Gadamer claims that human beings are capable of understanding only ‘aspects’ of reality, yet he also holds that, through these aspects, we understand reality itself. In this sense he is an ‘aspectival realist.’ This paper considers two attempts to explain Gadamer’s aspectival realism: the ‘schematization’ reading defended by Charles Taylor, and the ‘holist’ reading of Brice Wachterhauser. I criticize these views on two fronts: that they are at odds with Gadamer’s texts, and that they fail to reconcile aspectivalism and realism into a consistent philosophical position. I articulate an alternative reading that I call the ‘presentational’ account. At the heart of this account is the claim that, on Gadamer’s view, the ‘occasionality’ that characterizes language also characterizes being itself. I argue both that this interpretation fits Gadamer’s texts better than the views currently on offer in the literature and that it avoids the philosophical difficulties those views encounter.
ONE of the most well-known features of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics is the claim that human understanding is always embedded within a particular ‘horizon.’ Human beings do not and cannot have a God’s-eye perspective on reality; rather, our grasp of the world is ineliminably shaped by the particular traditions we occupy and the particular ‘prejudices’ [
Many other philosophers who acknowledge the aspectival character of our understanding take this to imply the skeptical idea that we are capable of grasping only a reality that exists for us, while reality itself lies beyond our cognitive reach. But not Gadamer. On his view, to experience an aspect of a thing is not to experience something other than the thing itself; instead, we experience the thing in and through its aspects. As he puts it, “the multiplicity of … worldviews does not involve any relativization of the ‘world.’ Rather, what the world is is not different from the views in which it presents itself” (TM 447). For lack of a less ambiguous term, in what follows I will call this idea—the idea that human understanding discloses reality itself, not a mere ‘reality-for-us’—
With few exceptions, Gadamer’s interpreters have recognized that he is an aspectival realist in this sense, but this (near) consensus masks a good deal of underlying disagreement. It’s one thing to say that we have genuine access to reality through its various ‘aspects’; it’s quite another to explain what an aspect is supposed to
The first of these camps seeks to explain aspects though the notion of ‘schematization.’ An aspect of a thing, on this view, is what results from construing the thing in terms of a particular, historically variable, conceptual scheme. Since we cannot understand things without schematizing them, on this view understanding is inescapably aspectival. But since schematizations are always schematizations
The second camp interprets the notion of an aspect in mereological terms. An aspect, on this reading, is a
Part of my aim in what follows is to unpack and critique these two interpretations of Gadamer. To keep the discussion manageable, I will focus on just one representative of each camp: Charles Taylor for the schematistic interpretation, and Brice Wachterhauser for the holistic one. While there is much to appreciate in each of these views, I will argue that they both face important difficulties—both as interpretations of Gadamer and as philosophical positions in their own right.
After this, I will lay out a third way of interpreting what Gadamer means by ‘aspect’ that has not, to my knowledge, been previously defended in the literature. I’ll argue that it both does better justice to Gadamer’s texts and is more philosophically compelling than the other two options. At the heart of this interpretation is Gadamer’s claim that understanding is essentially ‘occasional’ and that an ‘aspect’ of reality is to be thought of as what understanding discloses on a particular occasion. For this reason, I would like to call my view ‘occasionalism,’ but that name, it turns out, is already taken by an unrelated early modern theory of causation. So instead I will (for reasons that will become clear later) call it the
Though the term ‘conceptual scheme’ owes its popularity to Donald Davidson’s famous rejection of the ‘the very idea’ of such a thing (see
Kant famously held that the categories by which we make sense of reality are necessary features of human cognition and thus are the same in everybody. For that reason, while it is possible to describe Kant’s view as ‘aspectival,’ it is so only in a very weak sense.
