Gadamer's Aspectival Realism

1. Aspects as Schematizations

Though the term ‘conceptual scheme’ owes its popularity to Donald Davidson’s famous rejection of the ‘the very idea’ of such a thing (see Davidson 1974), the idea itself has a much older provenance. The thought that human beings make sense of the world by imposing a conceptual apparatus onto it, or, more generally, that the intelligibility we find in our experience comes from us and not from the experienced objects, finds its most influential historical expression in Kant—though Kant does not use the term ‘schematization’ to describe it.²

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.³ It is true, on this view, that our minds capture only an aspect of reality, but there is only one aspect that any of us are, or even can be, in touch with.

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.

Charles Taylor (2002: 290–94)⁴ agrees with this basic picture. The idea that there are multiple schemes which differently construe “the same X,” he claims, is “inescapable.” However, like most of Gadamer’s schematistic interpreters, Taylor recognizes that the crude view must be modified if it is to work as a reading of Gadamer. There are two problems that must be addressed. The first is that the crude view is often taken to imply the possibility that alternative conceptual schemes can be incommensurable with one another, in the sense that their respective possessors will find one another mutually unintelligible. Gadamer, however, famously holds that there is no culture so alien to our own that we cannot come, with some effort, to understand it. Taylor thinks that the way to avoid this pitfall is to follow Gadamer in thinking of conceptual schemes as ‘horizons.’ As Taylor understands it, “Gadamer’s notion of ‘horizon’ has an inner complexity that is essential to it. On one hand, horizons can be identified and distinguished. … But on the other hand, horizons evolve, change. There is no such thing as a fixed horizon.” The malleability of horizons allows us to affirm the notion of conceptual schemes while denying their incommensurability. It allows for the possibility that “the horizons of A and B may … be distinct at time t and their mutual understanding imperfect. But A and B by living together may come to have a single common horizon at t + n.” This, Taylor contends, is what Gadamer means by his celebrated image of the ‘fusion of horizons.’

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 gets schematized. Taylor provides an additional reason: Gadamer claims to be a realist, and realism requires, at a minimum, that the way the world is plays some non-trivial role in making our beliefs true and false. As Taylor puts it, reality must be able to ‘talk back’ to us. Thus, Taylor reasons, there must be something that lies outside our conceptual schemes to which they are answerable. If it were schemes all the way down, we would be left, as John McDowell (1994: 11) puts it, with a “frictionless spinning in a void.” This frictionless spinning is philosophically distasteful in its own right, but it seems especially intolerable for anyone committed to realism.

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, ineffable—a mere X “for which we have no stable, culture-transcendent name”? The idea that the X lies outside any particular scheme already answers this question. Languages are, or are at least part of, conceptual schemes. So to name something is already to locate it within a particular scheme, already to conceptualize it. The pre-schematized reality, qua pre-schematized, cannot be captured by any particular language. Put differently, to name the X with a word drawn from some particular scheme would be to privilege that scheme, to say that it gets at the being of the X in a way that other schemes do not. It would be to say that what that scheme reveals is not simply an aspect of the thing, but the unvarnished thing itself. We would thus have abandoned the very aspectivalism that the schematization view is designed to explain.

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,⁵ and that for this reason he would have no truck with the idea of ‘empirical content.’ But Taylor’s ineffable Xs fare no better in this regard. Insofar as they are ineffable, Taylor’s Xs would quite clearly lie “outside the human, linguistic world” to which Gadamer refers. They are brute ‘givens’ of the mythical sort that Wilfried Sellars (1997) describes and as such are genuinely knowable, if at all, only by a mind uninhibited by human language. Taylor’s Xs thus resemble Kant’s things-in-themselves at least as closely, if not more so, as uninterpreted ‘contents’ do. In short, the view that Taylor attributes to Gadamer appears to be one that the latter flatly rejects. This, together with the fact that Taylor provides no textual evidence to support his reading of Gadamer’s ‘horizons’ as conceptual schemes, should lead us to doubt its accuracy as an interpretation of Gadamer.

