252; for the thing, for the work 241, 250, 260, 264; see also charity,
love
Benjamin, Walter 76, 112, 277n57, 278n62
Bohr, Niels 16, 24, 239
Bori, Pier Cesare 171, 274n21
Bowie, Andrew 261, 278n70
Brands, H. W. 227, 233n29

Capurro, Rafael 197n11

Cantwell Smith, Wilfred 124n37
Carr, David 141, 148
Carroll, Noël 24n2
charity 22–23, 59, 69, 76–78, 84, 87, 90–91, 113, 200, 235, 242–244, 246–248, 279, 281; principle of 22–23, 25, 59,
69, 76–77, 84, 87, 90, 101, 105, 119, 121n17, 122n17, 234, 249; spirit of 24, 244 (see also spirit); as a virtue
242, 248, 249; see also benevolence, love, virtue
Chomsky, Noam 10, 109, 215
claim 15–22, 25, 28, 31, 36, 38, 59, 75, 81, 108, 109, 113, 114, 117, 120n2, 127n56, 134, 168–169, 202, 203,
209–210, 215–224, 226, 228–231, 234, 247, 252, 260, 280–281; to intelligibility 216–217, 220; moral 224;
to normative rightness 23, 199, 216–217, 219–220, 224, 228–229 (see also normative rightness); ontological
66n26, 139; from the past, from the tradition 52, 53, 57; from the text, from the work 53, 62; transcendental
209; truth, to truth 1, 19, 57, 143, 144, 192, 216–217, 228 (see also truth); to truthfulness 216–217, 228 (see
also truthfulness); universal, to universality 50, 166, 167, 192, 193, 207, 217; validity, of validity, to validity
15, 23, 24n12, 199, 202, 210, 212, 216–221, 223–230, 232n13, 233n24, 234, 280–281, 285 (see also
validity)
Clark, Francis 274n19
concept 16, 17, 31, 34, 44–45, 47–49, 56, 64n14, 67n35, 71, 73, 75, 88–89, 100–101, 104, 107, 111–112, 114,
124n35, 162n11, 179–181, 203, 208, 212, 230–231, 250, 257, 276n47, 277n50; conceptual, conceptually 15,
36, 38, 73, 75–76, 85, 105, 108, 115, 116, 121n14, 123n28, 126n51, 142, 196, 212, 250, 263, 276n47;
conceptuality 48, 113; conceptualization 17, 45, 67n43, 89, 108, 250; genesis of, origin of 44, 45, 47, 48, 88,
114; hermeneutic 105 (see also hermeneutics); historical dimension of 46 (see also history); and life 44, 47
(see also life); limiting- 152; nature of 213; teleological 37; unconceptualized 74, 121n16
Crisp, Roger 273n3
Cummings, E. E. 14

Davidson, Donald 18, 23, 55, 63n3, 64n7, 129, 212, 283; and benevolence or love 234–235, 248, 256, 279; and the
principle of charity 25–30; and radical interpretation 69–119, 120n2, 121n11, 122n21, 122n23, 122n25,
123n28, 123n29, 124n33, 124n35, 126n47, 126n50, 126n51
de Certeau, Michel 138–139, 161n6
De Lavalette, Henri 250
de Lubac, Henri 274n13
De Mul, Jos 67n39
Derrida, Jacques 50, 54–55, 58–59, 61–62, 68n49, 268, 278n65
de Saussure, Ferdinand 11
Descartes, René 12, 49, 212, 232n17, 235, 240, 273n1; and Foucault 172–173, 187, 197n14
Detienne, Marcel 197n15
de Vogüé, Adalbert 274n19
dialectic 26, 71, 176; dialectical 26, 65, 241
dialogue 23, 26–27, 29–31, 36–37, 44, 49–51, 54–62, 68n51, 70–71, 83, 106, 119, 120n7, 124n35, 155, 160, 164,
192, 193, 234, 241, 254–255, 266, 278n70, 279; dialogical 31, 48, 50–51, 60; intercultural 107; and language
33 (see also language); living 54, 62, 83, 107, 164
Diès, Auguste 120n3, 277n58
Dilthey, Wilhelm 13, 159, 166–167; and Gadamer 31–32, 44–47, 51, 59, 61, 63, 66n31, 66n32, 67n35, 67n38,
67n39
discourse 3, 6, 18, 32, 36, 39, 46, 49, 64n15, 84, 129, 152, 153, 164–167, 170–171, 173, 175–182, 184, 190, 202,
206–210, 212–213, 216, 218, 225–226, 230, 235, 256, 270, 277n53, 284; analysis of 185; clinical 178;
discursive, discursively 4, 42, 165, 168–169, 171, 173, 178–179, 183, 186, 206, 208, 255, 261; and drama,
dramatic of 184, 186, 190–191, 193–194; ethics, ethics of 229, 232n13 (see also ethics); historical 134, 135,
142, 143, 153 (see also history); iconic 36, 255, 258; indigenous 103; meta- 2, 17; philosophical 189, 209,
213; plausible (see iconic discourse); political 6 (see also politics); practical 225, 228, 233n25; pragmatic of
191; rational 45, 46; rules of 199–201, 230; scientific 45, 46, 47; and truth 188 (see also truth)
Dostal, Robert 65n18, 68n54