It is easy, however, to develop a more thoroughly aspectival version of Kant’s basic account. In its crudest form, this view simply replaces Kant’s single set of necessary categories with a plurality of contingent conceptual schemes. These schemes vary from one culture to the next, and perhaps even from individual to individual. They emerge not from the necessary, universal features of human cognition, but rather from contingent cultural, historical, and linguistic forces that shape individuals in ways beyond their control and of which they are generally unaware. Each of these schemes construes, in its own way, the same underlying reality—in Davidson’s terms, the same underlying body of ‘empirical content.’ The resulting picture is that there are two factors on which the truth of a description depends, not, as non-aspectival views would have it, just one. Whether a description is true or not depends both on the nature of the object being described (the content) and on the conceptual scheme to which the description belongs.
The second problem Taylor finds with the crude picture is its notion of ‘empirical content.’ While there must be something that “the concept ‘scheme’ contrast[s] with … The term ‘content’ is certainly bad, as though there were stuff already lying there, to be framed in different schemes.” Gadamer clearly has no truck with this idea. As he makes clear, our linguistic views of the world “are not relative in the sense that one could oppose them to the ‘world in itself,’ as if the right view from some possible position outside the human, linguistic world could discover it in its being-in-itself” (TM 447). Taylor, however, argues that we can accommodate this by replacing the notion of ‘content’ in scheme-content dualism with an undefined “X.” He notes that “in a general proposition, we might say that what we put in place of the X is a dimension, or aspect of the human condition. In the particular case, it is much more dangerous to specify.” Ultimately, Taylor contends, the point is to “beware of labels.” While it is essential that we recognize the existence of the ‘X,’ we must also recognize that it refers to “a dimension of the human condition for which we have no stable, culture-transcendent name.”
It is not clear how, exactly, Taylor thinks his ineffable ‘Xs’ differ from the more traditional ‘empirical contents,’ but we can put that problem to the side for the moment. For now, what I want to emphasize is that, whatever we call it, the idea of something like an ineffable X is essential to the schematization view. We might ask, first, why this view requires the idea of an X, ineffable or not, in the first place. One simple answer is that the idea of ‘schematization’ makes sense only if there is something that
So, for the notion of ‘schematization’ to accomplish the tasks Taylor sets for it, there must be something like unschematized ‘content’, or an underlying ‘X’, in the picture. But why think that this X must be, as Taylor suggests,
It not a mere accident of Taylor’s view, then, that it contrasts the notion of ‘scheme’ with that of ‘ineffable X.’ The former notion demands the latter. However, precisely because it demands the idea of an ineffable X, it is difficult to square Taylor’s interpretation of Gadamer with what Gadamer actually says. We already noted that Gadamer rejects the Kantian notion of a ‘world in itself’ with which our linguistically-structured worldviews might contrast,
But perhaps we are being too quick here. While the schematization view can’t be made to square with everything Gadamer
Unfortunately, however, Taylor’s account faces philosophical problems that are at least as pressing as the interpretative ones. Put succinctly, it fails to square realism with aspectivalism. An ambiguity allows the account to be interpreted as either aspectival or realist, but insofar as it is one, it is not the other.
The ambiguity at play here resides in the notion of ‘ineffability.’ Taken in a strong, literal sense, ineffability implies the impossibility of describing something truly in language. So understood, the claim that reality consists in an ineffable X (or a set of Xs) is incompatible with realism. Consider an example. Suppose there is some X which I, on the basis of my conceptual scheme, describe as a
However, there is also another, weaker sense of ‘ineffability’ according to which calling something ‘ineffable’ does not entail that it cannot be
This line of thought is not only plausible; it seems to be obviously true. Who could deny that there are innumerably many true things to be said about any given object, and that we often need to master new concepts in order to recognize and appreciate them? Nobody—and that’s the problem. If
In short, the view in question, while true and compatible with realism, is not aspectival in any robust sense. This is clear from the fact that we can remove even the appearance of aspectivalism from the view simply by identifying our Xs more precisely. Suppose I describe a dog as ‘brown’ and you describe it as ‘purebred.’ It is of course sensible to say that we have here identified different ‘aspects’ of the same thing—the dog. But in another, equally obvious sense we are not talking about the same thing at all. I am talking about the dog’s
The interpretative and philosophical problems here are related. The argument I just articulated is not new; it’s just a spin on the general Hegelian case against the coherence of the phenomenal/noumenal distinction. Either the noumenal is genuinely beyond reason, in which case we could not be in a position to know that there is such a thing, or even to refer to it—or it is not, in which case the distinction between it and the ‘phenomenal’ world collapses. This same critique applies to Taylor’s Xs. Gadamer, of course, is deeply indebted to Hegel, and this line of thought lies behind his own rejection of the idea of a ‘world-in-itself.’ The problem with the schematistic interpretation, then, is that it seeks to make room for aspectivalism by going back behind Hegel to Kant. Gadamer, by contrast, recognizes that “Hegel has thought through the historical dimension in which the problem of hermeneutics is rooted” (TM 346), and thus recognizes that aspectivalism can be secured, if at all, only by going through Hegel and out the other side. A Gadamerian version of aspectival realism, in short, must be a post-Hegelian one, and this means that it must be one in which the idea of a brute reality-in-itself, indifferent to human language and concepts, plays no role.