But perhaps we are being too quick here. While the schematization view can’t be made to square with everything Gadamer does say, it might nevertheless square with what he should have said. Gadamer’s texts do make it clear that he wants to be an aspectival realist, and one might think that the best—perhaps the only—way to pull that off is to adopt something like the idea of schemes and Xs. If that is right, then Taylor’s reading might be seen as sacrificing truth to the letter of Gadamer’s work in order to be truer to the spirit.

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 dog. We might now ask: is the X a dog, or not? The answer cannot be yes, because then the X would not be ineffable. Dogs, whatever else they might be, are describable in words—the word ‘dog,’ in fact, does the job quite well. So if the X is ineffable in the strong sense, we must conclude that it is not a dog and thus that my description of it as such was untrue. After all, how could it be true to call something which is not a dog, a dog? Whatever is true of ‘dog,’ of course, will be true of every other human word or concept, as well. When understood in the strong sense, therefore, the notion of an ineffable X entails that we can never speak truly of reality, and thus contradicts realism.

However, there is also another, weaker sense of ‘ineffability’ according to which calling something ‘ineffable’ does not entail that it cannot be truly described in language, only that it cannot be completely or exhaustively described. If we interpret Taylor in this way, then his view is not at odds with realism. For example, while it might be true that some X is a dog, that surely is not all there is to say about it. It might also be a beloved pet, a faithful guardian, a home for fleas, and the reason why Mrs. Conway next door can’t get a good night’s sleep. Each of these, we might think, represents an ‘aspect’ of the X. Each predicate is true of it, but none exhausts it. Further, it is highly plausible to suppose that which of these aspects one is in a position to appreciate will depend on the set of concepts one has at one’s disposal. Someone from a culture in which dogs play a different role than they do in our own—like ancient Egypt, for example—might be armed with concepts that allow her to recognize aspects of the X that I, given only my current concepts, cannot. In this respect, we might say, our conceptual schemes allow us to give accurate descriptions of things, but never adequate ones.⁶

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 this is all that is meant by the thesis that human understanding is horizon-bound and aspectival, then the thesis is utterly uncontroversial and uninteresting. More to the point, if this is all that Gadamer’s thesis amounts to, then he is mistaken in supposing that it offers an alternative to Enlightenment accounts of understanding and knowledge. Descartes, for example, is well aware that God knows many facts about the world of which he (Descartes) is ignorant. And there is no reason why he would have denied that learning some of these facts might require him to acquire new conceptual schemes—like, for example, the exciting new schemes that were emerging from the natural sciences in his own day.

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 color, you about its pedigree. Put this way, the temptation to describe what you and I are doing in aspectival terms dissipates. It becomes clear that you and I are not ‘differently construing the same X’; we are simply discussing different topics.⁷

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.

2. Aspects as Parts

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” (Wachterhauser 2002: 54). To counter this tendency, Wachterhauser calls us to draw our understanding of Gadamer not from our pre-exsiting notions about what ‘hermeneutics’ must be, but from a careful reading of what Gadamer actually says in his extensive oeuvre. When we do this, Wachterhauser contends, we discover that “although Gadamer says that we always understand the world in a language that is our own … what we understand is not simply our own world, but the world, the one world we all have in common.” Stated bluntly, what we find is that “Gadamer is an uncompromising realist” (Wachterhauser 2002: 66).⁸

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. Wachterhauser (1994: 152–53) explains,

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 (Wachterhauser 2002: 66). Rather “Gadamer’s position [is] that we know the things themselves (die Sache selbst) in and through history rather than without or despite history” (Wachterhauser 1994: 150).

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 isomorphism between language and the world which language describes. Language does not impose an alien conceptual structure onto a meaningless reality; rather, it discloses an inherent intelligibility that is already there (Wachterhauser 1994: 73; 1999: 101). This, Wachterhauser contends, is the import of Gadamer’s enigmatic claim that “being that can be understood is language” (TM 474). This should not be interpreted as saying that “everything is a text or linguistic construct” but rather that “the intelligibility of language and intelligibility of reality are, in principle, compatible. … The intelligibility of the world is reflected in language. What can be intelligibly said in words parallels what is intelligible in the world” (Wachterhauser 1999: 97–98). As Wachterhauser (1994: 162) notes, this parallelism is expressed (perhaps more clearly) in Gadamer’s frequent claim that language and reality ‘belong together’ (TM 426).