Elders, Leo 274n22

empiricism 49, 74, 75, 81, 121n15; empirical, empirically 29, 73–74, 78–79, 80–81, 83, 85, 121n16, 122n24,
123n29, 123n31, 206, 212, 219–221; empiricist 8, 69, 74, 121n14, 239, 240, 249
enactment 32, 60–63, 68n51, 279; of language 60, 61 (see also language); re-enactment 32, 45, 49, 51, 59–60,
62–63, 68n50, 175, 263, 273n10, 280, 286
Enzensberger, Hans Magnus 148
Erard, Michael 24n10
ethics 1, 32, 58, 66n29, 67n49, 129, 143, 163, 190, 195–196, 197n10, 220, 222, 224–227, 229, 236; discourse (see
discourse); ethical, ethically 1, 2, 14, 15, 18–20, 22, 26, 27, 143–144, 153, 156, 162n13, 163, 185, 189–191,
193, 197n11, 199, 201–202, 220–221, 223–225, 228–229, 231, 236, 239, 241, 252–253, 278n70, 281–283,
 285; of discussion 23, 199, 201–202, 220–221, 224–231, 233n25 (see also discourse ethics); of interpretation
1, 14, 22, 201; of responsibility 224–229; of telling the truth 194, 280 (see also truth), truthfulness; virtue
236 (see also virtue)
experience 1, 5, 9, 13–15, 46–49, 52–54, 64n11, 74, 81, 92, 95–96, 106–107, 113, 115, 119, 121n14, 125n43, 139,
147–148, 157, 170–173, 186–187, 194, 197n14, 209–210, 223, 236, 263, 271, 284–286; anthropologist's,
interpreter's, observer's 14, 18, 20, 22, 91, 279, 283; common 76; Greek 43, 285; hermeneutic 25, 31, 50, 53,
79, 182, 192 (see also hermeneutics); inner, internal 67n39, 202, 212; life, lived 14, 45, 47, 60–61, 117 (see
also life); sense of 283; of truth, of truth-telling 194 (see also truth), truthfulness; of the world 34, 44, 46, 54,
66n30; world of 93
expression 14, 34, 45, 61, 76, 104, 120n9, 133, 148, 216, 232n11, 249, 270; of intention, mental content, of mind, of
state of mind 72, 83, 164, 274n16; of life 45 (see also life)

Fish, Stanley 24n3

Flynn, Thomas 197n12
Forget, Philippe 67n48
Forster, Michael 276n43, 276n44, 278n67
Foucault, Michel 23, 163–166, 199, 231, 280, 285–286; and Ricoeur 129–130, 145; and truth 168–196, 197n9,
197n11, 197n12, 197n13, 197n14
Franek, Jakub 197n11
Frank, Manfred 276n48
Frege, Gottlob 283–284
Frischmann, Bärbel 278n68
Fuentes, Carlos 278n72
Fukuyama, Francis 196n3
fusion of horizons see horizon

Gadamer, Hans-Georg 5, 13, 18, 23, 285–286; and benevolence or love 234, 255–256, 260–263, 275n36, 276n48,
278n66, 279; and Davidson 69–73, 77, 79, 81, 83, 91, 109, 119–120, 129; and the ethics of discussion 211,
220–221; and Foucault 167, 174–175, 182–183, 192–193; and the principle of charity 25–68; and Ricoeur
159, 163–165
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 222, 268, 270
good, the 20, 34, 35, 37–42, 65n21, 70, 120n10, 229, 234, 239, 241, 242, 244, 265; idea of 35, 37–38, 71, 120n8,
234, 239, 241, 244
Govier, Trudy 162n12
Greco, John 273n6
Gregory the Great 8, 200, 235, 242–258, 260, 274n17, 274n19, 274n22
Grondin, Jean 61, 64n16, 67n38, 68n54