There is perhaps nobody who has emphasized the realist dimension of Gadamer’s hermeneutics more directly and forcefully than Brice Wachterhauser. He notes, perceptively, that there is a widespread tendency “to assume that ‘hermeneutics’ points to essentially one position (such as the one with which Rorty identifies himself, for example) and then to insist that Gadamer must conform to this picture because he is, after all, a preeminent hermeneutical philosopher” (
In contrast to Taylor and other proponents of the schematistic reading, Wachterhauser recognizes that Gadamer’s realism is incompatible with the Kantian idea of an ineffable thing-in-itself standing over against our linguistically structured takes on the world. He notes that while “hermeneutical thinkers like Rorty seem to be, broadly speaking, Kantian in their basic assumption about the position of mind in the world,” Gadamer has been convinced by Hegel’s arguments against the phenomena/noumena distinction. In fact, Gadamer takes these arguments to have a more wide-ranging import.
Gadamer’s position can best be approached on the assumption that he has generalized the lesson of the incoherence of a phenomenon-noumenon dualism to all dualisms which draw a principled distinction between some reality-for-us and some unknowable reality-in-itself. [S]uch dualisms always collapse. Apropos Gadamer’s position this implies that Gadamer rejects a strict dualism between our linguistically mediated knowledge-claims and an alinguistic reality.
Gadamer thus rejects any form of scheme/X dualism. Language is not a ‘scheme’ that stands between us and a thing-in-itself; it is not a barrier or “shroud” that obstructs our access to the truth (
Borrowing a page from McDowell (and ultimately, again from Hegel) Wachterhauser notes that the key to understanding Gadamer’s hermeneutic realism is to recognize that there is a fundamental
While this belongingness thesis (as we might call it) expresses a strong form of realism, Wachterhauser recognizes that it does not entail a simple, naïve realism. Traditional realists have supposed that there exists a straightforward, one-to-one correspondence between thoughts and words on the one hand and worldly objects and facts on the other. What these too-easy views miss, Wachterhauser argues, is the essential
On this model, God knows
This is the picture of finitude that we encounter, for example, in Descartes’ third meditation. We may add that it is also the sort that we encountered in the ‘weak’ reading of Taylor’s view above. There the appeal was not to God, but to other (actual or possible) human knowers, but the upshot was the same: our knowledge is finite (i.e., aspectival) simply in the sense that there are lots of features of reality that we might know about, but don’t.
Wachterhauser notes that this weak conception of finitude assumes an essentially atomistic picture of knowledge and meaning. It supposes “that we are capable in principle of understanding each proposition on its own, of judging its truth in isolation from other propositions.” In contrast to this,
the now familiar ‘holistic’ point that there are no meaningful propositions in isolation from the web of propositions … Every proposition, every ‘bit’ of language, every linguistic ‘unit’ has a meaning only in terms of the whole range of semantic relations of the sphere of discourse in which it is formulated.