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 finitude of human understanding. Gadamer recognizes this finitude, and that is what makes his brand of realism aspectival. To explain this, Wachterhauser draws a helpful distinction between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ conceptions of finitude. The weak conception, which is what has been affirmed throughout most of the history of metaphysics, understands finitude in merely quantitative terms. As Wachterhauser (1999: 107) explains,

On this model, God knows all true propositions and has an exhaustive and infallible grasp of their various logical relationships. By contrast, we as finite knowers know only some true propositions and have only a very limited and fallible view of the logical interrelationships that obtain between them. Thus our knowledge and God’s seem to differ only in degree and not in kind.

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, Wachterhauser (1999: 108) contends, Gadamer follows Hegel and Heidegger in endorsing

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, ‘logoi.’

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 logos to which it belongs, we can never have a fully articulate or explicit grasp of this logos. For Gadamer,

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” (Wachterhauser 2002: 57–58).

However, even if we could fully and explicitly grasp the logoi on which we draw, our knowledge would still be finite, because the logoi themselves are finite. This is a second, more fundamental component of our finitude. Wachterhauser (1999: 113) explains,

To say that we know reality through the logoi is to say that we never know it as a whole, all at once, immediately and exhaustively. Our finite knowledge is not like this at all. We know only ‘parts’ or aspects of the world; we only know it discursively, mediated by a variety of rich, unwieldy, and historically conditioned spheres of discourse. Thus our view of reality is relative to these logoi and never a definitive or timeless perspective on the real.

As Wachterhauser makes clear here, the finitude of logoi can be understood in contrast to the infinitude of reality considered as a ‘whole.’ As such a whole, reality is infinite in the qualitative sense that it is not limited or conditioned by anything else. It has no outside. It is a ‘totality’ in the Hegelian sense. (Thus it deserves to be capitalized: the Whole.) None of this is true of logoi. No single sphere of discourse, tradition, or vocabulary can exhaust the Whole of reality; each illuminates only a part of it. Logoi are thus always conditioned—by history, by other logoi, and, ultimately, by the Whole itself.

The asymmetry between the finitude of logoi and the infinity of the Whole means that ‘finitude’ in the strong, Gadamerian sense is not just a synonym for ignorance. It leaves its mark even on the things that we do know and understand. To return to the earlier example, though I can truly understand a dog, I cannot understand it in the way God does. Because holism is true, both God and I understand the dog by situating it within a wider context. The dog’s relationships to the other things in this context are what give it its meaning, its intelligibility. For God this context is the unconditioned Whole of reality, and God thus understands the dog completely and absolutely. Obviously, none of this is in the cards for me. I can understand the dog only by situating it within one or another of the various logoi with which I am familiar. Since the logoi are not the Whole, they enable only a conditioned, partial, incomplete grasp of the dog. However, since these logoi are also themselves parts of the Whole, they correspondingly illuminate genuine parts—aspects—of the dog. Logoi “disclose some range of phenomena as intelligible and meaningful in real but limited ways” (Wachterhauser 1999: 110). Gadamer, therefore, is not only an ‘uncompromising realist,’ he is an uncompromising aspectivalist, as well.

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” (1994: 170). Though Wachterhauser does not draw the inference, these two ideas obviously entail a third: that the truth is never arrived at. That, of course, is bad news for realism.

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 are. The aspectival dimension of Wachterhauser’s view, however, introduces a fundamental dismorphism lurking behind this similarity, because it posits that words and beings depend on fundamentally different contexts. The meaning of a word depends on the logos to which it belongs; the being of a being, however, depends on the Whole of reality of which it is a part. These two contexts are not, and cannot be, the same, since the former is a proper part of the latter. This entails that our words do not, and cannot, reveal beings as they are.