Habermas, Jürgen 23, 24n12, 88; and Apel 192, 199, 201–202, 234, 280; and the ethics of discussion 214–219, 221,
224, 226–230, 231n2, 231n3, 232n11, 233n24
Hacking, Ian 84
Hahn, Lewis Edwin 291
Hamacher, Werner 278n63
Hawking, Stephen 16
Heidegger, Martin 13, 21, 26, 77, 174, 182, 272–273, 280, 286; and Apel's critique 202, 204–211, 213–216; and the
ethics of discussion 220–221, 223–224, 231, 232n9, 240; and Gadamer 30–32, 34–36, 39, 44, 48–50, 60, 62,
64n15, 64n16, 65n16, 67n45; and Ricoeur 129, 131–136, 143, 150, 152–153, 161, 162n9, 163, 164
Henderson, Gae Lyn 197n11
hermeneutics 1, 25, 50, 57, 60, 62, 65n17, 66n32, 109, 129, 130, 131, 164–168, 171–174, 182, 187, 193, 195,
202–204, 207–208, 213, 219–220, 259, 262, 270, 276n43, 287; biblical 131; of Gregory the Great 242;
Heidegger's 202, 204–209, 211, 214–215; hermeneutic 1, 24, 30, 34, 36, 38, 41, 42, 44, 46, 47, 50, 55, 57,
69, 73, 76, 91–92, 105, 109, 129, 166, 169, 172–174, 183, 192, 204, 210, 213, 220, 229, 246, 260, 262–264,
273, 279, 281, 282, 287; philosophical 31, 32, 55, 164, 192; romantic 50, 253, 259–260, 269, 277n57; of the
self, of the subject 130, 163, 166, 169–175, 182, 187–188 (see also subject); of singularity 165, 172, 174,
186, 187, 191, 195 (see also singularity)
Hintikka, Jaakko 232n17
Hirsch, E. D. 8
historian 15, 19, 20, 56, 79, 132, 136–146, 151–153, 182, 190, 193, 195, 235, 280; see also historiography, history
historicism 67n34, 129, 165, 181, 197n9; a-historicism 283; historicist 207
historicity 67n34, 91, 180
historiography 131, 133, 139, 140, 144; historiographic, historiographical 24n4, 132, 141, 145, 151; see also
historian, history
history 2–3, 15, 19–21, 24n4, 29–31, 35, 45, 47–49, 53–54, 56, 60, 82, 88–89, 91, 121n13, 131, 133, 135, 137, 139,
141, 146, 150, 152–153, 156–159, 161, 162n11, 165, 168–170, 172, 174, 176, 179–185, 187, 194, 196,
197n9, 203–204, 206–208, 222, 228, 240, 243, 247, 255, 259, 286; account of 56; ahistorical 30, 83, 287; of
being 62, 231n5; books, textbooks,3, 19, 140, 194, 195, 279; of concepts 48 (see also concept); cultural, and
culture 55, 103; doing, making 45, 145, 151, 153, 159, 165; effects of 53, 54, 60; historical, historically 1, 3,
5–7, 10, 12–13, 29–32, 44–48, 50–51, 54, 57, 59–64, 66n31, 66–67n34, 77, 82–83, 86–87, 89–90, 109, 119,
126n48, 129, 131–132, 134–137, 139–141, 143–146, 150–152, 154, 158, 161, 165, 167–169, 170, 172,
174–175, 178–181, 186, 190, 192, 195, 199, 202, 204, 206–211, 216, 218, 220–221, 224–225, 226–227,
237–238, 243, 243–244, 247, 262, 268, 270, 276n47, 277n53, 278n70, 283, 285; of ideas 46, 177, 286;
national 19, 20; of philosophy 212; of the present 62, 126n48, 135, 152, 153, 175, 182; science of 45;
writing, writing of 2, 151, 153, 193, 282; see also historian, historiography
horizon 30, 34, 47, 51–59, 62, 132, 143–144, 152, 154–155, 169, 251; of consciousness 51, 52; fusion of 49, 51–55,
57–63, 129, 175, 182, 183, 193, 279; historical 53, 57
Hovey, Craig 197n11
Hoy, David C. 29, 84, 123n29
Husserl, Edmund 31, 48, 51, 66n33, 93, 183, 211, 221, 232n10, 286; and benevolence or love 235, 241, 273n2; and
the ethics of discussion 211, 215, 221