Gadamer refers to these ‘spheres of discourse’ under a number of different headings, including ‘horizons,’ ‘traditions,’ and, the one Wachterhauser himself prefers, ‘
This thoroughgoing holism, Wachterhauser continues, leads Gadamer to a more radical conception of finitude, one according to which “finitude is a permanent and irrevocable characteristic of human thought.” Wachterhauser identifies two components of this. The first is that, while the meaning of any particular ‘bit’ of language we might employ is dependent on the wider
history and language function as conditions of our knowledge that outstrip our ability to identify and justify fully our dependence on them. They are known partially, but our knowledge cannot encompass all the possible ways these factors function as conditions of knowledge.
The factors which shape our conscious understanding of reality cannot themselves be rendered fully conscious. The result is that “there is a certain ineluctable inarticulacy and inescapable opacity in all our knowing” (
However, even if we
To say that we know reality
As Wachterhauser makes clear here, the finitude of
The asymmetry between the finitude of
Wachterhauser’s holism is a marked improvement over the schematization view. It rightly emphasizes the central role that the belongingness thesis plays in Gadamer’s thought, and it is, in general, far more faithful to the actual language and argument of Gadamer’s texts. Despite all that, however, I do not think that Wachterhauser ultimately succeeds in reconciling aspectivalism with realism, and I do not think he gets Gadamer’s view quite right.
The interpretative problem with Wachterhauser’s account will be easier to see once we have identified the philosophical problem it faces, so let’s begin there. The central tension is most easily spied in Wachterhauser’s claim that “Gadamer shows himself someone who (like Hegel) thinks that the truth is the whole but (unlike Hegel) thinks that the whole is never arrived at” (
What comes to light here is a tension between the aspectival dimension of Wachterhauser’s account and the realist dimension. The latter, as we have seen, is secured by the belongingness thesis—the idea that there is an essential isomorphism between language and reality. This isomorphism partially consists in the fact that both words and beings are contextual. Both depend in some way on a wider context to which they belong—words for what they mean, beings for what they
To help clarify the problem here, indulge me in an attempt at a fable: A literary critic is spending his sabbatical sailing far out in the Pacific. To pass the time, he has brought a substantial library with him, including a copy of
What are we to say about this bizarre hermeneutic technique? Not, I think, that it must fail to yield a coherent meaning. The critic might well find that he is able to make sense of the sentence in the context of Austin’s novel. He might even find that it there expresses something profound and illuminating. Nevertheless, however insightful it might be, the meaning he assigns to the sentence through this procedure will not be the right one. It will not be
Wachterhauser’s account implies that we are doing something very much like the critic whenever we use language. The thing we aim to understand has a context that it proper to it: the Whole. It is
Like the schematization view, therefore, Wachterhauser ultimately fails to reconcile the realist dimension of his account with the aspectival one. In light of this tension, it’s not surprising to find that, despite his insistence that Gadamer is not a Kantian, Wachterhauser backslides when it comes time to explain the aspectival side of Gadamer’s thought. While realist Wachterhauser assures us that “dualisms which draw a principled distinction between some reality-for-us and some unknowable reality in itself” are “incoherent” and “always collapse,” aspectival Wachterhauser admits that for Gadamer “what we know is in a certain sense a distinctively human reality, a reality ‘for us.’ Reality in itself, understood as what Hegel calls ‘the whole,’ we can never know” (
We can view the tension in Wachterhauser’s position as arising from the conjunction of three claims that he attributes to Gadamer: (1) that language and being are isomorphic, (2) that language is finite, and (3) that being is infinite (i.e., that it constitutes a Whole). What I have tried to show is that what is finite cannot be isomorphic with what is infinite. If that is the case, then 1–3 cannot all be true.
