The Roots of Hermeneutics in Kant's Reflective-Teleological Judgment (Contributions to Hermeneutics, 11)

This book challenges the standard view that modern hermeneutics begins with Friedrich Ast and Friedrich Schleiermacher, arguing instead that it is the dialectic of reflective and teleological reason in Kant’s Critique of Judgment that provides the actual proto-hermeneutic foundation. It is revolutionary in doing so by replacing interpretive truth claims by the more appropriate claim of rendering opaque contexts intelligible . Taking Gadamer’s comprehensive analysis of hermeneutics in Truth and Method (1960) as its point of departure, the book turns to Kant’s Critiques, reviewing his major concepts as a coherent system in relation to his sensus communis . At the heart of the book is the interaction between reflective, bottom-up search and teleological, top-down interpretative projection as provided in Part II of the third Critique . This text contends that Kant’s broad definition of nature invites the liberation of the reflective-teleological judgment from its biological exemplifications and so permits us to establish its generalised status as a path-breaking, methodological tool. Kant’s dialectic of reflective search and meaning bestowing, stipulated teleology is asserted to anticipate a series of motifs commonly associated with hermeneutics. Figures covered include Dilthey, Husserl, Ingarden, Heidegger, Gadamer, Apel, Habermas, Ricoeur, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Deleuze, Vattimo, Nancy and Caputo. Their collective contributions to interpretation allow for a review of the evolution of hermeneutics from the perspective of the Kantian critique of the limitations of human cognition. The book is written for the informed, general reader, but will likewise appeal to advanced undergraduate and graduate students as well as researchers in the humanities and social sciences. The Roots of Hermeneutics in Kant's Reflective- Teleological Judgment Copyright Preface References Acknowledgments Abbreviations Contents Chapter 1: Introduction: Gadamer – Benchmark of Hermeneutics 1.1 Introduction 1.2 The Hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer 1.3 The Dead Meanings of Romantic Hermeneutics 1.4 Gadamer’s Dilthey 1.5 Gadamer’s Conception of Language 1.6 Hermeneutic Circularity 1.7 Fusion of Horizons 1.8 What Is Understanding? 1.9 The Hermeneutics of Facticity 1.10 Historicalness, Wirkungsgeschichte, and Productive Prejudice 1.11 Tradition and Universal Hermeneutics 1.12 Gadamer’s Failure to Distinguish Kant’s and Romantic Subjectivity 1.13 Gadamer’s Failure to Address Kant’s Reflective-Teleological Judgment References Chapter 2: The Chiastic Structure of Kant’s Critical Concepts 2.1 Introduction 2.2 The Chiasmus of Kant’s Conceptual Architectonic 2.2.1 Formal Judgments 2.2.2 Mathematical Judgments 2.2.3 Pure Judgments 2.2.4 Empirical Judgments 2.2.5 Practical Judgments 2.2.6 Non-cognitive, Aesthetic Judgments 2.2.7 Cognitive Judgments about Art 2.2.8 Reflective-Teleological Judgment 2.2.9 The Primacy of Reflective-Teleological Reason 2.2.10 Projection 2.2.11 Systematicity 2.2.12 The Telos of the Moral 2.2.13 The Telos of Normativity 2.3 Justification for Generalizing Kant’s Reflective-Teleological Procedure References Chapter 3: Kant’s Proto-Hermeneutics 3.1 Introduction 3.2 The Dual Nature of Reflective and Teleological Reason 3.3 Parts and Wholes (Teile und Ganzes) 3.4 Wholes: From Conglomeration to System 3.5 Means and Ends (Mittel und Zwecke) 3.6 Proto-Hermeneutic Circularity 3.7 Purposiveness (Zweckmässigkeit) 3.8 Explaining, Interpreting, Understanding 3.9 The Social Dimension of Understanding (Verstand; Verstehen) References Chapter 4: Kant’s Conception of Natural Language 4.1 Introduction 4.2 Kant’s Linguistic Sign 4.2.1 Language as a Set of Signifiers 4.2.2 Kant’s Motivated Signifieds 4.3 Kant on Syntax and Grammar 4.4 Schematism 4.4.1 Schematism as Procedure 4.4.2 Degrees of Schematization 4.5 Language as Erörterung (Discursive Deliberation; Exposition) 4.5.1 Kant’s Tone as “Mode of Expression” 4.5.2 Circumlocution and the Language of Poetry 4.5.3 Discursive Reasoning in