idea, ideas 2, 10, 38–40, 43, 46, 64n10, 65n23, 65n24, 70–72, 74, 88, 101, 110, 113, 115, 120n3, 120n4, 120n6,
120n7, 121n11, 121n16, 156, 165, 209, 212, 246, 261, 268, 273n2, 275n36; of the good 35, 37–38, 65n20,
120n8, 234, 239, 241, 244; history of 177, 286; ideal, ideally 88, 154, 193, 205, 218, 220, 225–226, 233n26,
251–252, 267, 268; theory of 36, 71 (see also theory)
ideal, the 24n3, 67n44, 264, 268, 269, 270, 270, 286; regulative 152, 154, 220, 251
idealism 16, 17, 25, 75, 253, 254, 277n59; idealist 253; idealistic 35, 85, 253
ideality 55
idealization 83, 218, 221, 223, 225, 228, 229
imperative 282–287; categorical 226; ethical 282 (see also ethics); hermeneutic 1, 24, 260, 264, 273, 279, 281–282,
287; of love 265, 273, 282; see also love
intention 3, 10, 29, 38, 62, 72–73, 100–101, 111, 120n9, 123n29, 123n30, 164, 167–168, 177, 192, 217, 226, 238,
243–244, 264, 274n16, 276n47, 283; of the agent 56; conscious 29; divine, God's 247, 248; good 247;
intentional 10, 11, 26, 123n31, 166, 281; non-intentional 11; private 26; psychological 26
intentionality 99, 125n41; intentionalism 11
intersubjectivity 216; intersubjective 10, 75, 76, 80–84, 86, 90, 91, 92, 203, 207–210, 214–217, 222, 223, 232n10;
intersubjectively 203, 210, 216, 218

Joyce, James 63n3

Kant, Immanuel 73, 152, 182, 254, 276n47, 286; and the ethics of discussion 213, 216, 220, 226; and Gadamer 33,
58, 62, 67n36, 67n37, 67n38, 67n40, 67n41, 67n45, 67n48
Kent, Thomas 26, 63, 76–77, 121n13, 122n17
Krausz, Michael 24

language 7, 11–13, 18, 24n4, 28–36, 42–45, 47, 54, 60–62, 66n33, 68, 73–76, 78–80, 85, 89, 91, 97, 107–119,
122n21, 122n23, 126n51, 126n52, 126–127n55, 127n56, 137, 164–166, 168–169, 175, 203–204, 206–207,
209, 211–216, 218–220, 223, 230, 232n10, 261–264, 268, 270, 276n44, 276n49, 277n50, 277n51, 277n52,
277n53, 277n54, 277n55, 277n56, 278n62; analysis of 213; and the a priori 213, 216; and being 34, 36, 61;
dimension of 32–34, 36, 42–44, 64n11, 66n30, 211; and enactment 60, 61; event of 60; and expression 164
(see also expression); -game 203–204, 209, 219, 231n5; linguistic 203; and logos 42; and ontology 31;
performance of 60; philosophy of 195; private 108, 202; system of 33, 214; and thought 108, 115, 118, 261,
262
Latour, Bruno 93, 121n14
León-Portilla, Miguel 94–95
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 96, 103–104, 107
life 13–14, 22, 34–38, 40, 44–48, 54, 59, 61, 64n15, 66n31, 67n39, 70, 87, 95, 108, 121n14, 134–136, 139,
168–169, 175, 188, 202, 207, 238, 242, 245, 250, 256, 263–269, 274n16, 277n56, 279; connection of 32;
continued 236, 253, 260, 264, 272; cultural 32; experience 47; expression of 45; form of 106, 117, 203, 211,
218, 231n5, 232n10; good, goodness of 22, 32, 37–38, 40, 70, 237–239, 242; meaning of 95; of the mind
237; ontology of 29; personal 12; philosophy of 44, 66n32; practice of, praxis of 43, 209; social 5
lifeworld 46, 93, 209, 211, 214, 225
Loewen, James 194–195
logic 46, 52, 63n2, 115, 122n22, 255, 273n1; logical, logically 10, 30, 47, 69, 73–74, 77, 89, 92, 101–102, 105, 111,
115, 121n15, 122n22, 152, 175, 179, 205–206, 269, 283, 284; of question and answer 52
logician 284
logicization 43
logos 18, 31, 32, 35–36, 39, 41–44, 46, 48, 66n27, 66n28, 66n29, 66n30, 141, 178, 211, 213, 255, 272;
apophantikos 39, 283; as the dimension of language 42 (see also language); eikōs 17, 36, 255–257, 270–271;
endiathetos 44; and ethos 60; ousias 44
love 1, 7, 14, 21, 23–24, 63, 65n24, 124n37, 155, 157, 199–200, 234–236, 240–241, 244, 246–253, 260, 264–267,
273, 275n31, 277n59, 277n60, 277n61, 281–282, 284, 287; as an attitude 240, 249; and caritas, and charity
119, 243, 248 (see also charity); as a commitment 21; as an imperative 24, 264–265, 273, 279 (see also
imperative); and knowledge 240, 265; for others 231; as a virtue 200, 267; see also benevolence, charity
virtue
Lyotard, Jean-François 298