Of course, the problem we have noted with Wachterhauser’s account does not necessarily mean that it is mistaken
The first such passage is as follows:
There is no possible consciousness—we have repeatedly emphasized this, and it is the basis of the historicity of understanding—there is no possible consciousness, however infinite, in which any traditionary ‘subject matter’ would appear in the light of eternity. Every appropriation of tradition is historically different, which does not mean that each one represents only an imperfect [
Wachterhauser glosses this passage with the claim, cited above, that
What we know is in a certain sense a distinctively human reality, a reality ‘for us.’ Reality in itself, understood as what Hegel calls ‘the whole,’ we can never know. If noumenal reality is defined as ‘the whole,’ as it is by Hegel, Gadamer would agree with Kant against Hegel that such a grasp of reality is beyond us.
It seems to me, however, that this interpretation runs entirely counter to the point Gadamer is making. Wachterhauser reads it as a point about the limits of
In this passage, therefore, Gadamer is not siding with Kant over against Hegel as Wachterhauser claims. Rather, he is distancing himself from
Gadamer reiterates this point elsewhere. For example, we have already noted that he asserts that the aspects of reality that language reveals to us “are not relative in the sense that one could oppose them to the ‘world in itself,’ as if the right view from some possible position outside the human, linguistic world could discover it in its being-in-itself.” The person who does attempt to “oppose ‘being-in-itself’ to these ‘aspects’,” Gadamer continues, “must think either theologically—in which case the ‘being-in-itself’ is not for him but only for God—or he will think like Lucifer, like one who wants to prove his own divinity by the fact that the whole world has to obey him” (TM 447–48). The former, ‘theological’ view is precisely the one that Wachterhauser attributes to Gadamer. But Gadamer makes it clear that he considers
In a second passage to which Wachterhauser refers, Gadamer expresses his debt to Kant. In the foreword to the second edition of
This fundamental methodical approach [the one operative in
Unlike the previous passage, Wachterhauser’s interpretation of this one is not at odds with the language of the passage itself. However, while the passage does admit of the reading Wachterhauser gives it, it by no means demands it. The specific reference Gadamer is making here is to the Antinomies, in which Kant argues that when Reason tries to move from the conditioned to the unconditioned, or vice-versa, it comes to grief. Kant himself (
This, I want to suggest, is the conclusion that Gadamer does draw. One reason for thinking so is that it sheds light on why it might be that Gadamer, in the passage discussed above, declares the idea of a view from nowhere to be ‘impossible.’ If idea of the unconditioned makes no sense, then
It seems to me that it is essential for taking finitude seriously as the basis of every experience of Being that such experience renounce all dialectical supplementation. To be sure, it is “obvious” that finitude is a privative determination of thought and as such presupposes its opposite, transcendence, or history or (in another way) nature. Who will deny that? I contend, however, that we have learned once and for all from Kant that such “obvious” ways of thought can mediate no possible knowledge to us finite beings. Dependence on possible experience and demonstration by means of it remains the alpha and omega of all responsible thought.
But the basis of such demonstration is universal and, if one can so express it, infinite in a finite way. All our ways of thinking are dependent on the universality of language. (
Kant, in Gadamer’s view, is right to insist that all our thinking remain rooted in what is actually experienced. This is required for thought to be ‘responsible.’ But this means that certain theoretical moves that seem ‘obviously’ justified from the perspective of speculative reason, but which have no basis in experience—like the idea that finitude can only be understood derivatively, on the basis of a prior conception of infinity—must be ‘renounced.’ The problem with such ideas is not so much that they are
If this is right, then Gadamer’s response to the Antinomies is not, as Wachterhauser suggests, to posit as a ‘regulative ideal’ the idea of an ‘unmediated view of reality’ that lies beyond language. Rather, it is to locate the ‘infinity’ that reason seeks in language itself—which, as ‘universal’, is ‘infinite in a finite way.’ Despite its essential finitude, language is also, in another sense, ‘infinite.’ It is infinite precisely because there is ‘no possible consciousness’ beyond language, because it is not bounded by a non-linguistic ‘outside.’ As Gadamer states elsewhere, “verbal experience of the world is ‘absolute.’ It transcends all the relative ways being is posited because it embraces all being-in-itself” (TM 450). If this is right, then it opens a way beyond both Kant and Hegel. The challenge, of course, is to make sense of how the idea that language is ‘infinite’ in this sense can be reconciled with its essential finitude. It’s to that task that I’ll now turn.