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 Moby Dick which, to his great embarrassment, he has never read. A storm arises, the boat capsizes, and he and his books are spilled into the ocean. He washes up on an island with only the clothes on his back and a few Jane Austin novels that survived the ordeal in his (surprisingly waterproof) briefcase. After a few days, the critic finds his copy of Moby Dick washed up on the shore—but, alas, it is soaked through and the ink has bled. Only a single sentence remains legible. Not to be deterred, he resolves that if he cannot read the whole book, he will at least understand this one sentence. Our critic, however, knows that he cannot understand the sentence all on its own; it must find a place within a wider context if it is to have a determinate meaning. After thinking for a while, he hatches on a plan. He tears the line from Moby Dick and judiciously places it, in what seems to him the very best spot, in his copy of Pride and Prejudice. There he reads and interprets it.

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 its meaning. Qua sentence from Moby Dick, its meaning depends on a specific context—the one provided by the rest of Melville’s novel. Since that context is unavailable to the critic, so too is the sentence’s real meaning.

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 this context that fixes what it is. When we use language to try to understand the thing, however, we situate it in a different context from its proper one. Instead of the Whole, we place it in the context of some particular logos. This context might make the thing appear meaningful, but since the context is the wrong one, what is thereby revealed will not be what it is. Language will yield understanding, but only in the form of misunderstanding.

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” (1999: 113). Whereas before we were told that Gadamer follows Hegel in thinking that “the Kantian distinction between phenomenon and noumenon cannot be maintained” (1994: 152), now we learn that “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” (1999: 113).⁹

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 qua interpretation of Gadamer. It could be that his reading simply mirrors a tension that is present in Gadamer’s own view. I do not think that is the case, however. The textual evidence Wachterhauser provides does, to my mind, put it beyond question that Gadamer affirms (1) and (2). The support for (3), however, is much weaker. In fact, there is evidence to suggest that Gadamer actively denies this claim—not least of which is his clear, if enigmatic, affirmation of the “fundamental finitude of being” (TM 458). I will try to unpack what this means later in the paper. For now, I want to focus on two key passages that Wachterhauser cites in favor of his view.

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 [getrübte¹⁰] understanding of it. Rather, each is the experience of an “aspect” of the thing itself. (TM 473)

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 human understanding; the lesson to be drawn is that ‘reality in itself,’ ‘noumenal reality,’ ‘the whole,’ lie beyond our merely human cognitive reach. But that is not what Gadamer says. His claim is not simply that there is no human consciousness that can view things sub specie aeternitatis, but that there is no possible consciousness—not even an ‘infinite’ one—that could do this. His point is not that the view from nowhere is inaccessible to us, but that no such view does, or even could, exist. Thus Gadamer is not claiming that what we experience is a ‘distinctively human reality,’ but precisely the opposite, that there is nothing ‘distinctively human’ about the aspectival reality we encounter. It’s not that finitude characterizes the way we human beings happen to experience the world, but that finitude is a necessary feature of any possible way of experiencing it. There is no other, non-aspectival take on reality to which our aspectival one might unfavorably compare.

In this passage, therefore, Gadamer is not siding with Kant over against Hegel as Wachterhauser claims. Rather, he is distancing himself from both Kant and Hegel in favor of a more radical philosophy of finitude. Both Kant and Hegel conceive of what is ultimately real as the correlate of an infinite, eternal perspective. Kant’s noumenal is what appears to God’s intellectual intuition; Hegel’s Whole is what is known by Absolute Geist. So in declaring that an eternal perspective is impossible, Gadamer is dispatching with the ideas of the noumenal and of the Whole, as well. To repeat, the point is not that the noumenal or the Whole are unknowable by human beings, but that there are no such things for us to know in the first place.

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 both of these to be bad options.¹¹

In a second passage to which Wachterhauser refers, Gadamer expresses his debt to Kant. In the foreword to the second edition of Truth and Method, he writes,

This fundamental methodical approach [the one operative in Truth and Method] avoids implying any metaphysical conclusions. In subsequent publications, especially in my research reports “Hermeneutics and Historicism” and “The Phenomenological Movement,” I have recorded my acceptance of Kant’s conclusions in the Critique of Pure Reason: I regard statements that proceed by wholly dialectical means from the finite to the infinite, from human experience to what exists in itself, from the temporal to the eternal, as doing no more than setting limits, and am convinced that philosophy can derive no actual knowledge from them. (TM xxxvi)

Wachterhauser (1999: 112) reads this passage as Gadamer voicing his agreement with Kant that “an unmediated view of reality is at best a regulative ideal that we can no sooner dispense with … than we can achieve.” In other words, he reads it as an affirmation (albeit a qualified one) of the phenomena/noumena distinction.