Macke, Frank 197

Malpas, Jeff 64n5, 64n6, 120n1
Markus, R. A. 274n17
Marvell, Andrew 7
McDowell, John 64n9
Mclaren, Margaret 197n11
meaning 3–4, 6–14, 16, 18, 49, 52, 64n12, 64n15, 73, 74, 76, 80, 83, 86, 100, 108, 121n15, 125n43, 138, 166–168,
175, 186, 193, 205, 209–210, 215–216, 218, 221–222, 224, 226, 243, 245–246, 256, 258–259, 266, 271, 283;
act of, active verbal sense of 9, 10–12, 60, 68n50; articulated, articulation of 40, 216; author's, speaker's 56,
167, 192; constitution of, formation of 202, 209, 221–222, 231n5; content of 13, 32, 45, 55, 62, 262, 267,
284; explicit 21; higher 259; historical 7; increase of 139; inner, internal 138, 266; intended, and intention 5,
168, 283; invention of 258; lexical, linguistic, of a word 7, 9–11, 14, 24, 64n5, 91, 203, 216, 242, 244, 248,
259, 274n16, 284; of life 95 (see also life); literal 6–8, 13, 244, 246, 281, 282 (see also sense); logical 10;
multiplicity of 246; original 26, 124n37, 248; production of 259; and sense, and Sinn 10, 29, 159, 160, 205,
242, 243, 284; and significance 8; spiritual 246 (see also spirit); of a text 9, 14, 18, 55, 280, 283; validity of
202, 215 (see also validity); variable 195
metaphysics 76, 113, 118, 175, 205, 206; destruction of 211; Greek 66n30; medieval 249; metaphysical 32, 58, 106,
206, 268, 269; post- 205; substance 25, 38; traditional 173, 205; Western 205
Millington, Barry 278n71
mind 10–11, 14, 25, 31–33, 36, 38–42, 50, 69, 72–73, 75, 80, 84, 91–93, 96, 99–100, 103–104, 114, 120n8, 123n26,
124n34, 125n43, 127n56, 181, 245, 249–250, 253–254, 256–257, 259, 262–263, 266, 270, 276n44, 277n55;
act of the 32, 240, 277n55; divine 256; life of the 237; and matter 265; as noūs 36, 41–42, 254; scientific
239; state of 83, 92, 101, 237, 239, 248; wild 103, 104
monism 6, 8, 16; see also pluralism

narrative 136–146, 151–156, 158, 161n7; and action 141; historical, and history, of the past 131–132, 134–140, 143,
145–146, 152, 199 (see also history); potential 139; production of 145, 156, 284; theory of 130, 161n1, 258;
and truth 144, 145 (see also truth); voice 143
Natali, Carlo 26, 120n2
Neschke-Hentschke Ada 298
Nicholas of Lyra 274n15
norm 1, 15, 101, 105, 170, 217, 220, 223, 225, 227, 230, 232n10, 233n25; of discussion 225; ethical 201, 224, 228;
 moral 17, 202, 225, 226, 228; normalized 93; normative, normatively 5, 14, 19, 23, 56, 144, 185, 191, 199,
216–220, 224, 226, 228–230, 232n13, 232n16, 280; of rationality, of reason 101, 105, 224
Novalis 258–259, 264–265, 269–270

ontology 31, 34, 37, 98, 118, 182, 184, 205–206, 208–209, 212, 232n9, 253; of life 29; ontological 18, 25, 27, 31,
33–34, 36–39, 41–42, 49–50, 64n14, 65n22, 65n23, 71, 81, 83, 85, 97–98, 100, 106, 118, 125n46, 132, 139,
141–143, 165, 167, 168, 185, 207, 220, 253, 255, 268; perspectivist 98; substance 75, 98, 100, 253
Overy, Richard 147