Here’s where we find ourselves. Realism, of the sort that concerns us here, requires that there be an essential “belongingness,” “correspondence,”
The solution to the paradox that I have been gesturing toward is this: that
At the heart of Gadamer’s notion of finitude is his frequent claim that language, along with the meaning it discloses and the understanding it enables, has the character of an
The occasionality [
A sentence is ‘occasional,’ in the sense Gadamer intends here, when its meaning is apt to change from one occasion of its use to another. Nearly everyone acknowledges that some sentences are occasional in this sense. For example, it is uncontroversial that ‘My dog has fleas’ is occasional, because the referent of ‘my dog’ will change depending on who the speaker is. Gadamer claims here, however, that the phenomenon is more ubiquitous than philosophers have tended to suppose. It does not merely characterize a few, exceptional sentences; it ‘constitutes the very essence of speaking.’
This is a radical and, at least initially, counter-intuitive claim. We might begin to understand its import by noting that, on Gadamer’s view, occasionality is not limited to obvious cases like possessives (‘my’) and demonstratives (‘here’ and ‘this’). It is also present in a host of forms we tend not to notice. Unfortunately, Gadamer provides no concrete examples to illustrate the non-obvious ways in which language can be occasional. However, in recent years Charles Travis—who inherits the idea of occasionality from Wittgenstein, rather than Gadamer—has provided scores of them. Here are just a couple:
Pia’s Japanese maple is full of russet leaves. Believing that green is the colour of leaves, she paints them. Returning, she reports, ‘That’s better. The leaves are green now.’ She speaks truth. A botanist friend then phones, seeking green leaves for a study of green-leaf chemistry. ‘The leaves (on my tree) are green,’ Pia says. ‘You can have those.’ But now Pia speaks falsehood. (
Suppose that a refrigerator is devoid of milk except for a puddle of milk at the bottom of it. Now consider two possible speakings, by Odile, of the words, ‘There’s milk in the refrigerator.’ For the first, Hugo is seated at the breakfast table, reading the paper. And from time to time looking dejectedly (but meaningfully) at his cup of black coffee, which he is idly stirring with a spoon. Odile volunteers, ‘There’s milk in the refrigerator.’ For the second, Hugo has been given the task of cleaning the refrigerator. He has just changed out of his house-cleaning garb, and is settling with satisfaction into his armchair, book and beverage in hand. Odile opens the refrigerator, looks in, closes it and sternly utters the above words. (
As these examples nicely illustrate, occasionality is rooted in something deeper than the convenience and concision that indexicals provide. It stems from the fact that language-use is never an isolated phenomenon but always part of a larger, ongoing social activity. These activities take different forms for different types of utterances. Promises, apologies, blessings, and requests all have their characteristic settings in which their utterance makes sense. In the case of statements, Gadamer contends that the background activity is always one of answering some
In the passage cited above, Gadamer’s claim is not just that occasionality is more common than we thought, but that it is an
Secondly, and relatedly, the claim that occasionality is an essential feature of language entails that it is
It is difficult to find a sentence that cannot, with a little creativity, be revealed to be occasional, and this difficulty provides some initial evidence in support of Gadamer’s claim that occasionality is an essential feature of language. But of course no mere consideration of examples, no matter how many, could establish this. To adequately argue for this thesis would require a lengthy and complicated discussion, but thankfully no such task is required for present purposes. My aim here is simply to identify what Gadamer’s view is, not to show that that view is right. For that, I need only show
We can sum up the meaning of Gadamer’s thesis in a slogan: occasionality goes
Every word, as the event of a moment, carries with it the unsaid, to which it is related by responding and summoning. The occasionality of human speech is not a casual imperfection of its expressive power; it is, rather, the logical expression of the living virtuality of speech that brings a totality of meaning into play, without being able to express it totally. (TM 458)
The claim that language, and so understanding, is inescapably occasional points to a more radical conception of ‘finitude’ at work in Gadamer’s thought than his interpreters have tended to notice. Citing a point of agreement with his teacher,
Heidegger was no longer concerned with conceiving of the essence of finitude as the limit at which our desire to be infinite founders. He sought instead to understand finitude positively as the real fundamental constitution of Dasein. Finitude means temporality and thus the ‘essence’ of Dasein is its historicity.