Reflective-Teleological Judgments 4.6 Conclusion: Kant’s Contribution to the Theorization of Natural Language References Chapter 5: Ast, Schleiermacher, Dilthey: Hermeneutics as Inductive Reconstruction 5.1 Introduction 5.2 Friedrich Ast (1778–1841) 5.3 Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768–1834) 5.4 Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) References Chapter 6: Husserl and Ingarden: Hermeneutic Intentionality 6.1 Introduction 6.2 Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) 6.2.1 Methodological Remarks 6.2.2 Parts and Wholes 6.2.3 Husserl’s “More or Less” 6.2.4 Intersubjectivity 6.2.5 Horizon-Intentionality 6.2.6 Being-Within-One-Another 6.2.7 Language as Communication: The Expanded Linguistic Horizon 6.3 Roman Ingarden (1893–1970) References Chapter 7: Heidegger: Being and the Hermeneutics of Pro-jection 7.1 Introduction 7.2 Heidegger: Methodological Remarks 7.2.1 Dasein as Interpretation 7.2.2 The Fundamentalontologie of Dasein 7.2.3 Verfallensgeneigtheit (Propensity Towards Falling) 7.2.4 Temporality and Care 7.2.5 Understanding and Meaning 7.2.6 Meaning as Truth 7.2.7 Language in Being and Time 7.3 On Thinking 7.3.1 Language as Constitution of World 7.4 Heidegger’s Hermeneutics 7.4.1 Early Remarks on Hermeneutics 7.5 Heidegger’s Moral Vacuum References Chapter 8: Ricoeur: Hermeneutics of Self-Recognition 8.1 Introduction 8.2 Interpretation as Self-Recognition 8.2.1 Broadening the Hermeneutic Frame 8.2.2 Ricoeur’s Freud 8.2.3 Psychoanalysis and Culture 8.2.4 Freud, Art and Philosophy 8.2.5 Hermeneutics of Suspicion 8.3 Ricoeur on Language 8.3.1 Structuralism 8.3.2 Semiology of the Text 8.3.3 Narrative 8.3.4 Metaphor 8.4 The Subject in Hermeneutics and the Project of Emancipation 8.4.1 Eliminating the Subject 8.5 Ricoeur’s Ontology 8.6 Hermeneutics and Phenomenology 8.7 Hermeneutics as Emancipation 8.8 The Flight from Kant References Chapter 9: Apel and Habermas: Emancipatory Hermeneutics 9.1 Introduction 9.2 Karl-Otto Apel (1922–2017) 9.2.1 Critique of Analytic Language Philosophy 9.2.2 Transcendental Communicative Semiotics 9.2.3 Discourse Ethics 9.2.4 Apel’s Hermeneutics of Presuppositions 9.3 Jürgen Habermas (1929 -) 9.3.1 The Confrontation with Gadamer 9.3.2 Habermas’s Critical Building Blocks 9.3.3 Communicative Competence and Distorted Communication 9.3.4 Habermas and Peirce 9.3.5 Instrumental Reason Vs Symbolic Interaction 9.3.6 Discourse Ethics 9.3.7 Habermasian Hermeneutics References Chapter 10: Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Deleuze: Decentered Hermeneutics 10.1 Introduction 10.2 Jacques Derrida (1930–2004): Celebrating the Margin 10.2.1 On the Genesis of Derrida’s Infrastructures 10.2.2 The Truth in Painting 10.3 Michel Foucault (1926–1984): A New Hermeneutic Paradigm 10.3.1 Enunciative Modalities 10.3.2 Foucault’s Statement 10.3.3 Foucault’s Archive 10.4 Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924–1998): The Political Sublime and Discursive Injustice 10.4.1 Kant’s Aesthetic Judgment 10.4.2 Kant’s Sublime 10.4.3 Presenting the Unpresentable 10.4.4 Forgetting Part II of the Critique of Judgment 10.4.5 Lyotard’s Transcendental Hermeneutics 10.4.6 The Emancipatory Project 10.4.7 Lyotard’s Differend 10.5 Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995): Self-Realization as Free Accord of the Faculties 10.5.1 Remarks on the Third Critique References Chapter 11: Vattimo, Nancy, Caputo: Hermeneutics in the Shadow of Nihilism 11.1 Introduction 11.2 Gianni Vattimo (1936–): Towards a Nihilist Hermeneutics 11.2.1 Vattimo’s Gadamer 11.2.2 In Search of a Non-metaphysical Ontology 11.2.3 Historicity, Anthropology, Science, Art and Ethics 11.2.4 Vattimo’s Nihilistic Hermeneutics 11.3 Jean-Luc Nancy (1940–2021): Hermeneutics Between Myth and Nihilism 11.3.1 The Sense of the World 11.3.2 Nancy on Kant’s Critique of Judgment 11.4 John Caputo (1940–): In Search of a Non-systemic Metaphysics 11.4.1 Radical Hermeneutics 11.4.2 More Radical Hermeneutics 11.4.3 Decapitated Metaphysics 11.4.4 Hermeneutic Scepticism as Weak Theology References Chapter 12: Meillassoux: Hermeneutics of the Absolute References Author Index Subject Index