Pamuk, Orhan 123n32

parrhesia 23, 129, 163, 165, 171–172, 188–194, 196, 197n11, 234, 280; parrhesiast 195–196; parrhesiastic 175,
188, 189–195, 197n13; as a practice 188; see also truth; truthfulness
Patsch, Hermann 276n43, 278n70
Peters, Michael 197n11
Petrus de Caua 244, 274n19
Pettersson, Torsten 24n3
phenomenology 51, 145, 156, 184, 188–192, 240, 254, 281; hermeneutic, and hermeneutics 131 (see also
hermeneutics); phenomenological 30, 125n46, 134, 142, 192, 273; singularity of 191
phenomenon 30, 116, 117, 171, 175, 177, 183, 186, 240; cultural 182; and singularity 167, 191, 194 (see also
singularity); of understanding 33 (see also understanding)
philology 35, 64n16, 166, 167, 262
Pinker, Steven 114, 126n51
Plantinga, Alvin 273n6
Plato 4–5, 17–18, 20, 22, 120n2, 120n4, 120n5, 120n9, 120–121n10, 212, 279, 282, 285; and benevolence or love
234, 241, 253–257, 265, 275n36, 276n47, 277n59; and Davidson 69–73, 83, 88, 114; and Foucault 174–179,
196n4; and Gadamer 26–27, 29, 31–32, 34–44, 49, 58–60, 62, 63n4, 65n18, 65n20, 66n30
pluralism 6, 8, 16–17, 81–83; see also monism
politicization 287; politicized 151, 195
politics 129, 155, 157, 160, 163, 189, 194, 221, 228, 233n30, 259; of discussion 227; and history 193; of
interpretation 84 (see also political interpretation); political, politically 2, 5–6, 12, 15, 19, 46, 84, 87, 119,
150, 151, 153–157, 160, 162, 163, 178, 185, 189–191, 193, 196, 210, 239, 259, 279–282, 287; of truth 146,
151 (see also political truth)
practice 6, 15, 17, 19–22, 55, 88, 92–95, 101–102, 104, 117, 124n38, 129, 164–165, 171–172, 174, 178, 181, 184,
187–189, 191, 194, 196, 197n9, 212, 219, 237, 281, 284–285; cultural 94, 102, 103, 117, 119, 230;
discursive 171, 178, 183; historical 172; of life 43 (see also life); practical practically 8, 9, 32–33, 35, 81, 93,
211, 225, 228, 233n25; and self, and subject 165, 169–173, 187, 189, 194 (see also subject); and truth 163,
165, 172, 189, 195, 196, 199; see also praxis; truth
practitioner 6
pragmatics 164, 176, 180, 182–186, 190, 193, 201, 206, 214; pragmatic, pragmatically 6, 22, 59, 75, 84, 95, 97, 105,
171, 176, 184, 191, 201, 205–207, 212, 214–216, 224, 230, 233n24, 234 (see also pragmatism);
transcendental 201–202, 220, 221, 223, 227; universal 214, 217, 220, 232n13
pragmatism 201–202, 206, 212–213, 219; neo-pragmatism 205; pragmatist 109, 221, 223
praxis 35, 203, 205, 209, 210, 215; see also practice
Price, H. H. 8
proposition 31, 33, 39, 46, 60, 90, 92, 103–104, 117–118, 129, 136, 174, 176–179, 184–185, 191, 218, 224, 230,
263, 266, 283; propositional 43, 45, 74, 85, 87, 91–93, 95, 103, 107, 109, 111–112, 116, 122n17, 123n26,
124n36, 124n38, 134, 144, 167, 168, 210, 217, 218, 224, 283; truth of 218 (see also truth)

Quine, W. V. O. 26, 108, 121n14, 121n15, 122n22; and Davidson 63n3, 69, 73–74, 76, 85, 91

Raaen, Finn Daniel 197n11

Ramberg, Bjorn Torgrim 83, 123n29
realism 75, 78; direct 74, 75; naïve 253
reality 2, 16–18, 25, 35–36, 42, 44, 46–47, 66n30, 67n39, 74–76, 78–79, 81, 88–89, 100, 103, 108, 115, 129, 148,
179, 204, 252–259, 265, 270, 278n67; articulation of, order of, ordering of 18, 36, 89, 258; attestation to 143,
145; conception of, conceptualization of 108, 254 (see also concept); historical 139, 220 (see also history);
 notion of 253
reason 18, 32, 41–43, 66n29, 66n31, 67n35, 72–73, 88, 121n10, 149, 150, 178, 197n9, 206, 213, 224, 233n24, 254,
256–257, 265–266, 271, 277n59, 277n60; as logos 178, 213; philosophical 211; practical 32; space of, sphere
of 42, 256
religion 87, 158, 219, 262, 275n39, 277n61
responsibility 15, 18–19, 23, 25, 129, 142, 145, 153, 195, 199, 216, 224–226, 233n26, 252, 273; ethics of 201, 225,
224–228 (see also ethics); responsible 19, 144–145, 153, 228
Rice, Condoleeza 228
Ricoeur, Paul 23, 199, 234, 258, 280; and attestation 129–146, 150–161, 162n9; and Foucault 163, 174, 190,
192–193, 195, 197n10
Roberts, Robert 275n31
Rorty, Richard 78, 122n25, 123n28, 205, 221–223, 283
Rousselot, Pierre 200, 269, 275n34; and benevolence or love 235, 249–252, 254