Occasionality constitutes just such a ‘positive’ conception of finitude. It is a type of finitude that does not merely consist in the absence of some unreachable infinity, but in the presence of temporality and historicity. To understand occasionally is to understand
As the idea that ‘being that can be understood is language’ suggests, for Gadamer the radical finitude of language has ontological implications. As he puts it, “the phenomenon of language and understanding proves to be a universal model of being and knowledge in general” (TM 489). The key step in the move from a merely epistemological or semantic account of finitude to an ontological one is recognizing what Gadamer calls the ‘speculative unity’ of language and being, the idea that there is no ontological distinction to be drawn between the being of a thing and the way it presents itself in language. He explains,
The speculative mode of being of language has a universal ontological significance. 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. (TM 475)
Language, on this view, does not simply reflect a ‘pregiven’ order of being; it actively “constitutes” (TM 284) that which comes to presentation in it.
It is not until the penultimate section of
In affirming the ‘speculative unity’ of language and being, Gadamer is claiming is that what is true of concertos is true of being in general. Just as concertos exist only in and through their various performances, being exists only in and through the various, occasion-sensitive events of understanding in which it presents itself. Being, in other words, is no less occasional than the language that discloses it. To illustrate, let’s return to Travis’s ‘green’ example. If
It is in terms of this ontological occasionality, I submit, that we should interpret Gadamer’s notion of an aspect. What ‘green’ expressed on the first occasion on which Pia used it is one aspect of greenness; what it expressed on the second occasion is another. In general, we may say that an aspect of a being is a way it presents itself in a particular, occasional event of understanding. The relationship between an aspect and what it is an aspect of, then, is not an instance of the schematization-schematized relationship, nor of the part-whole relationship, but of the presentation-presented relationship, understood in the ontologized way we have been tracing. Aspects are to the things they are aspects of what particular concerts are to the musical works they perform.
This account of aspects differs from the schematization view in claiming that aspects, in their entirety, belong to the being of that of which they are aspects. An aspect is not the result of throwing a subjective cloak or filter (a ‘scheme’) over an objective entity (an ‘X’). Just as there is no inaudible thing, ‘the real concerto’, that stands behind each of the particular performances, so too there is no unnameable ‘X’ standing behind the linguistically-structured presentations of things.
This account of aspects differs from Wachterhauser’s holism in that it denies that aspects add up to a Whole. There is, for example, no way of synthesizing all the various aspects of greenness into a single concept or predicate. This is not just impossible for us, but impossible in principle, and it is easy to see why. A conception of greenness that included both of the aspects that Pia’s words (on the two different occasions) expressed would have to be one which either (a) both does and does not apply to her leaves (in which case it would be self-contradictory) or (b) neither does nor does not apply to them (in which case it is hopelessly indeterminate).
To be clear, denying that aspects add up to a Whole does not entail eschewing mereological concepts altogether. Gadamer can, and does, appeal to the part-whole relationship, most centrally in his affirmation of the traditional hermeneutic maxim that one must ‘interpret the part in light of the whole.’ According to the presentational interpretation, however, the sense of ‘whole’ at work here is that of a
These differences can be traced back, at least in part, to the fact that the presentational account I have sketched rejects a fundamental assumption that Taylor and Wachterhauser share: that being is to be equated with
The ‘things themselves’ are primarily real essences, or intelligible structures discoverable in history and language and not constructed through history or language. Thus, such essences have an independence from a
Gadamer’s affirmation of the speculative unity of language and being, however, belies this reading. It asserts quite clearly that the ‘intelligible structures’ of reality
At this point, however, it might seem that the presentational view falls prey the same difficulty noted with the other interpretations we have discussed: namely, that it can preserve aspectivalism only at the expense of realism. After all, doesn’t the claim that reality is constructed through language imply some form of subjectivism? And isn’t subjectivism inconsistent with realism? This line of thought, I suspect, is the reason why Taylor and Wachterhauser attribute to Gadamer the objectivist (mis-)interpretations they do. Gadamer is clearly a realist, after all, and this seems to require that he acknowledge, somewhere in his view, the existence of a fully mind-independent world—even if certain passages seem to suggest otherwise.