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 (1998: 511–14) takes this observation to constitute an argument for the phenomena/noumena distinction, since he contends that it is only by drawing this distinction that the paradoxes can be resolved. We need not suppose, however, that Gadamer follows Kant in this second step. Gadamer could agree that the Antinomies disclose a real limit inherent in reason, but draw a different moral from this than the one Kant draws. Here is one possibility: rather than thinking that the Antinomies arise from the failure to systematically distinguish the conditioned (‘appearances’) from the unconditioned (‘things-in-themselves’), one could conclude that the problem lies with the idea of the unconditioned itself. Rather than simply concluding that the unconditioned cannot be given in experience; one could conclude that there is ultimately no sense to be made of the idea of ‘the unconditioned’ in the first place.

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 a fortiori neither does the idea of an unconditioned intellect. A second reason is that it seems to fit well with what Gadamer says in the ‘research reports’ (or, at least, in one of them¹²) to which he refers in the passage at hand. In “The Phenomenological Movement” he writes,

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. (Gadamer 1976c: 172)

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 false as that they lead nowhere; they ‘mediate no possible knowledge’ to us. The reason, it seems to me, is that they yield no concepts that we can ultimately make sense of. All of our concepts begin in experience, and our experience is always finite. And since (as Wachterhauser correctly emphasizes) the difference between finitude and infinity is qualitative, not merely quantitative, this means that we cannot move, through a progressive series of conceptual or imaginative steps, from the finite thing we experience to the concept of an infinite version of it. We cannot, for instance, start with our experience of material things, then gradually strip away all the marks of their finitude until we arrive at a coherent idea of Infinite Substance. Or, more to the point, we cannot start with the finite, situated perspectives on the world that we occupy and then gradually remove all the finitude until we get to the idea of an Absolute Perspective. Such ideas might initially seem to make sense, but they ultimately do not. When we push on them, they fall apart. The reason is that finitude is not, as the metaphysical tradition has supposed, a merely accidental feature of what we experience (substances, perspectives, etc.), but an essential one. That is why, as Gadamer says, learning from Kant on this point is ‘essential to taking finitude seriously.’

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.

3. The Finitude of Being

Here’s where we find ourselves. Realism, of the sort that concerns us here, requires that there be an essential “belongingness,” “correspondence,”¹³ or isomorphism between language and reality. This isomorphism entails that the idea of a ‘noumenal’ world or inaccessible ‘thing-in-itself’ can have no place in our thinking. There can be no necessary gap between the way language presents reality to us and the way reality is. Language, in this sense, is ‘absolute.’ At the same time, however, aspectivalism requires that language be finite. It must be the case that language never gives the last word on any subject, that it never reveals more than one among many aspects of the thing. This has the look of a paradox.

The solution to the paradox that I have been gesturing toward is this: that being itself is finite in just the way that language is. If that is the case, then we can affirm both that language is finite and that it is isomorphic with being. There is reason to think that this is Gadamer’s own solution, too. We have already noted his reference to “the fundamental finitude of being, which is wholly verbal in character” and his dictum that “being that can be understood is language.” To this we may add his claim that language determines not only the “hermeneutic act” but also the “hermeneutic object” (TM 389), as well as his assertion that the distinction “between a being and its presentations of itself [in language] … is a distinction that is not really a distinction at all” (TM 475). However, it’s one thing to cite these claims, quite another to give a coherent account of what they are trying to say. This section is an attempt at the latter. In the first part of it, I will try to spell out what I take the finitude of language to consist in. In the second I will consider how this finitude might be thought to also characterize being itself.

4. Conclusion

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 right account of how understanding and reality are related. As a result, there are significant objections to the view that I have not addressed. Nevertheless, I hope to have indicated that, at the very least, Gadamer offers an intriguing and deeply original answer to this question, one that deserves further attention not just as a reading of Gadamer, but as a philosophical view in its own right.