Sartre, Jean-Paul 24, 142, 197n12, 280

Schlegel, Friedrich 23, 33, 64n13, 275n41, 276n43, 276n, 277n59, 278n67, 282; and benevolence or love 200, 235,
253–260, 264–272
Schleiermacher, Friedrich 23, 28, 33, 50, 64n13, 67n44, 166–167, 175; and benevolence or love 200, 235, 253–254,
256, 259–265, 267, 269–271, 275n36, 276n44, 277n60, 278n66
Schuback, Marcia sá Cavalcante 273n10, 273n11
Searle, John 91, 216, 232n13
Sebald, W. G. 146–147, 150–151, 235
sense 6–7, 10–14, 18, 21, 29, 49, 53–54, 95, 132, 139, 156–161, 168, 247, 253, 255–256, 266, 274n16, 283;
allegorical 242, 243 (see also allegory); anagogical 242, 243; literal 82, 242–244, 246–247, 249 (see also
meaning); to make sense 5, 10–11, 13–14, 19, 21, 26, 32, 51, 55, 61, 76, 83, 88, 90, 99, 105, 126n51, 152,
156, 166, 167, 205, 218, 254, 266, 283, 286; nonsense 100, 101, 103; spiritual (see spirit)
Serra, Alice Mara 127n57
singularity 165, 167, 172, 174, 175, 180, 186–188, 191–192, 194–195, 275n40; hermeneutics of (see hermeneutics)
Smith, Adam 168, 196n2
Socrates 17, 20, 37, 38, 40–43, 47, 65n22, 69, 70, 172, 173, 187, 241
Sosa, Ernest 273n6
spirit 7, 23, 96, 99–100, 125n41, 125n44, 125n45, 155, 168, 242–244, 247–248, 254–259, 262–263, 266, 268–272,
275n39, 275n41, 276n47, 277n51, 277n53, 278n70; spirits 94, 97, 98, 99, 118, 125n41; spiritual 22, 98, 189,
243, 246–247; see also spirituality
spirituality 191; see also spirit
Steel, Brent 197n11
subject 25–26, 30, 45–46, 48–50, 53, 56, 59, 62, 74, 76–77, 80, 83–85, 89, 92, 97–98, 102, 106, 109, 119, 125n41,
125n42, 125n46, 126n51, 130, 163, 170–175, 177–178, 181–191, 194–195, 197n8, 215, 220–221, 224, 226,
233n20, 233n25, 241, 251–252, 266, 268, 273n2, 283; asubjective 83; counter- 266; genealogy of the 163;
ideal 251, 252; knowing, of knowledge 67n35, 185, 251, 266; and object 16, 30, 50, 98, 99, 265; observed
26, 69, 73, 76–80, 82, 84–93, 95–96, 102, 111, 119, 122n23, 124n33, 124n35, 248, 279, 283; as a practice
165; of science, scientific 46, 220; subjective 80, 82, 83, 84, 86, 202, 203, 210, 217, 232n10, 245, 257, 259;
transcendental 215, 220, 221, 232n10; see also subjectivity
subjectivity 48–49, 62, 165, 168–170, 172–175, 187, 194–195; see also subject
substance 59, 67n35, 98, 100, 106, 115, 127n56, 172, 187, 256, 259, 269, 283; metaphysics 25, 38 (see also
metaphysics); ontology (see ontology); ontological 83
Szondi, Peter 67n44, 263