This line of thought rests on the assumption that that which is not objective must be subjective, and vice-versa. At the heart of Gadamer’s notion of ‘speculative unity,’ however, is the claim that this dichotomy is a false one. Neither language itself, nor the things that come to presentation in it, fall on either side of it. Language and being are characterized neither by subjectivity nor by objectivity, but by what Gadamer calls ‘factualness’ [
To illustrate, consider
Further, on the interpretation I am recommending even what does depend on the occasion of an utterance depends precisely on the
I have tried to accomplish two things in this paper. First, I have attempted to show, through a close examination of Gadamer’s texts, that he affirms the ‘presentational’ version of aspectival realism that I have outlined. Second, I have tried to show that, unlike the schematization and holisitc views, the presentational account manages to hold realism and aspectivalism together in a consistent position. What I have not attempted, at least not to any significant degree, is to establish that the presentational view I have attributed to Gadamer is the
Hereafter cited in text as TM
Kant does use the terms ‘schema’ and ‘schematization’, but in a completely different sense from Davidson’s. A Kantian ‘schema’ is not a conceptual apparatus but rather an intuitive presentation of a category (thanks to an anonymous referee at this journal for this way of putting it). Taylor, however, uses ‘scheme’ in the Davidsonian sense of a framework for construing experienced reality so as to render it intelligible. I will also use it in this way in what follows.
The most influential ‘aspectival’ reading of Kant is found in
This has since been reprinted, with some minor modifications and additions, as a chapter of
This is far from a one-off claim; it is a consistent theme in Gadamer’s work. See (TM 450, 473, 476) and (
At times Taylor appears to endorse just such a view. For example, he distinguishes the schematistic view from relativism by noting that the latter, but not the former, entails that a given proposition might have different truth values in different schemes. For relativism “proposition p would be true from perspective A, false from perspective B, indeterministic from perspective C, and so forth.” By contrast, on his view if two schemes differ from one another, this will not be because they assign different truth values to the same propositions, but because “different questions will be asked, different issues raised, different features will stand out as remarkable, and so forth” (
I develop this point in relation to Davidson’s notion of ‘scheme’ elsewhere. See
As the preceding quotation makes clear, Wachterhauser uses ‘realism’ in the same sense that I have been using it throughout this paper.
To be fair, the seemingly contradictory statements in this paragraph are taken from two different texts, the former of which predates the latter by five years. Perhaps Wachterhauser changed his mind in the interim; he is certainly entitled to do that. However, that doesn’t seem to be the case. The realist moments of the later text (
Wachterhauser alters Weinsheimer and Marshall’s translation here from ‘imperfect’ to ‘distorted.’ The most literal translation would be something like ‘cloudy.’
The idea that we must replace a ‘theological’ understanding of being and truth with a finite, linguistic one is a common theme in Gadamer’s work (see TM 456–57;
It is less than clear which part of “Hermeneutics and Historicism” Gadamer is alluding to in the passage above. That text contains only two brief references to Kant, and neither seems well described as an instance of Gadamer “recording [his] acceptance of Kant’s conclusions in the
See
Wachterhauser’s translation renders
Gadamer also identifies this structure in recurrent festivals and discusses it at length. See TM 122–24,
Wachterhauser attempts to accommodate passages like these with the idea that “words do not create the intelligibility of the world, but they do more than simply mirror it in a representation. Words make the world more intelligible and accessible than it would be without words” (