Taminiaux, Jacques 67n45

text 1–14, 16–21, 24n8, 25, 27–30, 50–59, 62, 172, 182, 242–249, 253, 259–261, 263–265, 267–268, 271, 274n16,
278n67, 279–286; application of 260; biblical 7, 242–243, 245–246; historical 51; horizon of the 51, 62;
original 6, 18; and reader 245, 249
theory 16, 30, 36, 38, 69–70, 75, 78–80, 83, 123n31, 166, 197n11, 213, 214, 237, 239–240; coherence 69, 70, 78,
122n25; of communicative action 232n11 (see also action); correspondence 78, 122n25; ethical 26, 224 (see
also ethics); of forms, of ideas 36, 38, 71 (see also idea); interpretation, of interpretation 4–6, 81–82, 131,
202, 237; language game 219; linguistic 232n13; of narrative 131, 161n1, 258 (see also narrative); quantum
 16, 239; speech act 24n12, 164, 216, 221, 232n13; of the subject 170 (see also subject); of time 131; of truth
70 (see also truth)
Thucydides 189
Tiisala, Tuomo 196n7
Todorov, Tzvetan 162n12
tradition 26, 31, 51–53, 57, 66n30, 69, 80, 166, 174, 191–193, 196, 203–204, 268, 270, 272, 283; continental 202,
204; Hindu 274n16; liberal 173, 223; oral 5; Western 38, 210, 211
translation 5, 6, 26, 78, 122n23, 174, 176, 272, 283; practice of 212; radical 69, 73, 85
triangulation 29, 69, 78–87, 89–90, 92–94, 106, 108, 110, 112, 119, 123n28, 129; animal's 112; process of 83, 85,
119
truth 1, 6, 16, 19, 21, 23, 27, 31–32, 39–40, 43, 45–46, 59, 66n30, 67n38, 70, 75, 78–79, 91–92, 94, 96, 102,
104–105, 112, 115, 121n15, 126n47, 129–130, 137–138, 140, 142–145, 148, 154, 160, 161n3, 163, 165,
170–172, 181, 183–185, 187–196, 197n14, 199–200, 205, 209–212, 215, 218–219, 221, 223, 228, 230–231,
232n13, 232n16, 233n20, 234, 237–239, 241–243, 257–258, 265, 275n41, 279–280, 282, 285; as alētheia 40,
163, 189; claim to 17, 19–20, 143, 192, 216–217 (see also claim); commitment to 21; condition 122n23; as
disclosure 39, 129; hermeneutic 210; of interpretation, interpretive 56–57, 82, 129, 163, 199, 273, 280;
poetics of, production of,23, 129, 143–146, 151–152, 185–186, 193, 259, 280; political, politics of 146, 185;
as a practice 129; -teller, -telling 23, 129, 143–145, 164–165, 171–172, 185–186, 188–190, 192, 193–194,
199, 196, 199, 217, 232n13, 234, 280–281 (see also parrhesia; truthfulness; validity claim); theory of 69–70
truthfulness 1, 216, 219, 223, 228, 230, 280; truthful 143, 199, 217–218, 232n13; see also parrhesia; validity claim
Tugendhat, Ernst 284
Twain, Mark 12

understanding 5–6, 9, 21, 27–33, 35, 38, 41–46, 49–50, 53, 56–58, 61–62, 64n12, 64n14, 64n15, 65n21, 67n38,
67n43, 67n44, 67n47, 68n51, 83, 86, 76–77, 90, 96, 102, 104–105, 108–109, 115, 117, 119, 124n35, 133,
147, 160, 161, 164, 173–174, 187–188, 203, 205–210, 216, 222, 236, 240, 243, 247, 253–255, 257–258,
260–261, 263–264, 266–267, 271–272, 273n10, 275n35, 275n36, 275n39, 276n44, 276n46, 276n47, 276n48,
277n55, 278n66, 278n67, 278n70, 284, 286; better 67n44, 167, 175, 235–236, 253, 260–261, 263–264, 268,
271, 275n35, 276n44 (see also meliorative understanding); coming to an, common, mutual, reaching an,
shared 50, 63n4, 93, 116, 192–193, 216, 232n15, 233n25; different, differently 30, 59, 81, 176, 231, 261,
276n44; ethical 236; and explanation 67n38, 138–139; intersubjective 75; meliorative 235, 260–261, 264,
276n47 (see also understanding better); mis- 33, 246, 270; non- 28, 33, 267, 270–273, 278n70; pre- 207,
209–211; self- 203, 206, 208

validity 22–23, 24n12, 48, 55, 177–179, 202, 205, 209–211, 213, 215, 222, 231n5, 233n19; claim 15, 23, 199, 202,
212, 216–221, 223–230, 232n13, 233n24, 234, 280–281, 285 (see also claim); of interpretation 5–6, 16–18,
22, 25, 36, 82, 273; intersubjective 207, 210, 215
Vessey, David 64n5
virtue 32, 235–237, 240, 242, 245, 248, 280; and charity (see charity); epistemic 23, 234–240, 242, 245, 248–249,
275n31; epistemology 235–237, 239–240, 242, 248, 273n4; ethics (see ethics); intellectual 236, 238, 242;
and love (see love); moral 234–235, 242, 245, 249
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo 124n39, 125n43, 125n44, 125n45, 231, 285–286; and Davidson 97, 100–107, 117; and
Levi-Strauss 96, 103–104, 107
Vlastos, Gregory 69
Vonnegut, Kurt 147, 150, 162n15

Whorf, Benjamin Lee 76, 112–119, 126n55

Wittgenstein, Ludwig 28, 231; and Davidson 106, 108; and the ethics of discussion 202–204, 206, 209, 211, 213,
216
writer 7, 10, 12–13, 26, 55, 142, 246, 263; historical 6, 268

Zagzebski, Linda 236–238, 240, 273n4, 273n8

Zeilinger, Anton 24n13